Train travel

One of the particularly delightful things about this period coming up, preparing to leave Cairns, is that we have decided to make a point of revisiting the very special places we have known and loved up here. I was born here and have spent all but three of my forty years living here, and I have roamed extensively in the area between Cooktown and Townsville during that time. We have started making a list of places we don't want to leave here without seeing one more time, and there are a few that we have not yet got around to seeing and want to see for the first time while we still have the chance. These little excursions will serve as our little rewards or celebrations of renovation milestones!

I have a passion for trains that so far, I have had far too few chances to indulge. There are no suburban trains in Cairns, only intercity ones, and my first train experience was a trip I took aged 4 with my mother and my newborn brother from Cairns to Melbourne on the Sunlander in 1971. Scenes I recall from that trip are the most vivid memories I have from my early childhood. All through my early childhood my grandmother would come to visit by train and so there were lots of opportunities to climb on and check out the interior of the train and to this day I still feel the same strong yearning to stay aboard and have the train take me wherever it is going. All other modes of transport make me feel more or less uneasy and unsafe but I find train travel utterly relaxing and splendidly indulgent in its long, slow journeys.

When I first left home and moved to Brisbane I was terribly homesick at first, and travelled home to Cairns alone by train for a visit to ease the longing, a 36 hour trip. I had never felt so thoroughly in charge of myself, and revelled in the solitude. A few months later I came alone again to surprise my best friend at her wedding - bliss! At the end of the first leg of each of these journeys, I felt a huge sense of elation at the knowledge that in a week or so, I could do it all again on the way home.

My next train journey was more dramatic. In desperate unhappiness with my first husband, I fled the Hunter Valley for a couple of weeks in Melbourne with my best friend. My husband dropped me at the Newcastle train station at 5am and I encountered a double decker train for the first time. I felt that same elation, that same sense of incredible freedom and liberty and being left alone! I gawped at huge banks of wattle by the track as we approached the Hawkesbury River a couple of hours later. At the train station in Sydney I had breakfast - sausages and eggs - alone and excited in the grand old, dark panelled dining room before finding my connecting train to Melbourne. On the journey through NSW and the Victorian countryside, I saw sheep in the paddocks for the first time and I saw a breathtaking rainbow of a type I have never seen before or after - it was as if a normal "arch" rainbow had been straightened out, and it hung in the sky like a perfectly straight bar of brilliant colour. I glanced around the train - my fellow passengers were dozing, knitting, reading....I wanted to say "Look, everyone....!

My most recent train journey was a trip from Cairns just down the track a couple of hours to Cardwell for New Year's Eve a few years back. I had made a resolution to take a train trip the previous NYE and had found myself running critically short of time to keep it - so we decided we would take the train to Cardwell. We embarked early in the morning, and and tackled our picnic of Indian scotch eggs, lempkes and "Shooter's loaf" and had a celebratory Marguerita in coffee cups from our thermos. That must surely be one of the most picturesque train trips in the country, snaking through emerald green fields of sugarcane, across numerous little clear forest rivers and travelling alongside rugged, steaming hills and mountains covered in lush, impenetrable jungle. I was completely gobsmacked by the stunningness of it all and was quite taken by surprise to discover that we were Almost There and were going to be expected to disembark in half an hour. The big question was, had those delicious margaritas left us capable of finding, and carrying, our luggage and ourselves from the train? We weren't sure but we thought we'd give it a go. All the laughing didn't help a lot. When we pulled up in Cardwell there was no platform, and we were highly amused, and also a little concerned, to notice a guy wheeling a little ladder over for us to climb down with suitcases and an esky. All went smoothly. The train station was directly behind the pub, to which we retired from the 40 degree heat to buy a case of beer and await Cardwell's only taxi to drive us the couple of kilometres to our caravan park.

After a week lounging about Cardwell, primarily occupied with trying to avoid the deathly heat, we taxied back to the train station to catch our train home. The train station was just an unmanned shed, and we waited there in the extreme heat for an hour and a half, before our delayed train arrived. The train pulled up at the extreme opposite end to the economy carriages where we were supposed to be sitting, and as the train was quite empty, the conductor just showed us into the nearest empty sleeping car! Bonus! We could not believe our good fortune, to have our own private little haven where we could giggle and gobble stuff from our esky to our heart's content. There were clean towels in there, so we took a shower and washed the morning's heat and grime away and had the most wonderful trip home.

I have just booked our next train adventure, on the glorious art-deco silver Savannahlander, which runs north west from Cairns to little outback towns like Almaden, Forsayth, and Einsaleigh

I have been looking for an opportunity to take this train for at least five years, so it is a definite must-do before we leave. We are going on the Easter long weekend - I can't wait! Check it out here :http://www.savannahlander.com.au/gallery/2.html

Romantic Adventures on the Machans Beach Access Road

We live in a special suburb. Machans Beach (pronounced 'May-Chans, with the emphasis on the first syllable) is ten minutes drive from the centre of Cairns. There is only one road that connect this suburb to the world - the "Machans Beach Access Road", so we have no through traffic. Most of the cars that travel in and out of Machans are carrying people who live in here. We drive between fields of sugarcane to get in here - sometimes a solid wall of waving giant grass ten feet high, sometimes sporting fluffy pink plumes of flowers. When the cane is high it feels like driving home through a secret tunnel, into a little private, privileged world. Some days we drive out of the beach through the tunnel and when we return, we get a small shock to see the fields suddenly lying bare. During our small absence someone has gathered up all the tall green stalks and carted them away, and we travel home feeling strangely conspicuous and exposed.

There isn't a lot of litter along our road, but what there is is collected voluntarily by a Machanite - a fellow who rides a pushbike out there every morning armed with a rubbish bag, and makes it his own particular business to keep our Access Road spiffy. (He was one of several residents recently awarded an OMB ("omby" award) at the inaugural "Order of Machans Beach" community awards.)

Our one road to the outside world has a low-lying section that floods about every second year and seals us in, or out, for a few hours or days. I think that there is something particularly precious and rare about living in a place where your access to the world can be disrupted. It can be frustrating, and sometimes worrying, and sometimes financially costly when I can't get to work, but the disadvantages do not compare with the incomparable delight of getting an unexpected day off work. (And I adore my job, but I love being free in my house even more!) Often it is raining heavily and there is nothing for it but to sit round inside, reading, chatting, listening to music, listening to the rain, cooking, napping, catching up. And it is all completely guilt-free ! All social obligations are lifted, because we are innocent victims trapped by the weather. This aspect of Machans life will apparently soon come to an end, with our local politicians committing to flood-proof our access sometime soon.








Machans is bordered by a creek on one end and river on the other, with the ocean at the front and the highway behind, so with the road closed, any other access is by water. We have our own emergency services division in here, and a couple of little shops, which sell ice and fuel and gas and food, so the main hardship we face when the road is closed is that we do not have a bottleshop . Once the river becomes passable, some community-minded soul will soon volunteer to nip up the river to the Stratford Hotel and come back with supplies, and word gets around and folks put in their orders. They will also take the opportunity to bring more mundane things like bread and milk!

We recently became more intimately familiar with the Access Road than I ever expected (or hoped!) to become. Our poor old Magna seized to a final halt on the Access Road one afternoon. With no immediate financial ability to buy another car, we had to find another way to get to work. I have an early start at the cafe, earlier than the first bus from Machans. Getting to the city by 7am involved leaving home by 5:50am, walking half an hour along the Access Road and then standing on the edge of the highway with traffic thundering by at 100km/hour and trying to persuade a bus to pull over and pick me up in the gloom. I cannot thank my darling husband enough for getting up with me in the dark, walking me to the bus every morning for about four months - and then walking half an hour back home.

When we began doing this it was winter, and pitch dark the whole way. We carried a little flashing red LED to help protect us from being run over. There is little traffic on the road that time of the morning, and no houses, and no lighting, and I would have found it very unsettling to have to walk it alone. By the time we were able to buy a replacement vehicle, it was light before we even left home and the morning was hot before we got to the highway. With my beloved along, however, it became a little romantic adventure every day. We held hands and plotted and planned and laughed as always, even on days when a sole fell off my shoe half way there (gaffa tape to the rescue), or there was a torrential downpour and we almost died of heat and humidity inside our rain ponchos, or we were befriended by a huge, skinny, extremely goofy white dog that insisted on walking the whole way in between us, leaning heavily on us and lolloping out onto the road whenever a car approached.

We would make the most of a spare few minutes before we were parted for the day and hug each other and kiss on the roadside while we waited for the bus, and I often imagined what an unusual sight we must be to all the drivers streaming past us into the city - a couple standing in the first light between the highway and the cane, far from the nearest house, lost in a passionate embrace, day after day. When a bus heaved into sight in the distance he would valiantly stand almost in its path and flag it down for me (we had learned from frustrating experience that such extreme approach was necessary, and even then not always successful!)

It was romantic, and as we always do we made the most of it and found things to treasure about it ( this is one of our special skills), but we are both extremely grateful it is over.

Fear of moving

It has been over two years since I began to seriously entertain the idea of moving, and it is only very recently that I have reached a point where my excitement at the prospect has begun to outweigh my anxiety...ok perhaps fear is a better word.....sometimes bordering on terror
It has come as a great surprise to me that I have found the idea of moving so daunting - as a grownup and capable woman of 40! Over the past couple of years I have observed numerous of my cafe customers making decisions and plans and preparations to move, and then disappearing off to the new chosen place - and none of them displayed any signs of the anxiety I was feeling at the prospect. They behaved as if it was just an ordinary, normal part of existence, and not at all as if it was a cataclysmic life fracture, which was what it has felt like to me!

This is not to say for a moment that I don't want to go - I want to go very much, but I have been struggling to accommodate the part of me that also wants to stay - this is not really a desire to stay in Cairns specifically, (although I love it here with a passion) but a very strong desire to stay safe, stay the same, stay in the framework that is working fine in my life at the present.
We have given ourselves plenty of time to deal with the emotional and practical preparations, so I have not had to force myself to resolve these concerns quickly. I have had the luxuxry of being able to take a patient and gentle approach with myself, and to just have faith that these issues would resolve themselves in due course. And I have just been listening non judgementally to my own internal chatter and trying to pinpoint the heart of the often floating anxiety I was feeling.

I have realised that one reason this is daunting is because I have never actually done this before - I have moved before, but never of my own free choice. My previous relocations were all compelled by the neccessity of my life circumstances at the time and I have never had to fret and worry about whether I was making the right decision. I left home at 19 and moved with my fiance to Brisbane - but this move was compelled by the fact that in Brisbane was the nearest university at which I could study Law. From Brisbane we moved to Cessnock in the Hunter Valley - but that move was determined by the fact that a flying school from Cessnock had held a receruitment seminar in Brisbane and my fiance decided that he would go there to pursue his pilot's licence. A few years down the track I moved from the Hunter to Brisbane, to be with him during six months he spent in hospital after a plane crash. And after that we moved back to Cairns, to be back in the social support network of family that he (and I!) needed after getting out of hospital.

Then we had a couple of kids, and after a few more years split up, and for the decade since then I have felt unable to entertain the notion of moving away because of a reluctance to part his children from him. These kids are in their mid teens now and I believe they will be able to manage having their parents in two different places, so now, for the first time in my life, I am going through the process of deciding I would like to live somewhere else, and choosing that place, and setting processes in motion that will lead to me moving, of my own free will. VERY SCARY!

One of the big issues I have had to sort out is an overwhelming feeling of guilt at moving to the opposite end of the country from my lovely mother. And the strength of this fear has been surprising, given that although I couldn't love her more, and I enjoy her company, and we live twenty minutes apart, I only have contact with her maybe once a month ...but she is a very capable woman still, and cheerful and resourceful, and I have always felt that if she ever needs more support from me, I will be here to give it. Once I move to Tasmania, I will not be able to be of much practical support at all, and I found that a difficult notion to reconcile. But the alternative was allowing that prospect to stop me from going, ever, while she is still alive, and I could see immediately that that would not be normal or desirable. I reminded myself that millions of people live far away from their parents, and that this does not make them unworthy, uncaring children...when I got thinking about it, the list of children who live far away from their parents includes two of my siblings, who have been living merrily wherever they desired for the last three decades or more! Before long I convinced myself that it was ok for me to move away from my mother. We would both find a way to cope!

Similarly I felt very guilty at causing the kids to have to face the prospect of having their two parents at opposite ends of the country. My daughter, who is almost 16, is fine with it, as she barely choses to see her father anyway. My 14 year old son, however, is experiencing conflict and uncertainty about where and with whom he will live. He find the idea of going a few months without seeing one of us upsetting. For my part, I feel panic stricken and woeful at the idea that he might live with his father and that I wouldn't get to hug him or care for him for months at a time...of course I hope he will choose to live with us and holiday with his father, but the decision is his. He wishes he could go on being able to see each of us often. This continues to make my heart ache, and I deeply regret causing him this pain, and I suspect that I will continue to feel conflicted about this until I see it all working out for him somehow....but I have decided not to let that stop me doing it. Eric and I have been waiting a decade to be able to strike out somewhere new together, and I just don't feel I can wait another 4 years until he is finished school. In the end it may cause him some sorrow, which I will suffer intensely also, but I do believe the benefits to all of us will outweigh that cost.

The other thing that has made this decision difficult is the irreversibilty of it. I am perhaps the world's most cautious person and I am always searching for ways to minimise risks. I have a strong preference for being able to proceed in small, reversible steps, where at the first sign of trouble you can quickly back up. (When I was newly pregnant with my first child, even though it was a completely planned pregnancy, I was completely overwhelmed at the inevitability of this thing that I had started...being in a situation where there was no going back was very novel, and quite disturbing! )

This move will not be reversible. The real estate market in Cairns is reasonably expensive and upwardly mobile, and once we sell our house, pay off the mortgage and move to Tassie, we will never be able to afford to buy back into this market. If things don't work out in Tassie we will have the option of some other places we could move, but back here will not really be an option. I am quite unused to working in that kind of framework. Usually I quell my fears with self-assurances that if something doesn't work out, I can just abandon it and go back to the way things were before. This aspect of the move is calling for some real bravery on my part. I can't be absolutely certain that I will be happy in Tasmania, so I have just had to accept the idea that if I am unhappy there, I will tackle that problem then and work out a solution!

So now all the hard emotional work has been done and I can finally just feel excited about the prospect of the dramatically new life that lies ahead. There are so very many things that I am looking forward to about living in Tasmania, and now I am impatient to get everything done here that needs to be done before we can put our house on the market and dawdle off towards the place where the berries grow!
Cheers

Sue

Farewelling Pedro

A few weeks ago we farewelled a dear mate, casting his ashes into the sea that laps at our suburb. It was a windy, hot tropical afternoon and the sky was unbelievably blue. I took my turn, taking a handful of the gravelly dust that was all that remained of my tall, strong, passionate, ever laughing friend and waded knee deep into the little messy waves and poured the ashes into the ocean he loved to paddle upon. All I could think was "Who would have believed it would come to this?"

About twenty of his friends gradually gathered on the little beach. His ex girlfriend had made a flag woven with colourful strips of his sarongs and it stood on a tall bamboo pole thrust into the rockwall, flapping in the stiff breeze. Another friend had made a huge cardboard mermaid tail, with dozens of CDs for scales and decorated with jewelstones. It sparkled blindingly in the sun.

His ashes were contained in a splendidly colourful egyptian style urn, which had been found amongst his few wordly possessions. It sat on a big chunk of treestump near the water's edge. A couple of friends brought big bunches of frangipanis from their gardens and laid them at the base of the log, and someone added a single long stemmed rose. A few of us had brought a beer with us, as the man of honour would most certainly have done.

I recalled there that I had first met him on this very bit of beach. I had seen him round the beach before that. He had immediately attracted my attention with his striking resemblance to Billy Connelly! He was a strong, tall, striking man with an incredible windswept mane of long grey hair, and I would often see him walking along the waterfront with a fishing rod in hand. On the day we met I had taken my children (who were four and five years old) casting new lures from the bridge. One of us amateur fisherpeople had tied a lure on insecurely and it came off my daughter's line and it started to drift away. I didn't want the expedition to end in tears so I hesistantly approached this fellow who was casting for bait from the bridge and asked his if he would consider trying to catch it in his castnet. He agreed immediately and for the next fifteen minutes he was engaged in a committed effort to retrieve the lure. He clambered down the rockwall and waded in the water, despite my begging him not to bother, and got his castnet snagged and tore a hole in it.....but ultimately returned triumphant with a huge smile, reunited the lure with its delighted little owner, and waved away my gratitude and apologies.....

The other occasion we shared with him on this same beach was our wedding, about four years ago. He was a very talented photographer and artist, and he took some snaps at the wedding. The following day I realised that I had not seen him afterwards at our home reception, and nor had anyone else. I wondered what had happened to him in the couple of blocks between the beach and our back yard. A couple of days later he dropped in, smiling but apologetic, and explained that he had unexpectedly encountered an old flame on his way to our house, and that she had "offered him an opportunity too good to refuse". We all laughed and agreed that he had done the right thing. A few days after that he came for dinner with a folder of the most intimate, gorgeous photos of our ceremony that I could have imagined. He had perfectly captured the relaxed, glowing, joyous nature of our sunset celebration. He was a man of meager means, but had spent his own money on photographic print paper and refused to take any payment.

Who would have thought it would come to this? It was incredibly easy to imagine him striding up the beach towards us all - he was the ultimate sociable person and would have loved to be amongst this gathering of his friends. And yet, I knew that it was not the slightest bit surprising that he had gone first and left the rest of us behind. He lived an extreme life, driven by unbridled enthusiasms. He loved to ride motorbikes and paddle on the ocean and dive in it and skydive and party seemingly beyond the limits of human endurance. He didn't eat or sleep much and didn't take much care of himself, and yet he seemed strong and vigourous and his enthusiasm and laughter never abated. I often wondered how long I would have the joy of having him in my life. Nowhere near long enough, as it turned out. The unexpected thing about his death was the way it came about.

He had suffered a descent into psychosis, which was heartbreaking for his friends to observe. In the depths of it he had suffered a mysterious event which had broken his spine and left him quadriplegic. He had spent over two years in hospital, had finally left the hospital and moved back to Cairns, and within a month of his return had been found dead in his bed one morning by one of his carers, of a suspected stroke. Who would have thought it would come to this?

I have so many laughing memories of this dear friend. I had more fun in his presence than anyone apart from Eric. I feel social anxiety keenly and felt utterly peaceful and at ease with him. We delighted in the precious little glimpses of his immense musical talent we got to witness in our house. His exuberant appreciation of our cooking brought a warm glow to our hearts on many nights - he thought it was "Choice!!". Above all I delighted in the laughter he brought into our lives - laughing uproariously at our anecdotes and telling us about wild, unbelievable and hilarious escapades. At the end of a long night of feasting, laughing, telling tales, drinking and playing music he would announce his intention to "do the stagger" and gather up his harps and wander off into the night, maybe taking the long way round on a "lap of dishonour". Losing him has left a huge, Hungarian-shaped hole in the universe, and in our lives.

Tegeggi, friend!