A break from the customary blog today, being JC’s birthday, and a Sabbath to boot. Let’s put our feet up, people! It’s the ultimate holly day.
Rather than tell you about some dental floss museum or underwater golf course in the Ningaloo reef, I’ll take this chance to wish all regular and occasional surfers to Cassowary [...]
In Territory fashion, the retirement village at the southern fringe of Alice Springs is called Old Timers. In tourist fashion, back in the 1960s, busloads of sticky-beaks used to invade the refuge to meet the retired bushmen among the residents.
Led by manager John Blakeman, the residents revolted, throwing together a folk museum to deflect [...]
No gimmicks – the bottle shop in Cervantes (WA) is called Thirsty Point Liquor Store. The point was named by parched sailors engaged in the Spice Isle trade long before the strip mall arrived.
And drifting from liver to heart, and some 500 kms southeast, there’s a hill between Albany and Mount Barker (WA) that raises [...]
There’s an old Chinese well in Carnarvon (WA), on Marmion Road, off Robinson Street: a hole with history.
Another historic hole is the ramshackle two-storey pub on your right, just near the well, on William Street. Welcome to the derelict Sandhurst Tavern, while son-of-Sandhurst is the yellow breezeblock compound next door – with ZZ Top and [...]
Bulldozers in Jerusalem made a strange discovery this year. What road workers took to be random rock lying beneath the bitumen was actually a carved step. Two steps. A few more shovel scrapes unearthed an entire banked terrace, dating back 2000 years ago.
To the Messiah’s heyday in fact, the stonework the seating belonging to the [...]
Smelly was a ten-year-old boy who died of snakebite in 1876. I should add Smelly is a nickname – coined by the five-year-old boy who met him at Herveys Range Tearooms, 20 minutes west of Townsville.
Mason Sharpe – the living of the two boys – bumped into Smelly in 2000, when his Dad and Mum [...]
Xmas is here, and every second ho-ho-home in Melbourne is going fruitcake. That’s if the roll-call collated by the Derek Guille evening show at 774 ABC holds any reindeer water.
Snoop http://www.abc.net.au/melbourne/stories/s1512995.htm and you’ll be lost in a blizzard of polyurethane snow.
Some 30 suburbs are on the list, a few with eye-popping snapshots, most with glitzy [...]
Mike Bannister
John Dean
Jim Lawler
Bruce Guy
Phil Skeggs
Glyn Charles
All six died in a single race, the horror show that was the 1998 Telstra Sydney to Hobart.
A perfect storm, with monster swell and lethal southerly, threw the entire fleet into chaos. In the space of two days:
+ a wave snatched English crewman Charles off the Sword of Orion;
+ [...]
Not far from each other in the Pioneer Valley, just north of Mackay (Q), the towns of Mirani and Marian are anagrams of each other. Mirani was first to join the map. It means ‘place of wind’ in the local Lindeman language.
Perhaps even odder than anagrams or windy villages are the street names of the [...]
Offshore but offbeat – that’s the reason I can’t resist plugging Shop Horror – The Best of the Worst of British Shop Names.
Guy Swillingham spent two years tramping the UK with a camera, stalking such flower shops as Aloe Petal, Sherwood Florist, Lone Hydrangea and Austin Flowers.
The prize for goofiest town per capita went to [...]