Thursday 26^th September, 2019

Not much to report really…

It is a beginning and no beginning. With the supreme optimism built only of hope and no knowledge, experience or any other advantage, such deriving from a family of intrepid land explorers or a degree in some nature-derived subject – such that they make up in modern universities to cast the net ever wider for rich international students – we are setting off. We don’t even have our own campervan, but such has been our enthusiasm that we couldn’t wait for the promised van from Germany, the country which is reputed to produce faultless workmanship and on-time trains, in the hope that we can transverse Australia without need for a maintenance stop.

So here we are, travelling in a borrowed Fiat van with an entire orchestra of percussion instruments hidden within the vehicle which we can’t mostly identify. We wouldn’t really mind the instruments, if only they had a conductor to keep them in line. As it is, the instruments, being rattling cupboards and clinking glasses and clanking tools and lazy doors and jangling spoons and knives, not to mention various percussion instruments in the vibrating car-body, it being of Italian origins – and we all know what an unruly lot they are – they, that is the instruments, have no way of seeing each other, therefore play at their own pace, and to their own idea of the tune, whatever that is, which we have not discovered, and play it at a seriously louder volume because of Dungog Shire’s famous, even, one might say, legendary roads.