Australia Part 1 – Sydney to Canberra

1^st to 7th March, 2020

We had had a good flight on Emirates from Christchurch to Sydney, shuttled to the car hire place and picked up our car and then drove literally round the corner to our overnight hotel, which was modern and efficient without being charming.

We ate out for breakfast and then loaded the car and set off for Canberra. By this time Val was getting more and more keen on getting to Claire’s as soon as possible, but we did have time for a stop at the town of Bowral and, specifically, the Sir Donald Bradman Museum. For the uninitiated, the Don, as he was known, was, undisputedly, the best cricketer there has ever been (and this is a Pom saying that!). Indeed, there is an argument that he was the greatest sportsperson ever if you agree with the statisticians:

World sport context

Wisden hailed Bradman as, “the greatest phenomenon in the history of cricket, indeed in the history of all ball games”. Statistician Charles Davis analysed the statistics for several prominent sportsmen by comparing the number of standard deviations that they stand above the mean for their sport. The top performers in his selected sports are:

Athlete	Sport	Statistic	Standard deviations
Bradman	Cricket	Batting average	4.4
Pelé	Association football	Goals per game	3.7
Ty Cobb	Baseball	Batting average	3.6
Jack Nicklaus	Golf	Major titles	3.5
Michael Jordan	Basketball	Points per game	3.4

The statistics show that “no other athlete dominates an international sport to the extent that Bradman does cricket”. In order to post a similarly dominant career statistic as Bradman, a baseball batter would need a career batting average of .392, while a basketball player would need to score an average of 43.0 points per game. The respective records are .366 and 30.1.

Or to put his batting into context, he has a test batting average of 99.94 (he needed 4 runs in his last match for an average of 100, but was out for nought in the first innings and did not bat in the second because Australia won the match by an innings). The next nearest average is 61.87 by Adam Voges, also of Australia.

For those of you who would like to know more, here is the link to the excellent Wikipedia article. The endless world records are hard to take in!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bradman

And here is a photo from the museum of the famous Invincibles team that toured England in 1948, unbeaten in every match they played.

I do actually have some nice photos of the Bowral Cricket Ground, which is adjacent to the museum on which there was even a cricket match being played, but unfortunately I do not seem to be able to access the photos as I took them in RAW format, having changed to that in my attempt to get the rudiments of astrophotography mastered and then forgetting to switch back to the usual setting. I can see them on the camera, but cannot get the computer to open them just yet. Anyway, try to picture the scene of a nice old-fashioned pavilion and white-clad players in front with trees all round.

We went the short distance to another local town, that of Berrima, which looked lovely with some very old buildings built in the 1830s, such as the following:

It was then on to Canberra, driving down the Hume Highway past a huge flat plain, that apparently is mostly Lake George, an endorheic lake, as it has no outflow of water to rivers and oceans. The lake is believed to be more than a million years old. (Thanks Wikipedia). The Highway is interesting as all the service stations/rest areas are named after Australian recipients of the Victoria Cross (for your information, 96 Australians have received the VC and a further 4 the VC for Australia, which has superseded the old Imperial VC in 1991). Indeed, this is all linked to part of the road between Sydney and Canberra which is called the Remembrance Driveway, initiated by the Queen and Prince Philip in 1954 and designed to be a living memorial to the Australian armed forces. In case you are wondering, it takes about 3 hours of driving to get from Sydney to Canberra. And it is about another 7 hours to Melbourne and 13 hours to Adelaide.

And so we finally arrived at what has been the main reason for our trip, ie to visit Claire, Georgie, Tristan and Robin and what a lovely welcome we received. They live in a very nice bungalow (most houses are bungalows in Canberra) having moved here in August last year. Things were certainly much improved compared to a month or two ago when the bushfires and the resulting smoke were so bad the whole household had had to evacuate to Tasmania. When we arrived all was well with a nice temperature, a bit like a good English summer’s day. Mind you, don’t be fooled, temperatures can reach well into the 40Cs.

The photos from hereon will be a bit patchy as they will largely be of the major places we have visited around Canberra, but rest assured, we have been busy. it has been interesting how people’s eyebrows would rise when we said we were visiting Canberra and how they would rise even higher when we announced that we would be staying for 3 weeks. There is a perception that there is not much to do in the nation’s capital, but that could not be more wrong, as I hope you will appreciate by the end of the posts on this part of our tour.

Val and I were straight into it, going to the cinema twice in as many nights – once with Claire and Georgie to see the excellent Oscar winner, ‘Parasite’ and then seeing ‘1917’ with Tristan, both good. We also found the local table tennis club for the ACT (Australian Capital Territory), which had Seniors mornings 3 days a week. Very friendly bunch, indeed we ended up having lunch with a number of them.

Claire also took us to the ANU, the Australian National University, where she works, which was fun and nice to meet some of her colleagues.

In between, we explored the local shopping mall and on 3^rd March we went off to the National Museum of Australia with Claire, Georgie and Robin, not least as we had 2 days of absolutely torrential rain, so museums seemed a good idea. It was interesting to be here in a country where everyone is overjoyed when it rains!

The museum is very modern (post-modern in fact, or so I have read) and incorporates a lot of Aboriginal design and we did in fact concentrate on the section that highlighted the lives of the indigenous people or first Australians as they are known. We also managed to build virtual robots and try and play games against each other in a rather more interactive part of the museum. In Val and my case, the emphasis is on the word ‘try’. The museum concentrates more on taking a few places that are reasonably representative and then follow the lives of some who live there to highlight various issues in the life of Australia, both good and bad. I do not envy the very delicate tightrope those who decided the design and content of the museum and the descriptions of the exhibits have had to walk to avoid offending anyone! They seem, in my limited experience, to have done a good job. That said, there is considerable contention about the design and quite a lot of angst on both sides about acknowledging the plight of the Aboriginals on the one side and on the other the feeling that it is overdone and not acknowledging the achievements of those who have developed Australia since the Europeans first came.

A few photos of the design and exhibits:

And a few photos of those who went to view the exhibits!

On one of our table tennis ventures we discovered one of the fresh food markets, of which each area of the city seems to have an example. They are great for fresh fruit and veg, meat and fresh fish as well as nice artisan-like bakeries and cafes as well as several shops serving street food and the like. So we persuaded the crew to head out to Fishwyck Markets on the Saturday for a bit of shopping and something nice for brunch!

OK, we are off tomorrow, so this may be the last post (stand by your bugles!) before we leave, though I am not holding my breath. Matters are considerably different compared to two weeks ago and I will only believe it when we touch down in Heathrow.