Friday, May 14, 2010

Frere's Crossing

Short pants. Felt hat. Funny handshakes. Dib dib dib - oh no, that was the cubs. It's Boy Scouts I'm on about.

As a scout I'd go with the other lads and often Jim the scoutmaster all over - Jamborees, shooting trips to Tenterfield and the Piliga Scrub, long bike rides, scuba diving, horse riding, boat trips up the Hawkesbury River, water skiing... and of course camping. We camped in the Blue Mountains, the Royal National Park, the South Coast, lots of places. One favourite was Frere's Crossing, in bushland at Kentlyn not far from Campelltown. I'm reminded of this because there's a story in today's Herald about a girl who has gone missing after setting off to go camping at Friars Crossing (sic).

Yesterday I returned from a visit to a friend's farm in NE Queensland. Our mutual friend John Woodrow, one of the founders of that farm, lived in Leumeah in a spot I would pass when hiking up the hill to go camping at Frere's Crossing back in the 60's. In the early 70's I would visit John in Leumeah. In the late 70's I had bought a business in Liverpool and was looking for a place outside of Sydney and not too far from the business. At a dinner party in Sydney I was introduced to people who had a place at Campelltown which would be for rent shortly, and I subsequently moved into it. The house was in Kentlyn (the PO called it Leumeah) just up the road from John's place and just a few km from Frere's Crossing, Kentlyn.

I should add here that I had not for one moment mentioned Campeltown when speaking to people about a house outside Sydney, and in fact the very first time I raised the subject was that occasion. It probably sounds incredible, but that's how it happened.

And there's another connection with that area - the station before Leumeah is Minto, and I used to go train-spotting there on occasion with Richard Eslick, a school friend.

Ain't life strange!

P.S. My friend wrote recently (Nov 2010) to tell me he too as a boy scout camped at Frere's Crossing. John Woodrow introduced us.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

There's That Word Again

Thursday I phoned the dentist to book a checkup for Friday. That afternoon a filling fell out. Prescience is not the word I was thinking of, but it fits. Also that morning, I continued a strain of increasingly silly emails with one which contained the lines:

Ahoy me hearties. Yo ho ho and batten down the cabinboy. Death to the French!

which of course sounds more like Jabberwockian than English if you're not party to the the preceding year or two's correspondence and even then would be difficult to fathom and possibly lead you to believe that you were reading the ravings of segregated madmen. You'd be part right on that, too. My point is that I almost never speak of sailing so the word batten rarely gets a mention. Today's A-Word-A-Day word is Batten. (and yes DD if you're reading this, hang-gliders do have them too as you pointed out to me sometime in the recent past.)

Two days later, in a similar vein...
I phoned a friend in Canberra to inform her that our meeting in late July would have to be changed. Another voice came on the speaker phone - it was a mutual friend who was also my list to phone about another meeting in Qld and whose cellphone number I didn't have - he was there for one night only, his first trip to Canberra in years, and this was my first phonecall to our friend in ages.

Synchronicity.

A couple of months back, it had been on my mind for some weeks to phone a friend who I thought must be back from Africa by now, so I did. There was silence for a moment on the other end, then a puzzled response, something like "why are you phoning me now", or somesuch. And then a shriek - I don't believe it, she said, I've just walked in the door a few minutes ago. She had been away for two months, and our communication during that time had been limited to a postcard.