(no subject)
I am playing pool in the bar of the Hotel Victor. I am drunk but my opponent is even more drunk. Nursing a schooner of Toohey's, he shows me a right fist laced with scar tissue and then tells me he got it when he punched his way through the bar-room window last time he lost a game. I eye my doubles partner nervously and consider a change of tactics.
Outside the bar it is dark and a flock of galahs are sitting in a tree nearby watching our game. I am drunk and I sense they are rooting for yellows. Across the road the town ends at the esplanade and I can see the dark water of Encounter Bay, where the English explorer Matthew Flinders unexpectedly encountered his French rival Nicholas Baudin a couple of centuries ago. Instead of fighting (their countries were then at war), they exchanged information and consequently the place-names round here tend to be alternately English and French. Before we came to the bar we were walking around the bay and, crossing the causeway to Granite Island, we could see the dark shapes of seals flopping elegantly through the water below us.
The town is called Victor Harbor and it is on the southern tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. As I played pool I was feeling wild and romantic about the tiny part of the world that I was currently in, an almost aleatory desination which was decided at the last moment to avoid travelling into the path of Cyclone Wati. I had never been out of Queensland before and the Pogues' sea-shanty was going through my mind:
In South Australia I was born
(Heave away! Haul away!)
In South Australia, round Cape Horn
(We're bound for South Australia!)
The Hotel Victor, where I had just lost a game of pool, used to be popular with whalers that at one time were the town's main businessmen, and so as we drink I like to imagine these guys swaggering in from the harbour, stinking of blubber and sweat, knocking back beer and knocking out each other. The guy I am playing pool with is telling me that one set of his grandparents was from Belfast and the other from Manchester, his mother was a New Zealander and he's lived in Oz his whole life, and so he was having trouble deciding who to suppport in the Commonwealth Games.
The town was quiet and sleepy and the kind of place you get everywhere in rural Australia, with one dusty main street, painted wooden shopfronts, verandahs, a general store and a post office and a vague feeling that you have wandered on to the set of a Western. The landscape round the town and all along the peninsula is sort of Spanish-looking, all dry and rocky but with scattered bushes and scrubby trees. The name of Victor Harbor itself confuses me a bit, because Australia normally spells harbour the British way, and also no-one seems to know who Victor was. Anyway, it is a lovely little township and, as I say, there is a causeway you can walk to Granite Island where there is a colony of Little Penguins which waddle back up the rocks at dusk after a hard day's fishing and are very cute. I would see a lot more of them soon, but that is enough of an update for now.
By the way, we played a rematch at the pool table and I cleared up heroically to take it, a tiny Commonwealth victory of my own. No windows, or tourists, were punched.
Outside the bar it is dark and a flock of galahs are sitting in a tree nearby watching our game. I am drunk and I sense they are rooting for yellows. Across the road the town ends at the esplanade and I can see the dark water of Encounter Bay, where the English explorer Matthew Flinders unexpectedly encountered his French rival Nicholas Baudin a couple of centuries ago. Instead of fighting (their countries were then at war), they exchanged information and consequently the place-names round here tend to be alternately English and French. Before we came to the bar we were walking around the bay and, crossing the causeway to Granite Island, we could see the dark shapes of seals flopping elegantly through the water below us.
The town is called Victor Harbor and it is on the southern tip of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. As I played pool I was feeling wild and romantic about the tiny part of the world that I was currently in, an almost aleatory desination which was decided at the last moment to avoid travelling into the path of Cyclone Wati. I had never been out of Queensland before and the Pogues' sea-shanty was going through my mind:
In South Australia I was born
(Heave away! Haul away!)
In South Australia, round Cape Horn
(We're bound for South Australia!)
The Hotel Victor, where I had just lost a game of pool, used to be popular with whalers that at one time were the town's main businessmen, and so as we drink I like to imagine these guys swaggering in from the harbour, stinking of blubber and sweat, knocking back beer and knocking out each other. The guy I am playing pool with is telling me that one set of his grandparents was from Belfast and the other from Manchester, his mother was a New Zealander and he's lived in Oz his whole life, and so he was having trouble deciding who to suppport in the Commonwealth Games.
The town was quiet and sleepy and the kind of place you get everywhere in rural Australia, with one dusty main street, painted wooden shopfronts, verandahs, a general store and a post office and a vague feeling that you have wandered on to the set of a Western. The landscape round the town and all along the peninsula is sort of Spanish-looking, all dry and rocky but with scattered bushes and scrubby trees. The name of Victor Harbor itself confuses me a bit, because Australia normally spells harbour the British way, and also no-one seems to know who Victor was. Anyway, it is a lovely little township and, as I say, there is a causeway you can walk to Granite Island where there is a colony of Little Penguins which waddle back up the rocks at dusk after a hard day's fishing and are very cute. I would see a lot more of them soon, but that is enough of an update for now.
By the way, we played a rematch at the pool table and I cleared up heroically to take it, a tiny Commonwealth victory of my own. No windows, or tourists, were punched.