Common Sense and Whiskey

Melbourne HDR

I put up this Melbourne skyline the other day non-tonemapped (bottom) and here's an HDR version (top). Sort of looks like the difference when they colorized black and white movies:

(More Melbourne photos here on EarhPhotos.com.)

Odds and Ends - Broome

- Bunker building is a flourishing since those bushfires last southern summer. A family bunker for under $10,000 from Wildfire Safety Bunkers includes “100mm thick concrete, ventilation, 7.2 cubic metres of air when sealed (enough for four adults for two hours) with a further 4.5 cubic metres  of air offered as an optional extra.” They also come with mobile phone charger and a door temperature gauge.

- And further to that previous post that mentioned Australia’s continuing drought, The Australian points out that “Australia is on track for a record hot August, and this winter is likely to be the hottest on record as well."

- Two examples of distances in Western Australia: 1.  The Australian, which is Australia’s only national daily, doesn’t make it up here until, well, down at the convenience store they explain, it depends on the day. Different days it’s flown in at different times, I guess. Anyway here at the Pinctada Cable Beach Hotel (named after a type of pearl shell) hard copies never arrive. They just download and print it on mini-broadsheet paper. 2. I ordered a Little Creatures beer, from Freemantle, a 2:10 flight and fifty minute ferry ride ago, and the guy said, “Ah, good for you, a local beer!”

- State of the Australian recording art: John Paul Young, whose 80’s hit Love is in the Air (4:40/Fade) I played so many times on the radio during my day job at the time that I actually can no longer hear it,  and which marked pretty much the first and last time Americans ever heard from him, was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame at Melbourne’s Forum Theatre last Thursday night.

Sundowners in Broome, Western Australia

Continuing our time at the beach here in Broome, Western Australia, which is not to say ON the beach, as no hotels are built up in high rise rows lurking behind the dunes. Everybody has to walk a few hundred meters, and that lends a nice pristine feel to Cable Beach. Except for one thing: every afternoon along about 4:00 or 4:30 or so, the big SUV type vehicles that are standard issue up here line up to stream down a particular path and right onto the beach for sundowners.

They pop out little tables and chairs and hors d’ourves and everybody has a drink in their hand, and the conviviality lasts an hour and a half or so and the whole parade goes into reverse. It really is a pretty spot. The sun drops into the ocean at low tide (or thereabouts) just now, so there’s a long expanse of beach to play on.

(More Broome photos here on EarthPhotos.com.)

Cable Beach, Broome, Western Australia

Perth, Western Australia

The activities of the lady in the photo notwithstanding, the air quality is superb in Perth, all sweet and clear and maritime, and it stands to reason. No cities for half a continent on one side, no big manufacturing, ocean on one side and desert on the other. We've been breathing deeply.

Australia's fourth largest city with about a million and a half, Perth is just bigger than it by rights ought to be. Big skyline, and the fifty minute ferry route down the Swan River is lined with vacation and retirement homes that testify to the mining wealth to Perth's northeast.

You figure a place that's 1680 miles west of Melbourne, with no real population in between, would support its port and the mining operations outside of town and that's about it. But there's highways north and south, a multi-line Metro and people and trains and enterprise and a separate wine country. And a really big casino.

Somehow it's just a wee bit implausible, all the hustle and commerce way out on the edge of nowhere. Implausible, but nice.

(Photos from Australia here on EarthPhotos.com.)

Eat at Joe's, Freemantle

Freemantle, Australia

Spent a lovely day in the Western Australian port of Freemantle yesterday. It's nineteenth century architecture is admirably preserved, and it's nice, comfortable, pedestrian-sized. Little Creatures Pale Ale, served at the brewery down on the waterfront, ain't bad, either.

Not quite warm enough yet for a blanket on the beach, but spectacular, brilliant sunshine.

(See more photos from Freemantle yesterday here at EarthPhotos.com.)

What in the World is Going On? - Panel

During our stay in Melbourne the Melbourne Writers Festival was ongoing, and we attended the event "What in the World is Going on?" at which the principal speaker was Dr. Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House.

Niblett said he'd just flown to Australia that morning and maybe he wanted to keep things moving to keep himself from falling over jet lagged, but he didn't look the worse for wear. He held a brisk 25 minute presentation followed by maybe ten minutes each for two local panelists and then a Q & A.

Billed as a look at big ideas, what we heard was a survey of center-left conventional wisdom. Not a lot to disagree with, mostly boilerplate:

- Obama reestablishes soft power.
- Good to move away from the Bush years' unifocus on terrorism.
- The economy limits the U.S. administration, with the problems being brought on by under-regulation.
- Demographic change is rapidly aging the developed world (one juicy fact: Russia is depopulating by 1600 a day).

and so on, so that at the end of the quick moving hour, you felt like you hadn't learned anything you didn't already know by thoroughly reading the daily papers, but it was all lucidly and appealingly presented. People like Dr. Niblett and the other panelists are part of the opinion-making class, so I suppose it's no surprise what you heard from them was the conventional wisdom.

Might like a firebrand thrown into the mix for a little electricity.

Odds and Ends - Melbourne

Southwest, heading out toward the Great Australian Bight with the town of Ballarat lying out there to the north, we read that dams that serve Melbourne are near record lows and the best guess is that a drying el nino pattern will keep the forecast predominantly dry through the end of October. The least rain ever recorded in a year was 332 mm, the average is 650, and this year to date it's a dismal 200. So they have "stage 3a water resrictions" in place, but they haven't kept Melbourne from losing 900 trees this year, three times average. Nearly half the rest of the trees in town are stressed but water restrictions continue. And summer's coming. ..... The oil rig in the Timor Sea will leak for two more months while they tow in another rig from Singapore to tap the well and stem the leak. They're flying a hercules 45 meters above the sea spraying chemicals to break down the slick, which is now estimated 8 to 15 kilometers long. A fracture in the well more than two kilometers below the surface is believed to be the cause. The well is Thai-owned by a company called PPTEP. ..... The 450 k Tour de Timor kicked off yesterday with 300 riders from 15 countries. Winners will cross the finish line in Dili a couple of days before our arrival. It's part of Timor Leste's commemoration of the tenth anniversary of its vote from Independence from Indonesia.

(Photos from our current trip to Australia and East Timor are here on EarthPhotos.com.)

We'll Never Be Closer to Our Own Personal Antipodes

We've located our farm on the top chart. The Antipodes Map has done the rest. It shows if you drilled straight through the earth from home you wouldn't pop out amid bustling Chinamen in pointy hats, the way I grew up thinking.

In fact, if you dug straight down from our farm you'd pop out in the Indian Ocean west of Perth, which is where we are today. Check out Perth, the only city showing on the bottom map.

We're heading out to Freemantle to hang out on the waterfront, and that will probably be the closest we'll ever be to our own, personal antipodes.

Melbourne to Perth

There was a modest dusting of snow atop the little mountains with the grandiose name, the Great Dividing Range between Sydney and Melbourne. We'd been eyeing malicious weather forecasts for Melbourne, but arrived to find it all blown away by a stiff, flag-flapping breeze, which has held the entire time we've been here. Winter light is slanted at this latitude and reminds us of the way it looks where Mirja's family lives in Finland.

There are obvious attractions in Sydney. Those in Melbourne are less obvious. It's consistently ranked as a world's top livable city, and walking up Collins Street last night and looking up at Melbourne's pretty skyline, it felt perfectly safe to be out in crowds of pedestrians enjoying their city. Liveable, but maybe not a dazzling place to visit.

Maybe a little like our city of Atlanta twenty years ago, before it became a traffic nightmare. Traffic's not as much of an issue here, the streets all laid out in sensible, understandable grids, extensive hop-on  hop off trams. And also like Finland, the citizenry politely wait for the walk signal at intersections.

There's theatre, sports and cultural exhibitions like the ones you seldom visit in your own town. A Saltavador Dali collection is visiting from a museum in Florida, and the Melbourne Museum exhibit is a Day in Pompeii.

Hitting a town known more for living in than visiting and staying in the central business district on a weekend may not be giving it the best opportunity to impress. And the expensive Grand Hyatt Melbourne started us off unfortunately, asking $29 a day to access the Wi-Fi in the room, and then another $29 for a second computer to use the same Wi-Fi. Far too mercenary, and it didn't stand, but it gave Melbourne something to prove.

We've been quite active in our short time here, actually. A few hours after flying in we sat down at Ethiad Stadium for an Aussie rules football match. We've walked pedestrian Bourke Street from the docklands all the way down to the town hall on this end. The Melbourne Writers Festival is ongoing and yesterday we attended a lecture at the RMIT Capital Theatre by Dr. Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House, the British Royal Institute of International Affairs. I'll post on that in a day or two, maybe during the long flight to come.

For now we're going to head out west to Perth a little earlier than we'd planned and plant ourselves on the Indian Ocean for a few days. The dueling forecasts say Melbourne rain with highs of 15 & 13 and lows of 7 the next two days, and Perth checks in with a promise of 19 & 21, no rain and "plenty of sunshine" Wednesday. It's a 4:10 flight, about like flying from our home airport, ATL, to LAX.

See you from there.

(Photo is the Yarra River at Melbourne, Australia from EarthPhotos.com. More photos from our current trip here.)

Don't Know Aussie Rules, Doesn't Matter

The Carlton Blues held their nerve against Melbourne in an afternoon match at Etihad Stadium here yesterday. Best I can tell, the score was Carlton 24.9 Melbourne 15.6.

Ranked last in a sixteen person league and having won four of their 21 games this season, Melbourne failed to impress on a breezy, cool late winter afternoon.

Not understanding the rules ws no obstacle. A good time with the affable, long-suffering home crowd. A hoot.

"...Australia is just a small place."

In the U.S. we sometimes speculate, in a separated-by-the-great-Pacific-Ocean kind of way, about whether China’s rise will be a peaceful, beneficent one. In Australia the answer is already searingly clear, and it is "No."

The ambassador to Beijing has been back in Canberra (with denials that it's anything but routine) after no Chinese official deigned to meet with the minister sent from Australia to preside over signing of a $41 billion natural gas deal. An Australian mining executive remains in Chinese custody under charges of spying, and a Chinese vice-foreign minister cancelled a trip here to show displeasure over the Ruud administration’s granting a visa to an exiled Uighur leader, the splittist-du-jour.

China is acting this way, as Wei Jingsheng pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, because it can:

"Australia has a prime minister who thinks he knows a lot about China, when actually he doesn't. Because Kevin Rudd has many relationships with China, the Chinese Government is hoping that because of these ties he will not make a strong reaction.

"Second, historically, Australia is one of the weakest countries in dealing with China. Third, Australia is just a small place."

China continues to loom over our summer holiday. Even in Australia.

(Photo from the China Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. See also photos from our current trip to Australia.)

Change of Fortune

The Fortune of War Hotel, Sydney: 1995 & 2009

Easy New Continent

Lovely city. Livable scale, perfectly shoulders down friendly. They say 4.2 million and it doesn't have the busy busy busy of Atlanta, or anything like the urban frenzy of Hong Kong. It may be three or four days away body time, but it just doesn't seem like a different continent. Seattle, maybe.

They say it's the most brutal month, dead of winter. Saw buds on trees today, though. Been very kind to us.

Likely to change after another city or two, but here in the international hub it's hard to hear the authentic Aussie accent over the Asian din. Paper today said they're going to tighten up on student visas. Actually have everybody from select countries in for an in person interview.

Putting up some unedited, unfluffed photos here at EarthPhotos.com.

Sydney HDR

First Post from Sydney

A really fresh morning everybody was proud of; Sydney greeted us with brilliant sun and wind. It put a bounce in the community step - it' still brisk but spring is in sight.

The long trip over was inconsequential.  Delta's lie-flat beds on their brand new 777 yielded nine, count 'em, hours of sleep, still leaving five hours forty one minutes of mouth breathing time.

The beds sit in a four across angled configuration (that make the windows pretty much useless) and if you are the least bit wider than normal I'd think you might feel constrained - it's a little tight once they've got you down in your cocoon, but mercifully it's full length - at least for my six feet or so. The flight crew said flights had been full when they started service back in July but nearly a third of our cabin was empty. Kids are back in school, was the attendants' theory.

Just now it's in the 7:00 hour Wednesday morning, we have the Opera House and Harbour Bridge view we were promised from the 24th floor and I have dee-lish Vittoria brand Arabica Espresso coffee, watching the flags snapping full extended in a stiff west wind atop the Harbour Bridge as the rush hour streams across.

Got to work on my day job for a bit, but I'll leave you for now with a couple of original versus HDR photos from our window: The Harbour as shot and then as HDR, and then the Harbour Bridge, with views across to North Sydney, as shot and as HDR.

(Photos from EarthPhotos.com.)

Action Plan: Australia

I've set this up to post while we're over the Pacific en route to Sydney. Come with us here on CS&W, and we'll post what I imagine (high speed internet willing) will grow to a sizable bunch of fairly unruly, unedited photos here. Here's the action plan:

Common Sense and Whiskey Road Trip

Common Sense and Whiskey gets a bit sparse for a day or two as we travel to ATL today, LAX tomorrow and from there, SYD, arriving Tuesday a.m. local time.

We'll keep a running commentary as we do the Australia circle tour, Sydney to Melbourne to Perth to Broome to Darwin, a short hop up to Dili and back, then across the "Red Centre" by train, the continent north to south, Darwin to Adelaide, aboard the Ghan. Click the little "Subscribe" button just under the masthead to subscribe for free in your reader.

Photos will post on EarthPhotos.com as we go. Bookmark this link and check it regularly for new pics.

The Friday Photo Quiz will resume in September. For now, "Cheers, Mates."

(Photo of tall ship in Sydney Harbour from EarthPhotos.com.)

A Breezy, Unpredictable People

In the course of due diligence for our next trip, I've come upon a picture book called Australia and New Zealand from the Life World Library, copyrighted in 1964. It's one of those classic treatments of a Land Far Away circa the 1960's, with a mix of black and white and over-saturated color photographs (like the one at left), the way they used to do.

It was a different world in 1964. Chapter four, "A Breezy, Unpredictable People," startles with its directness, but makes me smile at the same time. Here, for your edification are some things you'll learn about Australians:

- "Certainly the Australian male is tough - very tough - and in appearance lean-eyed, hatchet-jawed, relaxed and slightly ungainly. The girls generally run in two types - either a rather stringy, small-breasted, leggy girl with a sun-baked complexion, or else one with a large-hipped figure and an easy grace of posture."

- "Both sexes look athletic, purposeful and healthy; yet each may be said to lack style and glamour."

- "... the girls tend to be boyish: frank and kindly, yet lacking mystery and romance."

and

- "...Australians are reluctant to give credit where it is due. A man of achievement is accorded a publicity value but not much else. For Australians are great 'Knockers,' and a man of high talent may often be pursued by a kind of envious rancor."

Photo from Australia and New Zealand, copyright 1964 and available used for $3.64 via Abebooks.com.