Oz XXX - And that is that. The end.

I like the quote even if it isn't entirely accurate. My time in the land down under has come to a close and my next stop is South East Asia. I had a superb time in Australia. I thoroughly enjoyed working in Sydney, 1770, and the Goldfields. The highlight of the year would be the 3 months working on the mines in WA, simply because it was a unique Australian experience. I was very lucky to have so many connections in Perth. I would not have been able to get my mines job otherwise, and it also meant I was given a roof over my head by Nadene and Andrew, Richard and Sandy, and Jon and Alexia. Not only did this mean that I got to save more money, but I also got to meet locals and see Perth from their perspective.

I managed to get to enjoy a big event on the Australian calendar before leaving, the Melbourne Cup. I wasn't actually in Melbourne for the Melbourne Cup but it is celebrated across the country with other horse racing events. So I made my way to Ascot Races with a mate from the mine site Alan. It was a true Australian day of drinking and gambling. Alan and I made an effort and wore a shirt and tie and about half of the guys there did, whilst the other half (the Bogans) were in board shorts and wife beater tops. All of the women took the opportunity to be glamorous with dresses and hats. ALthough these dresses were of varying degrees of taste and decency. The drinking started early at 11am and by midday a number of people seemed to be the worse for wear under the sun. By the afternoon taste and decency dropped as people stumbled around. There is something quintessentially Australian about gambling and drinking. It is a key part of any Australian celebration, none more so than Anzac day, the true Australia day. The equivalent of Remembrance Sunday, it takes place in April commemorating the Gallipoli landings, while there are dawn services across the country, by late morning the drinking begins and the 2-up gambling starts.

One of the great aspects of working on the mines in the outback were the characters that you would meet. My supervisor had been working on mines across Western Australia for years. He told one story where he was on his own in the Pilbarra sleeping on a camp bed in a swag (the Geo had left to leave him with tidying up to do). They had heard dingo howls in the distance but had thought nothing of it. During this particular night he woke up to find dingo's sniffing his neck and trying to open his swag with their paws. He said it was the longest half an hour of his life waiting for them to either attack him or get bored and leave. This guy had also managed to accrue huge gambling debts which meant he had to become a male stripper to pay them off. One job that paid particularly well was to be a human table where people would pay for the privilege of eating food off of you. A driller's offsider on one of the rigs was nicknamed Clivey (substitute rude word here) because whenever the driller told him to do something he would refer to an imaginary character named Clivey who was telling him what to do. He was another guy who had love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. It is no wonder that the drillers go slightly mad. Alot of them do month long stints and back at the beginning of November they were considering doing double stints, to take them up until Christmas and give themselves an extra week off. I would not want to leave the impression that all of the people on the mine sites were the salt of the earth. There were some people who were ridiculously lazy. We had a supervisor who would not come out to the core yard to do any work. He would just hide in the office all day and on a number of occasions he was caught in the mess watching TV. In the evening during dinner he would ask what you had been doing all day, rather than actually having a look himself. The trouble is he won't get the sack because the guy above him is even more lazy.

There are a number of things that I will miss from Australia. The good weather for starters. Although I won't miss bad weather when Australians would ask whether it reminded me of home. For the record it doesn't. Australians do seem to live in some sense of denial about rain. They tell you that it never rains and that they are experiencing one of the worst droughts on record, yet it does rain. When it does rain Australians refuse to wear raincoats. They wander around getting soaked, "It doesn't rain in Oz". I will miss the attitude of "No worries", "too easy", "it'll be right". I will miss the beaches and the wide open spaces. I won't miss the various assortments of wildlife that can kill you. I finally got to see a Redback in Perth, it looks like any other small spider. I may have even been bitten by something of the eight-legged variety as my forearm swelled up due to being bitten by something. In saying that you rarely see snakes and spiders around. The biggest spiders I saw were when I lived in Sydney, where there was a Huntsmen bigger than my hand in my house. The biggest snake I saw was in Byron Bay, a 2 metre long Python making its merry way along the grass behind the beach. I won't miss the hypochondriac response to the terrorist threat. I consider it highly unlikely that a terrorist would consider blowing anything up outside of Sydney or Canberra (even in these two cities I think its highly unlikely). I can't see Al Qaeda ordering a bus bombing in Tewantin (a tiny town near Noosa), and yet there are posters proclaiming such a fate. I will miss drive through off-licenses (bottleshops) because you never know when you might need a drink and how quickly you might need to get one. By the same token on every boat or ferry trip I have been on in Australia, no matter the size of vessel or duration of trip, there has always been an announcement that the bar was open. I will miss the Australian obsession with cold beer, not to sound too much of a Pomme but drinking a warm beer is not the end of the world. Australians, however, seem unable to contemplate such a fate. If you serve them a warm beer they take it as a slight against them. When we went for BBQs in the Bush on the mine site we would always have an esky full of ice, simply for the beer. I will miss the obsession with sport and the multitude of different sports being played. Aussie Rules may be legalised violence but it is certainly a good spectacle to watch.