Trees without their leaves at Albury’s Noreuil and Oddies Creek Parks.
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From the category archives:
Albury
Savoury scones from the famous Beechworth Bakery’s Albury store ($2.90… very delicious!). We also had a piece of bright red Jelly slice, straight from childhood birthday parties. It was like the bakery had directly imported it from the 80’s.
I didn’t end up getting the time to go down to the pretty colonial-era goldrush town of Beechworth, about an hour outside of Albury, to have scones or pies at the bakery proper during this stay (or get lollies from the great olde-style sweet store right next to the bakery), but thankfully their Albury store is just as yummy.
What better place to enjoy some scones than down by the Murray River in Albury, the scene for so many of those sugar fueled childhood birthday parties? The Oddies Creek Off-Leash Park is one of Pogo (our fluffy silly dog)’s favourite places in town.
But like most of our family though, when there is food around, Pogo isn’t interested in exercise.
He has very poor table manners. At home, he knows he’s not allowed on the table, but he didn’t feel those rules applied at the park.
This jumping style is how he got his name of Pogo. (The park is partially sealed off in the background because they are building a new playground area)
Once the scones were gone, he finally decided it was time to have a run. He’s a scaredy dog though and will only play with puppies his own size. If there’s a big dog, he won’t stray far from his sisters.
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When I was 16 years old, I went on my first overseas trip. I went to Vietnam on a history study tour with my public high school, Albury High, for 14 days.
My family didn’t have a proper camera then because nobody was into photography. It wouldn’t be for another two or so years until I would have a proper digital camera, so my photos were taken on two cheap disposable cameras with plastic lenses. Each camera had 24 exposures on it, and one had black and white film and the other colour. I had barely taken any photos in my life before this trip. Now it’s unthinkable to me that I travelled for 14 days and only took 48 photos!! I would sometimes take up to 150 photos a day in Indonesia! These basic sorta-blurry photos almost make it look like I was over there 30 years ago instead of only 8.5 years ago!
The Vietnam trip was pretty remarkable for me. My family had never gone on any international travel. My dad had gallivanted around a little when he was in his teens on the scant money he earned from his odd jobs, but since then, nothing. In our small-ish “regional city”, back then we had two Chinese restaurants and newly opened Thai and Indian restaurants were pretty revolutionary. I’d never in my life tried Vietnamese cuisine and the population makeup of our town was far from being racially diverse. I’d also only been in a busy big city a couple of times in my life (but Australian “big” cities are obviously a far cry from Asia’s large cities, population wise).
At that stage of my youth, I thought I wanted to go to university in Albury and become a speech pathologist. I hadn’t really thought seriously about moving away to one of the more prestigious universities in the cities, though it was starting to tick away in the back of my mind.
I was honestly shit scared about going to Vietnam, even with my cool teachers and school friends, and at one point I almost thought about dropping out of the trip.
Sometimes, when I was on the road in Indonesia and even in Eastern Europe, I think about how lucky it was that I went…
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Our family owns a little red Hyundai.
For a while it was mine. I had it up in Sydney, zipping around to interviews and to take photographs, with my straightened newsreader cut hair in a snappy little outfit.
After a couple of years in an office job where I never had to leave the office, my snappy dressing toned down dramatically… but the car is the one that really let itself go while I was in the tropics. It was not entirely Mr Hyundai’s fault though I have to say.
When I went to Indonesia, the red Hyundai became my brother’s vehicle of choice. In fact, “when I moved to Indonesia” was the last time the car had been cleaned until I came back from Indonesia. It was filled with crap, and still jetlagged, I took it and cleaned it out so I could drive it up to Sydney. Hard yakka.
Five weeks later, my bro has filled it with so much rubbish and crap again that I would be ashamed to take any non-relative passengers in it again.
But tonight, when I was driving up to work, a new level of disgusting was reached.
A chip packet STARTED MOVING. Something was thrashing around inside it. THERE WAS A MOUSE IN THE DAMN CAR!!!
I squealed so much, thank god I was only a block or so from work. It was also fortunate I was at traffic lights when it started moving around, otherwise I may have crashed the car out of shock.
Regular readers may remember how much I hate being in enclosed spaces with rodents. I was not impressed.
I have no idea how it got in there. But at least my bro is cleaning the car now.
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I always take lots of photos of my little sister when I’m home, and there’s a good reason. Not only is she a gorgeously beautiful ballerina type, she’s also the type of person who responds enthusiastically to suggestions like “why don’t we go and get that carnivale mask I bought you back from Venice and go to the park in the Albury CBD in the cold at night to take weird artsy pictures while bored bogans drive past and honk their car horns at you?” You’ve got to love that kind of attitude.
We had a pretty epic photo sesh tonight (I can’t find my damn tripod, making night photography tricky!), taking heaps and heaps of kooky snaps. There’s some more…
… if you clickity-click-click this linkety-link-link.
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My nanna has dementia. It’s getting worse. Some days she is OK, some days she is terrible, driving my poor uncle, who is selflessly caring for her full time, understandably crazy.
It’s a sad disease, especially when it impacts younger people. But it can also be oddly hysterically funny. It feels wrong to laugh at, but until there is some sort of cure, those caring for someone with the disease deserve to be able to see the lighter side of it, I feel, if only to keep their own sanity. Answering the same questions over again every five minutes is frustrating even for just a few hours, let alone every day.
My grandmother’s sister suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I remember as a child thinking it quite hilarious when she would take dirty dishes, “dry” them with a tea towel and then put them away in the cupboard as if they had been washed, forgetting the crucial step of actually washing them. That being said, I wasn’t the one that had to go through the cupboards to find the dirty plates, often with chunks of food still on them, and clean up the mess. I also wasn’t tasked with having to try and tactfully dissuade her from helping out with the dishes anymore.
But my grandmother takes the hilarity to a whole new level. Nanna’s latest annoyance is the failure of my mother to return her bicycle, which my mother borrowed when she grew out of her child bike and needed a new ride up to the high school when she was aged 12, circa 1972. The bike got many years of use. When we were young kids, mum and dad took us out on rides on the bike, which by then had a child seat fastened on the back. But it is now 2010, some 38 years after the original loan, and Nanna wants the bike back. So she can go riding. Even though she is very elderly and has troubles hobbling around the house.
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Photo taken somewhere on the Hume Highway between Melbourne and Albury… still south of Glenrowan, maybe just past Stanley?
(My darling friend Ani at the left at her amazing 25th birthday bash)
Swanky birthday parties in Sydney art galleries complete with drag queens. Fattoush and hummus and sausages and pies until one’s brain explodes. A whole aisle of cheese in the supermarket. Hearing my brother and dad talk footy while my mum watches Home and Away on the tele. Being able to eavesdrop on every conversation on the train. Lots of people with weird nicknames like “Shazza” “Dazza” and “Wazza”.
I’m not in Indonesia any more.
I’m back home for two months to catch up with my family and friends, do some work for my parents and most of all, get ready for my move to Washington D.C. in August, where I will be attending grad school.
It’s nice to be home. It has been more than a year since my last visit.
It’s also nice to be invisible and to have clean clothes each day after backpacking for three months.
But I know I will miss Indonesia and I will miss all the adventure… and it has been a bit of an adjustment being back in regional Australia.
Thankfully my family are a little nuts, always providing blog fodder, and thankfully I’m way behind on blog posts from my travels, so I’ll still be posting heaps of Indonesia stuff in coming weeks!! I’ll probably also be trying to replicate some Indonesian meals in the kitchen with ingredients available in Albury… the other night I cooked a pretty good beef rendang with buncis belacan and lemongrass-scented nasi uduk.
So this blog will be a bit of an Indonesian-Australian hybrid in the next few weeks… and then its on to Washington!
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On the banks of the Murray River, Albury NSW (No date). From State Records NSW Collection.
I 
really love old photos… and thanks to the internet, I can still experience the joy of wading through some while sipping some tea (shush, I’m not a nanna!), despite Indonesia’s fantastical lack of museums and libraries (not to mention my lack of motivation in the wet season to leave my room…).
I love the feelings of nostalgia they bring back… even if it’s nostalgia for a time or place that I never really experienced. So strange. But I love it. I especially love looking at what things are still the same, and what has changed… especially the style. In the picture above, which is taken just a few blocks from my family home, I can identify the bend in the river and I love the swimsuits…
So I’ve been looking at some pics on Flickr… from government collections, and I also found a whole set from my hometown of Albury, mostly by the late Jack Dallinger, whose family still own a photography store on the main street. It’s amazing how many of the buildings still look the same. I found some old photos of Indonesia as well, here and here. The pictures really go to show that while some things change, others stay the same…
Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction, 1930. From State Records NSW Collection.
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