Mail boxes

I saw this group of mail boxes on a trip out into the country. You see lots them by the side of the road, sometimes in groups, like these, or sometimes standing solitary. Some of them are bought, ready-made, from a hardware store but mostly they‘re just made from junk - old metal drums, plastic containers, anything that can be cut open at one end and nailed to some kind of support.

Occasionally, you see some that are real works of art, complex metalwork creations, weatherproofed sculptures of birds, animals or strange machines, and you can almost picture their creators in their workshops down the end of the farm track, designing yet another mail box as a way of relaxing after a hard day on the land.

Mostly, though, they’re just bits of recycling left to stand out in all weathers, mostly blazing sun and wind-blown dust but some torrential rain, by the side of the road, just about affording some protection for the mail left inside. They seem rather frail and vulnerable, and not really up to the job of protecting what’s inside. After all, in spite of the web, lots of important stuff still comes by mail - from banks, the utility companies, solicitors - so why leave it in the care of half an old seed drum?

You can stand by many of them and scour the surrounding landscape for the house they serve without seeing a sign of habitation. The owners clearly don’t take a casual stroll down to pick up their mail and would more likely drive or check it when they were getting into the ute to go into the nearest town. The boxes are really out on a limb, almost abandoned. And yet no one worries about their mail being stolen, which says a lot for rural communities.

The one below seems to have a definite identity - 287 Irvines Road. If you were in a town, you’d look at an A to Z and find Irvines Road but here there’s just the tarmac road from Macksville to Bowraville and then the two dirt tracks heading off who knows where, both unmarked. And there’s no sight of number 287, or 285, or 289. Just the mail boxes.

Sink or swim

One of the things I like about Australia is that there’s always someone exercising and there’s always someone sitting in a café, often after they’ve been exercising. I’m glad to say that that I’m doing my bit to maintain this admirable state of affairs but I’ve had to withstand some cultural intimidation along the way. Exercise, and sport, is taken very seriously.

Fired by my enthusiasm to stay afloat and alive on the local beach - Diggers has a mysteriously mobile and treacherous rip that has been known to draw away unsuspecting holidaymakers - I decided to take myself off to the proudly named Coffs Harbour War Memorial Olympic Pool (I should say that “Olympic” refers to its size and, apparently, the aspirations of its regular users; the Games have never been held here).

It took me a few visits before I made it across the threshold, even at 9am, because for weeks the pool was booked for school competitions right through to lunchtime. Before 9am, the pool was used for “squads”, as one of the attendants told me. I didn’t bother asking which squads because I took it for granted that in every town, in every sport, every morning across Australia, “squads” are at work, striving for sporting domination, and possibly even enjoying it. They then go to the nearest café.

When I finally made my way in, it was very different to the siege-like atmosphere in many British public pools. I asked the jolly woman on the gate if they had lockers. “We do,” she replied. “But they’re not worth the trouble so if you‘ve got any valuables, you’d better give them to me.” She put my wallet and keys next to someone’s sandwiches on a shelf. No one bothers with the changing rooms, either. You arrive wearing your swimmers, shorts and a t-shirt so it’s straight to the pool, which is open-air and so vast, you can barely see the other end. In March, the air was pleasantly warm and the unheated water pleasantly cool and I started working on the only stroke available to me, the breast stroke, which, with practice, becomes reasonably efficient, despite my habit of lying in the water at an angle, like a surfacing submarine with a surfeit of ballast in the stern.

I flogged up and down, feeling glad the pool was empty as I was going so slowly (oh yes, there were no lifeguards; they seem to have no need for them). A couple more swimmers drifted in - there were never more than a three of us at that time of the morning - and then something like a torpedo went by in the next lane, trailing a stream of bubbles. Of course, I didn’t catch it and humiliation was complete when the torpedo was revealed to be a slim woman in an elegant swimsuit who, though clearly extremely fit and youthful in spirit, was even older than me. I’m fifty, for the record, and it would not be polite to hazard a guess at Ann’s age. We started chatting each morning, before, as she puts it “we’d better get down to business” and she powers off to the distant, far end of the pool while I flounder along in my lane. She also does more lengths than I do.

I’m impressed by Ann and, believe me, there are many more like her, all out there unintentionally humiliating passing Poms. I was even more impressed (yes, ok, even more humiliated) when, after a couple of weeks, she revealed that the pool is her second exercise session of the day and, that before 9am. “I usually go for a walk over Mutton Bird Island with some friends and then we have a long swim off Jetty Beach,” she told me casually. “But I like to do a few lengths here as well.”

Behind the bench where we leave our clothes, a new generation is prepared for the stern business of being Australian. In the teaching pool, protected from the sun by a wooden roof, children who can yet barely walk are having swimming lessons. “Long arms, Monty, long arms,” shouts the instructor. Inside, two small boys are made to race for a ball flung to the far side of the pool. Monty wins by a head, possibly because he has long arms for his age, or he uses his arms in some secret, Aussie-domination-of-sport way that makes his arms seem longer. I notice that they both have floats strapped to their backs, clearly to correct the tilting submarine tendency. If only I’d had their advantages.

Anyway, I’m having a break from all this because the pool has shut for what passes here for winter. I asked the pool’s owner, who works there full-time, how he passed the close season. “Grouting,” he replied. “It’s a big job.” They really are indomitable, these Australians.

Bowraville

We went to Bowraville the other day, a small town inland and to the south of here. It’s easy to find. You just drive down the Pacific Highway for about an hour, turn left and keep driving for another twenty minutes or so. And you’re there. Similarly, you can reduce the directions for getting to us from Brisbane to “drive south on the highway for six hours, turn left at the Big Banana and we’re the fifth house on the right.” If you’re coming from Sydney, then you just drive north for eight hours and turn right at the Big Banana. That’s the sort of country it is.

It’s a small town and very quiet, the kind of place where, although thriving, you’d expect tumbleweed to greet you on the main street but it is just quiet and not abandoned at all. It was founded by cedar getters in 1850 though, of course, indigenous people were living there and still do. Cedar was known as “red gold” but real gold played a part in the town as well. In 1881, two brothers looking for stray bullock found traces of gold in a stone in the remains of a still-warm campfire and staked a claim. This was then promptly disputed by the men who had built the campfire as soon as they heard about it. But there was still mining in the area until the 1960s.


Bowraville Theatre

The buildings are old, for this country, and well-preserved. It has most things - a town clock, a hotel, a couple of lodging houses, a butcher, food store, a couple of cafes, and a race course. It also has a theatre, recently restored and re-opened by the town’s arts council, after more than 40 years. In its previous existence as the Raymond Theatre, the audience was segregated, the indigenous Gumbaynggir people sitting on inferior seats nearest the stage. The practice was highlighted in the sixties by a group of student civil rights campaigners known as the Freedom Riders and, eventually, the owner closed the theatre rather than face de-segregation. Now it’s been fully restored and, following a cleansing ceremony to mark the break with the past, there’s a programme of films, bush poetry readings and music.

The chair of the arts council is Dorothy James. Now in her seventies and not shy about it at all, she comes originally from Mumbles (and turned out to have gone to the same school as Sara’s father; and Sara’s mum knew Dorothy’s brother). After we’d all seen the theatre, she took us back to her home outside the town, a bungalow perched on the side of a valley with views from a wide verandah down to a creek and up the other side of the valley over fields and hillsides. In Britain, you’d call it isolated. She has a lively cattle dog, Ruby, and an old horse for immediate company, and has family living on a farm nearby. They were away for a weekend when we visited and Dorothy was happily looking after their ponies, dogs and chooks ie chickens. You got the impression this was all in a day’s work and more than welcome.

Warning: Vortex looming

Feeling as though I'm being stalked by those ads at the top of the page. No sooner had I finished yesterday's posting, than they seized on the word "morning" and produced an offer for a video of film called "Joy in the Morning", starring Richard Chamberlain, for heaven's sake. I thought he'd gone to soap opera hell with his alter ego, Dr Kildare. Now they've changed and they seem to have been thinking about the word "breakfast." No doubt this posting will initiate some digital head-scratching and brow-furrowing. It's relentless. Should I stop now before I'm sucked into a post-modern vortex of self-reference, swirling around in hyper-space with cockroaches, Mortein, wallabies and humpbacked whales? Where will it all end?