RECONCILIATION PLACE, CANBERRA – the space we share

Reconciliation Place, Canberra.

Australia Day will be upon us at the end of the week. There’ll be Twenty20 cricket, barbies in the park and citizenship ceremonies. And indigenous Australians will be prominent too.

Some may be protesting at what they regard as white Australians celebrating ‘Invasion Day’. Many more traditional owners of the land will be taking part in the official and non-official Australia Day events.

We broke our road trip up the Hume Highway with a diversion to the national capital, Canberra.

My eye was caught by this memorial I hadn’t seen before, though it’s been there for over a decade.

KANGAROO ON THE MENU – Gardener’s Lodge Cafe

Gardener’s Lodge – once a toilet block, and a seedy one at that.

It’s been a while since I ate kangaroo. It’s lean, full-flavoured, healthy meat, and it’s a shame we don’t see much of it around these days.

A laudable enterprise has recently opened in Sydney; the Gardener’s Lodge Cafe, where Beryl Van-Oploo has remodelled a beautiful, historic building and trains and employs Aboriginal Australians in hospitality. The publicity said it serves ‘bush tucker’ – food native to Australia.

Mevrouw T and I have cut down on meat-eating in general and kangaroo is seldom on our menu, but we saw this article on the Fairfax website and went to try lunch at Auntie Beryl’s.

STREET ART – Newtown, Sydney

Nice work, Fukt! Banksy will be saying, ‘Damn! Wish I’d thought of that!’

I have a little assignment (paid, thanks) to write about Newtown, the inner city Sydney suburb.

As I wandered the streets and back lanes, researching the best coffee, restaurants, bookshops and bars (what a tough job I have!) some more-interesting-than-the-usual-rubbish street art caught my eye.

SYDNEY HARBOUR DAY 12 – the best bushwalking so far

That's North Head in the distance. The end of the road is in sight.

If you want a nature walk by Sydney Harbour, this is as good as it gets. The ten kilometre track through the national park from The Spit to Manly is easy to walk if you don’t mind a few steps, gives lovely views out over the water and offers a useful coffee stop by the water at Clontarf.

BET YOU CAN’T BEAT THIS, EUROPE!

South West Tasmania...nice clean beach, where are all the people?

There was a thoughtful and thought-provoking article by Europe-based Australian travel writer David Whitley on the Sydney Morning Herald website today. Whitley argues that Australia can never compete with Europe in attracting tourists – Europe has so much that Australia will never be able to match.

We can’t provide tourists with centuries of history or spectacular ancient buildings, says Whitley. We have no great castles or cathedrals or museums like the Louvre or the Uffizi. Our modern architecture, with the Sydney Opera House as a notable exception, is uninspiring. Our mountains are puny compared to the Alps. We have no drawcard festivals like Oktoberfest, Carnivale in Venice or even Queen’s Day in Holland. We don’t even have summer twilight.

In Europe you can travel three hours on a train and traverse three different countries, passing through charming villages and encountering totally different languages and cultures. Three hours on the train from Sydney will take you through Goulburn and Yass.