WWII Australian Home Front Map

Hello! Just a short blog today on material related to the Stage 5 'Australians at War' Depth Study. I was looking around for resources on Japanese attacks on Australia during WWII and couldn't really find a clear or free one that suited my purposes, so I put together the map above. 

It includes the following information:

• Japanese air raids. 
• Australian ships sunk.
• Major PoW camps. 
• PoW outbreaks.

There's also a worksheet that incorporates some questions alongside the map - download here. 

And a large, downloadable version of the map.

On Bookstores and the Argyle Emporium

The Argyle Emporium

Nicole and I often pass through Goulburn at least twice a year on our travels but I never thought to see if there were any bookstores in the area before our stopover there today. 

Sometimes you just find pure book gold, and the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn lives up to its fantastic name.

I love bookstores, and they're easily where I spend the most of my disposable income, but it's not every bookstore that interests me. The franchises, like Dymocks and Collins, hold only a passing interest for me as they are - by and large - filled with the same books at any given time. The next tier of interest is any other bookstore that retails new books - again, these are usually filled with books that can be found pretty much anywhere.

Kinokuniya holds a special place for me because its sheer size (and inclusion of graphic novels) usually means I'll find something of interest there.

But, really, the kind of bookstore that usually gets my money is the Secondhand Bookstore. Here you'll find out of print books, books that I never knew existed, books I've been searching for, specialist international books that have accidentally found there way to some Australian backwater via an itinerant erstwhile owner, and small books that are specific to local regions.

For about 8 years I worked for a well-known bookstore chain before I was teacher and there are some things that customers often wouldn't realise when it comes to books, I'll list them below briefly before I get onto the Argyle Emporium:

• The mark-up isn't particularly high in Australia for booksellers, which means that new titles can be costly for customers while also not generating much of a profit for the seller. Part of the reason for this is that the Australian book industry fought hard against the introduction of parallel importation for books in Australia - this means that Australian book publishers get to determine which editions go into our bookstores and an Aussie bookstore isn't allowed to import in a cheaper version of a book from overseas. So... you can imagine how responsible Australian publishers are when it comes to pricing, considering they've been handed a market where price-fixing and monopolisation are very easily achieved.  
• One result of the above practices is that customers are often better off just ordering their books online from an overseas market where competition is allowed. Even with postage, overseas editions of books are often cheaper for Australian customers.
• New titles have a very short lifespan on bookstore shelves if they're not popular. After anywhere between 3 to 9 months, the big publishers will release a list of titles they're willing to take back and the bookstores can then send them back for credit. The titles that don't get sent back often get marked down so that room can be made for the next round of new releases.
• The sheer number of new releases means that books are continuously rotated through bookstores. Customers will often walk in expecting that any well-known book they want will automatically be sitting on a shelf - this just isn't possible, there are literally hundreds of thousands of books available in the market, which brings me to my next point.
• Books don't remain in print very long. Unless it's one of the 1000 or so recent high-selling titles, or a canonised classic, most books go out of print within a year. And they often don't come back into print. 

Anyway, the Argyle Emporium is an amazing secondhand bookstore in Goulburn that I never knew existed until today. The site is a former police station that was built in 1885, vacated by the police in 1975, and turned into a secondhand bookstore in 2007. The Emporium also sells comics, posters, music, videos, DVDs, and a few other curios. 

Sci-fi, fantasy, comics.

Some people come into the Emporium and enjoy it so much that they never leave.

Here are the books I picked up today:

Always up for a bit of natural history, and the Tasmanian Devil is an interesting marsupial.

Winner of the Booker Prize in 1984.

When I was 8 years old we went to the World Expo in Brisbane and we got to see some replicas of the Terracotta Warriors. Dad hyped us up about it so I went in there with a real sense of awe at seeing these nearly 2000 year old lifesize sculptures.

This is an offshoot of Steve Jackson's 'Fighting Fantasy' series; Choose Your Own Adventure styled novels that employed the use of dice so you could fight monsters while you adventured your way through the different paths set out in the book. Don't worry, it's every bit as nerdy and fun as it sounds. There's an argument to be made that they're a basic form of ergodic literature. Anyway, I loved these when I was a kid and I used to borrow them from the library all the time.

Nicole found these ones - we both have nostalgic memories of this series from our childhoods.

An overview of the American and French Revolutions. I love a good revolution.

I'm always on the lookout for Aboriginal history texts, and it's never unhelpful to find some literature that unpacks and unravels some of the debates around complex issues like the 1996 Wik land rights decision.

What's impressive is the sheer size of the store, with some 10-15 rooms converted into different sections organised by genre. It's bigger than some libraries I've been to, and to think you're often standing in former gaol cells now repurposed for book storage is kind of cool. 

There's also a tunnel underneath the building somewhere that leads to the old court house; I like to imagine this is probably filled with books too... maybe a wall of books that blocks it off. 

Secondhand bookstores like this are invaluable because they help Australian booklovers get around many of the issues I dot-pointed above. Places like the Argyle Emporium are filled with out of print titles, they have multiple editions of books available due to the depth of time that they draw from, and you can usually pick things up for a fairly reasonable price.

Extension English: Elective 1 - Literary Homelands

The Literary Homelands elective asks students to explore how individuals and communities express their connections to place, ethnicity, and 'the other'. This is essentially an elective about diversity and voice, values and assumptions, and the impact of one culture on another. All the texts share this last thing in particular as a common thread - they portray worlds in which cultures overlap, intersect, and come into conflict.

There are three novels - two of which are set in India, albeit a century apart. One is written by an Indian writer, the other by a British one. The third novel is an Irish author's exploration of the Irish migrant experience in 1950s America.

The poetry option represents a Singapore-born Chinese-Australian's perspective on migration and cultural identity, and the drama option is an Australian-written exploration of the clash between European and Aboriginal worlds in the early 1800s.

The final text is a feminist one; a British film about London's Bangladeshi community.

Prose Fiction Options

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

What is it: Meet Balram Halwai, an impoverished Hindu who watches his father die unattended in hospital and thereafter vows to transcend the shackles of his caste. In his ambition to achieve financial security and independence, Balram becomes a driver for a wealthy Bangalore family engaged in dodgy political dealings in Delhi. His story, relayed in epistolary form to the Chinese Premier, charts his rise from extreme poverty to powerful business mogul. 

Scope for Study: In Balram, the author Aravind Adiga has created a complex and authentic voice that is representative of a class of Indian people often stereotyped or rendered voiceless. What's perhaps most engaging about Balram's narrative is that he is neither portrayed as a victim of circumstances or villified for his extreme actions throughout the novel. The line between satire and cultural expose become somewhat blurred as Balram's highly engaging second-person narration veers from the sharply comic to the brutally sobering and then back again. Students will be able to examine the significance of narrative voice, authorial intent, and literary value (The White Tiger won the prestigious Booker prize just a few years ago).

NESA Annotations: Notes can be found on The White Tiger in the annotations for the 2015-2020 syllabus, when the text was connected to the Extension 1 Elective: Navigating the Global. Most of these annotations focus on the novel's exploration of globalisation which, if you squint enough, can be co-opted to assist with reading the text in connection to the Literary Homelands elective (in that both electives allow for the examination of Adiga's depiction of India as a country shifting under a wide range of social and cultural pressures). The annotations also highlight Balram's role as an anti-heroic narrator.

Verdict: I think this would be a fantastic text to introduce to students. Adiga's novel is both very funny and quite confronting so there will be little chance for students to become bored, and the way the novel is constructed will also provide plenty of scope for lively discussion. In particular, there's a lot of mileage in examining the author's role in shaping his narrative as a complex but recognisable representation of a nation, a depiction that's familiar enough to the average student without losing a sophisticated depth of complexity that justifies the novel's critical acclaim. 

A Passage to India by EM Forster

What is it: Written and set in 1920s British India, Forster's novel concerns the tensions and misunderstandings that arise from the relationship between the British colonialists and their Indian subjects. Much of this is relayed through the friendship of Aziz, a young Muslim doctor, and Fielding, an independently-minded British headmaster - a relationship that is tumultuously tested when Aziz is falsely accused of sexual assault by a visiting Englishwoman who wants to see the 'real' India. 

Scope for Study: Forster's text remains highly relevant (despite its age) due to the complex commentary it offers on colonialism, imperialism, racial differences, and gender. At the time of its release it was considered inappropriate by Western audiences as it challenged and critiqued the concept of British superiority and flew in the face of contemporary Western views on Indian identity. From a 21st century standpoint, the text can be deconstructed from the opposite standpoint as ultimately reflective of Forster's inherent racism and other attitudes that have long since changed - something that students should have no difficulty picking up on.

NESA Annotations: Notes are provided in the new 2019-2023 Annotations, with emphasis placed on the novel's literary value as a key text written by a Nobel Prize-winning author. Opportunities for challenging teaching and learning include analysing the myriad forms that conflict takes within the text, looking at the way the author represents perspectives of different characters seeking a greater understanding of Indian society and culture, and examining the narrative's tripartite structure.

Verdict: If you count Bangladesh as a part of India (and it was at the time of A Passage to India's writing) then there are three texts in this Elective that focus on this multi-religious, multi-cultural country. I don't think I would teach all three of them but I think you'd have to be working very hard to avoid them altogether if you were doing this elective. A Passage to India is probably the most divisive and deconstructable of the three texts if you were choosing to utilise just one Indocentric work. Forster's novel challenged me at several points due to the backwards attitudes of its era, however, it also remains highly pertinent in that it offers a outlying critique of its time that was entirely apart from the common attitude of the 1920s British readership.

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

What is it: Eilis is a young woman living in sleepy 1950s Ireland who finds herself presented with an opportunity to relocate to New York. Using her connection to a Catholic priest, Eilis moves into a boarding house filled with other Irish girls, gets a job in a department store, and goes to night school to become an accountant. She begins a cautious relationship with a young Italian-American man, however, when tragedy strikes back home in the village of Enniscorthy, Eilis is confronted with a difficult and life-changing decision.

Scope for Study: Brookyln's placement as part of the Literary Homelands elective makes a lot of sense as it provides students with ample scope for examining the notion of a cultural and physical homeland and the effect this can have on a person's sense of loyalty and growth. Eilis is a strange character in that she manages to come across as paradoxical in that she is both strong-willed and unassuming, and students can examine this as a symbolic representation of the way an increasingly divided cultural identity can manifest itself. The dichotomy between 1950s America and Ireland also provides scope for examining the increasing complexity of the modern world; with Brooklyn's social modernity acting as a counterpoint for the cultural decline of the 'village' represented by the rural landscape of Enniscorthy and the backwards attitudes therein.

NESA Annotations: Brooklyn was introduced in 2015 as an Advanced English novel for the now defunct Module C Elective 'Representing People and Landscapes'. As such, notes on Toibin's text can be found in the 2015-2020 Annotations, and concern themselves with the Advanced module rather than the new Extension Elective. That said, there are some useful pointers on the differences between Enniscorthy and Brooklyn, and what Toibin's authorial choices for his character might represent in relation to the novel's themes.

Verdict: Brooklyn is one of a couple of 'new' texts from the 2015 text prescriptions that have been shifted from Advanced into Extension (another that comes to mind is Melissa Harrison's Clay), which may leave a few English faculties across NSW expressing frustration after recently purchasing large class sets. That aside, Brooklyn seems a much better fit with the Extension Elective in comparison to the previous Advanced one. I would be careful about selecting this text; the themes and characters are the sort that would traditionally appeal to a middle-aged literature-conscious crowd, and some teenagers (yes, even the ones who choose Extension) may be significantly alienated and resistant to Brooklyn as a matter of taste.

Poetry Options

Burning Rice by Eileen Chong

• Burning Rice
• Mid-autumn Mooncakes
• My Hakka Grandmother
• Shophouse, Victoria Street
• Chinese Ginseng
• Winter Meeting
• Singapore

What is it: Eileen Chong is a Singapore-born Australian poet who has attracted a diverse array of accolades for her work. The selected poetry from the volume Burning Rice focuses on Chong's migrant and cultural background, straddling her Chinese ancestry and Singaporean upbringing with particular attention paid to the importance of food as a ritualised expression of identity.

Scope for Study: The seven poems selected here offer portraits of captured moments fraught with the emotional charge associated with memory and self-awareness. Chong's use of structure is fluid and free-form, allowing for word placement to slip into unexpected places via the joys of enjambment and split clauses, thus providing scope for students to examine the effect of representing moments in this stylised fashion. In relation to the elective, Chong's hyphenated identity (China / Singapore / Australia) allows for a relatively straightforward examination of the rubric provided in the syllabus. 

NESA Annotations: Featured in the newest annotations, NESA's advice on the selected suite of poetry highlight "the poet's exploration of the tensions of the diaspora" - calling to mind years past when a lot of NSW English teachers taught Peter Skrzynecki's Immigrant Chronicle as part of the 'Belonging' Area of Study. Attention is paid to the poet's use of narrative, imagery, and intertextuality to explore the impact of the past on the shaping of the present.

Verdict: I really love Burning Rice, and not just the poetry selected for the elective. My three favourite pieces from the volume are Chinese Ginseng, Bathhouse Ritual, and Mid-autumn Mooncakes - two of which are featured in the prescribed suite. It's worth noting that this text doesn't just focus on cultural heritage; it's a lot deeper in that it also deals with very personal issues such as infertility and family relationships. A lot could be done with this text in the Extension classroom.

Drama Options

The Secret River by Andrew Bovell

What is it: William and Sal Thornhill are pardoned convicts who, upon hearing that anyone can claim land for themselves by the Hawkesbury River, decide to head into the un-colonised bushland west of Sydney. William finds a few fellow settlers along the river, all battling hardship to make a new life for themselves, but doesn't bargain on the fact that the area is already inhabited by the Dharug people, whose close connection with the land challenges William's concept of what constitutes ownership and civilisation. 

Scope for Study: The foreword before the play goes into Bovell's process of adapting Kate Grenville's iconic novel into play-form and therefore provides great scope for discussing the necessities and strictures associated with crafting a story bound by the dramatic conventions of the stage. Students will also be able to draw connections between the text's content and their own personal context as Australian citizens, perhaps in relation to family histories with a basis for contrast and comparison. Bovell's extensive use of indigenous language is also a unique gift for teachers and students to explore within the totality of prescriptions available across all the English syllabuses.

NESA Annotations: Notes can be found in the 2019-23 Annotations. These outline the clash between European settlers and the Dharug people as representations of conflicting worldviews. Mention is also made of the Thornhill family as a symbol of the fledgling Australian identity, the author's use of parallels to demonstrate ideological similarity and difference between the two races, and the significance of this dramatic adaptation of a novel in that it gives the Dharug characters more defined identities and voices.

Verdict: It's worth carefully reading all the text that preludes the main bulk of the play in The Secret River as it describes Bovell's writing process as a partially collaborative one. His use of the Dharug language is probably one of the most engaging aspects of the text and reflects the input of Dharug performers, making this play at least partially representative of an Indigenous perspective (and in a way that Grenville's novel is not). I really like Grenville's novel and I can understand completely why she would not include the first person perspective of the Aboriginal characters, however, Bovell's pared-down version of the narrative is highly evocative of a lost era and I think there's a lot to be gained through its bi-cultural examination of interracial conflict on Australia's 19th century frontier.

Film Options

Brick Lane, directed by Sarah Gavron

What is it: Set in East London's Bangladeshi migrant community of the same name, Brick Lane tells the story of Nazneen, who leaves behind her home in the rural heart of the sub-continent to raise a family in England with her husband, Chanu. Their marriage is an arranged one and therefore not particularly loving, and Nazneen's isolated life and the increasing racial tension following the 9/11 attacks sees her begin to explore her individuality with a much younger Muslim man.

Scope for Study: In a reversal of A Passage to India, Gavron's film shows the West through an Eastern lens, and can be examined quite easily with multiple readings - a gender-based reading could examine Nazneen's sexual awakening and burgeoning independence as a reflection of the Western values that her daughters have adopted, and a historical reading could examine the significance of using the 9/11 attacks as a backdrop for a story about assimilation and integration. Gavron's direction is also of note in that she represents a female viewpoint in a profession (film directing) where women are few and far between.

NESA Annotations: Annotations can be found in the 2019-2023 Annotations document, where particular attention is paid to the film's context as an exploration of challenges faced by Muslims in the post-9/11 world. Note is also made of the concept of 'home' in relation to the migrant experience, and the director's use of visual metaphor and flashback to portray complex cultural perspectives and the impact of the past/memory on the present.

Verdict: A moving and beautifully-shot film, Brick Lane manages to tell a relatively straight-forward story about cultural dislocation without sacrificing the complexity that comes with living in the interstitial places afforded by close-knit migrant groups such as the Bangladeshi-British community based in East London. Pairing this film with a study of A Passage to India would be a valuable use of the elective in that both texts deal with Indian culture from near-antithetical standpoints. Brick Lane also contains a powerful and heartbreaking portrayal of the impact that 9/11 had on long-integrated Muslim communities in Western countries such as the UK, which links to the unassessable 'values' part of the syllabus in that it allows for exploration and expression of varied dimensions of the human experience.

Eden: Paradise and Purgatory by the Sea

Eden perches with some degree of isolation on a clifftop, surveying a wide open expanse of ocean with a sense of ambiguity not often felt in country communities. In the 21st century Eden is known as a perfect whale-watching spot, however, it's history is also firmly entrenched in a dark whaling mythology that is so unique that the town dare not ignore it. 

Nicole and I came here because I was drawn to the bizarre story of Eden's whaling industry. We booked a room at the other end of Twofold Bay in 'Boydtown', not realising that this building - the Seahorse Inn - had its own strange past as well. 

My first stop in Eden was the above memorial to those from the town who died in service to Australia during our 20th century wars. In travelling across Australia the one thing I've noticed that consistently appears in rural and coastal communities is some kind of ANZAC memorial, evidence of a shared cultural identity that goes beyond our media. Eden's pristine monument to the soldiers sits high up on the town's summit near its churches.  

I took this photograph because it mentions the little-spoken about Malayan War. I can't recall seeing many war monuments that make reference to this conflict and our country's involvement in it.

Mary MacKillop Hall was once a schoolhouse that was built following the death of MacKillop's mother, Flora MacKillop. Saint Mary visited the schoolhouse twice, in 1899 and 1901, out of appreciation for the care that the town of Eden demonstrated in recovering her mother's body after she was lost at sea. 

Flora MacKillop was one of 71 lives infamously lost during the wreck of the Ly-ee-Moon, a former opium transport steamship from China that broke up during a storm off nearby Green Cape in 1886.

The inside of the Hall remains a shrine to Mary MacKillop, who was canonised by the Catholic Church as Australia's first (and so far only) saint in 2010. Catholic-Australians make the pilgrimage here to pay their respects. I know this is true because I saw some.

  

The view outside of Mary MacKillop Hall is quite breathtaking.

The Eden Killer Whale Museum is one of the main attractions in Eden and features two storeys of whaling-related local history. While Nicole and I visited we saw at least 50 other people in there, making this one of the busiest 'local history' museums I have ever seen.  

The centrepiece of the museum is 'Old Tom', the alpha Killer Whale who assisted Eden whalers in their brutal hunting of baleen whale species (predominantly Southern Right and Humpback Whales, and the occasional Blue Whale) in the early 20th century. The local narrative is one of Old Tom and a pod of five other Killer Whales attaching themselves to Eden's whaling families to help them kill the bigger whales. The story says that these Orcas would round up and harry the larger baleen whales into range of the harpoons. The bigger whales would then be killed by the humans and left to Old Tom and his pod, who would rip off the whale's lips and tongue and take them deep under the surface for feasting upon (these organs are huge and are all the Killer Whales were interested in). Such was Old Tom's eagerness and intelligence that he would swim into Twofold Bay to meet the humans early in the morning and grab the ropes of their boats, dragging them out to where the baleen whales could be found.

It's the only known case of Killer Whales working with humans in this way. In 1930, Old Tom was found dead and floating in the bay - he had apparently come in to Twofold Bay to die near the human community there. His massive 7 metre-long skeleton was salvaged and preserved, and the Killer Whale Museum grew around him as the whaling industry in Eden disappeared. He remains as a terrifying ode to a dark past, the teeth on one side of his skull filed down from the wear of the rope he would grasp between his jaws.

Nicole was less interested in the museum than I was.

There is a section of the museum dedicated to Eden's original inhabitants, the Thaua people, however, I couldn't help but think a bigger acknowledgement of their history could have been made. The reason behind the extraordinary behaviour of the Killer Whales of this area is most likely tied to the Thaua, who had a special relationship with the Killer Whales that stretched back thousands of years. In the Thaua language these animals were referred to as 'beowas', which translates as 'brothers'. All of the whaling families in Eden 'employed' local Aboriginal men to work their boats in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Scrimshaw is the art of engraving objects out of ivory or whale bone. The ornate figures above demonstrate the intricacy of this disturbing art.

The parking demarcations outside of the Killer Whale Museum demonstrate the town's maritime heritage in a fun way. 

Further out of Eden, The Blue Wren Cafe sources the vast majority of its food onsite, demonstrating the 'slow food' ethos associated with lessening one's carbon footprint. This cafe is part of Potoroo Palace, an animal sanctuary located a few kilometres north of Pambula. The park is predominantly known for its care and healing of rescued Australian animals, and for a potoroo-breeding program that supplies these little macropods to wildlife parks all around the country.

This is Trevor, a rescued Brush Tail Possum who is quite happy to move around in the day if there's weetbix and carrot in it for him.

The sanctuary has a collection of Emus that have been raised from chicks. They are currently 4 years old and some of them have had to be separated because they've taken to fighting each other. The picture above shows two Emus that kept running over to the fence to kick at the bird on the other side. The solitary Emu on the right was nonchalant and calm the whole time, pretending that he wasn't fazed by the aggression of the two bullies.

Nicole and I also ducked up to Bega to check out the cheese factory. The upper floor of the Bega Heritage Centre featured a range of dairy-related historical paraphernalia and an animatronic cow that just shook loudly rather than actually moving.  

There was also this weird eight-legged cow. The cheese of the future? I'm thinking this genetically-modified monstrosity could be called 'the Bovine Centipede'.

I have to say that I wasn't completely sold on the Bega cheese experience. It's not like they have an amazingly large range - they know what they do well and they've stuck to it, growing a nationally-recognised brand and no doubt boosting the economy of the surrounding town - but I'm just not a huge fan of their cheese. That said, they did have some canned cheese that they use for international export, which was mildly interesting. 

Another view of Twofold Bay. Note the mountains and forest in the distance - this area is not very densely populated at all. 

The pictures above show Seahorse Inn, our accommodation. This elaborate castle-like building was constructed in 1843 just a few kilometres south of Eden in 'Boydtown'. It was envisioned by British stockbroker Benjamin Boyd as the first part of a whole new town and business empire, which he dreamt would become the future capital of the New South Wales colony. He built the Seahorse Inn, a nearby church (which burned down 50 years later in a bushfire) and a privately-owned lighthouse a few more kilometres south (modestly called 'Boyd Tower'). 

To get to Boyd Tower you need to drive another twenty minutes south and then access the coastline via an unsealed road. From here it's a short walk out onto the escarpment. On our way out we saw a shy and diminutive Swamp Wallaby watching us from between two trees; evidence of how forgotten this part of the world seems. As we got closer to the end of the bluff we spotted the tower rising up out of the bushland like some ancient, half-hidden ruin. 

Boyd wanted his tower to serve as a lighthouse, but the government wouldn't sign off on its use so it became a lookout to assist in spotting whales for the local whaling industry.  

Like the Seahorse Inn and much else of the would-be capital city, Boyd's Tower was built from an expensive form of sandstone that was brought all the way down from Sydney rather than sourced more locally. Boyd also resorted to using slave labour via the highly dubious practise of 'blackbirding', in which Islanders were kidnapped and brought to Australia as indentured workers. Despite his ambition and apparent ruthlessness, Boyd's empire collapsed in financial ruin and failure before he could attract settlers. By the late 1840s he had run off to California to try and make his fortune in the great American gold rush. 

The tower remains as a sign of his folly.

Ironically though, just a few hundred metres from the Seahorse Inn, a collection of 15 upmarket coastal houses have sprung up in a little estate that started just a year ago. It's taken nearly 180 years but it looks like Boydtown is finally happening for real, complete with the name of the entrepreneur still attached.

Eden has a population of just over 3000 people and it's busiest time of year is the end of winter when whales can be regularly seen. The town has a siren that it sounds whenever these mighty creatures are spotted so that any locals or visitors can quickly get to a lookout or the beach. It's a curiously benign industry for a place that once teamed up with one of nature's most notorious predators to drive some of the world's biggest animals to the brink of extinction, and the community's rich history of ambition, shipwrecks, and whaling makes it a uniquely intriguing and vaguely macabre destination for the curious.

Of Tumut, Tiny Frogs, Trout, and a Terrifying Lack of Bookstores

This pic was taken by my wife, Nicole. She took a few of the pictures below (the better ones)

Ever since I was a little boy I have been drawn to the idea of exploring the map. This was no doubt influenced by my idle plotting of imagined adventures across my father's globe, the random flipping of pages in a big leather-bound atlas, and our family's annual journeys to Queensland to visit my grandparents. 

By the time I was 22 I was cut adrift from everything that had been stable in my life - I hadn't lived with my parents for a couple of years, my first university degree was done and dusted and quietly filed away in a random drawer, and I quit work at Target three weeks before Christmas in order to avoid serving the rabid blood-eyed masses as they poured forth into Westfield shopping centre like the 11th Biblical Plague of Egypt. 

I unfolded my dog-eared map of Australia and looked at where I had been. Canberra; cold and educational. Queensland; I had travelled from the Tweedy border-part right up to the Daintree. Melbourne; a cool city with cool trams. Where could I go next? My finger trailed south, along the NSW coast, and landed at the coastal settlement closest to the border: Eden. 

I had never heard of it. I looked it up and learned that it had once been associated with whaling; a taboo and arcane industry that Australia has long since distanced itself from. Eden may as well have been the end of the Earth. I've always felt attracted to such places, the ends of the Earth - the barnacles beyond the outstretched fingers, the frayed edges of the map. I vowed to go there.

Fast-forward to now and it's 15 years later. Life intervened and I never travelled there in my supposedly adventurous youth. I'm married now, working as a teacher, and I have a nice place of my own. Things are relatively stable in comparison to the headier days of my early 20s. And so, today, I finally got to my end of the Earth. I currently write this blog entry from Eden. 

Here are some photographs of our journey, in which Nicole and I travelled across the Snowy Mountains.

The town of Tumut is at the north-western edge of the Snowy Mountains. Some of the back-areas of the town have really cool street art created by the Tumut Youth Council in collaboration with the Snowy Valleys Council. I really wish my home town, Penrith, would do something like this. This artwork was easily the highlight of the town (in other words, there wasn't much else to see there).

The Southern Corroboree Frog is a species endemic to the Snowy Mountains. The Information Centre in Tumut has a tank with 8 of these unique frogs in it, designed to help raise awareness and funding for their conservation. There are thought to only be about 200 left in the wild, which is quite appalling! 

The Corroboree Frog is:

• Poisonous, and could be lethal to other animals if they ingest it. They are the only vertebrate known to science to produce their own poison (as opposed to generating it via diet).
• Not a hopper! They actually crawl in a weird side-to-side fashion (see the first of the two photos above for what I mean). 
• A tiny little guy. They grow to just 3 cm.

Adaminaby is a small town of about 300 residents, situated at one of the highest and more remote parts of the Snowy Mountains. During summer it seems incredibly quiet, however, in winter it accommodates tourists attracted to the area for horse-riding, skiing, and trout-fishing. The last of these is what Adaminaby is best-known for, hence the Big Trout pictured above. 

The construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme in 1949 led to severe flooding of the township's original location, and so the residents were re-located to the current locale. In 2007, the water levels of Lake Eucumbene dropped enough to reveal the ruins of the original town beneath the surface, leading to significant media interest.

As we travelled across the Snowy Mountains I made use of the internet to look up bookstores we could visit. It turns out that bookstores are quite scant in this part of NSW. In Tumut, we looked for the Between the Lines Bookstore and The Night Owl Book Shop, both of which no longer exist. When we got to the next major town, Cooma, we made our way to Pages of Life, but alas, this also seems to have shut forever as there was nothing in the spot indicated by Google Maps. 

Eventually I found Dorothy Dickens' Books and Music in Cooma, and it was a lovely secondhand bookstore with good range in general fiction, locally-based authors, and sci-fi/fantasy.

Sugar Gliders live in the Snowy Mountains. We didn't see any, of course, but we did see an echidna, some kangaroos, eagles, lots of livestock, wild rabbit, wild brumbies, and an emu.

Brumbies have been a staple of the Snowy Mountains for over 150 years and, thanks to the romance of the Australian Bush Legend, they're probably one of the most respected kinds of feral wildlife found in this country. In fact, the attachment of the brumby to Australian folklore (IE. The Man From Snowy River) means that attempts to cull these horses in this region have run afoul of the State government, and there are currently significant problems relating to overbreeding and the ecosystem.

Our final stop along the way was in Candelo, where we ate at the riverside pub seen above. We also pulled over to look at some ponies grazing on the side of the road, and I wandered off under a bridge to find some strange artwork featuring a centaur and what I imagine to be the troll from the Three Billy Goats Gruff story.

About an hour later we pulled in to Eden and found our accommodation. The drive here was quiet but dotted with several interesting townships, and the everchanging scenery reflected dramatic shifts in altitude. The winding view of the high country, with thousands of bone-white gum tree-skeletons clustered together like a giant graveyard of antlers, had a strangely ominous effect on us as we drove through the State National Park.

Each town felt remote and cloistered in its own pocket of history, something that was most evident in the ghost gold-mining town of Kiandra - once Australia's highest settlement but now just a sparse collection of frost-beaten ruins with a bristling but under-used potential for tourism and historical preservation. 

The loneliness of today's drive appealed to me in much the same way as this journey across Nevada's desert, taken exactly two years ago with Nicole. Perhaps this solitude is down to the Snowy Mountains being with snow at this time of year but, really, it was this eeriness that probably spoke to me most as it made the day feel exactly as it should - like a drive to the end of the Earth.