Cairns to Sydney (at atypical speed)

Oct 26, 2014 | boab tree, Brett Adamson, camp cooking, carob, cars, family, food forest, golden crown beard, Indigenous health, Linda Burney, roadkill, shelter camping, tamarind | 9 comments

As Meg and Woody treadle along they make up songs about our experiences. They have songs about going downhill, uphill, about sugarcane, bridges, flags, kangaroos, rocky roads, plants, horses, trucks, bones, beaches, cows and caravans. After staying at Sarah, Renee and Oscar’s the caravan song now has fourteen verses, one for each of our caravan experiences.

Oscar (pictured on Zeph’s knee) is a delightful and tenacious kid and it was a joy to watch our little boys experimenting in social play.

While we were in Cairns, on Yirrganydji country, Patrick was a guest speaker at the inaugral national Indigenous Men’s Conference, which ran alongside the Women’s conference and brought together people from all over Australia. We published an earlier version of his paper several posts ago, however we thought we’d share the final version he presented:

Wiradjuri descendent Linda Burney MP opened both conferences,

before the partition rolled in and the two conferences split into their respective groups. John Riley, a nurse with the RFDS who we had met in Hope Vale, gave an account of his time in Aurukun setting up the men’s group there with Wik Warrior Vince Koomeeta.

Vince and John were just two of forty men who shared stories about their community projects, and these stories, often harrowing, made Patrick aware of just how much reconcilitory work still has to be done in Australia. Patrick met Simon and Gordon from Bendigo and District Aboriginal Co-operative and they discussed how reconciliation doesn’t happen in or out of the mouths of prime ministers but rather in and out of the homes and communities of us all.

Gordon and Simon (pictured second and fourth from left) are both descendents of the Yorta Yorta people and will come to Daylesford next year to look at how our town’s community gardens, meal trees and other gift economies operate. And while gift economies were very much part of the discussion at the conference, Artist as Family (sans Patrick) were out and about carrying on the plant research, finding our first tamarind trees (Tamarindus indica) loaded with tart and healthful surprise.

Being back in Cairns signalled the assembly point for big changes. For eleven months we have had to adjust to much daily change but there has been a rythmn to our travel, which provided us some comfort. But then, in Cairns, we put our bikes on a truck (thanks Steve!),

and hired a car. In the five or so years our family has been car-free we have only had to hire a car once and have borrowed friends cars a handful of times. We knew back at Hervey Bay that if we were to cycle for the entire fourteen months we’d have to turn back south then, missing the wonderful north. We explored various alternatives, but travelling with our dog-kin Zero and children make trains or hitching a ride with trucks fairly impossible. The only option left for us was to hire a car and send our bikes back in a truck. We have cycled 7300 kms on our freedom machines and now we were couped up in a glazed off and air conditioned metal box removed from the world. It made us sick,

a little cuckoo,

and really sad.

It felt like we were undoing all our work and we were hypocrites, participants again in the damage established by global oil lords, administered by governments and their armies and carried out by everyday people who either have no agency or will to resist. We were back in the thick of it; in the clouds of pollution ideology. Our need to be home by a set time justified the use of oil, and we realised that petroleum for us is still an option based on unaccountable and non-renewable privilege. This was both distressing and depressing. But then, after only a short day of driving, we arrived at a little free camp site in Mount Garnet and Zeph lit a fire,

and we set up camp and got ourselves grubbed again before brewing up some grub.

Our simple camp kitchen reclaimed some of the sensibilities we had lost,

and we decided to go a little easy on ourselves and to try to take from this experience what we could, even if it was to be just an expensive reminder of how not to live and how not to make art and sense. As soon as we were out of the car the boys forgot about the ordeal, showing us the way back to the simplicity of camp life.

The following days’ driving were again difficult, but compared with most of our fellow creatures we came across in this drought-stricten part of the country, our comfort was off the scale. Cows were hungry,

animals with no agricultural or ecological status were brutally cast aside,

and those better adapted to (and camouflaged in) the environment raced away from the obnoxious intransigence of the motorised world.

Many didn’t make it,

others proudly protected their young and resisted the enslaught of digi-industrial civility.

These roads were typical Australian corridors of suffering and our cyclist eyes were still keenly attentive to the man-made mass death around us. We stopped under this tree to take a break,

and discovered its ingenius fertility, which fitted into the palm of a hand.

We still haven’t found out anything about it. If you know, Dear Reader, please share with us. A little further on, in the town with the Game of Thrones name, Charters Towers, we came across some pods we did know something about.

The carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua) hails from the Mediterraen and Middle East and has been cultivated in these regions for around 4000 years. After removing the seeds the fully dried pods can be ground into a delicious powder. This is very easy to do at home and prefereable as apparently most commerical carob powder is not raw but rather pasteurised at high temperatures.

Another edible pod-producing tree found in this part of Australia is the boab or bottle tree (Adansonia gregorii). Many streets are planted with this beautiful tree in the inland central Queensland towns that we teared through.

In winter, large pods are produced that contain a white edible flesh or pith. This is what the dried pods look like after they have been emptied of seed and pith.

An annual weed we saw plenty of along the road verges is golden crown beard (Verbesina encelioides), which has been used in folk medicine around the world. Research suggests the plant exhibits significant antiviral, antitumour, antimicrobial and antiinflammatory activies. The plant is also known to be mildly toxic so care is required to use this plant.

Just north of the little town of Springsure we had a history lesson on the Frontier Wars; histroy we were never taught at school. The Cullin-la-Ringo massacre took place here in 1861. It was the largest massacre of settlers by Aborigines in Australia, and thus a significant moment of nulla nulla resistance to gun-barrel invasion.

And we found evidence that gun-barrel invasion is still very much alive in Central Queensland. The Frontier Wars were fought for access to land and its resources. For those who had been on country for millennia, stealing the sheep of the newcomers often incited violent retaliations and even bloody massacres. This same war continues today; dingos are the victims of grazier intransigence and violence.

Deborah Bird Rose first alerted us to this commonplace occurance in her book, Wild Dog Dreaming. In his doctoral thesis Walking for food: regaining permapoesis, Patrick wrote: “Australian writer Deborah Bird Rose (2011) wants us to stay close to images of the slung remains of shot or poisoned dingoes on fences, whose trophied, atrophying bodies are kept from making a return to soil, kept from re-entering the continuum of living, dying and renewing. They are the images of settler indifference that continue to haunt Aboriginal people today, and continue to attack the we ethic of Aboriginal inclusivity, an ethic that extends well beyond the human.” (2014)

We were hurtling towards Sydney with temple-strained awareness of this deadly form of travel, stopping to document significant places and species, but mostly the land and its many forms were just a simulated blur, a land escaped by speed and speed’s abstractions.

The most notable edible outside our walled-city-on-four-wheels was prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica). They mark these remote roads as signifiers of agricultural desertification but also as radical adaptation and future drought-hardy food.

This was the heart of the Queensland dust lands—cattle, sheep and coal doing much of the damage, which was quite a contrast to the no-less-damaging sugar cane and reef tourism found on the Queensland coast. There would be little chance of us cycling this inland route with such large distances between towns and so few opportunities to refill with potable water. Much of the water we came across was fairly undesirable, but at times it was hot enough for a dip…

For eleven months we have been hardy to all weather, living in it, but now that hardiness has been challenged by the health-negating convenience of air-conditioning. For the first time in eleven months we had sore throats and flu-like symptoms, unheard of in our car-free family. A cayenne pepper tonic is our preferred rescue for such occasions and similarly Jacarandas brought moments of framed ecstasy as they flashed out at us from Cairns,

to the New South Wales border,

as we hurtled on south to Gary Trindall’s home in Walgett. Gary, a Gamilaraay man who Patrick met at the Cairns conference, welcomed us into his home and shared with us a few of his traditional bush medicines.

Gary and his wife Jenny put on a BBQ, gave us their camper to sleep in, cooked us a beautiful breakfast using their hen’s eggs before bidding us farewell the next morning. Thanks Trindalls, we’d love to come back (a mere 1000 km bike ride from home) next winter and film more of Gary’s bush food and medicine knowledges.

Zeph had a great night getting to know Gary and Jenny’s grandchildren Markell and Kevin, playing tag in the snake hours around the house. Many tags but no bites.

As we dropped further south into NSW the land changed, the climate cooled and water was evidently more available. It had been many months since we had witnessed cool temperate climate weeds such as plantain, dock and clover. It reminded us of the weed salads we make back home, using twenty or so species including the three mentioned here.

We were fast-tracking it to Sydney for many reasons, namely to return the expensive hire car and spend time with family, but also to catch our dear friend Brett (who rode and camped with us for a few weeks in northern NSW) before he left again for Brussels. Brett’s work for Médecins Sans Frontières has been significant over many years and of late he has been in Liberia managing the MSF Ebola hospital in Montrovia, which by all accounts is functioning more as a morgue than a hospital. Brett has given many interviews, written articles and appeared on TV attempting to make the Abbott government aware of the extent of the crisis in West Africa. We are so proud of you Brett! Here he is in May harvesting roadside passionfruit with us near Uki.

We camped in Mudgee and used a public BBQ to cook up both some roadside and out-of-season produce for dinner. Thanks chooks!

We also camped at Lake Wallace where we spent a night in this little shelter. Who needs tents? Our sleep was fairly disturbed and at one stage in the night the rain whipped in with gusty weather, spraying our bedding and faces, but we woke alive and joyous.

In the morning Woody got all WorkmanJones on us.

And then, after a few more hours travelling arrived in Sydney – 2800 kms, 170 litres of unleaded petrol with a fuel cost of $250 – relieved to see our bikes and our family. Hello Eliza, Tildy, Hen (Patrick’s sister), Ant and Millie! Sadly, we had missed Brett by a day.

While in Sydney we are hosting a working bee and workshop at a community garden that we designed and planted with the community in 2010. We’d love to see you there.

And then after a week or so in Sydney we will head to the Southern Highlands to help other family members construct their food garden, before we push off for the final two months on the road along the coast from Kiama to Melbourne, and then back home to Daylesford.

Thanks once again, Dear Reader, for joining us on our journey.

Crashes, kills, stacks and new edibles (Rockhampton to Mackay)

Jul 27, 2014 | Ber fruit, bush cucumber, bush lemon, coal, coconuts, emu, fleabane, macadamia, Mackay, magpie geese, mangrove snail, mud whelk, pandanus, roadkill, sugar cane, Warm Showers, water, waterlily | 6 comments

On leaving Rockhampton we discovered this strange scene:

The local council had laid fake grass beside the Bruce Highway, then an alive grass had penetrated the fake grass and remarkably grew until the council then sprayed it with glysophate (a poison Monsanto tells us is safe, as they did with Agent Orange and DDT). Someone then stubbed out their cigarette butt and threw it into the mix. The logic of the city is beyond us. Time to reconnect with the intelligence of autonomous, uncivil things.

Not far north of Rocky on the Ridgelands Road we came across bush cucumbers (Cucumis spp.),

which weren’t quite ripe,

although we did find one almost formed and ready.

And not far on again we came across our first Ber fruit (Ziziphus mauritiana), otherwise known as Chinee Apple, Jujube, Indian plum and Masau.

These small trees from south-east Asia have naturalised in northern Australia. We look forward to trying them next time now we know what they are.

We had decided on the Ridgelands – Glenroy Station route to avoid the Road of Death, but our rather paltry map didn’t warn us that most of the way to Marlborough would be gravel.

After 70 kms or so of riding we made camp beside the road, bloody exhausted.

Being on gravel certainly slowed us down, which was only a problem of water. We filled up two bottles at the Glenroy Crossing of the Fitzroy River, just in case we needed them. Zero’s iron constitution surely wouldn’t have a problem drinking this water.

This was cattle station country, and we got a view into this altered ecology firstpedal.

We also got a view of our own vulnerability without water. We banged on this farmer’s door to ask for a tap.

No one was home, so we took his water upon ourselves. Thanks unknown farmer!

Relief!! We passed water-savvy emus,

and motorised ones.

Aching, dust-covered and sorely parched we arrived in the little town of Marlborough, pulled up outside the pub and were immediately greeted by Jeff and Linda, who invited us home for an impromptu party.

After a bonfire and rowdy dancing sesh with several locals and a Swede, we passed out in their backyard caravan and awoke rested,

ate a delicious home-cooked breakfast then farewelled our new friends (hi Digs!),

and ventured back onto the Bruce.

Over the 31 kms that we rode that day from Marlborough to Tooloobah Creek we counted 212 individual road-killed animals on the left lane, shoulder and verge alone. Assuming the other side would produce a similar number (it certainly looked like it), we concluded that on this stretch of the Bruce Highway there was one roadkill every 75 metres of bitumen. Staggering!

This number exceeds tenfold the bodies we encounted along a 60km stretch of the Hume Highway last December. We stopped to rest at Tooloobah Creek Roadhouse and after only a few minutes of sitting in the shade witnessed this:

We were only moments from being roadkill ourselves. No one was hurt, the owners were even fairly jokey about it, praising insurance and airbags. We walked away from the amounting spectacle, set up our tents,

and went in search of some tucker.

The next day, as we were packing up to leave Tooloobah we were greeted briefly by a southbound Frenchman, Stephane, who was on a solo mission to cycle around the world.

It was a long hot day in the saddle. Temperatures are again starting to climb in this region known as the dry tropics. But Bruce was fairly good to us, only once, and for just a short time, turning his shoulder away so we had but a few hundred millimetres of safe path to balance on.

We’re getting fairly hardy to such travel. Failing a capsizing caravan or some such unavoidable situation coming crashing down on us, riding defensively makes touring dead-safe in Australia, even on the Road of Death. A road that can throw up delightful pastoral vistas,

bush lemons (Citrus limon),

and crazy pandanus sunsets.

We arrived on dusk at delightful Clairview where the Great Dividing Range pushed the Bruce to the Pacific’s edge. Apart from the short leg from Marlborough to Tooloobah Creek we had been covering around 70 kms each day and were fairly sore. We pitched our tents at a free camping ground for an extended rest.

We spent the following day drifting along the mangrove shoreline, playing in rock pools,

and learning more about shellfish,

such as these mud whelks (Terebralia sp.), found around the hightide line on mangrove mud in north and eastern Australia.

We collected several, broke into their shells and cooked them on a public BBQ.

Delish! We followed the same procedure with mangrove snails (Nerita spp.),

which were also delicious, just more rubbery in texture.

There were no shops in Clairview, but on most days this little charity store on the beach opened to the public selling all manner of things including home-grown produce. Bless. Thanks ladies!

We bought a pinapple ($2), a dozen eggs ($3) and a whole pumpkin ($3.50) and feasted with our foraged shellfish,

and other bush tucker including panadus leaves,

and a bag of goodies Meg gleaned on a walk around the little town.

After a day of rest we left Clairview recharged with a morning’s bowl of oats, chia seeds, ginger, raisins and honey under our lycra,

ready for another morning’s ride and day of discovery.

Accessible waterlilies (Nymphaea spp.), and no possibiliy of crocs in this roadside dam about 20 kms north of Clairview!

We’d been wanting to taste the bulbous roots of this plant for some time, and we weren’t disappointed.

So many discoveries on this long leg from Rockhampton and I guess we were getting fatigued, a day’s rest probably wasn’t long enough at Claireview and after eight and a half months on the road we had our first accident. We ran into eachother trying to converse on the noisey Bruce and Woody, sadly, came off worst.

Meg was also brusied and battered and hurt her wrist.

We hobbled into Koumala and set up camp,

treated Zero to a dose of fleabane (Conyza spp.) that we found growing nearby,

and treated ourselves to another early night. We were, alas, repeatedly woken by trucks and cane trains operating all hours.

Macadamia nuts,

coconuts,

and even the promise of magpie goose (Anseranas semipalmata) eggs,

all mildly interrupted the dominant culture’s war on peoples’ health and the land as we rode into Sarina the next day,

and on to Mackay,

where the delightful Warm Showers host Jeanie met us and led us back to her home where we will rest and recover before returning once again to our home on the road.

Thank you Jeanie and Peppe for your über hospitality. It was so so lovely to meet you and two of your boys. Thank you for taking in our bedraggled selves and opening your peaceful, loving home to us,

especially when you where also hosting the delightful Igor and Luka, fellow cycle tourists from Switzerland and Italy.

We hope your life is filled with peace, too, dear reader. Much love from us in Mackay until our next update somewhere further north in a week or so.

Aaf xx

On generative life and interrupting death (the prosaic roads from Hervey Bay to Bundaberg)

Jul 2, 2014 | bicycle touring, Bruce Highway, Bundaberg, bushfood, camping, couchsurfing, gleaning, low-damaging travel, macadamia, monoculture, Queensland, roadkill, roadside memorials | 1 comment

Well, as some of you may have guessed, our decision has been to keep riding north and follow the sun, even if this means catching a train south for part of the journey to be home by January. On our last morning in Hervey Bay we left our camping site in the grounds of the local youth hostel,

and hit the road with itchy pedals and gay hearts.

We cycled a little uphill, a lichen downhill,

but mostly it was flat. On this sunny winter’s day we four mammals on our four inflated tyres passed a number of flattened fauna memorials,

which were by far the most significant things we came across on the rather uneventful road to Howard.

Howard is a proud coal-mining and timber town established at the expense of the Butchulla peoples, just inland from the Great Sandy Biosphere.

We camped near the local skate park, setting up our tents on dark among the wattles, gums and paperbarks, beside the supposed crocodile-free Maria Creek and woke,

to another chilly, though blessed sun-filled day. Woody tried on his old man’s hat for size,

before we departed the town for the dreaded Bruce Highway; a road unavoidable for the short (30 km) ride to Childers. Yes, we now agree with the Queenslanders we have met who have also bemoaned how Queensland motorists have a far lower BQ (Bicycle Intelligence) than drivers in Victoria and NSW. The roads are simply terrifying to all forms of fauna.

This is the carnage we witnessed on our first leg of the Bruce. We could ignore all this machine-derived death but it is so prevalent on these roads, alongside the systemic pollution and excruiating noise. Everything else to a bicycle tourer is washed out, backgrounded. And, while we know that in a car none of this violence really exists (such is the speed and sound-proofed estrangement of motorised travel) you can not disappear it on a bike. We stopped in Childers for supplies, rode on for several kms and arrived at a free camping spot at Apple Tree Creek and found our last memorial for the day.

Before pitching our tents we had to dry off the morning’s dew ahead of nightfall and another wet and cold morning.

Needless to say, being so close to the Bruce Highway didn’t enable much sleep, but miraculously we awoke in good spirits, dried and packed up our tents and before we rode off with bellies full of oat porridge, sultanas, chia seeds, raw ginger and local honey, along came Bernie Creagh,

a teacher from Sydney on his $15 tipshop bike. We enjoyed meeting Bernie, his spirit was a reminder of all the good reasons we cycle. Although we were going to be taking different roads, meeting Bernie harbingered a wonderful day ahead, starting with an early departure from the Bruce and getting onto the quieter Isis Highway to Bundaberg.

Monocultures reign in Queensland, sugarcane being the King Wally of them all. But on the Isis Highway an Indigenous plant, generally found in a diverse forest ecology, formed another monoculture of note.

We were drawn to stop and investigate a little further and soon discovered gleanable gold.

We got to work and were instantly reminded of Agnès Varda’s beautiful film, The Gleaners and I, as we bent and gathered the undesirable wastes of last season’s crop.

We harvested several bags of the macadamia nuts and rode on towards Bundaberg with a song in our pedals. We stopped at a roadside resting place, took out the hatchet and feasted, trying not to spoil the moment and think about what pesticides must be used in such a monoculture,

while also singing the praises, at this rest stop, of non-treated rain water. For travellers this can be a rare thing to come by. We tipped out the foul tasting chemical-treated bore water we were carrying and filled our bottles (trying not to notice the questionable peeling paint on the roof iron – the water tank’s catchment).

We left the rest stop with the promise of an unusually friendly prohibition,

well almost friendly, and legged it to Bundy passing our very first sighting of these generative creatures,

the magestic magpie geese (Anseranas semipalmata), as well as more signifiers of extractive technologies working against life as we approached the city of rum and ginger beer.

It was in Bundaberg we stayed with our first couchsurfing family. Meet Ange, baby Sophia, and boys Santiago (left) and Gabriel.

Ange so generously hosted us for two nights, and we enjoyed talking all things parenting, home-educating, community living, permaculture activism and many more positive things. Thanks Ange! Your home was a temporary sanctuary from the intensity of bicycle and tent life.

On and off the Island: Minjerribah to Maleny

Jun 16, 2014 | citrus, co-op, community, Glass House Mountains, gotu kola, indigenous intelligence, lilly pilly, Maleny, Minjerribah, roadkill, roadside memorials | 6 comments

Our last post featured the bounty of autonomous food on Minjerribah in early winter. This post begins with the array of social warming we encountered there.

While on Stradbroke Island we hooked up again with fellow cycle tourer Tom, who once more became uncle Tom,

his portable cabin a hammock tent.

We spear fished and foraged with Tom and went along to the community jam at Point Lookout where Woody was handed around among the local tribe.

Along with Tom we free-camped with Tim, who we met back in Uki and then again in Brissy, and his mate Luke. Both had a passion for free food and simple ways of procuring it. We shared knowledges and food together.

We snapped this image at the North Stradbroke Island Historical Museum, it shows Indigenous folk on the NSW midcoast collecting eugaries (pipis). The image for us represents the ecological intelligence and social inclusivity that our little mutable tribe was perhaps attempting to emulate – the utter sophistication of non-damaging simplicity.

On our return to Dunwich from Point Lookout we stayed a night with Shelley and Milla again, and this time got to meet Milla’s dad/ Shelley’s man, the musically talented Chris.

We harvested macadamia nuts from their produce garden,

and learnt to crack them open with this simple tool.

Our sense of an ecotopia was drowned when it was time to leave the island, our reliance on damaging industry to barge back to the mainland was all too painfully obvious.

But this life is about generational transition, and learning to maintain our bikes (after the sand and salt of the island) is certainly a part of that movement.

On our first night off Straddie we made camp in a hidey spot in a large public park off a bike track in a north-eastern suburb of Brisbane.

The next day we crossed the Brisbane River by climbing a monumental achievement of industrialised culture,

before coming down the other side of that story:

As cyclists we are painfully aware of what motorised transport is capable of committing. Everyday we face the reality of death in a much more direct way and feel the pain of those who have suffered as we pass by at a speed slow enough to acknowledge it. We are flesh and bones on wheels and bitumen and the violence of cars and trucks is forever present, deafening and exact. Then occasionally, we find a motor-free track,

or road,

like here between Woodford and Maleny, and somewhere quiet to stop for lunch.

And even if such remoteness brings its hurdles,

crossing creeks and slipping around on gravel can be more preferable than the constant noise and sometimes terror of more populated routes. And after such a physically difficult but relatively peaceful day on and off the saddle we arrived on top of the range to treats of naturalised citrus,

and views of the Glass House Mountains.

We arrived in Maleny on dusk, caught a pub meal and a beer and pitched our tents on the lawn behind the hotel on the banks of the Obi Obi Creek.

In Maleny we bumped into two locals prone to bouts of cycle touring. The first is Hamish who, for want of a better description, is a bee health scientist and knows firsthand what Monsanto and co are doing to the biosphere.

The second is Garry, a retired English teacher who dons great t-shirts and excellent facial hair. Garry met us by chance at the community garden after he had finished his shift as a volunteer at the UpFront Club, a co-operatively owned venue.

Garry invited us back to his home where he lives with his partner Susan in their hectare permaculture garden on the outskirts of town. The garden features a mature copse of bunya pines, an extensive chook area, raised beds packed with produce, diverse insect-attracting flower beds, food forestry and indigenous revegetation. Needless to say we were well impressed with this model garden for the future.

We had two gentle nights with Garry (Susan was away). We walked into town picking a pharmacopeia of health-packed edibles from the roadside, including the super herb Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica), which according to the Maple Street Co-op newsletter, has been used to aid “fatigue, anxiety, depression, poor memory, senility, epilepsy, bacterial viral or parasitic infections, trauma and tissue repair, leprosy, circulation problems, tuberculosis, arthritis, rheumatism and skin conditions such as psoriasis.”

We noted loquats coming into fruit,

and chewed on the white base stalks of lomandra leaves that Woody generically calls oosh ucker (bush tucker).

Maleny is the first place we’ve been to that is so ideal for citrus, that trees have naturalised along the roadside,

and we sampled various varieties of lilly pilly (Syzygium spp.), these being the most desirable.

When we arrived in town we bee-lined for the co-op, which has been going since 1979, and brought bulk foods to restock our panniers for the next leg of the trip.

Thanks Tom, Tim, Luke, Shelley, Chris, Milla, Hamish and Garry. We’ve so enjoyed our time together.

Novel fruits, roadside memorials, tiredness and general life making (from Coffs to Lawrence)

Apr 6, 2014 | bike puncture, bush tomato, Clarence River, free camping, free food, Grafton, Gumbaynggirr, honey, hunting, Lawrence, pecan, Red Rock, roadkill, roadside memorials, starfruit, sugar cane, Woolgoolga, Yarrawarra | 0 comments

We left Coffs Harbour and headed north along the Pacific Highway, passing banana and blueberry plantations and,

sadly, more visions of life interrupted.

We met a family from Woolgoolga at Steve Hill’s skydiving centre and they invited us to stay with them. Woolgoolga, we found out on our arrival, is home to a large Sikh population. According to wikipedia nearly 13% of Woolgoolgians speak Punjabi at home.

The name Woolgoolga comes from the Gumbaynggir word Wiigulga, meaning black apple (Planchonella australis) and not lilly pilly (Syzygium) as wikipedia suggests. Out on the headland we joined the local hunters to try to snaffle some autonomous ocean food,

to bring to the dinner table at the Feeney’s.

Meet Mark, Vivienne and Denise. Mark is a teacher and musician who plays a mean tin whistle in a folk band called Headland. Vivienne is studying for her HSC, and Denise’s passion is the circus.

She gave us a couple of stellar backyard performances of aerial acrobatics, while Woody worked on the hoops.

It was at the Feeney’s, under their paw paw tree and passionfruit vine, that Artist as Family first sampled starfruit (Carambola).

A mildly astringent but nonetheless delicious fruit native to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, that is grown locally in Woolgoolga, no doubt as a result of the local Sikh population. After a couple of restful nights with the Feeney’s (thank you! thank you!) we bid them farewell and headed for Red Rock passing more signifiers of loss on the Pacific.

We arrived at the Yarrawarra Aboriginal Cultural Centre in the late afternoon,

where we met the delightful Kim, a Gumbaynggirr woman, and bought some dried bush tomatoes (Solanum diversiflorum), which we tossed through the evening’s pasta dish a little further on at Red Rock.

The local Garby elders call Red Rock ‘Blood Rock’ because of the massacre of their people by Europeans that took place in the 1880s. Thankfully today Aboriginal culture remains strong in the area. Bush tomatoes, a food traditionally found in more arid parts of Australia, have a sweet, mildly spicy flavour. After dinner we went in search of a camp site, which we found on dusk and hurriedly set up while being predated by the local mozzie population. As Jake Cassar taught us back on the Central Coast, Aboriginal people burned the leaves of native cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis) to keep mozzies afar, but lighting a fire would have given our game away in this country of incessant prohibitions. The next morning we woke to a flat tyre and a heavy dew that permeated throughout all our bedding. We are always dry inside our tents under heavy rain, but condensation knows no barriers.

So it was a late start in getting away by the time everything dried. We sensed we couldn’t stay where we were camped after a couple of locals expressed their disapproval of our chosen lodgings. So we left Red Rock,

and jumped back on to the Pacific, with no other choice of road to push north to Grafton. It was to become a very long and draining day.

Meg and Woody were sporting a cold, Meg was still fighting off a UTI, our tyres were deteriorating after nearly 2500 kms and kept puncturing, we had numerous patches of dangerous road with little shoulder to ride on, and to top things off we had a stiff headwind for the entire way. It took us a whole day to ride a mere 50 kms. It was one of our hardest days yet.

We cooked dinner at a free BBQ facility and sneaked a camp spot in an arboretum originally planted by the Grafton Girl Guides, near the local tennis courts.

We had only a morning in Grafton, purchasing and fitting new tubes and tyres. It was fairly hot by the time we rode out of town in search of a place of rest.

On the quiet road out of Grafton towards Lawrence we stopped for a watermelon break in the shade.

This delicious melon cost a mere $2 bought directly from the farmer, across the road. Woody devoured his share with gusto.

It was such a relief to be off the Pacific and not having cars and trucks dominate our senses.

But even so, on this quiet road meandering alongside the Clarence River, reminders of the normalised brutality of fast travel prevailed,

in numerous forms.

But there were also forms of life suited to slow travel and slow food,

which was ironic as we began to pass more and more sugar cane monocultures, the most south this crop is grown in Australia. Hot and fairly fatigued we hobbled into the beautiful township of Lawrence, made a late lunch by the Clarence, enjoyed a rumble on the grass,

and were again hurried to set up camp, this time on sighting a formidable storm approaching.

We prepared camp, tarped over the bikes and walked up to the local pub. We had the priviledge of speaking with local cane farmer Rex, who claims his household doesn’t use any processed sugar in their diet, and sings the praises of cold extracted honey, as we do. We also shared other environmental concerns, such as the toxic wastes of bottled water. He couldn’t work out why greenies don’t focus more on disposable wastes, especially plastic pollution, and couldn’t work out why bubblers are not more widespread in Australia. We shared with him this link and this link to suggest that ‘greenies’ are doing this work, but that it takes more than a few activists to instill change. The next morning we woke and after a brief walk were gifted the discovery of ripe pecans (Carya illinoinensis), just fifty metres from our camp.

It was in hindsight that we realised we needed some golden find like this to rejuvenate our motivations for this trip, after some very draining days. Pecans are high in fibre, manganese, copper, thiamin, magnesium, phosphorus, iron and protein, and there is just so much pleasure climbing a public tree for food that has (more than likely) never been sprayed with pesticides.

We harvested a bagfull of these lovely nuts and eagerly cracked their shells to reveal the largest and most buttery pecans we’ve ever had.

We will stop now for a few days in Lawrence, whose postcode just happens to be 2460, to forage and fish and generally recharge our tired Daylesford (3460) bodies. There is something special about this place, and we like the way the locals encourage free camping (despite the local council’s prohibition signs littering the reserves).

Thanks Feeney and Lawrence folks, thanks for giving us places of rest.

Dreaming up a bicycle utopia; eating non-privatised foods

Dec 16, 2013 | almonds, artist as family, bicycling, bulrush, dogs, free camping, free food, Gundagai, Gunning, Hume, Jugiong, roadkill, stinging nettles, Yass | 2 comments

We woke early and left Gundagai, the town of long timber bridges, before the sun got too hot.

We made a quick obligatory stop,

before really finding out how the Hume Highway was going to shape us.

We were surprised. Despite the noise and the speed of the traffic, the wide shoulders really helped us ride in relative peace. It was a cruisy ride from Gundagai to Jugiong (helped along by our first tail wind of the trip) where we parked our bikes in the shade beside a green grocers run by the very frinedly Gino. We (dumpster) dived into his compost boxes and produced some lovely stone fruit.

While buying some local veg from Gino he asked if we needed a good camping and swimming spot.

Thanks Gino! A perfect free camping ground. The next morning we harvested some stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) beside the Murrumbidgee River.

Nettle is high in iron and great for relieving painful muscles and joints. Just the thing for weary bike tourers. Lightly blanching the nettles takes away the sting, produces a healthy tonic to treat urinary and prostate complications and leaves a perfect fodder material for making an excellent pesto with almonds.

After our free medicinal hit we cycled up the road to the very bourgeois The Long Track Pantry for a breakfast cup of tea and a loaf of yummy bread,

before easing our way into the heartland of wool country.

Since leaving Daylesford over a month ago our nostrils have flared wildly and our hearts have sunk deeply with the roadkill we have passed.

We counted 81 killed animals between the left verge and left lane of the north bound Hume Highway between Jugiong and Yass, a distance of 60 kms.

This massacre included a myriad of birds, three tortoises, a dozen wallabies, several blue tongues, countless kangaroos, flattened foxes, rabbits, a wild pig, two echidnas and numerous snakes including this young copperhead.

Given there are four lanes and four verges on this dual highway one could surmise as many as 324 roadkilled critters for every 60 kms of highway. That’s a staggering 5.4 deaths per kilometre. The Hume, according to Wikipedia, is 838 kms in length which means, if you average it, there are quite possibly 4,525 corpses along this highway at any one time.

But it wasn’t just the sickening aspects of this road – the senseless massacres, the climate changing and packaging pollution that proliferated – we found worth observing,

the Hume offered up sweet moments of beauty and surprise, especially when we got off it (in this case in Bowning) and found some roadside fruit to forage and help restore our battered senses.

Then when we arrived in Yass we were welcomed by an avenue of not-quite-ripe publicly accessible almonds (Prunus spp.),

some heavenly ripe plumcots (Prunus spp.) overhanging a fence,

and were given some Leeton grown oranges by a God’s Squad bikie. Thanks Glen!

We camped, fished and slept under a balmy summer’s night sky before facing the Hume again.

Imagine this road as a sea of bicycles…

After riding about 40 km we arrived in Gunning, a town that boasts a free caravan-camping ground with hot showers at Barbour Park, and found we were just in time for the monthly Sunday market.

We bought some regional produce,

picked some free herbs (gave them a drink),

took a swim and lunched on some delicious bush tucker at Barbour Park.

The starchy bulb of cumbungi or bullrush (Typha spp.) offers an excellent raw or cooked vegetable at this time of year. Cumbungi is ecologically beneficial for capturing silt, creating habitat for diverse species and stabilising banks. It can also become ‘weedy’ so it makes a great food where we are the biological control or, as Russell Edwards would say, ‘ecological participants‘.

Stay tuned for more free food and other low-impact resources as we inch towards the Christmas lunch table in Moss Vale,

keep safe on the roads and if you’re driving, please think bike and think critter!

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Category: roadkill