Attraction

If a sign says "Tourist Attraction" there seems to be an expectation that whatever lies behind it will draw a flotilla of pensioners and excursion-starved school children in the same manner as a sign which says "wet cement" acts as a magnet for all who wish to be remembered by scrawling their names and birth dates.

The very word Attraction seems to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

The Super bee at Glenview on the Sunshine Coast was an attraction apparently, but despite trying really hard one fine sunny day, we could find nothing attractive about it.

Not a thing.

It was an attraction with a small "a", and I write in past tense because its owners, having officially announced its demise, are preparing to move their honey processing business a thousand kilometres south, leaving nought but happy holiday memories for the thousands that apparently flocked their every year, or perhaps, if the closure of the establishment can be taken as a sign of financial success, who didn't flock there at all.

From the welcoming green forty four gallon drum at the entrance with the blurry superbee carelessy stencilled in white, with its little row of soldiers formed from butts from hastily drawn last-minute durries on the way in, to the decaying and somewhat leprositic concrete images of Snow White and her merry band, it was difficult to find anything that was either relevant or attractive about the whole catastrophe, except of course for the honey, which to be fair, could be bought at any supermarket for at least less than the special tourist prices available direct from the manufacturer.

The quality of souvenirs, unlike the quality of mercy, seemed fairly strained, the plastic cups made sense perhaps, the furry maggotts with wings and bee-stripes a little less, but the tray holding polar bear side table was beyond credible explanation.

I have met a person who said her son enjoyed he go-karts, but he was five, and didn't want to see the bee display.

Someone else I have spoken to of late told me that their child had gone to a party there, and that it was "surprisingly" good.

Before I become accused of being cynical and less than partial, I should note that the cost of entry is nothing, and we paid the full amount on our visit.

Of course if one wished to see the bees at work, or visit a demonstration at a small additional cost, (which one certainly did not) then there is a chance that one might perhaps recoup the (small additional) cost of admission to those tired displays in entertainment value, or at least perhaps some educational worth could be derived. Perhaps, if the place were bigger, one would pay the price just to rest one's weary feet.

Alas, there being nowhere particular to amble, nor anywhere in particular to arrest one's attention for long enough to cause one's feet to become weary, the Bee Show didn't quite meet its potential in the customer attraction stakes either.

As we departed, we glanced over our shoulder at the waving Superbee smiling somewhat less than enigmatically through its multiple coats of paint, and wondered if there was any wet cement nearby.

If you are seriously masochistically inclined, you may make your own assessment of these observations, by popping straight to our small Superbee Gallery on Flickr.

Water, Water Everywhere. . . . .

It's been raining here.

All our dams are overflowing, and we've got three years' supply, but the rain keeps coming down at at least an inch a day, sometimes this happens in twenty minutes. This is not a bad thing, because we know that in three years' time the dams will be empty again and by then we'll have difficulty remembering what it was like to have rain.

One morning this week we woke up, and there was no water in the pipes at our house. This wasn't that insidious sneak up on you run out of water slowly the drought's really bad sort of water shortage. This was (or could have been) urban terrorism at its best. Bang! No more water in our entire suburb.

The sky was blue, after all the rain the river was running that nasty angry brown colour it gets when it's swollen with floodwater and full of nasty bacteria, but even if we had contemplated taking a glass or two of it for breakfast, it's still tidal saltwater and not really the stuff which any mammal except perhaps the odd stray whale could tolerate.

It's quite amazing how much our routine is set by what seems to be such a simple commodity.

We had a litre or so in the fridge, but I didn't want to waste any of that washing the morning goop out of my bung eye. Oh, and I couldn't dress the infection on my shoulder which flared up in the humid weather after having "that" skin cancer removed last week.

There was just enough in the kettle to have a cup of tea each, with half a glass to clean our teeth, but shaving was out of the question, and bathing was simply off the agenda.

It was all strangely frightening. Not "ooh I'm scared" frightening, but frightening if one contemplated (and one did) the impact of a large community suddenly without any means of access to water, and how that communty would attempt to survive beyond the first few uncomfortable hours without clean teeth if its access to it has somehow been terminated.

Don't be too concerned though, the council fixed the burst water main, and we had it back later that same morning, and I stopped being frightened by my own thoughts.

But it had made me think quite seriously of all those people in the world who have to walk kilometres to retreive a bucket of dirty water that's of no better quality than our river, and wondered what chance the infections on their shoulders would have of ever healing, and whether they even knew that mostly their life expectancy is less than the time it takes their beards grow.

They don't have a council to fix all that, or an office where they can go for a shave.

All they have is people like us who can afford an internet connection, so I thought I'd place a small advertisement on their behalf.

. . . . . nor any drop to drink.

Sensitivity

Sydney's Queen Victoria Building has been described by Pierre Cardin as "the most beautiful shopping centre in the world". This outstanding example of Byzantine architecture, which occupies an entire city block, was built in 1898 to replace the original Sydney Markets. Later, it accommodated a concert hall, which eventually became the City Library. The building was remodelled in the 1930s and used for different purposes, including municipal offices. In 1984 it was completely refurbished as a shopping centre, with more than 200 shops. The renovations, by the Malaysian company Ipoh Garden Berhad, were highly imaginative and thoughtful. Most important, they retained the turn-of-the-century charm of the building.

And then some clown came along with his screw gun, and bunged up a couple of signs to tell us where the loos are.

Tell me where to go

Duncan and Aiden are doing research into GPS (that's the satellite based Global Positioning Systems not to be confused with the Greater Public Schools of our youth) as part of their Engineering PhD's, and I suppose that makes them the closest thing to rocket scientists I know.

They are also very sensibly building small wooden boats, I suppose so that in the event of a catastrophic breakdown of the positioning system, they can get away by following the stars out to where the dark blue bit meets the light blue bit just like we used to in the old days before there were satellites.

Talking to them got me thinking about Satellite navigation in cars, and how unbelievably useless it is in a country where roads just head off in a straight line for hundreds of kilometres, and the way the manufacturers attempt to gain acceptance for any inaccuracy in their mapping, simply by using a synthesised female voice to provided directions.

"Turn left in two hundred and twelve kilometres"
"Turn left in two hundred and eleven kilometres"
"Turn left in two hundred and ten kilometres"

Just turn it off and listen to the radio.

Undoubtedly the logic behind using a female voice is to capitalise on the well known deficiencies in directional sensitivity within that gender, but the more thought I give the subject the more disconcerting it becomes. If there is indeed a woman in that little box on the dashboard, how do I know she hasn't turned the whole kit and caboodle upside-down to work out where I am supposed to be going?

How do I know when she tells me to turn left, that she didn't mean the other left, or worse, that she actually meant right but said left because the map was upside down so she'd made "allowances". I'm almost certain the only reason there hasn't been a class action over the inaccuracy of the things is that it would lose on grounds of gender discrimination.

Quite a long time ago, the occupants of the front seats in our car decided that there'd be no more navigation, particularly when we are on a touring sort of holiday. The air is much clearer that way, the language more conducive to comfort. If ever we feel that we don't particularly know exactly where we may be entirely, we simply find a car which looks like it knows where it's going, and follow it.

So far we've managed to have an enormous number of adventures relying on this method, happening on things that we would never have happened upon, and places we would never otherwise have thought to go.

As greater, better, cheaper, gadgets evolve, although I can't actually foresee a time when an in car navigation system will be on our shopping list, I have a foreboding sense of inevitability that one day, we'll buy a car that has one fitted.

This fear is compounded by the probability that the car that we always follow will have one as well, so while he once looked as though he knew where he was going, the female voice from his dashboard will place just enough uncertainty in his driving to convince us he's lost too, so we'd better not follow him.

There's a little pub at the end of a road and round the corner somewhere that we'll never stumble across, because we'll always know where we are, and where we are going and why we are going there. It will be the end of the exclusive hideaway because nothing will be hidden away from the far reaching tentacles of the satellite map. We will have lost the joy of random exploration.

The cast of "Lost" will need to find new jobs because we'll all discover that all this time they've actually been on Gilligan's Island, the only place on earth that's a short day sail from a major population centre, yet until now, impossible to find.

Deep down I suspect that the final episode will feature two young Doctors of Engineering discovering the place by celestial navigation while travelling in a small square boat with a polytarp sail.

That's technology for you!

Australia Day (the Holiday)

Yesterday was Australia Day (the Holiday), as opposed Australia Day (the Day) which observant readers will by now have realised was last Saturday, and we celebrated it by having a goodly portion of a few hundred people over and sailing all manner of boats, and of course launching Phil and Chris' lovely Eureka Canoe.

We had sort of planned to launch ours too, but well there are one or two little details still to complete, so that remains as a good excuse for yet another party at the home of the Biting Midge at some yet to be determined future date.

Australia Day did mark the fourteenth anniversary of the launching of our Goat Island Skiff, Gruff, and we took her for a burn round the block but it's fair to pay a bit of homage to the dear old thing.

Since this story has been on my Goat Island Skiff pages for about ten years, I'll repeat it here for posterity without fear of reprisal from the cast.

Gruff was very new, and yes I was quite pleased with the way it turned out, it being my first solo boat building attempt and everything, and in the process I'd managed to achieve a small amount of notoriety by having my construction diary published in Australian Amateur Boatbuilder. AABB is not renowned for being terribly fussy about its editorial content, but I took that one as a goal to me anyway and felt suitably famous.

It was all glistening and woody and had shiny new sails and let's face it, I was chuffed. I think we all were to greater or lesser degrees.

Abbie was 16 and we were holidaying on the Noosa River at Noosaville. Fiona was staying with us, and by stretching the already overstretched mathematical bit in my brain, I have calculated that her age was very similar to Abbie's at the time.

One fine sunny afternoon, the girls asked me to help them rig the boat and of course I gladly obliged, anything to encourage healthy outdoor pursuits, particularly those that reflect my own interests. How successful was I as a parent and role model? My children were becoming boat people, perhaps I could get them to crew when we raced! My heart almost skipped a beat at the thought.

After happily rigging the boat on a suitable patch of clean, dry sand on the riverbank, I began my carefully rehearsed words of sage parental advice about wearing life preservers, and not straying too close to the river mouth on the outgoing tide, and watching out for idiots on jetskis and....

Abbie interrupted:
"Oh we're not going sailing dad, we're just going to sit beside it on the river bank."


"All the guys keep coming up and asking us questions about it."

A Day Off

Today, 26th January is Australia's national day, named rather imaginatively - "Australia Day".

For the first two hundred years of our history, Australia Day was a celebration of the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, or the first White Settlement as it was known for many years.

In 1988, the year in which the bicentenary of settlement was celebrated there was a not imperceptible shift in official policy:

There is a greater awareness of the need to celebrate modern Australia - a land of diverse ethnic makeup, a country working towards reconciliation with its indigenous people and a nation gearing itself for the challenges of globalisation, the removal of previously safe assumptions regarding national identity, and the uncertainties of a new century. Australia Day is the centre of an evolving nation.

Today, the official Australia Day website describes the day thus:

On Australia Day we come together as a nation to celebrate what's great about Australia and being Australian. It's the day to reflect on what we have achieved and what we can be proud of in our great nation.

Now there's nothing at all wrong with that in itself, but it looks to me that in the race to "reconciliation" our actual history is being smothered, or perhaps slipped under a beach towel. It seems to me these strangely anonymous powers that be, are hoping our history will fade, that we've grown beyond it, that for some reason we can't be proud of it as though being great in some way makes up for an apparently dark past.

They're making a big deal of swimming in blow up pools and eating hamburgers shaped like maps of a Tassie-less Australia without giving a thought to the fact that here, notwithstanding the challenges of globalisation, they'd be called rissoles, not hamburgers.

It's not that I'm against having fun, far from it, I just don't think that we have to get too introspective about celebrating our history. We certainly don't have to morbidly "reconcile" every time the moon rises, neither do we need to apologise for our place in time.

I do think that being told to have fun, or more correctly being directed to have fun by a quasi government department is to put it simply, UnAustralian! Or would be, if there was such a thing, which of course there cannot be, but that's for another day.

The reality is of course, that notwithstanding the apparent need to advertise the fact, we never did care too much about what it was about, as long as we get the following Monday off work, and that we do.

Australia Day is worth a Public Holiday!

The only thing that could beat that would be taking a sickie!

Perceptual Blindness

When Julian wrote his piece last week on Perceptual Blindness, he couldn't have known that at the same time I'd be editing my single Eiffel Tower photo from 2007 and pondering that very concept. Our photo shows the tower in the background viewed at the end of a vista created by an insignificant street lined with a mix of modest hotels and construction work, and was taken with the help of my phone.

Of course having to use a phone to take photographs was indirectly the reason we were in Paris this time, as our passports were undoubtedly on their way to Morocco with our camera, leaving us with only two options: we could learn to speak French and just blend in with the crowd for the rest of our days, or we could spend a few days in Paris having deep and meaningful discussions with our Embassy about some replacement paperwork which would allow us to travel across a border once again.

The photo isn't all that sharp, and the tower is some distance away, but it's unmistakably the Eiffel Tower, the one that is so instantly recognisable that when they make souvenir keyrings in its image, they don't even have to stamp "PARIS" over the arch. If you leave your Tower keyring carelessly on a boardroom table, the others at the meeting don't have to ask.

They know.

We visited Paris for the first time in 1982, and like every visitor before or since, made a visit to the Eiffel Tower. I spent hours looking at every detail, at every rhythm and swirl in the structure. I was amazed to discover that this tower wasn't just a silhouette on the skyline, it was a masterpiece of wrought iron elegantly woven into a piece of fine sculpture.

Clearly, I wasn't the first to discover that. I'm sure that Mr Eiffel had a fair idea that it was pretty good, and the World Heritage people had probably noticed a thing or two that set it apart from a few stories of temporary scaffold holding a flag, which was its original purpose.

The interesting thing, to me at least, is that I can't recall anyone else being so taken, in fact when ever I happen upon an Eiffel keyring on a board room table, and attempt to share my enthusiasm with its recently returned owner, I'm met with blank stares, as though none of the details exist.

"The lights were pretty", they'll say, or "There was a lot of haze and the view wasn't even that great from the top platform."

Nothing to describe the wonder.

Nothing to indicate they'd even considered the juxtaposition of structure with decoration, the elegance of the curves bisecting the the catenary bracing, finishing with an organic flourish contrived with such skill that it hardly feels contrived at all.

Nothing.


The lights were pretty though.