Well! The Sydney trip turned out to be different than the expectation but isn’t that just the way of life? I arrived after a smooth flight from Hobart on Monday last week and checked into my hotel. I think that is when I may have last checked in. I went to the Kinokuniya book store and picked up Aphrodite’s Breath after reading Lisa’s review. It had been on my radar.

I read Limberlost by Robbie Arnott on the plane and was really enjoying it. It is such a Tassie book. Robbie writes about Tasmania like Tim Winton scatters Western Australia dust through his pages. They both have a deep understanding of their home states and are wonderful of getting it into their books.

Then Tues morning arrives and I was preparing to meet my friend for a day of photography but she got covid so that scuppered those plans. I had been looking forward to seeing her but we will catch up again. I hopped on a ferry and visited Taronga Zoo. I had fun with the camera and although I haven’t downloaded the photos yet I hope the young gorillas playing come out good. Will share that later.

Wednesday was the Tina Turner musical and I think of the hundreds of plays I have seen in my life this would be one of the best. I loved the energy, the inclusion of so many of the events of her life and the actor, Ruva Ngwenya was incredible. It was also so very sad hearing about her death on the same day I was enjoying the play. I saw her in concert twice in Melbourne in the 1990s as well as growing up with her and Ike’s music and stories for a lifetime. I don’t think there were many people at the play who were younger than 65.

Thursday I hopped on a crowded bus and went toBondi Beach to do some photography. Ended up sitting on a bench chatting to an 81 yr old man from Albury-Wodonga about the play we had both seen the previous day. He told me he went to see it. His wife and he loved dancing and did so several evenings a week during their married life until she went into care for dementia. I listened to his memories as though reading a book. I then got up and took some photos as I headed back to the city on an even more crowded bus. I really love sitting next to older people while travelling alone and hearing their stories. There are so many stories in the world and so many lonely people wanting to share them with someone.

Friday morning I woke up with a sore throat. I was quite tired Thursday so the sore throat didn’t surprise me. That’s what my body does when I’m tired. It had been a very busy week.

So back onto another delayed Qantas flight with the rest of Limberlost to occupy my time arrived home feeling worse. It felt so good to be back in my own bed. Saturday morning I tested positive for Covid and I haven;t done much since except take the anti virals and sleep. Monday arrived and now Mr P came down with it.

This week is dragging on a bit but I am thankful for vaccinations as I would have been much sicker without them though even with them this illness is not a walk in the park. I’m starting to feel human again. I now have the energy to do some laundry, pick up Hemingway;s book The Sun Also Rises for June book club. Maybe begin to download the photos I took. In the meantime I will share the phone pics I took of the opera house as the Vivid Event, running in Sydney now was being set up.

It’s good to be home and on the mend.

The photos scattered throughout this post are from the Sydney Harbour area.

With my friend out of commission or whatever happens on my trips, I can always count on the Penguin for company. Out last evening celebrating our week of surprises.

The Alphabet photo challenge and reading challenge has begun. But let me back up.

Tomorrow I head to Sydney to see the Tina Turner musical and spend a couple of days taking photos with a friend. Now, I’ll need a book to read on the plane. Will put my soundproof headphones on and enjoy a couple of hours in the air.

Alphabet by author’s last name: The A book is Robbie Arnott’s book Limberlost. I have heard so much about it and hope I can finish it then pass it on. It has won numerous awards and everyone I know seems to have read it or is talking about it. The blurb states:

“In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat.

His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.

Desperate to ignore it all-to avoid the future rushing towards him-Ned dreams of open water.

As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.

The third novel by the award-winning author of Flames and The Rain Heron, Limberlost is an extraordinary chronicle of life and land- of carnage and kindness, blood ties and love.”

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Yesterday I visited a home where a young woman had lost a ring from her grandmother somewhere between her garden and a large hardware store several miles north. She posted on our Good Karma fb page wanting a metal detector. I contacted her and said I don’t loan it out but I would come over and scour her back yard. After 90 minutes yesterday digging up screws, nails, bottle tops and crushed beer cans I am fairly certain there is no ring in her yard. She said it could be in her house and one of her two cats found it. One of her cats is a kitten so we can all guess what could have happened if that is the case. She presented me with a lovely bottle of red wine for my efforts so it was a good return for me anyway.

I then headed north to begin my Alphabet photography challenge. I really want to visit places I have not been so the afternoon had me at the James Austin cottage north of Hobart 14 kms. A for Austin. The wind was blowing a gale but the sun was out and although cold it didn’t take long to explore the small grounds of this property. I’d never seen it before.

Google told me:
It is a small and simple cottage, built by James Austin in 1809 and is located a couple of hundred metres from the Austins Ferry Yacht Club.
Austin was a convict who had been transported to Port Phillip in HMS Calcutta in 1803 and then transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1804. His crime was the theft of beehives valued at thirty shillings and he built Austins’s cottage on his release from local stone. He named the cottage and farm after Baltonsborough the village of his birth in Somerset, England. In 1816 James Austin and his cousin James Earl established the first trans Derwent ferry service which remained the main transport route from Hobart Town to Launceston until completion of the Bridgewater causeway in 1838.

He became prosperous and developed a large farm property and orchards. He died in 1831. The original farmhouse he lived in is gone and an inn built at the time burned in the 1967 bushfires.

It was a lovely day out and finished off with a toasted sandwich and a flat white coffee sitting outdoors in freezing wind along the River Derwent. I look forward to future challenges. We need to go out into bad weather at times just to feel alive🤠🌻.

I hope you enjoy the little cottage photos. I’m tempted to visit it one Sunday arternoon when it is open.

I will finish off with our cat, Cousin Eddie helping me pack. So glad I noticed him.

In January I was notified I had a bunch of Frequent Flyer points and I needed to use them by end of March or lose them. I had been wanting to fly to Sydney to see the Tina Turner musical as I love anything to do with Tina Turner. Event though she does not play herself in the play I think the actor who won the part will be very good. So I booked it all and leave Monday.

I’ll be there for five days. Two days will be spent with a good friend doing photography. Hopefully some street and urban photography one day and animals another. Then I’ll come home.

I’m taking my lovely copy of Hemingway’s book The Sun Also Rises to read on the plane. That is the June book club read. It is one of the books of his I have not read due to the bull fighting in it but I’ll just have to skim over that part if it gets too busy.

When I return I am going to do a little photography project and a book project. Both are alphabet projects. Tasmania is cold and dark for the winter and it is important to get out for some sun. Photo project will have me visiting different places alphabetically with my camera. Saturday I am visiting a local spot that starts with A. I’ll include it in a future blog. I’m hoping to find some interesting spots in southern Tasmania that I have not been to before.

Alphabetical TBR project. I have my book club reads that are often more substantial but I have a lot of books on my shelf that are slimmer and need to be read and removed. So I will start with an author that begins with A and go from there. We’ll see how far I get until the first day of spring, equinox spring, but of September spring.

So stay tuned for my thoughts on that and some photos hopefully in a couple of weeks. Stay well everyone.

…but I wanted to tell you about the rally I went to here in Hobart on Saturday. In Australia we have Aussie Rules football that is quite popular in several states, though not all as others prefer rugby. Each state has one stadium to accommodate football, cricket or rugby. However Tasmania has two stadiums. One in the north that is currently under renovation and one in the south of the state. Several states have one or more football teams. Tasmania does not have a team. Tasmanians have wanted a team for years but usually support a favourite team in another state. We would like one.

Now the head of the AFL, Aus Football League got together with our state premiere and said we will give you a team. All you have to do is build a covered stadium for 750 million dollars. We will chip in 15 million and your taxpayers can pay the rest. Our premiere and this head guy from Melbourne went into a room and signed a secret deal approving this. No one else in parliament was allowed to learn the terms of this contract and still don’t. Then our prime minister weighed in and said, “We’ll give you 240 million dollars if you follow these redevelopment rules in this area of old warehouses, etc on your waterfront” . However all predictions indicate costs will blow out to a billion dollars and where are the engineers and builders coming from who will build it? Where will the traffic go? There is one main road that flows by the site. Not to mention it will be 10 stories high and overshadow the Cenotaph, the ground the war and veterans memorials are on. The mayor and city council don’t know the details either. It was a done deal and then announced in the media that this stadium will be built on the waterfront of Hobart. Right in town. Again, Ten stories high-highest building in Hobart. And it is on Indigenous historic land.

Well, the proverbial shit hit the fan throughout the state. Everyone wants a team but this is blackmail. We have homeless on our winter streets. We have people dying in ambulances. We have a mental health hospital closing its doors as the building is too old. We have environmental issues. We also have 70% of people in our state not wanting a third stadium in a state with 500,000 people. We are a small state.

On Saturday a protest as called for on Parliament House lawns after 7 days of organisation. 6,000 people from all over the state arrived at noon. Every branch of government was there. Two of the party our premiere belongs two resigned and became independents as they are against the whole thing. Tasmania’s liberal government is now in minority. They did have majority. For my North American friends the liberal party here is the conservative party unlike liberals in the USA being more to the left.

So now, no one knows what will happen but the protest was great and I went to it with my camera and took photos. The only book related bit of this post is that Richard Flanagan, a Booker prize winning author and homegrown here who loves this state, introduced the speakers.

I don’t get political in my blog but I want to share my photos and if this goes ahead Tasmania will have 3 large stadiums and maybe no team.

When you visit here be careful not to step over a cut down tree in the rainforest, step over a homeless person or get in the way of a ramped ambulance who cannot unload their patient for another few hours.

Members of the other political parties all sent messages that were read against the stadium by Australian actor Essie Davis.

Now a new week is underway and time will tell what the future holds. Until next time.

I will leave you with the proposed image. Not my photo🙄🙄

MONDAY: Weather here still chilly but have had sun. So good for the mood. Good session with the weights. Felt good to toss them around. Stayed in and got stuck into the book Lost and Found in Paris. A light but enjoyable read. Joan, married to film photographer Casey, works for a lovely art gallery and museum in Pasadena, California. The first few pages has Casey arriving at her work place, announcing he had twin boys with his assistant five yrs ago and would like them to all be a family. Of course he would be a proper father and live with his assistant but Joan could integrate the boys into her life. Well you can imagine how that goes over.

TUESDAY: Yesterday I streamed the film The Whale from Amazon while Mr Penguin was at the gym. I saw trailers here at our State Cinema, that has really interesting films. My sister enjoyed it. I, not as much. Online English teacher who is secondary teacher is morbidly obese. He left his family, wife and 8 yr old daughter for another man years previously. The love of his life. When the love of his life died, he compensated by developing an eating disorder of binging. He becomes completely incapacitated by his weight. He can barely move and is cared for by his boyfriend’s sister who is a nurse that drops in regularly. His angry daughter comes back into his life , now in grade 12. Failing at everything she needs help from her father to help her graduate. A young man also enters the picture claiming he is door knocking from a religious sect but he has his issues too as we later discover. The three of them develop a tenuous relationship. I thought the acting was very good especially from the main protagonist. However the entire movie until the end takes place in a living room with all curtains drawn. Lots of yelling, darkness, etc as the themes of homosexuality, religion and relationships are all thrown together. I found it melodramatic and filled with a good deal of Hollywood moralising. The movie is very dark due to the setting and with my eye sight I struggled at times to see. It did win 2 oscars at the Academy awards I’m told but don’t recall what categories. However, I take the Oscars with a grain of salt. Some will love it, others not so much.

Tuesday evening had me enjoying a meeting of Photo Club 2. Photo club 2 is the club I joined recently that I am enjoying mainly for the great socialisation and excursions they go on. Photo club 1 has more members and challenges, more instruction. I have been a member of no. 1 for 6 yrs. So I am meeting lots of new people and enjoying photography on many fronts.

WEDNESDAY: Today was a quiet gym day and lunch with a friend. So I’m going to move through Wednesday and Thursday…straight onto:

FRIDAY: We attended an interesting Fullers event this evening at the RACV hotel across the street from Fullers. We meet here for events that have more attendance. Women and Whitlam-Revisiting the Revolution edited by Michelle Arrow. We had a panel consisting of Michelle, Margaret Reynolds, former Senator 1983-1999 Qld., and former Tasmanian premiere Lara Giddings. Michelle discussed how she put the book together and Margaret is a minefield of stories of how women were treated in politics and especially in Townsville in the 1980s. It was an evening filled with lots of head shaking and laughs and “I don’t believe its” and “Weren’t they just awfuls”. The room was packed and our hour flew by with interesting questions at the end.

SATURDAY: was purely political but I will do a separate post on that as I have some photos I took to share of that day.

I hope you have all had a good week and as Arnie Schwarzenegger would say, I’ll be back!

I know, I know. Time gets away from me, no excuses. I’m just diving in with this past week. Tasmanian weather has turned quite cool. Inconsistent rain. Back and forth to doct for erratic, genetic blood pressure annoyances. Hopefully something will work soon. But exercising a lot this past week and reading again after a big slump of books in print.

Weekdays had the twice gym sessions with Daniel and the weights. I have paid for 10 sessions for a personal trainer, who has become a friend for 30 min sessions once a week. So that will get me to gym 3x a week between the two of them. Daniel does weights, Teresa who is 55 but looks 35 does PT for core strength. Then a bit on a treadmill.

I’m doing a 5 day intensive photography workshop/tour of the Flinders ranges in July . 8 people plus two very professional photographers teaching us from 5:30 am to 8pm for 5 days. I’ll either learn some wonderful techniques or lie dying in the outback somewhere. But looking forward to it. Really!

Friday I slung the camera over my shoulder and spent two hours walking around Battery Point in Hobart. It is the oldest neighbourhood here and very historic with lovely cottages, convict built walls and beautiful gardens and lovely cafes. One in particular is very good and always busy. The clouds were dark and threatening and I was sure I’d get wet. Sat outdoors, wrapped in my winter coat, enjoying the fresh air and a delicious quiche full of goat’s cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, side salad and a decaf cappuccino.

Then walked along Salamanca place, a historic area with many sandstone buildings, old trees and a large market on Saturdays. Not many people out due to the weather. There is a carriage with two wonderful horses that do rides around the area. The horses are very well cared for and beautifully groomed. Their work hours are not high. I stopped for a pat. Soxy and Rex, who is a beautiful strawberry roan. They were having lunch out of large buckets with grain. Rex got grumpy once his meal was finished. Waving his head around but soon got over it.

Saturday I went metal detecting up from our road about 4 or 5 kms near Mt Wellington (Kunanyi). It was a park with woodchips that had no lost gold rings in it. The green area next to bush and the swings had old foundations and lots of nails and junk metal. Probably destroyed in the very large 1967 bushfires that people still talk about.

That was my travel for the week. I might add, after detecting, I went to the Fern Tree tavern to sit outside in the sun and watch people walk off the hiking tails of the mountain in late afternoon. No decaf coffee (We aren’t a coffee shop! I was informed). Is there tea? Yes, English breakfast, Earl Grey, Green, Chamomile. Great I’ll have chamomile. Right, that will be $5.00. I paid and went outside, wrapped my scarf around my neck tighter, it was 5 degrees C (about 40 F) and sat at a table in the sun to wait for my pot of tea and a cup. Five minutes later out comes an old mug, filled with hot water and a teabag. I guess they are not a coffee shop, though in fairness I have had some very good meals at night time there. I enjoyed the scenery and I suppose everything balances out at the end.

Books. I have been listening to Patricia Highsmith’s diary again. It’s 986 pages! I will be listening to it for some time I’m sure. I really loved her book The Talented Mr Ripley and the play. She has quite a dark sense of quirkiness. We are only in year 1944 at the moment. No mention of the war for the past couple of years but all about her writing and love life which is quite skewed. Her love life, not her writing.

At the recommendation of a Fullers staff member I have begun the book by Lian Dolan called Lost and Found in Paris. So far I am enjoying it. The blurb states:

Joan Blakely had an unconventional childhood: the daughter of a globe-trotting supermodel and a world-famous artist. Her artist father died on 9/11, and Joan—an art historian by training—has spent more than a decade maintaining his legacy. Life in the art world is beginning to wear on her—and then one fateful afternoon her husband drops a bombshell: he’s fathered twins with another woman.

Furious but secretly pleased to have a reason to blow up her life, Joan impulsively decides to get out of town, booking a last-minute trip to Paris as an art courier: the person museums hire to fly valuable works of art to potential clients, discreetly stowed in their carry-on luggage. Sipping her champagne in business-class, she chats up her seatmate, Nate, a good-looking tech nerd who invites her to dinner in Paris. He doesn’t know she’s carrying drawings worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But after a romantic dinner and an even more romantic night together, Joan wakes up next to her new lover to discover the drawings gone. Even more shocking is what’s been left in their place: a sketch from her father’s journals, which she thought had been lost when he died on 9/11, and a poem that reads like a treasure hunt.

With Nate as a sidekick, Joan will follow the clues all over Paris—from its grand cathedrals to the romantic bistros to the twisty side streets of Montmartre—hoping to recover the lost art, and her own sense of adventure. What she finds is even better than she’d expected.

It’s a bit fluffy but just what I needed to start reading real books again.

Okay, this is long. I’ll stop. Will let you know how next week goes. All the best to everyone.

I am trying hard not to eat a lot of junk food, especially chocolate, biscuits and ice cream this weekend. I have been doing well but all the chocolate rabbits, squirrels, marshmallow chickens,(my favourites) have not gone unnoticed. My good friend gave me a chocolate squirrel which I did demolish one night quite late but that is all. I have lost 4 kgs since November as I needed to. I don’t want to put it back on. So…

Let’s get on with how last week was. Monday started the week off with a weight training class and a dentist appointment. I managed to get to the weight training but had a bad night’s sleep the night before and missed the weight training class.

Tuesday was a quiet day at home where not much happened. I don’t even remember it really.

Wednesday had me at the hospital for my annual MRI that needs to be done before my June MS specialist clinic appt with the neurologist. I panic in that machine. They gave me a tablet for sedation but I might as well have eaten a jelly bean for all the good it did. A minute into the tunnel with the helmet type mechanism that encloses my head had me squeezing the bulb each patient holds and the technician pulling me out. My MS hasn’t really progressed in 20 years which is wonderful but my neurologist is known for the research he does. He is internationally known for MS reseach through the Menzies centre here and I have participated in quite a bit of it over the years. I’m sure he continues these MRIs because it goes into his research. My brain hasn’t really changed. So I’ll talk to him in June and see if it’s really necessary. Enough of the body parts talk. Germaine Greer once said after the age of 50 body parts should not be mentioned as you’ll become a boring old person. It is harder to do than not. I spent the rest of the day in an anxious state so wasn’t much good to anyone.

Thursday picked up a bit as author Lucy Frost was interviewed by Cassandra Pybus at a Fullers event three of us attended. Lucy has recently launched her historical book Convict Orphans. These are stories of the children that arrived either with or without mothers who were put in orphanages and then farmed out at age 12 to work without pay on the farms and in homes during Tasmania’s colonization by the British in the 1800s.

It was absolutely cases of child slavery and large numbers of children were affected. The stories represent their experiences of abuse, abandonment, and also kindness and generosity. It really did become luck of the draw.

There is a good introduction, a lengthy bibliography and a comprehensive index. It was such an interesting hour followed by Lucy signing books then we disappeared into a very good Malaysian restaurant across the street for a meal. The Fullers events are frequent and well managed. They go from 5:30 to 6:15 with questions for another 15 minutes , then book signing at 6:30. They don/t often run over time. So plenty of time to grab a quick Asian meal and be home between 7:30 and 8. Quite often with a new book!🙄🙄🙄

Next thing I knew we were going into Good Friday and a long weekend of the coldest Easter Tasmania has had on record. It included rain and wind and was good for catching up on things indoors.

I have now finished the two David Sedaris books and will begin Between A Wolf and A Dog by Georgia Blaine. It is going to be discussed in early May.

Not much photography or metal detecting this past week due to inclement weather but the coming days look promising. That’s it for now and I’ll leave you with a couple of photos. Hope all of you had a good weekend and if you’d like to comment about what you did I’d love to hear about it.

Now I have things to do such as read some books, renew my passport as I squeaked into New Zealand with just over 3 months left on it. Most countries require six months left, so got lucky. I think the best part of travel is anticipating it and then returning home exhausted. I also have to have my annual MRI on my brain next week before the MS specialist clinic appointment. Always things to look forward to.

I read Yeonmi Park’s book While Time Remains. It is an easy, interesting read but needs tighter editing as there is much repetition in it. The story is certainly worthwhile and her comparisons with what happening, politically in the USA comparatively with autocratically run countries is frightening. I really need to completely tune out my home country and only immerse myself in Australia’s systems. I would never go back.

On to more pleasant things. I have been continuing to listen to David Sedaris about 30 minutes each night. The book I have now is Carnival of Snackery. If you enjoy him as a writer and story teller you will enjoy this one and his books are so easy as a listen. The book club book I am about to begin is Between A Wolf and A Dog by Georgia Blaine. Our book group will discuss that book in May. I had not heard of it but it was published in 2016 by Scribe. Amazon describes it as:

WINNER OF THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER’S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE 2016 UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 STELLA PRIZE

Outside, the rain continues increasing silver sheets sluicing down, the trees and shrubs soaking and bedraggled, the earth sodden, puddles overflowing, torrents coursing onwards, as the darkness slowly softens with the dawn.

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to fall in love again. Meanwhile, April is struggling through her own directionless life; Lawrence’s reckless past decisions are catching up with him; and Ester and April’s mother, Hilary, is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all. 

Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with the evocative and powerful prose Blain is known for, Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art. Ultimately, it is a joyous tribute to the beauty of being alive.

I am looking forward to reading it.

Now I will leave you with some roadside photos of the southern island of New Zealand. My main photos taken with my big camera are still on the card. Those will be shared here and there in future but enjoy the drive.

Until next time.

So far we have had a very lovely, laid back trip. We don’t have long days of driving and stay at each destination for two nights. Weather has varied between beautiful days to pouring rain.

I have taken photos as we go. I’ll post up a few here. Looking forward to getting home and seeing our fur guys. We always misss the four of them when away. They are such a large part of our lives but all are in good hands.

Arrived into Queenstown last night to a very rainy welcome but it has since cleared up.

Tomorrow we head to Lake Topako then back to Christchurch. They had a 4+ earthquake the day after we left so we didn’t feel it but I understand people there felt it. Not an experience I aspire to.

Mr Penguin finished Yeomi Park’s book, While Time Remains and is now in my possession. I look forward to reading it. Will be back in touch.

I might add I gave up on Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I’m sure it is an interesting, well written book to have won a Booker but the tale is extremely convoluted and violent from the point of view of a dead man. I will attend the book club meeting to hear about it but just not the book for me while enjoying travels and needs more concentration than I am willing to give at this time.

More soon…….