Being Age Pensioners, we’ve been on a waiting list for many years for low-rent accommodation via the State Housing Department, and finally we’ve got it! Although we have enjoyed being here on the coast for the last five and a half years, we’ll be very happy to move nearer our beloved Tweed River again, and our favourite magic mountain, Mt Warning (so called, we are told, because it was the first thing Captain Cook saw when approaching this coast). In the new home we’ll say hello to the mountain every time we drive out of our street, and again when we drive back.
We saw the outside of the place on Sunday (because we couldn't wait) and the inside today, and we love it! It’s the front unit of a duplex, in a quiet, leafy court. We met the lady in the back unit, who is very nice. She has a huge, thriving rosemary bush. I like having my namesake plant where I’m living, and it’s been a while since that happened. (It’s a sign! It’s a sign!) There are parks nearby for walking, a big local store and a petrol station, and we’re just a few minutes out of town. We’ve lived around the town of Murwllumbah for the last 16 years, ever since we left Melbourne and moved to this part of the country. Our present location is the furthest out we’ve been.
When we moved to the coast, after loving the hills for about nine years, we said, “Yes, it’ll be good to be near the ocean again for a while” and so it has been – but note the “for a while”. Lately I’ve started itching to be closer to the mountain once more; I've begun to miss driving along the river. ( I grew up in Tasmania, a tiny island of mountains and rivers, small towns and villages, forests and rural districts, where you can’t go far in any direction without meeting the ocean. So I love all those things. (I only didn’t like the cold weather!))
We need to be in asap. If Housing Department properties stand vacant too long, people start complaining. We’ll have to break our lease here, though not by much. It was 21st January that we moved in here. The Department has written us a letter to show our landlord, saying we are required to be in before the end of the month. In fact, with Christmas coming up, it could be hard to get a removalist, so they will probably be a little flexible. Still, it’s all about to happen, and I don’t expect to be online much for a while. We’ll hope that our service provider doesn’t take so long over the transfer this time! After that – well, it’s a ten year lease, so we’ll settle down to a new era of stability and security.
Last time all the packing and cleaning half-killed us, and a number of our friends too. We moved in and went to bed for a few days! So this time, with a bit more money stashed away than we had then, we are going to get a carrier who will do all the packing for us, and we’ll have this place professionally cleaned. I still have to wash curtains, and go through my great hoard of papers to see what to chuck out. My darling can’t believe I am finally going to let go of the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1977 – but only because I found out I can now get it all and more on DVD.
We’ll actually be only a half hour’s drive from where we are now, and the Neighbourhood Centre here will pay my travel exes to stay on as a volunteer, continuing to facilitate the writers’ group and fill the role of Secretary of the Management Committee. Just when I am about to leave, I am also thinking of starting a spiritual development group and a Mac users’ group! Both have been requested, particularly the spiritual group. For a few years now, people have been coming up to me and asking if I’d start one. Finally, as I’m about to leave the area, I get my act together!
We are also going to keep seeing the chiropractor here: best one we ever found – and we’ve found some good ones. And we’ll continue to see the psychologist here too. Every time I start going into nostalgia about the things we have to leave behind, I stop myself and say, “Hang on, you’ll be coming back twice a week!”
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Showing posts with label Mt Warning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mt Warning. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Being here
As I just said in response to a comment on yesterday's post, Loving MySpace, I think my reason for loving it could have something to do with being brought up in a small town. That town long ago grew into the City of Launceston and I haven't seen it in the last nine years, but I'm sure it will have kept some of the villagey atmosphere I remember.
I'm not fond of big cities, even though I lived in one – Melbourne – most of my adult life. I went to the University of Melbourne when I was 17, worked in various Melbourne libraries after I graduated, got married there (three times!) and raised my kids there. I lived there about 30 years and did get to love it for a long time. Cities are exciting places for teenagers, so I was disposed to embrace it from the start. But what was it I embraced? The city centre, the Uni and its surrounding suburb of Carlton, and later the Bayside suburbs where a kind fate led me to live and work. That's about it, really. With blithe disregard for such things as financial considerations, I used to ask rhetorically why anyone would live in Melbourne and NOT be by the sea. Put it down to my island heritage. Still a Taswegian at heart (which is what we Tasmanians jokingly call ourselves) I go for beautiful scenery, historic buildings, and a sense of community.
But I'm over Melbourne now. Andrew and I moved to northern New South Wales in 1994, and have no hankering to go back. We've lived since then in various locations around the town of Murwillumbah – with its hills, rivers and nearby mountains and ocean. No wonder I've always felt at home here! I like going into Coles and having six conversations with old acquaintances I bump into. I like walking down the street, encountering a friend unexpectedly and grabbing a coffee while we have a catch-up. I like it that the people in the shops have known me for years and say hello with a smile when I come in. I like the proprietary feeling I have about Mt Warning, the Tweed and Rous Rivers, certain cafes and the only bookshop.
We don't get into Murwillumbah so often any more, though those things still pertain when we do. In 2002 we moved out to Pottsville Beach, a small but fast-growing coastal resort with two tiny shopping areas and a thriving Neighbourhood Centre with hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers. Yes, there's a villagey feel and a strong sense of community, but the natural connections are with other places along the coast. When we want serious shopping, we go to urban centres like Tweed Heads (the start of the Gold Coast) or Byron Bay. And there are always lots of tourists here. One way and another, it feels less cocooned than dear old Murwillumbah, the town of which I used to say approvingly that it was 'cool to be daggy'. (For my non-Aussie readers, that's an oxymoron.) But we have the sea, and it's glorious!
It's a little like that, blogging here instead of on MySpace (not that I have stopped doing it there): considerably less cocooned, but with certain benefits. Now that I'm engaging with it, the wider blogosphere is rewarding too for a writer and lover of writing. Masters of the Verse on MySpace directed me to Writer's Resource Centre, one of my favourite places to play on the web, and there I found The Cerebral Mum, new friend and brilliant writer, without whom my life could no longer be complete. :) Also she's a generous promoter of other blogs including mine. It was she who directed me to David Coomler's blog on HOKKU, which I greatly treasure. Only yesterday, she helped me find PomGirl, a relative newcomer to Australia with a fresh eye for our foibles and a humorous take on her own, to whose delicious blog I instantly subscribed.
There's some cross-pollination goes on. I have told all my MySpace haiku friends about the HOKKU site, many of them now love it too, and one has started a thread on Haiku on Friday, based on a recent HOKKU post. Some of my favourite writers post on both Blogger and MySpace: e.g. Collin Kelley, an Atlanta poet whom I met in Texas at the Austin International Poetry Festival; Savvyology (B Y Penman) and Lance Strate, both of whom I met on MySpace. I see that one can duplicate content in both places, or have very different blogs at the different locations. Lance, for instance, who is a Professor of Communication, uses his blogspot for material related to his interest in that field, and his MySpace blog for his poetry. I'm opting for different posts in different places most of the time – though, regarding the recent Australian election, I waxed jubilant EVERYWHERE, including here.
I suspect, though, that this is really a MySpace blog. Does it truly belong out here, where there is so much concern for attracting traffic, writing winning headlines, and using blogs for business?
I'm not fond of big cities, even though I lived in one – Melbourne – most of my adult life. I went to the University of Melbourne when I was 17, worked in various Melbourne libraries after I graduated, got married there (three times!) and raised my kids there. I lived there about 30 years and did get to love it for a long time. Cities are exciting places for teenagers, so I was disposed to embrace it from the start. But what was it I embraced? The city centre, the Uni and its surrounding suburb of Carlton, and later the Bayside suburbs where a kind fate led me to live and work. That's about it, really. With blithe disregard for such things as financial considerations, I used to ask rhetorically why anyone would live in Melbourne and NOT be by the sea. Put it down to my island heritage. Still a Taswegian at heart (which is what we Tasmanians jokingly call ourselves) I go for beautiful scenery, historic buildings, and a sense of community.
But I'm over Melbourne now. Andrew and I moved to northern New South Wales in 1994, and have no hankering to go back. We've lived since then in various locations around the town of Murwillumbah – with its hills, rivers and nearby mountains and ocean. No wonder I've always felt at home here! I like going into Coles and having six conversations with old acquaintances I bump into. I like walking down the street, encountering a friend unexpectedly and grabbing a coffee while we have a catch-up. I like it that the people in the shops have known me for years and say hello with a smile when I come in. I like the proprietary feeling I have about Mt Warning, the Tweed and Rous Rivers, certain cafes and the only bookshop.
We don't get into Murwillumbah so often any more, though those things still pertain when we do. In 2002 we moved out to Pottsville Beach, a small but fast-growing coastal resort with two tiny shopping areas and a thriving Neighbourhood Centre with hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers. Yes, there's a villagey feel and a strong sense of community, but the natural connections are with other places along the coast. When we want serious shopping, we go to urban centres like Tweed Heads (the start of the Gold Coast) or Byron Bay. And there are always lots of tourists here. One way and another, it feels less cocooned than dear old Murwillumbah, the town of which I used to say approvingly that it was 'cool to be daggy'. (For my non-Aussie readers, that's an oxymoron.) But we have the sea, and it's glorious!
It's a little like that, blogging here instead of on MySpace (not that I have stopped doing it there): considerably less cocooned, but with certain benefits. Now that I'm engaging with it, the wider blogosphere is rewarding too for a writer and lover of writing. Masters of the Verse on MySpace directed me to Writer's Resource Centre, one of my favourite places to play on the web, and there I found The Cerebral Mum, new friend and brilliant writer, without whom my life could no longer be complete. :) Also she's a generous promoter of other blogs including mine. It was she who directed me to David Coomler's blog on HOKKU, which I greatly treasure. Only yesterday, she helped me find PomGirl, a relative newcomer to Australia with a fresh eye for our foibles and a humorous take on her own, to whose delicious blog I instantly subscribed.
There's some cross-pollination goes on. I have told all my MySpace haiku friends about the HOKKU site, many of them now love it too, and one has started a thread on Haiku on Friday, based on a recent HOKKU post. Some of my favourite writers post on both Blogger and MySpace: e.g. Collin Kelley, an Atlanta poet whom I met in Texas at the Austin International Poetry Festival; Savvyology (B Y Penman) and Lance Strate, both of whom I met on MySpace. I see that one can duplicate content in both places, or have very different blogs at the different locations. Lance, for instance, who is a Professor of Communication, uses his blogspot for material related to his interest in that field, and his MySpace blog for his poetry. I'm opting for different posts in different places most of the time – though, regarding the recent Australian election, I waxed jubilant EVERYWHERE, including here.
I suspect, though, that this is really a MySpace blog. Does it truly belong out here, where there is so much concern for attracting traffic, writing winning headlines, and using blogs for business?
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