My Grandfather was a Wonthaggi coal miner from the 1920’s. It was a very dangerous job and miners were killed or severely injured on the job regularly. As this article (Mercury 10 Dec 1923) proves a dangerous job isn’t necessarily the thing that will kill you. The poor guy was having a swim with his mates to relax and ended up being eaten by sharks. I wonder what happened to his unsuspecting fiancée and if they were able to contact her before she left England. Imagine the poor girl leaving home to start a new life on the other side of the world to find her beloved had been eaten by sharks.
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All posts for the month March, 2011
The word tumefy means to become swollen. A perfect word to describe number 2 sons forehead after an ‘incident’ during a family get-together at Ringwood Lake on the weekend. A high-speed coming together between his head and the metal dome in the middle of a bouncy see-saw thing caused instant tumefaction and many tears. I was not witness to the actual impact, but the collective shock of the bystanders assured me it was spectacular. He was helped by his lovely brother and cousin and when I saw the gigantic black egg already forming on his forehead I was glad I had missed it. We decided that he could do with having a conversation with a doctor and packed up our bits and pieces and took him to the nearby Maroondah Hospital.
We have visited hospitals with him many times as number 2 had terrible asthma when he was small and I have found that if you arrive in emergency with a small child having breathing difficulties and they have a history of severe asthma you rarely see the waiting room, and if you do there is no time to warm the seat. This time he was horrified to find he had to wait his turn as he was now just some kid with a bumped head. The only concession he received was a cold pack for the bruising. Welcome to the real world. I was resigned to spending the entire day watching sicker people get ahead of us and being bored out of my mind when, suddenly, we were called in. The nurse saw us quickly, as did the doctor. By the time the doctor saw him number 2 was bouncing off the walls and back to his normal monkey-boy self, proving that the injury was self-inflicted, and we were sent home. Amazing. A Saturday afternoon in emergency and we were out before the 2 hour parking had expired. We had even got a car park right at the door!
The tumefaction receded quite quickly, thank goodness. The next morning a darkening of the corner of his left eye spread the existing bruising out from under his shaggy fringe and now on Wednesday he looks a bit like he has been beaten up. I was going to cut his hair last week as both kids are looking a bit feral but now I am pleased I am so slack and he is able to avoid everyone asking him what happened. He is usually happy to show off his war wounds but when they have been caused by something embarrassing he is eager to keep it to himself. Falling off a see-saw is not cool so very few have been privy to this particular bit of damage.
Found this article in The Mail (Adelaide) from 9th May 1931. People will never stop complaining about the shiftlessness of the younger generations, and to me this article proves stupidity is nothing new. What an idiot. I wonder if he survived.
Today is a beautiful sunny day and I have no thoughts in my head to share as it is crowded out by the urgency of the pile of dirty clothes on the laundry floor. While I was waiting for the machine to finish the camera and I went for a walk in the garden and found some happy critters sunning themselves.
The lavender was full of small spiders and flies and the beautiful metallic fly sunning itself on the rosemary caught my eye. There is a tiny cricket hiding in the leaves near him. There are critters everywhere you look, even if you can’t see them.
The boys school is having crazy hair day today. It is part of the Be Brave and Shave thing that raises funds for the leukemia foundation. I am very proud of myself as I am not a person with any discernible hair dressing skills and yet I still managed to send both boys off with fantastically coloured and crazily spiked hair that they were delighted with. YAY ME!!! I was even more impressed with myself when I realized that it was also out of uniform day and they actually had clean clothes to wear. Phew! I also helped the man of the house this morning when a screw came out of his glasses. Without them he couldn’t see to fix them, so it was a bleary-eyed me to the rescue at 6am with a tiny screwdriver.
Unfortunately, apart from cooking dinner, I have already used everything in my skill base today. Not sure how I can have any further use to anyone for the rest of the day. Going away now…..
Due to huge amounts of rain over the last few days part of one of the roads out to the popular tourist spot Wilsons Promontory in Victoria has been covered by a landslip and one of the bridges has been cut to another campground in the park. Yesterday there were a few hundred people stuck there, including school groups. Yesterday, and again today they are airlifting out groups. Lucky buggers! Number1 son was on a school camp there last year and a group of grade 5/6 kids from our school have not long returned from a week-long camp there too. The kids all had a great time and told us all of their exciting news when they returned but can you imagine how long the stories would have been told and retold if they had been off to a camp and then they were trapped and had to be helicoptered out?
The best holidays are the ones where things go slightly awry. We have been on lots of camping trips but the ones we remember the most fondly are the ones where we teetered on the brink of disaster or the weather did it’s best to ruin it for us. We still laugh about the camping trip where the cooking fire had to be started with chemical assistance with the help of a table placed over the kindling due to the torrential rain. Then a drain had to be dug to keep the water from filling the fire hole.
Last year we took the kids on a road trip to see Ayres Rock. We were away for 5 weeks and a multitude of unexpected things happened to us and we enjoyed every minute of it. We hadn’t even made it to Adelaide and we had to find a mechanic able to stop the terrible vibration coming out of the front passenger wheel. The front end had been overhauled before we left so we were at a loss as to what it could have been. After one day of repairs and thanks to the wonderful help we received from the Toyota dealer in Clare we were back on our way, $800 lighter and carting a bag of busted bits to take back to the original grease-shy mechanic.
A few days later we pulled into Coober Pedy in flooding rain. The streets were flooded and that is not a town that has any concept of storm water drains so the water just hung around until it found somewhere else to be. We didn’t moan about it and we didn’t stress about having to put up the canvas top of the camper and get drowned in the process. We just laughed at the silliness of floods in the desert and took the opportunity to treat the kids to an underground hotel for the night. They were thrilled and we found a caravan park the next day. I bet they couldn’t tell you anything about that caravan park but the hotel has been regularly mentioned since.
When we got to Ayres Rock campground in Yulara it was still pouring. Even though we had driven for hundreds of kilometers that day we had been rained on nearly all the way. We set up between rain showers and were lucky that we have our own power supply in the camper as the rain had got into their mains and blown the power in our half of the caravan park. Again we laughed as we had power and pretty much everyone else around us just had a cold dinner and went to bed.
A week later we were taking the Mereenie Loop road from Kings Canyon to Alice Springs and our next blip occurred. We were driving along quietly (no we don’t hoon in the bush, too much to see) and I asked the leader of our expedition if the car was getting hot. He looked at the dash and I got a don’t-ask-me-stupid-questions look. I told him I could smell radiator water. He looked back at the dash and we came to a skidding halt. We got out to find the entire contents of the radiator spilling out onto the sand of the road 5 kilometers out of the aboriginal community of Hermannsburg. That meant we were still 136kms from Alice Springs. Hermannsburg’s claim to fame is being the birthplace of Albert Namatjira. Sadly it is not famous for it’s car repair facilities and we had to try to sort it out on our own. The leader of the expedition is quite mechanical but I don’t think there is a person in the world that would choose to breakdown in that situation. The tip of the fan had snapped off and made a hole in the bottom of the radiator. Damn. We started poking around under the bonnet and suddenly another Victorian plated car pulled over to see if we needed help. It was a couple on their way back from the Alice Springs truck show and as fate had it one half of the couple was a mechanic. 2 hours later the radiator was out, plugged up, back in and full of camper water. We were back on our way and very impressed with the random roadside service. As we made our careful way to Alice on the bitumen the tailpipe gave up the ghost and needed seeing to and 2 legs of the old roof rack finally decided that the spare tyre was too much and parted ways. We were still laughing as we pulled into Alice and started looking for another mechanic.
Whenever we go on holiday something goes wrong. I don’t think that a perfect holiday is possible and, really, I love it when things happen that make you remember that place or day forever. No 1 son will never forget the town of Burra where he found what appeared to be a real human skeleton in a dusty box in an old junk shop. No 2 son always says ‘I didn’t like the ants’ when asked what he thought of Ayres Rock after an ant climbed up his jeans and bit him on the leg while we were admiring the rock from the track.
Perfect is not fun. Disaster is memorable. The people at Wilsons Prom have one of the best holiday stories they will ever get now!
Buried words and Bushwa. 
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