Last year the CB and I visited the Highlands of Scotland. The weather alternated between bleak, sunny, atrocious and average, every day. It was summer. The only difference between the Highlands and Tasmania’s south west is that while we’ve been here in the south west the weather in mid-autumn has been consistently atrocious. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you can marshal a bottle of port, a few red wines, a roaring fire and double glazing to your defence against the elements. And thus it was so. Oh, and there are no men in skirts that I could locate despite the name of the town.

Still, Strathgordon is a long way to go to sit in front of a fire. Fortunately the view through the double glazing was spectacular. The white sandy beaches of Lake Pedder and the bare mountains dusted with snow like icing sugar on grey, craggy cakes provided a perfect backdrop to the lounge chairs round the open fire. Occasionally, when the rain relented we rushed outside to snap a few photos then beat a hasty retreat back to the sanctuary of the Lake Pedder Wilderness Lodge, an excellent, welcoming and hospitable sanctuary I have to say.

It “only” rains for 270 days a year down here and for the other 95 there are bush fires. We saw the evidence. Black charred trees and pristine white snow provide quite a contrast. And now, a couple of months after the last major fire there’s a smattering of green as the tree ferns spit new fans skywards and leaves start to sprout rather incongruously from tree trunks. Fortunately the wilderness areas here are massive and the fires only impacted a small percentage before the tireless firies got things under control. Thanks guys for another job very well done.

Strahan is the only port on the west coast of Tasmania. In fact it’s the only town of any significance on the west coast because if you go west from Tasmania, the first land fall is Argentina. So the weather has quite a long run-up before assaulting poor little Tassie. So why would anyone want to live here? I guess that’s one of the reasons the harshest penal colony in Australia’s colonial history was put on Sarah Island, a few miles away from Strahan in Macquarie Harbour. Now, with its infamous history well and truly behind it, it’s a picturesque little maritime town with terrible weather.

Strahan is also something of a holiday destination. When the CB and I lived in Zeehan (about 40km from Strahan) we were surprised (initially) to learn that some of the locals went to Strahan for their holidays. Some of them hadn’t been to the eastern side of Tassie and considered the north island of Australia to be “overseas”. Salt of the earth people but somewhat insular.

One of the country’s most famous rivers – the Gordon – empties into Macquarie Harbour which incidentally is 6 times as big as Sydney Harbour but has only a 60m wide access to the ocean hence the two lighthouses which attempted, not always successfully, to guide ships into and out of the harbour. Why you would attempt that at night is mystifying, but some did and suffered the consequences.

The Gordon is famous environmentally and by extension politically. You can look it up. Suffice to say it was almost dammed (not damned) but due to political intervention, wasn’t. So a boat trip to Hell’s Gates, the entrance to the harbour, and then down the Gordon was very much on the agenda. And they were serving booze from the get-go which was 9.00am once we were underway so the incentive to do an all day (or most day) tour was irresistible.

Hell’s Gates is very much as the name suggests. Having spent all of my working life in the mining industry I am here to tell you the people on the front of our 34m catamaran, when we passed through the Gates would have been required to wear life jackets, safety harnesses and hard-hats at least and no kids would have been allowed if a mine manager rather than a tour operator was running that boat. But the boat proprietors were obviously oblivious to the risks of having their clients flung to the deck or worse still, overboard as the boat bucked and tossed like a tasered kangaroo. Notwithstanding we all had a jolly good laugh afterwards then settled back for the trip to the Gordon River.

On our Gordon River cruise we had occasion to stop in the heritage area and do a 400m boardwalk through the impenetrable rain forest. While GF2 rushed off to find a spot to have a smoke in the strictly non-smoking dripping wet rain forest, GF1 was taking pictures of everything moss and fungus to add to her extensive photographic collection of such things, the size of which would fill a full set of Encyclopaedias Brittanica. I thought she would be the only person on the planet to engage in such activity. I was wrong. There are 50 or so others with similar interests and they were all on our boat.

Macquarie Harbour is also home to countless fish farms. All I remember about the operation of these things is the fish are the size of your little finger when introduced, are left for 12-18 months then when they are five or six kilos they’re sucked up by a pipe into a boat and despatched to your plate. Sucked up by a pipe – where are the vegans swimming out to these fish farms in the freezing water and chaining themselves to the easily accessible pipe infrastructures to protest this fish sucking. Surely this would be much more effective than invading an abattoir or a nicely temperate farm. Apparently not in the fairyland they occupy.

The CB and I had ever so briefly been to Stanley many (many) years ago and it obviously never registered what a charming, picturesque place it is even if, like all other Tasmanian coastal towns it is exposed to elements which would have daunted the most intrepid of explorers.

I did most of the planning for this trip (after a suggestion from GF1) and up to now it’s been a resounding success which is just as well. Can you imagine (if you are a man) being in a car for hours on end with three disgruntled females. But I hadn’t expected the response to cute little Stanley. It was positively orgasmic. The place is full of neat, immaculately presented period houses and they all seem to have views to die for. As we were leaving yesterday, GF2 demanded the car be stopped so she could get out and buy a house. And then there’s The Nut, a large rock that sticks up out of the land (50%) and the sea (the other 50%) like a miniature Ayre’s Rock.

And there’s penguins. Back along the coast a few kilometres there’s a place called Penguin but their attempt to corner the region’s penguin driven tourist economy failed when word got out that there are penguins all along the coast. Common as bums they are, but they still generate the sort of reaction generally reserved for tiny babies and puppies. So we duly went down to the sea wall / boat ramp / wharf a couple of nights ago to watch and listen as the juvenile penguins whinged and whined for their food like so many tiny babies.

The old pub in Stanley was a welcome respite after a few hours in the car and for an hour or so, we were the only ones there. “How’s the serenity” one might say if one was in an iconic Australian movie or in a quiet (when the bloody jukebox was on recess) country pub. But eventually we were joined by other tourists and perhaps the odd local.

Now we’re all of the friendly persuasion and are quite happy to converse with those of a similar bent. Unfortunately GF1 inadvertently opened a conversation with a gentleman who had ignored the two women he was with but was happy to talk at us with a relent that would have done the ever persevering Wylie Coyote proud. I tried to do a Road Runner on him to shut him up by saying I was holidaying with my three wives and this was the one time of the year they are allowed out in public, but he was unphased. Admittedly my “wives” were wearing jeans and skirts rather than freedom sacks and we were in a pub and we were drinking so my attempt at cultural intervention failed miserably. I should have said I was a Mormon.

But back to The Nut which so dominates this place. There’s a chairlift that takes you to the top which never gets more than a few feet off the ground. GF1 who doesn’t like heights, figured this was her kind of chairlift after the somewhat more challenging experience of the largest single span for a chairlift in the world over the Cataract Gorge in Launceston. During the 2km circumnavigation of the top of The Nut the clouds and rain moved in. This was more like the Tasmania we knew and loved in our three year Tasmanian sojourn many years ago.

Up to last week, in my long(ish) and mostly satisfying life I estimate I had seen around four sea horses. This rather obvious deficiency was spectacularly righted when GF1 insisted we visit the sea horse farm at Beauty Point north of Launceston. Incidentally, and I digress, there was a general complaint among my female travelling companions regarding the fact that most if not all things in this part of the world are named after men. Then I pointed out that Beauty Point is in fact named after a female….cow. Hurt feelings were not assuaged I’m afraid.

Anyway I am now an expert on the reproductive ins and outs (if you’ll excuse the expression) of the seahorse. I know there are 54 species of seahorse of which 23 are in Australia. I’ve seen them in their thousands and they are exported to aquariums all over the world. I’ve even held one and let it twirl its long tail round my finger. But I still don’t know what you call a tank full of sea horses – a herd, a school, a posse, maybe a saddle of sea horses.

And who knew there were things such as hand fish which look like a miniature version of Thing from The Adams Family. They are almost extinct and of one species there are estimated to be only 70 adults left in the world, all of them in the Derwent River. When they sit on the river bed and don’t move much you’d think that would be an open invitation to predators to partake of the hand fish buffet. So it’s not surprising there aren’t many left.

Up to now the trip’s been mostly about animals (Tasmanian Devils, platypuses (platipi?), echidnas (hello Randall you cute little three legged critter), kangaroos, the aforementioned sea horses, wombats and assorted bird and snakes. Oh, and bridges – Richmond Bridge, Batman Bridge and the Hobart bridge that was hit by a barge many years ago, collapsing one of the spans. I had the t-shirt to prove it which in hindsight was a bit morbid and insensitive because there were fatalities. But we joke about everything provided there has been a respectable interval between tragedy and comedy. Why were the Japanese crying poor after the Fukushima tsunami. I saw one house with eight cars and four boats in the driveway. See what I mean.

Time to switch from animal to mineral and The Nut at Stanley.

 

I could have started this travel saga by saying that I don’t know how or why I allowed myself to be talked into it and you would be none the wiser. But that would be disingenuous. I actually volunteered to embark on a 10 day holiday with three women. Admittedly one is the child bride and the other two, GF1 and GF2, are good friends who I’ve worked with and socialised with for many years so it won’t be heaven or hell but it will be a lot of fun

We’re now four days in and I haven’t had a chance to add to this because the days have been as packed as a porn stars jocks. And we’ve pretty much been left to our own devices as it’s Easter and Tasmania is closed apart from the touristy stuff. So driving has been quite leisurely and just as well because we didn’t want to be snapped by one of the four speed cameras in Hobart, the locations of which the hire car lady kindly revealed. I won’t reveal the name of the hire car company or the authorities may send Constable Dan Adams of Liawenee after her. That would give him something to do because the town he patrols has a grand total of no people apart from him. It’s that sort of public servant to public ratio which puts Tassie in the same mendicant status as Greece and California.

Politeness is a state-wide trait which makes the people a delight to interact with. We found the only French waiter who has been privileged enough to be given a working visa to wait tables in restaurants in Tasmania. His countrymen (and women presumably) would be permitted to scowl at diners in the less courteous parts of Melbourne and most of the city nosheries in Sydney, but not here because of the politeness directive. Luigi, as we christened him (Italian I know, but we’re on vacation so the normal rules don’t apply) was the Manuel (Spanish I know etc etc) of Hobart – bumbling, eager to please to the point of obsequiousness and somewhat forgetful. We ordered four entrees and four mains. Three entrees arrived together and three mains arrived together. A 75% strike rate in some activities, baseball for example, would be exceptional. When it comes to delivering meals in a high end restaurant it’s a 13 on the par 3 12th at Augusta National. But as soon as he was reminded in a very non-Fawlty Towers way, I might add, he immediately offered the missing meals free of charge. This offer was obviously accepted. That meant an extra 60 bucks for booze so were we happy – bet your life we were.

Just in case you were wondering about the brown sign reference, tourist signs are brown and GF1 was running shotgun on them. There are millions of them even in a tiny place like this so while we didn’t check them all out we did our share.

I took up golf on a semi-regular basis about 18 months ago after playing intermittently for years but rarely in Australia. I spent so much time on the road I was playing more golf in Korea than here. There was this one time (not at band camp), early one morning in early spring, so it was still very cold, I hit a perfect wedge onto a green and it bounced almost as high as I hit it and finished up adjacent to the next tee. But that’s another story. Now that I am back playing it’s likely there will be more golf stories. Here’s the first.

The Masters finished recently and the Tiger is back. Will Augusta retain its aura or has the fact that the winner was someone who hasn’t won a major for 11 years, rubbed off some of the mystique. I suspect this says more about Tiger than Augusta but we’ll see.

Augusta National Golf Club is said by some, to be the most exclusive club in the world. Not as exclusive as the “Fell 30,000 Feet Without a Parachute and Survived” club or the “Olympic Medal for Underwater Swimming” club or the “Duelling Survivors” club but still rather difficult to get into.

When the Masters comes round each year I get an attack of the Groucho Marx’s. Most people (men mainly) would give their wives to be members of Augusta National. It’s not particularly expensive to join (if you’re reasonably well off) but it’s by invitation only and if you make it known that you’d be receptive to an invitation, forget it. In this vein, some of the rules and regulations are rather quaint which gets us back to Groucho.

Groucho once said he wouldn’t be a member of a club that would have him as a member and I’m sort of that way with Augusta. Not because they wouldn’t like me (said he, gazing into a mirror) but because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like them. Not least of these quaint ways is the “Fight Club” rule – the first rule of Augusta is you don’t talk about Augusta unless you’re the chairman. Fair enough I guess if we’re talking about secret men’s business (there are a few women in the membership of 300) but having the New Year countdown at 10.30pm is just ridiculous. And there’s no running, no cell phones, no sitting or lying on the grass etc etc.

So where does that leave us? Augusta will never invite me but if they did I wouldn’t join. No no, it’s no use begging. I’ve made my mind up. I’m more than happy hacking my way round Nudgee Golf Club’s south course or whatever it will be when the renovations finish. I’d rather be fighting off the midges than smelling the magnolias. Never did like magnolias.

 

Hearty congratulations to Professor Peter Ridd for his bravery, conviction and ultimate triumph over the forces of scientific (and by extension societal ) darkness. If you believe in the idiotic concept of scientific “consensus” can I remind you, you have a fundamental orifice where you can store it in perpetuity.

Forget you peak oil tipping points and your climate tipping points because this is a very real tipping point that will sew the seed of the reversal of the peak stupidity currently blanketing the world on so many levels.

Now that the Mueller Report is out, I believe it should be safe to publish this. I wrote it a couple of months ago and filed it away for future reference. The future is now and I feel ever so slightly vindicated because I think I have already  heard one or two mea culpas . Read on to find out what this is all about.

Alright blog, what do you think of this? The Spectator magazine is running an essay competition and the topic is “The Next Great Hashtag”. I’d love to enter. I’ve been threatening to submit something or other to one of these competitions or to a magazine for ages but it’s unlikely to happen here sadly because I’m not familiar with the mythical (to me) power of the hashtag or indeed why it isn’t still just that little sign you put in front of a number to indicate that it is a number, as in #3 or “number three”. There’s a degree of redundancy there you’d have to admit so someone somewhere has decided that # is being grossly under-utilised so is in need of a higher purpose. So dear blog, to continue concealing my hipness ignorance (“hignorance’ or “hipnorance” – could have invented a new word there) from the rest of the world because only three people regularly read you, I’ll subject you to a discourse on the topic at hand.

I’m a child mostly of the previous century so the significance or indeed the aforementioned power of a hashtag eludes me. My football mad relatives write comments on Facebook followed by #ManU  #Football  #SirAlex or such like. Why? What’s the point? Does this magically transport the comment to …..somewhere or someone? That Twitter thing uses them a lot but I don’t wallow in that sewer so am none the wiser there. I remember a picture of a pouting, frowny faced Michelle Obama holding up a sign with “#Bring Back Our Girls” written on it. The parodies were hilarious which just goes to show that unless you can genuinely fake sincerity then forget success (attrib. George Burns or someone called Jean Giraudoux or someone else). Come to think of it, Michelle Obama’s fake sincerity doesn’t seem to have held her back. Neither has Bill Shorten’s for that matter – once more with feeling Bill, the director might shout. But why is that noughts and crosses thing needed at the start of the comment?

So not understanding the authority of a hashtag makes me eminently qualified to expound prophetically on the next “big thing”. If it’s okay for humanities professors to lecture me on climate change and get away with it, then cop this.

No, I can’t do it. My curiosity has got the better of me and I’m going to have to do a bit of research.

Later that day……………..

Apparently, according to that fount of all knowledge Wikipedia, a hashtag links messages with a common theme, much like a common theme used to. During my in-depth research I went onto Facebook and clicked on a hashtag to see what would happen and bugger me, all of these Facebook entries appeared and all were related to the same, wait for it, theme. So there’s the clue. The Next Great Hashtag has to be linked to today’s most ubiquitous, prevailing (“trending”?) theme. And what might that be, said he, asking the most obvious question in the world?

Before I answer that question, let me say that I follow American politics reasonably closely. Closely enough to not have to read the numerous articles written by the work experience kids who populate some of our online “news” websites. You know the ones – they regularly point out where Donald Trump continues to go wrong or expound on the five reasons he will be impeached or resign or somehow or other be kicked out of office in the next three or six or nine months. This has been going on for more than two years. Predictions of his downfall or at least that he would achieve nothing and be the worst president since the last one have come and gone like so many climate tipping points.

Consequently I’m predicting that The Next Great Hashtag will be #Iwaswrong as in I was wrong to underestimate, demonise, mock (pick any number of abusive adjectives) Donald Trump and not give any credit where credit is due, which is all Donald Trump (and the rest of us for that matter) can ask for. I accept that this will be a stretch for those suffering the most chronic, incurable strains of Trump Derangement Syndrome, because let’s face it, there’s a lot of face to lose here. Mea culpa’s of the “It’s a fair cop, Your Honour; guilty as charged. I was wrong” type, will need to be levered out of CNN for example, with a crowbar.

In a parallel universe a casual observer might feel sympathy for someone who has put the bank account, the house, the car, the wife, the kids, the credibility and the beer can collection on a sure bet like Hillary Clinton who then rather unsportingly loses. If not for the billions squirrelled away in the Clinton Foundation, you’d almost believe that the fix was in. And the flashing red lights were there for everyone to see. Fortunately the “someones” in question in our universe are celebrities lite, 90% of the media, the self proclaimed elites of the bureaucracy and academia plus random undergraduates with nothing to lose and as would have happened with a different election result, nothing to gain. So they get no sympathy.

These clowns (for want of a better word) painted themselves into such a tight corner with their samurai-like commitment to Hillary, the only way out for some of them if she lost was the Hollywood version of hara-kiri – moving to Canada. When this level of devotion takes you to your own version of Jonestown, there is no backing down. The only way out, up to now, has been to totally discredit everything Donald Trump said, says, did and does, past present and future, so that upon his downfall they can say “See, I was right all along. It just took a bit longer than I thought to play out.”

Sadly for them, it’s not playing out. Consequently we have the tragically pathetic sight (and sound) of an actor at the top of his game (debatable, I know), Robert De Niro contributing a philosophical “F…Trump” to the discourse thereby proving that even the most inspirational actors are orally vacuous unless someone else puts words into their mouths. In fact the two years of Trump’s presidency have played out like the speeded up versions of left-slanting news shows on CNN and MSNBC on election night which are preserved for posterity on YouTube  – initially euphoria but morphing into equal parts feral aggression and despair. If the leader of the free world didn’t have such a profound and ongoing impact on global machinations, those shows would have represented the pinnacle of Trump’s presidency before it even started.

Now we know most of the Trump opposition is of the left; not exclusively but predominantly. And we know that leftists like collectives because, let’s face it, most of them don’t have the courage of their convictions when confronted by arguments which rely on facts, logic, common sense and human nature. They need a protective outer cloak of like minded automatons. Watching Ben Shapiro or Brendan O’Neill or Jordan Petersen or the late Christopher Hitchens skewer emotive half-baked arguments with these axioms, even though a couple of those people mentioned would not necessarily consider themselves to be of the right (socially and/or economically), is a latter day version of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, such is the mirth-making.

Returning to the hashtag, the aforementioned emotive collective (“emective” perhaps – I’m on a roll with these new words) has nowhere to go especially if the Mueller probe into God knows what turns up nothing of significance and the now Democrat dominated House of Representatives turns out to be, as expected, all piss and wind.  I’m predicting that the dam will break when one prominent leftist admits they erred in condemning everything Trumpian and tweets #Iwaswrong. Collectivists being what they are will initially try to isolate this clearly deranged outlier until someone else realises that maybe he/she is right. Then other collectivists, because they are, will want to join the party to show how woke they are and hey presto, the trend is on its way.

Incidentally I was torn between #Iwaswrong  and #Wewerewrong but such is the power of #, I have found, it doesn’t matter because in social media world # is the great gatherer or more appropriately collector, if we want to stick to our leftist shtick. It turns out the armour provided by “we” won’t be required.

Now I’d love to do a piece on the “Green New Deal” but it would look something  like this byooooootvglsek5bvdktgb,bsc              after I fall face first into the keyboard laughing like a drain.