White Night

I thought I'd write a little post on my latest living-abroad experience - Melbourne's White Night on the 21st of February. A few people told me it was no big deal/horrendous/not to bother but I liked the sound of it. Art and entertainment all over the city, 7am-7pm. What's not to like about that? I read an article somewhere in preparation that said to embrace being a tourist, so that's what I've done. I also suspect that having such low expectations helped me have a damn good night.

So, we drank wine while we played board games in preparation, and then had some Red Bull for energy of course, and unfortunately as the evening went on I did drink them both at the same time (but not from the same cup; I'm not a heathen). However, by midnight, when we went out (having been advised by the aforementioned article not to venture out between the peak times of 9pm and 11.30pm) I was only feeling the effects of the Red Bull. I know this is probably not the general consensus, but I think you can enjoy the event an awful lot more sober.

The first stop between our flat and the city centre where stuff was going on was the Royal Exhibition Building, where we watched a light show symbolising the four elements projected onto the building's façade with some cool sounds too. I only had my phone camera so these images are from Instagram.

We wandered down Swanston St, starting from the State Library which had a loooong queue outside so we went on to the Wheeler Centre, where the Emerging Writers' Festival was running an event called Magazine in a Night. Lachy and I both wrote something and put it in the submissions box, so we'll see if we make it into the final magazine! We moved on and discovered a travelling organ in the street; not something you get to see too often.

We discovered the dance stage where a dance troupe were leading the audience through some steps and had fun taking part in that for a while; then we visited the City Library where there was some interactive art that you walked around on with black lights to reveal a pattern criss-crossing over it (it was about integration I think). Around 2am the queue for the State Library was shorter so we joined it, but it was moving so slowly once we got inside that we jumped ship and went to the library's Bohemian Melbourne exhibition, which was really interesting.

After that we headed to Hamer Hall, where a show called Ghostly Machines was running. For a long time nothing happened and then there was all this sound and light and all these machines moving in sync over the stage and I couldn't tell you what it was about but it looked spectacular. Also it seemed that they were just using the actual machinery they use for light/sound/acoustics in all their shows, but in a creative way, which was cool.

At the NGV we walked into a room with a projection of some cool alien landscape which turned out to be a microscopic camera focused on a jar full of chemicals which the artist was adding to, so we could see all these cool tiny reactions projected on the wall, but I couldn't get a decent photo of it.

On the way home we dropped by Sticky Institute, Melbourne's only dedicated zine shop, where there was a 12-hour zine reading taking place. The guy we stayed to listen to was wearing a bird mask and reading from his zine by candlelight; he also played a song from the zine called 'Island of the Dead' - they were the only lyrics and he sang them progressively louder over one chord on his guitar. I didn't get his name but I will be going back there to find his zine - I'm sure they'll know who I'm talking about! 

We hit the hay around 5am and the following day White Night felt like a very trippy dream. Will definitely be going back next year.

Volunteering at Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary

We were back in the UK over Christmas, which was definitely more of a social visit than travels worth documenting on this blog, but a week after we returned to Melbourne Lachy and I had made plans to head out again. You may remember that a year ago we visited Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary, a wildlife sanctuary run by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. On the 7th of January we were due to head back out there, but a monsoon up in the north-east meant we ended up spending almost another week at home before it was possible to fly out and get picked up.

Last time, as part of a big group, we'd flown direct to Broome and then in a charter plane out to the sanctuary. Easy. This time there were no direct flights, so we flew out to Perth, then Broome, took a Greyhound bus to Derby, then flew out with Operations Manager Dan Swan (Swanie) in a tiny Cessna plane. And there were a few nights spent in hotels in between (some with broken air conditioning...) when transport wasn't possible 'til the next day. It goes to show what I've become used to that the trip still felt like a breeze compared with the living nightmare of a UK-AUS flight.

Camels on Cable Beach (Broome) - the first time I'd seen them up close!

Since we'd been out the year before, we knew what to expect in terms of accommodation, so we were well prepared - except on one front. There hadn't been much rain when we came out the previous year, and this time round one road we had used now passed through a fast-flowing river. The rain seemed to have brought the flies out. I don't remember being troubled by mosquitoes last January, but this time we were eaten alive. I'm terrified of spiders, but I got used to having them in the shower with me - the mozzies on the other hand nearly drove me to an early grave.

Usually they have volunteers there in the dry season because the sanctuary is so busy with the Wilderness Camp tourists and all the wildlife surveys that are being conducted, so we were kind of out-of-season volunteers. The main task we were set to was the herbarium. Eight boxes of pressed plants to be alphabetised, catalogued and mounted (fortunately they had already been identified by experts!). We also went out on a trip collecting plants from the escarpment next to the camp and did some detective work to identify them ourselves, which was oddly satisfying. We helped out with odd jobs around the camp, like fixing stairs and making railings.

Plants!

Living in the city I've become more interested in birds than I ever was in the UK, which I put down to the fact that they're pretty much the only wildlife I get to see day to day. So I was pretty excited to find out that there's a Mornington Bird List - a list of all the birds around the camp with check-boxes - because if there's one thing I love, it's ticking things off lists. Probably the most exciting bird we spotted was a brolga, but I didn't have my camera at the time. They are huge, crane-like birds that usually wander around in pairs, but this one was alone. I had to do a double-take when I spotted it because I thought I'd seen a flamingo or something in the bush.

We also saw dingoes this time since they hang out a lot near the hut we were staying in. Hearing them howling in the night was so eerie and awe-inspiring. By day, they looked more like big-eared, scraggly dogs, but it was still an impressive sight. One morning I heard something like a door slamming, which was vaguely concerning since our hut was in the middle of nowhere, and I went downstairs to have a look. A red shape went bouncing away from the bathroom and then stopped to have a look at me. It was a wallaroo, and not the only one that we saw hanging around the hut early in the morning.

the guilty wallaroo

One of the coolest things we got to help with was setting up camera traps on the escarpment. These are really tough cameras that can survive in all weathers and are triggered by heat. We collected them up again just before we left and, though the images weren't of great value to science, we were amazed by what they had captured! We had only seen two goannas on our trip so far but we captured no fewer than three different species of them with the cameras, as well as a few selfies taken by a wallaroo and a couple of echidnas.

the explorer

We intended to do lots of walking while we were there, but the time flew by so fast that when we left we'd still only been on one walk, at a pretty poorly chosen time of day (it was HOT). It was a very valuable experience for the two of us in terms of food - we had to bring all our food with us on the plane, so we had to plan carefully. We got a bit sick of rice and pasta, but since we got back we've been much better about planning our food shopping for meals, and not running down to Woolworths three times a day. We also got to know a group of amazing people living in a close-knit and friendly community out on what is essentially an island of civilisation in the bush.

There won't be much travel this year what with our wedding coming up and lots of things to be saving for, but it isn't really travel when it's in the same country, right? Even if the country is the size of the United States? So we can go back again in the dry season without feeling guilty? Yeah? All right then.