Kiwi gold
This was one not to be missed, the twenty-fifth and, as it transpired, final Swanbourne Olympics. Beachside, under the hot Perth sun, this was competition as its most fierce; an international field contesting such unlikely events as pass the bucket, fill’er up mate, the four legged race which was actually what Kiwi’s know as the three legged race but with an extra person, the hot-rod race, ocean swimming and a variety of others culminating in an all-in tug o’war. This left the concurrently running Vancouver Winter Olympics for dead, and proudly taking the gold and silver medals from the Aussies in the ocean swimming in the second event of the day were a couple of young New Zealand women. We were just so proud; it almost brought tears to our eyes when they belted out a couple of refrains of God Defend New Zealand as they stepped onto the podium to collect their medals. They were to take more medals later, fortunate as their only other compatriot competitor, an unidentified male formerly of Christchurch, was beaten into second-to-last place in the egg and spoon race, which was actually golf ball and spoon, after some unruly interference from an Australian rival. Typical.
Team uniform for the day’s events was described as immaterial and that was as well; judging the best bum competition would have been difficult had costumes been mandatory or even allowed. It may be that some think a best bum competition culturally inappropriate in an age where substance is intended to be more admired than form, but we thought the whole event somewhat ageist. What chance does a middle-aged, sagging backside have against a nubile, taut young thing, and this proved the case. The winners were all young, but we applauded as our country fellows again picked up the gold and silver medals in the female section.
Uniforms too would have been quite a problem for the eggs in space competition. It comprised one competitor throwing eggs to another who attempted to catch them without breakage. The distance between the players was increased after every successful throw until a point was reached where containment could no longer occur, the catcher generally becoming splattered in yolk. No good for clothes we were told.
We refrained from the lunchtime body painting feeling no particular need to have a blue Australian flag torso with one nipple the fifth Australian star and the other the centre of the Union Jack, or to have an elephant whose trunk extended to a phallic finish, but others did. Instead, we had a barbequed sausage from the stall of one of the local nudist clubs.
Clearly these sports are not everyone’s cup of tea. The local free beach association reports that there is entrenched opposition to their very existence from some local residents and council representatives and elements within the surf club despite North Swanbourne having been a nude beach since before the Second World War. There was even, their newsletter says, opposition to the new beachside café calling itself the Naked Fig, the word naked apparently not considered to be family friendly.
If it was considered that people who inhabit nude beaches might be odd, they are nothing by comparison to some who use public transport. Just the other day, a young man sat next to Marty on his way home from work. Not long into the journey he began shadow-boxing, sparring, it seemed, with an invisible Mohammed Ali and he was sidetracked only by a need to repeatedly call out to a non-existent person who may or may not have been on the bus.
Next, he jumped out of his seat, stood underneath the ceiling mirror designed to let the driver see passengers wanting to alight from the rear doors, pulled off his cap, spat on his hands and spent the best part of five stops sculpting his hair in one of those rooster comb styles. Brilliant, he then sat down in another seat and told a complete stranger loud enough for the whole bus to hear how he was off to meet his partner, the previous night being the first time they had been together in four years. “It was a bit strange”, he said, “but we have an open relationship. I told her she could sleep around as much as she wanted as long as she didn’t tell me about it”, he said to all who probably didn’t need that level of information. And then he proceeded to then tell us all about permaculture.
How very odd this country can be.

Post Mao
It was the place to be, Chinatown, Melbourne for the Chinese New Year and it was quite by accident that we found ourselves making our way through hundreds of spectators, mostly Chinese, watching costumed dragons weaving their way through the crowds accompanied by drummers and lines of followers. Strings of Double-Happy firecrackers sounded like random machine-gun fire going off completed the raucous atmosphere as we made our way to the Post Mao Restaurant for dinner with Seath and Nicole.
We can’t be sure if this was coincidence or fate, but they had brought tickets to see the rock band AC/DC in Melbourne and were booked for a week in Australia’s cultural capital while on break from work. Subsequently, when he started work, Marty learned was to be dispatched to Melbourne at the very same time. But it didn’t end there, quite independently we had been booked into the same hotel, The Rendezvous, opposite the Flinders St railway station and, as would be expected, we couldn’t help but all bump in to each other once there.
For us, it was a return visit to Post Mao, a restaurant themed on the iconic leader of the Cultural Revolution, complete with Mao statues and posters and a maitre‘d who seemed like a Chinese version of Basil Faulty. With tie tucked firmly into shirt, he challenged intending patrons about whether they had a booking and, if not, it seemed, he made random or arbitrary decisions on whether he would let them in. We must have passed the test, so secured a table and subsequently tucked in to a fabulous meal of Peking duck, honeyed chicken, sizzling beef and other delicacies washed down by New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc.
Melbourne itself is just as we remember, but for the number of AC/DC fans in town for the band’s three concerts planned for the city. The place was crawling with people adorned in tour T-shirts, although there was clearly some competition to be wearing clothing from scenes of the band’s past glories. Among the current tour shirts were those from previous eras, dating back as far as their concerts of the 1970s.
The National Gallery of Victoria even got in on the act, with an AC/DC exhibition including concert posters, tickets, magazines, videos, photos and even a series of handwritten letters and cards from the former, now dead, singer, Bon Scott, to family and friends. One letter, loaned to the exhibition by his girlfriend, accused her of being unfaithful to him while he was away on tour and telling her how cross he was as a result. How very generous of her to loan such a personal letter and how very possessive for such accusations to come from a wild man of rock’n’roll.
Four Australian cities have made into the world’s top ten most liveable cities in the world according to an annual survey conducted by The Economist magazine. The survey considers five factors; stability, health-care, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Melbourne comes in as Australia’s highest ranked city, beaten into third place by Vancouver and Vienna. Sydney, Perth and Adelaide are also included in the list ahead of Auckland in tenth place. Not surprisingly, Zimbabwe’s capital Harare was considered least liveable of the 140 places compared.
While these Australian cities are easily liveable, one difference between New Zealand and Australia is the level and visibility of organized crime and how the seemingly responsible rich and famous appear to be have such interesting connections. Incidents linking industrialists, business people and lawyers with underworld characters are commonly reported, the latest the firebombing of a car belonging to the boss of a company currently in charge of Perth’s largest construction project. The West Australian reports that underworld characters had been seen around the construction site and that bikies and other gang members employed by sub-contractors had proved impossible to control before the bombing. Soon after, the developer announced a halt to the $550 million project.
Among the frontrunners to take over the project is a company whose board members include former “Sword Boys” gang member, cage fighter, nightclub bouncer and “enforcer” Edmoind “Monty” Margini, who has denied any connection with the incident. He claims as his alibi the fact that he was dining with ‘larger-than-life construction union boss, Kevin Reynolds”, at the time. It turns out they are good mates, Reynolds having employed Margini at one stage as an industrial relations officer.
This all seems quite normal in the lucky country.

Jesus, the kangaroo
This may be taking things too far, but we spent the weekend with the other Churtons, Kaelene's first husband and his second wife, but then we are all mature and sensible people. With Seath and Nicole, we headed down the Kwinana highway past Bunbury and inland to Bridgetown in the South West, to what is an essentially old-fashioned rural Australian town. They exist, these places with old, verandahed pubs and tree-lined streets, but to get there we had to pass the “ups”; Burekup, Boyanup, Kirup, Balingup, Manjimup, Dwellingup, Gnowangerup, Kojonup, Nannup, Kulikup, Beerelup, Dardanup, Mullalyup, Yowungup, Maranup, Naimup, Kakatherup, Winnejup, Mandalup but to name but a few. Up, we are told, is the indigenous term for water, but there seemed little around.
This is outback Australia where legend has it there are such things as Kangaroos and Emu in the wild; we’ve not seem any and we are not convinced they exist outside of wildlife parks and zoos; all we found were wineries, olive groves, orchards and market gardens, and traffic police hunting down wayward drivers. This is a place where, when forecasters’ talk about improving weather, they mean it will get colder and, better still, it may even rain. It is big, dry country but it does have quite an appeal if you can appreciate the beauty of straggly gum trees and red soil. Undeniably it is big country, the tourist brochures tell us in graphic form that this state is bigger than New Zealand, Japan, the British Isles and half of Europe put together. We believe it.
The first Mr Churton, Victor, and his second wife, Victoria, have a five acre block just out of Bridgeton and it is quite heavenly. In the mornings, vivid, almost iridescent, blue wrens fossick in the garden while, later, white Cockatoos and bright green parrots call by. Ravens and crows squeal, sounding for the world like new-born lambs and the flies, huge things, bite everything that gets in their way. We don’t like those one bit, but breakfast of garden fresh tomatoes, free-range eggs and local bacon make it all seem okay.
As if to prove that Kangaroos really do exist in the wild, the president of one of the University union branches provides a weekly update into his latest charge, a young Joey. As part of a rescue group, he and others pluck survivors from the pouches of road-killed kangaroos and hand rear them until ready for release back into to the wild. In this case, Jesus, as this Joey is known, lives in an eskie, the Australian equivalent of a chilly bin, until big and strong enough for release. What happens is that, once independent, they are put into a paddock with other similarly hand-reared joeys, the gates are left open and, eventually, they drift back off into their wild state.
Down at the beach, dressed in nothing more than red and gold surf lifesavers’ budgie smugglers, Australian Liberal Party leader, the ghastly Tony Abbott, has told women that their virginity is a gift that shouldn’t be given away lightly. Those he says who are tempted by sex before marriage should at least use contraceptives. This might seem obvious to some, but Tony Abbott for more than two decades was hoodwinked into believing he was the father of a love child conceived during his teenage years. “I have gone through twenty-seven years of life convinced that I was Daniel’s dad, but it appears that is not the case,” said Mr Abbott after DNA testing proved that an unidentified man was actually the father. Clearly Mr Abbott did not mean that young males need to give away their virginity so easily.

The smart rider
It is easy to tell that school’s back. Patrolling school pedestrian crossings are an unlikely rag-tag mob of jug-eared, wild-eyed pensioners, each and every one looking quite mad enough to belong to New Zealand’s Sensible Sentencing Trust. Identical in their uniforms of sandals, socks and white lab coats covered by high visibility vests, these folk, the Percy Sugdens of Perth, stride out without warning into the middle of road crossings, blowing whistles and waving lollipop signs challenging traffic to swerve and stop while kids idly dawdle to and from school. It is easy to suspect that these pests have nothing better to do than exercise petty power and, rather than keeping children safe, they are really more interested in reporting to traffic police motorists who inadvertently drive past schools at more than the permitted 40kph or forget to stop at the crossings. We try to run them down, but to this point have been completely unsuccessful.
An unfortunate reason for this lack of accomplishment is that of working, something which keeps Marty off the roads at critical times. Instead, he has become a SmartRider, one of Perth’s million commuters who cram onto trains and buses each weekday morning and head into the city. Public transport has always been a favourite and Perth is no exception, and it is easy to see why. On his first day as a serious commuter, three of Marty’s four rides were free as a result of the ticket machine at the Bayswater station being broken down and then bus drivers having insufficient change for the $100 note tendered for the $2.40 fare. It was tempting to try and ride free forever, but there was some feeling that the drivers would eventually twig if offered unchangeable tender every day. He is now the proud owner of an electronic card which is so clever it works out the best applicable fare for each day’s travel.
It is undeniable that public transport commuters have exceptionally highly developed skills; what other species could stand at platforms, get on and off trains, remain upright as other passengers push past them for space, not topple or lurch as trains hurtle at an uneven gait without lifting as much as an eye from the page of the book they are reading, not even for a moment? Who else could sway to the beat of an Ipod and digest a Tolstoy novel at the same time?
If reading is one skill, timing is another. In economical anticipation of effort, commuters position themselves in the best part of the train to get to a connecting service or out of the station so, when the doors open, there is a determined rush to the nearby bus terminal or to other platforms. In this case it is off the train, down the platform, up the escalator, into the bus terminal and on to the bus within a minute and all without missing an Ipod beat or making eye or any other contact with another soul. This is precision itself.
There are also the curious conventions. Without exception, when a seated passenger gets off at a station, the vacated seat remains empty even though there may be 50 passengers or more standing sardine-like in the aisle. Either they are too absorbed in their Ipod or book to notice or pretend not to notice the empty seat or, more likely, they don’t want to be seen as the pushy or greedy ones by sitting down. Inexplicably, the seat remains unfilled for the duration of the journey. As for us, we are of sufficient age that we nab priority seats reserved for the elderly and infirm, believing that we qualify on both counts.
With the local council apparently threatening to prosecute the tree man of Thornlie if he doesn’t soon relinquish his gum-tree perch, we set off on a search mission to photograph this unlikley hero and with the help of our satellite navigation we homed in on one of the only two gum trees remaining in Hume Street. From what looked like a Bedouin campsite fifteen feet in the air, came a voice from among the branches demanding to know who we were and the nature of our business. Satisfied that we posed no threat the star emerged, Richard Pennicuik, the tree man himself. Alas, it seems that he has become a target for local hoons who pass by and pelt his sanctuary with eggs and hurl abuse. And it may not be exaggeration, for while we were chatting a small ute pulled up, its occupants giving the impression they were not there to spread good cheer. Fortunately, they reviewed their plans after sighting us and departed.
After learning more about his protest, the nature of global warming and the beauty of living up a tree, including being visited by rare, black cockatoos, we signed Mr Pennicuik’s petition to save the tree. It may have been coincidence, but the very next day he called for the tree to be given a heritage listing.