Rhonda Bracey: At Random

It felt cold this morning so I put on the heating… Why? According to the official weather stats for Bridgetown, the overnight minimum was a chilly 0.3C and the temp at 9am was only 4.9C.

At 6am when I got up, the temp in the house was 5C, so that’s when I put the heater on! We turned it off at 8am. I popped in to the post office around 10am without realising how cold it still was outside – should’ve worn some gloves!

Late yesterday afternoon we took a short drive to Balingup to play some pool (snooker) and have dinner at the Blackwood River Tavern. Near Greenbushes we got ‘flashed’ by a car heading south, so we figured that some police were up ahead. A couple of kms further on there they were – police car in a parking area, and two boys in blue with their fluoro jackets pulling over vehicles heading south, away from Balingup.

I guessed that this wasn’t a random breath test stop, or even a speeding driver stop – none of the things or behaviours you normally see with those offences were evident. I *thought* it might be because the forests around Balingup are reputed to have ‘magic mushrooms’ growing wild, and each year the police and the mushroom hunters bang heads over this substance. The dead giveaway was a slightly beat up car further up the road at the crest of a hill – the driver had stopped on the side of the road, probably because he could see the police in the road ahead (and they had seen him), and I guessed that he was contemplating what to do! Turn around and get chased by the police, drive on and hope they don’t stop him, get out of the car and run into the forest… Of course, my imagination assumed that all this was the case whereas maybe he’d just broken down (yeah, right!).

When we got to the tavern, we asked the barman if it was magic mushroom time (all sorts of other mushrooms are sprouting now, so I expected it was). He grinned and said it was and that there police stopping traffic on all roads leading out of Balingup – South West Highway heading north to Bunbury and south to Bridgetown, Balingup to Nannup road heading west, and Grimwade Rd heading east. And they would be doing so for some weeks.

Makes you wonder whether chasing hippies and other thrill seekers through a forest is the best use of police resources. Personally, I wouldn’t know one mushroom from another!

… is SO much cheaper! I never thought so when we first moved out of the city as we had a lot of expenses getting the house set up (painting, plastering, electrical, plumbing etc. – nothing cosmetic like a kitchen makeover [I wish!], just making the house livable). And the price of groceries, newspapers, etc. is more.

However, after being here for nearly 3 months I can say that our daily living expenses have dropped considerably. I haven’t done an analysis using MYOB yet, but I can see it in my purse. For example, I took out $150 cash from the bank a month ago – and I still have over $50 left! That amount would last me two weeks when I lived in Perth – maybe.

We pay for lots of things on our credit card – but we always did, so that hasn’t changed. But the little things like using cash to buy lunch when you forget to make it to take to work really add up. Of course, working 3 steps from the kitchen means that ‘buying lunch’ is now a thing of the past, as are regular fuel bills. Assuming I don’t go to Perth, a tank of fuel is lasting me a month or more, instead of 2 weeks. And my husband’s gas usage is even less than that. Town is literally 2 minutes drive away – we could walk it easily, except for the enormous hills!

Some other unexpected things about country living:

• No junk mail in the letterbox or the PO box either! Ever.
• Wood smoke. I think EVERYBODY here has a wood-fuelled fire for heating, and they all have them going all day… So some days the smell of wood smoke is a little overpowering, and, even if the weather is fine, we have to have the doors and windows closed (not good for me as I’m a fresh air fiend who must have a window open at all times). The smell is not unpleasant (burning eucalyptus is quite nice, actually), but just not in the quantity we’re getting. Thank goodness we’re not asthmatic.
• Fog. I didn’t realise how foggy it gets down here – even at the top of the hill where we’re living. I expected lots of fog over winter in the valley, but not up this far. Some mornings lately we’ve had some real ‘pea soupers’. Fortunately, they haven’t been days I’ve been driving to Perth.

I *thought* it was cold when I got up this morning! It’s the first time I’ve felt cold here in one of the coldest places in Western Australia, and now I know why – it was 1.5C overnight here in Bridgetown (source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology website). It’s been that before, but I haven’t actually *felt* cold – this morning I did, so I guess winter is setting in…

Actually, I think everybody else here thinks it’s cold as the wood fires are on all day, every day now. And sometimes the wood smoke is a bit much to bear. Everyone here seems to have a wood fire (potbelly, tile fire, whatever). These fires all use timber from the forest floor and offcuts from the sawmills. We have a tile fire too, but have no intention of using it if we can get away with not doing so. Chopping wood just doesn’t appeal!

That’s why we had a reverse cycle split system air conditioner installed when we moved in. Yes, the air conditioner uses electricity, which burns fossil fuels and adds to greenhouse gas emissions, but hell, burning fuels directly and creating an awful lot of smoke pollution doesn’t seem any better, in my book. Meantime, we haven’t turned on any artificial heat yet – I’m making do with tracky dacks, uggs, and polar fleece jackets. So far that’s working!

I’m in Perth at the moment and took the opportunity of booking my car in for a well-overdue service. On the drive up, the car got covered in mud (roadworks for 4kms near Donnybrook + lots of rain the past week = MUD!), and I was going to get it cleaned before heading home on Thursday.

When the guys from Jason Mazda picked it up (yes, you heard right – picked it up from my client’s workplace!), I apologised for the state of the car and the guy said that they wash it anyway – it’s part of the service! Well you coulda knocked me over with a feather! When did car service centres start doing *that*? I can’t recall ever getting a wash as part of a service at Parkland Mazda (though the car was always pretty clean, so maybe they didn’t bother – or I didn’t notice). Thanks to Craig’s experiences with his new Honda in the US, I knew that some (all?) US dealerships cleaned the car when you brought it in for service or repairs, but I didn’t realise that some (all?) Australian ones did the same. Maybe it’s just Jason Mazda.

We live in an area filled with beautiful native forests, hills, valleys, and some of the most unique flora and fauna on this planet. It was a gorgeous day yesterday so I dragged my reluctant other half to an area some 25 km away called Karri Gully (locals: off the Brockman Highway between Bridgetown and Nannup, adjacent to the Bibbulmun Track).

Karri Gully is the start of the magnificent karri forests of the southwest of Western Australia (that’s a karri tree in this photo; see more pics on pages 10 and 11 of this photo album), and has some massive trees.

Karri tree

There’s a 20 minute walking trail that loops through this bit of karri forest (which also has marri and jarrah as far as I could tell) so we walked on that until we came to the intersection with the Bibbulmun Track. We decided to take the south branch of the Bibbulmun back to the highway, then walked back to the car at the Karri Gully picnic area.

For those of you who are unaware of the Bibbulmun, it is a 900–1000 km walking trail that starts near Perth and meanders through the forests of the southwest to Albany on the south coast. Like the US Appalachian Trail, some people have walked the whole trail, but most people only do small sections. There are huts along the way for those camping out overnight, and, as far as I know, the entire trail goes through state and national forests and parks, crossing roads and farms only as necessary. (More information on the Bibbulmun Track’s website and on Wikipedia.)

One of the highlights of our short walk (under an hour I’d guess), was seeing some red-tailed black cockatoos coming in to perch on a high tree branch. These are an endangered species, and we were fortunate to hear them call, and see the red tail feathers as they fanned their tails when coming in to land. Some of the conservation groups have sighting reports you can submit, so I found one on the internet when we came home, filled it in, and posted it off.

After the walk, we headed back to Bridgetown, taking a detour to loop along Maranup Ford Rd to Greenbushes. Along Maranup Ford Rd we saw the strangest thing – a real National Geographic moment! (if only the camera’s memory card hadn’t been full…). We were driving through the rolling hills of some farms and saw a full grown and very healthy fox close to a wedge-tailed eagle in a paddock near the road. When we stopped, the fox looked at us for a bit then went up over the hill. Meantime, a magpie started to dive-bomb the eagle, which must have been 20 times its size! That was followed by two more magpies joining in until the eagle flew off. We couldn’t see what it was that had attracted the fox and the eagle (possibly a dead lamb or rabbit?), but our presence and the territorial magpies saw both the fox and the eagle run or fly away. Magic!

Greenbushes is a little tiny town that has lived and died on its mine – initially tin, more recently tantalum. We drove through it (which takes about 1 minute!), then took Spring Gully Rd out to Norilup Dam about 4kms out of town. By the colour of it, I think it is an old disused tin mine site as the water was quite green. Quite a pretty spot and well off the beaten track. Then it was back to Bridgetown.

As autumn starts to set in, it’s obvious that the recent rains and the cooler weather are having an effect – the hills around the towns were all starting to ‘green up’ with new shoots, and the European trees were all changing colour and shedding their leaves.

A friend and I drove to Balingup (about 20 mins away) on Saturday morning to go to our first Small Farm Field Day. We got there just after 10:15 and it was already crowded. Just to put the size of the crowd into perspective, Balingup is a small town of around 800 people and some 10,000-15,000 people attend the Small Farm Field Day!

There were heaps and heaps of stalls with all sorts of things to see, taste, and buy – small farm machinery, animals (Lowline cattle [cute!], miniature horses, alpacas, chickens, puppies…), local food and wine, local clothing and crafts, a ‘food hall’ area, a stage with bands playing all day, native and exotic plants, etc. etc. It was a gorgeous day and quite hot.

For lunch we sampled two varieties of lamb -my friend had a roast lamb and gravy roll from The Lamb Van which she said was the most delicious she’d ever had, and I had a lamb kebab/souvlaki with hot chilli sauce from the BBQ Lamb stand.

For more photos from the day, see pages 9-11 in this photo album.

I make good use of sites such as Wikipedia and EatingWA (a Perth/West Australian restaurant reviewing site), so thought it was time to give back and contribute to both. My efforts to date have been very modest – a few restaurant reviews, and some editing of the Bridgetown, WA entry on Wikipedia – but I hope to contribute more, especially editing typos in Wikipedia! I use my “sandgroper14” identity for both.