A New Year

The new year will soon arrive in this part of the world.  We will spend it with family on an island off Tasmania almost identical in size and shape to Whidbey Island in Washington (but with about 1/50th the population).  As we sit drinking bubbly on the deck of a beach "shack" as they're called here in Australia, watching the sun go down on 2012 over mountains at the bottom of the earth, just a few dozen kilometres away the city of Hobart will be pulsing with an energy that is possibly one of the most exciting places to be on New Year's Eve.

Outdoor movie at Parliament House Lawns

Sullivans Cove, downtown Hobart and Mt Wellington

The Taste Festival will be in full swing on the waterfront, with special entertainment, fireworks and some of the best food and wine in the world being showcased at the annual event. The smaller Sydney to Hobart yachts will be arriving in the harbour as the party goes on, exhausted sailors cheered on by increasingly rowdy and appreciative crowds. 

The big maxi yachts that took line honours several days ago will probably have already left town, on to bigger and flashier places for their next race.  But if there was ever a place that feels like you're standing at the centre of the world at a moment as significant as the start of a brand new year that some people believed we wouldn't see, I don't think it gets much better than this little city at the bottom of the world. 

"Wild Oats" line honours winner in Sullivans Cove

With best wishes for a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year...

Rosie


  

The End of the World as we know it

The sun coming up on another new day.

It’s Saturday 22^nd December in Australia and the sun is coming up on yet another ordinary day.   Since new days start here before most other places, I'm guessing that the end of the world hasn’t happened.  At least in the way that seemed to be the most popular;  no major tsunamis or solar flares or eruptions or other natural disasters that signal the ultimate demise of the planet.  

But I wonder if the end of the world as we know it doesn’t necessarily have to be about doomsday prophesies that are so popular and so much easier to believe when we see evidence of all sorts of horror and mayhem in our own small worlds.   We had two double murders in the past week within an hour of my home in Tasmania  - nothing like the scale of the horror of New Town, Connecticut of course, and yet it could still be taken as an indicator of the world gone mad, as the whole state of Tasmania usually has only a few murders a year. 

Sun rising at my Mum's house

And yet I choose to believe that this may be just the beginning of the end of the world as we know it.  As in, the world we know that has become mad with consumerism, and greed and the horrific imbalance between the haves and the have–nots, and insane gun laws and fear and negativity, and lack of humanity and compassion for those who suffer with mental illness or poverty or have different beliefs than our own.  

I see so much evidence of people reconnecting with their humanity and spiritual life and grappling with the essence of what it is to be a human being.  People who are filled with a need to know what the one-in-an-infinitesimal-chance that they were conceived and born might mean, and if they have a higher purpose for being one of the people who populates the planet.  

I see the internet being used as a tool for good – for connecting, and pooling resources and giving the power back to the people and letting them truly choose who gets to be elected or exposed as a fraud or held accountable for their actions. 
 

I choose to believe that “the end of the world as we know it” is the promise of a new world of hope and humanity and joy, and of recognition that the “powers that be” are actually the simple ones that live inside us all. 

Thanks for listening...

Rosie 

Christmas Traditions - gingerbread houses and potbellied pigs

The post below appeared as a guest post on Communicating Across Boundaries, a blog from Boston, Mass. USA.  Marilyn invited posts about Christmas Traditions - many thanks to her for sharing this with her readers.

Profile tour photo

Christmas in Australia is quite different than in the northern Hemisphere.  When I was a kid I loved that it came at the beginning of the summer so when the excitement of the holiday season died down you still had the whole summer vacation to look forward to, plus the summer weather meant you could actually ride the bike you may have received!

With 7 siblings and no extended family, we had to create our own Christmas traditions that included singing carols around the piano, Christmas crackers and party hats, big lunches of fresh green salads and cold ham and special local “pinkeye potatoes“, family photos, and a softball game at the local football oval.  This all happened after going to church to sing and listen to the choir, but then “sneaking” out (as only a family of 9 can do) before the sermon. The one time we stayed it was about people who only go to church on special occasions!

One of our very imperfect gingerbread houses

When I married an American and moved to the USA there were times when my heart ached for a Tasmanian family Christmas.  For several years I yearned for those old traditions, but as my kids got older I came to cherish our little family of five and our quiet, peaceful Christmases at home, with no other family dynamics.   And when we started our annual Christmas carolling party at our home on Whidbey Island, near Seattle, the mild ache of not having my sisters and my brothers’ wives to sing the descant in “O Come all ye Faithful’ was mitigated by having a local musical genius from New Zealand playing the piano just like my father did, as well as knowing the Downunder version of “Away in a Manger’.

One day when the kids were quite young I read about a great gingerbread recipe in the Seattle Times and so began my very favourite tradition that endures to this day.  I make a huge gingerbread house, complete with windows made of Jolly Ranchers (as much I love and prefer Australian “lollies” I’ve yet to find ones that melt perfectly to make beautiful stained glass windows).

The only rule is that everyone gets to do their own thing with their part of the house and no one is allowed to complain.  That includes comments about the gummy bears on the roof with toothpick spears sticking out of them, courtesy of our son.  Last year’s had an “occupy the North Pole” igloo, thanks to our oldest daughter and, from our other daughter, perfectly laid out flowers around the windows of what inevitably (and ironically) is a church every year, since we discovered the stained glass windows.

A happy and well-fed Izzy the Pig!

After several days or weeks of eating the gingerbread house till it becomes a sad wreck that looks like a survivor of a bomb attack, the part I used to enjoy the most was feeding the remains to my beloved pot-belly pig Isabel. She was appreciative in a way that only a 300 lb pig can be, and when we moved back to Australia I wanted her to know that we were carrying on the tradition and hadn’t forgotten her.  

So, even though she can’t be with us when we make the house, I now have a new tradition – I pack up a huge doubled bagged heap of the remains and present them to her every summer when we return to our property.  She is always very pleased to see me when I come back, even though she is loved and cared for by the people who rent our house, but she is even more pleased to see the gift that I carry 7,000 miles in my luggage to let her know that I miss her.

An AMAZING Tale from Two Islands!!

Bruny Island

My sister-in-law called me on Sunday afternoon from Bruny Island, which is a gorgeous little island off the coast of Tasmania, amazingly similar in size and shape to Whidbey Island but with about 1/50^th the population – just 600 year round residents.  Our family has a “shack” (beach cabin) over there and my sister-in-law and my brother were returning from a hot, sunny weekend with my mother and their son.  They had just missed the ferry, so decided to walk over to the café by the ferry dock, which they almost never do.  There they met a man and his wife who had been visiting the island on a motorcycle.  In the course of the conversation, it turned out that the couple was from Washington; not just Washington but Whidbey Island, and not just Whidbey Island but Clinton, the same rural area where we live on Whidbey.  Not only that, he knew who I was because he’d eaten “Rosie’s potatoes” at Bayview Farmers Market where I had had my food concession trailer, “Rosie’s Tucker Wagon” for 10 years.  

 Whidbey Island Ferry

Our Whidbey neighborhood

We made phone contact, and they were leaving town the next day to head to Port Arthur and then up the east coast, where they were going to meet another Whidbey Island fan - Kate from Kate’s Berry Farm in Swansea (see upcoming post).   

Before they left, they stopped in to visit me in Hobart and we found out that not only do they live in the Clinton area but we are actually neighbours - they live less than two miles from our place on the island!!  In such a small place you would think our paths would have crossed somewhere closer to home than the Farmers Market, or that we wouldn't have to travel to, literally, the other side of the world to meet each other!  We only had a few moments to chat before I had to prepare for the arrival of a big cruise ship, but we exchanged information.  Actually, I gave them my Island Time Tours business card, and they mentioned how I could find them in the little Whidbey Island phone book and we made plans to meet get together on the island next summer. 

Songlines connecting!

My daughter swears that there’s the equivalent of an aboriginal “songline” between our two islands, invisible lines that connect and interweave two significant places on the earth.  I can’t help but think she’s right!

Thanks for listening…

Rosie

Izzy the Bus is wounded

Izzythe Bus at home

Izzy the Bus is wounded!  As we were about to pay the bill for her regular service at a new place that we hadn't used before, the person who brought her around to the front of the station managed to side swipe a metal pole.  When he said he'd scraped the paint off I wasn't too worried, but when I saw what the poor guy had hoped was just a scrape I knew it wasn't going to be that simple.  

And of course it hasn't been.  Over $7000 worth of damage and at least 3 weeks out of commission.  Just 10 minutes before, I had finalised a charter to the Coal River Valley wine country in two days and the only bus I could find to replace her for that trip was a slightly shabby 25-seater beast with no air conditioning and a gear box that took me the first half of the trip to figure out, much to the amusement (and understanding) of the 20 kids on board who were heading out for a friend's birthday picnic at a small local winery.

Izzy the Pig

The upside is that has given me a whole new appreciation for the special beauty and personality of my own bus.  She's the only one I want to drive; the only one that can do a U-turn in normal street (if necessary) and happily chug down tiny one-way streets in small villages.

Izzy's wound - much worse than it looks!

I have never been one to be attached to my cars or give them names, but there has always been something about Izzy right from the beginning that has reminded me of my beloved pig Isabel, and my feelings and affection for Izzy the Pig have somehow been transferred to my bus.  

And it's not just me.  When I checked in with one of my "Hobart Jaunt" regulars, our phone conversation ended with a heartfelt "give our best to Izzy".  But the most telling reaction was from an old family friend who was visiting my Mum (and has become a regular Jaunt passenger).  When I told her what had happened she groaned with sympathy and said "Oooh.....poor Izzy"  That's when I knew I wasn't just imagining it - she really does have a personality and I will be so glad to see her back on the road.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!  I have fallen behind with my posts.  Actually, I have posts ready to go but am suddenly having trouble figuring out how to add photos and my daughters (who so far are the only people who regularly read my posts anyway - I still don't know how this all works) tell me the photos really add to my posts.  

But it's Thanksgiving, my favourite American holiday, and even though when I first lived in the USA I didn't understand what it was about, and my friends at the time didn't seem to be able to articulate the significance of it, I eventually understood it to be about nothing more complicated than being together with friends and family, eating good food and taking a moment to be thankful - always a good practice, I find, even if it's only once a year.

It's also the one holiday that, try as they might, the media and advertisers and other corporate marauders have not managed to make commercial in any significant way and that gives me such faith in the power of simple human traditions.

We have had Thanksgiving dinners here in Tasmania before.  While I don't generally push our American traditions on my family here, and it's disconcerting to see Halloween becoming a ridiculous commercial farce that has people scrambling to imitate what they see on American TV without having grown up with the cultural reference point that makes it all make sense, Thanksgiving is special enough to make the cut.  And since we're a day ahead here, we get to have our dinner on the Friday which makes more sense to my Tasmanian family.  It also means we get to do what I think is one of the most magical things about this occasion, and that is sit down to a meal that thousands of people all over the USA (and other pockets of the world) are all doing at the same time.  Like a gratitude tsunami...

Thanks for listening....
and Happy Thanksgiving today and every day!

Hobart - one of the top 10 cities in the world!

The Hobart Waterfront

Lonely Planet has put Tasmania on the world map by ranking Hobart one of the top 10 cities in the world to visit – not bad for a city of just 200,000 people.  I hear from people every day about how wonderful Tasmania is and how they wish they had planned to spend more time here, but what really put us on the map was the genius and generosity of one man and his vision. 

Downtown Hobart - GPO

MONA The Museum of Old and New Art is the largest private art collection in the southern hemisphere.  David Walsh is a very successful businessman who made his fortune as a professional gambler and grew up in a dodgy neighbourhood near the promontory where his $80 million creation sits on the edge of the River Derwent.  The project is completely independent and privately funded, with no involvement of government funding, boards of directors or non-profit status – it is truly this man’s personal vision and he happens to be pretty eccentric.  

MONA contains a huge range of classic, unusual, controversial and sometimes confronting works of art.  The centrepiece is "Snake" by Sidney Nolan, a work that is so huge it has only once been displayed before but now has a permanent home at MONA.  The most controversial, disliked and yet most-viewed work is commonly known as the “poo machine,” a work well-sealed behind glass that displays the whole process of what happens to food when it is consumed and then finally emerges at the end into a toilet displayed at eye level.

View of Hobart from the top of Mt Wellington

For the first year, entry to MONA was free and it still is for locals who can prove their status by showing either a drivers license or evidence that they have two heads (a standard joke about Tasmanians from mainlanders who are becoming more and more annoyed with us, the traditional “poor cousins” of Australia!)  

I remember when MONA first opened less than two years ago there was huge excitement in the community that had watched this creation literally rise up out of the waters of the Derwent River.  Rumours flew that all sorts of A-listers and VIPs were going to be part of the celebration - word was that David Bowie and Mick Jagger were going to fly in for the occasion. 

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on Hobart's waterfront.

What actually happened was that the typical VIPs and local players and heavies were made to wait in line for the free food and wine just like everyone else, and the press from mainland Australia who were all poised to deliver a scathing dismissal of this annoying little event in the backwater of Hobart, were shocked when David Walsh didn’t even bother making a statement to them.  His statement was in the welcoming atmosphere and stunning setting of his creation, with his VIPs and guests of honour being the tradesmen and workers who worked for years to bring his creation to life.  Several hundred random locals who had won a spot at the event in a lottery sat on bean bag chairs with everyone else and mixed it up in a true vision of humanity being what it is supposed to be – inclusive, welcoming, and accepting of everyone, even a kid from the dodgy side of town who rose up like his creation and stayed true to himself.

And now MONA’s being compared to the Guggenheim, but when people come  

to Tasmania to see it they will also be stunned by the diversity of history and culture,
world-class cuisine, wine and whisky that this little state also offers.

For people who venture out of Hobart there are some of the most pristine wilderness regions on the planet, small friendly villages, unique convict heritage, and world-class festivals and theatre and other art.  Oh, and the cleanest air and water in the world…

 

So thanks, Lonely Planet, and David Walsh of MONA for putting this magical little island on the map.  And for people reading this ... come and see us - Izzy the bus knows the way to all the special places here, and our “authentic, unhurried” philosophy at Island Time Tours is perfectly suited to this special island at the bottom of the world.   

Thanks for listening.....

Rosie