Weekend visitation to the World Ocean

Stop it, Broulee.

I’ve just returned from an unscripted getaway to the New South Wales coastal town of Broulee to visit the Hydrosphere. I always find it a bit annoying that, despite the ocean comprising 70% of the earth’s surface, it still take me two hours to get anywhere near it.

The World Ocean and I have a thing, but it’s more of a unrequited type of thing, because I care considerably more about our bond than it does.

I spend thousands of dollars visiting it nearly every year (courtesy of the Hawaiian Islands unfortunate stranded geographic location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean), and it's never visited me once. I think it likes to keep things planktonic. That’s the thing with the ocean; it's quite shellfish.

I’m always a bit of a nervous shipwreck driving down to the South Coast via the precarious Clyde Mountain, the 780 metre steep, winding peak that comes between me and my watery plankonic friend. Evidently it is the locale of many car crashes. No big packet of surprises there.

Moi

If you have the stamina to endure the oncoming racing cars speeding right into your face and overtaking vehicles side swiping your side mirror - presumably because they are neurosurgeons heading to perform delicate emergency open brain surgery? - then you will have a pleasant trip down the way.

I do hope they know that if they crash into a tree I’ll have to choose between my need to casually continue my drive and any attempt to prolong their lives, and I've already made my choice.

It was forecast to be a lovely day down the seaside and I was heading there with one porpoise because long tide, no sea. It sounds like the sealiest thing, but I swear the ocean waves at me every time I get to its shores. I'm not a stage five clinger, but I will pier pressure it to come around to my way of thinking. Stop doing ocean jokes? Shore thing, buoys and gulls.

In the nineteenth century, the township of Broulee wasn’t all that. One squire, in 1840, even wrote to the District telling them so:

“SIR, – After a tiresome journey from Braidwood over a most mountainous road, I arrived at this place a few days ago, having been induced to visit it from certain passing accounts of it which have appeared in the Sydney papers, vaunting the excellency of its harbour, land, but, after a patient investigation of the whole country, I find I have, like many others thrown my time away to very little purpose... Being here, however, and being thoroughly disgusted with all I have seen and heard, I take advantage of a leisure hour and opportunity to Braidwood to forward to you the following description of its situation…”

Okay.  Not a fan.

Still, old mate was probably in the area prior to the invention of rest and relaxation, because those pursuits, or lack of, are a hit down that way these days. I suppose relaxing and letting off steam in 1840 wasn’t a prospect many could afford. If it couldn’t be peddled, vended, propositioned or haggled, them what really was the point in spending time in the sand and water.

I imagine most spent their every waking minute trying to avoid the massive waves of contagious diseases and epidemics, rather than the massive waves emitting from their jetskis. What did people do for fun in Australia in the 1840s? A quick Google search will tell you that fun was actually invented in the 1960s, so I guess they just worked and then died for their troubles.

Mogo

Free lunch. There is such a thing.