Batemans Bay
Root doo doot doo doo doo doo doo ...
Goin' to the fish and chip shop,
To buy ourselves a decent meal,
There's five of us and we got twenty cents
So come on lady, give us a good deal!
Down in Batemans Bay, Batemans Bay ...
Bedridden, 'Batemans Bay'
I wouldn't quote those lyrics but they're by a cousin so I guess that counts for something. Think Pogues or Whitlams before they sold out, or similar.
We were invited to a holiday house by the sea near Batemans Bay this weekend for one of Max's workmates' 30th birthday. The colleague is a recent ANU physics PhD graduate so her crew are all chemists, physicists and physical chemists in various stages of PhDs, post-docs, fellowships, job applications and existential crises.
Batemans Bay is that part of the NSW south coast where Canberrans swim on weekends, about a two or three hour drive from ONFC. Stops along the way include Queanbeayan, Bungendore, Mogo and Tomakin (I'm still sensitive to the echoing dissonance of placename dislocation syndrome although I don't claim the WA equivalents are superior, of course - not, indeed, that there's anything at all wrong with any of these names or those in WA - Muchea, Eneabba, Katanning, Greenbushes, Augusta, Badgingarra - to an Australian ear, but I quote them for outsiders in case I can freak them out even slightly ... we are aliens here, you understand; we play cricket and we eat hamburgers, but we do not speak your language).
The holiday house was addressed 48 The Headland, Tranquil Bay Retreat, Tranquil Bay Place, Tomakin NSW or something similar: a marketer's naming scheme with heavy emphasis on the virtues of peace and quiet. Irony demanded that it be a squalid mining smokestack or a gaudy brothel, but no, it was a sprawling timber house of rooms connected by outdoor walkways, with luxurious fittings and four double beds, a bunk room and a loft, all overlooking two "secluded coves" (populated only by the occasional nudist) and a few hectares of eucalyptus forest. Beautiful really. I'll add some photos to this post once I've recharged the camera, although I don't think we took any good ones of the setting.
We had an excellent time. For one thing it was great to get away from our rental house, not because it's awful, but simply because it's a little suffocating to always be there, especially for me at the moment. It was also fascinating, in an anthropological way, to be briefly inserted into a tightly knit and unfamiliar social group - people who seemed cooler than us in some ways (probably more interesting work for one thing) and less cool than us in others (e.g. taste in music). They took us at face value, which was nice.
Goin' to the fish and chip shop,
To buy ourselves a decent meal,
There's five of us and we got twenty cents
So come on lady, give us a good deal!
Down in Batemans Bay, Batemans Bay ...
Bedridden, 'Batemans Bay'
I wouldn't quote those lyrics but they're by a cousin so I guess that counts for something. Think Pogues or Whitlams before they sold out, or similar.
We were invited to a holiday house by the sea near Batemans Bay this weekend for one of Max's workmates' 30th birthday. The colleague is a recent ANU physics PhD graduate so her crew are all chemists, physicists and physical chemists in various stages of PhDs, post-docs, fellowships, job applications and existential crises.
Batemans Bay is that part of the NSW south coast where Canberrans swim on weekends, about a two or three hour drive from ONFC. Stops along the way include Queanbeayan, Bungendore, Mogo and Tomakin (I'm still sensitive to the echoing dissonance of placename dislocation syndrome although I don't claim the WA equivalents are superior, of course - not, indeed, that there's anything at all wrong with any of these names or those in WA - Muchea, Eneabba, Katanning, Greenbushes, Augusta, Badgingarra - to an Australian ear, but I quote them for outsiders in case I can freak them out even slightly ... we are aliens here, you understand; we play cricket and we eat hamburgers, but we do not speak your language).
The holiday house was addressed 48 The Headland, Tranquil Bay Retreat, Tranquil Bay Place, Tomakin NSW or something similar: a marketer's naming scheme with heavy emphasis on the virtues of peace and quiet. Irony demanded that it be a squalid mining smokestack or a gaudy brothel, but no, it was a sprawling timber house of rooms connected by outdoor walkways, with luxurious fittings and four double beds, a bunk room and a loft, all overlooking two "secluded coves" (populated only by the occasional nudist) and a few hectares of eucalyptus forest. Beautiful really. I'll add some photos to this post once I've recharged the camera, although I don't think we took any good ones of the setting.
We had an excellent time. For one thing it was great to get away from our rental house, not because it's awful, but simply because it's a little suffocating to always be there, especially for me at the moment. It was also fascinating, in an anthropological way, to be briefly inserted into a tightly knit and unfamiliar social group - people who seemed cooler than us in some ways (probably more interesting work for one thing) and less cool than us in others (e.g. taste in music). They took us at face value, which was nice.