Bart Bear's Blog

Last Sunday we went for a drive to Bundanoon, in the southern highlands of NSW. Bundanoon is a pretty little town and is a place bushwalkers go to explore Morton National Park, just out of town. The park is a spectacular maze of gorges and waterfalls but it's a bit too hazardous for small bears, so the Oldies settled in for a Devonshire tea and I settled in to watch for trains. The town is on the main line between Sydney and Melbourne. I have been along the line in a train many times and I wanted to see one from the outside and wave to the faces in the windows. There were a couple of good places to perch and watch, but although I was there for an hour and a bit, no train came through. The last time I stopped in Bundanoon for a while, trains were coming through every quarter-hour or so. Maybe it was slow because it was Sunday. Actually, a very stupid thing is happening in Australia at the moment. Passengers and goods are being moved more and more by road and less by rail. The trains are being reduced and the rails are not being looked after properly, so rail is slowly dying. Even a small bear can see that doesn't make sense as trains are a much more energy-efficient way to transport things. Most of the rest of the world seems to be moving back to rail as the way to move things. Maybe common sense will prevail and we will see better Australian railways again in the future. I hope so, because I love trains.

Labels: New South Wales, train

These trees zipping past the window of our cabin on the Indian-Pacific are actually nearly all of the trees you see on your way across the Nullarbor Plain. They are at what remains of the tiny town of Forrest, half way across the flat, dry, treeless Nullarbor. They were planted to give a bit of shade to the town back in the days when Forrest was a vital stop on the Trans-Australian Railway and on the air route from Perf to Adelaide. There are only a few houses left there now and the only people living there are two guys that look after the airfield and occasional railway maintenance crews. The airfield is still important as it is the only one on the Nullarbor that can take big jets. Scruffy and I really liked our trip across the Nullarbor. It is a very different place to where we live, and there is not much like it anywhere else in the world. You learn all sorts of things when you travel. Everybody should do it.

Labels: South Australia, train, trees, Western Australia

One of the things that the Oldies did while they were in England was to go for harbour cruises whenever they could. I have almost forgiven them for leaving me at home with my uncles..... Some of the harbours had not just ferrys, cargo ships and passenger liners, but warships as well. The most exciting ships are aircraft carriers. I mean, the Oldies and I love ships and aircraft, so carriers are the ultimate. When they were at Plymouth they could see, way off in the distance, HMS Ark Royal being guided out of the harbour by tugs and they could see destroyers going out to form the screen for her. She was so far away that the best photo they could get at maximum zoom was not too good, but they were really excited to have seen her at all. A week later they were at Portsmouth and there was the Ark, moored at the naval dockyard. Their little cruise boat went so close that they couldn't fit her into the camera frame from the side. Happy Oldies. Ark Royal is the fifth Royal Navy ship to carry that name, three of the earlier ones were also carriers. She went into service in 1985 and is the RN flagship. At present she only operates helicopters and is mostly used as a Commando Carrier. I would have liked to see her a few years back when she had Harriers on board. There were some more carriers at Portsmouth, a French one and HMS Illustrious. The only thing missing was a small bear or two. Oldies please note.

Labels: boats, England

At the Fishing Boat Harbour in Fremantle there is a street lined with lots of anchors. The anchors were mostly dredged up from the sea bottom while the harbour was being widened and deepened, and are from ships that got stuck and had to cut the anchor line to get free. There are lots of different types of anchors there and Dad was all excited explaining how they worked and what sort of ships would have lost them. Scruffy and I had a better use for them. Anchors make great climbing frames for small bears. The only downside to anchor climbing is that they sometimes leave dust, rust and grease on fur and Mum gets a bit stroppy with us, but that doesn't stop us doing it whenever she is looking the other way. The other side of the road is full of the biggest fish-and-chip shops I have ever seen. The oldies say the tucker is good, but small bears aren't allowed near f+c because they (the f+c) are greasy. Sometimes I think there is a conspiracy to keep us away from interesting food.

Labels: climbing, Perth, Western Australia

These two lighthouses mark the entrance into Fremantle Harbour in Western Australia. We saw them a couple of times during our trip to Perf because the river cruise boats stop in the harbour, and the boat to Rottnest Is goes past them. They are right at the end of the breakwalls that keep the Swan River mouth calm, one on each side. The breakwalls are called "moles"; I can't understand why because all the moles I know are small little critters that live underground. Anyhow, these lighthouses have been there since the harbour was finally completed in 1903. They are coloured red and green, red for port (left) and green for starboard (right) so that ships coming into the river know what side is what (I think it would be funny to see one get confused and come in the wrong way around). During the war Fremantle was an important naval base. It had one of the biggest submarine bases in the world. The concrete building at the base of the green lighthouse is the remains of a WWII observation post. These days Fremantle is a very busy harbour with lots of huge container ships, livestock transports, cruise boats and river ferrys (some of which carry small bears on holiday).

Labels: lighthouse, Perth, Western Australia

You see all sorts of things out of the window when you travel. This is a pretty one, a rainbow. We saw it late in the afternoon of the first day of our Indian-Pacific trip. We are somewhere west of Bathurst in western New South Wales and have just passed through a series of rain showers. Dad says that you get rainbows when the angle between you, the Sun and fine raindrops is just right. The raindrops scatter the sunlight and split it into colours. Dad uses gear that does the same thing to light from stars and galaxies, and he can tell all sorts of things about what they are made from and how they work. I think rainbows are very pretty things and one of these days I will manage to get to the end of one and see if there really is a pot of gold there.

Labels: New South Wales, train

Meet Binky, the oldest bear of our mixed-up family. Binky was Mum's very first bear and has been with her ever since she was a small girl. That makes Binky ancient, almost the bear equivalent of a dinosaur. You can see that he has had a rough life. Lots of his fur is missing, some of his seams are a bit dodgy, he is missing most of his claws and he only has one eye. Mum says that he has been to bear hospital for repairs several times, but is now too fragile for any more trips. That makes him far too fragile to do most of the things I do, particularly parachuting and hang-gliding, so he is not much fun to play with. But he is really interesting to talk to. Boy, does he have the goods on Mum. Some of the things she got up to when Binky was newer are good listening and almost worth selling to gossip mags. You can see a strong family resemblance between the two of us and it should be obvious that I am an evolved version of this remote ancestor.

Labels: family

It may look like a pile of sticks on a rock, but it is actually somebody's home. Actually, it is also a pile of sticks on a rock. This belongs to an Osprey, or Sea Eagle. Sea Eagles are the second biggest birds of prey in Australia. Big ones have wingspans of around two metres, only a little bit smaller than the Wedge-tailed Eagle. They are pretty birds with white undersides and dark grey and black topsides. They are found all around the coastline and feed mostly on fish, turtles, snakes and small animals. Normally they nest high up in trees, but the ones we saw on Rottnest Island have a problem. There are no tall trees, so they have to nest low down. Most of them choose a spot like this one on a big rock near the sea. I think it must be a bit tough on the little eagles because big waves would splash them a lot and get them really wet. My Mum wouldn't let me live in a place like this, because she has this thing about me getting even a little bit wet.

Labels: animals, Western Australia

One thing I like about travelling is that the Oldies usually find interesting places to have lunch. Sometimes it is a picnic spot with a spectacular view and sometimes it is in interesting old buildings. This spot had a bit of both. I am sitting on a small table in one of the dining rooms in the old historic Seahorse Inn at Boydtown, near Eden in southern NSW. This place was built by convicts in 1843 for Ben Boyd. Boyd went broke soon after and the Inn gradually fell into ruin. It was restored in 1936 as Boydtown started to come back to life as a holiday place, and was renovated completely in 2006. Not many places provide seats for small bears to sit and watch boats, sea-eagles, wrens and lizards while their Oldies fill up on hamburgers and prawns (you can guess which one had what, can't you?), so I really do recommend it if you are ever travelling that way.

Labels: Eden, New South Wales, south coast

No doubt about Mum. She is always learning new things, and most of them are fun. Last weekend she started to learn how to make things from glass. There is this place called Canberra Glassworks in a big building that used to be the power station for Canberra. Now it is full of workshops, furnaces, ovens and all the sorts of tools that glassworkers need. You can go along and sign up for classes and actually make things. Mum started out by making a paperweight. She had to get a big blob of melted glass out of a furnace onto the end of a pipe, then roll it in coloured glass powder, heat it all up again so that the colours melted into the blob and stir and twist the colours with grabby things. Then, with some help from the teacher, she blew through the pipe and rolled the coloured blob around in a shaper until it was round, cut the round thing off and sat it in another small blob of melted glass. Then it had to go into a special oven and cool down really slowly. We picked the paperweight up yesterday. It looks great. With the clear top and insides, the blue hazy outsides, and the yellow streaky bits, it is a bit like a tiny frozen aquarium. I like it a lot and will keep all of my special papers under it. After all, Mum must have made it for me, don't you reckon?

Labels: Canberra, craft