We are selling our house after building it and living in it for the last 15 years. The house is too big for us now that all the children have left and we will now base ourselves in the UK. However, It is not a good time to sell as loans are more difficult to get and less houses are being sold during the economic downturn. I would say that the UK housing market is much more fluid and dynamic than here in Italy. Families tend to own a house that gets handed down the generations, or else the father builds a house for his son or daughter. I don’t think there is any inheritance tax or capital gains tax on the primary house. This way wealth stays in the family. Probably for this reason we should hang on to it or “give it” to our kids. Travelling so much would mean that the house will be empty for longish periods though which would not be too good. So right now if someone wants to buy it we will sell it.
The house is in a nice position about one kilometer up from Lago Maggiore. It is with an agent who has now asked us to update the photos. So I thought I might as well put them up here as well. I will be sorry to leave this area but logically it makes little sense to stay here now that I have no work ties, and all our children are scattered around the world.
Price ? Less than you would imagine.
Back in Sydney now for the last few days before we leave Australia alowing us to see this wonderful city. We are staying in Newtown, which is an up and coming suburb just outside the main city centre. It looks like a Victorian suburb of London or any major UK town. Better still there have been preservation orders placed on all the old buildings which stop shops and developers transforming their frontages. This is one of the tragedies of Britain where chain stores like Boots, M&S, Waterstones etc. are simply allowed to plaster their massive shop signs and transform entrances to mediaeval buildings. As a result Newtown and other suburbs look much the same as they did 50 years ago despite massive rises in property prices.
The waterfront at Circular Quay is just stunning. It looks even better from one of the ferries taking you to Manly or elsewhere. The Opera House is a work of genius and contrasts say the Festival Hall and the South Bank in London built around the same time. One is timeless, the other looks dated, monolithic and dirty. The Sydney Harbour Bridge looks better in real life than it does in a photo and is an iconic piece of engineering. Yesterday we went for a swim at Bondi Beach. It really is a lovely beach despite the thousands who go there during the holiday season. The sand is clean and fine and there is enough room for everyone but swimming between the flags is a little hard when they put the flags about 30 meters apart, but the surf was small so no problems. Strangely enough it reminded me of Newquay in Cornwall, but that may be because Newquay itself got based on Bondi . The water is cooler in Sydney than in Perth or Adelaide which is fine when you get so hot in the sun.
We flew to Sydney from Perth with Virgin Blue. The last day in Perth we went to the Aquarium which is quite a way outside Perth which we reached by train and bus. There is a trendy new resort with a Marina, water park and expensive apartments. The aquarium was really good and exhibited fish from different local areas in Western Australia. You walked through a mega tank with 15 sharks, sting rays, groupers etc. pools of coral and rays and tanks with sea snakes. While in Glenelg I saw a huge sting ray swim into the beach from the jetty. It reached about waist high water before turning back out to see. They are harmless unless threatened and they do carry a powerful sting in their tails
The last few days we have spent exploring the region around Port Augusta. The weather has been very hot but finally cooled to a mere 35 today. On New Year’s eve went to Whyalla which is a steel town on the other side of the estuary about 50 minutes from Port Augusta. The main interest for us was the very shallow beach area which would look good in a Red Sea resort. The weather was so hot - over 40 degrees that I couldn’t face the long ankle depth walk out for 300 metres to swim. Whyalla is a largish affluent place with good sea and boating access.
Then on New Year’s day we drove down to Melrose because I saw an advert for local wine there. Melrose is in the Southern Flinders and was one of the main settler towns for agriculture. There was a great detailed museum there which highlighted the ambitions and frustrations of the early settlers. There would be one or two years’ good harvest followed by drought, plagues of locusts and mice. However it is beautiful countryside with a lovely old pub there facing Mount Remarkable. It is on the edge of pastural agriculture and in fact there is a line north of which supposedly farming was not viable.
On Saturday 2nd Jan we drove to Wilpena Pound which is a very beautiful reserve about 3 hours drive north of Port Augusta. It is dominated by a large crater-like escarpment and surrounded by beautiful forests. There is a system of trust whereby visitors pay a park entrance fee. It really is a fabulous park with kangaroos, old Gum Tree forests and long hikes through the forest and hills. We could only spend a couple of hours there but managed to get lost and nearly walk into the biggest spider’s web I have ever seen. The spider looking big and mean in the middle of it. I expect it was deadly poisonous. On the drive back we stopped off in Hawker and found an art gallery full of prints and original paintings by a local artist Jeff Morgan. We bought some prints for Naomi’s house.
Yesterday we went for lunch at the Old Willow Brewery near Quorn. The daughter of the owner is a friend of Naomi’s and the restaurant is in a beautiful spot beside the old Pichi Richi Railway. This was way the best meal I have eaten yet in Australia. I had a salad of grilled freshwater crayfish called Yappies and an armoricain type sauce followed by a perfect Rib-eye steak. I had a good sleep when we got back to Port Augusta.
Tomorrow we leave for Adelaide and then fly to Perth on Thursday.
Barossa Valley hosts some of Australia’s best vineyards. We took a 2 day tour through Clare Valley, Barossa Valley and Adelaide Hills sampling and buying wine on the way before ending up in Adelaide. The countryside is very beautiful and less arid than Port Augusta. There are rolling hills, scattered vineyards and lovely wineries. The towns and villages have many stone houses and it all looks very affluent - no doubt owing to the great wine grown here and exported around the world.
We visited and bought wine from :
- Penfolds. I tasted some of the best Cabernet Sauvignon ever and David and I ended up buying 2 very expensive bottles (Cellar Reserve) to keep long term.
- Jacob’s Creek
- Yalumba
- Seppeltsfield
- Wolf Blass
- Peter Lehman
- Bird in the Hand (Adelaide Hills)
After that we staggered back down to Adelaide for David’s last night in Australia . The taxi drivers turned out to be real mercenaries and Anna and I got refused a lift and told that the restaurant the other taxi had taken the rest of us was just 3 blocks away. After 20 minutes walk a local explained we needed to take a tram! Eventually we got a taxi with a nice Chinese driver in time for a great steak and more beer.
Today we drove to Quorn, about 45 minutes from Port Augusta, in 40 degree heat. Quorn is in the Flinders mountains and was a staging point on the old Ghan railway. Today it seems a magic place where time stood still and all the shops, pubs and railway stations are just as they were 100 years ago. The drive there and back to Port Augusta passes some wild empty scenery. I am writing this at 7pm and outside it is still 37 degrees.
On Christmas Eve we took a boat trip up the estuary from Port Augusta. The boat weaves through the mangroves until it reaches nearly the very end of the sea inlet - only accessible at high tide. You begin to get a feel of just how tough it was in the early settler and explorer days. The country is wild, beautiful and dangerous. Early explorers believed there was an inland sea in the central part of Australia and set off to make their fortunes. One cannot imagine how they managed to get so far relying on finding water sources on the way. Later on camels were the only way to send supplies into the bush to cattle ranchers and farmers. Every few years a savage drought would destroy years of effort as homestaeds and communities had to be abandoned. The camels arrived by boat to Port Augusta with their Afghan handlers and it seems this is where the name “GHAN” comes from for the trainline. The first trans- Australian railway was constructed in the late 19th century with wooden sleepers. The line was eventually closed around 1960 because termites had destroyed many of the sleepers and the lines would buckle under the intense heat. The new railway has concrete sleepers and carries freight across Australia north to Darwin and West to Perth. Port Augusta is the terminus point for both lines. Similarly huge “road trains” leave via truck terminals heding north to Alice Springs.
In the afternoon we visited a private refuge for Yellow Tail rock wallabies. They live in a gorge near the Flinders Range a drive of about 1 hour from Port Augusta near Quorn. The countryside is beautiful and empty. Rugged red rocks dominate an arid plain. The wallabies live in the rocks surrounding a natural water hole. We were very lucky that the weather had stabilised and they were down near the path. This was the first time we had seen wallabies and kangaroos in the wild. The yellow tails have an amazingly smooth hopping movement which enables them to climb sheer rock faces seemingly effortlessly.
Christmas Day lunch of turkey and all the traditional trimmings outside in Naomi’s garden. It felt very strange to be outside in the hot sunshine.
We finally arrived in Port Augusta to spend Christmas with out daughter Naomi. She started work here 2 months ago as a vet, having just qualified in London. The temperature is 37 degrees and it is a very dry semi-arid area. Our travels took this far took us to:
1. Melbourne staying in St Kilda’s for a wild Saturday night. Some trendy pubs seething with people and bouncers on the door plus nice outside restaurants.
2. The Great Ocean Drive. A wonderful stretch of coastline between Melbourne and the limestone coast. It passes famous Bells Beach, and some rugged wild coastlines before we stooped for the night in Kingston.
3. From there to Adelaide which is an elegant laid back city with wide open boulevards and a fairly decent city centre. We stayed in Glenelg to be next to the sea, went for a swim on the beach and caught the sun after just an hour. There is a tram direct to the city centre which worked great and everyone was very friendly. This morning we headed to the airport to meet our son David flying in from Sydney and Naomi’s Grandad flying in from London, then headed out for Port Augusta.
Port Augusta is a dry town at the crossroads of the trans Australian railway and road systems into the bush. A couple of goods trains passed us on the way here. These trains must be 500 meters long. Similarly immense Road Trains dragging two sometimes three containers set off across the desert to Alice Springs and beyond. This is a world away from anything you will experience in Europe or even the US. The distances are immense, the environment hard yet there is a stark beauty to the scenery hard to find anywhere else.
We arrived in Australia on the 15th December to spend Christmas with our daughter naomi who recently got a job as a Vet in Port Augusta which is about 300 km north of Adelaide. The journey is very long from Europe and therefore I probably needed the impetus of visiting our daughter in order to get us to travel here at all. Australia immediadetly gives you an impression of open spaces which we have lost in Europe. On arriving we spent the first night with friends Greg and Jan in Manley. We made a tour of the main sights of Sydney which give an impression of a wonderful physical setting and good architecture. Manley is in a beautiful position at the entrance os Sydney Harbour and one of the best beaches.
Day 2 we picked up the rental car and headed south down the coast and after 5 hours driving ended up in Ulladulla after passing some great beaches and scenery. You begin to get a feel of he vast scale of Australia when you find just what little impact you have made after a day’s driving on a map of the whole country.
Day 3 we tried to drive inland to head south to the Victoria coast. You rise up in through the fotthills of the Great Diving Range and the temperature began to rise dramatically. By the time we stopped for lunch there was a strong hot wind with tempretaures in the high 30’s - just the wrong thing for bush fires. Driving south towards Cann River we started passing through thick smoke areas which looked like clouds. Finally in Cann river a dark storm like cloud spread over the eastern coast. The road was closed by police so there was no access eastwards towards Melbourne and all rooms in the town were booked. The policeman said last time he did this in 2003 the road was closed for 6 days ! He advised us to head north again and take some small unmade road south east to avoid the fires. A chinese family took his advice whereas we decided to head west and booked a room in a resort called Mallacouta and this turned out to be a good move. Mallacoutta is miles from anywhere on the coast but has a nice friendly atmosphere. The temperature had fallen from 41 degrees in he morning to 12 degrees by the time we arrived as clouds spread in from the sea. It rained hard during the night which was good news for us as the fires were brought under control on the coast as a result.
The next morning the road was open so we headed back the way we came and kept going. There is a vast rain forest on the road stretching 50 miles or so where all the fires had been and you could see many scorched trees. Australia has vast areas of natural forests. We stopped for lunch at Lake Entrance and met the chinese coupe who had parked in front of us. They had had a nightmare drive the night before in the dark with no other traffic down this unmade steep mountain road. they left Cann River at 5pm and finished at Orbost 6 hours later shaking from the experience ! We headed on towards Melbourne and spent the night in St.Kilda’s a nice seaside suburb.
We have just spent most of the week helping install a new sculpture in Colletta. It is a fantastic work consisting of 12 reinforced glass panes each weighing 80 kg. The panes have been laminated with an amber section which together form a 3-D reconstruction of the sculptor’s father. The sculptor is Jonty Horwitz who is the winner of this year’s Bernard Noble Sculpture prize. Jonty conceived the idea and defined each slice in the work which reconstructs a 3-D lidar scan of his own father. The glass has been manufactured to extreme constraints by Michael Baron. It was delivered earlier by truck from Cheltenham to Colletta and I helped unload it and store it initially. This experience made me realise the very tough logistics of transporting and constructing the piece by hand to a lovely glade by the river below Colletta. Firstly a reinforced concrete base had to be sunk underground to hold a combined weight of 1 ton of glass. Giulio and GianPietro worked several days to get this ready.
This Tuesday Jonty and Michael arrived and we started carrying down the glass on Wednesday morning. One single slip or one single crack against the stone walls might have damaged the corners of the glass so it was rather stressful, but Giulio and GianPietro really had the muscle to make it work. They took each end as 2 extra men walked the 200 metre steep path down to the glade. Then the whole of Thursday Jonty and Michael worked without a break, first to fix the base to the concrete, and then they built a wooden rig to exactly position the glass and then raise each one (with Giulio’s help) vertically spaced by exactly 13 cm. Finally the glass was secured with many layers of epoxy resin set into the base. Epoxy resin reaches 150 degrees C while it fixes! On Friday morning the last layer of epoxy was set and the rig removed. As with everything there were a couple of problems as it became clear that the glass spacing needed to be fixed at the top as well. However the first sight of the sculpture standing alone was stunning.
Then on Saturday we had the official presentation of the work. Many of Jonty’s family had flown in specially for it and all present went down to see it for the first time. Overwhelming positive response! It is a stunning work which will surprise people when they come across it walking near Colletta.
