If you’ve missed it, this series starts here.
Tuesday 21 March 1995
20/288 Casuarina Drive
Nightcliff 0810
G’day (hopefully) Mum and Dad,
We hope you are both well. We’re pretty good, and we’re looking forward to your visit.
Well this letter has taken considerably more effort to write than any previous one to date, that’s for sure. Mind you, it’s not for want of trying on my part.
Our computer is trying my patience just a tad. I think that it wants to be superseded. This letter has been created and typed six times, under six different names, in six different formats, and they have all subsequently disappeared into the ether.
The computer changed my English in my last creation into thick white lines and obscure characters which looked remarkably like grinning faces. Well I’ll be blowed if I’m going to let a silly machine beat me – those little faces can grin all they like.
This time I’m trying my luck with Greg’s help, using the floppy disk version of Word 5. Fingers crossed that it works, ’cause as sure as eggs, I couldn’t actually hack writing a letter this long. So here I go, no fancy boxes this time, just straight typing very, very quickly before the gremlins cotton on to what I’m up to.
We’ve been here in Darwin for over 1/3 of a year now. A few weeks back it looked like that this could well be the extent of our stay. We went through a bit of a rough patch, and were pretty ready to pack our bags and head back to Perth.
We’d started to seriously speculate on the sanity of our decision to uproot ourselves from such a happy, dry, sunny, cheap, comfortable and safe home and work environment.
However, this was probably just the cumulative affect of us undergoing several different unexpected stresses to our lives simultaneously, whilst also coping with the expected adjustments of settling in to a new home in the tropics.
It started with me getting the Flu, which meant that I missed the opportunity to do some work that would have both interested and suited me. I then infected Greg right on the eve of his departure to Kuala Lumpar, and we missed each other heaps.
Greg had the added stress during this time, of applying for his boss’s job, waiting to see if he was selected for an interview, then finally having the interview right after he returned from K.L.
Also, Greg’s work is particularly busy at this time of the year with enrolments and admissions consuming much of his time and energy, even after hours.
Greg also had a bit of a fall and bruised his back and shoulder, and my bones have been giving me a bit of a hard time (damp air I guess), and my blood levels have decided to take a roller-coaster ride.
Also, I went for a job which turned out to be a bit beyond my skill level, so I quit a day and a half into it. This was not a great exercise in confidence building.
Last but by no means least, it’s been the wettest “Wet” on record, (in excess of 2 metres so far) which makes it fairly difficult to get about. I started suffering from cabin fever, and everything but everything in the cabin was growing mildew or rusting.
All of this happening at once made me a little melancholy. But that was then, and this is now, and I reckon we’ve just about conquered our various woes.
Mind you, we’re pretty damn keen for the start of “The Dry”.
Greg didn’t get his boss’s job, but he’s very pleased with their decision to employ Lorraine Perry. It at last means that he can focus solely on his role as manager of Student Administration.
Getting back to his trip to K.L. The trip went OK, he flew “business class” officially for the first time and has decided that it’s a very nice way to travel – free booze, your own TV, meals on china and real cutlery, etc.
But once there, he didn’t get much of an opportunity to look around for himself. It seems he was constantly chaperoned by his hosts who just happened to be a bunch of millionaire businessmen types.
They were out to impress. So they drove Greg and his offsiders around in a number of very fast and very expensive black automobiles – Greg was more concerned for his life than he was with their obvious flaunting of wealth.
In the evenings, Greg and Co. were plyed with $350 bottles of Dom Perignon, dinners out, entrance to nightclubs, best tables at dinner/theatre shows – one of them even covertly offered to pay for Greg and another bloke to have a “complete massage!” Huh!
opened the window right up, and stood starkers in front of it
As NTU were paying for the hotel that Greg stayed in, we felt that it would not be proper to expect them to pay for him phoning me each day, so I rang him. Well, we were too ethical for our own good. It turned out that the millionaire bloke who owned the Law college that Greg looked over, paid the entire hotel bill – boy did we dip out!
Greg was glad to eventually get back home. In the meantime in Darwin, we had had four consecutive days of fine weather, the first for weeks.
Everything had gone OK with me until the last night. Greg was due to arrive at 4 in the morning. Well, there was a disgustingly torrid storm which cut the power at about 9pm.
Of course not only did the lights go out, but more importantly, the fans stopped. Within five minutes, I was almost expiring from the humidity.
The bedroom window is the only window that can be opened when it’s pelting down with rain, so I grabbed a wet flannel from the bathroom, ditched my clothes, opened the window right up, and stood starkers in front of it, swabbing myself with the flannel, ducking at each lightning strike, and convincing myself that I would not jump at the next thunderclap – I jumped every time.
I must have been a sight to behold. The power thankfully returned 1 hour & 40 minutes later.
Darwin is currently playing host to a number of country’s war-ships, which we have occasionally seen from our balcony as grey hazy lumps on the horizon. We had dinner at Margie (Greg’s boss) and Steve’s with a few other folk several nights ago.
Steve and one of the other guests are divers in the Navy Reserve, and they’d been asked to go down and “sweep” the wharf for bombs to ensure the safety of the visiting ships, a job they didn’t relish doing because at this time of the year the water is thicker than pea soup, plus there’s still a dangerous amount of sunken bombed debris from WWII, not forgetting also that several large crocodiles have recently been captured from this very area.
So we all agreed that it would be a much wiser option if all the ships moored at bouys out at sea, and ferried in to the wharf when necessary.
We decided that our unit would feel alot more homely if we had more of a garden to tend. So the Sunday before last, we went to Sue and Bob’s place to select a few plant cuttings from their garden.
Sue is the woman who employed me in the Marketing Department at NTU just prior to Christmas. Whilst we had arvo tea with them, we discussed the prevalence of mildew.
They reckon that mildew is only a problem if it rains for more than five days straight. Well it’s certainly done that this year! They said that some “Wet” seasons there’s very little mildew growth at all. If they’re right, it does offer us some hope for future “Wets”.
Sue and Bob were both very keen to show us once again through their garden. We had thought we might come away with about 10 different plant cuttings from them. Well, they were so generous and enthusiastic that we ended up with about 110.
It took us several hours to prune and plant them. And now, we have absolutely no idea what about 98% of them are. In Perth, we can take a walk through most gardens and be able to name, or at least recognise, a majority of plants. Not here!
I do know that we got some orchids, ferns, bromeliads, coleus, miniture justiciars, but the rest – we’ll have to get Sue over to identify them if they survive the rigours of living in pots on a coastal balcony.
Which reminds me…One morning when Greg was on his walk, he picked up a not very impressive looking coconut from the footpath and brought it home. He set about making a huge mess on the balcony as he hacked away (in a most professional manner I must say) the fibrous shell to eventually expose a fairly puny, furry coconut.
I thought he was being rather optimistic when he placed the coconut in a small terracotta pot, covered it with a handful of potting mix, and gave it a squirt with the hose. Well, it’s about one month since then, and we now are the proud foster parents of a thriving 1 foot high coconut palm.
If it continues to grow at this rate it will be pushing through the ceiling way before Christmas.
A few weekends back, the rain had become so oppresive that we just had to get out. So we went to the Museum of Arts and Sciences and had a look at “The Dutch Masters” national touring exhibition.
In our haste to go, I forgot to take my specs which meant I had to stand about an inch away from each piece of art to see them, (and not very well even then) because most of the collection was very small etchings and drawings housed in very large frames.
– it was very gross indeed
Greg got through the collection in half the time I did. We had lunch at the museum’s cafe, and then went for a drive through East Point Reserve – a peninsula around Fannie Bay. There’s Lake Alexander, an artificial lake that you can supposedly swim in all year round, a military museum, stacks of wild wallabys, free BBQs, mangrove walks and so on.
However, on this occasion it was pouring so we were confined to being “drive by” spectators only.
However last Sunday, we bought a BBQ chook and some huge rolls, packed a picnic lunch and went to Lake Alexander to eat it. It was a fine arvo, we watched some novice windsurfers for awhile, and there were a couple of swimmers, but we didn’t go in.
Instead we went over to The Old Fannie Bay Gaol. It’s free and well worth a visit. Although, we had to cut ours short because when we were in the mess room reading some of the history of the gaol, we just about ended up merely pools of sweat on the floor – it was so, so hot.
We were dripping – it was very gross indeed.
I know I talk about crocodiles and the weather an awful lot, but really they do seem to pervade every aspect of your life here.
For example, as you know our street is right on the coast. Well, the street immediately to the back and running parallel to us – Aralia Street, hit the news recently. A 4 foot long crocodile was spotted at the Aralia St. shops – our local deli, take-away, and post box are there.
This is very middle suburbia, the croc would have had to cross several fairly busy streets to get there, it was eventually caught thankfully.
In comparison to other crocodiles that have been in the news lately, it was a pretty small creature. Nevertheless, it would still give you a bit of a scare if you came across it on a leisurely stroll to the shops, because you wouldn’t really be expecting to see such a thing, would you?
I reckon this is a pretty weird place to live
MMmm, I think I’ll be fairly vigilant from now on though, just to be sure.
Not a crocodile, but as good as…Greg came home on Friday night looking a bit paler than usual. For a good reason it turned out.
You see, to get to his car, there is a short-cut in between some demountable buildings, but it’s been roped off recently whilst some of the buildings were being demounted.
Greg noticed the rope had gone, and a woman was walking quickly towards him having just come from in between one of the buildings. You beauty, he thought and headed for the short cut.
He turned in to the small alley between the buildings, only to be stopped dead in his tracks – he came face to face, and was standing within inches of a 2 metre long Goanna. Greg backtracked out of there just as fast as the woman he’d previously seen had.
I checked my Wildlife Identikit book, and discovered that Greg had encountered a Gould’s Goanna, the largest type of goanna in Australia. My book suggests that they will stand their ground if approached, and should be treated with respect – Greg couldn’t agree more!
I reckon this is a pretty weird place to live. Despite it’s obvious population growth, Darwin is still quite a frontier kind of town.
The Tip here is a pretty interesting place to visit. They have a tip shop and flog everything they think is worth flogging. Mind you, the majority of stuff can only be described as rubbish.
They don’t really go out of their way to keep retrieved stuff in good knick either, because most things are left outside to deteriorate further in the rain.
It was drizzling when we last had a visit, there was a sort of dank smell about the place, not all together unpleasant, the ground is red clay and everything was sodden – at least it kept the dust down.
Greg thought he was in paradise, he’d almost be ready to give up his job at the Uni to work here. I had to keep reminding him that we live in a unit and we couldn’t store half of the “junk” that he wanted to take home with him.
I mean really, what would we do with a rusted out photo processing machine? There’s all manner of things, and it is good fun having a wander around.
There’s hundreds of bikes or bits of bikes, (Greg’s got visions of building his own bike), we saw one bloke loading up his truck with old bed frames he’d scrounged, we reckoned he must have been starting up a backpackers hotel. (We could have saved a fortune on our sofa bed, if we’d come here first).
Anyway, you can bet your bottom dollar that Greg will be keen to take you to have a look when you come to visit – we sure know how to show our guests a good time!
Well, I’ve just had a re-read of this letter, and I reckon it’s a bit of a mish mash of stories. But it’s the best I can do for now, I’m sure that my six previous tries had one or two more good tales but they’re lost for the time being.
Say G’day to the rest of the family for us.
lots of love,
Tren and Greg
X X O O X X