14.3.11 – Of folk festivals and fruit flies

Dawn at Princeton

The Twelve Apostles

14.3.11 – Of folk festivals and fruit flies (Princeton and Port Fairy, Victoria, Australia)

In the morning, mist lay across the fields and amongst the trees beside the campsite.  All the night before, as the stars had pierced the blackness, we had listened to a deep roaring and thundering as the rollers ended their long, rhythmic journey across the Southern Ocean by assaulting the base of the nearby cliffs.  Our first sight on our journey onwards was from the top of those cream and brown cliffs, stratified like a pile of sandwiches.  There below us was a long golden crescent of sand, which the rollers headed for in a seemingly leisurely procession, rising up in a mound of green as they got closer, only to crash down in a confusion of spume and foam.  And rising up all along the coastline were The Twelve Apostles, immense sea stacks, towering up from the sands, some with little patches of grass and stunted bushes on their tops.  In some places, the sea had cut deep gorges into the cliffs, and caves into which the waves thundered, sending opposing peaks back out of the gorge to challenge the more recent arrivals in violent collisions of spray. 

The plants have altered now.  Gone are the rain forests of amazingly tall white barked eucalyptus trees and the green grassy fields, to be replaced by low scrubby bush, green and greyish blue in colour, and wide expanses of sun-whitened grass.

Port Fairy

And then there was romantically named Port Fairy, in which we suddenly found ourselves amidst the closing stages of a Folk Festival Weekend, which seemed to owe its presence to the Irish origins of most of the original immigrants.  However some muddled identity issues meant that the first song we heard being sung was ‘Ally Bally, Ally Bally Bee, sitting on yer mammie’s knee’, which is as Scottish as heather and Ben Lomond, and not the least bit Irish.  But they had obviously been enjoying themselves, so it clearly didn’t matter.  Tables and chairs were now being stowed away, cloths folded, vans filled, as a somewhat exhausted-looking crowd mingled around the remaining stalls, buying hot dogs, pies, jewellery, hats and dresses.

The joys of paddling

Paddling on the beach is always a nice thing to do, and these beaches were beautiful – white sand, black rocks, brilliant blue seas.  They called to mind the beaches of the Hebrides, only somewhat warmer.  Bill stripped off socks and shoes and paddled in delight.  I could not join him owing to the ongoing battle I am having with the mosquitoes, and last night it was five-nothing for them as I acquired several large wealds on my heels.  But that is only an early round of this contest – I will repay them tonight!

The official notices here do not mince their words.  On the cliffs, one, painted in red and black on a large white board, said ‘If you wander on these cliffs, you may DIE!’.  Another on the roadside stated, alongside a sketch of a gravestone ‘If you text, you will be NEXT!’.  Still further on, in huge letters, another one announced ‘Drowsy drivers DIE!’  One gets the point.  This is also a fruit fly exclusion zone.  I am not sure how one tells fruit flies that they are not welcome, but they are not.  At the state border, we were told in huge notices that we were not allowed to take ANY fruit or vegetables from Victoria across into South Australia.  A large board demanded that we put all our contraband tomatoes and onions into a quite small yellow box.  So, the lurid threats we’d seen on the road making us fear the worst, that we would be searched at gunpoint for illicit garden produce concealed our underwear, we sacrificed our apples, nectarines, half chopped onion and small slightly squashy tomatoes into what turned out to be a totally empty box.  Obviously we are the only virtuous travellers or else everyone else does not like fruit.

And so we entered South Australia, the state which Bill left almost 50 years ago.  Nearly home at last, Grandpa!



Bill reaches his home state