The pier.

He broke out of the water and pushed towards the piling. His brother was already there. They rode up and down on the swell, must have been three or four feet, and wore wetsuits against the crusted mussels and other shells on the piling. They pulled themselves up the ladder and went off the edge of the pier again. Tom surfaced and called out he’d been to the bottom.

We were four hundred metres from the shore. The pier was a swarm of people, loose boards rattling under hundreds of feet. Flags were everywhere. People were wearing them. There was even one in the sky, trailing a biplane. The plane flew east and disappeared over Arthur’s Seat. The boys jumped into the water from the lower landing, swam under the pier boards, out again, up the ladder, into the water. A muffled rhythmic whump echoed from the shore. It was three in the afternoon.

They pulled off their flippers and we walked down the pier. Away from the water it was hot. The whump from the shore formed itself into a noise from a band playing on a temporary stage on the foreshore. We threw the flippers down and sat on the grass amidst the fleeting audience. A couple of old rockers who must have been teenagers when the song was a hit were jiving in front. The sax player blew the break from I’m Walkin’ and the smell of barbecue drifted across the crowd. More flags everywhere. The lazy hum of holiday traffic on Point Nepean Road. Flags on stalks in their windows. Flags on their mirrors.

Flags? The Age, a newspaper that was once great, had reported – the day before Australia Day – some academic’s thesis that flags were racist.

Back on the pier now. Teenagers wearing flag bikinis; children wrapped in flag towels. Tom curved a line in the air and disappeared into the water. William followed. They surfaced. The whump with soaring sax came again. Something about a blue moon.

About that exact time on Australia Day, a mob of politicians and professional protestors were making childish ferals of themselves. Or is that feral children? It was like tantrum time at kindergarten, but without the cuteness.

About time governments and academics got the hell out of our lives.

Vegetables that squeak.

Favourite vegetable? Depends on the season. Right now, as summer sails serenely into the bloom of early middle age, I’m enjoying:

• eggplant brushed with garlic-infused olive oil on the outdoor grill at sunset;

• zucchini done the same way;

• warm salad of sweet potato, toasted macadamias and snipped coriander;

• silverbeet cooked with aromatic fenugreek (dried) with a touch of yogurt and chilli flakes swirled through;

• potato salad with spring onion and crisped prosciutto tossed over the top;

• asparagus not much more than merely blanched then rolled in cracked pepper and dipped in orange-flavoured mayonnaise - snap! crack! zing!; and

• Brussels sprouts tossed with butter, pine nuts and chopped chili peppers.

Not all at once, of course.

Another favourite vegetable is the one that looks like a cross between a duckling and a flying saucer: the yellow button squash.

Pasta with vine-ripened tomatoes and button squash

Trim and quarter six button squash. (Choose squash that are medium size and have no wrinkles. My completely non-professional approach to testing button squash freshness is that they should squeak when you handle them!)

Chop six medium very fresh vine-ripened tomatoes into twelfths. Chop an onion into fine rings. Peel and score a garlic clove.

Cook pasta. Try spaghetti rigati or alla chitarra but any long pasta will do. When pasta is almost done, drop in button squash segments. They’ll take a minute or two.

Meanwhile, cook onions, tomato segments and garlic in olive oil and a dash of white wine on very low heat in a covered pan. You want the tomatoes to practically melt, not cook; gradually giving up their juice while roughly holding their shape, eventually to collapse like little tents on top of the pasta when served. Only the very best flavoursome tomatoes should be used. If you have only the billiard ball quality ones, send out for pizza. Add more wine to pan if necessary.

When pasta and squash are ready, drain and carefully add to pan with tomatoes. Do not stir, but place large serving plate over the top, quickly invert and remove pan to reveal tomatoes resting on the pasta and squash. Top with finely chopped basil, cracked pepper and parmesan cheese. Serve outside in the late evening with a glass of chilled wine. Or beer. It's been very hot these past few nights.

Barbecue roasted rack of lamb with mint, garlic and yogurt sauce.

The advertising industry knows how to milk an idea and run with it until it is as dead as Burke and Wills’ last camel, as anyone who has switched on a television, radio computer recently might know. Sam Kekovich isn’t dead by a long shot, but for the eighth year in succession he barks his way in an obnoxious monotone through a sea of bad puns in the Australia Day lamb campaign. It’s done to death, like a barbecue chop that has fallen into the coals. Throw it to the dog.

But don’t let the campaign put you off. Buy a lamb rack and light the barbecue. These long warm nights won't last forever. Go outside and enjoy the aroma of barbecued lamb with a hint of mint and garlic drifting across the garden.

The mint is reaching for the sky in its captive cell in the back garden, so let’s use some. Pick a dozen sprigs of mint and use these to line a large square of foil. Place the lamb rack on the mint. Give it a generous squirt of vinegar, and a good shake of salt. Toss in a few unpeeled cloves of garlic. Now wrap the rack carefully in the foil, overlapping the edges.

Place it on the barbecue slightly offset to the hottest area and bone-side up. Place a large lid over it. Place some parboiled whole small potatoes under the lid, around the rack. Lift the lid after thirty minutes. Depending on size, barbecue heat, distance of grill from coals, number of drinks you’ve had, phase of the moon, time of day etc etc, the lamb should be rare and the potatoes should be done and redolent of garlic and mint.

Remove the foil from the lamb, and place it back on the grill to sear. This stage is optional. I like at rare and unseared. Remove and rest ten minutes, then carve into individual rib chops. Serve on a bed of more fresh mint with the potatoes on the side, and a sauce of minted yogurt (shred mint, fold through greek-style yogurt) to accompany. A green salad with asparagus. Cold white wine.

Eighties singer dangles from clothesline.

Now this is complicated, so let’s go back a step. I drive old cars, because old cars are better than new cars, and because driving a car manufactured twenty years ago is better for the environment than buying a new car - even a Prius - every other year, or every ten years for that matter. Those batteries are murder on the environment, and the electricity just shifts your emissions into someone else's air. Plus, electric cars kill people because they are silent. Last year I was nearly run over by a Prius driven by an inattentive vegetarian backing out of the organic fruit store car park at the top of Lygon Street where the old Liberty cinema used to be.

Old cars mean vintage technology: each of mine has something called “stereo with Dolby”, which is prehistoric sound reproduction equipment installed in the dash, where in today's cars you would find video screens, coffee cup holders, geographic positioning systems, internet interfaces, iPod docks, phone chargers, and maps that tell you where to go. Ridiculous. I don’t know how people concentrate. You don’t even get an ashtray now to steady your nerves. You can drink coffee, check emails, or download movies while you’re driving, but don’t smoke, it’s too dangerous. With that nanny-state logic, no wonder there’s a Prius.

*

There we were in our old Bluetooth-less car with "stereo Dolby sound" driving to the beach on a warm cloudless summer afternoon around the cliff top road that winds from Mornington to Dromana overlooking an impossibly beautiful sparkling Port Phillip Bay. And there was music. A few months ago I found five apparently unused early Elvis Presley albums on cassette, at 99 cents each, in an op shop. The boys like them. They’re on high rotation in the car. After a few plays, the boys learn the songs and sing them. One does Elvis, the other the Jordanaires. Then they swap.

Stand-out tracks: I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell from Separate Ways; Too Much Monkey Business from Flaming Star; Today, Tomorrow and Forever from C’mon Everybody; and, in quieter moments We Call on Him from You’ll Never Walk Alone and If We Never Meet Again from His Hand in Mine, the latter two tracks surely channeling angels.

*

That was the background. Now we move forward a few steps. While otherwise in perfect working condition, very old cassettes sometimes throw their pressure pad, due to aging adhesive. This happened. I went back to the op shop for a donor cassette, taking care to choose one that that no-one could possibly want. I picked a tape by one of those screeching, long-haired power ballad singers from the late 1980s; some guy called Bolton. I took it home and pulled it apart and took out the pressure pad and dropped it into the Presley cassette.

Meanwhile, the boys scampered off with the little reels out of the Bolton cassette, and started throwing them around the backyard like streamers; and some of the filmy brown tape got caught up in the clothesline, ribbons of horrible 1980s music spinning and glinting in the sun, never to be heard again.

Thursday, 16 December 1971

There comes a stage in every journey when you just want to get there and to hell with the scenery.

The salt shower was the turning point. I had slept the night in the top bunk feeling grimy in the intense heat, and all I wanted was to plunge into the Indian Ocean at the end of the road. OK, that’s salt water too. But different.

My cousin and I had been patient. We’d crawled a thousand miles in a westerly direction and it was progress. But then, at Norseman, we ran smack into the world’s biggest detour. Perth is directly west, but to get there you have to drive 150 miles north to Kalgoorlie or 200 miles south to Esperance. How do you decide? Toss a coin? It’s desert whatever way you choose. I wondered how many motorists had felt inclined to just crash the road barrier and plough straight through the dust.

At 8 a.m. the car sat at the intersection with its right indicator ticking patiently while several northbound road trains thundered past. Then we turned and followed them.

Now it was a mind game, if game is the right word. golden miles before me/black tracks of my shoes behind me It didn’t feel like a game. It felt like a dream. It felt like we were marking time. I was breathing air with no oxygen. The landscape was still straggly trees and red dust from horizon to horizon and the sky a blue dome and the heat all around, and I fell in and out of sleep and the music kept running through my semi-comatose mind. a season goes so quickly/you don’t know where you are

Consciousness returned. Two small semi-spoked wheels turned in front of my eyes. I walked away like a movie star The wheels froze. The music stopped. My cousin pushed a button and pulled out the cassette and dropped another one in. He’d recorded several before the trip, to keep him sane.

The music insinuated itself into my half-awake, half-asleep dream; just as at school the droning of my teacher would often become the distant soundtrack to so many nodding afternoons. Now I dreamt I was at school and my teacher was murmuring about mathematics, or having to bring two dollars for tomorrow’s excursion, or how no-one pays attention to him any more, or what next week’s history essay would be about. till Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again Then I snapped awake and I was back in the car in the desert, and the pain of inertia suddenly disappeared; and that’s how I came to finally understand the idea of freedom, despite being a prisoner stuck in the scorching back seat of a 1967 Valiant that was taking forever to arrive at its destination.

Late in the day a scattering of prehistoric rusted machinery grew out of the distance and cut the boiling horizon to ribbons; the shafts and wheels of Kalgoorlie’s nineteenth century goldfields. They died here for gold until the water came. Before the water came, there was only the insane lust for gold, and death by thirst, and typhoid, and madness. I should complain about a saltwater shower. 

see the curtain hanging in the window/in the evening on a friday night

Why people don't write letters.

I needed a stamp to post a letter. I fought my way to the post office through the pigeons that plague Victoria Mall, and managed to enter without hitting one or one hitting me. They are everywhere. They sit on the wires and the shopfronts like fat brown and grey sentinels and scrabble about on the ground and swoop onto the tables and chairs outside the cafes and get under your feet. All the shops in the mall have signs reading 'Do Not Feed the Pigeons' but people feed them anyway.

The queue in the post office was long and full of people not buying stamps, and it snaked its way around merchandise including boxes marked 'large telescope', alarm clocks in football team colours, childrens DVDs, a table of Christmas decorations marked '50% off', and a display of flatpacked birdbaths.

Oenglish: the language of labels.

The label on the wine bottle said the wine inside was 'affable'. It was a Victorian shiraz, 2008. I have forgotten the maker, who might be an affable chap. But I suspect he meant either quaffable or approachable, or a meaning in between those words.

Happy new year.

Book babies.

Alexandra, with early morning hair, and books.

William at the same age.

Thomas, same age.

Let it hail.

It was the second white Christmas in five years, if you count hail.

Christmas was back at the golf course after three years. A dozen tables sat under shady umbrellas outside the clubhouse, on a rise of lawn overlooking the fairways. That’s where lunch was supposed to be served. But the rain came first. I watched it come.

A little earlier, a massive black thing in the sky way out west had grown larger and loomed over the city, and had then started aiming hail at us as we hit the Eastern Freeway. I thought it might overshoot and fade to the southeast. Wrong. I took the exit ramp at Bulleen Road, crossed the freeway, turned right into the Boulevard, and right again back over the freeway along a narrow bridge road that ended at a steel gate. By this time it was a torrent. The gate slid open and we drove through and stopped out the front of the clubhouse.

They were huddled under the eave and inside looking out at the storm. It raged. Way below, the fairways were white carpets sweeping away in all directions. It didn’t stop. Lunch was served inside. Later, a few brave golfers headed out in buggies when the rain appeared to be easing, but the storm just kept circling and it was on again. You couldn’t hear conversation. The stream grew and broke its banks and the level climbed one of the fairways. The lightning put on a show to the north east. That was where most of the damage seems to have been done, around Eltham way. Hope you weren’t affected.

Sydney Road was still flooded as we drove home around eight.

What I listened to this Christmas.

Good King Wenceslaus
All my childhood Christmases occured during summer heatwaves in a sunburned land characterised by wildfire, burning northerly winds and dust storms. So all those songs about cold and snow and fir trees and medieval kings fascinated me and took me away into a faraway land. Here is a song written in 1853 in Britain by an Anglican minister about a duke, a thousand years earlier, who gave to the poor in Bohemia - in order to teach children about the virtue of generosity in celebrating the birth of a Jewish child in Bethlehem another thousand years earlier - and listened to by a marvelling child in twentieth century Australia. Like a beautiful woven gown circling the world with goodwill down the ages, this song says something about Christmas. And about goodwill to all men.

O Come All Ye Faithful
As a child I used to think it was O Calm All Ye Faithful and I would think to myself Why are they telling everybody to relax? Maybe it's because tomorrow is Christmas; and everyone is getting way too excited! Like me!

Silent Night
This is the most recorded song in history and the most famous of all the Christmas hymns. It exists because of a broken organ in a little parish in the little alpine village of Oberndorf in 1818. The priest, Father Mohr, asked his friend, Dr Gruber to compose some words for a poem to be sung with accompanying guitar because the organ had broken down. Dr Gruber did so in time for midnight mass. For me, the gentle lilt and simple melody of Silent Night is quintessentially Austrian.

Away in a Manger
Just because it is a sweet song, poignant, naive and beautiful. Children love it and it was the first Christmas song I learned, as far as I can remember.

Ave Maria sung by Kiri Te Kanawa
Find a copy of this, settle back on Christmas night, put the kids to bed, put the dog out, turn off the TV, turn off everything else, disable the front door bell, take the phone off the hook, turn down the lights and listen. If tears of joy are not running down your cheeks by the end, then you've already died and gone to heaven. On second thoughts, let the dog stay inside and listen with you.

Happy Christmas, every one.

Heat, dust and salt water showers.

Wednesday morning, 15 December 1971

It was five in the morning when we slipped out of Eucla under the heavy cover of an oppressive darkness, car headlights blazing. The sultry heat hung over the desert like a wet tent. The landscape fell behind us faster than yesterday because we were back on a real road again and the tyres were humming instead of crunching. 

At six o’clock, Uncle switched off the lights as the first rays of the sun slowly throttled the long shadows. Black turned to gold. Seven o’clock passed, eight o’clock. If it was hot earlier, now it was like someone had switched on an oven. At twenty minutes past ten, the Valiant rolled to a stop off the road at Madura, a town that was just a fuel stop. We parked in the shade of nothing and climbed out of the sticky car into more heat.  You could just about pick it up in your hands. We took refuge in the van where it might have been 95 instead of 100. 

Aunt pulled a meal out of nowhere as she did the whole journey; simple fare such as cheese, cold meat and salad sandwiches, tinned fruit, fruit cake, hot tea. It was endless. I don’t recall seeing a supermarket. We sat at the fold-down table in the caravan, trying not to melt over our early lunch, and sweating drips that turned to little streams flowing onto the cushions of textured vinyl in flecked cream with black piping. A small fan moved some hot air around.

While Uncle rested, tired from the hot early drive, my cousin and I went to climb a long, low hill across the highway. We thought we might be able to see the Southern Ocean, or Perth, or wild camels. Halfway up, stumbling between some straggly low trees, I walked into something soft and velvety and sticky. The soft and sticky thing was as big as a hammock. I kind of bounced off it, except it stuck to me. In the middle of the hammock, a long, fat, black leg stretched itself out. The other seven legs just stayed where they were. I didn’t have to count eight. I knew. You always know. It was about the size of a crow and the same colour. I reeled backwards. Part of the web was still stuck to me. I flicked it off. That got the spider going. It jerked around like a dog doing circles before lying down. Maybe it was annoyed. Maybe it was going to bite me. Maybe I would die before I could get back to the caravan. It was impossibly nimble for its size. Then it stopped moving and just rocked there in the heat and stared at me. I stared back. The spider won the staring competition, but only because it had more eyes than me. My cousin laughed. “They’re harmless, remember? They only eat birds.”

We went back down the hill.  Uncle was just closing up the caravan. He fired up the Valiant and off we went again; west, west, west.

*

That night after dinner, from way over the other side of the caravan park, we could see Uncle sitting on a deck chair next to the open door of the caravan; Aunt next to him, rolling tomorrow’s cigarettes. She rolled all her own cigarettes, making them curiously thin and storing them in an aluminium flip-top tin. She was a tiny slip of a woman in her forties with short dark curly hair and olive skin, and she always wore simple sundresses with flat shoes. Ever ready with a wisecrack, she was just like her younger brother, my father. Her husband was fifty, white-haired, calm. Cousin and I watched them for a minute and then continued on our usual evening walk.

*

Wednesday afternoon, 15 December 1971

Delirium now. Two in the afternoon. We stopped at Water Tank. Is it a place or just a water tank? Don't know. I mentally gave it a capital W and T anyway. It was a wire-fenced square compound with a corrugated iron roof over a tank and a rudimentary pump, drawing water from some subterranean aquifer. I suppose an aquifer is subterranean by definition. What do you think, cousin? He’s a man of few words. The water tasted rusty, like it had old ploughs in it.

More red flat landscape and then we are rolling through Balladonia and the name sounds like a fictional land where songwriters go to write movie soundtracks, but it was just a Mobil roadhouse frying in the sun - 105 degrees - with its red flying horse sign blown down by some long-gone storm. Delirium. The road went straight for ninety miles and I had the sensation of standing still while the desert went past. Deserts are supposed to be made of sand, I raved quietly to myself. Cousin was fast asleep now and his head lolled on my shoulder. In front, Uncle's head was a statue. The car radio crackled and that was all the noise there was apart from the tyres. Time stood still. The sun burnt my arm on the sill of the window. I moved it. Sand would not be as infuriating as dust, I raved on, which is finer and hangs in the air like a hot, red fog. Man, the size of that spider. I shivered, even in the heat. My cousin woke.

Slowly, the red landscape changed. Spinifex or saltbush or whatever it was called turned to low shrub, and the low shrub turned to small trees. Still straggly and parched, but small trees nevertheless. Then - bang - the Eyre Highway ended at Norseman, a town that was more Sahara than Scandinavia. At the caravan park, the usual ‘All Visitors Must Report Here’ sign greeted us at an office that was an old caravan. A propped-up clothesline was strung along the side for visitors' use. That made it a four-star resort instead of three. Sure enough, the Renault was parked across the way. He seemed to have figured out the tent. Only took him half of Australia. By Perth he’ll be an expert. 

I headed straight to the shower block to try and shed some dust.

I stripped off and stepped into the concrete shower cubicle, turned on the water and watched the dust flowing red down my trunk and my legs, through my toes and out the drain hole. Norseman’s water supply is salt water, and the water from the cold tap was warm. It made my body feel stickier and saltier than before. I finished my shower and sandpapered my naked body with my towel. 

The end of email.

That's it. Goodbye email. I'm unsubscribing to everything. Tiger Airways, Start to Finish, InfoChoice, Vigor Health and Fitness, Crikey (how on earth did I get onto their list?), LinkedIn Updates, Melbourne Writers and dozens of others. (LinkedIn, by the way, sends me emails saying something to the effect that 'someone who may be connected to you has updated their profile'. Nuts.)

That was yesterday.

Today I got another email from Tiger Airways. So I unsubscribed again. A message came up:

The following error was encountered while processing your request: You are currently not subscribed to our newsletter. 

Then why did they send it?

Come for a drive with us, my uncle said, you'll keep your cousin amused.

Tuesday morning, 14 December 1971

A threatening humidity lurked under a blanket of darkness as we hit the highway out of Ceduna around half past five in the morning, dawn a threatening red streak on the east horizon. You have to start early to make headway before the heat hits. The nearest large towns are Port Augusta, 300 miles to the east and Norseman, about three times that distance to the west.

The road west runs along the bottom edge of the Nullabor Desert where it meets the section of Southern Ocean called the Great Australian Bight. Cliffs run along the coast for hundreds of miles and the sea, over millions of years, has gouged tunnels deep into them. These surface as blowholes in the plain and people, straying off the road, have fallen into them. What a horrible fate. Today, we’re aiming to reach Eucla, driving across a red desert with nothing in it except a dirt road. The car has run like a Swiss watch so far, hasn’t missed a beat.

It was a steamy, dusty, unforgettable day. Uncle was unusually quiet. It could have been the early start, but it was probably the prospect of driving a car towing a caravan across three hundred unsealed miles. The bitumen ended a few miles out of town, and as we hit the dirt, the tyres starting talking a different language, a kind of cobble-cobble-cobble instead of their usual crossply whistle. We swished along in the heat and dust like a land-boat.

Red dust everywhere and scrubby, ugly, spiky desert plants that could not possibly have had names. They probably had, but I’m no botanist. You wouldn’t want them in your garden next to the prize roses. The things you think about when there’s nothing else; and even your aunt in the front seat has stopped the wisecracks. The morning creaked towards noon. The miles rolled under the car.  The road has a name. It’s the Eyre Highway, after Edward Eyre, who walked it, so shut up and stop complaining. Actually, he had horses. There’s very little traffic now. Most travel early to avoid the heat, but that’s when animals are up and about. People worry about snakes and spiders, but kangaroos are the biggest killer in Australia. People hit them in cars. Have you seen the size of a Big Red? I talked rubbish to my cousin, stared out the window, tried to sleep.

Late morning we were stopped by some Anangu; gentle, black-skinned, snub-nosed, brown-eyed people with washed out hair and the kind of eerie presence possessed by humans whose ancestors have lived in the district for thousands of years. They flag cars down to sell their wares; carvings, craft, traditional items. Later, we crunched to a stop somewhere in the flat sea of red dust for lunch, and cups of tea. Always cups of tea.

*

We - my uncle, aunt and cousin - had left Melbourne three days earlier to cross Australia from east to west during the sweltering Christmas holidays of 1971-72. The car had no air-conditioning. You wound down the windows, except on the unmade roads, because the car would fill with dust. It came in anyway. Entertainment was the AM car radio when in range of a station, and my aunt’s jokes. My cousin was fifteen, a year older than me. The journey should have been a teenager's nightmare, with nothing to do except stare at an endless flat landscape. 

*

Tuesday afternoon, 14 December 1971

I fell asleep as usual after lunch with my head against the C-pillar. Uncle’s power of staying awake at the wheel amazes me. Two thousand miles of alertness. Maybe Aunt, in the front next to him, was jabbing him the ribs the whole way. She never drove.

I snapped out of my reverie when I felt the car braking. A car was right in front of us. It was the white Renault 10 with yellow NSW registration plates that had accompanied us, on and off, from somewhere near Port Augusta. We had seen its occupants, a somewhat eccentric elderly couple, at two of the overnight stops. Uncle was driving evenly now, but the Renault kept accelerating and slowing down as if its occupants were looking at something outside the car. What, exactly? Dust? Uncle braked, sat back, braked some more. The Renault slowed again and eventually Uncle had to swing out and pass. Mid-manoeuvre, the Renault sped up again. Fools! It was too late to pull in again, so my uncle had to coax a little more speed out of the engine, which was already singing the high notes.

You can’t see potholes but you know they are there. The dust evens them out. The Valiant's right front wheel hit one; the car lurched. The lurch telegraphed through the tow bar, and the caravan corrected, the other way. Then back again. Uncle wrestled the beast. The beast fought back. Uncle kept wrestling. I waited for the jack-knife. We ran off the road. After an eternity that lasted maybe eight seconds, he somehow found a straight line in the dust, dragged the car and van to a stop, switched off the engine. He got out of the car, sat down on a log. We got out. My aunt lit a cigarette, a little shakily, and made some kind of a joke about it being a nice place for a stop. My cousin and I took off our shirts. It was unbearably hot and the sweat was turning the dust on our backs into soup that ran down our spines and into our shorts. The Eyre Highway's verges are littered with caravan wrecks. No point retrieving them. They just leave them there to bleach in the sun like bones. We'd seen them. Uncle got up off the log and walked around the car and the caravan. One hub cap was gone. He didn’t go and look for it. It could have rolled into a blowhole for all he cared. The Renault 10 had just kept going, of course. The last thing we had heard was its idiotic four-cylinder rear engine popping up and down like an over-enthusiastic marching band.

We got cold drinks out of the caravan; and then after a while, we got back in the car and pulled back onto the road. The dusty unmade highway stretched on into the afternoon. Now the sun was in front of us, drawing us on like land-moths to a flame in the western sky. Some hours later the car rumbled across dust and small stones into Eucla. We found the caravan park easily enough, and the car panted to a halt at a sign that read ‘Stop Here To Register'. Uncle and aunt got out and went into the office.

My cousin touched me on the shoulder and pointed. A Renault 10 was parked in a camping bay at the far end of the park, bonnet lid up and front doors open. We watched as a man fussed over a tent that kept falling down. A woman was jabbing her finger at the tent and her mouth was snapping open and shut. 

Moral issue raised by old plates.

Now the old plates are turning up in mosaic-ed numbers for houses as Christmas gifts for relatives, an 'office' sign for the kindergarten, and some other projects.

"But why not bone china?" I had asked, continuing a somewhat convoluted conversation of a week or so ago. It does not fracture or chip easily, is the answer. And when it does, its shards are uneven and very, very sharp. Bone china is hard because it is manufactured using bones. I have tested knowledge of this fact on a small research group, and it was not universally known. In fact, there was some surprise expressed.

Which raises a question. If you have friends over for dinner, and they are vegetarians, and you cook up some wonderful vegetarian food, and you serve it on your best crockery, which is bone china; should you admit to your friends the awful truth that they are eating their vegetarian meals off plates made from the ground-up bones of dead cows? Or not?

*

The oldest bone china item I have is a bread and butter plate from the set given to my maternal grandfather and grandmother at their wedding in 1925. It is the last piece of the set remaining, as far as I know. 

A few posts ago, I tried to justify a $90 tag on a book. Forget it. Dymock's has knocked $20 off the price. A week before Christmas.