Tuesday, February 04, 2014
Monday, February 03, 2014
Southern Cross, 4th time around ... The skies aren't like LA around here ...
This is my fourth time "Crossing the Line" (so to speak). In 2010, I visited Brasil and Australia; then, in 2012, South Africa.I was able to spot the Southern Cross on those trips, especially on the trip to South Africa where I stayed in a lovely light pollution free area of Cape Town for part of the trip).
But on this trip to Australia, I was in a perfect spot. Lorne, a few hours from Melbourne on the coast, had a perfect light free sky and clear skies, so it was easy to spot.
In fact, the night I went Southern Cross spotting, I was looking skyward when a man in a suit with an American accent asked "Are you Australian?" I said no, sorry. He said he was looking for the Southern Cross, so I pointed it out and him and said, "The skies are so different here." And he replied, "Yes, much different than LA."
Different indeed ...
Here's the post from South Africa.
Sunday, February 02, 2014
Some passages from "On the Beach" ... the end of the world as we know it, down under
On the Beach (1957) by Nevil Shute is possibly one of the first novels set in Australia that I read, probably back around 1975 or 1976, I read it during a period when I was working my way through various apocalypse novels (Fail Safe, Alas, Babylon, etc.). Perhaps the most meditative of them, it is also the most calmly intense as the residents of Melbourne and a few Americans (from the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion) slowly await death as radiation makes its way down from the northern hemisphere.From On the Beach by Nevil Shute
Northern hemisphere people seldom mixed well, now, with people of the southern hemisphere. Too much lay between them, too great a difference of experience.
He shook his head. “Not a thing. It’s the winds. It’s mighty difficult to dodge what’s carried on the wind. You just can’t do it. You've got to take what’s coming to you, and make the best of it.”
It told him that a civilian scientific officer of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation had been ordered to report in Scorpion for scientific duties. This officer would be under the command of the Australian liaison officer in Scorpion. His name was Mr. J. S. Osborne.
At the corner of Swanston and Collins Streets an Italian was playing a very large and garish accordion, and playing it very well indeed.
It wasn't the big countries that set off this thing. It was the little ones, the Irresponsibles.”
I think the next step is that I call a conference with C.S.I.R.O. and anybody else who may be concerned.“I don’t knit. I don’t do anything restful. You ought to know that by now.”
The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it.
After lunch, smoking before they did the washing up, she said, “I don’t think I want to go to Melbourne again, Peter.” He smiled. “Getting a bit piggy, isn’t it?” “It’s horrible,” she said vehemently. “Everything shut up, and dirty, and stinking. It’s as if the end of the world had come already.” “It’s pretty close, you know,” he said.The human race was to be wiped out and the world made clean again for wiser occupants without undue delay. Well, probably that made sense.
“I’m going home,” he said quietly. “This is a grand country, and I've liked it here. But it’s not my country, and now I’m going back to my own place, to my own folks. I like it in Australia well enough, but all the same I’m glad to be going home at last, home to Connecticut.” He turned to her. “I shan’t see this again, because I’m going home.”
Saturday, February 01, 2014
QotD: "Down the road to Lorne -- ... / West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin --" Kipling
Buy my English posies!You that will not turn --
Buy my hot-wood clematis,
Buy a frond o' fern
Gathered where the Erskine leaps
Down the road to Lorne --
Buy my Christmas creeper
And I'll say where you were born!
West away from Melbourne dust holidays begin --
They that mock at Paradise woo at Cora Lynn --
Through the great South Otway gums sings the great South Main --
Take the flower and turn the hour, and kiss your love again!
- Rudyard Kipling, "The Flowers"
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