Dream a little dream with me

 

Just paraphrasing the Mamas & the Papas as I, mental traveller that I am, go up to Kuranda in tropical North Queensland for another stay at my favourite watering hole, the iconic Kuranda Hotel.

Way back when "Riverbend" seemed to have found a buyer, my thoughts turned immediately to Kuranda and which I immediately visited for an up-close-and-personal look at its real estate. Luckily, I didn't get carried away and never put my money down because "Riverbend" never got sold - and maybe never will - but it's nice to dream a little dream, isn't it?

Coming as far south as Canberra and Nelligen has always seemed like an accident and I've always thought of returning to the tropics. I've lived in Brisbane and Mackay and Townsville and Magnetic Island and Cairns and Mt Isa and even on far-away Thursday Island; the last two okay if you have a job there; the first two too urban and too urbane; and Townsville and Magnetic Island too loaded down with too many personal memories.

Kuranda still retains its magic for me. It's in the tropics just 30 minutes from Cairns but at an elevation of 350 metres which means the nights are nice and cool and the days rarely exceed 31°C even in summer.

And the whole world comes to you by road, by Scenic Railway, and on the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway, to fill up the cafés and shops from mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Once the last train and cable car have gone, this 'Village in the Rainforest' belongs to the koalas and cassowaries and the few locals on their way to the pub. You could fire a shot down the main street and only hit the town drunk - and no big loss that would be!

On a previous trip I inspected a grand lady of a house overlooking the Barron River which afterwards became the Grand Barron Lodge. I have since learned that you don't "invest" in real estate in a tropical climate which requires endless maintenance and where, as soon as a cyclone has dropped the first palm tree, real estate prices drop, too.

Smaller is better and this charming Queenslander at 14 Barang Street is just small enough to be comfortable, and at $339,000 stretches nobody's finances (since relisted at "Buyers over $299,000" - see here). Not that the current owners are laughing at that price: they bought the place in 2008 for $316,000. Fungi grow quicker than that!

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

Snakes and ladders, poles and wires

 

You sell us your prized assets on the cheap. If we make money out of them, we keep them. If we lose money, you bail us out. It's called privatisation, stupid!"

And so they did, both Federal and State governments. Prized assets, built with taxpayers' money, were sold off, either in public floats back to the same taxpayers who already owned them (Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, QANTAS, GIO, Medibank Private), or in secretive 'commercial-in-confidence' deals (Sydney Airport, Darwin Port, hospitals and prisons, electricity and gas generators and distributors) to vulture funds here and in Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Hong Kong, Qatar, China and elsewhere).

The outcome? Predictable! My latest electricity bill for the low-usage three summer months of December through to February is $371.72. Of this, $141.01 (or $1.60 a day) is not for electricity used but for "Supply Charges", i.e. poles and wires. The year prior to privatisation the daily "supply charge" was 20.35 cents. That's an annual increase of $510.00!

Oh yes, there were "safeguards": secretive as the deals were, it became known that the profits of poles and wires distributors were limited to a percentage (well above bank interest rates) of their capital expenditure on poles and wires. So what did they do? They 'gold-plated' them and we were hit with the costs! From $74 a year to $584 a year!

Perhaps we should privatise our politicians. We wouldn't get much for them - methinks, we would have to pay someone to take them off our hands - but at least we would be rid of them. Any takers?

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

A very short flight of fancy up and down the Clyde

Click in the bottom right-hand corner of the video to fill the whole screen

 

No, I didn't hire a helicopter, not even a drone; I just pinched this clip from the NIRVANA Property Specialists' promotion of Cyne Mallows Farm, a beautiful 330-acre spread of land, albeit rather isolated and hard to get to.

I left out everything else bar the view of the beautiful River and pretty Nelligen nestled alongside it, but you can look at the whole kid and kaboodle during a replay. Who knows, you might be interested in total-ly withdrawing from the big bad world and living like a woodsman.

Maybe you buy it "for family & friends in a co-operative cost effective ownership seeking realistic self sufficiency". That's real estate talk.

As the ad continues, "The farm has been held by the current owner for 37 years and is now offered for genuine sale." More real estate talk; I have no idea what an ungenuine sale is.

I go now to "to seek some realistic self sufficiency" in the clubhouse by the pond. Call me when the Cross turns over.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

It's all incense and mirrors

 

A new monk arrives at the monastery. He is assigned to help the other monks in copying the old texts by hand. He notices, however, that they are copying from copies, and not the original books.

So, the new monk goes to the head monk to ask him about this. He points out that if there was an error in the first copy, that error would be continued in all of the other copies. The head monk says, "We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son."

So, he goes down into the cellar with one of the copies to check it against the original. Hours later, nobody has seen him. So, one of the monks goes downstairs to look for him. He hears sobbing coming from the back of the cellar and finds the old monk leaning over one of the original books crying. He asks what's wrong.

"You fuckers", he says, with anger and sadness in his eyes, "the word was celebrate!"

Seriously though, celibacy has never had anything to do with sex, purity and holiness. It was all about money. Mix money and the Catholic church and you get a mess.

Back in the days before Martin Luther, a sort of one-man equivalent of today's ICAC, blew the whistle on indulgences, the priests and bishops who were selling this shit became wealthier and worldier. Many were married and regarded the endowments being made to the church as their personal property which they passed along to their sons and heirs.

Then came tough Gregory VII. He told married priests they couldn’t say Mass; in other words, they couldn't be priests. To keep the money in the church, celibacy was born.

And it has just been introduced into the Australian Parliament, but only for Ministers of the Crown, which must seem hugely ironic for at least one newly-created backbencher. Not to mention the general public, as politicians have been screwing people left, right and centre ever since time began.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

Want to know why I left Germany?

 

Having served my articles with the insurance company "Hamburg-Bremer Feuerversicherungsaktiengesellschaft", I was well used to German compound nouns - although good-looking Trixie has come up with a real doozie - but what really pissed me off was the constant handshaking.

You shook hands with everyone when you got to work, and you shook hands with everyone again before you left. Add all that time to what was already a 50-hour week (half-days on Saturday), and you begin to understand why I enjoy the casual informality we practise in Australia.

Strangely, in recent days we've gone all Gallic (or should that be garlic?) touchy-feely here and embrace and kiss each other like there were no infections tomorrow. I was scared of Germans; now I'm scared of germs.

www.tiny.cc/riverbendmap

 

P.S. I hope when watching the above video clip you kept your eyes firmly on the writing on the wall and didn't "do a Barnaby Joyce":

P.P.S. And, yes, you're right: the 'one minute long' German word could've done with a hyphen or two, just like this recent newspaper headline:

P.P.P.S. If you want to take extra lessons in how to make up German compound nouns, see here and here.