Celebrating Fremantle

November 26



Well it was time to get ready to go home. This meant many goodbye dinners including a lovely one at the local Indain Restaurant with Betty Apps.


It was also time to say goodbye to our little shopping mall:





It seemed like Freo was even saying a personal goodbye as there was a big Town festival parade that went by right outside the domicile on Pakenham:



There was this lovely lady walking around amongst the crowd:





...and the Waldorf school participated with a lovely dragon of colored paper.



There were Chinese style dragons...



..and denizens of unknown alternative universes...



The colors and imagination were genuinely awesome.



And I also learned that the Hare Krishnas are still around.



Their float was beautifully colored...






...and as it rounded the corner I even caught a glimpse of the holy man within.



I was sad that the students were no longer around to enjoy this, but it made this a marvelous personal experience that warmed me inwardly for days.

An Evening Out With John

October 30,

Well, I am now more than two months behind on my blogging!! I thought I'd post some pictures from a lovely evening out with our landlord. I've got the system bugs worked out, I think, so I'll tell a bit about our evening out.

John picked us up and showed us his apoartment/condominium that he is upgrading. he has done an amazing job and it is a lovely place. We arrived in time to watch the sunset on his balcony and enjoy a nice glass of wine.



His apartment is in a bit of disarray since there are builders tromping in and out and working on various parts of the dwelling (so I tried not to take images of the messier areas). This is a shot taken from the living room area of the dining nook.



There are many objets d'art and John has a very good eye for art. He is quite eclectic in his interests. He is well read (particularly in the field of history and supports the arts (as do many Australians - in fact I am quite impressed by the way that art takes a major place in Australian culture - rendering the idea of the nexus art and class debatable - although John is quite patrician in his schooling and interests despite his farming roots.) There is a sculpture by the person who did the aboriginal woman sculpture on the hearth shelf in our apartment -



This piece is more primitive - called the drover's wife - quite exhaustive and sad in a way - but another lovely piece of art which is visible on a shelf against the side wall(on the left side of the picture - you might want to click on the photo to enlarge it - but I fear there will not be much detail.).



The above picture shows the other side of the living room area. One can see that he has collected many interesting pices of historical and artistic memorabilia. There are also photos of his children and family including (in the study area) a fenian document granting honor to his father.

Cottesloe is a lovely, sleepy little palce and we went to a restaurant around the corner (full of original paintings and red decor, (looking a bit washed out in my phto here)..



where we dined on delicious fare and had a nice bottle of wine.



Unfortunately I did not drink my fair share of the wine and this became a problem, as we got stopped by the police on the way home. This turned out to be one of the more nerve-wracking incidents of our stay abroad. Long story short, Mom and I ended up driving John's car back to our apartment and he met us there by taxi. After some good conversation and checking in on the students, John was able to drive back home safely. The Australians are very serious about DUI (what they call drink driving and licenses get lost for years for a first offense and revoked for a second one. (I don't know the exact details, but they are severe in comparison with American standards.) We were all quite rattled.

Margaret's Beach House

Around the 27th of October:

Sometime around October 27th we were invited by Margaret to visit her beach house south of Mandurah. Mom and I packed up our art supplies and said Hi to Mick on our way out. Here he is in his flower pot so he can look out the window.



We joined Margaret and a friend down South. Margaret's house is in the settlement called Florida Beach. What follows are a few photos from our visit. This is her dining area in the beach house where we had a lovely lunch of bread and salad with a preprepared chook.



The beach house is a wonderful space for art.



Outside was sunny and clear. One can see part of her wall which she hired a mason to emulate on a different section of the property.



After lunch I took a walk out to the beach while Mom and Margaret and Mom chatted. This was an opportunity to take a few pictures...



... and gave me a chance to indulge my artist's eye without betraying my lack of physical dexterity (drawing-wise).



The sand had these interesting formations.



On teh way back to Margaret's house, I saw this bumper sticker, which in some ways epitomizes the masculine culture of West Australia (to me).



The snails were evidently a bit of a problem and quite large. (That is what those white things are on the aloe.)



There is opuntia in the gardens, and I had to admire the red fruits on this one.



This is a wonderful gate out to some trees that are actually in the neighbor's yard. Margaret was very sad about those trees, because the neighbors asked if they could take them down and she was too nice to say no.



So she painted her beloved trees when we got together for a little art time.



Mom and I chose other subjects.



(You've already seen my results earlier on the blog.)



All too soon it was time to return home, so we packed up and headed back. We watched the sun set over the ocean as we drove back to downtown Freo.

Penguin Island

October 22 (Happy Anniversary Don back home!)

Although I have already written about this field trip in the csbsjuaustralia.blogspot.com blog, I thought I could add a few more photos on our personal blog as it was a pretty interesting experience for me. Of course seeing the little penguin nesting under the steps was the highpoint, but I was also thrilled to see the seals and some of the other native bird life. The Australian Pelican is the largest in the world and so although we were ostensibly off to seal island to see the seals (and see them we did)





...it was the pelicans that were more fascinating. As you can see there are hundreds of them here on this island.



(Here an enlarged detail from the above photo.)



Here you can see some of them flying in for a landing.





On our walk back from the boat to Penguin Island we passed by multitudes of nesting seagulls. The baby seagulls were adorable.



Of course the parents weren't too happy about all these human beings walking so close to their young and their nests, so they raised a hue and cry as we walked by.



The eggs were a dark dull green as you can see and located more or less openly in the scrub near the beach.



This area was also full of skinks that lurked nearby to prey upon the eggs and helpless young birds.



The penguin center itself rehabilitates injured penguins and keeps the ones who could not successfully readapt to the wild.



We attended an informative session about the penguins and had the opportunity to see them fed.



Fairy penguins are the smallest of the penguins.



They are also sometimes called blue penguins because their coats have a bluish cast to them.



They fed the penguins and we also got a chance to see them swim around their pool.



They swim amazingly fast and it was quite difficult to catch them on film.





After the demonstration we headed out for a walk around the island. This is an injured seal that has a large wound on the back side. He stays by himself but seems to be surviving despite his horrible injury.



More seagull eggs we saw along the walk.



The tramp around the island was a bit challenging, but Mom made it with a little help from the students in the group. (We had to walk over some pretty rocky places. We did get to see various seabirds including these terns that were nesting on a platform.




At this point I think I will close. I'll include some plant pictures of our trip to Serpentine Falls in the next section of the blog.

Weird Objects

And this is a shawl knitted from spun dog hair

Prison and Where I am.

No, That is not one and the same!! Anonymous commented on my last blog asking where I was. Life has been very busy. As program director for 22 students I find myself rather busy keeping them entertained and safe (see my blog csbsjuaustralia.blogspot.com if you have any questions or are hankering to see some pictures of my lovely young adult "children". ) So the answer to the question is that I'm still in Fremantle as busy as can be and hoping to find a spare moment to catch up on my personal blogging one of these days. (It will have to be soon, because I'll be leaving for home in a little over a week!)

Today, for example I graded papers until my brain turned to mush and then I was incapable of doing anything except eating leftover chocolate cake from our last birthday celebration and goodbye dinner! Tomorrow I have to get a grip and get some exercise, but in the mean time I thought I'd load some pictures from Mom's and my second visit to the Fremantle prison.

October 20, 2006

On our first visit to the Fremantle prison we had been told if we wanted to do a second tour we could take "The Great Escapes" tour for just 5$ more. I guess they were desperate for our money, because they extended the offer over the period of a week, so sure enough a week later we were rested and ready for another trek up to and through the prison and since I still hadn't seen the Catalpa exhibit (for which our flat is named) I was determined to go in and read about the escape from prison by the daring Fenian rebels.

I won't post a lot about the trip, but it was quite interesting to hear about Western Australia's most famous criminal Moondyne Joe(Whose real name was Johns). Wikipedia explains Joe's first offense as follows:



On 15 November 1848, Johns and an associate named John Williams were arrested near Chepstow for "... illegally entering the premises of Mr Richard Price, Esquire, of Pentwyn Clydach... and from there taking three loaves of bread, one piece of bacon, several cheeses, a kettle and a quantity of salt". Arraigned at the Brecon Assizes on charges of burglary and stealing, the pair pleaded not guilty. On 23 March they were tried at the Lent Assizes before Sir William Erle. Newspaper reports of the trial suggest that the pair gave an unexpectedly spirited defence, but Johns was abrasive and "contravened the conventions of court procedure". The men were convicted and sentenced to ten years' penal servitude. Edgar (1990) observes that in several other cases brought before the same judge that day, guilty pleas to very similar charges resulted in sentences ranging from three weeks to three months.

Joe actually got a Ticket of leave after arriving in Fremantle and settled in the Avon valley. Later he was imprisoned for horse stealing and entered into a repeated career of escaping and being re-imprisoned (Each time his sentence was extended longer and longer and each escape found him hiding out in the Darling mountains near Perth.) They even built a specific cell for him with studs all over the floors and walls to keep him from escaping (although it was usually from the yard that he effected his escapes and not from his cell.)

Anyway - this visit allowed us to see the refurbished building without its scaffolding :



This is a visiting pen - the room to the right is for "Non Contact" prisoners and thus has two viewing slits, while the room to the right has only one slit for prisoners who get to be in the same room with their visitors.



There are several places not on the regular tour that we got to visit including this room occupied by a forger who did beautiful pictures on the wall from memory and covered them over when he wasn't working on them so no one would know he was doing them.



We also visited a different chapel from the main one on the regular tour.



I was fascinated by the imagery of prison and so will mostly just offer up a few photos like this connecting yard.



On the tour we were also educated on the different kinds of "pie holes"and orifices for passing cigarettes to prisoners. I was taken with the numbering of the rooms in this area of the prison. We were told that there were no rooms with the number 6, because it was too much like a hangman's noose.



There were some lovely, lyrical images to be found in the yard.



This image of the walls and a dandelion shows how brittle the walls actually are. Inmates were able to break through the crumbly material fairly easily.



Here are a couple more photos from the tour:








One section that I had never seen before was the women's quarters. This yard could not have been very pleasant for the few women who were imprisoned there.



We also got to hear about the Postcard bandit, Berenden Abbott, who used to commit crimes and then send a postcard of pictures of himself to taunt the authorities with their inability to capture him.

Finally I also got to spend some time in the exhibit about the Catalpa escape.



Irish revolutionaries (Fenians) who were imprisoned as political prisoners in Australia were rescued by a group of men who hired a US ship and came to Australia ostensibly as a whaling ship. The convicts were smuggled aboard and when the British wanted to fire upon the escape ship the Captain dared them to fire on the American flag. A prior incident made this a very risky thing to do, so the rebels were able to sail away uncaptured on the whaling ship Catalpa.



There were many interesting exhibits, images from the diaries a few items from the Catalpa and I was glad we had gone.

Creatures of the Night

October 18, 2006

I'm almost a month behind in the blog and since there is only one Yank down under here now I'm writing under a fictitious precept but about a time when there were still two of us here. (grin).

One of the more interesting things that my Mom and I did while she was still here was a visit to Dryandra Woodland park to see some of the nocturnal marsupials.

I had originally hoped to drive through historic York, but we got lost (big surprise) and ended up getting a late start, so eventually we had to turn around in order to get ot the park in time for our appointment to see the night animals.

We did stop along the way to look at flora and fauna along the side of the road and found some particularly nice wild flowers at a little rest stop half way to the park.



As you can see the woods have a different quality than those in the south, still pleasant but the area feels more sparsely populated and dryer.





These are not lush spreads of flowers and yet they are quite abundant and varied in form.





We arrived at the park a little over an hour before our appointed time and feared we would not find the entrance to the animal sanctuary so we drove around the park a bit.



The above picture does not capture the peculiar quality of the woods the way the picture (below) on the web site does.



Unfortunately all the driving around meant we lost the sun and did not have time to draw as I had planned. Instead we wolfed down a sandwich amidst multitudes of flies and after a quick duck into the brush then headed for the sanctuary.



I took a few quick pictures in the bush while I searched desperately for a numbat famous for being one of the few diurnal marsupials that stayed awake and fed during daylight hours. Alas no numbat and very little light to take pictures by.



Dryandra Woodland Park is named for a peculiarly Australian plant form, the Dryandra, that grows in abundance in this area of Western Australia.



It is related to the South African Protea and is a strange alien-like plant form with unusual pointy leaves and antennaed flowers. (sort of).



This is an interior part of the continent and thus does not have the gorgeous beaches and humid air. Instead there is a dryer climate that serves as a home to the ants and termites and the animals that feed upon them.

The CALM (Conservation and Land Management office) website comments, "Although the numbat is probably Dryandra's best known inhabitant, woylies, tammar wallabies, brushtail possums, tawny frogmouths, kangaroos and wallabies are regularly seen by visitors to Dryandra. More than 100 species of birds live in the area, including the mound-building malleefowl."

Of course we did not see the numbat, but the Barna Mia sancturay has a big fence inside of which they keep members of endangered species to protect them from predators while attempting to breed these animals in the wild in order to release them back in to their natural habitat. They feed these animals at night so that visitors can see them (but keep the percentage of feed down so that the animals msintain their foraging habits and will be able to survive in the wild.)

The guide...



first does an educational program which tells of how and why they bait the non-native with poison-laced meat. The posion is derived from local plants which are posionous to European species , but to which the Australian animals have long become immune through constant contact. Then we go out in the dark and congregate around red lights to watch for the animals. Of course there was not enough light to take photos but that did not stop me and here is some of what we saw:







Mostly we saw woylies and bilbies. Here (from the Barna Mia website) is a bilby.



We also saw lots of boodies, and...



more exciting this rufous hare-wallaby.



Altogether we saw five different rare species and went home absolutely thrilled with the experience (even though
an inconsiderate British man insisted on talking through much of the waiting and thus risked scaring the animals away!)

We drove home in the dark contented and aware of the small animals we saw but could not identify on the side of the road.
(I guess we need to go back for a second course!)