Australia
What to say about OZ and the holiday which took most of February of 2005, – after 18 years away from our home city of Brisbane (except for a few days after Tiananmen Square time), it was good to get back and check it out! Seeing all the South Bank that was developed for Expo ’87, which was after we left Brisbane, the new bus corridors, high rise apartments and all the other changes that happened over the times have certainly made good improvements to the city. It also it helps in seeing it with bright blue skies, no rain in sight and nice balmy weather that we had. Brisbane is what Marg and I tend to call our home city, although, like I said we have not lived there for 18 years. But we met there, working in the same hotel in different restaurants and on different floors. After a while Marg realised that the person getting drunk in the bar each afternoon after work was not such a bad person after all, and we have been together ever since! Australia at that stage was also the place where you owned large 8 cylinder cars, like my Statesman De Ville, bought houses on credit card advances and always had a job to walk into. Over time though, it changed like all places, credit became more expensive, Brisbane became bigger and moved on from its large country town status and things started tightening up from the apparent freedoms that we seemed to enjoy. It was a good place to be in then and like all things, a time comes when we need to move on and it all changes.
In some ways the city has not changed all that much, certainly bigger and now with a four or six lane freeway nearly continuous to the Gold Coast, the city is still recognizable as our own little piece of the world. You now worry though over having one glass of wine and driving home, as the chances are you will be stopped, you need a license for this and licenses for that, walk here, do not walk there, wear a helmet and do not drop a single piece of paper onto the ground! It all gets so sterile after a while that unless you live in the timeless outback, it becomes a bit like a regimented regime that seems to have lost a bit of that Aussie spirit! Part of the reason we live in Asia is still a bit of the frontier feeling that we have, agreed, many times frustrating, but nevertheless, more of living life. Anyway, let’s see if we ever move back to Aussie to settle or whether it was just part of our lives at that stage! There is always so much to see around Australia that we have not touched at yet, that it is tempting to consider this adventure for our retirement years!
On this trip though, we visited Brisbane as I said, and also travelled to Perth for a few days, overnighted in Byron Bay and then I went to Cairns for a couple of nights to meet a close friend of mine, so a bit of travelling but not too bad. We hired a car for a couple of these trips and it is easy driving in Australia with well-behaved motorists and very good roads with every one behaving themselves and following the rules. Mind you, once back in Chennai and you are into the world of character driving again, flowing around bullock carts and three wheeler push-bikes found in the middle of the road, missing cars and potholes by inches and generally being pushed, shoved, scattered and driven along by a crushing sea of vehicles! What fun! In addition, there are no speed cameras here, but after a few trips to NZ and OZ, I feel a bit of a lucky charm there, or else the tickets have not caught up yet! Marg stayed in Brisbane and caught up on items of her own, including time with Brenda and Fred, our great ex-neighbours from Tooth Avenue days, who gave us such great hospitality while we were over there. We went past the old house and peered through the bushes, so to speak, and have put the ghost to rest that we should have stayed and not sold up, as the bit of street that made up our world had changed of course, but not for the better we feel. It seems that we would have moved out of there a long time ago, if we had of stayed anyway.
