Elvis Costello Plays for Canucks Fans

Too good. Elvis Freaking Costello played "Pump it Up" with a local Vancouver band at the rink where the Canucks are playing tonight. (Elvis' wife, Diana Krall, is from Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, where, incidently, I played a folk festival in the early 1990s.) Check it out:



Since my Sabres are gone - Go Canucks!

Cockatoo in the House

Just working at my computer, in the corner of the living room next to the veranda window. Just heard a noise behind me: a cockatoo had walked in the open door, grabbed the bottle full of seeds we keep behind the couch, and was trying to drag it out the door. Christine just gave him a little to get him to knock it off.

Have You Always Wanted to Go to North Korea?

Now you can.

North Korea announced a plan Friday to designate the Mt. Geumgang tourist region as an international tourism zone to attract foreign investment.

[...]

It announced a development program to create a tourist district in the region covering some parts of Goseong, Tongcheon and Geumgang counties.

Fascinating: South Koreans have been allowed to go to the region since 1998. Now it will be opened to international visitors. Very cool.

Music

I went to a songwriter's competition at the Mona Vale Hotel last night with old Oregon friend, current Sydney Northern Beaches friend, Jeff Stanley. There were seven performers, four move on to the semi-finals. Jeff and I were of those four.

Over a handful of weeks in the last few months Jeff and I went to a smilar competition at the Dee Why RSL. Jeff took second (or co-won, really, as he moves on to the final at one of Sydney's best known clubs, The Basement, on May 3); I finished next and won a "paid gig" at The Basement. In the future.

I was kinda hoping the move to Australia would wake my atrophying music back up. Hmmph. Maybe it is.

One American on Trump and the "Long-Form"

I do not want to do a lot of politics on this blog. I just don't. But sometimes I have to. This needs to be watched, carefully, by a really lot of people.



An excerpt:

It was during my viewing of this video [Trump’s remarks in New Hampshire] that I began to cry. I thought of my ancestors, both direct and collective, who had fought and died so that I might be treated as an American. I then thought of this fetid, smug, hate-filled, wealthy white man taking credit for the release [of the "long form" birth certificate] and yet still not being satisfied. It does not matter how long we’ve been in these United States. We will never be American.

So, tears in my eyes, pain in my heart and rage in my soul, I composed this video message. More than written text, it comes close to expressing my full pain at witnessing a white man who was handed everything call the President of the United States (and me) a nigger.

FaceBook and Twitter

Why do really good communication platforms have childish names like "FaceBook" and "Twitter"? I know they're hugely successful—so what do they care?—but I why are these things seemingly marketed to ten-year-olds?

Half expect the net big thing to be called "Poopy Pants Party" or something.

"Dead 10m whale lures sharks to Newport Beach" [updts]

Update I: Got pics.

Just a few miles down the road. Going to see it right now. Yay! (Yay for possibly seeing sharks, I mean.)

"AUTHORITIES are considering cutting up the carcass of a 10m sperm whale, which is attracting sharks to Sydney's Newport Beach.

The body of the wedged amphibian has drawn schools of sharks to the popular surfing spot, forcing the beach to be closed.

Local residents are flocking to the scene, but not for long, as the smell of rotting flesh wafts throughout nearby Newport village."

Back now. Got some pics. There were about 50 people down there, an air of excitement. The whale is at the  end of the rock.

The young whale. They say it's about four years old, thirty feet long—weighs twelve tons.

No sharks in sight. Tomorrow at low tide they'll try to cut it up with chainsaws, load it in trucks and bury it somewhere.

Update II: As of Saturday the whale has been cut up with chainsaws and trucked away. The beach is still closed, as more sharks have been seen in the area, drawn in by the whale blood.

Busy Busy Busy

I'm deep into a bunch of articles that are just killing me ("The History of the Lock and Key" - without the crap you find on a thousand internet sites - for example), and creating a table of contents for a 500+ page book due out in April - on the natural world. So my blogging has been sparse.

And "Ow," too.

Limb Regeneration…In Humans?

This is a 2007 article from Nature. I'll see if I can find updates - because it is really fascinating. Just imagine.

Tadpoles can achieve something that humans may only dream of: pull off a tadpole's thick tail or a tiny developing leg, and it'll grow right back — spinal cord, muscles, blood vessels and all. Now researchers have discovered the key regulator of the electrical signal that convinces Xenopus pollywogs to regenerate amputated tails. The results, reported this week in Development, give some researchers hope for new approaches to stimulating tissue regeneration in humans.

...

But the complex networks needed to construct a complicated organ or appendage are already genetically encoded in all of our cells — we needed them to develop those organs in the first place. "The question is: how do you turn them back on?" Levin says. "When you know the language that these cells use to tell each other what to do, you're a short step away from getting them to do that after an injury."

The Jesus Bird

From a 2006 trip to the Northern Territory: The Comb-crested Jacana, [links fixed] according to the very knowledgeable and talkative guide on the South Alligator River in Kakadoo National Park (part of the Yellow Waters cruise), has the longest feet, per bird size, of any bird in the world. Allows in to "walk on water."

The Comb-crested Jacana or Lotusbird is a waterbird with long legs and extremely long toes that enable it to walk on the leaves of floating plants. It is brown above with white face and front of neck. The back of the neck is black extending into a black band round the belly. The rest of the underside is white. It has red bill with black tip and pink comb on forehead.

Here are some drawings of the Comb-crested jacana by John Gould. And more. And more on Gould himself.

Update: I posted this, then seconds later went, "Oh, it's Easter." I wish I could say it was intentional.

Yemeni Leader Will Step Down

We are witnessing some extraordinary events these days.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen has agreed to step down under a 30-day transition plan aimed at ending violent unrest over his 32-year rule.

Officials in the capital Sanaa confirmed the government had accepted the plan drawn up by Gulf Arab states.

Surf Fishing: Flathead and Mystery Crab

I went fishing yesterday. (Was it a Good Friday thing? Some smoke from a stirred childhood memory?) Christine came along, and spent some time trying to catch beach worms.

Just a few minutes in I caught a flathead on a little prawn (not fresh; been in the freezer for ages). Clean, hard strike, I didn't have to set the hook, it just took it and ran. Christine took a shot of the hook removal:

Now here's the weird thing: The flathead you catch surf fishing around here, the way I understand it, is the dusky flathead. But the dusky flathead, like all flathead species, I'm learning, has a characteristic tail:

Dusky Flathead are easily distinguished from other flathead by the distinctive black spot circled in blue on their tail fin.

Look at this fish's tail. Click on the pic and then again to zoom in.

You see those spots on the tail? I'm pretty sure that tells us this is a Northern flathead:

The Northern Flathead has a pale brown body speckled with pinkish-red spots. The caudal fin (tail) is the best way to identify the northern sand flathead, with a pattern of almost horizontal flag-like black stripes across the tail (three distinct black bars on the upper portion and two on the lower portion of the caudal fin).

Here's an image of a tail.

I quickly got out my book and found that flathead have to be 33 centimeters, about 13 inches—to keep. This one was a few centimeters short, so back into the Pacific he went.

Christine gave up on the beach worms—they're so hard to catch—and went home. About an hour later I felt something tugging on my bait. I yanked the rod, and got something. It felt like a bigger fish that the first. I pulled it in and in the surf saw...what?...the hell is that...damn, it's a crab. He fell off right at the edge of the surf. I don't think I had hooked him—I think he just held on to that piece of pilchard for the whole ride to the beach.

 I have no idea what kind off crab that is. My NSW fishing book lists just three that have size limits; this crab isn't one of those (mud crab maybe); for the rest there is no size limit.

Grrrr.

I put him back anyway. Can't cook up one little crab. He scampered and swam sideways back into the surf.

"Ooh ooh Child..."

I was playing with some very simple chord changes on my guitar the other day: C-G, 3 times, then to Em, repeat the whole thing, then to F, resolve on C. The Cs start with a hammer-on of the two highest fingered notes (C and E), and the G comes in on an up-strum. Nothing new or spectacular here, just sounded nice and I felt like strumming.

Last night I woke up, I'm guessing around 4:30 AM. I started playing those changes in my head: C-G; two times, Em… Then I thought, What if I didn't repeat the C-G? I'm always doing these simple repeats of two chords. So I start playing it in my head again: C-G, Em, then I go to Bm, which I knew on the way there was just stupid. So I kinda go to clean up that mess, when after a few seconds I notice that some other part of my mind has picked up the song and continued, but in a different direction. I heard it do this: C-G with the hammmer-on on the C, two times, then it went somewhere else I didn't recognize—was that an A?—then it came back to the C-G, with these words now singing: "Ooh-ooh child, things are gonna get easier, ooh-ooh child things'll get brighter…"

Weird. Just weird.

I just found this. It's very cool.

Easter in Australia

Christine's buns

It's Good Friday, and Easter in Australia has officially begun. Most shops are closed, everyone has a federal holiday today and Monday, and huge feasts will be taking place all over the drab continent this weekend. (Drab? Did I just say that?) We will even be having the rels over for a feast here at our place on Sunday. All good stuff.

I'll update this diary throughout the weekend as I notice things about Easter in Australia that Americans, and maybe even an Australian or two, might find notable.


Hot Cross Buns. I'll start by saying that Easter unofficially started last week, when Christine started making regular loads of homemade hot cross buns—pictured above—the Easter treat in Australia. (I've just had my morning dose of halved hot cross buns toasted and slathered with butter.) To give you an idea of the strength of this tradition: There was an article in the local free daily (which doesn't come out on Sunday…or Monday) about how some un-Australian bakers were messing with the traditional hot cross bun recipe and adding sacrilegious bits like chocolate and coffee. The outrage! (The news!)

Smoked Fish Cooked in Milk. While I'm here at the computer working on an article right now (well, not right now, or practically ever…), Christine is making us smoked fish and eggs. The smoked fish (cod, in this case) is cooked in milk. It's what you do on Good Friday, or maybe just around Easter, apparently. Christine doesn't know the origin, though it must have to do with Lent, and the meatless Fridays that had us Catholic kids eating store-bought fish sticks on Fridays in Buffalo.

The Story of My Life, via a Not Scrupulous Record of the Many Wild Animals I've Encountered in their Natural Habitat, Part One

This will be an ongoing series. It will partly be me making for the first time a written record of the more interesting animals I've encountered in the wild in my life, and partly just shameless bragging, as this is the kind of thing a person like myself brags about.

The list will be in chronological order, best as I can do; they will include brief stories of the encounters; and many entries won't have accompanying images (damn), as they just happened in non-camera-carrying moments. Some, I'm happy to say, will entail quite exotic creatures, seen by not a whole lot of people; some are not so exotic animals (the skunk, for example), which I include only because of the stories surrounding those encounters (including getting sprayed by a skunk from very, very close, while trying to beat it to death with a stick).

Crow at the grape vine (late 1960s): When I was probably only six or so, there was for a period of time, maybe only a summer, that a wild crow would eat out of your hand. Maybe it had been domesticated and escaped, I don't know. I remember it scaring the crap out of a couple kids on the way to school, trying to land on a shoulder or head, and that there was for some weeks talk among the adults of this vicious crow, and that maybe something should be done about it. Luckily that something was never done. (At least I think it wasn't.) But best, I remember being at the grape vine in our far back yard on North Maple Drive in Lancaster, outside of Buffalo, New York, the crow sitting on my knee, me feeding it grapes. I felt like Marlin friggin' Perkins. Maybe that's where all this wild animal crap started.

Snakes and skunks (1960s-70s): Catching snakes was a huge part of my childhood. Our one acre backed up on thousands of acres of Western New York wilderness: cool, sweet-smelling forests; thick grassy, clumpy fields that held the wet for days after a rain; creepy, smelly, wonderful swamps. We'd put boards down in various places, and go on a regular rounds: quickly lift a board and dive for the snake or snakes if there were any. Often there were many, in a writhing ball I did not know the meaning of at the time.We mostly caught garter snakes, less often but still plentiful were the larger, more exotic milk snakes, occasionally what we called red-bellied racers (these?), and various other breeds I can't remember right now. But the real reason for this post is the time, probably around 1970, we dug a pit in a garden in the back yard about three feet in diameter and three feet deep, just twenty feet from the house or so. Then we went snaking. We caught a bunch of snakes, and we put them in the pit…then we'd put a little toad or two in. This was serious entertainment for us rural Western New York kids, watching the snakes catch and eat the toads for hours. Over the following days we got to where there were about 40 snakes in the pit—no exaggeration. Then came the day we were having a barbecue with friends and relatives. I remember that Dad's Japanese friend from work, Mr. Kim (Hiroki Kimura, I found out much later), a karate teacher who us kids adored, was there along with his beautiful wife, Junco. At some point the skunks came. Skunks, it turns out, are crazy about snakes. Two of them just came waltzing straight into the yard full of people as the food was still cooking. Mr. Kim and a few of the older kids went up the huge, sprawling willow in the back yard—they were stuck up there for a quite a long time, I remember—the rest of us else ran into the house and watched the madness through the back windows. I can't remember if the skunks ate any of the snakes. They left eventually.

Snapping Turtles (1960s-70s): I remember a few snapping turtle episodes, but none more so than the time Scott, the craziest person in out neighborhood, and the tallest—he topped off at 6' 8"—came down North Maple Drive with a snapping turtle in a wheel barrow. He'd caught it in the swamp somewhere. It filled the wheel barrow. It was enormous. We all marveled at it for a while, tested its beak with pencils and pens and sticks, which it demolished in a snap. The bigger kids could pick him up—a hand on either side of the shell, half way down—but that turtle would scare the crap out of you because they can stick their necks out a lot farther than you'd think. It was a huge, jagged, pointy, crusty, and annoyed old dinosaur—god, we loved it.

Star-nosed moles (1960s-70s): I love that these creatures were part of my kidhood—they truly blow peoples' minds. If you were digging in the yard, there was always a chance you'd come across one of the most bizarre creatures in existence. I wrote a post about them over here. (Pic.)

Skunk (mid-1970s): I was probably only 12 or 13. Some of the older kids in the neighborhood, including and especially the aforementioned Scott, had begun trapping. You could go into the basement of his family's home, as I did many times, and see dozens and dozens of pelts hanging from the beams, stretched on wire racks and drying. Mostly muskrat, some raccoon, some opossum, for some reason, and some fox. The muskrats got you $5 a pelt, the raccoons more, and the fox up to $50, if I remember correctly. I, most definitely, would take part in this glorious exercise just as soon as I was allowed. Or sooner. I got a book out of the library. In that book I learned that 1) skunks like garbage, and 2) skunks build their dens on slopes, to allow for drainage. I knew of an animal den in the woods only a couple hundred yards from our back door…that was in an area where there was garbage strewn about…that was on a slope. And, I thought, and there's no arguing with this, skunks have beautiful fur. I don't remember how long it took, but I remember some sort of pleading, with, especially, my mother. (At 13 Dad would have already allowed me to go into the woods by myself with the .22, and had already taught me how to shoot the double-barrel 12-gauge.) I eventually got a simple foot trap (like this). I carefully dug a small pit about eight feet from the den opening, set the trap, covered it lightly with soil, and staked the chain down. Every morning before school I'd run back into the woods to check my trap. A few weeks passed, then, one day, there it was: a skunk. I had done it. I couldn't believe it. I had predicted a skunk, I had set a trap for a skunk, I had caught that skunk. Uhhhh, now what? It was very alive, and very unhappy. I knew it was wrong to let an animal stay in a trap and suffer. I picked up a stick—a thick, stout stick maybe five feet long—and I began to try to beat that skunk to death. Even when it hissed viciously, and turned its ass to me and sprayed me, still looking back at me with its red eyes and hissing like crazy, I tried to beat that skunk. It sprayed me from head to foot as I tried to kill it. I couldn't kill it. I couldn't go home; I had to kill it. I couldn't kill it. It sprayed and sprayed. My eyes and mouth stung. I don't remember if I finally went back, or if one of my brothers or sisters finally smelled the smell and heard me crying and told my mom and dad, but eventually our neighbor, Mr. Trobert, shot that skunk with his rifle and they got me out of there. Mom gave me the tomato juice bath. I was out of school for days. Maybe more. Me and my big brother Garry tried to skin that skunk—I had to skin it after all that, right? We hit the scent sack and nearly puked. I eventually just got rid of that unlucky skunk. Weeks later, months later, in the back of class, I would sniff my hands, my wrist: it was still there, I was sure of it.

Barracuda, manta rays (1982): I left home in early '82, 18 years old, with pack and guitar, drove one of those cars that needed delivering somewhere to Ft. Meyer's, Florida, with my old best buddy, Ken, met up with my sister Joyce and her family at her friend's house on Big Pine Key. They'd had an inheritance of some sort. The guy, whose name I don't remember, spent most days boating out to reefs, diving for and catching tropical fish, which I believe he sold. Massive seafood feasts, with fish he'd caught, oysters we dug, were a regular event. Beautiful! This heir and fisherman took Ken and I out on his boat one day, eight miles out, the Atlantic side of the key, to a reef. For an 18-year-old just stepping out into the great big world—and who'd only ever seen the ocean once, at a German beach on the North Sea two years earlier—heaven. Unbelievable. We strapped on snorkels and paddled our way over sea urchins and anenomes and octopi and all that assorted reef business. It was mostly shallow, but all of a sudden a cavernous space would open beneath you, taking your stomach with it for a second, and a huge manta ray would fly beneath you. A manta ray—only Jacques Cousteau got to see them! This went on for some hours, in and out of the boat, beer, the fisherman diving and catching fish, coming up with a speared grouper or something now and then, which we'd grab and toss into the cooler. Ken was swimming by himself when he suddenly almost propelled himself into the boat—from forty feet away. He was sputtering like crazy. "Fu-fu-fuckin' barracuda!" he barely said as we helped him over the side. The heir and fisherman dude laughed: "Don't worry," he said, "barracuda're so fast, it's the ones you don't see that'll get you," and back into the sea he dove. From there on out we swam with them. One would all of a sudden be right up alongside you, four feet long, one great eye staring at you, its teeth a cartoonishly dangerous display.

Wild pigs (1982): I'm just remembering that part of that Florida experience was wandering though the palmetto forests—if that's what you call them—off northeast Florida, south of St. Augustine, where my sister lived. There are some serious wild pigs in the bush there, and we encountered them several times.

Salmon, my God, salmon (1983): In 1983 I hitchhiked from Portland, Oregon, to Fairbanks, Alaska. The year before I'd read On the Road in Knoxville, Tennessee, while I was there working at the World's Fair—and I just couldn't find enough road in the Lower 48 after that. I arrived in June, 1983, nearly broke. The employment agency said I could work at a cannery. "What's a cannery?" I said. The next day I was flown to Anchorage, King Salmon, then, in a tiny bush plane, down the Alaskan Peninsula to Chignik. Twice the pilot turned and swooped low over the top of huge, lumbering, honey-colored grizzlies; one reared up and swiped at us like King Kong of the tundra. All that there is of Chignik is a cannery and a few rundown shacks. My job: Slimer. That's the real title. I spent the next two months (it was about a four month season—I got transferred: more later) standing at a table with several other people grabbing freshly decapitated and gut-slit salmon—pinks, chums, sockeyes, silvers, kings—and with a fat-handled spoon cleaning their guts out. One, then another, then another—for sixteen hours a day. Every day. No days off. My god. Most of us camped on a spit, in the bush. I didn't have a tent, so I carried heavy pallets, one at a time, to the spit, built a shack with a floor, three walls and a roof, and covered it with plastic. That was home. I'd drop a couple salmon into my rain pants at the end of my shift, walk back to the house, and cook them up on a fire. People would visit. A woman even—swear to god!—turning that pallet palace into a love nest. A love nest that smelled of—and was littered with pieces of—dead salmon.

Salmon, my God, salmon (1983-86): I went to Alaska to work the canneries every summer from 1983 until 1986. I worked various positions—slimer, header, deep freeze room, egg sorter, egg packer, forklift driver, beach gang (my favorite: we unloaded the tenders of their fish, sometimes by hand into metal mesh brailers, sometimes with huge suction hoses), in Chignik, King Cove, Valdez, and Ketchikan. In 1998 I went back, but this time worked on fishing boats: a gill-netter in Bristol Bay; and a seiner in Southeast, out of Ketchikan. I've personally seen, and held, probably hundreds of thousands of salmon.

Dungeness Crabs (1983-86): We also processed dungeness crabs in the canneries. When I was on the beach gang in Chignik (about half way through the season I was transferred there) I'd have to step into a hold of a boat holding a lot of really cold water and many thousands of pounds of live crab. You had to unload them by hand into a brailer. The second you stepped in the ones on top would go into click-click-claws up and staring at you defense mode. Scared the crap out of me first time. The guy with me could reach his hands in, gloved, of course, and be whipping them crab into the brailer, no problem; I'd be carefully turning then over one by one, trying not to get pinched, which happened all the time, with the boss screaming at me to hurry it up. Getting pinched really hurt. When one got you, you had to hold your hand up—don't try to shake it off, the pincher will fall off the crab and stay there pinched on to your finger—so you had to wait for it to let go and fall off. The worst moment came when probably still on my first day, long before I got the knack of dungeness picking, I was standing in the hold trying to get my nerves and head right when one of those crabs bit through by boot—through by XTRATUFFs!—and got ahold of my big toe. Now that was just unreasonable. It bit my toe, I had freezing cold water on my feet, and it ruined my XTRATUFFS. I took a rather long smoke break after that.

Black porpoises? (1985?): I did a certain amount of a substance the kids took back in the old days while camping out on a trip to Bahia de Concepcion in 1985 or so. If you ever have trouble picking somewhere to go on a vacation, go to this place, half way down the Baja Peninsula, on the Gulf of California. Just go. It will kill all the bad things inside you and walk their ghosts away from you into cactus forests on moonlit nights. It will save you. I promise. Anyway, I did this thing and communed with nature and whatnot for a day, and a night, and when the dawn was approaching I sat on a rock by a rocky beach (they're not all rocky, just this one) waiting for the sun to make its appearance. I waited for about three months, pretty sure. I yelled a lot. When the sun finally made it over the horizon, I cried, shouted, and wept for happiness, and a group of small, black porpoises, or maybe dolphins (I don't remember any white markings, but maybe they were Dall porpoises?), came right up to the shore where I sat. They wriggled and shivered in the water, me on my hands and knees just feet from them, wondering what in the world was happening.


***

Still to come: Right whales; muskox; wolverine; and a harbor seal pup, which jumped into my bed as I was jumping out if it, in Bandon, Oregon; and many more.

Swamp Wallaby

This is from the 2006 trip Christine and I took to Australia. We were driving into Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park north of Sydney when all of a sudden there it was, a swamp wallaby (we incorrectly say rock wallaby in the video), just sitting on the side of the road. What follows are, while still worth viewing, in my opinion, the kind of photographs and video you get when you are freaking out about seeing your very first wild wallaby.

You can almost hear the wallaby shake his head in the video, and say "If you would have just relaxed I would sat here and let you take pictures of me all day. I would have posed! You dope."

Much more on the swamp wallaby here.

Japan to Stop Whaling [updtd]

Wow. What's the Sea Shepherd going to do now?

Makes you wonder if the terrible tragedy that was the earthquake, tsunami, and ongoing Fukishima nuclear disaster had anything to do with this.

Update: It obviously didn't mean all whaling.

Canada Goose, Black and White

Southern Oregon, ponds on I-5, between Talent and Ashland, 2010.

Fuzz

Southern Oregon, 2010.

(Click pics to make huge.)

It's almost time for a new camera. Our Kodak Z650, which we got for $300 or so in 2006, has gotten us some surprisingly good shots, like these (no crops, no filters, no nothing, just one color and one black and white shot of the same plant), but I cannot wait to step up a grade, or several, and take this whole photography thing much more seriously.

Quote for the Day

My neice, Rain, 200+ miles into the Appplacian Trail:

I'm in Dollywood land... for you that don't know Dollywood let me sum it up for you... wal-mart meets jersey shore meets deliverance...

Hamburger

I've just put a post on FaceBook to my 300 or so friends, telling them that if more people became followers of this humble (yet spectacular!) blog I would eat a hamburger for lunch. I've already gotten two more. Was I lying?

Hamburger, 10:52 AM, April 18, 2011

No. Not lying!

Avalon, and Three Generations of Artists

We went up to Avalon. You can see up near the top of this map how it's located on a peninsula (thirty miles north of Sydney CBD), with the Pittwater inlet to its east, and the Pacific to the west.

Or, if you live in this house, high up on the peninsula's ridge, here's the Pittwater window:

And here's the Pacific Ocean window (looking across the same painting):

I realize that you can't really see the water in these shots, but you can, really well, see them from the windows.

It's all part of the home of Nada Herman-Witkamp (more here), the third in a line of three generations of Australian painters. Her grandfather was Sali Herman, one of Australia's Official War Artists for World War Two, and four time winner of the Wynne Prize, one of Australia's most prestigious art awards. Her father was Ted Herman, another well known Aussie painter, and the guy who bought the land on which the Avalon house now sits, in the 1950s. There were at the time, Herman-Witkamp told us, hundreds of koalas in the area. Like "an infestation," she said. (There was a sign on the way up to the house with the image of a koala on it, but she said she hadn't seen one in twenty years.)

Herman-Witkamp, and, I'm guessing Witkamp himself—there was a guy there who I thought seemed pretty Witkampy—open the house to the public every weekend during certain times of the year. You can just pop up and walk around the house and grounds. They were there, hanging out in the kitchen. Herman-Witkamp told us to go ahead and make some tea in the kitchen if we liked.

The place is really something. It has one "little" sandstone cottage (that's where mum lives, we were told "Pop in, she won't mind!"), and the big house, made of windows and a bit of nice wood, it seemed, around an open courtyard, and the whole place surrounded by huge old gums. Christine and I decided that, in a pinch, it would do.

The view from the deck of the kitchen, of the Pittwater and a slew of sailboats:

All around the house are examples of her work, much of it, by my untrained eye, really quite good:

Around the grounds (the first pic is looking through one end of the courtyard into the kitchen):

An easel I'd love to have:

A table:

The Herman Art House, Avalon, NSW.

Cabramatta—"A Taste of Asia"—New South Wales [updtd]

Took about an hour drive due east (edit: west, not east - we were not in the Pacific Ocean) of Sydney to the city of Cabramatta (which actually feels like a suburb of Sydney). During the 1970s, during the Vietnam War, a wave of immigration from South Vietnam began to Cabramatta, and it today has a very large Vietnamese population, mixed in its own particular way with Australia's own particular way.

Anyway, I got some photographs.

First, the restaurant: Thanh Binh, 52 John St. Cabramatta. Fantastic. Recommended. Great food, nice people, laid back—crowded at lunch time. The specials: (As always, click to enlarge photos; click again for closer.)

For those interested in pictures of food—king prawn spring roll with a peanutty sauce; soft-shelled crabs in tamarind sauce; scallops:

I've just learned that tamarind sauce is made from the tamarind tree—which is native to Africa. It was so popular in ancient times, apparently, that it was continuously transplanted, and is now all over Asia (not to mention the Americas).

We had more, including a pork dish that was great, but every time they brought something out I just wanted to eat it and kept forgetting to photograph it.

We shared a cold tea drink that had barley, agar, and seaweed in it, which was good, very refreshing, but I wasn't crazy about the agar texture. And we had a durian smoothy, which managed to be strangely nice while leaving an aftertaste like you just had a mouthful of gasoline. (I say this with more than a little experience.)

Lunch cost about $110 for four. Not bad. Kevin brought a bottle of wine. No cork fee.

We went for a stroll on John Street.

Fruit shop:

My Tin.

Just one of the many delectable things to be found in this pastry shop:

I wish I knew what type of lobstery things these are. [Update 4/21/11: They're Eastern Rock Lobsters, a type of spiny lobster, which are not closely related to what we normally call lobsters!] Look at the beautiful shells on those poor buggers:

Thanh long—"dragon fruit"—which I've just found out is the fruit of a type of cactus:

I let my arm dangle at my side for a while, and clicked the button when I glimpsed something interesting:

A pastry machine:




Look at the women in red at the very, very end of this short video:




Vertu cell phones—only $12,000 or so a pop.

The family:

My Tin:

On our way to the car, I found a piece of paper just off the sidewalk:

Cabramatta, NSW.