woof, miaaaw - our story in pictures.

in cages in the plane


Duchess was the first cat out.

There is FISH here!

finally OUT!!!

run, bounce.



It's been a long road home. But we're here

It's EARLY tomorrow

We have had an update. Our 3 cats, and one of our dogs, Wednesday, are in Tasmania. The other 2 dogs are in Melbourne. By tonight, all of them will be in Launceston, Tasmania. Tomorrow morning between 8 and 8.30am they will all arrive on the island in the mail plane! I am so excited, I really can't wait to see them all again.

I spoke to the wonderful man who collected them from kennels in Sydney and put them on the plane there. He said the cats all appeared well, and the dogs had enjoyed a long walk with him, and they were all very bouncy and lively.

The mail plane's take off time is heavily dependant on the weather, high winds or mist and it doesn't so the trip. So please will you all send really good weather thoughts this way until 11am tomorrow our time, after that it can snow for all I care.

Dave and the boys are out in the dark with headlamps getting the fence ready to keep the dogs from getting at the cows on one side of us, or the sheep on the other. Yes, I know, we have had 5 months to get it sorted, but somehow we kept thinking there was plenty of time. Also I was being a bit superstitious, as in, 'if I prepare for them too long in advance they won't get here' which was really silly. But what can I say, I am female!

So I am currently 'alone at home' and 'keeping the home fires burning' literally, I am making sure they have a warm house to come back to.

If this comes out of your nose...

you'll need more than kleenex.

James and his battle-mother - very inky. 1.5Kg - not quite as big as his mum's one. They went fishing while I stayed and wrote and cooked supper. Poor me.



The poles for the piece of fence for the dogs are up. Tomorrow we wire it. Tomorrow is their last day in quarantine, and they are being collected in Sydney to fly here. Will post as soon as we know their arrival times.

Is the ice still in the river?

This seems appropriate as I have just been writing about the frozen Dnieper River in the Ukraine (of course it's the territory controlled by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the book, not Ukraine).

Despite gale warnings and rain forecast James and I took the galleon in persuit of adventure to Pat's river for an hour or so in what was theoretically the hottest part of the day.



The joy of being very close to all of this sort of thing, and quite organised is that from get up from my desk to get into the water or throwing a line takes 15-20 minutes. Unlike my good friend Chris back in SA who would get up at two AM, to faff about, and fiddle pack everything and check it... and be lucky to be launching by seven (and he lived a few hundred metres from the slip) we're a good team, and quite practiced at chaos theory packing. Hey, it does mean some interesting things get left behind, which has been responsible for quite a lot of fiendish contrivance and ingenuity over the years, but most of it has residence in the dive box or squid box or flounder crate etc.

The ditch next to Galleon would have been a better target... warmer for a start. We took the big kayak which has a 180Kg capacity - and James I don't weigh much more than 130Kg. We got the boat down to the river - low tide and it was the color of tea. Black, stand-your-spoon-in-it-tea with a reddish tinge, overhung with ti-trees and she-oaks. It's quite a pretty estuary, and the vessel was perfectly designed for those with piles - with lovely soothing icy water coming up through the drainage in floor, and soaking my sit-upon. It's a sit-on Kayak designed not sink even if a wave breaks right over the top of it, with drainage holes. Someone needs to explain to the water that it needs to go OUT not come seeping in, and through the rubber of my wetsuit. We paddled upriver first (for the Google Earth-curious - it's the little river next to the airport. We got in off Boyes road, next to a bunch of guinea fowl - I'm not sure if they show up on google earth, but I was very excited to see them. Good eating!) There is a mile of estuary that is tidal. It's about 40-50 feet wide at the best down to about 20 at the upper bridge - where there is a little weir with a dead wallaby in it. And a huge fish that dived away from us... so there are fish in there. We'll investigate at higher tide, sometime.

On the way back down, we established that the fish living in it are entirely mad, as our tandem paddling or vast skill tipped us into the drink (it's not very stable with two on it) and that water is around 8 degrees Celcius - a LOT colder than the sea at 12-14. Anyway, we paddled down to sea, and met the gale (delightful when you are wet) and passed a dead ray in the 6 foot wide range. Sorry - no pic - just as well as the camera would have got wet. Hmm. Dead critter at the top, dead critter at the bottom... maybe that system needs a good heavy flood before we forage there.

The red flag flying there.

No, before you even ask. THERE ARE NO PHOTOGRAPHS. I'm not that tired of life. When, like me you've been married for a long time to a woman of strong will (she has to be, she's still married to me) and arm (she has to have. She has a strong will and she's married to me, and I do daft things. 'Anything I can do she can do better (I can do better than you :-))'. This includes use a chainsaw - do you understand 'respect and no photographs' fully now? Do you understand my favourite character in Rats, Bats an Vats better now? If you haven't read it, you should. It's available at the Baen Free Library.)

What's all this about then? Well, it's our dogs and cats, but mostly the dogs. We suddenly realised this morning that 1)Paddy is as sick as a horse, and needed to go to the doctor (done and on antibiotics) -- he's got his mother's AND my obstinacy. getting this done was no small feat. 2) The Doggins get out of quarantine on Monday. And we haven't sorted out the fence yet. I've been too busy with the book. So B and I went on a very expensive mission to Elders to buy a gate and wire and posts (there is a 20 foot section that needs fencing and a gate, where the driveway comes in.)The one downside is our double-cab ute does not have a very long bin, and we wanted a 12 foot gate - which protruded. We tied it in place safely. So the youngster at Elders says 'have you got something to tie on the back? Which of course we didn't have. And our local police have been stopping cars at the intersection going out of town.

But B is wearing red trousers. So she says "Is there a law that says you have to wear pants when driving?"

The youngster's jaw gets gravel rash. I think he'd never quite dealt with luntatics like these South Africans anyway... "Er. No."

"Good," says B, and gets into the cab. The youth gets the picture... well the idea anyway, and disappears with terrifying speed. I know better than to argue, collect bright red cords and give B my jacket as a sort of skirt. Attach trousers firmly to the gate, and we trundle the couple of klicks home in the blue slug (a nudibranch for those of you who get Zoological jokes), not meeting any black-and-white uniformed folk, unless you count the Magpies. They always make that laughing noise.

And B and her trousers are re-united and James and I dig the new hole to the centre of the earth - or close anyway. Little fellows in red pyjamas kept climbing out of the hole. If they'd showed up earlier we could have hung them on the gate.

Some small fiendish part of me does however have this mental image of the large cop from Lady Barron first leaning into the driver's window, and then saying "would you mind getting out of the car?"

Rain, sun, rain

A typical Flinders day - it should have been blowing a gale and raining. It alternated between all 4 seasons. Bucketing this morning - then 11 o'clock I was stuck so I went and planted out a punnet of red onions that have been waiting a week - in a t-shirt. It was windless and hot enough for the local gecko to put his head out and ask if it was my shout. By 12 the onions and the gecko were getting a good soaking. Then the sun was out enough for B to put the washing out again. I needed some veggies for the stirfry tonight, and went out in the gooti (new word especially for Dirk Flinthart)(thin sticky, mizzly rain - it's Shona, I think. Like sussuration it sounds like what it is.) and picked some spinach, a jalapeno, carrots, and some fresh Italian Parsley and thyme. This is the first of our Jalepenos (we used the ones Lisa gave us up to now - which were so mild.) These - having planted late and struggled along since January and ripening very slowly and temp stressed are toilet roll in the freezer stuff - which may be just as well as Pads is down with flu/cold and B and I are feeling Inge's 'crook'. Chili could burn it out. Anyway, we still wait. The boys for exam results, B for her test result. Me for my brain to tie up the last threads. It's not going easy, but we'll get there.

Home... is in your chest

The boys were listening to Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long, which includes a song by the typical noxious super-hero about the homeless - Problem neatly solved because 'Home is where the heart is, so your home is inside your chest'... which of course immediately had me thinking human snail thoughts. It's not always easy being a science fiction writer with an over-active imagination. Imagine how much worse it is for my dear family! It got me thinking about a few comments on Baen's Bar (my US publisher's forum, where I echo these posts)about this lot.


Yeah. We've been frightened. It's a long step into the unknown, leaving our comfort zone, our old home where we owned outright the house Murphy built (with 15 roof pitches and a sinstral spiral design) in an area of South Africa famous for its beauty, with our own stream and fruit trees and some acres, our safety net of friends and family far behind. There were no paths trodden by other migrants to do what we had done - how I earn my living, the visa we got, and where we have chosen to live are all new ground that we could ask no-one else about. Taking our dogs and cats most people reckoned as close to financial insanity. Deciding to stay would have been far less effort, and cheaper and much, much simpler.

I'm glad we did it. It was anything but easy, but I've never been good at doing the easy or taking the path everyone else travels just because they have. Yet, it's actually not that different or that unique. Humans have done just this... well, since the human race existed. Humans move, explore adapt to their environment, and adapt the evironment to themselves, just like termites build termite mounds. It's what we are. We're intelligent enough to start trying to minimise our damage and do some custodian work... but we always do move, explore, find new things to eat and places and ways to live. The culture I come from - which has more in common with that of the US, Australia, Canada or New Zealand than the 'source countries' in Europe would find Flinders, and what we are doing, very like going back 50 years or more... in all the good aspects too. Community. Yeah, gossip and all the other small place things... but the support too. We know our neighbors. People drop in (and we've only been here 5 months). Yet we have good medicine available and good internet access.

And you can make home anywhere you can take your heart. We have our rock, our piece of an African frontier farm -- proof that it can be done. It's only one stone toward building a new home of own, and not just a rented place (which still is a big improvement on the tent or caravan we thought we'd be in), but it's a start. A root, if you like, that we grow from. Soon the dogs and cats will be here. There are days and events which will still be bleak. Unlike 'refugees' who get humanitarian visas there are no free rides for us. We're not bludgers, we don't expect them. Rock, dogs, cats, our boys and most especially Barbs... I can handle it. And although I am less than sure about eating sea-weed, enjoy a lot of it.

Flinders Island might have been a long way to come to plant that root, but I believe it's good soil for it. I think if I had listened to the voice of reason and left the dogs and cats... we might have had more of a financial security blanket, but I would not have been me, and I would have struggled to come to terms with myself. I'd rather be poor and feel at peace with that aspect of my concience anyway.

The island has had its share of sadness and hardship. Shipwrecks, brutality and heartbreak. But it has also been a refuge, beautiful, lonely and quiet, yet friendly and warm, a balm for the soul, and place that has been much loved. You can feel that here.