Graffic language

Looking at the posts so far I thought it was getting all a bit Anne of Green Gables, so here are a few reassuring signs of aggression and stupidity. You know, colour and shade.

I thought this specimen, on a garage door of a house near one of the dodgier venues in town, was all the more threatening for the brutal penmanship. You can practically see the veins bulging from their neck as they wrote it.

Maitland is surprisingly graffiti-free when I think about it. There are occasional outbreaks of tagging, but they're removed by council workers fairly quickly. One particular tag that made a brief appearance near the High Street mall intrigued me:

Is it his/her name? A test run to see if the marker worked? Was it also meant to say "my finger" but the artist got distracted? Perhaps it's a heartfelt cry for the world to inhale the life-affirming beauty of nature.
It's so stupid it's almost Zen

Other examples stick with your basic crudity. It's always a bonus when ambiguously deliberate mis-spelling is involved. Especially if it's on a Centrelink building.

But my favourite message so far is this one, which we came across just after we moved here. It wasn't the best advertisement for the town:

Gather no moth

There are crawly things up here I have never seen before.
These caterpillars, for instance, are beautiful. Nevertheless, I got the distinct impression they would suddenly leap at my face or spit some sort of deadly loogie at me if I got too close:

We also get preying mantises (manti?), which are my favourite. There's something so poised and elegant about them, googly eyes notwithstanding. This one stood sentry on our front porch for a good hour. Sadly it hasn't returned:

It's all quite fabulous but what I could live without is walking in the backyard and finding myself enmeshed in spider web. They're all over the place. I've learnt to keep an eye out for them, which is why I've noticed the number of trapped bugs, hanging like morbid little decorations.

One moth in particular caught my eye - it was flapping madly, trying to extricate itself. When I got close with my camera it froze and seemed to stare at me, as if it were saying, 'What the fuck are you waiting for? Get me off this thing!'

So I did.

God said to Noah...

This month marks the 55th anniversary of the big Hunter Valley floods. As part of the commemoration, there will be the '55 Classic Raft Race up and down our section of the Hunter River this Saturday. That's the town centre in the background.

It's a fundraiser for the emergency services and entrants are creating sundry elaborate contraptions. Two will reportedly be "kept afloat using four fitness balls".
It's touted as "fun family time" but it all makes me a little uneasy. Flood channels and levees have been built since, but the sign outside our house – one of several dotted around the neighbourhood – is an unsettling reminder of how bad it was.

A visit to Wikipedia was even worse:
"The flood overwhelmed rivers on both sides of the Great Dividing Range, creating an inland sea the size of England and Wales. Worst hit was the inland city of Maitland, which is sited precariously on low-lying land on the Hunter and was completely inundated by floodwaters. A total of 25 lives were claimed during a week of flooding that washed away 58 homes and damaged 103 beyond repair. In Maitland alone, 2180 homes were invaded by water."

There have been 16 major floods since 1806. I hope this picnic/piss-up doesn't tempt fate.

Chicken run

Our yard isn't big enough to have chickens, but several neighbours keep them. Although roosters aren't allowed in residential areas, there's one somewhere nearby that crows exclusively in the afternoon, at different times. Very strange.
Anyway, Tuesday's excitement was provided by chooks that escaped the yard across the street.

After a near miss with a car, a friendly lesbian neighbour and I attempted to round them up, a futile endeavour. Not only are they deceptively fast, they have an infuriating habit of scattering in opposite directions at any sign of approach.

It was the first time I'd properly met this neighbour – she and her girlfriend moved in after we did – but she's about the seventh dyke I've met so far up here. Go figure. I told her I loved the fact we had chickens on the loose, it was such a change from city life.
She replied she was from the Northern Territory – she'd seen men walk camels into bars.
I really had nothing to say to that.

MateLand

When we moved up here, my biggest concern was being surrounded by country blokes. It was unfounded, for while a lot of men look like they'd beat me to a pulp without raising a sweat, everyone so far has been friendly to a disconcerting degree.


Walking anywhere is an exercise in social interaction. Whereas in Darlinghurst, if you say hello to a stranger on the street they'd assume you were a) angling for money or b) planning an assault, here it's par for the course – everyone does it. Constantly.
Even the local motorcycle club, the Gladiators, are more likely to organise a fundraiser for a local children's charity than cause a showdown with police. They are uniformly scary-looking – facial tattoos and savage mullets – but are actually quite non-threatening and beloved for keeping the dickheads out of the neighbourhood.
They've even been allowed to install their own signage on the street where their headquarters are:

They make a lot of noise hooning up the main drag on Friday meeting nights but it's a small price to pay.

Local traffic

Life here is uneventful, blissfully so. In the morning I do the cryptic crosswords on the front porch, engage in a bit of gardening, maybe walk along the river into town, then feed carrots to the neighbours' horses in the evening. It's a stress-free zone – no sirens or pimps yelling obscenities, just birds and crickets with the occasional distant rumble of a coal train.
On occasion, however, a drama does unfold, although it's usually comical. A while ago three cows broke free from their enclosure into the backyard of our elderly neighbour across the road – her screams had us running outside thinking she was being attacked. They stood around in our street for a while, looking bewildered, then casually trotted off, destination unknown.

I'm more used to seeing perfunctory blowjobs outside my window.

Greetings from The Bend

Horseshoe Bend – or The Bend, as locals call it – is a suburb of Maitland, about a two-and-a-half hours' drive north of Sydney. I moved here last April with my man, Mick, who bought a lovely old house with a big yard just 50 metres from the Hunter River.

It couldn't be further removed from Darlinghurst and I'm relishing the culture shock.

Frankly, I thought I'd be like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but it turns out I'm more Felicity Kendal in The Good Life.

Who knew?


I'll be posting more shortly. Having been in the internet wilderness I'm currently playing catch-up.
I mean, ChatRoulette. Seriously?