Wintering down south

I know, it's been months since I last sent any news.

It seems like we've spent a lot of time with visitors over the past couple months, and we've thoroughly enjoyed showing everyone around. First up was Christina's friend Wendy, over from Cape Town for an astronomy visit to Sydney (and she talked her supervisor into flying her down to Melbourne to visit all the Swinburne astro people), then my uncle Keith came from Zimbabwe for a few days, and finally my friends Joe and Adam came over from Perth. So it's been a lovely autumn, and we've gotten to do loads of touristy things of the sort that one never gets around to when one lives in a city.

Among the highlights was certainly the day we spent on Mornington Peninsula with Keith. It's a scenic and very accessible spit of land along the southern edge of Port Philip Bay, and the peninsula is split in roughly equal parts into a national park and a restricted military area. Either way, it's protected from development and has a lovely contrast between the sheltered Bay side on the north and the rough and storm-tossed southern shore.

It's also the home of Cheviot Beach, where Australia famously "lost" a Prime Minister. In 1967, Harold Holt decided to go for a bit of a paddle on the southern shore, despite its dangerous rip tides, rocky reefs and treacherous currents (not to mention some large and hungry fishies), rather than swimming on the opposite beach, 500m away and clearly visible from the rise above Cheviot, where the calm waters of the bay lap playfully on the gentle sandy shore. Oh, and he was on painkillers for a serious shoulder injury and had been warned by his doctor not to swim until it healed. And he had already had two near-drownings that year, from which he had needed to be pulled out of the water by friends. Whether he was suicidally depressed, excessively filled with hubris or just exercised poor judgement, he plunged boldly into the surf and was never seen again.

Anyway, we stayed out of the water and went for an extended stroll to Point Nepean at the end of the peninsula, taking in a picnic lunch along the way while watching the ships navigate the narrow heads at the mouth of the bay.

On the topic of hikes, we also went for a splendid stroll in the Dandenong range on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne with Joe and Adam. It's a picturesque spot with great forests, and our plan was to hike one section, catch a bus to the peak, and then have lunch with the view. We hiked two hours up a seriously steep track, and made it to the bus stop with five minutes to spare... only to see as the bus cruised by that there was another bus stop 100m down the road. With two hours until the next bus, we decided to try and hitch - quite a challenge with three guys, two of whom were around 2 metres tall. Brilliantly, Christina walked up the road to hitch by herself while the three of us waited inconspicuously under a tree. In a short time she flagged down a very friendly and more than slightly deranged dude with a Land Rover full of tools. Christina sat in the front and chatted to him while the three guys perched on top of various articles of hardware in the back seat. A sample of the conversation:

Christina: "I'm studying astronomy."
Crazy dude: "So, do you know anything about astrotheology?"
Christina: "Um... I'm not sure what that is?"
Crazy dude: "Well, you know, the ancients knew so much more about how to live than we do now... it's like, you know, the Greeks had the right idea, man... you've got to learn by yourself, we shouldn't be, like, trying to shove all this education into kids... they've got to find it out from within... and there's so much we don't understand about the old ways, it's like, with hieroglyphics, you know, when you see like, a pharaoh and a kestrel, it doesn't mean just what you think it means, it's so much more..."

Anyway, Christina was a very good sport, and he was having such fun explaining his ideas that he ended up driving two towns past his destination to keep the conversation going. So we ended up with a lift most of the way to our lunch spot, for which we were very grateful on a hot day.

On a more domestic not, I've been experimenting with gumbo. It's good winter food - with over a kg of chicken, shrimp and sausage, a litre of beer and a whole lot of stock in it, it's very rich and filling. We had it recently for my birthday dinner, and it was judged a great success. We also had birthday drinks at a local pub called Bar None. The directions for getting to Bar None:
1. Turn off the main road and walk down the dark alleyway next to the railway tracks.
2. Keep going past the garbage cans until the streetlights are fading behind you.
3. When the crazy old lady upstairs yells out of her window, duck into the nearest empty doorway.
4. Carry on down the empty stairway.
5. Find the only door that isn't marked "Gents", and open it.
...and you'll find yourself in a warm and relaxed bar with comfy couches and excellent cocktails. Good times.

On the day of my actual birthday, Christina had arranged the most wonderful of birthday presents - she took me rowing! She had very cleverly tracked down a local club, where one of the organisers was happy to take us out for an hour of sculling on Lake Albert in the early morning. The water was like glass, the air was crisp and clear - absolutely gorgeous to be out rowing again.

More recently, I also went to my first footy (i.e., Australian Rules Football) match. Went with a bunch of friends from church to watch St. Kilda play Geelong at the famous MCG. What a fabulous stadium - can't wait to watch a cricket match there in the summer. It was cold and raining, but good fun and an educational experience. As a sport, it has none of the tactical complexity of rugby, but I'll say this for it: it's an awful lot better to watch than American football. It may not be intellectual, but at least it is 2 hours of continual action, so I can certainly see the appeal as a social event.

This morning finds us back in Hobart - Christina's down for a conference this week and I'm down to visit my supervisor for a week, and we're both loving being back in Tasmania. The sun is shining across the waters of the Derwent and the city is looking grand.

That's enough for now.

Back in the groove

Wow, it's been a while since I last wrote.

I think the last time I was in Vancouver, after a wonderful holiday with James and Tamsin in Connecticut and Christmas and New Year with Christina's family in Vancouver. If you're in a rush and don't feel like reading a novella, I guess the brief summary version since then is:
- Spent a few days in Hawaii on the way back. Christina was working, I wasn't.
- The day we got back from holiday, we moved into a new apartment, which was exhausting, fun and provides us with a much more pleasant living arrangement. Even more so after we spent the next month systematically cleaning it.
- Saw a few good movies; played a legendary game of Risk; had loads of good meals and great times with friends; spent a lovely weekend in San Remo; and slowly got back into work again after the break.

For some more details:

We left Vancouver on Jan 9th, in a time of ludicrously heightened security. After a thoroughly unpleasant airport experience, we arrived in Honolulu and crashed for the night in a hotel near the airport. Early the next morning we flew to Hawaii Island, which probably has the most charming and laid-back international airport ever. Palm trees, thatch roofs and ubiquitous smiles were a delightful change from the endless dreary queues of the previous day. We waited at the airport for Christina's colleagues from UC Santa Cruz, who were arriving from San Francisco an hour after our flight, and then headed off for a leisurely drive up the west coast of the island to Waimea, where the W.M.Keck Observatory is situated. This was our base for the next few days, and the site of some truly gruelling 18-hour work nights - but not for me. I spent the next couple days tootling around the island in the hired car, stopping off at beautiful spots or intriguing diversions as the mood took me.

The highlight was certainly the trip to Kealakekua Bay. The northern border of the bay features a memorial to Captain James Cook, who was killed there during a misunderstanding with the local inhabitants in 1779. Just in front of the memorial is a spectacular coral reef which I was particularly keen to see. That side of the bay is only accessible by water or by an hour-long hike from the road, so I hired a kayak and paddled there from an old cargo jetty 2km across the the bay. I had snorkelling gear in the boat and swam along the reef among a magnificent profusion of fish. That I had the whole place to myself was just an added bonus.

I was joined as I paddled back by several spinner dolphins. The surf had come up considerably, and landing a kayak against a static concrete jetty in a 4m swell was fairly invigorating, but fortunately I had a rather better reception than James Cook and there were some helpful Polynesian gentlemen on hand to grab the boat.

Hawaii really does seem remarkably unlike the rest of the USA. Oahu was fairly consistent with expectations of an American state, but heading out to Hawaii island it felt far more like a part of Polynesia.

I flew back by myself, thanks to some administrative bungling from Swinburne which left Christina and me returning a day apart, but I did manage to get emergency exit rows for 3 out of 4 flights (the last one, from Sydney to Melbourne, being by far the best flight to miss out). On Korean Air from Seoul to Sydney they appeared to have over-booked economy class, so I found myself in a wonderfully reclining business class seat and had a very comfortable trip. Christina arrived the next day, and we began The Great Move.

Graeme very generously assisted in the move, and using his driver's licence (we needed a Victorian one) we rented a ute (read "pick-up truck with a flat bed" if you're not from Australia) for the day from a local hardware store and loaded up the boxes and furniture . Then we got our first look at our new home, having not seen it before we signed all the paperwork! It's a great spot, actually pretty spacious and very handy for Swinburne, the shops and the station. We also took advantage of the having the vehicle for the day and bought a whole bunch of second-hand furniture, a fridge, washing machine, etc. Most importantly, we got a couch, so we can now have people to stay!

The next month involved various odds and ends to do with setting up, steam-cleaning the carpets (which were pretty filthy when we moved in), getting more furniture, etc. We acquired a dining room table and chairs about 22 hours before we had our first dinner guests, and with the addition of two extra bookcases our various libraries are now entirely on shelves, rather then sitting in boxes as they have been for several years.

Ho- ho- holidays...

So, last time I wrote I think I was in Hobart. At the moment I'm sitting in Honolulu's excellent departure terminal. And I mean that - it's a lovely open-plan affair with the warm evening breeze blowing directly into the waiting areas, without the usual interruption of plate glass. We've had a splendid day cruising around the south-eastern section of Oahu - with 12 hours to kill between flights, we rented a car and spent the day driving along the coast, swimming in the sea and being awed by the spectacular scenery. Best of all, my brother-in-law Andrew (who lived in Honolulu until two weeks ago) put us in touch with some friends who let us use their shower before our next flight...

Wait.

Let me start again.

Ok, it's now a rainy day in Vancouver, nearly three weeks after that opening paragraph, and I'm only just getting around to continuing this mail! As evidenced by the long intermission, it's been a great holiday. Our first major destination was James and Tamsin's house in Connecticut, where we arrived after some 70 hours of travelling (including 12-hour layovers in Oahu and Vancouver, admittedly). It was wonderful to see the US family again, and wonderful also to be able to introduce Christina to them and show her around the parts of New England that we know so well. On our second night there it snowed, which was another first for Christina. We were at a Christmas concert at J&T's church at the time, and about 4 inches fell that night. It was perfect: just enough to cover everything with a proper blanket of white, and not so much that we were in any way inconvenienced by closed roads, delayed flights etc.

We also spent a glorious day in NYC with James (Tamsin was feeling under the weather), strolling in Central Park and visiting the Met. New York had a lot more snow, and in full sunlight the Park was was a magical place to walk. My old friend Nic Gibson, from UCT undergrad days, was coincidentally in NYC for his sister's wedding (which I had found out the day before on FaceBook), so we met up for the day and had some great catch-up chats. Rack up another point for virtual technology enabling real-world contact!

We flew back to Vancouver on the night of the 23rd, and have been holidaying with Christina's family since. We had 18 people to dinner on Christmas Eve, including Simon Spicer who joined us for the Christmas holidays from UWash in Seattle. Great to spend some quality time with him, and he also introduced us to a new board game - Settlers of Catan, which we are thoroughly enjoying. In true South African style, we went for a beach picnic on Boxing Day (albeit a very cold picnic on a fog-covered beach). We've just returned from four days at Whistler, where we spent New Year's and also acquitted ourselves very well during our foray into skiing - ie., we finished with the same number of unbroken limbs as we started.

It has been a wonderful holiday, and we still have another week before we return to Hawaii - time to get down to some work, I think. Christina has plenty of preparatory stuff to do for her observing run, and I'm taking advantage of a quiet house to get some model parametrization done too (Marietta is back at work and the kids are back at school).

So a very merry Christmas to you all, and I wish you every joy and success in 2010.

In the wet with the platys

Legend tells of a legendary animal, whose anatomical peculiarities were the stuff of legend...

Last weekend, still bouncing from our adventures with little penguins, we headed inland to north-east Victoria, to a tiny little dorp called Tatong. Our objective: Ornithorhynchus anatinus, or Platypus, if you prefer. We were there to assist Elise, a PhD student at UMelb who is looking at genetic markers in platypus sub-populations.

The "town" of Tatong consists of a pub/inn and a post-code for the surrounding farms, but nothing approximating shops or any other signifiers of permanent habitation. The pub was lovely, though, and served as a fine base of operations. We arrived after a 3-hour drive through rolling rural grassland, and spent most of the Friday afternoon setting up nets and scouting for likely platypus haunts. There was a slight conlict of priorities, in that the platys are fond of fairly deep pools where the freshwater invertebrates flourish, wheras the nets work much better on narrower streams (which are also nicer to work in), but we found 5 suitable spots in the end. It was very warm, so we enjoyed having an excuse to spend the day knee-deep in cool water, despite an unfortunate encounter with a leech and the (unrelated) loss of a pair of glasses in one pool. (Said glasses were recovered after much groping about in murky swamp water, somewhat bent but otherwise in good condition after their swim). As we were finishing up the last net the rain started, a persistent drizzle that continued through the rest of the weekend.

Once the nets were in place, there was nothing to do but rest up and wait to see what came in. We checked them first at about 9:30pm, the first location had a family of ducks in the net. We freed them and moved on to the second spot, where we found a platypus! Sitting there in the net! Snuffling the strings with his little bill! Baring his one-inch poisonous spurs! So cute! Really, they are the most adorably improbable beasts. The bill is not as hard as expected, the fur is incredibly soft and they are just wonderful. We took him back to the truck and did a whole lot of measuring and weighing, took a tiny bit of genetic material and gave him a microchip tracker in case he ever got caught again, and then returned him to the river. Amazing.

We then spent the next 20 minutes trying to get the truck back to the road - the rain had turned the trail into a muddy slope, and in a truck with an automatic transmission and 2-wheel drive there is only so much you can do to get out of that kind of situation. We parked on the road after that.

The rest of the night was less dramatic - a few freshwater prawns (called "yabbies" or something), a few wombats on the prowl and a fair bit more rain. We got to bed around 2am and woke at 6:30 to start checking the nets again. The morning brought another platypus and a few holes in the nets: these are caused by water-rats (also known as rakali), which get caught in the net and gnaw their way out, causing substantial damage. They grow up to 35-40cm body length, so they make pretty big holes on their way out. The day was spent resting at the inn with another check in the mid-afternoon and a splendid pub dinner. The pub turned out to be a popular watering-hole, perhaps simply by virtue of being the only place with booze for about 30km in any direction, but I must say that the staff were lovely and the atmosphere very congenial. There was a christening party the first night we were there (and when we left in the morning to check the nets there were a few people passed out in the backs of trucks), and there appeared to be a consistent business from groups of bikers looking for a place to stay overnight.

The following night we got 3 more platys! And another on Sunday morning! Brilliant. (Also: ducks, several trout, loads more yabbies, a spiny crayfish and a few turtles. We found one water-rat in a net, plus a generous helping of holes in various others. We cleaned the trout and left them at the inn - they may have appeared on Sunday's lunch menu). Drove back to Melbourne in great spirits.

That evening we went to a Thanksgiving dinner with Christina's astro group, and then slept deeply and well... until 4:00am, when I had to get up to go to the airport. After battling late trains and shuttle buses, I got to the airport and checked in, at which point I discovered that the online travel agent had messed up and given my a hand-luggage only ticket. Never mind, my bag was small enough for hand-luggage, if a bit awkward, so I ditched a few sharp articles and made my way to the gate as the passengers were starting to board my 7am flight. It was at this point that I realised I no longer had my laptop with me, having left it at security. And, of course, you can't leave your bags at the gate while you run back... Anyway, it all worked out fine, and in the end the flight was delayed by a Korean family trying to pull a baggage scam by checking in bags under someone who wasn't actually flying. I passed out shortly after take-off and woke up just as we were descending towards Hobart.

And what a lovely city Hobart is. There were grey clouds in the sky, but the sun was shining brightly on the harbour, and as we drove over the "diplodocus" bridge the sun was directly behind us, and ahead was a perfectly clear and brilliantly colourful rainbow, magnificently arching over the bridge and disapperaing into the water on either side. Best welcome arch ever. And I was thinking, "Gee, Hobart, I already liked you, you didn't have to go to all this effort to make a good impression!"

I'm looking out of Andrew and Verena's window at a very grey and damp scene as I type this, with about an hour before I head off to the airport and fly back to Melbourne. It's been had an excellent week here, working at CSIRO with Beth, and lovely to spend some time with the Oliviers again. Despite todays rain it's been good weather the rest of the week and I've enjoyed walking to CSIRO and back each day. It's a lovely stroll, a little over 4kms, and passes the river front and the sailing club, as well as several lovely parks. On Wednesday evening the weather was so grand that I decided to walk by an even more picturesque route, and ended up taking 3 hours to get home, hiking more than 10km over the top of Mt. Nelson on the way. So it's been a pretty good week.

Christina's spent the last few days in Canberra, so I'm looking forward to hearing all about her adventures when we both return this evening. And then it's less than 3 weeks til we leave for our great holiday!

Giant Earthworms and Little Penguins

So, we've been planning to have another Saturday afternoon tea, and have come to the realisation that our weekends are ridiculously busy. We have precisely one Saturday in Melbourne before we go off to North America in a month's time. We have, however, been filling our days weekends with delightful adventures.

Two weeks ago we went to Brighton Beach for a belated picnic birthday party for one of Christina's colleagues. It was fiercely hot, so the sea was a great relief, and with liberal application of suncream we managed not to burn. (It's generally been getting a lot hotter here, with days regularly in the mid-30s. It will get much worse around January, so I think our skiing trip over New Year will be perfectly timed.) We followed up the beach with a party at the church, which involved bush dancing, sumo wrestling (with stacks of inner tubes held together with duct tape providing the required girth) and indoor soccer. All good fun, and I picked up some remarkable carpet burns to attest to my enthusiasm in goalkeeping. The following day was Christina's baptism, which was a wonderful occasion. The church had acquired a rainwater tank specially for the occasion, and I must say it looked very refreshing in the 34-degree heat. In amongst all this I was working furiously to edit a paper for submission, so it was a pretty busy weekend.

This past Saturday we drove south of Melbourne to the Bass Coast and Philip Island, in a car very generously lent to us by the Prestons. Two academic interns from Christina's astro centre, Stephan and Anna, joined us for the trip. They are both originally Swiss, although Stephan left when he was about 4. (His parents work for YWAM on the mercy ships, so his childhood involved a lot of travelling around.) We set off early for Gippsland with picnic supplies and high spirits.

Now, some background: a few months ago when we went to Wilson's Promontory at the southern tip of Victoria, we drove part of the way there on the South Gippsland Highway. When I read this name I admit that I felt a certain inexplicable frisson of excitement, because I recognised the name from a passage in Bill Bryson's travels in Australia (entitled either "Down Under" or "In a Sunburned Country", depending whether you got the UK or US version). In the section on Melbourne and Victoria, he mentions visiting the Big Worm to see the legendary Megascolides australis, or Giant Gippsland Earthworms - I know, I know, the excitement is overwhelming, but stay with me for a bit longer. Yes, these are worms. Yes, they look pretty much like regular worms, except for one crucial difference: they average 2-3m long, and can grow up to 4 metres in length and 5cm diameter. True, they don't caper about in the manner of more entertaining wildlife, but still - that's a must-see attraction if only for its peculiarity.

You can imagine the crushing disappointment, then, when we got the the Big Worm and found that we were in fact 8 years too late to see any of these majestic titans of the soil. Shortly after Bryson's visit (the book was published in 2000), the worms were placed on the endangered species list and it was no longer possible to keep them in captivity. Also, thanks to the decade-long drought that Australia is still experiencing, the worms have moved about 7m underground. The Big Worm itself has been painted with aboriginal murals and the whole place has rebranded itself as "Wildlife Wonderland" (it has a couple of dingos and possibly some other hidden delights, but I confess I had rather lost interest by this stage), so we pressed on for Philip Island.

When we got there (over a short bridge from the mainland), we found it charming. Philip Island lies just south of the Mornington Peninsula, so it's exposed to the open ocean (unlike Melbourne's coastline, which is on the shore of the very enclosed Port Philip Bay). Beautiful beaches and satisfyingly craggy outcrops of rock feature prominently along the shore, and the whole island is fairly tourist-centred. We skipped over the chocolate museum and the koala treetop walk, and instead went to Phillip Island Wildlife Park, which promised a decent range of beasties to "ooh" and "ahh" over before our lunch. (No connection there, I promise). The park was splendid - the animals were well looked-after, the enclosures were very generous and visitors received a packet of food pellets on entry, with a helpful suggestion that it would be enjoyed by the wallabies, kangaroos, wombats and flightless birds. We spent the next couple hours strolling around a delightful menagerie: echidnas and kookaburras, blue-tongued lizards and talkative cockatoos, Tassie devils and dingos, fierce cassowaries and sleepy koalas, a kangaroo having a fight with a large and aggressive black swan... In addition to the regular enclosures, there were some more interactive experiences: shortly after we arrived we saw a couple of wallabies hopping about "free-range", and approached one. As we were enjoying the experience of hand-feeding a wallaby, another little head popped out from the pouch with a hungry look, so we got to feed the baby too. Absolutely adorable. Towards the end of our visit we took a stroll through the red kangaroo and emu enclosure, which stretched about 200m square and looked like a very comfortable home for the animals.

Next stop was a beach on the south coast of the island for a picnic lunch and a cool-off in the sea, and then we headed to Nobbies Point at the far western tip of the island. "The Nobbies" (only in Australia could you give something a name like that) are two small outcrops which are connected to the main island at low tide, and the area is host to a seagull breeding colony. I know: again, hold the excitement - but actually it was wonderful. The natural vegetation on the cliffs is a stunningly verdant ground-cover with purple and white and yellow flowers, which gives the whole place a "Shire-by-the-sea" kind of feel, and there are raised wooden boardawlks to keep people from eroding this fragile vegetation. Mixed in with the seagulls is the occasional burrow with a nesting Little Penguin, and it is these penguins (Eudyptula minor if you're taking notes) for which the Philip Island coastline is famous. There is a large commercial exercise devoted to extracting money from tourists for the experience of sitting in an arena and watching the birds return to their burrows at sunset (the road out to the Point is closed to vehicles long before sunset to avoid any accidental encounters between cars and penguins). We decided to go the cheap route, and had a picnic dinner on a deserted beach while the sun went down, and then sat very still as the dusk gathered. Soon the birds came, slowly working their way over the rocks - and this took some effort for the world's smallest penguin species, which only grows to about 20cm. Three of the birds walked within a metre of us - well, first one penguin approached, and then he saw us and ran off to get some buddies before coming back. As the last light faded we made our way back up the road. We walked for about 30 mins back to our car, surrounded all the way by thousands of clumsily delightful birds. With no nearby lights, the sky above us was a spectacular vault of stars, and the whole experience magical. Now, I can't honestly speak with great authority on the Penguin Parade, and it may be that it's worth every cent of the $20-$80 (depending on your seats) that it costs, but I can't help feeling we got a better deal.

This coming weekend promises to be full of more excitement: we're off to rural Victoria to help with platypus research. The last few days have involved more frantic editing of papers while simultaneously trying to prepare for my next CSIRO visit. I'm off to Hobart next week to visit Beth and set up the next few months of thesis work before our big trip in a month's time.

October News

Oh boy, it seems I left it too long between writing and now there's too much to write about! Where to start...

Well, I think last time I wrote we were planning to go to Adelaide for the weekend. That went almost according to plan - Christina went to Adelaide, and I got messed around by Tiger Airlines to such an extreme degree that I failed to make it past the airport. A combination of appalling customer service and preposterous regulations (like failing to mention that they close the boarding gate 45 mins prior to takeoff for a domestic flight) left me grounded while Christina flew off on Qantas for a weekend of astro tours and wine routes in South Australia. It was, needless to say, a distinctly disappointing experience on my side but fortunately Christina had a splendid trip - shortly after arriving she and Caro went for a drive with our old family friends Denise and Neil, and the first thing they saw was a koala crossing the road. With a baby on its back. And then they spent the rest of the day drinking excellent wines in the countryside around Adelaide.

I stayed in for most of the weekend and watched the entire first season of "24".

Otherwise, it's been work as usual. Some interesting seminars and a little bit of headway made on my project. We had a visiting academic from Stellenbosch who specialises in invasive species and their ecosystem implications, and a fascinating PhD final talk by a guy who's researching fish assemblages in Port Philip Bay over the past 60 years. So there is at least some compensation for all the great seminars in Cape Town that I'm sad to be missing!

Campus seems to be astir with stressed undergrads at the moment - I think that there are exams or something looming? I'm also noticing a disturbing resurgence of 80s fashion - it seems that the current decade has more in common with that one than a financial distaster in the 7th year. There is altogether too much neon, spandex and big hair about.

Much more importantly, last week was Christina's birthday, so we've been celebrating for a week solid. On the actual day we had phone calls from various friends and relations and the day after we went out for dinner and then to a show on campus by a Melbourne Uni group called Flare Dance. It was great - an interesting panoply of styles, ranging from hip-hop to ballet, and all performed and choreographed by students. I heard about it because a colleague of mine in Zoology was performing, and it seems that most of the dancers (like her) are actually doing degrees other than dance or theatre. It was great fun, even for those who have had their expectations of dance raised to impossible heights by Jazzart shows...

The birthday celebrations culminated on Saturday in a high tea (although I think Christina more frankly called it a "sugarfest" in the invitations) with about 25 people squashed into our flat. A great mix of Swinburne astro people and friends from church, and a total excess of cakes and tarts. I had baked an orange/chocolate cake, Christina had made milktart and lemon-meringue pie, her colleague Andy (who is the chairman of the Melbourne Uni climbing club, despite being a Swinburne PhD student) made an extraordinary strawberry and rhubarb cheesecake, and we went for a long stroll later to work some of it off. Good times.

What else... We had the AGM at church yesterday after the service, and there was a prize for the best dressed - so we went in black tie (me) and ballgown (Christina). And we won a golden chocolate frog, which may not sound that impressive, but it's basically a slab of exquisite deliciousness made by a local expert chocolatier... as if we hadn't had enough sugar this weekend already. Another walk may be called for.

As a complete aside, I've been getting a lot of reading done on the train and tram rides to and from work - sometimes papers, but often fiction. In the process I've read some great books, but also gotten a lot of strange looks - it so happened that the book I started with (and took about 2 months to read) was a collection of travels by Andrew Mueller, a journalist (originally Australian but working from London) who spends most of his time in troublesome spots. It was a splendid read, but it features on the cover a huge picture of a hand grenade with a map of the world on it - just the sort of thing you want to be reading on public transport and taking through airport security. Today I was reading the first volume of Spike Milligan's excellent diaries of his WWII service, which is also a lovely book. However, it's entitled "Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall", and has the first two words of the title in giant font, above a photo of Milligan's own face to which he's added the toothbrush moustache and emo-styled fringe more famously sported by the Fuhrer...

Anyway. Let me stop before I babble too much more. Christina and I are starting to teach social dancing at St. Columbs tonight, so I need to get some work done first.

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