Australia Day

Determined as I am tonight to post my thoughts I just can't do it. I'm falling asleep at the desk. In brief, I'm grateful to have been born here and live in this affluent country of more than 7.5 million square kilometres.

The low point of the day was the General Peter Cosgrove's Australia Day speech. What a load of eulogistic, politically correct, sycophantic bulldust. Talk about wallpapering over cracks and sweeping under the carpet.
Platitudinous nonsense! Fair dinkum, I winced throughout. I think the rest of the world must be getting a bit sick of Australians saying how good we are.

Cosgrove likened himself to a test cricket batsman having a good innings, in good nick despite the odd slips chance. I think it's time he copped a good bouncer and pulled his head in. I'm tiring of Australian self aggrandisement. Let's roll up our sleeves, get our arses into gear, and repair the damage we've done to this amazing continent over two hundred years. Stop taking 'sickies' for starters, and stop wanting more and more for less input. And stuff the flag. Why start arguing over the flag? What the hell difference does a flag make, or a change to it? What pomping bloody nonsense!

Needs Must as The Devil Drives

It's raining heavily now. On the morning of the 18th of January! The gas heater is pumping out warm air at a big tub of honey in front of it, honey I extracted yesterday after taking a few boxes of combs from the bees on Saturday. I tipped a bucket of honey through the fine strainer last night. It was difficult to get it through so I'm keeping this one warm while my rinsed out straining cloth dries off.

Summer cold snaps are not unusual here in southern Victoria, and the rain is most welcome. Huit dropped off a trailer and ute load of plants in big pots yesterday, for me to look after while his new house behind the supermarket is built over the next six months. Canna lillies, tree ferns, maples, lilacs, a gingko, are amongst a wide range with which Huit hopes start his new garden. He and Wilma sold their 15 acres after 38 years and vacate this week, to a house they are renting from a friend in Bayswater. They plan to go away a bit in their caravan and  do trip to Holland and Canada in May. I won't have to water Huit's plants, or mine, for a few days now, nd the water tanks are full and the vegie garden lush.

I would have liked to get some honey off the bees earlier, say a month or so ago. Not that there was much there, which I knew from a quick inspection, and which was probably the base reason for my lack of action, but had I done it earlier, less of it would have been candied. Candied honey wo'nt come out. It hasn't been a good honey season, the weather's been up and down and the bees have been scrappy when I've had a look. Not from a distance this year have I looked across to the beehives and seen heavy flight with honey laden workers returning heavy with good loads. Nor have I caught the sweet scent of ripening honey in my nostrils in the evenings when near the hives.

So it was a weekend of work cleaning out my shed and setting it up as a honey house, working through the bees on Saturday before the change, then extracting, now clean up, all for little result. Maybe 50kgs in total. There might be another extract in February, but I wouldn't expect much. So it goes sometimes. Maybe next year will be a 'biggee'. In hope, I resolve to get the bees in good nick in the autumn, replace crook boxes and paint spare material, buy new frames etc in readiness, but I doubt it'll happen. There's too much else to keep me busy.

I've been busy since some weeks before Christmas, driven by necessity, without a day off for personal pursuits, except for Christmas day itself. I don't mind admitting it, I'm tired. The effort to spend the weekend mucking about with bees and honey took some mental strength, knowing I'm so far behind with work at the farm and at home, and there's always things to do in Nobelius Park (in my spare?time).

For some reason the wholesalers we work with don't stop or slow down for a few weeks after Christmas like they used to. Christmas Day was a Friday and they were back as normal on the Monday, wanting their orders a day early that week because New Year's Day, also a Friday, was a holiday (for them). We say "how high" when they say "jump" as we paid the farm insurance in November, which rises every year and cleans us out, and have to get the rates together by February, as well as all the usual on going expenses.

My old friend John Barelds used to say, regularly, "It's a great life if you don't weaken." It's true. And we've been so lucky with the rain this year. Maybe next year there'll be a bumper crop of blossom and foliage at the farm and a bumper crop of honey.

I worked a bit with my friend Mal over the last two weeks in his garden. Mal, in his seventies and recovering from recent heart attacks, threw himself at the landscaping while Pat was away. He was for five years a commercial salmon fisherman off the west coast off Scotland. When I suggested he take a breather, he told me how when he went home to take up the licence, an old fisherman in his eighties, Hamish McGlynn, said to him, "If you give me a pound I'll give you my cobble, and teach you how to row it in the Ocean." A cobble is a large wooden rowing boat used to set nets. They went out week after week, sometimes in enormous swells, with Mal working the heavy oars by himself while Hamish shouted instructions. Mal said once his arms needed a breather. Hamish said, "There'll be plenty of rest when you're in your grave, laddie."

A Letter at Christmas

Elvie, who has trouble reading letters these days, relies on Meredith to read her mail. I was fortunate to be in the kitchen at the farm a few days before Christmas making a cup of tea late in the day when Meredith was reading a letter from Elvie's cousin Dorothy. Dorothy is about Elvie's age but the two ladies haven't had much contact during their lives, in fact there has been none until now that I can recall.

Dorothy is the daughter of Elvie's Uncle Oz, her father's brother. She said in her letter she was sorry they'd had little contact, especially as Edgar and Oz (Austin) were close, loving brothers who had both served in WW1. Oz lost a leg after being wounded at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. Edgar was not present on the first day of the Fromelles battle when 2000 Australians were killed but spent the next three days searching for survivors and removing the dead. Dorothy said my grandmother Annie, Edgar's wife, wrote to Oz every year on the 19 July, and Oz would answer immediately.

 Dorothy told Elvie in her letter that after a happy childhood she worked for the Immigration Dep't. and was sent to Corowa in NSW. There she met the man with whom she felt she could spend her life, a Polish migrant, and they married in 1951. I can't remember her husband's name, but he'd had a terrible time in the war and just wanted a quiet lifestyle growing food. They found a cottage on five acres of land, somewhere near Sydney, where they grew 3000 tomato plants each year and fruit trees and started raising their family. When the family outgrew the cottage they managed to get a bigger house on ten acres and continued growing fruit and vegies. Dorothy's husband passed away a few years ago. She now lives with a daughter in the Blue Mountains where they have plenty of room and she invited Elvie to come and stay anytime she would like.

It was a heartwarming letter that made me grateful for Christmas, if for no other reason than it inspires communication within families and between old friends. I asked Elvie why she didn't have much to do with her cousins throughout her life and she said it was because of Oz's wife, who would have nothing to do with her father Edgar or his family, even though they lived in a neighbouring suburb. Apparently in the minds of Oz's wife and her sister, Edgar was supposed to marry the sister when he returned from the war. Two returning brothers marrying sisters, the 'two little girls in blue'. This was never in Edgar's plans, as the album of photo's, postcards and memorabilia sent home to his fiancee Annie shows.

Edgar and Oz continued their brotherly mateship throughout their lives. Edgar, a grocer, delivered to Oz's house every week but the wife would never come to the door to say hello let alone invite her brother in law inside. She died before Oz and Edgar did, having gone quite mad, Elvie thinks, but by then the offspring had gone their own ways.

Elvie then told me that when Edgar was on a ship waiting to leave Cairo for France after his battalion had been training in Egypt, a ship came into port carrying more Australian soldiers. Without any prior knowledge of it,  he had an overpowering feeling that his brother was on that ship. He rushed to the side and back along the ship calling out as loud as he could, "Has anyone seen Ozzie Wilson?" A familar voice called back from the sea of faces on the other ship.

"Here I am Ted." There was his brother waving back to him.