When the fish aren't biting

I find camping grounds scary places. You wonder why people didn’t just stay at home – with tents the size of McMansions, BBQs bigger than the average stove and enough fishing gear to send Lake Jindabyne dry.

So we normally avoid them at all costs.

That’s why I’ve discovered the Snowy Mountains in summer is not a bad alternative to the beach. The clime is slightly cooler and in Kosciuszko National Park you can camp anywhere you like so long as you can’t be seen from the road.

Our aim on our five-day trip was to do a major Alpine walk, explore a bit, try our hand at freshwater fishing and camp out. I’ve since realised it pays to be organised on such expeditions.

Many years ago when I lived in the Kimberley and Northern Territory my ute was equipped with a tin box full of camping utensils, including a couple of billies, a swag and water bottles. All have disappeared over the years. So into the back of the trusty Subaru we packed a couple of sleeping bags, a tent, the fishing lines and hooks, a bag of plastic plates and cups, knives and forks and  a thermos.

After a magic day of walking from Thredbo to Charlotte Pass, we headed off on our camping adventure. It was years since I’d been to the Snowies in summer and it was exciting to see the wildflowers out in bloom and the mountains green from all the rain. The unexpected part was also seeing people had lit fires at their camping spots – no bushfire ban so far these holidays.

Mmm, some matches might be a good idea, I thought as we stopped in Khancoban to buy supplies, including a torch at a rather under-equipped store. At the petrol station we were able to get fishing hooks.

“Do you have bait?” we asked.

“No, you have to go to 42 Alpine Way for that,” we were told and we headed back past the store.

An enterprising local had a thriving business selling worms from the neatest shed I’ve ever seen – with rows of caps and stubby holders displaying his collecting habits.

We asked if he knew where we could buy a billy – and he suggested the local op shop.

No billies there but decent frying pans and some more plastic plates.

“You need something good and deep for frying the trout you’re going to catch,” the woman in the store said hopefully.

 

Back up the road we found a good little picnic spot for our lunch and a possible place to throw in the line but then I realised we’d forgotten to get a license. Having been stopped before by a Hot Lips Houlihan lookalike when fishing on the south coast, we didn’t think it was worth the risk.

At Cabraumurra we swapped yarns with ruddy-faced men from Merimbula who’d been exploring back roads and finally picked up a licence as well as emergency food of tinned tuna and fresh bread. We were directed to Three Mile Dam opposite the Selwyn Snowfields as a good place to camp and fish.

It wasn’t long before we found a spot and took the tent out. Problem was it was missing a part and was therefore useless and anyway I thought we’d be warmer and more comfortable sleeping in the car. Then the March flies struck, stinging even through layers of clothes. Lucky the one thing I hadn’t forgotten was the Aeroguard.

Down at the dam the late afternoon sun was warm, leftover Christmas cake and luke-warm tea tasted heavenly as I read a novel and my husband fished. I could hear the wack wack of him hitting something with an empty bottle but ignored it.

But the fish weren’t biting, even with all that fresh worm bait. All he’d managed to catch was a pile of March flies.

 “Don’t worry we’ll go into Kiandra tomorrow and have a big brekky,” I said.

It wasn’t till the next morning as I stood at the Kiandra cemetery eating my bread and tinned tuna, since we also discovered the historic town had no shop or café, it dawned on me what would have made perfect bait: March flies.

A country pub joke

I was in the tiny hamlet of Wee Jasper recently, having taken a back road from Tumut to Yass (NSW).


After winding our way down the mountain on a rough, potholed road through part of the Brindabella Ranges, we stopped for a drink at the pub overlooking the Goodradigbee River. You can usually find a few jokes and funny comments on walls or in posters at such pubs, if not from patrons sitting at the bar.

I thought the one I found tacked to the wall worth sharing but can only paraphrase it:

Well Julia Guillard and Bob Brown decided it was time they visited the "country", talked to country folk and hopefully drummed up a few country votes. They dressed in their moleskins and Akubras and headed bush. Just for good measure they took a blue cattle dog with them.

Finding a nice country pub they wandered in to the bar.

"A couple of middies," Bob asked the bartender and they settled in the corner with their dog, waiting for likely constituents.

The next thing an old farmer came into the bar. He looked at the dog, picked up its hind leg, put it down, looked puzzled then walked up to the bar and asked for a drink.

About ten minutes later another farmer came in. He also looked at the dog, picked up its hind leg, put it down, with a very puzzled look and walked out again.

Yet another ten minutes and another farmer came in. This time he also did what the others had done but Bob could stand it no longer.

"Hey mate, why are you all looking under our dog like that?" he asked.

"Well," the farmer said. "I was told there was a cattle dog in here with a couple of arseholes."

Cowgirls and Indians

Anybody interested in pioneer women or colonial history has to visit at least some of the Laura Ingalls Wilder trail in the United States.

Since the initial publication of Little House in the Big Woods in 1931, Wilder’s books have been continually in print and have been translated into 40 different languages. And let's not forget the TV show which ran for nine seasons.

Several of her former homes, school houses and farms in Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, Missouri and New York are on the trail.

When Wilder was in her 50s, her only daughter, Rose, who was herself a journalist, editor and ghost writer, urged her to write about her youth and the difficult pioneering days. 

Rose herself had the pioneer spirit in huge quantities and was a world traveller. She wrote about America as well as countries such as  Albania. But, according to Roger Lea MacBride, her lawyer, “Rose grew up at a time when ladies did not consciously seek fame”. She chose to shed light on the lives of others instead of her own.

Later under her married name of Rose Wilder Lane she wrote a number of magazine articles, some of which were published as the Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework. Incredibly, she was sent to Vietnam as a war correspondent in 1965 when she was 78 years old.

 “Rose read constantly and knew more about any subject I can think of than any person I ever knew,” MacBride says in the introduction to The First Four Years  by her mother.

But a week before she was to set off on a world tour at the age of 81 Rose’s heart stopped suddenly at her home of 30 years in Danbury, Connecticut. The night before, she had sat up in jovial and lively conversation with friends after making them a baking of her famous bread.

There’s some controversy around the “Little House” books, with some believing that Rose, then one of the highest paid journalists in the nation, had written them. She did know the publishers and editors and that would have helped get her mother’s books published and most probably collaborated with her or at least had a big hand in editing them.

Laura’s books aren’t as PC as some might imagine. When American Indian groups visit her former homes in De Smet, South Dakota, they tell the association running them to “be careful what you say about Indians” as in the books “Ma” was afraid of them. Yet Laura was fascinated by Native Americans and  her descriptions of the way Indians rode along ancient trails past their cabin or came right inside demanding food makes really interesting reading.

In The First Four Years, Laura confronts some Indians who she thinks might take her pony and saddle. And when one lays his hand on her arm, she slaps his face.

Laura was the only one out of her sisters who had children – Rose was named for the prairie roses - but her next baby, a boy, died. Rose herself had a stillborn baby. And she was said to have been  a lesbian. And so Rose was the last living descendant of this most pioneer of pioneer women.

Dances with Kevin

                                                          Crazy Horse by Diana Plater

The world is divided into those who love Kevin Costner and those who don’t.

One friend describes him as “an archetypal spunk” but then she admits to a partiality to honey-hued hair on boys.

Others think he is a super dag and a bad actor.

I’m somewhere in between on this one.

While researching a recent story I watched Dances with Wolves again and I loved it.

A film adaptation of the 1988 book of the same name by Michael Blake, it tells of a Union Army lieutenant assigned to an abandoned army post who finds himself alone and beyond civilization. Only a wolf and some roving Lakota Indians provide distractions, as the back of the DVD cover puts it.

Winning  an Oscar for best picture, apparently it was responsible for reigniting the western genre in films when it came out in 1990. Three hours long it was also pretty entertaining, funny, sad and moving. And I liked the way Lieutenant Dunbar danced around the fire and rode his trusty horse.

At least he attempted to make it a bilingual movie – with much of the movie in  Lakota.

But one Native American activist and actor described it as Lawrence of the Plains.

He said a woman taught the actors the Lakota language, which was a problem because Lakota has a male-gendered language and a female-gendered language. So some of the Indians and Costner were speaking in the feminine way.

 This brought on a flood of giggles by male Lakotans everytime they saw the movie in local cinemas.

Really, you can’t win.

Well old Two Socks, the wolf, loved him.

But Kev’s $100 million Dunbar Resort in Deadwood has also been surrounded with controversy since the early 90s when he and his brother Dan first proposed it.

The project hinged on a change in state gaming laws. The state of South Dakota voted to raise the betting limit at Deadwood casinos from $5 to $100 and reportedly gave the brothers $14 million to develop their plan.

It was to be built on land next to the Black Hills National Forest and would have had a golf course and a railroad right of way. But Native American groups view the Black Hills as sacred, the resort as desecration, and said the land was deeded to the Lakota in treaties.

Also previously in these states only Indian reservations had had the rights to run casinos - a way to boost the local economy.

Despite spending millions, Costner's resort has never materialised.

Still he does have his small casino, Midnight Star, in Deadwood and the staff  think he’s a good guy and pretty laid back, despite all the troubles and bad reviews over the years..

All over the walls of his casino are memorabilia, costumes and props from his movies including the one I loved because it was just SO kitsch – The Bodyguard. Oh Whitney, how far have you fallen since then?

The night we visit it’s quiet with only a table of card players - probably playing the Dead Man's Hand, I think to myself. Upstairs a barmaid tells me Costner comes “about twice a year”.

“He’s kinda mellow and down to earth,” she says.

And you could tell that was all she wanted to say on the subject of Kevin Costner.

Writing, Cooking and Eating

There's still a couple of vacancies for my next LANDSCAPES Travel Writing Workshop on Sunday November 13.

10.30am to 3.30pm.

$150 per person including lunch.

 

Held at my home in Sydney's eastern suburbs the class is small and friendly with plenty of time to write and also get feedback.  You take home a kit of articles and tips for successful travel writing.

While we're writing and talking my husband, Budi, cooks a great Balinese lunch for us to enjoy after our short excursion. The class is all about "making something from nothing". 

Past participants have described it as inspiring and fun. So you should go home full of ideas and great food! 

Another class will be held in early December. And more are planned for upcoming months in Bali.

 More information/bookings: plater@optusnet.com.au

Powwow Posts - greetings from North Dakota

EAT, LOVE and PRAY TO GET OUT OF THE TRAFFIC

I saw something that I really wished I hadn’t seen as I walked the beach of Kuta yesterday.

Yes it was a woman lying in the sun reading Eat, Love, Pray.

As everybody in the world knows the book and film of the same name was partly set in Bali.

And floods of divorced and single women have rushed to Ubud, the “cultured” and “spiritual” town in the mountains, ever since to have their fortunes told and their problems solved by the toothless healer also depicted in the book and film.

They are probably hoping to meet a Balinese prince who will dress them in a sarong and kebaya and marry them in his local temple. Why is it that every second foreign woman you meet here is married to a prince? There’s so many princes there’s no room for the commoners.

Julia Roberts might have ridden around on a bicycle in the movie but I wouldn’t recommend it in the bumper to bumper traffic that now besets the island of the Gods.

Sitting on a bike drinking in truck fumes is not my idea of Paradise. And how many Maccas, circle Ks and Starbucks does Bali really need? Let alone giant hotels and shopping malls.

Yet only a few metres away you can enjoy the late afternoon sun at a warung right on the beach, drinking Bintangs and eating tipat cantok while watching the fishermen come in from the sea loaded with fish they throw straight on the coals.

We’re heading to the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival tomorrow. Hope we don’t run into too many princes, healers or women looking for luuuuve there. But I’m looking forward to the babi gulung.

Bali is a land of contrasts – and that’s the beauty of it.