10 funny things about Australia

1) Bookshops, bookshops everywhere

There are more bookshops in Perth (Australia?) than you can shake a stick at. The first second hand bookshop I found I got excited and noted its location so I could go back there. Then I realised there are bookshops absolutely everywhere, including second hand bookshops in the suburban shopping mall! On a walk through the Perth CBD I passed 7 bookshops in as many minutes, including two second hand, one specialist, one discount and three mainstream. Bibliophiles buy your plane tickets now!



This bookshop is on a main shopping street in Perth CBD

2) Locks (and indicators) are weird

For some reason (maybe because we're upside down(!)) locks seem to go the wrong way round here. This means every time I unlock a door I have to turn the key TOWARDS the door jamb which to me is counter intuitive. I get it wrong every time, especially in the car, although Steve has mastered the lock. He has not mastered the indicators though which for some reason (despite having a right hand drive car (like in the UK)) are on the opposite (right hand side) of the steering wheel. I've lost count of the number of times the wipers have gone on when we want to turn right!

3) The law on sale of alcohol is all wrong.

The licensing laws here are weird, you can't buy alcohol in supermarkets or even anywhere other than bottle shops, but you can buy alcohol in "drive thru" off licenses. I can't get my head around that as driving and alcohol is pretty much the only no-go area for alcohol sales in the UK (no alcohol is sold in service stations) and it seems like the Ozzies are being prudish about selling wine with food in supermarkets only to be careless about drink driving!

A drive through off-license...

4) Charity shops are commercialised

When buying some much needed clothes in "Salvos" a big charity shop over here I noticed that the shop assistants seemed remarkably professional and, well, non-retired. I couldn't resist asking if they were salaried, and yes, they are - so all the charity shops are run like businesses over here and I reckon they are a big improvement over the UK versions, well run, lots of good stuff, staff who know what they are doing and most importantly, a brand that is well respected.

5) BBQs are free!

Woo-hoo! Just take your snags (sausages) to the park and fry 'em up on the free gas powered BBQs the council has generously installed. Maybe Hyde Park should think about doing this, it certainly prevents those blackened patches of grass where everyone runs their disposable barbie!

6) The Ozzies are schizophrenic about water conservation

So Western Australia is very short of water and they are trying to conserve water, (every toilet has a full and partial flush setting for example) but on the other hand they have sprinklers to water grass on roadside verges, and the radio tells you when you're going to need your sprinkler, which seems silly for a country with a water shortage...

7) Cheque, savings or credit anyone?

For some reason when you go to the ATM or use your Ozzie bank card to buy stuff you have to select what type of account you want to use: for some reason we have been told to select savings in the shops and credit at the ATM, but as far as we know we only have one account. If anyone can tell me why we have to do this I'd love to know.

8) Everything is supersized!

As they say, a photo speaks a thousand words... Those are tyres from a monster truck, compare to the normal sized truck carrying them and the guy standing alongside. How big must the truck be...! They use those trucks in the opencast gold mines in Kalgoorlie.




















No, it's not a can of paint, its a tub of feta cheese!

9) They love surfing so much they even cast their waves in stone!

Here we are at Wave Rock, WA. It's formed from granite by some kind of obscure erosion. It's a good 3.5 hours from Perth, through 350kms of endless wheatfields and small towns, like Corrigin, where there's a dog cemetery, a fluorescent yellow salt lake, and Wickepin, where AB Facey comes from (good book: A Fortunate Life was written by him).

We stayed in the bush overnight sleeping in the car, but were completely unprepared as we had no cooking equipment so were forced to drink beer and eat chocolate for dinner. It's a hard life ;-)





















Cowabunga!!!

The salt lake near Corrigin


10) And finally a joke, courtesy of Murray from work

Did you hear how there's no television in Afghanistan?
They've had a total Telly-ban.

Boom boom

Sign in a shop window in Wickepin (pop. 679) reads "Grandma-in-law said, 40 years ago in 1958, Every bride should have a little brown jug in her cupboard."

Back to reality (for now)

Bye bye baby

With heavy hearts, and even heavier bags, we boarded the plane in Bali bound for Perth. It was a night flight but we didn't sleep much. There was a bit of drama on the plane as an elderly lady felt a bit ill, although reports that she had been wheeled down the aisle on a stretcher proved to be a bit wide of the mark, or they'd done it so quickly I hadn't noticed. We arrived into Perth airport and then paid the equivalent of one person's day budget in Indonesia on 2 bus tickets from the airport to the city centre.

The last supper in Denpasar, Bali, and more importantly, the last Bintang beer for a while.

It was about 730am by the time we rocked up at the hostels without any reservations. Unfortunately we were still in the 'open all hours' mindset of Asia, but here in Perth everything was closed until 9am. So we had to sit on our bags on the pavement waiting for the hostels to open. For the briefest of moments we had nowhere to go: no bus to sit on, no train to catch, not even a waiting room to sit in. We were homeless. Then the hostel doors opened only for us to find that Perth was chock full of travellers so there was a bit more humping around to do to finally get a room. The room was about twenty times more expensive then we were used to, but unfortunately not 20 times better. It had a lurid green shag carpet which didn't look like it had seen a hoover in 30 years, a shower that couldn't decide if it was hot or cold and a collapsed mattress. The hostel was run by two kindly old women, sisters, who were stuck in some kind of 1960s timewarp and were still running the hostel as such, like some kind of museum of what hostels in bygone days looked like.



Steve and the Mighty Boy, an early forerunner of the Smart car. I'm not sure how useful that roof rack is.

Our house

It was hard being back in a hostel competing with all the other inmates for the limited supply of cooking equipment, so our immediate priority was to secure work so that we could get somewhere to live. The harvest job we had set up eventually came through but not without lots of phone calls. Once that was secured we looked for somewhere to live. Not many landlords are looking to rent out their places to people for a couple of months, so we didn't have many options. We settled on a place about a 20 minute drive from work owned by a kiwi called Richard with a very interesting past and a useful skill in reading people's palms. It took a while to break the ice with a few of our numerous housemates - when we introduced ourselves one of them ran off!

Get your motor running

We couldn't get to work without a car, so we got one. All the cars in the classifieds were a long way away, so we plumped for a look around a local garage. This local garage turned out to be a 75 minute slog along the pavement-less dual carriageway being tormented by Perth's fly population. It seemed big cars were the order of the day if you wanted to drive it around Australia, as we did, with some truly scary fuel consumption figures. But the idea of breaking down in the middle of nowhere didn't appeal too much, so we got a 3 litre V6 beast of a Toyota Camry wagon, then spent the next few days watching the petrol needle sink at an alarming rate, finding niggly little faults, and losing the petrol cap.

On the job

6 days after arriving, we went for our induction at CBH, a grain company who basically store grain for farmers and then ship it out to food companies who then process it to make breakfast cereals, bread, beer etc. In fact, you may have eaten something today that me and Jo looked at or even touched!!! Don't worry, CBH have VERY stringent hygenie standards - but look out for the ear plug Jo dropped into the canola yesterday ; ) It certainly was a shock to have to get up early but luckily our not being told to bring lunch shortened the session. 2 days later we were back even earlier, a 7am start no less, for a meeting to kickoff the harvest season. I'm not sure how, but we survived 9 hours of corporate spiel (our favourite soundbite being 'let's cascade those ideas up'), mindnumbing discussions of safety procedures led by big men with mullets, and stupid questions such as what does D.R.A.F.T. stand for and does a line through 'No' mean no or yes? Jo particularly enjoyed the discussion on timesheets. But I have to say their approach to looking after their staff was good, not just the health and safety, but educating their employees on how to eat and live healthily.


Our office

All work and no play...

So our first week was basically spent organising our lives. But we did manage to do some fun stuff. We went salsa dancing with our landlord Richard. We looked completely underdressed with everyone in their dancing shoes and us in our travelling clothes and walking boots. That was the night I parked my car the wrong way round, I'm still not sure if this was Richard winding me up or not, but all the cars on the street had to be parked facing the same direction, and I hadn't, so I had to do a 3 point turn in the street and park the same as everyone else, otherwise I might have got a ticket. We went to the Red Bull Air Race which was ok but not as good as motorbike racing in my opinion.


Planes do a kind of aerial assault course over the Swan River in Perth

We went to the recycling centre and got some knackered old bikes for four pounds each which Jo did a grand job of doing up, then on our test ride she got attacked by a bird which must have mistaken her cycle helmet (compulsory over here) for some rival male. We went out to the beach at Fremantle, and marvelled at the communal free gas powered barbecues everywhere. We drove out north to Yanchep National Park and Koala sanctuary, and more communal barbecues (although we still haven't coordinated things well enough to actually use them - we'll let you know when we have).


Ahhh

Western Australia has seen three gold rushes in the 1800s and 1900s, the last one being the biggest gold rush in Australia. We saw a gold bar being made at Perth Mint, it has to be heated up to 1300 degrees C and to show how hot that is, the guy picked up the bar and his gloved hands caught fire.


Jo with the gold bar I bought her at the Perth Mint - no wonder she looks so happy!

Onwards and upwards

We'll probably have more to report when the first paycheque is in the bank... until then... toodleoo!