Zombie Zac and the Billy Cart of Doom

Here are Zac dressed as a zombie for a school assembly, and Tash, not dressed as a zombie, proudly showing off our billy cart.

It took us a few weeks, but we finally collected all the things we needed to put it together - wheels, the frame from an old barbecue, a shopping cart, some old rope, a few nuts and bolts and washers.

So thanks to all the people who left their junk outside in the council clean-up.

Sadly, not long after the billy cart had been created, it flew down a steep and bendy hill and crashed into the gutter.

Unfortunately, Zac was driving at the time, and moments after he was in the gutter as well.

Here is the proof. Scabs.

See if you can spot the hidden six-year old in the photo.

Ant.

We didn't go to Echo Point

Well, that's not strictly true. We've been to Echo Point a number of times since we moved out here to the Blue Mountains.

Echo Point is in Katoomba, the biggest township up here, and as you can see, it's where you get the biggest views, looking out over the Jamison Valley towards Mt Solitary, or nearer to the Three Sisters.

I never get tired of the spot. It at once puts you in your place, a mere speck against nature's backdrop, and yet at the same time opens up vistas inside yourself, vistas too easily forgotten or ignored in the day-to-day.

But these excellent photos were taken by Meryl, Judy's sister, who has come out from England with a friend Sam to stay with us for a couple of weeks before flying up to Coffs Harbour to see Lara and the gang.

This is my first post on the blog for a few weeks, which I guess means that we're well and truly settling in now and have slowed down with the touristy stuff. It's not so interesting posting entries about shopping and walking the kids to school.

Fascinating though that kind of thing might be to me.

Ant.

Mr Incredible Came Over

A rare sighting of Mr Incredible outside of his movie career.

Alex, Zac and Hamish in our kitchen in Hughes Avenue, with Tash obscured behind them all.

Ant.

A South Lawson Bush Walk

The winter holidays seem like ancient history now that school has been back for a couple of weeks, but here are some photos from the bush walk Tash and Zac and I went on with some of our friends from the neighbourhood.

As you can see, Zac found some warpaint with which to adorn his savage features. And we found some great waterfalls.

Ant.

Sports Day

Sports Day here in Australia was not all that dissimilar to the Oxford variety - a series of event stations manned by parents and teachers, between which the different groups of students rotated during the day.

It was a little more competitive, though. Whereas the St Christopher's sports day was hardly more than sports-like games and activities, with only the winning team being announced, Lawson at least was an athletics carnival, and embraced the running, the jumping and the throwing in the traditional manner.

In addition, the winners and runners-up in their age groups go on to the District Carnival later in the year, where there will be further striving towards the Zone Carnival and beyond.

So congratulations to Zac, first in the 10s Discus, and also for winning his heat in the 200m - as the top action shot above shows. Wow, I got one in focus!

Sadly, Tash wasn't quite as thrilled as Zac with the way the day panned out. When she heard that she was going to a carnival, she assumed the obvious.

Consequently, the lack of sweets, fairy floss and rides was a bit of a downer.

Ant.

Wentworth Falls

Wentworth Falls is two suburbs west of us here in Lawson, about ten minutes by car, and a popular destination for tourists of all shapes and
denominations.

To be fair the views are not quite as breath-taking as those you get a mere ten minutes further west in Katoomba, but it's still about a 7.9 on the Grandeur Scale.

The fish and chips in Wenty Falls are spectacular too,
possibly the best in the upper mountains.

The Choc Nut Top ice creams are fine as well.

I just eat the nice bits off and give the rest to the animals...er...the kids.

Ant.

We went to Taronga Zoo

A couple of weeks ago we drove down to Eastwood to link up with my mate Phil Stallard from the old days. Phil and I used to play in The Quarks together back in the late 80s, and now he is the driving creative force behind Big Fat Squid, as well as being a successful and critically acclaimed artist. Not that that has much to do with going to the zoo.

Phil and his wife Lisa have two boys, Jim and Max, around about the same age as Zac and Tash.

From Eastwood we all drove to Meadowbank and caught the ferry down the Parramatta River to Cricular Quay, from where it's but a short - and spectacular - ferry trip across Sydney Harbour to the zoo.

This was the first time we'd been in the heart of Sydney since we'd arrived in Australia, and the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House looked fantastic.

It's hard not to feel a bit sorry for some of the animals in the zoo - the tiger is clearly completely mad and spends the whole time padding back and forth in its cage with a crazy look in its eyes. And I've never liked the idea of elephants in cages, they're too big for that caper.

So it goes.

To Winter Magic We Went

Last weekend we caught the train up to Katoomba and had a wander around the Winter Magic Festival.

I can't tell a lie - I found it a bit dismal. The parade was great, but after that the hordes closed in, and it was extremely hard to get around. Not to mention it was raining and cold.

Fortunately, though, the evil guy from Hellboy was there being generally evil. He's the dude wearing the hat.

Oh, and the ice creams rocked.

'Pointy Hair' Ant.

We went to Bathurst

Last Monday was the Queen's Birthday holiday here, a relic of Australia's colonial past no doubt and once upon a time, Cracker Night! But there are no crackers any more, I expect they eventually blew one too many people up. So being without, we drove to Bathurst instead.

Bathurst is about 100 kms west of us here in Lawson, has a population of around 30,000, and is apparently the oldest inland settlement in Australia, having been founded in 1815 on the orders of Governor Macquarie. The local aboriginals were from the Wiradjuri groups, but they got short shrift and in the early 1820s the Frontier Wars effectively put paid to any idea they might have had of keeping a hold of their land.

Nowadays, Bathurst is the home of my old mate Pete Simmons. Pete and I went to the same primary school in Warrawee, so I guess he's the oldest friend that I keep in touch with, though it's five years or more since we saw each other last.

We spent a lovely day and night with Pete and his wife Bernie and their boys Max, Henry and Joe, who are all in high school or beyond. Pete's mum Helen was there as well. We also met Bernie's sister Alice and her daughters Anna (8) and Rosie (6), so Zac and Tash had some kids to hang around with too.

Good times.

Ant.

We went to Jenolan Caves

A couple of weeks back, we took a trip out to Jenolan Caves, about an hour and a half west of Lawson by car.

For me it was a bit of a nostalgia trip, like so many things we've been doing since we arrived in Oz. I remember the Caves quite vividly from my childhood. I spent a week at Caves House with the family when I was about ten, and then another few days with my school.

I remember this school trip well, mainly because of the crazy stuff that we all got up to while our teacher was taking an afternoon nap. About forty of us, all around twelve years old, took it upon ourselves to explore the caves. On our own.

Not the caves marked out and made safe for tourists, but the other caves, the ones which may have been explored by speliologists, but which are considered too dangerous for the public to go into.

Jenolan Caves is a limestone system which is only three hundred metres wide, but which runs for twelve kilometres underground. You can see small cave entrances everywhere you go. We were like ants, crawling up the sides of the Devil's Coachhouse, in and out of these little caves with our torches. Well, they start out little. We found out later that some of these passgages have bottomless pits in them. Nice.

This time round, we settled for a guided tour of the Chifley Cave, an unguided tour of the Nettle Cave, and a walk down by the lake.

The top photo in this entry is a view of the Devil's Coachhouse from the Nettle Cave. The strange 'lobster' formations you can see on the right are called stromatolites, or craybacks - colonies of live cyanobacteria. You can find out more about this unusual life form here:

http://www.jenolancaves.org.au/index.asp?pageID=24

Ant.

We saw the Vincent Tree

I don't know if anyone out there has ever fallen into a coincidence so strange and earth-shattered that it has redefined their very outlook of the universe down to the deepest heart of their visceral awareness etc etc. Me neither, but this comes pretty close.

A couple of months back we were staying with Jude's sister Lara in Coffs Harbour, a coastal town four hundred miles north of Sydney. Lara and her husband Nick and their three boys currently live just outside the town, back in the hills among the banana plantations.

One day, Lara and I and Zac and his cousins Jake and Darwin took a drive up the windy road behind their place and then on into the rainforest, which is under a conservation order and so has been spared the logger's blade.

After driving for half a mile along the narrow road, surrounded by the deep green of the forest, we stopped at a huge tree which was growing in a half-clearing. We got out. There was a plaque on the tree. It said, The Vincent Tree.

My mother's maiden name was Vincent. Her dad was Roy S. Vincent. He was Minister For Forests in the NSW parliament from 1932-41. This was his tree, named for him after he'd brought in the rainforest's preservation order.

I'd never seen it before, and Lara, though she had know it was here, had no idea of the connection between the tree and me.

Spooky, huh?

Ant.

We went to Ironfest

At the end of the Easter Holidays, a few days before the kids started school, we went to Ironfest with our friends Danielle and Joe and their 12-year old son Damien. Ian and Kate and their kids Bella, Ingrid and Davey were there too.

Ironfest is an annual festival in Lithgow, an old mining town not far west of the mountains. The festival is an odd mix of jousting, metal sculpture, smithying demonstrations and overpriced fast food, as well as folk music, mock hangings and reenactments of Napoleonic battles.


It was a great day out apart from the icy wind, which was just about as cold as anything that we ever felt in Ye Olde Country of Ye Drizzle and Ye Gloom.

Highlight for Zac was seeing The Spooky Men's Chorale, playing with singer-songwriter Fred Smith. We'd never heard of The Spooky Men's Chorale, but it turned out they were a local Lawson ensemble, and only a week or two into school, Zac had made friends with Hamish, whose father Dave is an actual Spooky Man. The Spooky Men will be touring England in the summer of 2009. All three hundred of them.

Joe took some great photos of Ironfest.

Ant & Zac.

We saw some toadstools

Zac and Tash and I saw these toadstools walking to school, not far from the library.

(How do toadstools walk to school, do you ask? It's a fair question, and one that deserves an answer.)

They look pretty amazing, but as it happens they're a very common species called Amanita muscaria or fly agaric, poisonous for sure, but not usually deadly.

They last only a couple of days then turn brown and wither away into sludge.

A few days after Zac took this photo, we went for a walk in Hazelbrook down the back of our friends Ian and Kate's house - they have five acres of bush - and Kate showed us a huge field of these little beauties.

Ant.

Well hello there

Welcome to ournewdaze, which is basically cobbled-together bits and bobs about what we're up to now that we've moved from Oxford, UK to the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney, Orstralia.

This is our second shot at a family blog - the first began as a travel diary, but never got off the ground. And as we're not exactly traveling, but simply living in a different place and not going anywhere much at all, it seems appropriate to kick that old neglected fragment of the internet into the void and start over.

We'll try to keep it all up to date with news and post interesting photos of what's been happening, as well as encouraging Zac and Tash to make some contributions so friends back in Blighty can see what they've been up to as well.

All the best,

Ant & Jude.