Footy Fever

So, here's something I never really expected to be able to say: I now understand Aussie Rules Football.

In case you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's a vaguely organised barfight in which 36 men wearing vests and very short shorts kick and jostle and elbow each other around a huge circular field (as in, they use the full extent of a cricket field) with the intent of eventually kicking a ball through a set of upright posts. Its most likely origins are in an early version of Gaelic Football, although the recent theory that it emerged from a traditional Aboriginal game has found a great deal of popular support (most of it, alas, based on emotion rather than evidence). In any case, it's the obsession of nearly everyone in Victoria. The season culminates in the Grand Final, played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground each year to a crowd of 100 000 passionate supporters, half of whom are typically destined to experience soul-crushing despair by the end of the match. We took the civilised approach and watched it from a comfortable living room supplied by the director of the Centre at Swinburne, who had invited everyone over for a barbecue. It really was a thrilling match, but as the rain turned into hail I think we were all happier to be inside and warm than at the stadium...

Apart from that, we've had a pretty lazy weekend after climbing on Thursday and dancing on Friday. Yes, we've finally found a nice place for dancing - it's close to a train station, they have socials every Tuesday and Friday, and they seem to be a hospitable bunch, so we'll keep going there. It really is wonderful to dance again. I've also found a good climbing gym very close to the Uni, and also met some interesting characters there, so little by little Melbourne is starting to be more comfortable. I must say, the people at the Centre where Christina works are also a very social crowd, and that has certainly made it a lot easier for both of us.

I'm generally enjoying the Australian culture, too. I had previously been struck by the sincere and friendly way in which everyone I met said "Welcome to Australia" when I first arrived: it really did make me feel welcome to be here. I'm also enjoying the dry humour. I was on my way in to Uni on the train a couple of days ago, and we came to a stop on a steel rail bridge over the highway in a particularly dire area of Richmond, with a view on both sides of graffiti-covered warehouses and grimy steel superstucture. A voice came over the intercom: "Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Sorry for the delay, we're just waiting for another train to clear the platform ahead of is." After a short pause, "I'd also like to apologise for not finding a more attractive spot to wait in..."

On my Uni side, I'm starting to get more to grips with the scope of the PhD as an overall project. It's very different coming from UCT's heavy marine focus to a Zoology dept which is more involved in terrestrial creatures, genetics and embryology, so it's proving harder to find exposure to similar research. I'm establishing connections gradually, though: there is a centre for ecological risk assessment in the Botany Dept which does a lot of ecosystem modelling, and their seminars will hopefully be more suitable. We're also discussing plans with the few PhD-level researchers who are in the marine field to try and set up some sort of regular meetings and discussion groups.

Speaking of which, I went on an interesting trip last week with Bastien, a fellow PhD student from France. He specialises in sharks, and got a call one morning from the Melbourne Fish Market to say that they had a strange and unusual beast that they'd never seen before, so we went off to pick it up. It turned out to be a goblin shark, a type which is apparently known from only about 50 specimens (Bastien had never seen a real one before, but knew it from pictures). It lives at depths of up to 1500m (this one was caught at 1050m down), and has the freakiest-looking mouth of any shark I've seen. There are some decent pictures here:
http://dsc.discovery.com/sharks/goblin-shark.html
http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/ecology/deepsea-goblin.htm

Springiness in Melbourne

Wow, it's been a fair little while since I last sat down to type a newsy-mail (well, actually stayed in bed to write - gotta love laptops sometimes). Last news I sent was from Hobart, where I had a great time and managed to get some good work done at CSIRO. I really like the offices there, too - a good work ethos and nice little touches like sun-cream dispensers in the bathrooms.

I was very happy to get back to Melbourne (and especially Christina), though. One of the first things I did on return was pick up a 1.5TB harddrive so I have plenty of space for backing up stuff at home, as my models will eventually produce some fairly silly amounts of data. I then tried to get a dual-boot system set up with windows XP and Ubuntu. All I can say is, no matter what assurances that you may receive from software vendors, never try and partition a harddrive which already has a windows installation on it, it will only lead to tears. My first idea of installing Ubuntu on the new drive didn't really work either - the BIOS will only recognise one harddrive as a boot option, so the dual boot OS's must be installed on partitions of the same drive rather than separate HDDs. I had an extra week of frustration after my PC (with its newly installed operating systems) started spontaneously switching off. Got the power supply and motherboard tested, reassembled it, and it works.

Ok, enough with the boring geeky stuff.

We've been experimenting on a few fronts these past weeks. We have a herb garden, which is very exciting. We're growing mint, rosemary and thyme from little plants, and got seeds for chilli (two varieties) and basil. The chillis have yet to put in an appearance but we have a profusion of little basil sprouts poking up through the soil. We greet them every morning and they seem to appreciate that. The mint is rapidly threatening to take over the living room - I think a few mojitos may be called for to keep it a little more in line.

Other experiments involved cooking: I made my first cake in about a decade, and tried baking with gas for the first time. It was a qualified success - it was yummy, but didn't rise quite as much as I'd hoped, so there are still a few things to experiement with and get right. We also made a casserole, which was a first for both us us. On Thursday last week we had Caro and Frik around to dinner at our house - Caro (who is Quebecois from Montreal) is a fellow Swinburne PhD student doing galaxy stuff with C, and her partner Frik has a real job and hails from the Philippines. Both absolutely lovely people. We did a chicken apricot casserole with roast potatoes, and I was astonished by the results. As we had no idea what we were doing I think we are allowed to say that it was exquisitely delicious, and a lovely evening was had by all.

Other lovely evenings this week - I was contacted by a long-lost second cousin once removed, Rob Estcourt, who was going coming to Melbourne for a couple of days. We went out to dinner with him and his son Peter and had a splendid time catching up and exploring the vagaries of genealogy.

Spring is starting to make hints and suggestions in our general direction - the mornings are less biting, there are flowers all over the place. It's lovely here in bloomin' Melbourne. We went for a stroll to the Royal Botanical Gardens yesterday - they are wonderfully reminiscent of Kirstenbosch without the entrance fees. Adjacent is Victoria Gardens, a large stretch of park along the banks of the Yarra River, and the home of the Shrine of Remembrance, a very tastefully crafted and moving memorial to the Australian forces killed in foreign wars. It was initially built in 1934 to honour the fallen of WWI (and was opened, of course, with a Kipling passage penned in its honour), and extended as later conflicts warranted. It's now a massive sandstone edifice with outstanding views of the city over the gardens.

The real excitement from the weekend, though, was that we finally went dancing! We found a place which has dancing every Saturday night - it's about an hour and a half away, with two trams, a train and a 20-min walk to get there, but it has dancing, so we went off to try it out. (The area is oddly reminiscent of Brackenfel for some reason - perhaps the preponderance of auto-repair places and mullets has something to do with it. There was also a shopfront called Marquis de Sade's Corset Boutique - I don't really want to know. There was also a wedding cake shop which featured a top-piece on one cake of a sickening little cherub wearing a backwards baseball cap, just in case cherubs weren't kitsch and grotesque enough already). The floor had some crazily slick patches, and I ended up on the floor during a Viennese Waltz, but otherwise it was fun - great to move again. There is also a challenge in that they spend half the night doing "New Vogue", which involves a repeated set routine of a regular dance which everyone does in sync, ie., all get in a circle and do a little 16-bar waltz sequence and then repeat ad infinitum, ad nauseam. But hey, in between there was actual dancing, which was lovely. Ended up very tired by the end, though.

(Brief pause to dash off to church).

Ok, back again. We had a Father's Day breakfast at church today, with the theme "The Gods of Sport", and an address from the chaplain of the Hawthorn Hawks, the local Aussie Rules footy team. We were all supposed to go in sporting colours of some description, so I dug around in the back of the cupboard and found an old Rhodesian rugby jersey which I seem to have acquired along the way, and wore that. The option was my rowing gear, which would have had me covered shoulder to knee in lycra, and no one wants to see that at breakfast...

Just caught a glimpse of the mint again. It really is getting out of control. I'm having Day of the Triffids flashbacks here. Actually, speaking of sci-fi, we went to see "District 9", a new South African aliens movie, and it truly is remarkable. Amazing film, brilliant social commentary. Interesting to read the reviews afterwards and see how many people overseas still imagine South Africa as it was in the 1980s, and perceive the film as being a reflection of apartheid-era social issues, rather than understanding that it is actually referring to South Africa now...