Musings from the Seaside

I’m been presenting myself for weekend penance at the South Coast, New South Wales, quite a bit lately. The South Coast, if you are unfamiliar, is the coastal belt between Sydney to the north to the Victorian border to the south.

My location of choice for optimal sun and sand experiences occasioning sunburn is Broulee, just south of Bateman’s Bay, which is often branded as Canberra by the Sea. Broulee, population of just over 1,700, is so laidback and blasé about life that it's on the brink of toppling over.

It feels like the place is a refugee of the 1950s or 60s, whichever decade was the last one with unobtrusive capitalism and a laissez faire attitude and I do not hate this. Sure, internet reception is scant (but very curiously receptive on the beach), there is not a lot to do if you don’t want to devote the entire day to sand worship, and there is just one takeaway shop, which has implausible opening hours for an operational small business. 

On the flip side, there are no loud and kitschy billboards encouraging food or services, just sporadic signage of a small business courteously and respectfully expressing the purpose of their existence.

If you need to uber-advertise your goods and services to the market for a price to do capitalism properly, Broulee doesn't really care a whoop-de-doop.

What commodity are they selling in Broulee, then? If anyone cared, it would be lifestyle of ye olde days, by effortlessly laidback means.

I don’t care how current your hipster status is, how many mason jars containing salad you have in your arsenal, how many trimmed bearded men work for your ironically named business, you cannot engineer ye olde days. Thank goodness the hipsters haven't gotten their conceited mittens on this seaside haven.

Walking in the direction of the ocean I can smell it's briny aroma, but it’s not always that way. The wind has to be blowing from the east, or at least from the north. 

October in Broulee? It’s all about cold sandcastles and iced water. I go there for the simplicity, the ease of life. Minimalism. 

Also, there are birds. Lots of them. David Attenborough would be able to tell you more. Or anything. The birds are arguing about bird things. Or just being interactive in a shared space. Who knows the ways of birds.

Painted whores of the plant world

The first of the summer flies harass me as I walk past all the painted whores of the plant world (A Homer or Bart Simpson reference to flowers) on the way to the beach. 

Teenage boys ride their bikes past me on the footpath, precariously balancing their beloved surfboards in their strong arm, forgetting that when they recklessly spin around to chat to their friends the board whips around too and there goes my ribs if I wasn’t quick like a butterfly.

And then I see the offending sign, which is always there; a picture of a dog with a cross through it. DOGS NOT ALLOWED. Seriously, if you a barbarian who does not like watching dogs playing on the beach then we have nothing to say to each other and move along from this planet please.

I love watching people playfully encouraging their dog to do instagrammable tricksies for photographs, which they obligingly do, through a volley of barks which ricochet for kilometres along the beach.

This visit, to the beach, I had to be vigilant. There are brutal brutes seaside who will find you. And then they will hurt you. But they are so pretty, so one must get up as close and personal as possible to their tentacles to admire their bright hues. Bluebottles. Lots of ‘em.

The statistics are not in your favour when it comes to avoiding their sting, and the little suckers pack quite a punch. I imagine it is their vengeance for being purged from the ocean.

Crankypants Ocean

I currently reside on the South Coast of Australia. When I say reside, I mean I’m here for five days. I came down for the sun, that burning yellow thing in the sky that I like to follow around, because it makes me happy.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I haven’t seen the sun for two days I would have been greedily lapping it up. And today, finally, the sun came out. THE SUN IS OUT!! I am so darn happy to see it I can’t even tell you. If I wanted to live in a dark, damp cave without the sun I would go and live in England or something.

Today is perfect beach weather – particularly if you were from Lapland and didn’t mind a bit of a cool breeze - so I decided to go for an early morning walk (um, 9:00am is my early) along the beach, but it seems the ocean had other ideas.

The first red flag should have been that there were no other people along the whole coastline, as far as the eye could see. The second red flag should have been that there were no red flags to tell people where they could and couldn’t swim.  The third was no surfers. 

The absence of these key features are not ideal near the sea – which can often be a cantankerous pain in the arse - and intelligent people probably would have noted that. I, of course, naively ignored the forewarnings, or lack thereof, and went along my merry way. And what I discovered is if you are not smart enough to realise that the ocean doesn’t want you around then it will soon tell you.

Maybe I had come at a bad time, perhaps the ocean was redecorating, and decluttering; it was certainly throwing out everything it didn’t want. Seaweed, coke bottles, bits of fallen trees, me. It was high tide as well, so I didn’t have much legroom, and at one point she had me pinned in at the seawall and doused me with icy water up to my thighs until I rolled on top of the sandbar.  Yes, I rolled, like Bear Grylls might do.  It was all very exciting.  And cold.  More cold than exciting, really.

I cursed a fair bit, laughed it off, and then came the wind; and when a strong gale and beach combine they produce a perfect machine gun effect that fires stinging sand bullets at your arms and legs. So I went running, sobbing, from the beach, or something like that. There’s nothing like being rejected by the ocean; a living, breathing body of water that doesn’t want you around.  I might try again later; when she’s in a better mood…

Coastal Retreat Treat

I'm kinda fed up with the whole Canberra thing.  I'm utterly bored and miserable here.  I'm not doing what I want to be doing for a career - how the hell did that happen? - and every day I get more and more fed up with it.  It's like groundhog day without Bill Murray.  I would do just about anything to be self-employed.  But how does one change careers when you are in a secure job?  How the hell do people just jump and change careers anyway?  Scary times, indeed.

My birthday is this week.  If you are interested - and who wouldn't be - I will be turning 18 again, with 10 plus years experience.  I'm taking the day off work, because there is nothing more annoying than people at work celebrating your birthday and making so-called humourous references to how freaking old you are and everyone staring at you while you try and cut the cake like they've never seen someone cut a fucking cake before. 

And you're supposed to smile and take it.  I know it's cake, and I will usually do just about anything for a slice of cake (there is vast empirical evidence), but the whole activity just to get the cake is annoying.  Happy birthday, indeed. 

So I've got a five-day weekend coming up and I'm going to a detox farm.  Yes, a detox farm.  You know the place; full of angry humans who haven't eaten chocolate for a week, wheatgrass shots and starry-eyed hippies, those people that God later turns into corporate executives just to make sure we never lose our sense of irony.  Well my detox farm is going to be sort of like that, but mostly nothing like that.  Because it's going to be fun, for a start.

I'm going to a house down the south coast of Australia to pretend that I don't live in Canberra at all and that I am actually a coastal local.  Although the weather is predicted to be downright summerish, so there will be a lot of my fellow Canberrans lurking around, so I will be forced to brandish a faux moustache and novelty glasses when I head around town so no-one I know will recongise me.  Small price to pay.

I will go to the zoo, I will write, I will read, I will walk, I will attend the markets, I will buy useless and possibly hideous trinkets at the markets, and I will snigger endlessly at the tourists who must go back to work on Tuesday.  Oh wait.

Torn muscle issues

I have managed to tear one of my abdominal muscles through a complex and technical process involving a shitload of coughing.  Shitload being the layman's understanding for doing a lot of anything.  The doctor says I have torn a muscle but I believe that he is WRONG, and that I have actually busted every one of the bones in my right rib cage.  I think this is so because it hurts a SHITLOAD.  The genesis of my cough can be found here.

I reluctantly went to the doctor last week after the relentless pestering of my coworkers, which may or may not have had something to do with my relentless whinging and whining about my PAIN and that NO-ONE UNDERSTANDS MY BURDEN.  Well, someone on my floor at work brought in this coughing disease that must have been distributed by their germ-ridden offspring, so it stands to reason that everyone in hearing range should suffer for my burden by having their auditory sense somewhat inhibited by my coughing.

The other reason I went to the doc was because I am a responsible adult and I wanted to make sure that my life wasn't under direct threat from an exploding gall bladder or an imploding rib bone puncturing one of my lungs.  Because that would have really sucked.  So the doc told me that I need to rest, rest and rest so it can get better, better and betterer, or some advice of equal ridiculosity.

I'm sorry - rest?  Is that the thing where people sit still for hours and hours while keeping their hands busy with some type of remote control or needlepoint embroidery?  Yeah, I don't do that.  I am more than happy to do dencorub and nurofen and heat packs, but I'm not very good at sitting still, even if my attention is distracted by a DVD box set of Bones.


Mr Pelican being awesome

I am very much not one of those people who sit on the couch on a rainy Saturday afternoon and watches twelve DVDs in a row.  That is my idea of suffering and punishment.  By the end of the day my cabin fever would rival Norman Bates'.  I can sit around for about an hour and a half on the weekend while reading the newspapers but then I must go and do stuff that involves movement or I am prone to self destruct.

So my first weekend with my new condition was spent resting at Broulee on the South Coast; following doctors orders.  My resting involved climbing over rocks, going out on a boat without a warm jacket in sea-salt scented gale force winds, and walking on loose sand along a hurricane-infested beach.  You know; resting. 

I don't feel so good right now. 

Cats

Ah yes, the big ten hour round-trip to Moggy (Mogo) Zoo down the South Coast, where you pay 23 dollars to watch lions, tigers, and servals sleep all day. Cats invented lazy. When cats aren’t sleeping they are just obscenely lazy. Maybe we should take a leaf out of their book. ‘The Lazy cat’s guide to happiness’ by Deepak Chopra.


















Speaking of spiritual journeys, years ago I was blessed by a Sumatran tiger at Moggy Zoo. It truly was an awakening for everyone involved. I didn’t wash my hair for hours to allow the holy gift to infuse. You can only imagine the looks of worship and adoration I received from all those around me. I discovered that people can’t stand to be around such wonderment and started to scatter like flies. The flies also scattered, obviously overwhelmed by the greatness in their midst. Not everyone can handle the responsibility of being the chosen one, but at least I got to see most of the animals without marauding crowds.

I love Mogo Zoo. It’s one of the few places you can take your binoculars and zoom lens and focus on one thing for hours and hours without getting arrested. I must confess that I have a big crush on big cats. I took a couple of pics. It may have been around the 200+ mark, but who's counting.


Nail care is important to any self-respecting tiger. What's a little striped baby fluff to do while waiting for his siblings to wake up? File his nailguns of course by ripping apart a tree stump. Bless.




This little fella is 4-months-old, has a brother and a sister (I think) and it's really hard to take a photo of him not being cute. Bare your fangs you wild animal!! The three Sumatran tiger cubs are an integral part of a breeding program that hopes to prolong the survival of the critically endangered species. Tiger cubs seem to have a pretty fixed routine throughout the day. Sleep, play, destroy stuff, be cute, play, eat, play, destroy stuff, pester mum, play, sleep, sleep, be cute, sleep, destroy, pester mum, and so on…




A stupid, stupid man woke up this lion. Does the lion look particularly happy to you? He’s not, he’s highly displeased. He seems to be saying ‘fuck off’ with his eyes. He stared at his human alarm clock until he could no longer see him and then fixed his feline gaze on me. When they stare they STARE...But look how beautiful he is




Meerkat lying around being awesome.