Having really enjoyed our maiden cruise in 2019, we booked another for 2020. Planning again for a short “taster” 3-day trip, but heading south along the coast this time instad of north; we were stymied by the presence of bushfires all down the NSW South Coast. As such, we went generally north again, but somewhat further out to sea and with no particular destination.
I think we both felt a little less posiftive about this one [and then of course COVID basically shut-down the cruise industry for a few years 🙁 ].
In April 2019 we embarked on a short 3-day “taster” cruise on P&O’s Pacific Explorer; basically to see if we actually liked the experience. It was just a couple of days to sample on-board life.
This left from Circular Quay, went out of the heads and turned left up the coast. The next day we arrived at Tangalooma Resort in Moreton Bay: many passengers elected to go ashore sightseeing for a few hours but we chose to stay on board. The following day we returned to Sydney’s Crcular Quay.
One of the highlights was seeing the Northern NSW bushfires from the ship…
In the last week of August 2023 we finally managed to achieve a trip that had been 4 years or more in the planning (flamin’ COVID!): to spend a few nights on the Murray River in a houseboat.
Along the way the composition of the party changed from our whole family to just Dean and Reen and a couple that we had been good friends with for over 30 years. Amazingly, doing this was one of their “bucket list” items also 🙂
Naturally, a fantastic time was had by all concerned…
Day 1-(Friday) Granville-Holbrook
We left at 1000hrs and arrived at the Byers Fountain Motor Inn at 1600 hrs, Room 33. We had lunch at the Yass Service Centre, then afternoon tea from Holbrook Bakery and dinner at the RSL Club. Day 2-(Saturday) Holbrook-Echuca
We left Byers at 0800 hrs and we had a delicious breakfast at the Holbrook Bakery. We were on our way again at 0900 hrs. We drove through some beautiful countryside. We arrived at Echuca at 1245 hrs and we sat by a park until we could get into Motel. At the Old Coach Motor Inn we were in Room 7 and settling at 1350 hrs. Once we had set up the room we headed to Maureen (Reen’s sister) and Ian’s at 1600hrs, 48 Elizabeth St, Echuca for the afternoon, dinner and evening and left at 2155hrs. Day 3-(Sunday) Echuca
We had breakfast at Maccas with Richard and Heather Wilkins at 0805 hrs and explored Echuca by driving and walking around town. Dean and Richard walked to Moama Bakery and got lunch for us which we shared together in Room 10 with them. We then headed to Maureen’s at 1630 hrs for the afternoon, we went to the RSL Club for dinner and then back for more talking and headed back the Motel at 2205 hrs. Day 4-8-(Monday-Friday) Echuca to Infinity cruising the Murray River
We packed up and prepared to leave the room at 0810 hrs. We had breakfast at the Odd Captain’s Cafe, DELICIOUS. We went exploring local shops and wandered along the Port looking at the river. I actually walked around 3,000 steps, my biggest day since the op. We sat on the wharf waiting for the Infinity Houseboat to be cleaned, getting ready to leave.
We boarded the houseboat around 1500hrs. We all sat through the Induction video and the how to drive lesson, all good. We finally set off from the wharf at 1630 hrs with instructor on board, observing our new learned skills. He abandoned us, using his tinny and we went looking for a spot to moor for the night, we stopped just pass the Echuca Bridge. Richard was steering and Dean tied the ropes to moor us. After dinner we sat around chatting and playing on technology. We were well looked after with delicious food every day, thanks to Heather & Richard. While Richard did most of the steering during the cruise, we all did take turns steering. We all had the opportunity to sit and enjoy scenery of the river and of course we took heaps of photos. We spent time doing a puzzle. We moored the houseboat each day for lunch and each evening. We had to moor on the Victorian shore only because the NSW shore was mostly privately owned. We travelled to the furthest point on the river, Torrunbarry for us because we had to allow enough time to get back to Echuca.
Most afternoons we used the 10 seater spa which was very relaxing. Heather and Reen spent a lot of time colouring in and they enjoyed the views out the window. As we were closing in on Echuca we found the first houseboat movingly slowly in front of us, Richard overtook it. On Friday morning we headed toward Echuca and as we got closer the young guide met us in his tinny and he steered us into port. We had packed up earlier and were ready to leave the houseboat once it was moored. What a great adventure. During the cruise we had sunny days with a sprinkling of rain and at times some mild winds. Day 8-(Friday) Echuca to Holbrook
After docking at Port Echuca at 0940 hrs and we packed our vehicles and left the port at 0955 hrs. We stopped in Echuca for coffee at the Odd Captains and then headed out of town. We travelled to Finley where we had lunch at Murray St Cafe at 1230 hrs. When we got back on the road again at 1305 hrs we split up travelling together, we were heading to Holbrook and Richard & Heather were heading toward Bathurst. We arrived in Holbrook at Byers Fountain Motor Inn at 1630 hrs and settled into Room 33, again.
Day 9-(Saturday)-Holbrook to Granville
We headed out at 0900 hrs and headed to the Holbrook Bakery for breakfast and were on our way again, heading home at 1015 hrs. After travelling safely we made it home by 1620 hrs, very tired and ready to stop.
I read with mounting concern a complaint by a letter writer about the quality of the modern school bag.
This set my slow mind moving back to the portable leather carrier with its eager straps tonguing the buckles that was a part of my undistinguished schooldays.
Then the schoolbag had leather of rhinoceros hide durability. Some schoolbags were handed down from brother to brother usually with a bang on the head.
The schoolbag was at once a mobile canteen (Vegemite sandwiches, old cake crumbs, geriatric jellybeans and abandoned apple cores).
It was a trading post like the vans of country hawkers (two banana sandwiches for a pencil sharpener, a two-toned rubber for a lizard).
It was the repository of the majestic high-rise pencil case with sliding compartments and inlaid flowers on its varnished top. Its interior was surrealistically coloured with crushed crayons, powdered chalk and spilt ink.
It carried the compo cricket ball made of some mysterious substance that caused it to bounce erratically, particularly off the head of silly point.
The schoolbag was a small nature area with the tadpole jar, the caterpillar container (airholed in the lid) or the exotic silkworm to be traded at the stud sales during recess time.
Oh! And it carried books, of course; the First Reader, the copybooks with their copperplate purgatory, the sums book, the dreaded tables which were always turned against innocent minds thinking of something else.
The schoolbag was a way of life, a small empire entire in itself, a Freudian revelation of its owner’s inner darkness with deep sexual undertones of the peanut crunch to be presented to some tee-heeing delilah behind the tankstand.
The schoolbag may have made its owner look like a small hunch back of Notre Dame, yet whirled at the ends of its straps it became a fearsome weapon, the like of which David would not have spurned in his encounter with Goliath. And the Goliath of education bore down heavily on the schoolbag.
The installation ceremony of the schoolbag was a domestic display somewhere between an investiture at Government House and the departure of the Spartans for Thermopylae.
“My little boy is growing up,” the schoolbag wearer’s mother would cry, adjusting the gleaming new straps and the single unit pencil case (the multi-storeyed one came later as you approached puberty).
“Such young shoulders,” she’d murmur as the schoolbag was at last lashed in position.
So enormously complicated were some schoolbags that I have seen children have to be cut free from them or lifted out of them on arrival at their seat of learning. One child insisted on wearing his through the day, fearful that its removal would expose it to the school black-market gang trading surreptitiously behind the dunnies.
So the schoolbag would mature and reek as all schoolbags should. It would be dragged on the dust of country roads. It would bear a guinea pig admired for its fertility and enormous mating stamina.
The schoolbag was hurled into melees. And you could smell it downwind for half a kilometre.
Most girls carried cases. They were small, compact and petite: the cases I mean. To carry a girl’s case was to signify you had reached understanding.
Sometimes the cases were flung into the Boys Only, and the weeping would bring a vengeful teacher to present the case for the prosecution.
I still have the schoolbag syndrome. My wife says the bag I carry to the office is a national disgrace and should be put down. Its old letters. the stale lamington I carry for sentimental reasons, the electricity bill, the slow accumulation of debris and business flotsam and jetsam have made its sides swell like a whale.
People stumble against it and ricochet off it in the bus. I am sneered at by businessmen who use the chrome and jet black cases with pop-up compartments.
I guess the bag lakes me back to my Vegemite school days. It’s the kind of bag Rumpole would approve of. And as I drag it home sometimes I am back in those country lanes and I look around to carry some girl’s case.
But I am back on the train, the girls are all huddled in one corner. screaming for the guard and the bags under my eyes start throbbing as they always do at the end of the scornful day.
He won (an) award at New Year & this is a beaut piece I reckon [Handwritten note from Grandma]
Maxwell Edgar Fatchen, AM, looked dismayed.
“It’s no good, Max, you can’t run away and say you’re too busy. I’ve been assigned.”
As he heard the words, 59 years of shyness and modesty wrote themselves on the mild face and brought from the lips a quietly murmured: “Oh, no, no.”
Oh yes, yes. A man can’t be literary editor of “The Advertiser,” be made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to journalism and literature, and expect just to go home to Smithfield and pat Butterfly the poodle on the head.
Fatchen met the enthusiastic congratulations from his colleagues with smiling thanks and then a string of self-deprecating wisecracks. Among them”
“Yeah, AM. It stands for after meals y’know. They thought it’d be appropriate.”
But he did not let the occasion pass without admitting frankly, quietly: “It’s nice, though. It’s very nice.”
To his more recent newspaper readers Fatchen is a stumbling buffoon. The character he has created for public consumption is, in his own words yesterday, “an ordinary man who isn’t too smart. He doesn’t rule his world—he’s ruled and fooled by it.”
These readers also know the author of those whimsical topical verses, sometimes brilliant, always full of jokes which come out three times every week, through sadness and joy, whether it is time to plough, to sow, or to reap.
They do not know of the Max Fatchen who goes out of his way to help and encourage his younger colleagues, who dotes on his six grandchildren, who cherishes his links with the Adelaide Plains where he has lived all his life. and who is, as an enthusiastic fisherman, one of the great fish conservators.
They may guess that the dreadful wife of what Fatchen calls his funnies does not—could not—exist.
They can know now that Jean Fatchen is spoken of by her husband as his great inspiration and help, a woman who is at once “liberated, a great companion, and with a marvellous sense of humour.”
They know very little of the hard- working disciplined writer who has been getting up early in the morning to produce a string of highly-praised children’s novels.
If it is the children who sense better than other readers that there is what one of his closest friends describes as a large store of wisdom and sensitivity in Max Fatchen, he would be happy enough.
“I have a powerful regard for children, whom I like to meet on equal terms,” he said yesterday.
“There’s a great clarity in their thought before they’re allegedly knocked into shape by society.”
“Children dream. The great thing is to carry your dreams into adulthood.”
For anyone who’s interested, this is a short description of the process I’ve used to convert the Max Fatchen newspaper clippings to WordPress posts.
I’ve used only tools that I had or that were available as open-source or for free. MS Word is probably the most expensive if you don’t already have it—but Google Docs, or Libre Office (Write?) or even Notepad will do the job perfectly well. In truth, you could forego that stage completely and drop text directly into WordPress if you wanted; however I see value in keeping the “source” files, particularly as some of them do need a fair bit of editing.
Process
Photograph the article/clipping in good, even light against a fairly plain background using a high-res camera. I used the one in my Samsung S22. Try to get the pic reasonably square and without significant shadows or “flare”.
Use Gimp to crop, straighten and otherwise manipulate the image to clean it up and make the text as clear and sharp as is possible. I tended to use crop, rotate and perspective adjust a fair bit, with occasional brightness/contrast tweaks (usually to some parts of the image, say where there was a shadow or similar).
Save the image as either JPG or PNG with the least reduction in quality, then upload to Google Photos.
Right-click the picture in Photos and select “Search image with Google”, which opens Google Lens in a sidebar.
Click (Text), then [Select all text], then (Copy)—this OCRs the text and copies it to the Windows clipboard.
Paste the text into your word processor or text editor of choice; as above I used Word because I had it and am familiar with it.
Read the article from the image and edit the text to accurately reflect it. I found that some pieces needed next-to-no work, others took up to an hour or so. I also found that I could sometimes improve the results by selecting parts of an image in Step 4 above. Obviously, the better the readability of the text, the more accurate the output.
Once editing is complete, copy/paste the text into WordPress: JOB DONE 🙂
As I’ve noted, this is what worked for me, your milage may vary!
In late September 2022, John and Hazel were finishing up a few months at Bourke, where she’d been supervising OT students.
We went out for a few days and came back through Gil for their “Back to Gilgandra” weekend. As you can see, I’m experimenting with trip logging—after bit of fiddling to get it set up it seems to work pretty OK. (EDIT 2024: changed mapping plugins, the new one is a little easier to use…)
One of the highlights was sunrise over the Darling River from the verandah of our cabin at Kidman’s Camp.
We did a day trip to Toorale National Park (or perhaps Toorale State Conservation Area, they’re adjacent and I’m not totally sure of where we ended up 🙂 ) and ran across a flock of emus…
When we slowed down a bit one of them became flamin’ curious…
A bit further along we met some National Parks blokes who were putting a camera up to record activity on a brolga’s nest. It was only about 10m or so off the walking track.
The brolgas themselves were over the creek (river? billabong?) a good 100 or 200 metres away foraging.
On our last evening there, John and Hazel took us up to Mt Oxley for the spectacular sunset and a nice quiet barbeque.
Sadly, we’re obviously rotten at this whole photo thing, as neither of us have any photos from the Back to Gil weekend events 🙁
Sunday 25 September-Wednesday 5 October 2022
We left Claremont Meadows at 0930hrs in our Toyota Rav 4 Hybrid and we were heading to to Dubbo. Mudgee seemed like a good place to stop for lunch where we sat at an outside table at the Square Cafe. Arrived in Dubbo at 1530 hrs for the night where we would staying at the Countryman’s Motor Inn in Room 7. The Garden Hotel in Talbragar St seemed like a good place to have dinner.
On Monday we left Dubbo at 0930 hrs and headed to Bourke. After a good trip we arrived around 1300 hrs and met John, Dean’s brother at the Bakery and had lunch and then some grocery shopping. We finally arrived at Kidmans Camp Caravan Park at 1510 hrs and headed to our cabin, a Log Cabin #12 where we could sit on the verandah watching the pelicans and ducks on the flooding Darling river and parrots in trees. After a busy day we had dinner with John & Hazel in their caravan annex.
On Tuesday John took us driving to Brewarrina (1 hour) where we visited the Information Centre, where we went on a Cultural Heritage tour with Bradley, the curator talking about the Fish Traps being 40— 150 thousand years old, this is not written on paper it is only shared verbally among the people, it was quite interesting to hear. Lunch was at Trish’s Thulii Ngemba Cafe. Before we headed back to the cabin we visited local artist Jenny Greentree’s Gallery (Gil girl). The Bourke bowling club had a chinese banquet which is where we went with J & H for dinner.
It’s Wednesday and woke early and sat and watched sunrise over the river, 0600 hrs with coffee on the verandah and watched a small wallaby hop across the front of us. It was time to visit the Back of Bourke Exhibition Centre for a tour, fantastic set up and very informative. The Cressey Motor session at the Wharf was interesting to watch and hear the story.
On Thursday we drove to Torale and saw the original homestead (being renovated), shearing sheds and the National Park. At 1650 hrs we left for Mt Oxley (about 1 hour) to watch the sunset and have a BBQ for dinner and stars were everywhere. We headed home about 2030 hrs.
It’s Friday and our time in Bourke is almost over but we watched another sunrise at 0615 hrs with coffee from the verandah; absolutely beautiful. Well the time came for us to pack-up and leave at 0900 hrs heading to Dubbo. We stopped at the Major Mitchell Cafe, Coolah for morning tea and stopped again at Nyngan Shell for fuel and had lunch at Lavish Coffee at Riverdale Shopping Centre Dubbo at 1332 hrs. At 1410 hrs we booked into the Countryman’s Motor Inn, same room as before and had dinner at Lions Pride Restaurant at 1930 hrs.
We have a busy day ahead, it’s Saturday and we are heading to Gilgandra for the town’s celebrations. It was great to see Hunter Park full of stalls, entertainment and people everywhere. While there we met up with Wes & Sim (Reen’s brother), Doug &Terri (Reen’s brother), Lois & Roseanne and Karen Marchant (Reen’s cousins). We enjoyed lunch at Cafe 41 owned by Linda Burgers (Reen’s cousin). We walked along Miller St, the main street and looked at lots of photos and displays. It was great to catch up with family while in town. In the afternoon we toured the High School where we met Glenda & Warren Ferguson (friends). At dinner time we enjoyed a BBQ with Wes & Sim and other family and then headed back to Dubbo at 2030 hrs.
It’s Sunday and we are headed back to Gil where we visited the newly opened Gilgandra Information Centre and Gilgandra Museum, both were really great. The Cornerstone Cafe was a great place for lunch. In the afternoon we headed back to Dubbo, both of us feeling quite tired.
We were hoping for a quiet day today, Monday, to slow down a little with lunch at Doug & Terri’s. We managed to find a laundromat to do a little washing to keep us going till we get home.
It’s Tuesday, it’s time to pack up and leave for Warner’s Bay where we will spend the night at Pippi’s at the Point Hotel, Speers Point and after a full day of travelling, we were tired so we had dinner at the hotel.
Our holiday is almost over, it’s Wednesday and we are heading to Cardiff, to Travelhome to check out how the 5th Wheeler is progressing before we return home to Claremont Meadows. Finally back home, it’s mid afternoon and we are ready to stop. It’s been an eventful 11 days away but very enjoyable.
A telephone with a hand attached, which will be able to caress by remote control, may one day be available, says a US journal on electronics.
The hand may be capable of pointing, feeling, touching, caressing under remote control over a telephone line, the magazine says.
Hands have been attached to our telephone for years. They are not remote controlled but flesh and blood and they are harder to remove than coffee stains.
These hands clutch, clamp, claw, caress and even snatch if confronted by other hands joined or connected or attached to other bodies which in turn are activated and motivated by brains appalled at the time others spend hand-holding on the telephone.
The whole thing gets horribly out of hand and cries of “hands off” and “hand and deliver” have no effect.
My wife is always complaining about how she wants a spare pair of hands. But not this, dear heaven, not this.
But getting back to the matter in hand. Such an attachment to a telephone should be more aggressive.
It should grab a caller who goes over three minutes by the throat and shake her like a rat.
It should snatch the receiver (from her hand) and automatically hang up.
It should give the garrulous teenager a good slap across the bottom.
Maintenance and hygiene of the telephone attachment could pose some problems.
For instance, are we going to have Telecom coming around all the time wanting to wash its hand?
And then there’s the problem of reporting your hand if it malfunctions.
I can picture myself ringing the girl at complaints and saying: “Look I’m having trouble with my hand. It keeps wandering.”
“By the tone of your voice,” she snaps back, “you’re the kind who would.”
The next thing the hand smacks me in the face.
There might be other uses.
When I phone my banker my telephone hand could start wringing itself.
The neighbour rushes over saying his telephone is defective so I lend a hand.
One could fish by remote control. You’d merely use the hand line.
But let’s not be too carried away. Will my daughter now be satisfied to hold hands over the telephone instead of at the drive-in?
There’s the morale factor. If you’re feeling a bit low you can ring a friend and get her to scratch your back.
Someone has suggested get- ting a clenched fist attached to the telephone. Then when some of our more spectacular performers get on it there’d be no show without punch.
I also suggest a foot phone (just for kicks), a rib phone (that’s if you feel like being tickled) and an eyebrow phone (so you can raise something).
There’s no truth in the rumour that someone slipped a diamond ring on a remote-controlled hand and got an engaged signal.
When the telephone bill arrives I’ll be interested to see whether the phone holds its hand out. Everyone else in our house does!
