Hello, Possums

Sitting outside Coffs Harbour council chambers in the dark the other night, waiting for Sara to finish work, something moved in the bushes at the bottom of the steps. A large possum emerged, with head-lamp eyes and a huge, erect bottle-brush tail, and stalked confidently across the road to the park. He was followed shortly after by a female with a young possum clinging to her back. They didn’t brave the road, though, and on seeing me, scrambled up a palm tree.

I’ve seen possums twice before – two fighting on the roof of a bed-and-breakfast in Bangalow and one peering at me out of tree one night in Canberra.

Pub With No Beer

Sara and I had a post-Easter trip to The Pub With No Beer, which is at Taylors Arm, about an hour-and-a-half's drive from Coffs Harbour. The pub is named after a song which was a big hit for the late Australian Country singer, Slim Dusty, and did once, allegedly, run out of beer, although the song refers to another pub altogether. Apparently.

They've solved the beer problem now by building a small brewery out the back, run by a bloke called Murray. The only remaining problem was that despite accepting our overnight booking, they were mostly closed. We were wandering out of our room looking forward to supper at 6pm when the barman approached and said: "Glad I've found you because the locals have all gone home and I'm shutting early. Do you want to come and eat? The chef's left you some risotto."

Luckily, it was excellent, as was the beer, and it gave us just enough time to admire the collection of photos and song lyrics ("you have to drink the froth to get the beer" - how true) before we wandered back to our room clutching a stubbie of Murray's Sassy Blonde and a glass of unidentified Chardonnay. That was 7pm. It is very dark in Taylors Arm at night and, apart from the insects, very quiet indeed. But it is a beautiful spot.

Wildlife Bulletin

First, the sad news that Lori, the lorikeet with no tail feathers taken in by Carl, has died. His adopted father found him on Saturday morning, still clinging to the side of the cage, upside down. He spent a lot of time like that. Carl reckons that as he was the runt of the nest, his Darwinian clock was ticking loudly and ominously. And then stopped.

More happily, John and I were surfing on Sunday and were treated to a swim-past by a pod of dolphins only a couple of metres away. They then put on a fine display of surfing (much better than us), also very near-by, and finally started shooting out of the back of the waves (we can’t do that at all), including a mother and calf. We felt very privileged.

Now to Western Australia, where a young female surfer was savaged by a sea-lion while being towed on her board by her father’s boat. She survived and there’s not much more to be said really, except that if you go in the ocean, these things will happen.

Forget Mains Water, Get Me Fibre Optics

Broadband is a big issue here at present. The general mood is that we’re way behind other developed nations in rolling out high-speed services and this is a bad thing. I’m not so sure it is and, anyway, there’s a good reason for it.

As I’ve remarked before, Australia is big, really big, and really empty. There are 20 million of us knocking around, enough for an attractive infrastructure market if we were all huddled together in one corner of the continent, but we’re not. Far from it, there’s a strong feeling held by many that they don’t want to be near anyone else and many people buy properties miles from anywhere or anything.

The odd thing is that while they’re prepared to accept that these properties are on a dirt road and don’t have mains water, postal deliveries, buses, shops, a doctor, a school or refuse collection (and for a very good reasons), once they discover that they can’t get an internet service that enables them to download the whole of The Lord of The Rings on DVD, with director’s commentary, in ten minutes, they’re horrified. And they certainly don’t want to pay any more than they did when they lived in the city.

I’m sure you can do most things at lightening speed in the cities. For the record, in Sandy Beach (pop, around a few hundred, who knows?) we have ADSL at 256 kb/sec. Anything faster, and you pay through the nose and your download limit plummets. In time, we may get ADSL2, which will be faster for less money. (I don’t understand why).

My point is that, considering where we live, which is 20 minutes drive from the region’s biggest town (pop. 60,000), and six hours’ drive from Brisbane, that’s not a bad service. And, unless you’re running an internet-based business, who really needs anything faster anyway? Most of us don’t. Most of us don’t play games and most of us don’t download movies and our lives wouldn’t be any better if we did. Offer me the choice between high-speed down-loads and an empty beach and I know which I’d choose. In fact, I have.