(I’m obviously way overdue with my posts, and have a few things here and there written, but otherwise will be slowly piecing things together from the last three months. I made it to Perth on the train the day before Easter, and am trying to find a job after traveling for so long. I probably won’t post things in order, but will try to explain everything I reference. To start with, here’s a very recent post covering the last nearly-two weeks, up to the train journey – next post).
After my awesome 2-day tour of Kangaroo Island (more on this
to come, but in short I went on a tour from Adelaide, South Australia, across
the ferry to Kangaroo Island and then stayed on KI after the tour because I had
planned another wwoofing venture – I know I haven’t posted about any of my
other wwoofing stops, but this was my fourth one and they were all cool in
different ways), I spent a peaceful evening in the town of Penneshaw, wandering
around the area where penguins supposedly nest (there aren’t many of them on
the island anymore, though there are conflicting opinions why), and checking
out the beach, though it was too chilly to swim.
In that white dome I saw one of Australia’s earliest
European graffiti (supposedly) which was scratched onto a rock by Baudin, the
French commander who explored the island along with the British Matthew
Flinders (they met up at a place subsequently named Encounter Bay, where they
swapped information about the island and the area, which was very civil of them
since France and England were at war at the time – 1803).
At the hostel I watched a bizarre movie (Wild Target, which
starred Bill Nighy as a hitman-turned-protector of Emily Blunt, and Rupert
Grint as an unexpected sidekick) with the only other two guests. I got picked
up the next day from the hostel by Scott and taken to his and Liz’s bush
retreat, the Wallaby Run, which is right on the edge of Pelican Lagoon, which
is a big inlet that nearly separates one side of the island from the other.
Scott and Liz are a nearly-retired couple who’ve been living there for several
decades in between doing lots of long-term travels and biking trips around the
world – cool people! Over the next week and a half I enjoyed their hospitality,
which included frequent Aussie BBQs and short trips around the island to meet
up with their friends. They had a little shed and tent set-up a short walk from
the main house, and the tent was super comfortable to sleep-in (it was a huge,
long-term tent that reminded me of the one in Harry Potter, except without the
plush furnishings and kitchen area, and I suspect it would still be large when
you packed it up).
The shower was interesting, you had to pour water into a
basin, light the gas underneath, and then put in a pump when the water was
ready which connected to the shower head. It was a very nice shower and perfect
for practicing saving water, because you could see the water level diminish as
you went and you had to stop before it got too low for the pump.
The first full day I was there we picked apples for friends
with a cider business (we tasted some and omg was it good!) and were treated to
an amazing lunch and buckets-full of windfall apples to take home. That evening
we picked up Cindy, a French wwoofer who was very nice and improved my
impression of the French. The next day was St Patrick’s Day, and we spent it with
Liz preserving apples and making apple butter (this was my idea and it came out
especially tasty, although involved a lot of apple-pressing-through-sieves and
clove-grinding that was a bit difficult).
Then we went round to another friend to grab some lemons and
limes from their trees to supplement future jam endeavors (we had picked a lot
of apples!). That evening I baked a sodabread for St Patty’s Day, which was an
interesting experience because they didn’t have any baking soda, so I had to
use baking powder, and their oven wasn’t operational, so I had to use the
Webber. It came out pretty good, considering, although it was a little bit
singed, and went nicely with the apple butter. I played some penny whistle
tunes and Scott accompanied me on some of them with his guitar (he also had a
penny whistle so I learned a few new tunes that I sadly have probably forgotten).
The next day we helped Scott in the garden, which is a large
area with lots of growing things all encased in poles and wire, to keep out the
wily possums that like to break it and eat everything and anything.
We had to take out some wire from near the chook yard (aka
chickens) and cut some new lengths to attach to an extension that Scott was
building. It was lots of playing with wire (not always fun) and reminded me of
making my seed plot cages in Peru and of taking down old wire enclosures in
Canada (I guess I’ve dealt with chicken wire a lot recently, come to think of
it). We met some German wwoofers and another wwoof host on the island who came
round in the afternoon to pick up some apples. We shared some of Liz and
Scott’s home-brewed beer (quite good, and proved to me that some beers are
actually tasty). Scott also showed me and Cindy the short path from our tent to
the beach, which was very picturesque but not deep enough to swim in.
It was covered in delicate shell remnants which were so tiny
and beautiful that I felt bad walking along the beach because I was crushing
them with every step.
The next day we met up with yet another friend of Liz and
Scott’s to go quince picking. I had never seen quinces before, and always
thought they were vaguely like kumquats or some other citrus thing, but I was
wrong. Turns out they were big, yellow, and bulbous, and inedible until cooked,
which make them kind of difficult to deal with (newest Al Gore spin-off: An
Inconvenient Fruit).
Of course we spent the rest of the day peeling, chopping,
and boiling quinces to make jam and jelly, although the quinces must have been
too ripe or something, so they didn’t set quite well enough and Liz had to buy
jam setter to get them to work.
We went to Pennington Bay that afternoon for a swim, which
was a surfers’ beach that you could swim in provided you were careful about the
undertow and didn’t go too deep. I was thrilled to be let loose in the water
without having to worry about what time I had to get out, and enjoyed jumping
around in the waves, although I think it was a bit too cold for Cindy.
The main reason I had heard about Kangaroo Island was
through this lady I found, Peggy, who is the world’s expert on echidnas and
does her research right next door to Liz and Scott’s place. I’ve been trying to
sort out whether I could come volunteer with her research team, but she didn’t
seem to have anything available. She recommended wwoofing at Scott and Liz’s,
so I decided to go to the island anyway on my way to Perth and maybe see if I
could meet her (also by this time I had realized that Kangaroo Island was
supposed to be an awesome place with lots of wildlife – true). I got in touch
with her and she invited me to go out with her group of volunteers (they only
come for a few days at a time, and she doesn’t have anything available the rest
of the year, which was disappointing, but oh well) to help out at a nursery
that prepares trees for bush regeneration sites. They do a big planting in July
(putting in something like 90,000 seedlings just last year) and needed help
transplanting a lot of small seed sprouts into individual containers.
It was pretty cool learning about the different plants and
the way you have to treat them and the soil to start the bush regenerating
(they clear the topsoil off to get rid of all the old pasture weeds, which is
radical but seems to work). Some plants need to be treated with smoke with a
certain compound that triggers them to germinate (good old Australian plants
that need fire to survive) but others will grow from direct seeding. Over the
day we transplanted about 2000 teeny weeny seedlings into new homes, which was
fun.
After lunch they drove us a short way out to the areas where
they had been doing the regeneration. I was impressed at how bushy the plants
looked after only 1 ½ years – those tiny plants do a bit of quick growing! Then
we saw the area after 2 ½ years (looking pretty good), and then 4 ½ (lots of
new seedlings in the undergrowth, and the trees are looking more tree-like).
They have to fence all the plants in to keep out the leaf-munching possums and
kangaroos, but Mike (Peggy’s husband and fellow researcher) showed us some echidna
and goanna burrow-holes, which shows that the burrowing critters make it in
anyway, which is really good for the plants since they help aerate the soil and
don’t eat the plants. The seedlings are put in randomly and densely (to further
reduce the attack of weeds), and everything that’s planted had been there
originally except for the she-oaks (aka a type of Casuarina), which are
normally found only on the coast. These are put in to boost the glossy-black
cockatoo populations, which are endangered on the island partly because they
only eat the pinecones from this one she-oak species (and I think the tree has
to have a certain virus in it or something as well, which is ridiculously
specific) and also because of nest-invaders like possums and other types of
parrots. Anyway the guy in charge of the nursery was really excited to see
“chewings” (aka pinecone remains) under the base of some of the she-oaks in the
4-year plots, because that means that glossy-black cockatoos have been using
the trees!
So it was a very educational day for me from the point of
view of island ecology and bush regeneration strategies, even if I didn’t get
to secure a volunteer position with Peggy (I did get to visit the station and
enjoy some more BBQ and a little lecture about how good echidnas and goannas
are for plants, and I also heard all about how absurdly hard echidnas are to
study, so maybe they’re not the best animal research species, despite how cool
they are)
The next day Cindy and I helped Scott a bit more in the
garden and then made apple ginger jam (super tasty) with some more of the
apples (even giving some away and making two types of jam and preserves, we
still had some leftover!). That night we got to see our first possum release. Scott
had set out a trap in the shed behind the house that had become possum
territory, and we drove the possum out a ways on back roads and released it to
a new home. It was cute to see it in the trap, because it was very similar to
the traps we used to catch ground squirrels, just a bit bigger. It took off
like a shot when we released it into the night, which was fun to see but
impossible to photograph.
Cindy had to leave the next morning, so it was up to me to
complete the next task of tearing down a bunch of bird netting in the garden
(Scott was convinced that it was helping the possums sneak in). Armed with a
knife, a ladder, and Irish music (I was still working my way through a lot of
tunes from St Patrick’s Day) I felt like a crazy pirate with a cutlass as I
hacked at all this netting, ripped it off the wire walls, and tugged it off the
orchard trees (as carefully as possible, since they were the booty I was trying
to save, as it were). It was very satisfying.
At one point Scott told me we had another possum to release,
and I said where, and he told me it was sleeping in the garden and he’d have to
pick it up. He got a big black barrel and I watched him sneak up behind this
slumbering possum (they’re nocturnal and can’t see well in daylight), grab it
by the tail, and wrangle it into the barrel.
We slapped a lid on it, lugged it to the “ute” (pronounced
“yoot”, means the pick-up truck), and drove away with it (Scott called it
transportation to the colonies for its thieving crimes). I got a video of it as
it ambled out of the barrel (it was a very fat possum) and into the bush.
I have to mention the awesome bird bath/kangaroo stream at
the front of the main house, which Liz fills with water at intervals to attract
the birds and thirsty marsupials. Pretty much every day I saw adorable little
birds bathing in the bath (I especially liked the grey fantail) and kangaroos
and/or wallabies drinking at the stream (I also saw them around my tent and the
garden and the bush and generally everywhere, it was awesome).
Sometimes there were little squabbles at the water hole
(once we watched two pairs of mother and mostly-grown-up joeys bat at each
other with their front feet as they tried to find drinking positions) but
usually they sorted it out and ignored us watching them from the kitchen
window.
If the water ran out, though, they would make sure we knew
it, with deliberate stares in our direction (once they even posed right outside
the front door when we were having dinner – which South Australians call “tea,”
just to be confusing). It was very cool to be able to watch them so often.
Saturday morning we had pancakes for breakfast, which was a treat (normally we had homemade muesli with homemade bread and homemade honey and/or jam, which wasn’t bad either) and later I finished demolishing the bird netting. I uncovered a few holes in the wire that were big enough for a possum to get through, so Scott and I were really hoping that no more possums would make it in that night. Sadly, we were mistaken, and I could see their eyes gleaming from the fruit trees that evening when I walked to my tent. We had already found and relocated another possum that day, which was interesting, because the possum managed to break out of the barrel while we were on the road, and suddenly it was loose in the back of the ute. I watched it walk deliberately up to the back corner, perch on the edge for a second, and then launch itself out of the truck and onto the road, like Toto fleeing from the witch on the bicycle. We circled back around to make sure it had made it to safety, and we couldn’t see it anywhere so it probably made it okay, but hopefully it won’t find its way back to the garden after its daring escape!
The next day I helped Scott look for the sneaking possums in
the garden (we found yet another one to release) and tried to patch up more
potential holes. We had dinner with another set of their friends, but on the
way we stopped at a different friend’s place to check out the status of some
hay (they wanted it for mulch for the garden). This guy, Doug, was originally
from Scotland and spoke in a gorgeous accent as he walked us out to the paddock
where he had some leftover hay rotting in the field. We debated how we were
going to transport it back to the Wallaby Run, but that was a problem for
another day. The house where we went for dinner was right on the water but on
the other side of Pelican Lagoon. They had some fish guts to try to feed to the
pelicans, but the pelicans didn’t turn up and instead we fed some big gulls who
didn’t need feeding but were fun to watch anyway. We also saw a ray swimming by
(just the edge of its fin was sticking out of the water) but we couldn’t lure
it to the fish guts to get a closer look. Here’s the sunset on the lagoon.
We had a delicious meal with chicken curry, chili,
multi-coloured carrots, couscous, and local wine, and were a bit more sluggish
on Monday morning. I helped out with various garden tasks, mostly watering the
orchard trees (which I had grown very fond of after negotiating around them all
the time when I was tearing down the netting and feeling responsible for them
and shaking my fist at the possums when I saw them on the trees) with a mixture
of worm poo to fertilize them. I also got to put the cornstalks (I pulled them
out on my very first wwoofing day) through the mulcher, which was a fun bit of
destruction. Then we went back over to Doug’s and I helped Scott roll one and
half giant bales of hay onto a trailer and the back of the ute. We disturbed a
giant centipede and a few mice as we messed with the semi-rotted hay, but
fortunately no snakes! I felt very much like a farmer pushing at the hay bales,
although the hay got stuck in my socks and gloves which was a less pleasant
feeling.
At some point over the weekend I wandered down to the lagoon
beach to wade in the water and explore more of the surrounding bush. The water
was green in places because of the amount of seaweed growing just under the surface
and there were lots of tiny mussels in sandy beds.
I was impressed to see a giant pink jellyfish (at a safe
distance away) nonchalantly floating along and looking like it would beach
itself at any moment. Monday evening Liz took me to Island Beach, which was
nearby but better for swimming than the lagoon, and I saw another jellyfish,
but this one tiny and black with white spots – it was so cute, I nearly called
it Squishy! The beach was deserted, except for pelicans, which was very nice
and relaxed.
Tuesday was my last full day, and I had the task to make
quince chutney to use up some quinces and apples. First I went over to
Pennington Bay again with Scott, because he was anxious to catch some fish (a
few schools had been spotted recently). We had no luck seeing anything in the
waves in the morning, so I made the chutney when I got back (well, everything
up to the bottling stage, it involved lots of chopping and even more stirring,
but tasted nice when I sampled it, although it’s supposed to be better after a
month of waiting). In the afternoon we went back to the Bay and Scott fished
while I swam.
We were just about to leave when Scott spotted a new school
nearby, so then I took a little mini-nap on the dunes while he tried to get
some more fish (he got a few tugs, but they always slipped off the line before
he could get them in). So we didn’t have fish for dinner, but Liz had too much
basil in the garden so I made pesto, which was epic, and we had more local wine
(at various times we had tried quince, apricot, and plum wine, from different
sources, and they were all really good and different from normal wine, although
I don’t know all the technical words to explain how).
The evening turned a bit interesting when we got a call from
Mike saying that a bushfire had started somewhere nearby. Over the next hour we
heard from different people and checked the online site, which said that
someone had reported a fire really close by, as well as one farther away. Liz
and Scott prepared their emergency escape trailer, putting in some of the more
crucial valuables and sorting through their equipment while we waited to hear
if we needed to evacuate (serious stuff). I had to bring up a bag of my
valuables too (just electronics, really, since my photos are my most important
possessions). It was a bit freaky, but we couldn’t see anything and we couldn’t
smell any smoke, and soon the website confirmed that the nearby fire had been a
false siting, so we could relax. There was still a fire going in that part of
the island, but it was a small grass fire at a beach a sufficient distance away
that wasn’t going to sweep through the bush and wreak havoc. So that was an
interesting and unexpected window into rural Australian life – fire is a real
threat, especially when you are living in the middle of a bush at the end of
the summer when everything is really dry.
We calmed down after that, and I persuaded Scott to play a
few songs about drought and Ned Kelly, which were mostly by an Australian
song-writer, John Williamson, and also a song about some European immigrants
who came over after WWII to build tunnels and are discussing about how they are
now Australians, even though they are “4 Germans, 3 Italians, 2 Yugoslavs, and
me [an Irish guy wrote the song].”
My last day was uneventful, the rain that had been building
finally broke (which was great for the fire danger) and I packed up my stuff
and cleaned out the tent so I could catch the ferry back in the evening. I had
to write a page to go in the wwoofer record book, and Scott put on the original
versions of the songs that he played the last night, which were really good and
I would have liked to get the music on my computer but the cd was being finicky
and wouldn’t let me.
Phew, I think that’s enough for now, this entry is really
the pinnacle of stream-of-consciousness and classic Annie-blog-writing, but I
hope you enjoyed it. I have many more travel stories to tell, but I think
Kangaroo Island was definitely a highlight (including the tour, which I’ll
write about soon), and I really appreciated the chance to wwoof with Scott and
Liz, who were fantastic.