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Day 64
Tuesday 14 March. Bright sunshine, 30ºC. A gentle start today (we are sleeping in a lot, partly because the curtains in the room are so thick that you can’t tell it’s daylight), then a drive into Kyneton to stroll around and explore the town.
It is hard to describe Kyneton – I did make a start in the last blog. It is a workmanlike town, not hugely pretty, but with the odd nice Victorian building here and there and a reasonable range of shops. It is clearly a market town for the surrounding farms and homesteads. In some ways it is a bit like Melbury in terms of being unpretentious, but unlike home it has four or five restaurants of modest cuisine and the same number of coffee bars. All the shops have verandas, so that as you walk along the pavement you are always in the shade. The roads, as mentioned earlier, are four lanes wide so there is no congestion caused by parked cars, and all the major junctions are controlled by traffic lights mounted high above he road, like in America. Here, the pedestrian crossings don’t warble or sing, like in Adelaide and Sydney (Blog 10), they click; so as you walk along past them there is this slow tick, like a clock, that turns into a clack-clack-clack-clack when it is safe to cross. There are two medium-sized supermarkets, one of which is Woolworths: a name still going strong here, but here it is only a food store like Tesco.
All of the shop assistants here are very helpful. I think I have mentioned this before, but I reiterate because it is becoming commonplace. I went into a chemist for some corn plasters (as you do) and was immediately approached with an offer of help and advice. They seem genuinely nice people. If it sounds like I am having a love affair with the Australian people then there is a tiny element of that, but I am not blind to their faults, or rather, the way they differ from us in a slightly negative way. They can be quite boorish at wine tastings, where they will think nothing of pushing in front of you at the counter when you are in the middle of the tasting. Also, when you are in a car, they will never let you out of a junction: you have to push your way out, like in London. Their sartorial presentation is also somewhat lacking, with nary a shoe, a cravat, a tie or even a pair of trousers in sight; but that is more a custom or way of life rather than a fault. Those are the only things I have found off-putting so far, however.
Having said that about Australian drivers, paradoxically they are very courteous to pedestrians. If you are crossing a side street at a junction, say, and they are turning in from the main road, they will always stop for you and wave you across. I asked about the Australian approach to driving lessons and it is far more stringent than ours. Drivers can start to learn at sixteen and they have to pass the preliminary theory test before they go on the road, just like us. Thereafter, there is the practical test as in UK, but after they pass they have to drive on a red ‘P’ probationary plate for a year, followed a green ‘P’ probationary plate for a further two years. During that three-year probationary period they cannot drive a car above a certain engine size and there is an absolutely zero tolerance of any alcohol in the blood – even if it has come from, say, cough medicine or a sherry trifle. Of course, they still have their boy racers with the bubbling exhausts: usually they are driving a ute (note the vernacular, which now comes naturally).
We whiled away the late afternoon just reading in the shade outside, wallowing like hippopotami in the heat. You find the Australians indoors with the air conditioning blasting away; we Brits are the only ones who still find it a novelty. We have been very careful to cover up or ‘slip, slop, slap’, as they say, with the Factor 50 however, and I don’t think we are going brown. I have had too many friends suffering from skin cancer to indulge in proper sunbathing these days, yet I saw a lot of it on the ship: people bright red lying out for another dose. And not all were Brits. It was horrifying. How times change from those days when it was commonplace in the summer to peel off sunburnt skin.
Day 65
Wednesday 15 March and we were off to the small local town of Daylesford. It is 25ºC, sunny intervals and windy, so still very pleasant. Daylesford was a quaint sort of a place, perhaps about the size of Hungerford, and our first port of call was – you guessed it – the Botanic Gardens, located right on the summit of a steep hill. These were very pleasant, but small and we soon whipped round and were ready for the next serial. A visit to the nearby lake followed. This area was like the Cotswold Water Park in terms of rentable properties around the lake, but much smaller (there was only one lake) and with some rather irritating flies. The town is a spa town like Bath, and prices are hiked accordingly, but it looked to be a nice place to stay for a holiday: quite up market and well presented yet, paradoxically, with a disproportionate amount of graffiti. Such a shame, and rather puzzling: why not clean it off?
The intention was to have lunch in the Convent Gallery, a converted building on the hill with origins and purpose that will be obvious. Indeed, it was a very pleasant building that had been cleverly converted into an art gallery and café and we looked forward to the lunch. As we sat down my nemesis, in the form of one baby and three small children, followed us in. I don’t know how they do this. There must be some sort of international bush telegraph that reports wherever I go. I didn’t comment on the arrival, but Jane was looking daggers at me lest I even think about drawing breath. To compound this happy interlude, we were further joined by eight members of the Australian Women’s Shot-Put Team and the combined noise of all assembled in a hollow room with hard walls was a delight to experience. Even Laura was moved to comment on the absence of tranquility. After a reasonable, though expensive, lunch we thought we would ‘do’ the gallery to prove that we were cultured artistic people. I sidled in, followed by the rest, pursued by a harassed woman calling out, “Excuse me madam, the entry fee is…”
She didn’t get any further because we were offski. Culture is all very well, but we don’t pay for it.
We drifted round the town, which has the reputation for being a popular place to live or stay for the Friends of Dorothy, and we took in a few shops, as you do. There was a poster in one shop window advertising the ‘Chillout Festival 2017’ and adding, ‘There’s No Place like Daylesford, 20 Years of Queer Country Pride’ and ‘Poof Duff Presents Chillout Festival Official After Party’. There’s nothing like the Australians for being right up front with something and proud of it; good for them I say. There was a very good second-hand bookshop that we could have spent hours in (books are very expensive in Australia – typically $32AUS [about £20] for a paperback), but Derek was waiting in the car, patiently as ever, and we felt we ought to head back. You can only pack so much excitement into one day.
Day 66
Thursday 16 March. Sunny intervals, showers, 23ºC. A totally idle day unless you count doing the washing and ironing and generally preparing to move on. This sounds awful, of course, but we are relaxing and relishing in the ability to just sit and read a book for as long as we want. There is a lot to be said for that.
Just as a matter of interest I looked up the criteria for retiring in Australia (only curious, you don’t get rid of us that easily). You can get a temporary retirement visa that lasts for four years, then renewable every two, subject to your health being OK. Alternatively you can apply for a permanent retirement visa provided you can prove you have assets of $AUS 500,000 plus $AUS 250,000 for every dependant (to live in large urban conurbations – less to live rurally). On top of this, the UK old age state pension payable in Australia does not get the annual increases, and you have to have health insurance. So, all in all, retiring here is a non starter. Besides, I know our son is looking forward to looking after us as we grow older, perhaps keeping us in a granny flat in the garden.
An interesting thing that came up in conversation was about cats. We haven’t seen any since coming to Australia. This is not because the Koreans have eaten them all, but because there is a curfew on them: all cats and dogs have to be microchipped and no cats are allowed out between dusk and dawn. Dogs are also not allowed out off the lead except in designated areas, such as a dog beach. Anyone finding cats in the curfew period can request a special cage to catch them and the local council then identifies the cats and fines the owners several hundred dollars. The purpose of the curfew is to protect the wildlife.
One thing we did do today was cancel our booking at Raffles in Singapore in favour of a Premier Inn. A bit sublime to the ridiculous, but it will save us about twelve hundred Singapore Dollars and Raffles was a bit of an extravagance that was conceived in Shiraz; it would have been lovely, but we were only spending two nights there and – besides – we could still go there for dinner if we wished. We have downloaded our E-tickets for QM2, so the writing is on the wall for the return journey; our joining time is 1530 on 8 April, which could be a bit awkward, and clearly we are no longer Princess Grill Rich People. Never mind, we are QM2 savvy now, and the return will still be excellent.
Off to a place called Halls Gap in the Grampians tomorrow, still in Victoria but yet another different viewpoint of Australia.
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 