Travelogue – welcome to country

I’m awake!

I posted last night at 3:30 am. I went back to bed at 4:00 and slept to 10:30. We’ll see if I’m up in the middle of the night tonight.

I can now get to the parts of my trip to Australia not included in previous posts.

Thursday, August 2, leaving home.

I stayed up late the night before to get a jump on jet lag, so got up after 9:00. I got to the Detroit airport at 4:45 and bought a salad for the flight. We took off on time, about 6:20. I had a good view from my window seat and a map display on the screen in front of me. We flew south until we were west of Toledo, then headed west. We passed over Quincy, IL, cut a corner of New Mexico and the tip of Nevada. I ate my salad about an hour out of Los Angeles. We landed about 8:15 local time. I collected my suitcase and headed into the huge Bradley Terminal, where I checked in for the Qantas flight. At the gate I saw it was delayed – original time 11:30, new time 12:15. Actual time 12:30. This is 3:30 am Detroit time. I slept some on the plane, probably not a full night's worth.

The plane arrived in Brisbane at 6:45 am Saturday morning local time – 4:45 pm Friday Detroit time. There was already too little time to make the connecting flight. Qantas knew that and rebooked me on a flight that left at 9:50. That flight was also delayed, though only 15 minutes. I got to Cairns at 12:30. The shuttle to the hotel didn't leave until 1:45 (also late). So lunch was at 3:15. I wandered around downtown Cairns, along the esplanade, past the convention center, and into a mall. I had supper at 6:15 and was in bed by 8:30.

Cairns is quite a ways north on the Queensland coast. It is definitely tropical. Though winter (the dry season) there were only a few times where I wanted or wore a jacket. The town, definitely the central business district, is geared to tourists, with 3-4 adventure booking agencies per block interspersed among the hotels, restaurants, and trinket shops. I could tell when I walked out of the tourist zone – suddenly no restaurants. The town is the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, so crowds head to the dock each morning for their day trip to the reef. There are also a wide variety of other adventures – rainforest, wild animals, rafting, aboriginal culture, etc.

Sunset was about 6:00 pm. On the way back to the hotel I heard several trees full of noisy birds. Later someone said they weren’t birds, but bats. I didn’t actually see any of the critters.

Sunday, August 5

In the morning I took a city bus to the Flecker Gardens north of town. This showed a lot of the native species. I also walked through a section of rainforest and saw a stand of bamboo.

Nearby were three repurposed large storage tanks. They were built for WWII. They are huge cylinders which I guess to be over 100 feet in diameter. One is now an art gallery. The other two are concert venues. I walked through the gallery. The other two didn’t have concerts scheduled while I was in town.

Every hotel gave me passwords for their wi-fi. I took my little netbook computer, but I knew I couldn’t plug it in directly in most hotels because it uses 110v power and what comes out of the wall outlets is 220v. I looked in a couple stores where I could get adapters for the different shaped plugs. All the products said that USA devices also need a transformer. The stores didn’t have those.

My hotel was small, less than 30 rooms. I ate breakfast at a partner hotel a block away. The desk clerk at my hotel suggested I could go to the other and use a computer available for guests. So I did. I logged into my mail service and got the message that the mail site was incompatible with an obsolete browser on the computer. So much for that.

Though I didn’t find a power transformer I did find a bookstore and bought a couple books. One that I bought and read during the trip was *Kings in Grass Castles* by Mary Durack. This was a biography of her ancestors, primarily her grandfather Patsy Durack. He and his parents and siblings left Ireland after the potato famine and settled in Australia. The extended family opened southwestern Queensland for settlement, though it was a rough couple years. The area was in drought when the arrived and when the rain came it also brought a huge flood. But after that Patsy and his family did pretty well. About a dozen years later they heard about better land in the Kimberley region, the northern part of West Australia. They drove cattle across the deserts of the Northern Territory, losing all the cattle, most of the horses, and nearly their own lives. They took a different route for a second attempt. The problem was they were crossing land that had not yet been mapped. Patsy deeded the western lands to his sons, which was a good thing because he entrusted the eastern estates to his brother who lost it all in land speculation that went sour.

I enjoyed the book as a good introduction to white bushman history. There was a fair representation of the native people, who first welcomed the white people – until there were too many of them. I learned that some of the natives willingly worked for the white bushmen and enjoyed riding horses and wrangling cattle. Though I enjoyed the book I declined to buy the sequel. There was one difficulty in reading the book, that of names being used several times. Patsy’s brother was Michael. This Michael also had a father, a cousin, and a nephew named Michael. There were also a couple more family members with the name Patsy and a few named Jerry. I frequently consulted the family tree provided at the front of the book to remember which Michael had which nickname.

Monday, August 6

In the morning I went to the Cairns Art Museum. It featured indigenous art, but this wasn’t the pleasant inoffensive stuff for tourists. This art was about resistance and protest. One video was of a black dancer with a bulls-eye painted on his chest. Another display was of a black domestic servant, normally seen as invisible, but she is in an oversized dress that spreads across the floor and demands attention.

The museum isn’t very big, so I spent the rest of the morning sitting in the oceanside esplanade and reading.

I spent the afternoon at the Cairns Aquarium. It has displays and tanks of fish of the various zones in Queensland – the rivers, the tidal zone, and the ocean and reefs. A couple of the tanks were quite large and one of those held a few sharks. Once an hour a museum guide gave a talk at one of the tanks. I think I caught three of them. I had a good time there.

That evening was the opening ceremony for the International Handbell Symposium (my primary reason for making the trip). We had a parade of flags with the presidents of each national handbell guild. So we had flags for USA, Britain, Canada, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and, walking together, New Zealand and Australia. We had a welcome to country by representatives of the local indigenous clan, by the head of the International Handbell Committee, and by the Australasia guild. There was music by vocal and bell choirs, including a new piece by a New Zealand composer for bells, voices, and Maori instruments. The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand.

Tuesday, August 7 to Saturday, August 11

This was the actual Symposium. We met in the Cairns Convention Center. Most of the time was taken up with rehearsal for our final massed concert, though there were a few other activities. There were at least 350 ringers from the countries listed, smaller than most Symposiums and probably less than half of the size of the Symposium two years ago in Vancouver.

There were 9 massed numbers, pieces all 350 of us played together. Each guild selected a piece with the Australians choosing a second piece. The Australians and Canadians held composition contests and the pieces they selected very much had a national character. The Aussie piece celebrated the Great Barrier Reef and the Canadian piece celebrated the Aurora Borealis. The Hong Kong director chose his own arrangement of the Yellow River Concerto, famous for blending Chinese and Western composition styles. The Singapore director brought an arrangement of one of their folk tunes. The American director brought an energetic piece of original American handbell music and the British director brought an original piece by one of his colleagues.

Alas, the Korean director brought an arrangement of a piece by Georges Bizet, who is French, the Japanese director brought a piece by Edward Elgar, who is English (at least it was the Japanese director’s arrangement), and the second Australian director brought a Les Miserable Medley.

The concert on Saturday afternoon went well. It also included an indigenous welcome to country. In addition to the nine massed pieces there was also a piece by a festival choir, those ringers who would rather rehearse than attend workshops.

I’ll have more about the Symposium in my next post.