Night out in Brisbane

That night was our only non-concert night, so we had planned a big night in Brisbane! I had bought a pack of playing-card-sized cards - each one contained information about a bar in Brisbane. I had selected about 10 for an area where we were going to eat so we could have a pub crawl from the restaurant. The restaurant we chose based on a leaflet about Brisbane restaurants, it was such a tough choice but we decided on one eventually and booked a table. It turned out to be a sensational dining experience, quite expensive but definitely worth the money. I then got my pack of handbag-sized cards out and we headed to our first bar – which looked like it had been transformed into a shop, ah! We had more luck with the next ones, and as we followed the route we ended up in some fantastic bars; trendy bars, a bar with a live band playing, a café-bar looking onto the main street, a huge converted post-office and a jazz bar with live jazz!! We would never have found many of the ones we visited so it was great having the inside information! It was a fantastic night, but sadly we couldn’t party too early in the morning as we had a date with an aussie bloke called Steve Irwin at his zoo the next day…

Koalas hangin' out during the storm

It’s not a huge place, but big enough to have a good few hours there. We had a great afternoon which actually got abruptly ended by the arrival of a mini cyclone to Brisbane!! Luckily for us, the centre of the cyclone was in south Brisbane so we just got really heavy rain for about an hour! South Brisbane had their power cut off, hail stone the size of cricket balls and severe winds. We had to shelter in the koala area so we were sat on benches surrounded by koalas who didn’t seem remotely bothered about the weather around them!!

Feeding a pretty faced wallaby!

We also saw wombats, cassowary (huge bird), echidnas (look like hedgehogs - one of the only two monotremes (egg-laying mammal) along with the platypus), dingos which are wild dogs, crocodiles, snakes, emus (second largest bird in the world) and a selection of tropical birds. Trevor the Tasmanian Devil is the most dangerous animal at the sanctuary – they are so called because they eat large prey from the inside out and therefore come out covered in blood.

Andy with an old kangaroo

The other main feature at Lone Pine is the huge field where all the Kangaroos and Wallabies hang out (about 130 of these too). You can buy some roo food and have them eating out of your hands (and have evil brush turkeys trying to get to the food first!). It was fantastic just strolling in amongst all the kangaroos lying around in the field! They are such sweet animals too – it’s so sad that all the ones I’ve seen in the wild are dead at the side of the road. We took loads of photos feeding a range of wallabies and kangaroos – it’s not something you get to do every day after all!

Andy's new friend

The koala keepers present two shows a day to tell you all about koalas, the first thing they tell you is that you shouldn’t call them koala bears as many people do – they aren’t bears, they are marsupials! Koalas are closely related to the wombat. The unbelievable thing is that the joey (baby koala) is born the size of a jelly bean, it then wriggles it’s way into the mother’s pouch where it feeds and grows.
Koalas sleep a great deal, on average 18 hours a day! This is because their food of eucalyptus leaves is very low in energy. The eucalyptus leaves have a very high water content which means that the koala very rarely needs to drink water, the name ‘koala’ comes from an aboriginal word meaning ‘no drink’.
At Lone pine, there are different areas for the koalas – a kindergarten for the ‘kids’, a bachelor pad for the young men and a retirement home for the elderly to relax in!
We both got our photo taken cuddling a koala, which was great!! They also let you take as many photos as you want on your own camera, as well as getting your own souvenir photograph. Koalas do ‘mess’ quite a lot, so it is advisable not to wear a white top if you decide to hug one…

Me and my koala

One of the main attractions to the koala sanctuary is that you can have your photo taken ‘cuddling’ a koala! There are lots of photographs there showing all the celebrities who have done this – including Janet Jackson and the Pope! Koala cuddling has actually been banned in New South Wales since 1997, but is still legal in Queensland – although koalas can only be cuddled for less than 30 minutes per day!! It’s not a 5 day working week for the koala – they must get every fourth day off to ensure that they get plenty of time to eat and sleep. At Lone Pine, they "clock on" and "clock off" the koalas when they go to the koala cuddling area. I’m not sure what the rate of pay is!

Koala dude chilling in the Batchelor Pad

Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary

On the Sunday (27th November), we caught the bus to Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary which is about half an hour from the centre of Brisbane. Lone Pine is the world’s first and only koala sanctuary and has over 130 resident koalas, amongst a variety of other animals, birds and reptiles.

Oasis in action: An excellent photo if I may say so myself!!

Oasis - Saturday 26th November 2005 - Brisbane

That evening we were going to see Oasis play at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre! After checking with the hotel receptionist where our venue was, we set off walking from the hotel aiming to get something to eat and drink first at South Bank on the river – a short walk from the venue. Our first problem was that our chosen eating location was extremely busy and popular and people were queuing out of the dorrs to get tables. We found a pub that served food, but although we are nearly 11 years over the legal drinking age we weren’t allowed in without ID cards!! To our dismay, our first meal in Brisbane was a sausage roll and a bottle of water from a bakers!! We decided that we might as well go and watch the support band and forget about having a drink before the concert. We arrived at the Brisbane Exhibition Centre (anyone spot the mistake yet??!) which was strangely quiet, although with it being so huge we thought the concert must be at the other end. We checked with a taxi driver nearby who confirmed that this was the location and the concert was probably right at the other side of the building. As we passed couples in formal attire – tuxedos and ballgowns, we were beginning to feel a little worried. I asked the lady at the reception where we should be heading for the Oasis concert and she just gave me one of those horrified sympathetic looks and explained that this was the exhibition centre, the entertainment centre is on the outskirts of Brisbane about 45 minutes away in a taxi!! Luckily for us, a taxi had stopped just outside to drop some more dressed up people off so we explained our situation to him and jumped in. He was very understanding and sped all the way there in record time so it was about 8.30pm when we arrived. After handing our life savings to the taxi driver, we were confronted with huge queues of people, every single person was frisked and all bags were checked before anyone was allowed into the building, so no water or any kind of drink allowed! We finally got into the venue and got a good space on the floor (we were at the front of the back section of the floor area so good view). It felt like we were back in the UK, we have never seen so many English and Scottish people in one place since arriving here!! In fact we struggled to find any Australians!! All the travellers, backpackers, holidaymakers, and ex-pats were here en force to support Oasis!!
The band was really good and played all their classics as well as new songs from their last album. However, Liam only said about 3 things and Noel didn’t speak at all apart from to dedicate ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ to “Australia’s sh*t cricket team”! So, the music was fantastic, but I felt a bit let down by the concert as a whole due to their unsmiling arrogance on stage – even though I know that is the way they are, it just felt as though they were going through the motions and not personalising the show or doing anything extra to really make me think, ‘wow’. Plus the set was as though they had bought some strings of lights at the last minute and draped them over their speakers and drums!
The set list for those interested was: F.in in the Bushes, Turn Up the Sun, Lyla, Bring it on Down, Morning Glory, Cigarettes and Alcohol (I’m so glad I’ve heard this live, it is one of my all time favourites! Liam aptly dedicated this to George Best), Importance of being Idle, The Masterplan, Songbird, A Bell will Ring, Acquiesce, Live Forever, Mucky Fingers, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova, Rock n roll Star, Encore: Guess God Thinks I'm Abel, The Meaning of Soul, Don't Look Back in Anger, My Generation

An old friend I met in the shopping centre!

Brisbane

On the 26th November, exactly 4 months since we first set eyes on the land of Oz, we touched down in Brisbane. It is a 1 hr 40 minute flight from Mackay to Brisbane, or a 14 hour drive (the equivalent of driving from Dundee down to Land’s End to put that into perspective!). It is slightly cooler in Brisbane than the temperatures further north in Mackay, but it is by no means cold, averaging around 30 degrees while we were there!
After dropping our cases off at our hotel in Brisbane we had a walk through a lovely park into the city centre to do some much awaited shopping! There is a main mall lined with shops right in the centre which is pedestrianised and also a few shopping centres at either end of this street. My hard earned cents from Coles were jingling with excitement as the big name shops came into view, shopping is so much more exciting when you are deprived for so long! In the centre there are international shops like HMV, Borders, Nike and Tiffany’s as well as big name national shops and department stores with all the designer handbags, perfumes, clothes etc. in. We decided to split up and meet in a few hours so I ran off like I was on a 1 minute trolley dash and started spending. I managed to buy a record 5 pairs of shoes, CD’s, DVD’s and 2 bags! The shoes were mostly ‘thongs’ because that is all anyone wears, it is too hot for anything else, and it is just not practical wearing heels in the bush!! My current shoes looked so jaded that I changed into a new pair I had bought - yes, you will be wisely saying that that was not a good idea, and indeed it wasn’t as I still have the scars to show for the blisters I endured that afternoon and couldn’t wear thongs for a week afterwards!! When I met up with Andy I could hardly get down the street with all my shoe boxes and other bags of stuff, and he, bless, had one postcard-sized bag containing 6 postcards he’d bought!!

Oasis in action: An excellent photo if I may say so myself!!

Apologies for the lack of blog postings and e-mails recently, as we have recently moved house, we had to get the phone line here connected, which has taken a long time to sort out. We should be getting broadband connected in the next few days so everything will be a lot whizzier! I will be gradually catching up with bloggage and mails in the next week so bear with me!

Our First Barbeque!

As I may have mentioned previously, barbeques here are so not the disposable cardboard boxes with charcoal in that us English are accustomed to. That fortnight each year where the weather suits, we all go dashing to get our 2-pack disposable barbeque, empty Tesco of every single type of barbeque meat they had on the shelf and then actually buy some of that charcoal that has been sat outside the petrol stations for years, only to get home and … it’s spittiiiing!!
Here however, the barbeque is not a cheap, disposable, charcoal burning affair – it is a sophisticated machine of status. It matters how many burners you have, how big your gas bottle is, if you have an add-on wok burner at the side, or a hot plate to keep things warm, a rotating kebab skewer, a cupboard underneath for utensils, a hood to cover the food etc. etc. Most people here hardly use their oven grill, why bother when you have a spaceship docked outside to char-grill your meats with, cook potatoes, fry the vegetables and even cook eggs?!
We purchased a reasonable spec of barbeque and have parked the gleaming silver beast outside on our patio. However, our problem was that we didn’t really have much of a clue what to do and when to cook things and since these are the focus point of any social get together here, we decided to have a sneaky practice run one evening. Andy took up the man’s role of chief barbeque controller, whilst I, the lowly Sheila, prepared the salads in the kitchen. It actually went really well, although we did, in our excitement, cook enough food for 6 people.

The upper garden to the right of the house

The estate we are in was purpose built for Anglo Coal (Andy’s employer) so the layout is fantastic with paths and green areas everywhere, and a huge park which is literally over the road from our house. Our street, Fenech Court, is a small cul-de-sac so we don’t have a lot of traffic going past. All the streets round this area are named after famous Australian sporting people. Jeff Fenech was a boxer, so in my quest to educate you all, here is some information about him which may come in useful in a pub quiz one day!

'Our greatest achiever in the ring'
Few sportsmen, let alone boxers, have captured the imagination of the Australian public like Jeff Fenech.
Arguably one of our greatest fighters, it is without argument that he is our
greatest achiever in the ring.
He first caught the public's attention at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic games, where he was unlucky to miss a gold medal. Fenech turned pro immediately and the 'Marrickville Mauler' was a world champion within an astonishingly quick space of six months and seven fights. That was the IBF World Bantamweight Championship in April 1985 Fenech took from Satoshi Shingaki of Japan. In a pro career of 32 bouts, more than half were with one title or another at stake. He made three defences of the bantamweight crown before moving up a division to claim the WBC Super-Bantamweight belt. Three times he defended this title before stepping up for a 3rd time - on this occasion to the WBC World Featherweight title, and made three successful defences. A fourth title narrowly eluded Fenech in a poor Las Vegas decision' when he drew with Azumah Nelson for the WBC Super-Featherweight title. Fenech was not the same boxer after this and advancing years precluded further glory. He remains one of a very select group of boxers to have won three world titles and throughout the 80's the passion and sincerity of Fenech ensured unqualified support and admiration from many Australians - boxing fans and non-fans alike.

The pest control man came yesterday; I was expecting a John Goodman
(Arachnophobia) look-alike! He has sprayed and treated all inside and
outside the house for bugs like ants, cockroaches and spiders so hopefully that
will keep the little dears away.

Kitchen with wash room to back, living area to lefthand side, and Ben cooling off on the floor!

Some of you will know the commotion we’ve had with the house situation, but for those uninformed, then basically there is a huge housing crisis going on here (yes, all that land and they can’t build houses!). The rules are because we don’t have children (Ben doesn’t count) then we can’t have a 4 bedroom house, instead we have to live in a duplex (which is basically a semi-detached bungalow). We were rather annoyed about this for a while; however when we went to look at it our house is lovely, and still fairly big. To be fair, we wouldn’t have even gone into most of the bedrooms anyway, and they are more places for bugs to hide out and to vacuum! Our house has 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, toilet, huge open plan living area joining onto the kitchen and a wash room. The garden wraps round 2 sides of the house and Ben loves it as it is one two levels and had trees and plants, he is out there all the time! It also has a shaded patio area where our new BBQ and chairs are. We have air conditioning in both bedrooms, ceiling fans in bedrooms and living area as well as an evaporative cooling system throughout the house, so we should be cool enough anyway! It does feel really comfortable and homely, and we only have 2 boxes of freight left to unpack now so almost there!

Living Area from patio

So, with MTV playing in the background we began to unpack our belongings from England, with a mixture of excitement (all my CD’s and DVD’s and the stereo are here at last!!), happiness (the sette – ahhh, we’ve missed it), dismay that we actually brought 20 jumpers between us, embarrassment that the poor freight guy in England individually hand wrapped 10 pairs of grotty smelly shoes that I will now be throwing away, and home-sickness (is that a word??) when we unpacked all the photographs. It was like Christmas for Ben to get all his old toys and his bed!

The Living Area

We had also just had Austar (the Aussie version of Sky) installed – with a satellite dish so huge I think we may pick up communications from Mars, so we were excited about finally having MTV and Fox Sports which shows all the English football. I must point out though that Austar isn’t a patch on Sky – it has less than 100 channels for starters, honestly, where is the choice please?!! It was great to have Andy back flicking inanely through the channels though – I had missed that…

Our new house! Kitchen window hidden by trees, garden to back and right.

Freight and moving house

On the 17th November our freight arrived in Moranbah, 4 months after it had been packed at our house in Eggborough. I can’t believe it is a third of a year since we left, excited and very emotional, wondering what the future had in store for us.
Chas and Dave, the delivery men, arrived late on the Wednesday night and asked if we wouldn’t mind them sleeping in our new house and having a shower... Andy went round to help them start unpacking the 100 boxes of freight at 6.30am. It wasn’t long before they asked if the missus could knock them up a bacon and egg sandwich, oh, and could Andy nip to the supermarket to get some sugar for their coffee?! They were off on their way to the next ‘hotel’ around lunchtime, bless!