In the "falls" category, much of the reason comes down to China and, I suppose, the reduction of import tariffs. And in the "rises" category, you can blame the drought for a big part of the increase in food prices. But a month ago, off the back of a truck parked on the roadside, we did buy from a Queensland farmer a box of 10 of the most exquisite mangos I'd ever tasted for $12.

The natural forest, all eucalypts, is an unchanging olive green/blue, but exotic vines and trees like oaks and planes (sycamores) are common in the mountain towns of Katoomba and Leura, a legacy of the generations of ex-pats who wanted to put an English cultural stamp onto the landscape.

Autumn. Australians don't say "fall," except to describe what happens on the way home from the pub. We went off daylight savings time on Saturday night, and on cue the temperature dropped drastically after a "southerly change." It had been mid-20s all week in the mountains, and low 30s and sticky hot in Sydney, but we woke up Sunday morning to a temperature of 9 degrees under heavy cloud and drizzle. The high that day was a shocking 12! You realize how solidly Canadian houses are built (especially the house we built at Killara Farm in Langley) when you try to warm up a place like this one. Our efforts to weatherstrip windows and insulate floors have redoubled. The good news is that this wake-up call won't last, and we'll back to the 20s in a day or so. We hope.

***

As part of our quest to plumb the depths of Aussie culture, we watched a 1990s film called Sirens, based loosely on artist Norman Lindsay and his milieu. Lindsay lived near Springwood, a Blue Mountains town not too far from us in Katoomba. The film was one of a number we've seen, including a documentary of life in the Outback (Mad Max), an ancient, clanking miniseries of doe-eyed Irish convicts suffering under the British jackboot, and an excellent and too-brief three-parter called Edens Lost.



We heard about Sirens when we suggested to Christine's aunt and uncle from Brisbane that we go to the Lindsay Gallery and Museum, which is one of three National Trust properties in the Blue Mountains. We'd been there several years ago; when we went back, we took the tour and heard from the guide how Sirens went way over the top describing Lindsay and the women who lived there and modelled for him as lascivious, amoral libertines. Sam Neill played Lindsay, and a typically mumbling Hugh Grant played the young clergyman who was sent out to tell him that if he didn't stop painting lusty nudes he would be felled by a lightning bolt or trampled by heaven-sent wombats. It was the sensual awakening of Grant's wife, the pale, decorous Tara Fitzgerald, that provided the movie with its oomph (a technical term for emotional suspense). Anyway, it was a slice of Aussiewood, borderline soft-core, with ample opportunities for ample women (and one man) to parade and pose naked.

The reality of Lindsay (1879-1969) was much more prosaic, as reality usually is, which is not in any way diminishing him as the most outrageous, rococo artist of the first half of Australia's 20th century. Do look at the website for the National Trust property for a bio and the pictures in the gallery. In his fine art, which was almost exclusively erotic tableaux, he combined Rubens, Watteau and Hieronymous Bosch; his etchings and watercolours are superb and his drawings lively. He was an incredibly deft artist, who could draw as naturally as birds fly. He also wrote and illustrated one of the classic Australian children's books, The Magic Pudding, which has been in print since its publication in 1918, and created a weekly full-page cartoon for The Bulletin newspaper in Sydney.

It was an interesting weekend being zoned back into Vancouver affairs, partly due to attending Gordon Price's lecture at Penrith, in which he talked and showed images of Vancouver, then hearing that Vancouver Remembered is a finalist for the Duthie Prize/BC Booksellers Award. Meanwhile, life goes on ....

Anniversaries always make me reflect, so the beginning of March, being three months since our arrival in Sydney after the longest plane journey in memory, is a time to look back. It is also a cause for celebration, as we've completed all the formalities and now own the Elizabeth Flats. So the grand project has moved on to its next phase.

I hear Vancouver has snow again. We got out of there at the end of November, also in snow, wearing sandals, with 2 suitcases each, having over the previous six months sold, given away, recycled and chucked out thousands of pounds of redundant possessions. The last load to go from the farm was mainly metal to be recycled, including our ancient barbecue that dissolved into a shower of rust when it hit the bottom of the bin at the Langley transfer site. Then a local auto parts dealer bought our Mazda pickup truck, shortly before its rusty patches metastasized into terminal cancer. By the time we left our Vancouver apartment, with the car sold to a young Israeli architect, we were as free of responsibilities as we'd been in more than 30 years.

But the Singapore Airlines plane sat on the tarmac in Vancouver for several hours waiting to be de-iced. As the crew had been on duty too long to then make the 11-hour flight to Seoul, we were pulled off and sent by bus to the Meridian Hotel on Burrard, fed a dish of sad spaghetti, then awakened at 5 for a caky muffin and a bus trip through the darkened, icy streets back to YVR. The plane then waited another 2 hours before leaving for Seoul. After what seemed like an eternity, we made it to Singapore at nearly midnight in some very foreign time zone, slept for 6 hours, returned to the airport and waited an extra few hours for the delayed connector plane. It was late on December 1, on a humid evening with lightning crackling in the sky, that we finally emerged from customs and quarantine check on Aussie soil.

The key to mobility at 18 was to have a half-empty backpack; at 22 it was to own only enough stuff to furnish a VW bus.* At our stage of life, we discovered, the key was to own just what would fit into a 20-foot shipping container. We had pared down our worldly goods from about 8,500 pounds to 6,500, most of which seemed to be books, and bade them farewell from the farm to a storage depot on River Road behind the dyke in Delta, hopefully not on the ground floor. I've made it sound rather easy, but in fact it was a real catharsis, undertaken gleefully by me, less so by Christine. I was determined not to ship and store unfinishable projects or drag along things I knew I would have to dispose of later. So my late aunt Ruby's papers and chattels had to be ruthlessly triaged, a folder of my unwanted watercolours became confetti after some enthusiastic ripping, and unworthy oil paintings succumbed to jumping and sawing. Old silkscreen frames that I had moved from Kitsilano to Kerrisdale in 1983, not used, moved them again to the farm in 1993, still not used, finally went to the dump. It was an instructive exercise in self-management -- a variation on the mid-life crisis which usually involves acquiring more stuff like sports cars or huge TVs.

Someone we met here recently suggested that the move would be easy for us, especially for Christine as she would be going home. But, she said, she'd been gone way too long from Australia for it to seem like home to her.

* A former editor of a VW bus journal in Pennsylvania, Tom Brouillette, is assembling a book of stories that will probably include some of my experiments, alluded to on the Travel portion of this site, a good example of my unfinishable projects. He was involved with the NEATO bus journal, as I recall.