The Song in my Head

Step one you say we need to talk
He walks you say sit down it's just a talk
He smiles politely back at you
You stare politely right on through
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
You begin to wonder why you came

Where did I go wrong, I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
**And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life **


Meg and I went to a see The Fray live in concert on Janurary 29th, 2007.This was the lyrics to the title song of their new album. The next morning I found Dad. It's taken a long time before I could listen to this song...

Arriving at Gamboola Station

Friday afternoon and the week's work is done. Time to sit down and use my limited internet time..

I first want to start out by commenting on just how wide open Australia's arms have been in welcoming me and helping me so far. Not just my family, but complete strangers as well. EVERYONE has been so eager to serve the greatest of hospitality, and to show off their own small piece of Oz. I gotta say, it's pretty humbling to feel so welcomed..

My week on the Gold Coast was filled to the brim. A barbque at the next door neighbor's was held, the second one in as many weeks in my honor. The first being a family one in Adelaide in which I got to see my cousins Paul and Simone. Not that I particularly deserved a barbque, I think Aussie's are just that quick to use any excuse they can find to have one.

The best part of the Gold Coast, hands down, was watching the sunsets from my Auntie Jo's backyard. A lawn chair overlooking a big water channel, a XXXX beer, country music blaring from the stero (Thanks to my ipod), and a bit of family to harass. Nothing could be better.

Here's where the 'making connections' goes from funny to absurd. So the lady I met on the plane that found me the job on Gamboola lives in a small town called Chillagoe of about 200 peole. Half my graduating high school class. Well it just turns out that my Aunt's next door neighbor GREW UP in Chillagoe. Well, she was kind enough to call up her dad (the one man cop of Chillagoe 20 years ago), who called up his old friend in Cairns, who in turn offered to pick me up from the Cairns airport, show me around town for the weekend, and then personally drive me the 4 hours from Cairns all the way to Gamboola. Talk about luck (and kindess of heart). Oh, and plus the neighbor's daughter was nice enough to teach me 'twinkle twinkle little star' on the chello. Oh yea.. I'm cultured now.

Charlie Marino and hiw wife were as great of hosts as any others, and Charlie knew PLENTY of old history of the area.. so we got along great. We were walking down the Espande St (waterfront upscale restraunt district) and Charlie was pointing out a nice Itallian restraunt which used to be the building he grew up in. As we walk by it, the manager drags us in and insists on sharing a bottle of expensive French champagne and an hour of interesting conversation about his family in Austria and so furth.. I tell ya, the twists and turns of this trip are as interesting as they are unexpected.

A four hour drive through the middle of nowhere and I am suddenly at a place I now call home:

Gamboola Station
Private Mail Bag 21
Cairns Mail Center
4870
QLD, Australia


The address is Cairns of course because that's where the mail plane takes off from. I got to see it land today as the airstrip is about 100 yards from the stockyard the manager Tony and I were working on.

Gamboola Station is a MASSIVE property on the Cape York Penninsula. To get an idea, think about the 1000 kilomters of fence that we will be checking in the coming months. That's a enough fence to strech from Austin to Dallas, back to Austin, and back to Dallas again. The homestead has three main buildings. The kitchen, which has vistor's quarters upstairs (hint hint), the house of the manager Tony and his wife Lisa, the ringer's quarters. The ringer's quarters has about 4 bedrooms, a bathroom and laundry facilities, and the single bedroom is my own. The others will be occupied by the 12 contract musterers that will come in 7-8 weeks and stay for about 3 months.

You couldn't create a place that was more of what I was looking for. I can honestly say that I'm very very happy with the place and excited for what the rest of the year will be like living here. Tony is smart, hard worker.. but he takes the time to explain everything. I've been honest with him about what I do and don't know about this sort of work, and he's very patient in teaching. In return, I've just make sure to work hard and make sure he doesn't have to repeat himself. The first week we begun work on an extension to the stockyard.. a lumber fence made from raw materials cut on-site. I've begun learning how to weld, as well as driving manual 4 wheel drive vehicles. I've oiled my saddle and bridal, and will begin riding next week it looks like.

A normal day:

5:30 Wake Up
6:00 "Brekky"
6:30 Work Begins
9:30 "Smoko" - short break for some freshly baked snacks
12:30 "Dinner" (lunch)
2:00 Back to Work
5:00 Shower, read some Tom Clancy, and do whatever
7:00 "Tea" (Supper)

One good thing so far has been the fact that wallabys are such a normal site that I've begun noticing them as much I would a common deer. As long as they stay off the dirt roads, we'll get along. A danger of the place tho is the sun. The radio often reminds me that the UV index is "10... extreme". Extreme? I didn't know it went that high. Long sleve shirts, a broad akubra hat, and sunscreen every few hours is the only way to go. The lecture my mother has been giving me for YEARS on sun protection has only now decided to settle in.. but better late than never.

I know that this has not been my most 'flowing' post, but there has just been SO MUCH going on and also I'll throw in the exuse that I'm pretty tired after spending an entire day working on the stockyard fence. Hope everyone is doing great..

Adelaide and the Gold Coast

So it's been a while since my last posting, and I know that if I were to put everything that I've done in the last two weeks into this blog... well it'd be awfuly long and very few of you would read it all. That said, here I go anyways.

My time in Adelaide was busy yet somehow very relaxing. Adelaide is a town on the southern coast of about one million, and so many small things about it reminded me of Austin. It holds a huge amount of festivals every year (I got to see their 'kite festival'), yet it's not a huge destination city. My uncle Frank took me out to the cliffs to show me his new model plane that he's been flying, equipped with a live-streaming video camera and matching headset. Maybe it's just me, but I thought that was a great way to get a good view of the coast.

One day we took a drive into the country where we stopped at a sleepy easter-weekend country market where I got the chance to hold a joey (baby kangaroo) among a few other animals. The animal care-taker wasn't letting just anybody hold the animals, but sufice it to say that she could tell I was from out of town. (I think me having a camera at a country version of a yard-sale might have been her first clue.) I got to see the beach, the mountain range, and even a short bushwalk to see a waterfall in the middle of the woods. Only thing was, there was no water. South Australia is the driest state on the driest continent, and right now they're experiencing their worst drought in ages.

Another notable event in Adelaide was my Auntie Suzzane's insistence that I see the movie 'Wolf Creek'. Knowing that I was going out into the outback to work for months on end, she thought this would be the perfect movie for me to watch. Yet she always said this while trying to hold back some laughter.. If you're unfamiliar with wolf creek let me just explain it this way. "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" meets "Hostel" meets "Crocodile Dundee". My aunt has a very sick sense of humor.

A quick stop in Sydney to get my tax file number and then I was off to the Gold Coast.

The Gold Coast is the name for a strip of beach that goes for miles and miles and covers a few different small towns and one city called Surfer's Paradise. As the author Bill Bryson put it, this is Australia's Florida. If the city of Adelaide is a well kept secret out of the spotlight, then the Gold Coast is right on the other side of the spectrum. High rise hotels and residencial buildings guard the coast in a way reminisicnt of Miami. But enough of a geography lesson.. back to my trip.

My Auntie Joanne and Uncle Jeff have just built a BEAUTIFUL new home overlooking the water channel just a short drive inland from Surfer's Paradise. The house is incredible, the view is impressive, and the best part is that the neighbors are all close-knit as well. One evening a neighbor took me to see the an Aussie Rules Football game in downtown Brisbane (about 40 minutes north). I had my doubts that I would even understand the game, neverless enjoy it, but it turned out to be even better than rugby in my opinion.

Besides a Aussie Rules game I also had the chance to get on a wakeboard for my first time. This was a great opprotunity to show people just how easy it is for me to pick up new skills, namely the skill of holding on to a rope for half a second and then planting my face into the water. After fine tuning that trick to an art, I able to finally figure out how to stand up straight on the board. This, I found, made for an even more impressive fall.. again only seconds later. After a few encores I felt that people's patience was growing thin, and the sun was setting, so I got off and let the other neighborhood kids have a go. A bunch of d*m showoffs if you ask me.

One major roadblock to my understanding of my Australian heritage was the game of cricket. Oh cricket. Aussies seem to love their cricket in a fashion similar to that of vegemite. They take it as a national icon, but accept that you foreigners could never appreciate it like they do. And mostly they're right. Yet two days ago I found myself wrapped up in a backyard game of cricket. And while I still don't think I could ever sit in a stadium and watch the sport, I happily report that it's quite fun to play. It was close enough to baseball that I got really sad realizing that I won't be seeing a batting cage for at least another 8 months. :(

There is plenty more to share but I wanted to give y'all a quick snapshot.. I know it's been a while since my las tpost. I hope everything is going good back in the States, and I will be posting the address of the Gamboola Cattle Station here in the next few days. Thanks for the comments (please keep them p.c. tho), I really do appreciate hearing from y'all. Take care!