Winter Beach - Caloundra

These are the last photos from my old Panasonic LZ3 digital camera. I have a new Canon G12 which gives me a lot more control over shutter speed and aperture etc. Will my investment make any difference to my photos?  Is it the camera or is it the photographer?

Brisbane Writers Festival

Met Jon Doust at the Brisbane Writers Festival today. What a character. He effectively sold Albany as the centre of the writing world of the planet. He was on a panel talking about the place of "old cultures" in new writing. Sue Woolfe and Brett Caldwell made up the panel. They were a great mix - about as different a three as you could find. At one end Jon's dysfunctional youth and off beat sense of humour at the other the 15 year military background of the surprisingly insightful and sensitive Brett Caldwell and Sue Woolfe in the middle - the white girl living in a remote aboriginal community in NT for  a year with her daughter and all her assumptions being smashed. That plus Drusella Majeska in conversation with Robert Dessai (wonderful) and then lots of writers from Oceania speaking French.

My theme for the three days was the Pacific and writing about cultures other than your own. Drusella Majeska talked about her novel 'The Mountain' set in Papua Nui Guinea where she lived for many years. PNG is the closest country to Australia but we fly over it, sail by it and largely ignore it. She spoke about how challenging it is to enter cultures so different from our own. She described her writng as getting behind the eyes of her PNG characters but always aware that they were still her eyes.

I also attended three sessions featuring Tahiitian and New Caledonian writers writing in French. The most interesting question posed was "Did they see themselves as French writers or writers writing in French?" They were all adamant that they were Pacific Islanders (both white and indigenous writers) and French just happened to be the lingua franca of their region. "Do people who write in English see themselves as English writiers?" was the question they posed in return. The question of writers writing in the language of the colonisers was one that was approached but one which continues to be unresolved in terms of influence and the irony or contradiction of that situation. There are some very good writers from that vast region.

A good couple of days.

Fishing for flatties

Went fishing on Thursday in Moreton Bay down by the mangroves at Jacobs Well. It's only 30 minutes out of town. It's part of the Brisbane area by-passed by all but fishermen. Tens of thousands of  families and surfers, boards strapped to their roof or boots bursting with beach towels and beach umbrellas and body boards fly by at high speed on their way to the famed Gold Coast. The M1 makes it less than an hour away.

But take the turn-off to Jacob's Well and it's another country. The road is a series of straight bitumen strips which take you through car-high sugar cane fields first east, then south, then east again. In the distance, between breaks in the walls of cane, a plume of cloud-white smokes reaches for the Queensland sky from the single smoke stack of the sugar mill. It's an anachronism, like having a abattoir in your suburb. The next nearest sugar mills are two hours south and five hours north in rich alluvial soil country much more suitable for cropping. Even the local farmers agree. They petition the government every five years for permission to sell up and subdivide but the land is deemed arable and the government has held firm until now.

We picked up some bait and got on the water by 9:30. The fish were biting but they were all small buggers and didn't need a measure. We kissed them goodbye and set them free. Every time we decided to pack up and head home the bites came again. More small ones, mainly bream, a whiting, a sole. Then almost at the death of the day Denis landed a bigun. A flathead. We thought about measuring it on the marked up rule on the side of the tinny but the bugger was thrashing about threatening to jump out of the boat and we weren't going anywhere near those painful spikes. He was likely to do a runner if we got him anywhere near the water.

We reckoned he was just under the 70cm length. Unfortunately we couldn't remember the actual maximum legal size so we phoned Denis' wife and getting no answer left a message - 'Could she do a flathead google  and get back to us?'

Poor fat, father flathead, cos that's what he turned out to be (flathead over a certain length are all female and can't be taken), was having trouble holding his breath while waiting for the return call. Our one-size-too-small esky was a tad cramped and rigor mortis soon set in. We gave him our blessings and our thanks and, since we had enough to feed two couples, we headed for home.

As we hauled the dripping boat from the water attached to our Nissan XTrail, the phone rang.  Turned out the max was 70cm and we were comfortably inside the measure. Luckily the hour delay hadn't resulted in us becoming conscience stricken. We were able to partake of that dusky beauty free of guilt.

Frosty morning - Maryvale Qld

Wine country - Wollombi, Hunter Valley, NSW

Skinny dip

We're walking along a path on the northern shores of Sydney Harbour. We pass only three or four people in the first twenty minutes. I'm amazed that Sydney, the largest city in Australia, has extensive walking tracks through bushland set aside as public space within sight of the Opera House.

The harbour looks beautiful. The water is polished to a gleaming sheen, sailing boats glide across the horizon, white sails gently puffed smooth by the breeze. We, all-four, are dressed in long pants, jumpers, jackets and scarves. Nick has brought a picnic which bulges from his backpack. It's a beautiful blue winter Sydney day. Did you bring your togs? I ask Nick jokingly. Yep. I love cold water, he says and goes on to talk about exotic places he's swum and laments the fact that his girlfriend is not as keen on iceberg swimming as he is. There might be other important elements to a long term relationship, I comment. I've had this conversation with Nick many times in our thirty year friendship. He's the perennial hippy; the surviving member of a share house in Annandale for which he has held the lease for over twenty years.

As we round a bend in the track past a string of dingies stacked on the overgrown bank of an inlet, we spy a length of sandy beach below us. Looks like a good place for a picnic. We all agree and find ourselves alone on this point which pushes out into the harbour. It's hard to believe that around the corner we would see the Opera House and to our left we can see South Head dropping off into the Pacific. From here we watch a   Manly ferry push through between us and Watson's Bay across the water.

The beach is sandy but the water hides flat sandstone rocks. There are a couple of thin pathways beween them. Suddenly it looks cold. There's a breeze off the water and Andrea and Lindy find a sheltered spot to sit and enjoy the scene.

You up for it Steve? Oh yeah. I bravely reply. I reckon its a skinny-dip don't you says Nick. I'm game if you are, I say. Nick drops his daks and pulls his layers of warmth over his head. I follow suit. I, too, love cold water and unusual swimming locations. My cold swim stories are of the Atlantic off Brittany in France, the 'mens only bathing pond' in Hamstead Heath in suburban London and deep, still swimming holes in the bush hinterland of Brisbane in winter.

Slippery rocks make entry to cold water excruciating. There's no option but to get colder inch by inch. . I find a hole. The harbour beckons and threatens. I plunge and thrash about trying to survive the first seconds. It's a high risk cardiac moment. My eyeballs threaten to turn to metal, my head and ears scream GET OUT. And then I start to warm up. Nick reckons it's just the body in shut-down mode. I love this - warming up and shutting down. It makes me feel alive rather than close to death. I could stay in the water now for half an hour but Nick is out within minutes and so I stumble across the slimy flat rocks and join him, triumphant, on the beach, in the sun. Warm again. No police boats have arrived to arrest us.

We savor the moment as if we are the first explorers of this place. Brothers in the nude together. Captured on camera forever.

Two Day Week

I've gone back to paid work two days a week. Monday is Monday and Tuesday is Friday. I highly recommend a five day weekend. My job? I've gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. My last job was managing the Brisbane City Council Youth Program and now I'm overseeing the Council's Seniors' Strategy. From the juniors to the seniors in one step! Any recommendations to make life better in our cities as we get older would be welcome.