Goodbye to all that
This had never happened until a recent trip to Phuket, but then it happened twice more on one night, and that was being swabbed in search of explosives. Bags, body, frisked all over with a wand attached at the one end to a square of material which in turn is run through a detector looking for things with the potential to light up the night, or at least an aeroplane. This was the farewell from Perth, the last hurrah, and the same happened again at Melbourne the next morning. This type of check may be a new phenomenon but three times in four flights could give rise to speculation of hyper-sensitivity or that an innocent grandfather from New Zealand could vaguely give the look of terror. I didn’t ask which, those that operate these sorts of security apparatus aren’t given lightly to such speculation.
If the security is sensitive, the airline is good and a second trip on Virgin Blue from the west of Australia to New Zealand was every bit as good as the first. Virgin’s plane have legroom, they provide a reasonable service and they run to schedule; everything a discerning passenger could want. In fact not only did the flight from Perth get away on time, it landed a half hour ahead of schedule, a tail wind pushing the Boeing 737 along at over 1,000kph. This has been said before but it is worth repeating, and it may be a free ad, but Virgin Blue leaves its Qantas-owned rival Jetstar in its trail of vapour and it beats other low-cost carriers such as Tiger, Air Asia, Ryan Air and EasyJet hands down. Although again, just to repeat the point, those other airlines are all OK with the exception of Jetstar which is in a class of its own, and that’s not a recommendation.
If there is a negative about a four and a half hour stopover at Melbourne Airport it is the absence of free wireless internet. In Singapore, free wireless internet access was a godsend during a five hour wait in the budget-carrier terminal, but at Tullamarine there’s nothing unless you pay. To add insult to injury, the Vodaphone mobile broadband service appeared blocked, and at 6.00am little is open to occupy transit passengers.
There are things to be missed about Perth and Western Australia, not least of which are the Monday night television interviews with John “Woosha” Worsfeld, the coach of the Western Sea Eagles, one of two local AFL clubs. The Eagles have an unassailable spot as wooden spooners of the AFL League and it is sheer theatre each week to watch a beaming Woosha confidently tell Channel Seven’s Basil Zemplas that the team is on track and that his job as coach is rock solid safe. Last Saturday, the assistant coach told The West Australian that Woosha was at the very peak of his coaching career, and that is the very thing to love about Australians. They are optimists; when the chips are down, lower than ever imaginable, they can always see the positives.
To put other things in perspective, a scheduled television debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, the leaders of the two main Australian political parties, has been moved; the timing clashed with the final of Australian MasterChef and it was feared, rightly so, that this would distract viewers away from the lesser stuff of who is going to lead Australia over the next three years. Gillard and Abbott are neck and neck in the polls which is a surprise given Abbott’s loathsome persona.
During out time in Australia we have scoffed, loudly so, at the prospect that Kangaroos run free in the wild. We had heard stories about their antics and were told on countless occasions we would see them, or at least Kangaroo road kill, in any number of places we travelled; on the Nullabor, in the south-west, while out camping and on our travels north. But not a one other than those tamed or in wildlife parks and so it was fitting that on the last day, between Perth and Ellenbrook where Seath and Nicole are building their house, there was an unexpected presence. In a paddock about a dozen, standing around grazing, the occasional one hopping at speed along a fence line looking for all the world like the tail on a Qantas aircraft. After seven months in Australia, it was like we had finally arrived.

Of Barrys and Shaggas
The summer may have been hot, but it gets cold too in Western Australia, and the news has been preoccupied in the last weeks with reports of the coldest winter on record and leading items on television bulletins showing frost being scraped from the windows of cars. The overnight temperatures have plunged below zero, and it may be too cold to stay much longer.
It may also be the cold which has caused a blockage to the brain at the Karratha Natural gas plant; the West Australian reports that the plant’s nine page Bicycle Procedures make riveting reading. Among the examples of the carefully crafted procedures are that staff are not permitted to ride their own bicycles on site but must submit a “Request for Bicycle” form including a 26-point bicycle maintenance checklist each month. All bikes must have a kick stand and carry basket sufficient to hold 5kg of cargo on the front and 15 on the back. It would be good to see these big, burly plant worker getting about in these bikes.
If there was any doubt that Australia is an uncultured, bogan nation there can be none now after, Rivers, one of the local discount retail stores started advertising “metallic shagga” boots. There are two things to consider here; if metallic footwear is not bad enough, calling them shagga boots is really quite beyond the pale. Apparently a derivative of Ug, Ugh or Ugg boots, the ad describes them as having a unique Australian history, created by surfers who, after a day paddling the cold water, wanted these sheepskin boots to keep themselves warm in the evenings. “As Australian, we consider them a cultural icon”, the ad concludes, and as a New Zealander this may be the last time a sheep joke will be enjoyed at our expense.
An AFL bad boy was in hospital last week, Richmond Tiger Ben Cousins having suffered a reaction to a combination of caffeine tablets and prescription sleeping pills. What has been revealed is that players get stuck into caffeine tablets before and during games to give them that added boost and then take sleeping pills after match to slow them down again. But what is intriguing about this report is that, while Cousins was relatively abstemious following one of his sides rare wins, one newspaper report described the official after-match function as having been attended by a number of “over-refreshed” club legends. Over refreshed, how is that for a euphemism for paralytic?
The final and favourite report for the week is that of a new website dedicated to saving the name Barry from extinction. Barrys built Australia, the site says, and the great name, once popular with parents, is being overlooked in a world of Zacharys, Oscars and Julians. Barrys need all the help they can get and on the endangered list a number of great Australian Barrys; Humphries and Gibb and one of the baddest boys of all, the Australian Football League star Barry Hall. Already the corresponding Facebook pages has over 3,000 “likes”.
Last night, the All Blacks beat South Africa in what must be one of the best rugby tests in recent time and local favourites, the Fremantle Dockers were beaten by Ben Cousin’s Richmond. It must be time to abandon this curious country and return to the sanctuary and sanity of New Zealand.

Rudderless
The dust has settled on the leadership change and in Julia Gillard the lucky country now has its first Welsh-born Prime Minister. If that if not bad enough she is the first ever “ranga”, as they call red-heads in this part of the world, in the role and that has become, perhaps, the greatest talking point of her sudden rise to the top. Television viewers have been subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of her hair through the ages, from schoolgirl to Prime Minister. On that alone, she will likely win the Federal Election, now expected to happen sometime during August..
The move to topple Kevin Rudd coincided with my return from Phuket, and in the transient world of politics it was both inevitable and wise. Rudd and Labor were losing ground at an alarming rate to the Liberal leader Tony Abbott who is, quite frankly, an unnervingly creepy man. It would be an embarrassment to the civilized world should he be elected and, although there is still an outside chance he could win, the betting odds have tipped back in Labor’s favour leaving the Coalition only now a $3.10 long shot.
In defeat Rudd was as every bit as charmless as former Australian leader John Howard who this week failed in his bid to become the Chairman of the International Cricket Council. For some reason, Howard was grumpy and seemed surprised that Sri Lanka didn’t support him after his calling spin bowler Murathilaran a cheat and giving Zimbabwe’s Mugabe his pedigree (not that anyone could argue with him on that score). The Asian nations decided that Howard was racist and after his conduct towards the boat people in the lead-up to the 2004 Federal Election, and who could blame them?
But back to Rudd; he managed to alienate not only his political rivals but also his colleagues, the public and, it seems, even many of his own staff. This mild, meek looking man is apparently no stranger to letting serve and following with a volley of choice four letter words directed at staff and others who may not have satisfactorily fulfilled his every whim.
According to West Australian columnist Zoltan Kovacs, "it is undeniable that Rudd was a friend to his political gravediggers. He was evidently unaware of his fatal political flaw; an addiction to spin as the indispensible means of getting and holding power. . . It is an irony of Mr Rudd's downfall that he was widely known as a master of spin, but wa kicked out of office mainly because of an inability to communicate effectively."
Never better illustrated, Rudd’s tussle with the mining companies over the proposed introduction of a new mining "super profits" tax was his eventual undoing; whatever the merits of the tax, it was a public relations disaster and his toppling became only a matter of time. One thing about the Australians is that they had the daring and courage to replace a serving Prime Minister, still ahead in the polls, just months out from a Federal Election, and there may be a lesson in that currently for the New Zealand Labour Party.
If there is some disappointing new to report, it is that stumps have been drawn on the annual Lilac Hill Festival, an annual cricket match held near the small town of Guildford in the Swan Valley just outside Perth. Since 1990, the Lilac Hill Festival has been home to an opening match for international touring teams, a sort of shrugging-off-the-jetlag warm-up loosener. It would be like having a carnival day at the Heathcote Cricket Club, all good fun, and as well as the touring teams other legends such as Dennis Lillee or even our own Sir Richard Hadlee come out of retirement and play for the local Chairman’s Eleven.
Apparently touring teams no longer want to play, saying it will somehow compromise other international fixtures, this year the death knell being spelled by England refusing to play in what would have been a twenty year anniversary match prior to the Ashes series. It is, alas, another casualty of the corporatisation of sport.

Trouble in Paradise
There is trouble in paradise; it may end in a gunfight at the OK Corral and if it does, there is no doubt whose side we’ll be on. Our friend Tanacha, or Kid, pronounced Kit, is currently embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over the ownership of a bar which her Canadian “boyfriend” brought for her in January this year, and she is sad, very sad indeed.
The problem is that, while Kid (on the left of the picture) was preoccupied setting up the bar, the boyfriend was just as preoccupied setting up a new Thai girlfriend, and if that wasn't bad enough, he then tried to replace Kid with the new girlfriend to run the bar. Kid was having none of it, having done the hard yards establishing the place and using her very wide circle of Facebook friends to draw in the punters.
Without doubt, at 29 years of age, Kid is a canny operator and was not prepared to stand by and watch her hard work go unrewarded, despite the Canadian boyfriend wanting to retain all of his investment, and this unfortunate stand-off has begun. Fortunately the bar is in Kid’s name.
The usually effervescent Kid was visible depressed when I caught up with her, and it saddened me that it could not be resolved short of litigation; she has spent 30,000 Baht so far on legal fees and heads to court early next month for a hearing, and although I am one, I cannot stand what some of the farang, or foreigners, do here.
This is a common problem in Thailand. There are countless stories where foreigners, lust-struck ones in particular, buy businesses for their Thai girlfriends or with a group of unknown locals and then things turn sour. Unless companies are properly set up, farang cannot have the majority ownership of businesses, and so these curious arrangements are entered into which, unless very carefully managed, have the potential to turn to disaster. In this case it has.
We met Kid on our first visit to Phuket when she worked at the Kiwi Bar, and back at that bar on this visit I enjoyed listening while another of the staff, Pons (on the right of the picture), told me of her dreams, and I wondered how she will achieve them on 9,000 Baht or nearly $NZ390 a month. It is a good wage for a local here, but she has a twelve year old daughter in the north being cared for by her parents and every week sends money for her care and welfare. She is frugal and, instead of partying like many of the other young women, Pons has brought land in a village where her uncle lives and knows that every Baht she pays off the land will mean she no longer has to struggle or rely on anyone else when she is older. She has an Australian boyfriend and, although he wants to marry and support her, she maintains her independence and doesn’t want to be reliant on others for money. She is proud, intelligent and optimistic, and has a great wish in life to see “seernow” which I eventually figure is that white powdery stuff that settles in the mountains, and so I tell her that Mama, as Kaelene is affectionately known to them, would be delighted to have Pons come and stay so she can have a once in a lifetime chance to try skiing.
With Pons and Na, we took a late night down trip the infamous and colourful Bangla Road in Patong; we drank at a club and while there I was approached repeatedly by two women asking me to buy them drinks. I declined politely saying my companions, drinking water and Coke respectively, were more than sufficient company. They persisted but had no luck, and it wasn’t until the next evening I twigged as Pons and Na regaled Kiwi Bar owner Tiggy with the story. My intended companions were, in fact, Kathoy, or ladyboys; all I thought at the time was that they were not to most attractive looking women I had seen.
Earlier, on leaving Perth airport for this short sojourn to Phuket I was stopped, taken aside and swabbed all over for explosives. Just a random thing they assured me and it was as well I turned out to be clear of harmful substance, but it was the first time in all of our travels that this has occurred.
It is quite late in our travels for firsts, but returning to Perth flying on Tiger Airlines was another first and it certainly passed the test for a budget carrier. The flight from Phuket to Singapore was on time and the same from Singapore to Perth, the seats were comfortable, service good and the red wine effective.
But there may be one challenge, however, and that is to unionise Tiger Airlines; its staff clearly need something to get the balance right, an attendant returned to my seat en-route as they had wrongly calculated the conversion cost from Australian to Singapore dollars for my can, yes can, of wine. The attendant explained that, unless I coughed up the extra dollar I had been undercharged, his colleague would have it deducted from her wages. What else was I to do but pay up but as I did I pondered on the nature of employers who deduct the cost of genuine mistakes from the wages of staff, and wonder what would have been the effect had the same rule been applied to chief executives and investment bankers as their recklessness plunged the world into the last global recession?
Perhaps the world would be a better place.

Phuket life
Some places capture your heart while others don’t quite make it, and it is often hard to tell exactly why. I tried to explain this to a colleague in Australia who asked why he should travel to Phuket, and as I rolled into Patong on Saturday afternoon I thought I may have made a grave error of judgment in recommending it to him. Is this the place for a meticulous man, one who knows nothing other than a sense of order?
Patong is tawdry but appealing, an edgy, dusty beachside town on this Thai island, filled for most of the year by Australian, European and Scandinavian holidaymakers and men looking for a short term wife. The infrastructure is third-world, ramshackle, the authorities’ questionable and everything seems quite chaotic, so there is every good reason not to like it, but it is not quite that simple. There is a charm, Thais are delightful, their Buddhist way of life peaceful, the weather is warm, the scenery spectacular, and among the chaos there are the little quirks of amusing logic.
As in New Zealand, driving is on the left hand side of the road, except that is for the cross roads joining the one way Beach and Ratu Thitt roads where the opposite applies. Driving on these streets is done on the right hand side as saves right-turning vehicles from cross-crossing each other when coming on and off the one way roads, which is all quite sensible really.
The locals can also be also wonderfully hapless; there are signs up around town advertising a comedy night featuring Arj Barker, better known as Dave from Flight of the Conchords. Trouble is that none of them say where the show is on, neither does the ad in the Phuket Gazette, and it took an internet search to find the venue, the local Mercure Hotel.
A fact that cannot be escaped is that Thailand is still a poor south Asian country and Phuket has made its way selling its soul to tourists rather than continuing to mine tin from its rich, red soils. Being poor means there are two quite defined economies and the two rarely meet; the high-end multinational tourist corporations and property developers are all here but there’s not too much evidence of a decent trickle-down. A taxi driver’s salary is about $6,500 Baht or $NZ280 a month, the girls at the Kiwi Bar between 6,000 and 8,000 Baht; all work at least 12 hours a day and get only one or two days off a month.
The standard price of an hour-long massage is between 250 and 300 baht, no more than $13, and it would be fair to assume that the masseuse gets only a small portion of that. Each day, down at The Mango Tree, each staff averages just one massage in the off-season, on some days none. For the remainder of the time they just sit around waiting.
Then there are the vendors who supply the locals. Mostly weary looking, older people, they trudge the back streets lugging baskets supported by cane poles, or pushing hand carts with food and drink. Some squat on the sides of the roads cooking from primitive looking burners, and it’s hard to imagine how they make a living selling bits of chicken to locals at about 10 Baht, or forty cents, a pop.
This may be holiday island, but for those who work here it is a tough life.
One change from the last visit is the long-awaited re-opening of the Hard Rock Café and, while it might be passé, an inspection was warranted. The same menu, the same memorabilia and the same type of chatty, up-beat staff as every other Hard Rock Café, but what is here is a fine collection of The Beatles Monthly, the fan club magazine of the Liverpool foursome, dating from 1963. Now that is rare.
Another very clear favourite is Phuketwan, an internet news journal edited by ex-pat Alan Morison who we met on our last visit. Alan is not one to back away from expressing strong views and takes no prisoners, local or tourist, when the inclination takes him. Many of his stories arouse heated blog discussion, this week one about the funeral of a “Scamdinavian” vagrant. Alan’s clear view is that the authorities, both Swedish and Thai, should have stopped her repeated visits during which time “she begged from Thais who could not necessarily afford to give, she borrowed from others with no intention of paying back the money, and she quite deliberately did not pay her bills”. In response to being called hypocritical by one reader Alan responded: “It's such a shame that neither you nor the Thai or Swedish authorities reacted appropriately to our accurate and pointed headings between Christmas 2009 and Ms Strand's death. Now, you find a voice. Now, you shoot the messenger. Well done, Simon”.
In today’s wire feed, Alan is on the rampage against corruption. “The crookedness …handicaps virtually every aspect of honest governance and justice, leaving Phuket's hopes of even competing with other international destinations permanently crippled.
“Rip-offs also abound. As fast as the beautiful beaches and coral reefs turn on the tourists, the extortionate prices and everyday deceits turn them off.
“This is not a purely Thai problem: the expats who exploit the graft are even more evil, perhaps, because they know there are workable alternatives."
“How long has it been since someone on Phuket was charged with corruption? We don't know the answer, but we doubt that there has been a memorable instance this century.
This is typical of Phuket and Phuketwan and we love it, but I have emailed my colleague suggesting the safety of a resort hotel. Patong might just be a bit wild for him.

The age of enlightenment
We found the archetypal Australian this week and he’s an absolute cracker, much too good not to share. Speaking at a charity dinner on Wednesday night marking fifteen years of Aussie Rules footy legends, former AFL star Mal Brown complained about the lighting in the early era of night matches. “We were at a disadvantage,” he told the audience, “we couldn’t pick any of the cannibals”, adding that, because they didn’t have any white shirts, his Aboriginal team mates weren't selected because they couldn’t be seen in the dark.
This came in the same week as New South Wales Assistant Rugby League coach and former star Andrew Johns was in hot water over describing a Queensland player as a black c....t in the built up to the second state of origin match. And not long after current AFL player Jason Akermanis advised gays in the league to remain in the closet because “footy is not ready” for them to come out. It would break the fabric of a club and be unsafe, the now former HeraldSun columnist wrote.
But back to the enlightened Mr Brown, on his way out of the dinner he told journalists not “to go writing what I said about those Abos” and later told media that his use of terms like “cannibal” and “little black buggers” were terms of endearment. To illustrate the extent to which he isn’t racist he went on to say that he’d helped Aboriginal boys and grown up with them all my life; thankfully he stopped short of claiming them as some of his best friends.
A true dinosaur, Brown told the HeraldSun that, while not sorry for making the comments, some “sensitive” people had told him he’d made a dickhead of himself and he accepted that. He agreed his comments were inappropriate in 2010, but added that he had made those sorts of comments probably 5,000 times in the last five years and, not to be restrained, he thought that the attention paid to his comments was unwarranted in light of the fact that “we are being led by a dickhead of a prime minister”.
This man is a true gem and, as if had not dug a considerable enough hole for himself, when asked if he had learned anything from the furore, he responded that if asked do another charity lunch he would just tell them to go and get stuffed.
Don’t you just love Australians?
Charity fundraising must be all the go this week, in an EBay charity auction the winning bid for breakfast and a surfing lesson with Liberal leader Tony Abbott came from a group called “GetUp” which campaigns on social issues. It paid $16,500 for former Afghani refugee Riz Wakil to get the chance to bend Abbott’s ear about the plight of refugees. Wakil, who spent nine months in an Australian detention centre, intends to tell Abbott that his hard-line policies on immigration and detention arrangements for refugees are inhuman. He quipped that he was more qualified to talk about people smugglers than Abbott’s now infamous budgie smugglers.
Wakil hopes Abbot will listen, but it is difficult to imagine he’ll get a word in edgeways.
Incidentally, the winner of a date with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was television Channel 10’s Seven O’Clock Project starring the very, very funny Dave Hughes.
Not quite so funny was news that our friends, the Andersons of the trucking-across-the-Nullabor-story, were truckless and walking back to West Australia from somewhere near the New South Wales and Victoria border. A wayward, on-coming, four wheel drive wagon attached to a mobile home, sideswiped their brand-spanking new Kenworth (with only 6,700 kilometers on the clock), rendering vehicles and trailers in need of surgery, the mobile home strewn up the highway, the other driver injured and all others shaken.
By anyone’s standards, that an extreme way to get a few weeks off work.

The match
This was like watching an emerging Crusaders rugby side, the same daring, scintillating back pay, familiar defensive patterns and the same heart-in-mouth mistakes. But these charges were decked out in the green and gold of the Australian Wallabies and not the black and red of home. And it was a positively dangerous sign for New Zealand’s Rugby World Cup hopes.
Rugby is not viewed at its best when played in an AFL stadium, a rugby field is 80 metres shorter than its Aussie Rule’s counterpart, everything is seen long distance, but from high in Block 415 at Subiaco Oval, the stadium equivalent of being in the Gods, we had a commanding oversight of the entire field.
It is not often that a rugby test is played in AFL-mad Perth and so the opportunity to see Australia play England was a test match not to be missed. And while it is not in the nature of most New Zealanders to support an Australian side, it is even less palatable to show any liking for the English. Of course it is easier to support the Australians with its Canterbury coach, Robbie Deans, and it must have been an omen, for as we arrived at the ground the team bus pulled in with Deans in command up front.
Overcome with the moment, I almost brought a Wallabies jacket for grandson Jack, but was saved from such folly by my friend Rod who rightly suggested the poor lad might be scarred for life turning up to day-care or visiting friends in Christchurch wearing such a rivaled outfit.
But to the rugby and we witnessed sides of such contrasting styles. The Wallabies were expansive and attacking, taking risks and exciting the home crowd. The English were big and dour and without imagination, and they typified the very reason that English test rugby has such a poor reputation. If there was a game plan it wasn’t evident and they were just, simply, dull and brutish. Had the Wallabies front row not repeatedly collapsed, handing the English an unprecedented two penalty tries, the English would have been thrashed. In any event, the Australian’s 27 to 17 winning margin flattered the English, but in the meantime, take note of these names; Quade Cooper, Will Genia, Berrick Barnes and James O’Connor; these are stars of the future.
The lesson from this is that the Australians have an exciting young squad and the Rugby World Cup is still more than a year away. Time enough to get the front row ills to be sorted and, once done, this team will be an imposing force.
If there is blight on the modern game, that is aside from its corporatisation, it is the number of handlers and trainers who appear on the field during the game; at one breakdown alone on Saturday night we counted eleven, that’s almost another full team, and it is plainly ridiculous.
There was some relief though; après match we retired to colleague Rod’s home and watched a recorded version of the All Blacks versus Ireland test played in New Plymouth earlier in the evening. Just as the Australian backs were young and dazzling, so too were the new All Blacks, with Cory Jane and Israel Dagg having cracking games. Even the front row looked good, although these are not the imposing men of past eras, and the worry is that coach Graham Henry has the year ahead to knock every shred of of that flair and brilliance from their systems.
Despite the win at Subi, Australia was in mourning by Monday. Their team, the Socceroos, was hammered by Germany four nil in the Football World Cup and it was worse in Western Australia. Both local AFL teams lost their weekend matches, the hapless West Coast Eagles by a whopping 49 points. “At least”, said the radio newsreader, “we won the rugby”. Not in the least consoled, the announcer responded, “Yeah, but who cares about Rugby.”
On another note entirely, we were amused to learn that the fast food chain, Red Rooster has brought out new signage, a single illuminated panel to replace the separate, stand-alone lettering of the current branding. A spokesperson for the company says the appearance of the new panels has nothing to do with the frequency with which the “S” keeps getting stolen from the current signs. Yean right.