A very nice way to enter into summer, although I wish the teenage boy who had been dragged along by his parents had brought something other than a wind-up flashlight to illuminate his Harry Potter book. And the lady in front of me, once the wine got to her, began to hum along in a quavering vibrato rather like the Hammond organs they have in funeral parlours.

For a complete change, when we got home we flicked on the tellie to watch an excellent documentary of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock -- the complete performance. Which put me in mind of an anecdote I read a few weeks ago: when the dying (or already dead) Hendrix was wheeled into a London hospital nearly 40 years, the young intern who signed the death certificate was an Australian named Bob Brown. Now a Senator, he's the leader of the Australian Green Party.

- with the return of summer comes the return of the Aussie Waddle. You see it mostly in shopping malls, like the huge one we stopped at in Penrith the other day on our way into the big city. To do the Official Waddle you have to wear flip-flops, the rubber thong sandals that are cheap as chips and very popular in the suburbs, push your feet flatly out ahead of your body so the flip-flops don't flip off or become caught in the escalator, and tilt your body back slightly, letting your arms dangle limply at your sides if they aren't holding packages. The best performances are by the Suburban Obese, common in the big malls.

When you think of Australian exports, you think of wool, lamb, and wine. Cheap milk, butter and cheese are almost a birthright here. But cotton consuming almost as much water as the dairy industry? And the real kicker was the statement in the report that the irrigation industry, which developed more than half a century ago when farms were smaller and water more plentiful, loses 900 gigalitres a year -- more than twice Melbourne's consumption -- to evaporation and leakage. When we travelled down through the Riverina agricultural area last May, we were amazed at the shallow open ditches under the hot sun, and the random puddles from leaking pipes. Obviously, a part of the water crisis is simply bad management.

And in this election year, with climate change being such an issue, there are grants up the wazoo for natural gas conversions, solar hot water, solar grid power, and rain-water tanks (we're installing a 7,000-litre one for toilets, washing and the garden). You learn all this interesting stuff, such as one millimetre of rain on one square metre of roof equals a litre of water. But the simplest energy-conservation technique -- insulation -- attracts no government grants at all, as we found out when we bought 200 square metres of "pink batts" for the attic. Not sexy enough, perhaps.

Christine always talked about how in her childhood the cicadas heralded a hot summer day, and how they had names for the different types: the "Greengrocer" was the most common, while the "Black Prince," the "Yellow Monday" and the "Cherry Nose" were much rarer. On the net, at cicadamania.com , there are some photos of these types and others, the statement that Australians are the best in the world at naming animals, and the suggestion that many of the names of these extraordinary insects came from children. Having had a good look at the site and, later, looking at the Boys Big Book of Cicadas (not its real title) at brother-in-law Graham's, it appears this one is a Northern Cherrynose.

I remember one year when Sarah Jane was in about Grade 4 we pulled her out of school for a month and went to Australia. The deal was she had to learn long division and do a project in return for skipping out on whatever it was she was supposed to learn. In her project, which became the subject of a "show and tell" when she got back to class, she included a cicada exoskeleton. Years later, in Arles, Christine found a brooch of "la cigalle" -- the cicada, a symbol of Provence and specifically of Arles -- that she wore on her coat for years. But I digress....

-We've been meaning to go back to the Mount Vic Flicks since we went with neighbour Roland several months ago to see "Becoming Jane." Mount Vic is Mount Victoria, the town past Blackheath, about a 20-minute drive. It is so small and charming; except for the details of the architecture, you would think you've stumbled upon a tiny French or Italian hilltown. In the daytime, the theatre looks like this ....

So off we went ....

The huge lineup 10 minutes before showtime ...

Luxury-priced goodies are a feature of the concession stand inside ....

A few minutes before the show begins, they roll a welcoming slide and a series of ads for local businesses....

One of our local cafes advertises. Unfortunately, my photo of the ad for the local goat dairy didn't turn out ....

And the film we went to see? Oh yeah, what was it? Uh, it was Sicko, the new Michael Moore documentary. It was very curious watching it there, surrounded by people who have a pretty good universal Medicare and have little sense of what life in the USA is like. And laughing at the references to "hooking a Canuck" -- marrying a Canadian in order to get free health care.

-today, Sunday, he finally did it. John Howard has called a federal election for November 24. If the polls are anything to go by, it will be bye-bye for him, but Labour will need to win quite a number of strategic ridings in order to win government. It's rather like the situation the Liberals in BC were in: they could easily win the popular vote, but their vote was not "efficient" in capturing the swing ridings.

- a few days ago all the newscasts noted it had been three years since the last election gave the Howard government a three-year mandate. When's he gonna call it? they chorused. Another sign that an election is imminent was the announcement today by the Prime Minister that a new history curriculum, focusing on a conservative, "dead white men" version of Australia's past (that's my interpretation of it), will be mandated. Howard has always cared about the nation-building aspect of historical awareness and has gleefully waded into the "culture wars," eschewing the "black-armband school of cultural relativism," but the key to this one is that it's a wedge issue -- a stick he can use to beat the State governments, all of which are Labour. His announcement comes a week after the introduction of a citizenship test, an innocuous multiple choice quiz no more complicated than the Canadian one that Christine aced a few years ago.

-in the middle of the massive concern for global warming and climate change, which has been dominating the undeclared election campaign, it was ironic to read that the Hummer SUV was about to be imported into Australia for the first time. Oh no, said the spokesman, it's not the H2 monster that's on North American streets -- this is the H3, which is about average in fuel consumption and size for SUVs here, where the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Nissan Pajero overflow the narrow roadway lanes. (According to our daughter Sarah Jane's South American ESL students, "pajero" means wanker -- I wonder what that beast is called there?)