and…
This lovely mama went straight back in the Nariel Creek from where we clutched her. It is now ‘closed season’ for Murray spiny freshwater crayfish (Euastacus armatus).
Over our short stay we have got to know nearby Corryong by riding into town for supplies.
We’ve also got to know a little about the horse thief Jack Riley, romanticised with ample hyperbole as the good-boy-hero Man from Snowy River, buried in the town. Thanks for the history lesson Warwick!
We have been touched by people’s generosity. Phil, our host at the caravan park, organised the wheel to be couriered to the Albury bikeshop, made numerous phone calls on the progress of the repair and kept us in good humour when it looked like a much longer wait than first thought. Thanks Phil!
Our friendly neighbours in the park loaned us their bike so we could all go on local expeditions. Thanks John and Jenny!
And these lovely women who we met in Corryong, gathered up their freshest garden produce including a dozen eggs and brought them out to us at Clack Clack. Thanks Nina, Eden and Jum!
Your food was a blessing. By living out of our own garden, food swaps, community gardens, food co-ops and by foraging and hunting we haven’t had to shop in supermarkets for nearly seven years. On this trip, with much less access to local food, we are finding out first-hand just how impoverished the industrial-corporate food industry is. At home we would avoid any food grown in another state, on the road we’re struggling to find bought food made in Australia. It was great to be able to cook up local garden frittatas for the neighbours on our last night.
There is just nothing like real food that has come from loved earth. Until science is freed from the economic imperatives of industry, people are going to be kept in the dark about how innutrituous, health-degrading and ecologically damaging our modern food supply really is. The annual increases in pharmaceutical medicine is proof enough that much modern food is woeful deception dressed up by PR firms.
For our children’s sake, isn’t it time we put our resources back in our own hands?
We found that to make sure we didn’t miss any of the bubblers in the chaos of the city we had to slow right down.
We found that although we only drink rain water at home, we loved drinking a toast to all the working bubblers we came across.
We found that after a while we even started acting like water bubblers.
We found that we started seeing bubblers even when there weren’t any.
We found a few over-zealous bubblers.
We found lots of important reasons to carry out our audit.
We found wheelchair accessible bubblers,
dog accessible bubblers
and bee accessible bubblers.
We found the wasteful remains of the winning entry in the 2011 Melbourne Urban Prize for sculpture.
We found some very brave people at the 
We found some great examples of people growing their own food.
We found people will go to great lengths to get a drink of water.
Overall what we found was very positive compared with Patrick’s findings from four years ago. 
