I think this will definitely class as the weirdest New Year’s Eve ever! This morning was extremely hot with a really scorching wind, and this afternoon the temperature dropped from 37C to 21C in about thirty minutes. We spent a couple of hours on the beach this afternoon in a strange orange light, and by 4.30 this afternoon it looked like late evening. The sky was a combination of brown-yellow and steel grey, and it looked as though there was going to be a huge storm. Then an immensely powerful wind blew up, bringing in smoke and ash.

All of this is because it has been a terrible day for the bushfires (again!). There are major fires all around us (though we are completely safe) and not far from here, lots of holiday-makers could not escape from their homes, and had to evacuate to the beach to be safe from the fires. The bush retreat that I stayed in a few weeks ago, where I saw kangaroos in the wild, is now less than 100 metres from a fire. The New Year’s Eve fireworks in Wollongong have been cancelled because of the fire risk – and also in most other towns in New South Wales (although the famous Sydney Bridge fireworks are still continuing).

So what are we doing this New Year’s Eve? We were going to go to the fireworks, but obviously that’s not on now! We’re bringing in the barbecue boys (James, David, and Grandad) and are having a sausage-fest, with a lots of different kinds of sausages – we are allowed to use our gas barbecue, which seems rather bizarre, given the situation! But we can’t help thinking about all the people losing their homes, and all the animals struggling in the fires.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2020, and one where we really take seriously the need to take care of our environment!

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Christmas in Australia is certainly different – it feels more like being on a summer holiday! Today we went to Hyams Beach in Jervis Bay. It claims to have the whitest sand of any beach in the world, but I expect that many places make the same claim. It is a wide, sheltered bay with jade-green water, fringed by the bush (and of course the white sand). In November, when the humpback whales are migrating back to the Antarctic, the mother whales often bring their calves into Jervis Bay for a rest because the water is calmer, and the mother whales teach them how to be whales. Sadly, we have not seen any whales all the time we have been here, even though we have been by the sea so often.

But we had a great time at Hyams Beach, especially jumping the waves, which are surprisingly powerful. Twice they completely knocked me over! The wind was extremely strong, which kept us cool, and fortunately our sun shelter stayed upright. Daniel was more cautious about the waves, but collected seed heads from the trees over the beach and played with them in the sand.

Jervis Bay is close to one of the huge out-of-control bushfires, and on the way back, we could clearly see the fire front, with a curtain of smoke stretching right across the landscape, broken only by taller plumes of smoke. We had a rather closer encounter than we anticipated, however, as a few miles further on, another bushfire had recently developed (while we were on the beach, as it wasn’t there before) and it was blowing thick smoke right across the motorway. We could smell it strongly in the car and it made our eyes sting. To James’ delight (and mine too!), a fire helicopter flew over with a huge water bucket hanging below it, and dumped it on the fire. By the time we had returned to Wollongong, Grandad’s ‘Fires near Me’ app told us that it was out. A real bushfire experience!

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Happy Christmas, everyone!

Today, we had a most Australian Christmas, and it was certainly very different from our usual traditional English Christmas. After some heavy rain yesterday afternoon – the first for two months – today was warm and sunny (with no smoke!). So we walked to the Christmas service in the sunshine, wearing Christmas shirts, with sunscreen and sunglasses: it felt very weird.

And then on to lunch – a traditional Aussie seafood and salad on the barbie. We had a huge platter of seafood: prawns; lobster tails; barramundi; salmon; and oysters. James had a chicken skewer, and Daniel had macaroni cheese, and then decided to take all of his clothes off and play with lego while we had our lunch.

And it wouldn’t be Christmas in Australia without a visit to the beach. So once our tummies had settled after lunch, we all walked down to the harbour beach at Wollongong, which is very calm, and went in for a swim.

A lovely Christmas Day – like no other we have known!

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Another year, another Christmas Eve – and here, we are all excited about Santa’s imminent arrival, and hoping he can find his way to Wollongong. The chestnuts are roasting on the open fire; the tree lights are twinkling; and outside the world is dusted with frost. Not!

Our Christmas Eve has been very different this year. First of all, it was another very smoky morning from the bushfires, but also very warm. Grandad went to collect our Christmas dinner from the fishmongers – lots of Australian seafood. Then we drove off to a wildlife park in the bush, where James and Daniel fed kangaroos, saw a mother koala with a baby on her back, watched a cheeky white cockatoo steal someone’s picnic, and to their utmost delight, saw a cassowary eat its own poo! (Quite normal, apparently!)

No ginger wine and Carols from Kings for us this year (in fact, if we want to listen to the Carols from Kings, we’ll have to get up at 4am tomorrow morning). Instead, we walked by the beach – and the pelicans performed an aerial show for us: wheeling and gliding high in the sky, then swooping right in front of us, and back to a formation of seven, flying in harmony. And as we were leaving the harbour, one pelican obliged by fishing for its food, scooping up the food out of the water with its huge beak.

A lovely day (though it really does not feel like Christmas!)

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Hurray – today saw the safe arrival of James and Daniel, David and Ann-Marie, after 10,612 miles flying. We have already visited the beach, seen the pelicans, and paddled in the water. And we found a surprise on the beach – a dead puffer fish! By 5.30 pm, we were working hard to keep them awake.

They arrived to another scorching day, and a disastrous day for the bushfires. Several of the places we might want to visit are now closed, and there are two huge fires west and north of us which look as they might join up into an enormous fire. Last night, the smoke changed the colour of the sky with long plumes of orange-brown smoke.

So a first day summed up by walking by the beach, a dead puffer fish, and a smoky sky.

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One common tree growing all along the Australian East coast is the banksia. The ones we have seen here have a lovely lemon-coloured flower, almost like a candle, sitting on a branch. But when the flowers die, they turn firstly into green cones, and finally into brown cones, with lots of hollows where the seeds have fallen out. As they get even older, they shrivel up and form strange shapes on the branches.

Australian children are sometimes told stories about these little shrivelled-up cones. They call them ‘Banksia men’, and the stories are about how these cones become little creatures. If you look at our second row of photos, you can see Banksia men we found on a coast path from Bondi Beach to Coogee in Sydney. Look really hard at the third one, which is a little hidden – we thought it looked like a hedgehog with a pointy nose!

One set of stories about Banksia men is called Snuggle-Pot and Cuddle-Pie. I was going to tell you the story, but when I read it in a bookshop in Wollongong, I thought it was rather dull and boring. So I made up my own! It involves a character you know well, and I slightly altered the names of Snuggle-Pot and Cuddle-pie. Have a listen!

I realise I’ve not said much about the food over here. That’s probably because, in general, it is very much the same as we have in England. There are the same fast food chains – Macdonalds, KFC , Pizzahut (and you know how much Nana loves fast food!). And the supermarkets are full of foods we are all familiar with, as well as quite a lot of Asian foods, and noodles of every description. We have found it hard to find bacon like English bacon, and most of it has little flavour and feels like ham.

The things we have really loved are the mangoes, and the fish and chips! The mangoes are grown in Australia, and have a fabulous flavour, much nicer than the ones we get in England, and much cheaper. We’ve had lots of different kinds of fish and chips – barramundi, flat head, blue grenadier, red snapper – all fish we don’t tend to find in England, and all delicious. Especially if you are eating them in the sunshine by the sea!

There are lots of restaurants in Wollongong, mostly run by people who have migrated to Australia from different countries, so you can choose food from a huge range of countries: Italian, Indonesian, Cambodian, Korean, Hungarian… We have not gone hungry! Although my blue-swimmer crab (see below) was a little smaller than I had expected!

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POSTSCRIPT: and this afternoon, as we walked around Flagstaff Point in Wollongong, we saw a pod of dolphins go past, leaping in and out of the water. Beautiful!

We have just been out for dinner in Wollongong and tonight there is a ‘Santafest’. All the young people are dressed up as Santas, or elves, or angels; and there are a lot of reindeer antler headresses. As we walked home through the city centre, every way we looked, we saw a group of young people dressed up. And because it is warm, they are all wearing shorts, or short dresses. Where we have Christmas jumpers, they have Christmas short-sleeved shirts!

All this jollity is to raise money for charity. There is a free ‘Santafest’ shuttlebus driving round the city, and people go from place to place around the city, and everywhere they stop contributes something to the charity. (For adult readers: this is an ambulant peregrination of local hostelries!) They are all having great fun, and for a good cause! One group even stopped to pose for a photo (see below).

Tomorrow night is carol singing by the beach, with a lightshow (not fireworks because of the bushfires). The Salvation Army will be playing, and Grandad and I are going to go and join in – although ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ will feel rather odd amongst cabbage palms, gum trees and sunshine!

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Yesterday I saw my first kangaroos in the wild! I was staying at Bamarang Bush Retreat working with colleagues from Wollongong University. It is a really peaceful place, surrounded by bush, especially gum trees with peeling bark or leopard-spotted trunks. As we were talking outside on the verandah, five kangaroos just hopped through right in front of us and off into the forest. One was a young one, and at the top of the hill, he couldn’t see his mother and we heard him calling for her, almost like a bleating lamb, and we heard her reply.

Then, at dusk, I slipped out on my own – kangaroo hunting! I walked down a path towards the Shoalhaven River, where there was some open grassland. And there were kangaroos everywhere! They were on the path in front of me, and right across the field – probably 20-30 of them. I was delighted!

They were all quietly feeding, but when they spotted me, two large kangaroos stood up on their hind legs and just gazed at me, motionless. Then the rest of them all started hopping across the field, away from me. But the two ‘look-outs’ stayed, stock-still, just watching me. I stood stock-still too, hardly daring to breathe! And then eventually they bounded away into the distance too.

They were Eastern Grey kangaroos, the most common ones round here, and they are marsupials, like koalas (and also only have one bottom hole!) Kangaroos live in large groups, called mobs, so the collective noun is a mob of kangaroos. They use their tails to balance so their tails are very strong and thick. Because they are quite large and very fast, they have very few predators, but in mountainous areas, wolves sometimes hunt them down by chasing them up a hill, and then chasing them down again. Kangaroos are not too good at running fast down hill because they are the wrong shape, so they often topple over, and then the wolves can catch them.

Taking photos of kangaroos at dusk, and at a distance, means it’s hard to get really clear photos – so you will need to look closely. Can you spot any kangaroos in the trees?

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In my very first blog, I noted that my first experience on arriving in Sydney was to smell smoke; and several other blog entries refer to the bushfires too. Well, the bushfires are still a major problem here in New South Wales, but also in Queensland, Victoria and South Australia too. Near Sydney, four bushfires have joined to make a mega-fire, which is out of control at the moment. The fire-fighters try to stop these fires by ‘back-burning’: curiously, this means they start new fires! But what these back-burning fires do is halt the bigger fires, because when they reach the back-burned lines, there is nothing left to burn and so they can’t move forward. It’s very clever!

When we flew into Sydney from Brisbane during the week, we could see the smoke plumes from the bushfires really clearly from the plane windows. They were enormous, stretching from the fires inland, right out into the sea. And the smoke haze over Sydney has been really bad for days now. When we landed, everything that reflected sunlight (windows, cars, roof-tiles), reflected it in an eerie blood-red. We took some photos from the plane (see below) but they don’t quite capture the immensity of what is happening.

There are now bushfires north of us, south of us, and west of us – and the sea is to the east. But we are not in any danger, because our little apartment is in the city and surrounded by concrete. I am going on a ‘writing retreat’ to a bush camp tomorrow, with colleagues from Wollongong University. They have advised us to bring cotton clothing, including underwear, and leather shoes, just in case of fire. I have no leather shoes with me and no long-sleeved cotton top, so I guess I’ll just have to run fast. To be honest, I’m rather more anxious about potential close encounters with dangers of the reptilian variety, or arachnids (spiders)!

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