Back at Sainte Foy

I was anxious about the return. I stayed overnight on my brother's boat in northern France, then whizzed all the way home. It was an easy trip in the sunshine, the kilometres disappeared quickly, as the landscape changes becoming hilly on the approach to Limoges. The land begins to spread out with massive views, blue hill after blue hill.

I arrived home with the sunset, just in time to be reunited with the beauty of the place. The house had been carefully tended by my lodgers. In fact, they had more than carefully tended it - they'd painted two rooms, which was a real pleasure to see. The salon had been a massive job, with lots of hole filling and plaster smoothing, but now, painted in the colours Rosie chose, it looks splendid.

The return has not been as hard as I'd feared. Rosie is everywhere and I still have to clear out her work room. But the time away has obviously healed quite a few wounds and I am able to contemplate the house and living here with much more equanimity. The cats were pleased to see me too and have slept in my room for the past five nights.

I'm thinking of starting another blog about life this year. If I do start one, I'll post a link here.

le retour vers la belle France

I'm going back home today, staying over night with Gavin on the boat. It'll be good to see my brother and his wife on their boat and it enables me to set off early tomorrow morning to get home. I'm planning to drive all the way in one day - it's a 10 hour drive - but if tiredness intervenes I'll stay somewhere en route.

I'm anxious but looking forward to being reunited with the cats, though they are quite likely to treat me with tail waving disdain. I've got one more flying visit to the UK in prospect for my mother's 90th birthday, then it's back to Sainte Foy for months of serious decorating. I will probably go completely mad. Please visit.

Back in Britain

For better or for worse, I'm now back in the UK. The flight from Hong Kong was immensely long at just on 13 hours. The plane was eerily empty - a 300 seater Airbus 340 with only 50 passengers. The most populated part seemed to be Business class, while the back was practically empty. It was a strange experience after years of full or nearly full planes. It is going to be the pattern for many months to come.

I've got a lot of things to do in the UK, then it's back to France to face up to whatever comes next.

Goodbye Eastern Luxury

I have had one final night of eastern luxury, with a bed at the Novotel, Hong Kong. I can't get enough of the fierce air conditioning, the immaculately prepared rooms, the showers like water cannons, the breakfasts with a huge variety of freshly made food on the buffet, including wonderful fruit, the smiling and bowing and customer service.

Ah well, it's back to France and the impeccable French version of hospitality and customer service! It can't hurt to dream.

See you in Europe.

Coming Back

After nearly two months away from Europe, I have to come back. It's been a welcome break which has done a lot to heal some very immediate scars. When I left I was jaded, tired and despairing. My time in Australia and New Zealand has given me new sights and sounds, fresh experiences and lots of time to reflect. I have thought about the past and the future. I still don't know what I'm going to do in the long term, but I know that the immediate future is about filler, paint and ladders, as I decorate Sainte Foy.

There is a bit more thinking time on the plane, of course, and tonight in Hong Kong, where I am having a lay over for 18 hours. But by the end of Tuesday I will be back in London and perhaps I'll wonder where it all went. There are loads of photos and images in my mind, not to mention some sand in the big red suitcase. I did leave some of my hair in New Zealand - I had a Hokitika haircut - but apart from that all I left was my tiredness and despair. Rosie is a massive gap in my life but I now know that she is part of my past.

You are all very welcome to visit me this year in Sainte Foy because I have plenty of paint brushes and several ladders. It's going to take the remainder of the year to finish the job but I have to get it done, whether I continue to live in the house or decide to sell it. So please come and help me paint and continue to heal. I do need my friends more than ever.

Sydney Again

A quick flight and I'm back in Sydney. As usual in this city, there is too much to drink and I wake this morning with a bit of a hangover. It's nothing much, but my body is certainly not its accustomed temple - last night it was full of rowdy pranksters bent on its desecration. We ate in a Chinese fusion restaurant at Finger Wharf, located in the longest wooden building in the southern hemisphere. It might even be the longest wooden building in the world, but no one seems to be certain about that, so we settled for the southern hemisphere. One of the party was a slightly rakish individual, born a pom but now definitely Ozzie. Sadly for him, he now has advanced macular disease caused apparently by driving buses over endless bumpy roads. He was great company with some very odd travel stories to tell as he smoked and drank incessantly without getting drunk.

My friend said I had to go and see some more sights. She was particularly keen that I should visit Cockatoo Island, which, she said, was once a major industrial part of the city. The only problem is that I have been able find no mention of it in the Lonely Planet Guide, so does it really exist?

I may not have been able to find Cockatoo Island, but at least I now know what it was. The answer was at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Contrary to what I imagined, the Barracks had very little to do with soldiers. Rather it had various functions connected with immigrants - as a secure environment for transported criminals until 1848 when the barracks were relocated to Cockatoo Island; then as a receiving station for young Irish women who were sent to Australia during the Irish famines of the the 1850s; and finally as an asylum for destitute and infirm women. In 1887 it was converted into court rooms and legal offices which were in use right up to 1979.

The displays are a frightening testament to the brutal early days of Australia, with endless floggings, hard labour and death from disease. The stories of the young Irish women who were transported here are deeply sad, although many of them did manage to make lives for themselves, through marriage to protestant settlers. Running through this nineteenth century history is the continuing failure Britain to solve its own problems which it managed only by shipping them off to Australia.

To cheer myself up I dropped into the State Library of New South Wales to have a look at the exhibition devoted to The Magic Pudding, a children's book dating from 1918, which is very well known and loved in Australia but little known outside. Written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay, a prominent artist of the time, it tells the story of Bill Barnacle and his sidekick, the penguin Sam Sawnoff, who are owners of the Magic Pudding, a grumpy creature that never runs out however much you eat it. The Magic Pudding also has the ability to be whatever flavour you want at the time. Bill Barnacle's ownership of the Magic Pudding is threatened by Possum and Watkin Wombat, a pair of professional pudding thieves. It's a wonderful story of the pursuit of the pudding and its eventual rescue with the help of Bunyip Bluegum (a well dressed Koala), told in highly coloured, exuberant larrikin language that children love. Lindsay wrote the book because he thought the contempory vogue for stories about fairies was utterly wrong. In his view children were really much more interested in stories about food. He proved to be right and the book has been a continuing success for generations of children in Australia ever since.

Australia's Shame

At the Ian Potter Centre, which is part of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the first floor is given over to indigenous art. I tagged along behind a party of students who were being told about the paintings by a huge bearded man who was part Aboriginal. He explained the paintings and artefacts in considerable detail. The connection between the traditional iconography and how modern Aboriginal artists have changed and reinterpreted the themes was really fascinating.

The picture shown is by Julie Dowling and refers to the Bathurst Island Mission, where in the 1920s a Catholic priest forbade the practice of Aboriginal ritual and marriage practice, effectively destroying the culture.

But what hit me so hard was what he said about the treatment of Australia's original people by the white settlers, which continues to this day. Incredibly, it remained legal to hunt and kill Aborigines until 1967. A bounty of ten pounds sterling was paid for each body, many of which were supplied to hospitals throughout the world for students to dissect. There were many other appalling facts about how abominably the whites have behaved. It may have begun in the nineteenth century but it was taken over and formalised as part of the white Australia policy, which apparently foresaw the complete annihilation of the indigenous population by 1970.

Today, the Australian governement seems yet again about to fail to keep its promises to the Aborigines, partly because out of habit, partly because in times of financial stricture, promises are expensive. It is a shocking story and so different from what has happened in New Zealand, where the Treaty of Waitangi is finally being fairly applied with the consent of both parties.

The Great Ocean Road

My friend Ian said I had to see the Great Ocean Road. It's awesome, he said. Like all Australians, Ian treats distance in a quite different way from Europeans - though it has to be admitted that Ian is only an adopted Australian,
having been brought up in England. But he's learned Australian ways and thinks little of driving huge distances. For him the three hours it took to reach the coast south west of Melbourne was just a short outing.

We stopped off for lunch in Colac, a typical Oz road town, with low rise shops, each nestling under its arcaded front. Traffic rumbled past as we sat outside, an endless stream of cars, utes and huge trucks. One hauled three enormous trailers, yet this is still smaller than a road train, which can drive on up to five sets of axles and seems to go on forever.

From Colac, the scenery changes to rolling hills, unrelentingly brown, mostly farm land from which the trees were culled years ago to make grazing land for milking herds. Our destination was Port Campbell, a small settlement, now a
holiday town, strategically placed on the Great Ocean Road. The road was built directly after the First World War by returning Australian soldiers. It was a classic piece of job creation for men who might otherwise have had nothing to
do. They hewed out mountainsides to create incredible corniches high above the sea, providing stunning views of cliffs and heaving surf pounding on the sandstone rocks below. A monument and arch over the road commemorates their achievement.

It is the sea that has created this coast, carving the soft rock into strange shapes, exposing layer upon layer of compacted sediment. There are a series of lookouts, giving onto bizarrely sculpted shapes, with names like "The
Twelve Apostles", "The Razorback" and "London Bridge". This latter is a massive arched rock, detached from but close to the land. Apparently it was connected by a second arch until 1990, when that fell into the sea. Unfortunately, two
sightseers on the remaining arch were marooned by the collapse and had to be rescued by helicopter many hours later.

We had a motel in Port Campbell for the night. It is the end of the season now so there were hardly any tourists, which lent the place a slightly melancholic feeling.

The coast along the road is notorious for shipwrecks and at various points there are plaques telling of individual disasters. Perhaps the saddest is the wreck of the Loch Ard, a three masted clipper which had set off from England in 1878.
Three months later it was approaching Melbourne through the Bass Strait, when in thick mist it foundered on rocks during a party to celebrate landfall. In these treacherous waters, only two people made it to land alive, Tom Pearce, the
ship's apprentice, and Eva Carmicheal, an 18 year old Irish girl, one of a family of eight Irish immigrants. Tom saved Eva's life but it is not recorded whether or not this led to a romantic outcome. I rather hope it did.

Burning Land

The Yarra Valley is one of the major wine producing areas of Australia. It is Victoria's oldest wine region, with over 3,600 hectares under vines. Located just one hour's drive from Melbourne, the Yarra is actually a group of valleys, surrounded by low mountains, a mixture of arable farming, animal rearing and vineyards.

Victoria has been suffering a drought for many years now and the land is parched brown. The dams are down to 30% capacity and water is increasingly short. All this could have been coped with. But then, three weeks ago, there was a massive heat wave. Temperatures soared to 48c. And then the winds came, more than 100kms per hour, blowing up from the South. The result was fire, advancing across the land at panzer speed, leaping roads, torching trees and smearing crops in flame.

We drove out to the Yarra today. The aftermath of these terrible fires, which have claimed more than 210 lives and many hundreds, if not thousands, of domestic animals, cows and sheep, was plain to see. Blackened fields stretched in all directions, punctuated by trees whose scorched trunks were witness to terrible heat. At Yarra Tracks Winery, the human cost was made plain to us. The owner showed photos taken the day the fires raced up the hill to the wineryjust after five in teh afternoon. As they watched trees burst into flames and all their tractors were incinerated. They spent 10 hours fighting the fires, attempting to keep the flames away from their home, but ready at any moment to jump into the swimming pool in a bid to survive. In the end, they did save their house and wine store, but everything else went. On their 70 acres, there is not a fence remaining, not a shed and all their crops are gone. Of their fiften acres of vines, the new plantings seem to be blackened stumps. It is possible the older vines will survive, but they won't know for many months. It was clearly an utterly traumatic moment for the owners of Yarra Tracks, but at least they are still alive.

Now, the countryside is threatened again, with severe heat and high winds predicted for early next week. The fires, which can still be smouldering underground - you can feel the earth is still hot under you palm - may reignite and for the second time in a month, bush fires will come to the Yarra. The Yarra Valley is one of the major wine producing areas of Australia. It is Victoria's oldest wine region, with over 3,600 hectares under vines. Located just one hour's drive from Melbourne, the Yarra is actually a group of valleys, surrounded by low mountains, a mixture of arable farming, animal rearing and vineyards.

Victoria has been suffering a drought for many years now and the land is parched brown. The dams are down to 30% capacity and water is increasingly short. All this could have been coped with. But then, three weeks ago, there was a massive heat wave. Temperatures soared to 48c. And then the winds came, more than 100kms per hour, blowing up from the South. The result was fire, advancing across the land at panzer speed, leaping roads, torching trees and smearing crops in flame.

We drove out to the Yarra today. The aftermath of these terrible fires, which have claimed more than 210 lives and many hundreds, if not thousands, of domestic animals, cows and sheep, was plain to see. Blackened fields stretched in all directions, punctuated by trees whose scorched trunks were witness to terrible heat. At Yarra Tracks Winery, the human cost was made plain to us. The owner showed photos taken the day the fires raced up the hill to the wineryjust after five in teh afternoon. As they watched trees burst into flames and all their tractors were incinerated. They spent 10 hours fighting the fires, attempting to keep the flames away from their home, but ready at any moment to jump into the swimming pool in a bid to survive. In the end, they did save their house and wine store, but everything else went. On their 70 acres, there is not a fence remaining, not a shed and all their crops are gone. Of their fiften acres of vines, the new plantings seem to be blackened stumps. It is possible the older vines will survive, but they won't know for many months. It was clearly an utterly traumatic moment for the owners of Yarra Tracks, but at least they are still alive.

Now, the countryside is threatened again, with severe heat and high winds predicted for early next week. The fires, which can still be smouldering underground - you can feel the earth is still hot under you palm - may reignite and for the second time in a month, bush fires will come to the Yarra.