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August 10 – 13th. Blue Gum Grove
-Briefly Olive
You don’t care at all about the confirmations, cancellations and occasional need for rehabilitation that are involved in organising WWOOFing. As such I’m going to spare you the gruesome details (though if properly lubricated I might just fill you in on the fitting day of Halloween...make it a really unpleasant one) and just present the bare facts – On August 10th we left Vintners Secret Vineyard and backtracked half an hour north to Bundaberg, where we WWOOFed at a property 30Ks out of town for a miniscule three nights before boomeranging back south to Childers for our next host...Vintners Secret Vineyard. The whole strange trip had more of a ‘weekend away’ vibe than a ‘travelling’ one, brought home by the absurdity of our tiny backpacks, most of our possessions remaining nearly piled up in cupboards back in Childers. Well, Liz’s were practically knotted in elaborate balls (is she perhaps preparing for some postmodern ‘folding is for losers!’ art exhibit?), but you get the idea I’m sure.
Marianne kindly dropped us off in Bundaberg (or Bundie if you’re in an Aussie mood) around 9.30AM, giving up plenty of time to have a pleasant wander around until our new host, Catherine, was scheduled to collect us at 2.30pm. The town itself was fairly characterless, chiefly ranging from cautious light grey to daring moist brown with the standard franchise scrawl. Neither impressive nor not, it was just another factory line medium-large town; we could have been anywhere really. Such negativity is true of most urban places (the countryside is clearly starting to get to me!) and I feel the key is finding the occasional colourful burst amongst the grey. Largely this is a matter of luck, how easy after all would it be to spend a day in Northampton and come away with the impression there is some obscure council prohibitation of independent business, so I count us as lucky as we looked at all the cool things we can’t afford in a kooky hippy cloths shop and then parked ourselves down in a decent cafe for a tasty hot chocolate and read the weekly version of the Guardian beneath blown up images of funny, very Australian cartoons before departing to the cheery call of ‘have a nice day now’ from the proprietor.
Alternative hypothesis: I’m talking out of that upon which I sit. At least I know where I can console myself with a big hot chocolate if that’s what you think.
Next we payed a visit to the loudly painted Bundaberg regional art gallery (BRAG), which had been closed on first pass but had since opened its doors. It was a small but good place; we left our bags with the friendly desk staff and went to check out the two exhibits. Upstairs was ‘Selfless portraits’ which consisted of a dozen picture frames containing nothing more than bold text of tabloid headlines with the celebrity subject substituted for the artists name e.g. ‘Matt reckons he’s got a lot to learn about love.’ If that sounds a bit naff in writing rest assured that in person it was extremely naff, causing me to silently mourn the lost energy I had wasted ascending the stairs. Thankfully downstairs was better. Called ‘Face to face’ it was pretty high tech stuff, frequently using computer screens, webcams, voice recording et al. Some of it received a swift nod and move on but some bits were rather interesting, such as a projection of a face that slowly shifted all its features into totally different faces, but so seamlessly and by such small degrees that you couldn’t really tell unless you strolled off for five minutes and then came back. During those five minutes you could go and have a moronic conversation with a giant 3D image of one artists head, writing your query onto a keyboard the idea was to look like basic AI but in the event the framework was all too obvious and the one syllable at a time robotic voice simply annoying. Still, it was fun in a juvenile rude words fashion...which more or less filled those five minutes.
We got some feed, loitered around a public library and eventually just sat at the bus station, on a bench underneath graffiti covered grey (what other colour) globe statue and across from a marginally less appealing than a bin looking ‘Bus station backpackers’, until Cath arrived and drove us to Blue Gum Grove, as her place was called.
A fellow pom, be it one who’s lived over here nigh on forty years, and Arsenal fan to the dizzying heights of owning a mug, she mainly grew Olives, with a secondary crop of Mangos. These trees sat in the large grove under looking the house – a pleasantly chaotic low-key affair with a hundred different empty spirit bottle looking down on you from high shelves in the kitchen – and there was a much smaller assortment of tropical fruit trees (Custard apples..erm...others) in the garden above the home. It was all very nice, she very open and friendly (AKA she frequently offered tea.) We didn’t do any work the first day, as we arrived in the late afternoon, so all that stood between us and sleep was some television and a few pages of our books. We endured.
It doesn’t really rain in QLD a whole lot. As I remove my hat and sunglasses to apply sunscreen its east to forget it’s actually winter at the moment. Rain does occasionally have to fall (and it’s a good thing for all the farmers tank water, not to mention crops, that it does) and this Wednesday was apparently the designated day. From on-off heavy during the day to apocalyptic at night it heaved it down...the upshot being trying to sleep through what sounded like minor shelling and being unable to mulch the garden trees as planned so instead washing the veranda and pumping water into two dozen small containers. So a very light, easy day there then.
Thursday, blessed with an absence of jet black clouds (but, it must be said, a hinderingly strong wind) we finally got around to that mulching. It was simple work, loading a wheelbarrow with a bale of sugar cane mulch (the fields of which seemed more common here than sentences ending in a questioning manner), perhaps laying some paper around the tree roots if deemed necessary and then spreading the mulch itself. Oh and a touch of weeding beforehand, there’s always a place for weeding after all. In and of itself it wasn’t hard but building up across a reasonably lengthily day, three hours before and three hours after lunch, I certainly didn’t have much trouble getting to sleep that night.
Our final morning saw us take a leisurely stroll down into the grove itself, accompanied by Jess the dog who delighted in jumping into the dam, which surely must have been ice cold and then excitedly rolling around in the dankest, stickiest looking mud she could find. I envy dogs some times. We also had a quick look at the olive press. This centred around an expensive looking sleek silver-grey machine, the presser itself. This had been imported from Italy (an Italian fellow even accompanied it to explain its workings) and as such all the writing on it was in Italian...meaning that to help out those not versed stickers with the English translations were all over the thing.
...and suddenly we were back at the bus station. It really felt like only yesterday we’d been picked up from there...and I guess as it was in reality only 3 days ago that actually pretty close! It all went very, very fast. Good though.
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