The Green Centre

On the whole, Alice Springs and the huge expanse of nothingness surrounding it is very hot and very dry, with very little growing. The aboriginal groups from this area believe that a wet year comes once out of every ninety-two. Well about 14 to 10 days before we arrived in Alice, the northern end of South Australia and the southern half of the Northern Territory had received a lot of rain. And so, we arrived in one of those rare wet years. The 'valley of the winds' down the centre of Kata Tjuta is usually the only place with plant life growing, a sea of green in a desert of red. But when we visited, Uluru too and the rest of the outback, plants can be seen in all our photographs, where usually it would just be red dust.

Just after Christmas I started reading Mark Thomas' book 'Belching out the devil'. I was aware of Coca Cola's links with Colombian paramilitaries and their publicised problems in India, but the rest of the human rights violations that can be linked to them was all news to me (the use of child labour in El Salvador, police brutality on workers in Turkey, draining water from already drought-prone areas in India - the list goes on, I suggest you read the book if you want to know more). And so as a result I'm now boycotting Coca Cola. Or at least trying to - you wouldn't believe how difficult this is. Coke is everywhere. It's always available, and quite often the only option. Juice drinks and bottled water are often owned by the Coca Cola Company. Their advertising stretches from a huge billboard in Sydney's Kings Cross to small plaques celebrating their sponsorship of Polar Bear and Tiger enclosures at SeaWorld on the Gold Coast and Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast respectively. So my boycott has become less of such and more of an attempted avoidance. I'll try not to spend any more of my pennies (or in this case dollars and cents) on it, but I won't let myself die from dehydration. I'll always buy an alternative if one's available, but I'm never going to shy away from checking out big bears and cats.

Seeing a kangaroo and koala in the wild were pretty high up my list of things to do while in Australia. We got to see a koala after just five days when Trevor took us to Warrandyte State Park just outside Melbourne, but after five weeks I was still to see a wild 'roo (even after travelling over 2500 miles through the outback!). So when we arrived in the Hunter Valley just north of Sydney and Deb and Greg (who we met in New Zealand at Waitomo caves and had invited us to stay when we were in Oz) asked us what we wanted to do, I knew immediately what was top of the list. It didn't take long. At the first roundabout on the drive to their house they pointed out two kangaroos in a field about 100 yards from the road. We saw some on several other occasions over the next few days, but no more after that all the way up the east coast. So either all Australia's kangaroos are found in a tiny corner of New South Wales, or you just need to know where to look for them.

While seeing a kangaroo in the wild was something I'd wanted to do, going prawing was something I never thought I'd do. Basically because I had no idea what it entailed. Prawning in this case, for those of you that don't know, involves dragging a net 500 yards up a waist-high river and hoping that you've caught a load of prawns in it by the end. And that's what Greg and I did. I was shocked at what we caught. In two 'runs' up the Williams River we caught seven kilos of prawns! Now I'm not sure how much Tesco currently does them for but in any case that's a prettybig saving. And these were a lot bigger than those measly supermarket ones too. So Deb cooked them all up when we got back and for the next few days I ate more prawns than I realised I could. I'm still useless at peeling them though.