HOME AGAIN

AT PEACE ON THE ROCKS: BLUFF POINT AUSTRALIA

COMING HOME

Many people we have met since coming home have asked:  Is that a year gone by already?

For Fulmaya and me, too,  it seemed as if we hadn't really been away all that long and it had all been a dream, a sojourn during which time had been zipped into a folder and filed away and labelled the past already. 

For the last year we've been having communications about the weather in Scotland.  Raining every day, my daughter wrote in one email.  Now, we've had a text from a friend, Thanks for bringing the sunshine back with you.  

Over the year, we haven’t experienced more than a week of rain – a wicked, palm-bending storm in Dongara, Australia; a few days of dust-settling drizzle in Kathmandu; and an unseasonable downpour in New York that added to the enveloping humidity.  I was quite looking forward to the rain on my return – dour Scottish rain – a drizzle that seems to penetrate the skin.  

I didn't have to wait long – a week in fact.  I’m looking out of my window at the slate roofs of the houses across the gardens and there is a steady light rain falling on them and leaving pearls of water strung out on the black electrical cables.  A crow complains from a nearby tree and shakes its feathers free and I’m reminded of the cormorants on the beach of Mandurah, drying their wings in the sun.

I've been asked a few times what my favourite place was.  I’m consistent in my answer – it has to be Australia.  In particular, Kalbarri.  The name sounded Irish to me and I envisaged a rugged captain of a ship with ruddy cheeks and whisky breath arriving and naming the place after his home town.  But I discovered later that the town was first visited by the crew from the Dutch East India Company who put two-mutinous sailors ashore.  No less colourful than my original imagined thought.

OUTSIDE THE BUNGALOW

We rented a spacious bungalow overlooking the Murchison River beyond which whales basked in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.  One exhaled water from its blow hole while it nursed its calf near the shore.  She had lain there for three-weeks, we were told, slowly rising and falling in the blue waves near the white sandy shore.

COW WITH ITS CALF IN THE SHALLOW WATERS

A steep path takes you to a lookout point.  From there you can see the place where the trading ship, the Zuytdorp was wrecked in 1712.  To the north of the town is the Rainbow Jungle, the Australian parrot breeding centre with hundreds of exotically plumed birds from all over the world: the first time I’d seen black parrots from the African forest, their iridescent feathers like an oil slick in the sun.

PRETTY PARROTS PREENING

As this was July, the winter temperature was in the low 20s, warm enough for us to sit on the shaded veranda in the evening with a glass of wine from one of the local vineyards and watch the crimson sunset in the west.  You could sense the world turning on its axis as a profound peace settled over you like a blanket and the cares of the world receded and you felt that this is the way to live in your old age – had we settled in our ways. 

But this was only the beginning of our senior gap year

How does it feel to be back in Scotland?  Well, there’s no doubt that Edinburgh is a beautiful city and especially so in the sunlight.  But the cold, summer rain drives you indoors and you watch the sparrows shake their feathers and preen from your window and wonder when the sun will breach the clouds again.

   

LAST DAYS IN KALBARRI

Walking today along a path that runs parallel to the seafront.  We end up at Red Bluff and sit in a little open hut with wooden benches and a table. Sandwiches with wholemeal bread followed by apples and pears fill us up for the return journey.  Of course, the seagulls try to join us for the meal and I'm always amazed at how one will threaten the others away with its squawking and pecking.  They are greedy, just like us, really.

Time here is so relaxing we decide to stay for another two-nights and journey on to Dongara later.  At the moment, looking out of the front porch the water is calm and reflects the trees in the distance where the water breaks against the sea ledge.

WAVES ON THE BEACH

Contact Adelle Taylor today and learn that an old friend of mine, her husband, Archie, died about nine-years ago.  He had a problem with alcohol, she says.  I know this.  Archie and I used to sing in pubs in the Gorbals for a little money, he on accordion and me on the guitar. We had to be very careful what we sang and most of his repertoire consisted of Irish songs wither on the protestant or the catholic side.  I haven’t seen Adelle for about 40-years so we decide to meet up in Perth with David Freedman for a reunion dinner.

Yesterday managed to arrange to get a booster jag for our hep A and B which should have been done in UK but we had left it too late. That meant paying an extortionate amount of money which we can apparently claim when we return home in a year’s time.

The doctor’s surgery is just a 5-minute walk from our apartment and but we decide to drive as things are running late.  The chemist has our prescription ready and for some reason we have to sign for the syringe and the medicine.  I’m not sure, but I think the medicine is already loaded there because I don’t remember the nurse doing anything but taking it out of the freezer bag, and injecting it.

The doctor who prescribed the booster the previous day is Scottish, from Glasgow, and practises in Edinburgh.  He doesn’t say much except that he’s over her for a few weeks, on exchange I presume.  He seems exhausted, probably jet lagged.

The nurse rubs my arm with her hand and injects the medicine before I can say anything, no swab or precaution against aids or any other germs she might have picked up from patients.  She does the same to Fulmaya.  As soon as we get back to the car, we take out the medical kit to swat our arms which are beginning to leak the liquid and cover it with a plaster.  Don’t they train nurses in hygiene here?

KALBARRI

EVENING SKY

A piece of news creeps into my consciousness and I’m reminded that a lot is happening in the rest of the world, outside of Kalbarri where we are at the moment.  The school holidays have come to an end and the thousands of caravans, trailers loaded with boats, utility vehicles, off-roaders, bikes, campers, some pulling cars behind campers and plain cars are meant to be heading back down south to cooler climes:  but there was not much evidence of this on the way in – they must have taken a different route out of the small town of Kalbarri.