Labor of love

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the sky was blue and it was 25 degrees (77 in real temperature), and I went to the park with some friends. Poor Leslie had to work, but we met up later. We rented canoes at the park and went canoeing on the Yarra, the river that runs through Melbourne. We had a barbecue afterwards on one of the free municipal barbecues. It was a perfect day for canoeing, as the water was calm and it wasn't too hot or too cool.

Melbourne is a fabulous city, small enough that it's easy to bike around, big enough that it doesn't feel boring, small or crowded. And it has lots of big city things like fantastic restaurants and theatre (Les and I went to see a fun cabaret show on Thursday night), but lots of outdoors things to do, like canoeing.

After the park we went met up with Leslie to watch the election. The Liberal party (who despite their name are arch-conservatives) had been in power for 11 years, and it was time for prime minister John Howard to go. John Howard, for overseas friends not familiar with the Australian PM, looks a bit like a cross between Dick Cheney and a toad:
He had been in power way too long and had instituted inane and reactionary policies. His main priority seemed to be giving tax cuts to people who don't need them, and he committed troops unnecessarily to Iraq, did nothing about climate change, eroded civil liberties and tried to scaremonger his way into keeping power. Hmm, sounds like another politician I know who is long overdue to get the boot.

The Labor Party (and it is the Australian Labor Party, no U, even though the word is labour) is much more progressive. They promise to actually adhere to Kyoto, do something about education, withdraw troops from Iraq and help working people. The ALP has strong union links, which the Liberals tried to use against them. Though I didn't quite understand the "but aren't you afraid of the unions??!" campaign - aren't unions a good thing? Don't they protect the rights of workers? You just do a simple glance as to who's on what side - management against the unions, workers with. I'll stand with the unions, thanks.

Some polls put Kevin Rudd (leader of the ALP) way ahead, but Howard seemed to gain some ground in the last days. Most people thought it was going to be close ("knife edge" seemed to be the TV stations' phrase of choice). But in the end, the ALP gained more than 20 seats and swept to victory in what the Age cleverly called a "Ruddslide." The best part, I thought, is that Howard lost his own seat (we're almost certain, it was really close and they're still counting postal votes). It was fantastic to watch his seat slide into the Labor column. We cheered and threw our arms in the air.

We watched wonderfully partisan coverage. Whenever Labor picked up a seat, the station played a "ding-ding" noise, like at the beginning of a boxing match. If they called the seat too early (which was often - they were calling seats with 0.5 per cent of the vote counted) and it had to go back into the undecided column, they played a "eehhhnnn" noise, like when someone gets a question wrong on a game show.

The best was the shredder. When they'd called a handful of Labor pick-ups, they "shredded" the Liberals who currently held the seats. A picture of the sitting member came up on the screen, an X was stamped over his or her face, and the picture went through a computer-generated animated shredder. It was exhilarating to watch John Howard go through the shredder. They did the graphic at least four or five times throughout the night. I hope an American station will follow that lead during the American election - I would love to watch George Bush go through the shredder.

So it is a proud day for Australia. We have new leadership, and I hope this marks a turning point. After the last two heartbreaking American elections, it was fantastic to win one, to feel good when the votes were counted.

Now all I can say is, go Hillary!

Deadly spiders and murderous sheep

Sorry we haven't written in a while. I feel bad posting without pictures, but we haven't taken any blog-worthy pictures in a while, so no post. I'm just going to post anyway, without pictures, and that's just that.

We have the day off today for a momentous Victorian event. We're celebrating something so vital to the heart of Melbourne it's an official state holiday. The occasion? It's a horse race. The Melbourne Cup, to be exact. People dress up in their finery and wear big outrageous hats and drink a lot of champagne. It's like Ascot, from what I can tell, but drunker. We didn't go, but I must admit the idea of wearing a metre-in-diameter hat appeals to me, so maybe we'll go next year. We had an office sweeps to bet on it, but my horse didn't win.

Over the weekend we went down to Phillip Island (an island about 3 hours from Melbourne in the middle of the bay, famous for the fairy penguins, which land there every night and march up the beach) to stay with Tanya, a friend Leslie's. She has a summer house down there and she and her kids went down for the long weekend (I had to work on Monday, but Les had the day off). Unfortunately it was lashing rain, so we didn't get to go see the penguins land or see the koala sanctuary or see the pelicans get fed. But we went for a drive around the island and saw the pelicans after they'd been fed, milling around the beach. We also went up to the penguins' nesting area and walked around (in the absolute pouring rain - all three of us were soaked to the skin) to see their burrows. The penguins were smarter than we were - they hid in their burrows and didn't brave the weather, so we didn't see any. We were surrounded by bedraggled seagulls though, at all stages of development from tiny brown chicks to awkward-looking adolescents to full adults. We walked along the cliffs to a blowhole, but despite the wicked wind, the spray was not coming up through it. The cliffs were green and lush, and they looked a lot like Ireland (the weather probably helped in this resemblance, since it certainly felt like Ireland). You'll have to take my word for it, though - our cameras stayed in the car.

Despite the weather, it was a really nice trip. The island is beautiful, and I'd love to get back there in summer and get to see a bit more.

I promised you deadly spiders, and here they are. On the way down Tanya and I were chatting about the various kinds of deadly spiders in Australia (until her son exclaimed "can we please stop talking about things that kill people!" - earlier conversations had touched on sharks), and she mentioned the white-tailed and red-back spider. White-tails don't kill you, but their bite never heals. It's called necrotising arachnidism (means dead due to spider - I knew that Latin would come in handy some day). They hide in clothes on the floor and in duvets and bedclothes. Red-backs are worse, as they are quite venomous and can be deadly if the person doesn't get the antivenom in time. Tanya said that they lived in woodpiles and sheds and did not generally go into people's houses, so there would be no way we would see one.

The scene is now set. Tanya had sprayed the house the last time she was down, so she expected to find no spiders or bugs of any kind. In the afternoon she called me into her room to show me a dead spider, surely the victim of the last round of spraying. It was a white-tail. I was hugely grateful for spider spray, as a dead white-tail is unnerving, but a live one is infinitely more so. The above picture is of a white-tail, but not the white-tail in the house. That one was more curled up and dead-looking. But they're nasty looking yokes.

We thought that was the end of spider adventures, but later the afternoon one walked across the living room, easy as you please. Well, until Tanya killed it (Tanya is a tough lady). She said it was just a regular brown spider, not a dangerous one. But spider adventures were not yet over. Late that night, she found one in the shower, descending from a vent in the ceiling on its silk. Tanya seems to have a spider radar - she says she often wakes up in the middle of the night and walks right to a room where there is one, and she can't sleep until it's dead. This one, contrary to her assurances that they only live in wood piles, was a red-back.

Tanya went out for spider spray, leaving us to "keep an eye on it." I didn't know quite what we were supposed to do with it if it made a move, but she didn't specify. After Tanya left, Les decided to opened the shower door and photograph it. I wanted to keep it behind glass, but he would not be swayed.

Here is a picture of a red-back, but not the one that he took, because he forgot to put a CF card in his camera. From my perspective, he risked the lives of everyone in the house and didn't even get a picture out of it. But he says I'm being overly dramatic.

Once Leslie opened the shower, the spider started to move. It started walking up and down its thread, and Leslie decided to take action. He thought he could kill it with a broom, but I opined that it would just go up into the bristles and we wouldn't be able to get at it. I was of the "wait for the spider spray" camp, but I was outvoted. Tanya's son said "You're grown-ups, why don't you just do something?!" The broom worked, and Leslie chopped it into three pieces.

When Tanya returned we sprayed the entire house. Two more spiders made appearances, one dead, one alive, both in our room (Tanya found them, I tell you, spider radar). The alive one got a faceful of spray, and it stopped being alive. She said she didn't know what kind it was, that it was shaped like a white-tail but didn't have the white spot.

That was the end of the spider adventures.

Leslie went on a field trip a few weeks ago with his school. He said it wasn't much for pictures, actually, but he had a good time. While he was away I went to see a New Zealand movie about murderous sheep called Black Sheep. It was a parody of a horror movie (or "lamb-poon", as one clever reviewer said). It takes place on a sheep farm in New Zealand, where an unscrupulous farmer has been genetically engineering sheep. Turns out these genetically modified sheep don't just have nice fur (or wool, or fleece, as they say in the sheep business), they also eat people.

The people that the sheep don't eat but just bite turn into sheep themselves. It was a very silly movie - one guy figures out he's turning into a sheep when he calls his brother a "baaaaa-stard". It had all the jokes you'd expect about Kiwis and their sheep ("You've got a really sick idea of animal husbandry!"), but most of the humour was just the shots of sheep standing on grass, doing what sheep do, and the ominous horror-movie music underneath. If it leaves our fair shores, I recommend it as a very silly (and gory) movie.