Tag Archive for 'Queensland'

Highway to Hell

Published
by
Ant
on June 1, 2009
in Australia
. 1 Comment

[Editors Note: In an unprecedented grovel I'm beginning this post with an apology to all those who believed me abducted or absconded! The Outback of Australia turned out to be the most impossible region to achieve any internet time - not least because Reb and I are too tight to pay the $30 to stay in a caravan park, ergo rarely even have electricity for the laptop (and you try asking where the nearest Internet Cafe is in Willabongadongdong!). Needless to say, over the next few weeks as I descend on Perth I will be typing up a mountain of notes and bringing you up to speed. OK, grovel over - here's the latest, entitled 'Highway to Hell']:

Highway to Hell

I had it all planned. A clever tribute to the Outback, laden with full stops in place of traffic lights; commas leading you up highways; exclamation marks to record calamities; and semicolons for side trips (and brackets to let you in on the local secrets). I was going to carefully pull over at paragraphs, use capital letters to signal the beginning and a trail of… to pull you to a stop. The title? Gone Walkabout. The beginning? I start the engine. The middle? I push the accelerator. The end? I push the brake. Oh, how wrong could I be. Australia’s lineal highways have stripped me of the literary curves and swerves I usually prune, and reduced me to the arrow straight, tell-it-like-it-is truth. The sparsest, remotest… most soul-sapping… nothingness you have ever seen. Roads so straight they send you round the bend! Continue reading ‘Highway to Hell’

Bad Fruit

Published
by
Ant
on May 2, 2009
in Australia
. 6 Comments

The thrill of actually landing a job was dummed down by the reality that it was picking mandarins. Still, the recruitment officer made it quite clear that we were very privileged to have received this job, while the government of Australia took pains to reiterate that we must remain employed for no less than three calendar months if we were to fulfill our desire to extend our visa by a further year. “Sign here. And here. And here. You’re now a Citrus Accumulator”. Continue reading ‘Bad Fruit’

Mundane in the Membrane

Published
by
Ant
on April 27, 2009
in Australia
. 4 Comments

Seconds after I rolled the car to a halt I popped the bonnet and did what every man does well; I stared at the engine, and let out a “hmmmm…” I’d later learn the “pregnant” radiator pipe was impregnated by a back draft of fumes and the car was in need of what us humans would call a heart transplant. The side effect of this decay, was a ten day delay that forced us into a major u-turn. There was to be no harvest work left in the South Australia wineries, so we had to get to the northern state of Queensland – pronto. Continue reading ‘Mundane in the Membrane’