travel - thegoodwills.com

How many bloggers to change a lightbulb?

blog-bloggers-blogging — Image by Tanja-Denise Schantz www.pixabay.com

The question should be – is FOMM a blog, a topical weekly essay, Citizen journalism or the random musings of a flawed human being who craves attention?

When posting it on the WordPress website, I am reminded that FOMM is not a conventional blog. It’s those endless reminders from the SEO plug-in. For those who have no idea what that means, Search Engine Optimisation is the key to more hits and making it further up the tree of Google rankings. SEO is a nag machine – you already used this keyword – don’t do that. Almost every week it gives my screed a low score for readability. You reckon?

If you are engaged to write short, entertaining blog posts for a company, SEO is essential. If you are being asked to post 10 to 20 times a week you need SEO to penetrate the on-line miasma of ‘Content’.

The way I was brought up, content meant happy with your lot in life. What it means in blog marketing terms is to write entertainingly and splatter keywords throughout your Content. The more times you say ‘widget’ when writing about a widget the higher you will be ranked by Google’s search engines. It’s an insane marketplace.

There are 600 million blogs and 1.7 billion websites out there. They write about anything from Taiwan’s right to independence from China to why the bristles always fall out of shaving brushes. This is not counting the untold numbers of communiques from people who bypass the whole process and just send an email to a list of readers.

Joy, an environmental activist, starting emailing friends about five years ago when the Adani coal project and climate change deniers were unfortunate bedfellows. Joy tells me her missives are sometimes known by readers as ‘Joy’s blog’.

Joe Dolce, who wrote the novelty song ‘Shaddup Your Face’, wrote a weekly letter for years. I know this because a friend shared one of his long, eccentric emails with me and I subscribed.

Famous songwriter Eric Bogle writes a kind of a blog which he simply puts out there on his Facebook page. Sometimes they are, as he’ll say, grumpy old man rants. Other times, Bogle writes with great sensitivity and hits a nerve the way his best songs do.

This is the goal of bloggers – to grab the reader’s attention and hold it to the last word, Alluring headlines have their role to play and I must confess this is not my strong point as a writer. My strength (if indeed I have one) is that I post every Friday, no matter what else is going on in our lives (even on holidays, says ED, somewhat testily).

Daffodil-loving Ange is what I’d call a sporadic blog writer – the best of hers are when she and hubby hit the road and share the trials and travails and lovely images of their travel. I think they are still missing luggage from a trip to the Red Heart (but the daffies are out). My favourite Ange quote comes from a late 2021 Australian road trip.

“I’m so excited about travelling again I even ironed my Lorna Jane cargo pants.”

Australia’s oldest regular blogger Everald Compton, 90+, posts most weeks. Everald’s election-eve analysis of the state of politics and forecasts of things to come was almost 100% on the money and worth re-reading.

Everald, whose CV includes professional fundraiser, inland rail promoter and National Seniors chief executive, has a few favourite causes. In his latest blog he (again) calls for the inclusion of our indigenous people in Australia’s constitution.

Let’s be clear when distinguishing blogs and bloggers from writers who share their opinions about politics, sport, culture, indigenous affairs, climate change, the environment et al.

A blogger in the commercial sense of the word writes interesting (short) articles for companies that are trying to grow their on-line businesses. Let’s say you have a micro-business that makes useful but not indispensable tools. You’ve invented the perfect toenail cutter and employ a blogger to write enticing copy.

“The Toejam fits snugly into the palm, its laser-guided cutting blades fitting beneath the curviest toenail. Its in-built sensors sound an alarm if you are about to engage with flesh. The Toejam comes with a tiny vacuum attachment so you don’t leave toenail parings all over the bedroom floor. The wife really likes it!”

The deputy director of On-line Engagement (OE) fires back a terse email to the contract blogger.

“You only mention Toejam twice – for text of this length you should use the brand keyword at least six times. Also, the brief asked for 150 words so you are 95 words short. Try again and please, what does your wife have to do with anything?”

You can find on-line copy of this ilk designed to sell everything from green tea to rocket launchers. Yeh nah, FOMM is not a blog of that ilk.

Oberlo’s research reveals that micro blogging platform Tumbler is the king of Content, home to 488 million blogs. Its closest competitor, WordPress, hosts 78 million new posts on its platform every month. Four or sometimes five of these are mine.

Nine out of ten Content generators use blogs to sell stuff. Businesses with a blog receive 55% more visitors to their website than those that don’t. They also produce 67% more leads every month.

I decided back in 2014 if I was going to write a newspaper-style opinion column I’d need to write at least 800 words and settled on 1200. The on-line wisdom at the time was that short and fluffy works.

One of my early unsubscribers informed me: “Sorry, Bob. It’s TMTR.” I had to Google that and found it was slang for Too Much To Read.

For those who wish to write blogs that aren’t merely advertising avenues, experts like Databox now recommend writing blog posts of between 1,500 and 2000 words, as the average blog post length has increased over the past seven years from 800 to 1,200 words.

It’s hard to find an objective list of top blogs and when you do, many are mainstream media blogs, ranked by audience size rather than by content.

There are a few independent blogs in this Top 50 list from Feedly that cross over into my own list of recommended blogs (Pearls & Irritations, The Conversation, John Quiggan, Michael West).

The best blogs start as a simple on-line diary, usually generated when the writer is visiting new places. There are many great travel blogs including Nomadic Matt, The Blonde Abroad, Salt in our Hair, Little Aussie Travellers and Ange’s Around the World in 99 Days.

Last time I wrote about blogs and bloggers I mentioned the famous Swedish centenarian Dagny Carlsson, who recently died at the age of 109. She started blogging age 100 under the name Bojan after becoming “bored with retirement”. Her posts were short, to the point and often cheeky. At 106 she advised people to “stop whining and get a grip”. Dagny’s last blog post was on January 28 when she wrote: “like a cat, I have at least nine lives, but I do not know what I should use so much of life for.”

Frivolity aside, if you live in a country with a repressive regime, writing a blog is one (dangerous) way of keeping the world informed. I discovered (in 2017) the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing (blogging) like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Although they are taking risks, rebel bloggers living in autocratic countries know their story will be picked up by libertarian journalists in democratic countries.

It’s the Internet, eh.

FOMM Back Pages

Overnight by ferry to Tasmania

As we were queuing to board the car ferry, Spirit of Tasmania, I couldn’t help thinking about a few folk songs that commemorate ferry tragedies of the past 150 years or so. If that seems neurotic, bear with me.

We booked our car and caravan on the ferry in November, probably the last opportunity to book a return ticket for March/April 2022. At the time, we had no clear indication we’d be able to go, pending the Covid state of play at the time. We knew that had the trip been cancelled/postponed, we’d be able to redeem the booking at a later time.

She Who Hitchhiked Around Tassie in 1967 has now been to various parts of the island state three times. My one and only flirtation with Tasmania was a trip to the Longford Folk Festival in 1981. I’d won a song-writing competition with a tune about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. I got there via an overnight bus from Brisbane to Melbourne and a cheap stand-by flight to Launceston.

Apart from spending a few hours walking around Launceston while waiting for a flight to Brisbane (no more 36-hour bus rides for me), that was my total exposure to Tasmania.

In March 2022, I’m looking forward to the next 18 days touring around. But first I had to suppress the emerging panic attack in our cabin once the ship’s engines kicked in. The goal was to overcome anxiety and reignite my love affair with the sea.

My first experience at sea was a big one – a six-week voyage from Tilbury docks in London to Wellington New Zealand in 1955. I was six going on seven and dogged in my determination to avoid being confined to the ship’s nursery. I was eventually released into Dad’s care on the condition that I was not allowed to wander around the ship unsupervised.

Dad and I shared a two-berth cabin, while Mum and the girls were in another cabin downstairs. I seem to recall being taken up on deck by my sisters while Mum and Dad ‘spent time together’ in our cabin.

I got the travel bug as an adult, starting with a trip to Europe in the 1970s – a combination of a sea cruise and international flight. We sailed on a small Greek ship popular with backpackers for its cheap fares. The route was Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Fremantle and Singapore where we stayed a couple of nights and then caught a flight to Athens.

My memories of that trip include observing crew members patrolling the ship armed with rifles as we navigated the hundreds of Indonesian islands between Fremantle and Singapore. Pirates ruled those waters then, as they still do today. Sailing adventures in the 1970s included an overnight crossing to Crete on an old, overcrowded ferry which segregated men on one side and women on the other. I still have no clue what that was about. Over the years, I have sailed on a variety of ferries – a mix of adventures and misadventures, including Dover to Calais before the Chunnel (seasick).

I’ve crossed Cook Strait between Wellington and Picton a few times and it is always turbulent to one degree or another. Kiwis who are old enough to remember would not forget that stormy night in 1968 when the inter-island ferry, The Wahine, capsized in Wellington Harbour with the loss of 157 lives. I was 20 at the time and itchy to travel. But I found that tragedy very sobering and it quite often influenced whether or not I boarded a dodgy ferry in the Mediterranean.

The main reason we remember maritime tragedies is the folk songs that have been written about them (Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald for starters). The late Roy Bailey wrote one about the Herald of Free Enterprise, a vehicle ferry which capsized and sank in Zeebrugge Harbour in Belgium with the loss of 193 lives. The tragedy on March 6, 1987 occurred not long after the ship sailed. An inquiry found that the main reason for the accident was the bow doors of the roll-on roll-off ferry were not raised before it sailed.

New Zealand folksinger Anna Leah had a minor hit in 1968 with her song about the Wahine, still New Zealand’s worst maritime disaster. The Wahine capsized close to shore, but the storm was so ferocious rescue efforts were greatly hampered.

Last year, I wrote a folk ballad about the 1896 sinking of the Brisbane cross-river ferry, The Pearl. It’s a tragic but true story.

Maritime tragedies linger in our memory because of the media attention (always dredged up again at 10, 20 and 50-year intervals). There have been far worse ferry tragedies in Asian and African countries, with a far greater loss of life. Some of these accidents involved collisions and fires. Some claimed 1000 lives and more, largely because of overcrowding. But our insular media rarely report these tragedies, (unless there was an unlucky Australian on board).

Despite my experiences as a sailor, I was in some trepidation about the Tasmanian ferry until I did some research on the Spirit of Tasmania.

The latest Spirit of Tasmania, launched in 2002, is the third ship to carry the name since the Melbourne to Devonport voyage was established in 1985. There are plans to replace these vessels in 2023-2024 with even larger ships (bearing the same name, as is the tradition). These vessels (also built in Finland) will each carry 1800 passengers.

The Spirit of Tasmania sailed late, at 11.30. We found the bar for the obligatory rum and coke (and a lime and soda for Bob) and then retired for the night.

After turning out the cabin light and settling in, I did a few ‘this is just a passing thought’ exercises to quell the anxieties and then slept fitfully. At some point I woke and the ferry was barging its way through heavy seas and rolling a little. But by first light we had entered calmer waters.

The previous evening when I watched the ferry cruising into Station Pier at the Port of Melbourne, I realised that this vessel is larger than the Rangitiki, the ship we sailed on from Tilbury (UK) to Wellington, New Zealand in 1955.

The Spirit of Tasmania (there are two of them) were manufactured in Finland. They have bars, restaurants and cinemas and a range of cabins for all budgets. The process of embarking and disembarking was very thorough (Tasmania has strict quarantine rules and the company has rules about what can and can’t be taken on board).

My only complaint was a lack of facilities (toilets) for those queued for hours in their vehicles. I told She Who Hitched Around Tassie in 1967 I had a great business idea for some enterprising young person. who in ScoMo parlance wants to become a Lifter rather than a Leaner. The Comfort Station operator would cruise up and down the queues of vehicles on a bicycle towing a two-wheeled cart loaded with sterilised urine containers. (Comfort Station would also offer containers not unlike those provided to female soldiers when they are out on jungle patrols – Ed: they are called Shewee). The cart operator would make the return trip down the other side of the queued vehicles (collecting full bottles and tips).

If you have seen that Mel Brooks movie, The History of the World Part 1, where the servant follows the King around with a gold bucket, you will get the picture.

The original FOMM travel articles

Just thinking about how much we love to travel (re: last week’s mention of Japan), got me thinking about how much we are missing being able to scratch our itchy feet. We are not the only ones. When it comes to having family or close friends living overseas, not being able to visit is particularly hard. We all know someone who has not yet met their new grandchild (in London or New York). We appeased the travel bug in 2020 and 2021 by taking month-long caravan treks in the outback, but it is not the same as travelling overseas.

An old family friend in New Zealand is having a few health problems and at 89, this much-travelled woman’s days of dropping in on friends around the world unannounced is probably over. It would have been good to just hop on a plane and turn up at the hospital. In her travelling days she was wont to describe her spontaneous arrivals as, ‘It’s just me, turning up like a bad penny.’ But we did send flowers.

Our friend went ‘backpacking’ in the 1950s with an intrepid Kiwi friend. They were both teachers and had a hunger to work their way around the world. Very few young women travelled alone in 1954, let me tell you. At the time my parents met them in Scotland (autumn 1954), they were out every day in the back blocks of Montrose, picking potatoes, saving up for their next travel adventure. Dad read a story about them in the local newspaper, tracked them down and invited them to stay for the weekend. He’d been thinking about emigrating for some time and had noted they came from the district where he had been offered a job. They became firm friends and of course that was the genesis of our emigrating to New Zealand in 1955.

Our old friend used to send me stamps she’d collected in her travels (the US, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden Switzerland, Sarawak, the Solomon Islands, to name a few). The album is still in the bookcase here. It’s not worth much money but it brings back treasured memories. Once I reached my 20s, I felt compelled to leave NZ on what was then known as the “OE” (overseas experience). But you were supposed to go to London, go drinking with other Kiwi and Aussies in Earl’s Court and head home once your money was spent.

It didn’t always turn out like that. Young Kiwis or Aussies travelled, met their true love and settled in foreign climes. Serious travellers worked out the only way to keep travelling was to learn a bit of the local lingo and wangle a job. In France I picked grapes (the Vendange). After 10 days of dawn to dusk picking, I could barely get out of bed.

Later I landed two part-time jobs in Edinburgh, where I lived for six months in a bed-sit. The three-hour shift cleaning a department store before it opened was easy work and we got a free cooked breakfast. The evening shift cleaning offices went from 5pm to 8pm. Those two gigs helped pay my rent and grocery bills and at weekends we’d go adventuring in the highlands or south to the Lakes District.

I recently discovered a folder of travel articles from 2004, when we swapped houses with an English couple and spent six months living in a village in Surrey. Work wasn’t going so well, so I took all the long service leave and holidays that were owing and absented myself for six months.

It’s intriguing now to look back on these rambling emails to folks back home as the forerunner to Friday on My Mind. My then-colleague Jeffrey Sommerfeld had developed a weekly email to hundreds of our contacts (he was so pre-Twitter). He tells me now that so many of my contacts asked after me (in a kindly way), that he forwarded our unedited and sometimes rambling accounts to family and friends. They loved being kept in the loop about the adventures of Bob and ‘Mrs W’.

Here’s a nostalgic taste of how travel was before Covid and 9/11. I’ll follow up next week with our experiences of Hydra, a Greek Island best-known for once being home to poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.

March 2004: TRAVEL can test the strongest relationship – just ask me. On second thoughts, don’t ask me because I don’t know my left from my right and can’t read a map.

My last bout of travelling in the 1970s was a solo effort, one last fling with tepid youth, if you will. I was practising to be a writer so did not really care where my feckless, directionless kind of travel took me.

In 2004 Mrs W and I made a base in Surrey for six months and made periodic forays to “the continent” as the Poms say.

I persuaded Mrs W to start with three weeks in Greece, nurturing warm memories of that stark country and its beautiful islands as a friendly and laid-back travel experience.

We flew via Singapore, arriving in Athens at 6am in that slightly stunned and disoriented state that flying in a pressurised container for 12 hours can induce.

The first stage of our adventure went without a hitch, lugging our (considerable) baggage on to the airport bus, arriving in central Athens about 8.30am.

I identified the Metro sign across the road and off we went. Much of Athens was a building site at the time, as the city prepared for the Olympics.

The escalators were out of order that day so we lugged four bags and a guitar down four flights of steep stairs to the (new) Athens metro station at Constitution Square.

On arriving at the right stop (Monistraki), I discovered there were five exits and I had no idea which one would take us to our hotel!

So there we were, us and our baggage, on a busy, dusty street, trying to decipher the tiny print on my (photocopied) local map. Mrs W was by now unimpressed with my forward planning. She was also discovering that my claims of knowing the language (after seven days on a Greek cruise ship in 1973), as complete bollocks.

Did I say we were in this situation largely because we had pledged to use local public transport and eschew taxis unless absolutely necessary? I used my mobile to call Hotel Tempi which I had pre-booked for three nights. Friendly host Yannes said we were just two streets away from the hotel “is easy – Parakalo.” but we turned right instead of left and took a very circuitous route via the fish market, across a road jammed with trucks, cars and two or three hundred motorcycles, carrying and dragging the baggage we needed en route to six months in the UK (which we did not get to until April).

Fortunately, our host encounters grumpy, jet-lagged tourists each and every day so was able to calm us down and send us to our room with the promise “I bring bags later”.

The hotel stored our bags (“no charge, is easy”) while we toured around southern Greece, starting with three days on Hydra.

In three weeks of exploring Greece on public transport and on foot we got lost many times: the big question for couples travelling on a budget to ask themselves is – does it really matter? As the Greeks would say “chalárose kai apólafse” (relax and enjoy).

Next week: A donkey ride on Hydra

Antarctica or Bust.

antarctica-penguins-icebergs — Antarctica photos contributed by JH

For most people who like to travel, Antarctica is probably not on the list of places they aspire to visit. I say that because, although visitor numbers to the frozen continent have risen 50% in recent years, the numbers are tiny on the mass tourism scale.

People with some curiosity about the seventh continent can satisfy it by reading books or viewing any of these recommended documentaries.

Armchair travel obviously did not do it for the 73, 991 people who took a tour to Antarctica in the summer of 2019-2020.

For many people, following in the footprints of Scott and Shackleton is more than a bucket list item. For them, touring the South, snapping multiple photos of penguins and albatross or kayaking in the path of mighty icebergs, is a lifetime ambition.

A family member, John, realised a long-held ambition in 2017 when visiting Antarctica with his wife and daughter. On the 21-day cruise, the ship re-traced the voyage of Ernest Shackleton. In 1914, the explorer crossed from South Shetland Island to South Georgia. He and a five-man crew then set off on foot, the first crossing of the island. The latter day tour included stopping at Shackleton’s grave and toasting him with Irish whiskey. Some comments from their tour:

“Each day we’d go ashore in the morning and view seal and penguin colonies.

“We also visited an old whaling station where they carried out whaling on an industrial scale.

“After South Georgia we sailed to the Ross Sea, but we didn’t get very far because of large icebergs. We were constantly changing course to avoid them.”

Icebergs ahoy

Antarctica does not belong to any one nation, so no visa is required to visit. However your country of residence must be a signatory to the Antarctica Treaty. It’s a long way to travel, expensive, and there is no direct route.

Most tourists do it with a combination of air and cruise or cargo ship travel. One common route is Brisbane-Sydney-Ushuaia (a southern Argentinian resort town and port), then by ship to Antarctica. As an alternative to the return journey, adventurers may travel from the Ross Sea to Invercargill/Bluff in New Zealand then fly to their home base from there.

The travel advisory for Antarctica is currently at level two (exercise increased caution). Just how many people travel to the continent between November 2021 and March 2022 depends on the status of the pandemic.

US citizens (who comprise 34% of visitors), will need to prove they are Covid-free before re-entering the US. This may or may not be a deterrent.

Antarctica expeditions are probably out for Australians this year, given a ban on leaving the country for other than compelling reasons. Likewise, Argentina has a travel ban in place, which makes it difficult for many tours that use the South American country as a launching pad.

A writer friend, Dale Lorna Jacobsen (left), first travelled to Antarctica in 2013. She was one of 25,284 visitors who set foot on land that summer. On her return she wrote a book, Why Antarctica: a Ross Sea Odyssey, which chronicles the fulfilment of a childhood dream.

“When I told my friends I was finally going to Antarctica, the most common question was: ‘Why Antarctica?’. I didn’t bother replying. You either ‘get’ Antarctica, or you don’t. If you do, there is no need to ask. If you don’t, words could not explain why.

I have been fascinated by the 7^th continent since, at the age of eight, I discovered the existence of a place filled with mountains, ice, snow and wild weather; all the things I love.

My first expedition was in 2013, and incorporated a 32-day semi-circumference from the Peninsula to the Ross Sea. A dream come true for an Antarcticophile, getting to step into the historic huts of Shackleton and Scott; walking for hours in the Taylor Dry Valley. I knew one trip would never be enough. I returned in 2016 on an action-packed 12 days, camping in a bivvy bag on the ice; snow-shoeing; kayaking. Then in 2017 I repeated the 32-day semi-circumference.

I am chuffed to say that the ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) Club commissioned me to write the memoir of Centenarian, John Russell OAM, who still loves telling tales of how he and nine other Aussies were first ashore to set up Mawson Base in 1954.”

Dale produced a companion book of photographs to her first book. I bought mine as an E-book, files tucked away inside the USB body of a cute rubber penguin!

You have to assume there will always be ‘Antarticophiles’ like Dale and John, passionate about visiting and even re-visiting the South. It will be interesting to see what authorities do when visitor numbers inevitably creep towards 100,000.

The Antarctic Southern Oceans Coalition (ASOC) says the number of visitors has been doubling every couple of years, along with the establishment of “mass tourism destinations”.

The US leads the pack in terms of visitor numbers (18,942), followed by China 8,149 and Australia 5,077 (2018-2019).

Paul Ward’s website CoolAntarctica is a trove of information about the frozen continent. We sourced some of the visitor information from this site. Ward notes the ban after 2008-2009 on cruise ships carrying 500 passengers or more. Large cruise ships were spending two or three days in Antarctic waters, often as part of a broader cruise, but not landing.

“These large ships were a great concern as an incident involving an oil or fuel spill from them would have been very significant,” Ward writes.

“Any kind of rescue or evacuation would also have been very difficult, owing to the large numbers of people on board”.

The global pandemic was just emerging as the 2019-2020 tourism season came to an end. The next cruise season, still seven months away, is likely to attract even more visitors to the South, Covid-19 restrictions not withstanding.

The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) plays a pivotal role in ensuring its members adhere to environmental and safety protocols. Formed in 1991, it requires all members to abide by the Antarctic Treaty. Cruise ships co-ordinate with each other to ensure than no more than 100 people are onshore at a landing site at the same time.

Despite these precautions, there are signs the continent may be at risk of being over-loved. Scientific studies have identified human interaction as one possible cause of sickness in Emperor penguins.

The Science Magazine published an article in 2018 based on research by a team of scientists from Spain. They discovered the effect of reverse zoonosis on bird and animal populations. Reverse zoonosis is the term used to describe humans passing pathogens on to animals.

The study found human-linked pathogens in bird poop, revealing for the first time, that even animals on this isolated, ice-bound landmass can pick up a bug from tourists or visiting scientists.

“This newly identified infection route could have devastating consequences for Antarctic bird colonies, including population collapse and even extinction.”

Regardless, if Antarctica is on your bucket list, a visit in the summer of 2021/22 will depend on how relaxed your country is about letting you leave. Still, we can all dream.

Further reading:

Deadline Stress On The Road To Winton

Deadline-stress-winton — Tambo Dam, which has nothing to do with this week’s FOMM, which I drafted a week before setting off on a road trip to Winton).

An old friend emailed me to say that when he saw a book review in the Sydney Morning Herald, he immediately assumed it was (a) my memoirs or (b) The Best of FOMM.

As he found out when reading the review, Friday on My Mind is a book by music writer Jeff Apter about the life of George Young. The late founder of the Easybeats wrote ‘Friday on My Mind’, a major hit around the world in 1966, with his songwriting partner Harry Vanda.

Friday on My Mind (the song), after which this weekly missive takes its name, is everything a pop hit should be. It starts with an irresistible ‘hook’ – the rapid-fire guitar intro that immediately cements the tune in your brain. It’s a circular song, starting with Monday morning (feels so bad), then names every week day through to Friday and back again.

This alone distinguishes FOMM from other songs about days of the week, which usually focus only on the day in question.

I was researching songs which name days of the week, finding yet again that if you have what seems to be an original idea, it has usually been done. Songs about a day of the week, or which mention a day of the week, for example.

Since the uncertainty and mass anxiety of COVID-19 set in around mid-March, I have been writing new songs. I’m not just writing, but using digital recording technology to flesh out the works in progress. Thus far, I have a seven songs which are at the point where I’d be happy to perform them in public, if I had a public to whom I could perform.

I had started toying with a song about deadline stress and how it always relates to a day of the week (if you have a weekly deadline). This new song is more likely to be about blogging and why millions of people around the world think other people will be interested in what’s on their minds. Some develop huge audiences and make some money, (like Nomadic Matt, which now has 1.5m followers).

Bloggers usually start with an ambitious bang and many vanish without trace within a year or two. The stayers stay by setting themselves deadlines.

A few years ago, I was writing about extreme weather in February; here and in the Northern hemisphere. This gave me a chance to reference the only song I know about February, a poignant Dar Williams tune. Along the way, I discovered a list compiled by Chuck Smeeton, who started the Cavan Project, with the aim of writing and posting a new original song once a month.

Apart from having an interest in lists, Chuck’s aim was to entertain people with an interest in music, but also to freshen up his songwriting by setting himself a deadline. Now, after writing a new song every month since 2012, he is packing it in. Sigh. I know how he feels after six and some years of writing 1,200 words a week.

Brisbane folk singer and performer John Thompson would also know how that feels. In 2011 he set himself quite a task – to research and record an Australian folk song every day for a year.

He achieved this goal, along the way uncovering old Australian folk music that might otherwise have sat undisturbed inside somebody’s piano stool. John wrote a few songs of his own on this ambitious journey, but in the main covered each song in his inimitable style. John finished the project, as befits his deft sense of humour, with Aeroplane Jelly, an advertising jingle which has blended into the culture, just like an old folk song.

I was chatting online to Brett Debritz, who was a sub editor at Brisbane’s the Daily Sun when it was a morning paper and later when it switched to afternoons. I asked if he could recall how many editions we produced. After conferring with a colleague, he said it was at least three, Monday to Friday at 7.30am, 10.30am and 2.30pm. We broke some good business stories in that final edition, which beat our rival The Courier-Mail simply by publishing before they did. Imagine that kind of deadline stress on a daily basis, next time you’re fretting about the article you’re writing for your monthly community newsletter.

I’ve never written songs to a deadline (which probably explains why my output has been so sporadic). I know songwriters who keep writing by exposing their new work to a collective. Some of these groups set challenges (a new song each day/week/month), and often written to a topic specified by the convenor. Some songwriters write songs together. I have always been a bit crap at collaborating (but I get 100% of the royalties).

Nevertheless, I support the notion of a group of creative people meeting to discuss what they do in the privacy of their own home studios.

So, I had this song idea which roughly started “Thursday I’ve got Friday on My Mind’. While true, this was never going to sit well with the publishers of the original song. Plan B, then. The idea was to somehow describe the creative tension which never goes away when promising people something new on a particular day of the week.

If you have a thing about lists, check out Chuck Smeeton’s months of the year and days of the week songs lists (including 16 Songs about August). Among other list blogs are ‘20 musicians who own wineries’ and my favourite, ‘28 songs in unusual time signatures’.

The latter, of course, includes (Dave Brubeck’s Take Five and Jethro Tull’s Living in the Past, both in 5/4), Money (Pink Floyd, 7/4), Happiness is a Warm Gun (The Beatles, various time measures) and Peter Gabriel’s Solsbury Hill (7/8).

In the spirit of ‘it’s been done, but never done my way’, here’s a playlist I put together on Spotify; two songs for every day of the week. Most of them are sourced from the music of my youth (1964-1974), but there are examples from the new crop of songwriters (who latch on to the topic as though it was a new thing).

The standout track in my opinion is banjo player Ian Simpson’s ‘Friday on My Mind’, drawn from a mixed collection of instrumentals by Simpson and guitarist John Kane.

As I so often think, when arriving at this point in my Friday essay (1,150 words), as the lyric of work-in-progress goes, “Will anyone see this post and does it really matter, only to my readers, near and far and widely scattered.”

Jimmy Webb would tell you that is not a true rhyme, to which I could say…By the time I get to Winton…

FOMM back pages

We’re on the road for a few weeks. This is something we prepared earlier.

Ten days in Aotearoa

Aotearoa-Te-Urewera — Aotearoa – Te Urewera, looking towards East Cape. Image by Brucieb, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2260517

As the doors swished open at Brisbane International Airport and I walked out into 35 degrees and a dusty, smoky atmosphere, I very briefly wished I hadn’t left Aotearoa behind. How I love the mellifluous way that Maori word trips off the tongue – Ao-tea-ro-a.

The Maori language uses vowels more than we do in English and it also uses them in combinations. The language has fewer consonants, preferring the use of Wh to replace the letter F, for example. The Maori alphabet has 15 letters including two digraphs (Ng and Wh) and five vowels, each of which has a short and Continue reading “Ten days in Aotearoa”

Travel without regrets

la traffic — LA freeway photo by Jeff Turner flickr

Dedicated readers will know by now my penchant for tinkering with numbers, so you won’t be surprised that I have done an inflation-adjusted calculation on my/our travel adventures over 45 years. O.M.G. We could have bought a second home, or a third; a luxury yacht, a Maserati or achieved the mythical $1 million retirement target.

New Zealand is Australia’s most popular outbound travel destination – 1.06 million went there in the year to March 2015; 483,000 for a holiday, another 603,000 on business or visiting family and friends. The next most popular outbound destination, according to Austrade’s Tourism Research Australia, was the USA (590,000 holiday makers and 286,000 people doing business or visiting family and friends). In third place was Indonesia (830,000), then Thailand (596,000). The UK is up there, with 510,000 Australian visitors. In all, 8.81 million Australians travelled overseas, for holidays, for business or to visit family and friends.
The other 15 million or so stayed home.

Ignoring travel alerts

Surprisingly (well, I was surprised) 77,000 Australians went on holiday in the Middle East and North Africa in the year to March 2015. There’s a risk/reward equation that probably adds a frisson of excitement to travel in unstable regions.
Egypt (population 91 million) attracts tourists who have the Pyramids on their bucket lists. Wikipedia says Egypt attracted a record 14.7 million visitors in 2010, but numbers have dropped significantly since 2013, due to civil unrest and travel warnings.
Reader M took her teenage sons to Egypt in 2008, “for an education”. It was also a rite of passage, as she had travelled there in 1985. She has no plans to return to Egypt, however, disillusioned by the lack of progress in that country since visiting 23 years earlier.
“Back then Egypt was pretty much culturally secular and was atmospherically a wonderful cross of east meets west. Many women wore the head scarf but an equal number did not. Cairo was cosmopolitan, with French, English and Italian influences. People were open, educated and friendly and the country looked affluent.

“Fast forward 23 years and nothing had been progressed in the country. In fact, a real sense of stagnation was evident. Not a road mended or a building finished….. Every woman was covered and there was pollution and filth everywhere.
“Where previously we were invited to people’s homes and the conversation was about global issues, politics, religion and family, this time the conversation was one-way rhetoric-driven, narrow, politically driven. The difference was staggering.”

Renovate or travel?

So far, we have not been that adventurous. In 1990, we’d been doing the sums on a major renovation of our 1930s colonial in Annerley. We planned to claw the $20k back from mortgage payments as we’d been keeping ahead of the game. Suddenly, in 1991, I found myself between jobs, with two months’ leave before I started the new one. We took our son (aged 9) out of school and spent the $20k on a tour of the US, Canada and New Zealand. We parlayed with the boy’s teacher – he had to keep a journal and make notes of all the amazing things he saw (Niagara Falls, the bilingual McDonald’s in Montreal, the Grand Canyon, Universal Studios, Disneyland, Giant Redwoods, Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump (more on that another day), and Fort McLeod, birthplace of Joni Mitchell (and She Who Planned the Itinerary). We hired a 20-foot recreational ‘ve-hicle’ (RV) from a depot at Anaheim and set off on the LA Freeway at 4.30pm on a Friday afternoon. What were we thinking? I later counselled son that “Mum and Dad were screaming in the car” was not the sort of diary entry his teacher would appreciate.

No regrets at all

Looking back, you never regret the money spent on travel, even when it was shitty; when the digs were below standard, when you all had head colds and the exchange rate was unfavourable. I remember nosing the RV into a parking spot at the Grand Canyon lookout. Our son got out, ran over to the rim of the canyon (it was almost sunset) and went “Wow”. We all went “wow”. He took an amazing photo with a cheap Kodak camera. We drove right around the canyon in the next week, shopping at Native American roadside stalls, talking Aussie to people, feeling light-headed from the rarefied air. A lasting family dinner-time catch phrase stems from overhearing this at an Arizona RV park all you can eat buffet:
“Hey Hank, you wants any more?
“Nope, if I eats any more I’ll be sick.”

US road trip

We rattled across four states in that big RV. The odd highlight (for me) was parking it in a 500-lot RV park in Las Vegas, getting a complimentary shuttle bus to the casino, winning $17 on the slots and queuing up for the $3.99 all you can eat buffet at Circus Circus. I tried to persuade SWPTI to get (re) married in an Elvis chapel (you can do that in Nevada), but she couldn’t get out of Vegas quick enough.
Every time we stopped for a meal at a roadhouse or diner, the wait staff would fuss over our boy and say “make him tark”. We did three days at Disneyland, drove up the coast to San Francisco, took a tour to Alcatraz, went camping in national parks, hugged a redwood, made sure we stored our food in bear-proof lockers. We drove across the desert in the RV we dubbed “Horse with No Name” and nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning because someone left the rear window open.
We ended the adventure the way it began, stuck in a 90-mile traffic jam (between Vegas and Anaheim).

Those inspired to travel reading books by Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Bruce Chatwin and such probably see travel as M does − as a pilgrimage (religious or not), to experience the journey for itself and to walk in other people’s shoes.
Others have a list of famous places, or a list of risky things to do in said places (e.g. running with the bulls at Pamplona, climbing Uluru or bungy-jumping off the Kawarau bridge at Queenstown).

On our first visit to the Red Centre, we arrived at one of the elevated spots where one can watch the sun set over Uluru. There were a lot of people there, complete with picnic hampers, bubbles, wine glasses, cameras and mobile phones.
Anyway, the sun began to sink and the rock started changing colour; it should have been time for a bit of hush, right? Not for two old blokes from Queensland who spent the entire time talking about how the Broncos were going and who’d win the State of Origin. They’ve come to this ancient, spooky place and can’t handle the feeling they aren’t really supposed to be there. So they drown the feelings out with white fella tribal talk and a few tinnies.

Next day we walked past 30 people waiting to climb the Rock (the climb was later closed because of high winds), which doesn’t excuse the wannabe climbers from ignoring the wishes of local Aborigines.
We took the Mala Walk around Uluru and I wished I’d gone before I left because (hint for others), there are no public toilets on this 11km walk. Apart from that, it was stunningly beautiful; a bit overwhelming, really.
As travel probably should be.