More on Olives.

I thought I'd add some more to the olive story after B's post yesterday. I don't know about the South African rainbow nation, but I'm doing a fine imitation of a rainbow human. The wind was cold, biting and strong when we were picking, looking up, my eyes screwed up so those symbols of peace, the olive branches, didn't whip back and poke me in the eye. And, because I had wanted to do some writing first, it was mid-day. Didn't realise how strong the sun was. My face is the colour of over-ripe tomato today, between the wind and the sun. My fingernails are black. Not all the scrubbing in world will stop me looking like I just hauled my hands out of the innards of an elderly Ford. The scars and cuts (this is me. My hands would not have healing cuts if I were in a coma. I am eternally grateful for anti-tetanus shots.) are purple. As it's not warm enough to consider swimming without a wetsuit a lot of me is a charming shade of dead-fish white. And my forearms are brown (from the hard sunny work of weilding a computer).

Anyway, we ended up with I think 9 kilos of usable olives which had to be either salt-layered (about a half kg of the ripest) or put into wood-ash lye (about 300 grammes of the greenest) and pricked and put to soak for the other 8 kilos or so. To prick olives... you cut a slice of cork and push pins through it to make a little hegdgehog. You then sit on the hedgehog, because that's whole lot more sensible than the alternative that you are supposed to do. Less painful too. However, if you have determined that you really are going to process olives, you then use the hedgehog to pick up olives (which are now in container without water, and thus prick them and drop them into the next bowl with water in it. You need to make sure you have a plate or second bowl which you can can put on top to keep the olives submerged. Otherwise you find them climbing out of the bowl, towelling themselves off and trotting off to the pub (where you can find olives someone has mechanically processed, also at the bar, in a bowl).

If you live in New Zealand (where they also grow olives and have lots of introduced English creatures) you can do this with a real live hedgehog, which will add a whole new dimension, and the RSPCA, to your life. On the whole I think you are probably better off with the pins, but if it's adventure you are after... well as an alternative you could try Barbara's new Olive oil experiment with the rejects... Not only did this involve danger to life and limb, but it was a great shaping up weightloss process. She started on the middle of the kitchen floor with her new patent olive squisher - A five litre cast iron pot and the lid off a three liter one. And her. Standing on it in her nice clean bunditoes and rocking... evil black goo began to squirt and splart out of the sides of the pot-lid onto those little feet... Oh for a movie camera. Her face! At this point I decided to intervene before the entire kitchen got covered in what I already suspected was a very permanent purple black dye. You may have gathered we're possibly not your most usual couple, but I carried my wife over the thresh-hold - out. Like a sack of meal - terribly romatic, with her laughing helplessly, and - when she had breath - begging to be put down. It got really interesting at the door - where I had to bend down so I could open it.

She's a very determined lass, so I got to carry the feindish device out after her, so the crushing jive could continue. Up she went again. Squish-splart. "Aren't you sorry I lost those kilos for our medical?"
I looked back at the door... "No."
Now... the pot lid is rounded. And olives do contain oil even if mixed with black splarty goo. Oily slippery oil. And of course a bed of olives is not terribly stable...



I love her dearly even though she was a fallen woman. (wearing her glasses to do this, I ask you). Fortunately, no need to call the ambulance - I have this mental image of their faces.

The goo... well It's been stirred and squeezed. It's oily, but oil hasn't really seperated out. I think B would need a lot more kilos. I am about to go and put some in a milk bottle, and walk out into the field (a long way from the house) and spin it around my head on a rope (nearest I can think of to a centifuge.) Hmm. odds on going into town and being asked just what I was doing twirling? :-).

Olives!

Today we picked olives.

I love to eat them, but had not realised how many different shapes and sizes they came in. At least the trees were fairly short, so we could reach the olives from the ground without climbing. Some trees were full of fruit, some completely bare, but we managed to pick about 12kg. Of course Dave was selective about what he picked, I tended to pick clean.

So when we got home I took the perfect olives out for Dave to begin to process in various ways, so we can see what works best, and then I was left with 3kgs of dud ones. What a waste! We could not allow that so I decided to get the oil out of them. Olive oil comes from olives? Pale yellow stuff, that is so good in cooking.

Right. These are ripe olives, already black in colour. So I put them in a big cast iron pot, and used a slightly smaller pot's lid to crush the olives. Only I wasn't strong enough to make any impression on the fruit, so I stood on it and rocked. That started to work and I could hear squishing noises. Only, unfortunately, the juice started to splash out, onto our landlords kitchen floor. Dave suggested I go outside, but my feet were already rather olive purple looking. So he carried me out! On his back! With me giggling all the way.

Once outside I did manage to get quite a lot of goo out of the olives, but it is a purple goo, more like the colour of wine! So I tasted some. It is bitter, very bitter.

Now we have added water to the goo, and hopefully the oil will rise to the top, and we can somehow scoop it out. I am not sure that the oil will be worth it, as my feet and hands are now stained purple, and my back is aching from falling over while rocking the pot, but it certainly adds to our fund of experiences here.

My only question is "is the oil that is going to rise up out of the goo going to be purple, pink or yellow?"

Gales, fear and danger

Woah nellie... it is NASTY out there. 40 knot gusts pushing fine rain. The mailplane didn't come in. It's been good for writing - I had a nice run of words this morning.

I was thinking about a comment someone made - about a lack of dramatic tension in our expedition into the wild making it a dull story... Hmmm. You know, you can't rock climb (and stay alive) on the sharp end doing trad without keeping your cool. That means going up first, putting in little wedges and cams. If you do it wrong, you die. If you do it right you still risk long scary falls and finding out if you did it right the hard way. If you happen to be opening (being the first person to ever climb) new climbs like this (and I have opened rather a lot. Several hundreds) you're going off into the unknown, where no-one has been before, trusting your judgement and skill. Much the same sort of thing applies to catching crayfish (spiny lobster) without aqualungs. It's a series of judgement calls. There may be an eel under that rock. You could get stuck down there (it's happened to me). There is a lot of risk, ameliorated by experience and skill, but, well you can't do these sort of things for many years without knowing the dangers, facing them, and dealing with them fairly calmly. It calls for a phlegmatic personality with a long neck. I wonder if, however, I am telling less than good story because of it? There've been a lot of phases of this journey where I have been near blue-faced with terror, torn apart by misery. It's been very like opening a new rock climb. This is not Joe with a degree in whatever moving from a job in South Africa to a job in Melbourne, where he has a brother and three cousins, a company organising it, a house and car organised and a comfortable financial landing mat. Or even young Fred with no real responsibilities setting off on a working holiday and going to a foreign country alone. Those are difficult and scary enough. This is... a long, long way out from that. Yes, we've done what we can to make sure that if we fall we have put in what wedges and cams we can. But we're a long, long way away from our support system, and a long way out from those tiny wedges. Keeping cool, moving steadily and keeping our nerve and courage is a lot more difficult, and more important. Much of our landing mat went into moving the animals. That was our ethical decision, that I am glad we made, but it was a terrifying one. The island is (so far) a friendly and welcoming place (partly because of our attitude, I think) - but back when we were going through the utter heartbreak of putting the dogs and cats into quarantine... we had no way of even beginning to assess that. We were selling Finnegan's Wake - possibly one of the most beautiful properties in the Midlands, leaving it all, losing a lot financially, emotionally and as a support system... to follow a dream that could easily turn into a total nightmare. And when I was dealing with those delightful people at Eastlands Mall Telstra, when our tent blew away, when the blue slug overheated in the middle of nowhere, when the tire blew and we couldn't get the vehicle jacked up and we had the ferry to catch... the nightmare seemed close.

There have been a few times since... we're still moving lightly, carefully, over fragile rock, on thin hand and footholds, just inside the limits of our strength. Knowing that if we gave in to fear or angst for a second... it would be over. Knowing too that there is potential for success, for dealing with disasters (which will happen) but only if we keep cool and work at it. For instance I'm diving - mostly alone. Dive alone = die alone. I know that. I am aware of that every second I am out there, my senses keyed. Feeling and watching for problems in water that I just don't know enough about. Watching for signs of current, knowing there are undertows. Yet... there is abalone and crayfish out there. And, bluntly, I am a man, not ready to back off and stick to eating cheese yet. And I've got real courage with me too in Barbs. In the night out there with me... walking carefully through the dark in chilly silent water - knowing there are channels, currents, soft and sucking mud. The possibility of dis-orientating mist... looking down into the water and seeing the s-bends of an eely thing - and not knowing just what kind of animal they are here? Deadly sea-snake? Vicious moray? Good dinner? So I prod it with a spear and it swims away and we laugh against the darkness.

Yeah, there is tension aplenty all right. I've probably been more worried and terrified and miserable at times in the last year than I have in the last twenty (and that's not all been a holiday camp). We've been knocked to our knees a few times too... so far, we've got up, and marched on. It'll probably happen again, and again. It'll be years (if ever) before we have the assets and friends and family support systems of the old country... But it's a dream we decided to follow. It's a demanding physical and psycological adventure. Sometimes I think better undertaken at 25 than 50...

But we have our dream and we have our rock. We have each other, a sense of humour, a sense of adventure, a willingness to fit in, to try anything. And soon we'll have our animals.

Onward and upward. No retreat.

Olives

They look like black cherries - the olives are ripe (and some are passed it). The Orchard up at the school has been left to its own devices, it was planted ages back by someone who is no longer at the school - they did as student excercise preserve some olives last year, but this year some other project has taken that slot - so there are I would guess 50 trees - many barely waist high and oliveless and shaped by the bitter wind (This IS Flinders). About 20 of them have anything from 10 to a hundred olives on them. Two or three have many more. I think Olive oil may be beyond me at this stage (unless done by hand-squeezing?) but I hope we'll get some olives brined and in Olive oil and vingegar and olive oil and lemon juice. Until you've eaten home made olives... you might think olives in a bottle were good. Yes, I adore olives.
The school is about a km away, and so very convenient. I just wish I knew what the varieties were! (the pictures are of fruit on different trees).



And yes I am squeaking with excitement! I've been dying to do my own olives again for 20 years.

Days daze...+

I feel like I've crammed about 4 days into today... Maybe that's what wombats do- ergo the cuboidal dos... Today was supposed to be the last day good weather for the week but I am trying to work on the book... Anyway - got up at 4.30 worked until sunup, woke B, went to jetty for an hour to catch trevally - got one flathead and 3 shrimp, worked, went to doctor (another hour and a half) wrote my MGC blog post, and set off for our clamming and oyster spot - arrived just before 3 - collected clams walked up to get oysters, and then legged it back to drive to John's place to cut firewood before dark. Filled the ute, set off for Patriarch's Inlet to try for flounder - the tide was too high and the moon quite full, but we gave it a go anyway - 3 swimming prawn scooped (to add to the 3 shrimp) and one flounder (2 others seen, but they were too small)later we headed back home avoiding 2 wombats, 7 wallaby and 1 possum - I cleaned the fish, B put the clams in fake sea water and then I cooked the morning flathead and some chips. And at 9.20 started to write the blog... I find myself too tired to think. Must be the intent staring into the ripples at the slivery shadows of fish and the walking about 2 km - all knee to groin deep in icy water, pushing against the tide... and a couple of km to fetch oysters... not just thinking about the seige of Constantinople in the current book so I think I'll go and bath and go to bed.

Tomorrow is supposed to be better - we have some Olive trees (with the possibility of pickling our own olives) we're going to look at at lunch time, but it is supposed blow and rain. Good for desk work.

Anzac Day too

Barbs posted about this, but I thought I'd give my perspectives too. It was cold and the last stars came and went behind the clouds as they went past. The little cenotaph stood lit up against the pre-dawn. You could see the brass plaques... I went to look later - There are plaques on all four sides and at reast twenty names on each and an extra one for Vietnam... The cenotaph looks out across Marshall bay to West End and to islands beyond to the West. Isles of Blest, one hopes. A good veiw for heroes, and large price paid for freedom by a small island. In WW2 my Dad was there, and my Mum and B's mum too (B's dad lied about his age and served WW1 - they wouldn't let in in WW2.) I was a conscript soldier too, once. Lost friends, saw people hurt inwardly and out. They gave a great deal with courage, and honour, so we could stand there. In South Africa that sacrifice is being swept away, forgotten. Weedy memorials, plaques stolen for the brass. It's a mistake to forget, methinks. And Anzac day... well it's not a paen of victory, and triumphalism is it? It's a tribute to battlers and the forging of steel by putting it into the fire.

In the silence after the Last Post... I was thinking of my own comrades, of my parents. Not a word or sound from the circle of people gathered... and I think it was kookaburra started up in the trees to the south.
Then his mate called from across the road, on a telephone pole. He flew across the paling sky. They cawed and cackled at each other.
It might almost have been 'g'day and 'howyergoin'.
It was very eerie.
"At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

ANZAC day

Wow, what a start to a public holiday.

A 20 min drive in the dark, avoiding wallaby, to the cenataph at Emita for a dawn service commemorating soldiers from the first world war, and subsequent wars. We stood out on the grass, about 1oo/150 of us, (out of a population of 700) while it slowly got light enough to see who we were standing next to. The sun finally rose as the service finished and shone on the flag at half mast. As the "last post" played it almost echoed in the predawn calm, but as the sun rose the wind rose with it. Unfortunately we had left the camera, with the torches, at home so we have no beautiful dawn photo's showing the cloud formations, but they were worth getting up for.

It was wonderful to see so many people up so early to share the service, especially as there is a second service at 11am in town, not miles out in the "bush".

Then it was off to a nearby farm where Lions had cooked breakfast and we could have our morning coffee with or without rum! We met some new people, who sound even better at foraging than we are. I hope we can do some trading with them, abalone for wallaby, we will see when they get back from a six week trip "off island".