Leaving Unschooling Behind

  Ah, unschooling. You seemed adequate for many years, but then the flaws started to become apparent. Most of the skills that are supposedly picked up automatically just weren’t-and not through lack of resources or exposure. The girls wanted to write stories and letters, but their handwriting and spelling was below their needed level, so they would get frustrated and give up. They were reading many good books, but had no internal filing system to sort out and categorise what they were learning. Oods wanted to learn Latin and violin, but you can’t really unschool either. The clones were becoming feral children, spending all day on the trampoline or in the sandpit playing pretend. Shorty needed more structure, more repetition, to allow him to master his basic skills. And I was looking at all of that time essentially wasted, thinking, ‘They could be learning so much more’. Which apparently is me projecting unfair expectations onto them based on my insecurities, and not at all based on me thinking that my eight year old really should be able to spell ‘because’ and write it without a reversed b. Because she wants to.

  So I did my usual reading blitz, and we’ve now totally shaken up our home education. The kids get a say in what they learn about, but generally they have an insatiable desire to learn about everything. In the last year they have learnt an incredible amount, and they’re incredibly proud of themselves. They’re challenging themselves and meeting the challenges. Their pretend play has always been varied and complex, but now it’s so educated-seeing Frosty, at 4, re-enact the Iliad is very impressive.

  I’ve noticed that they’re much more content. Arguments are rare when they have their minds challenged and hands busy. This goes for me too-I always felt kind of useless wandering around, giving a bit of assistance here and there, but generally feeling like they didn’t need me. And i’m having the most fantastic time. Not many adults get to fill in the gaps in their learning, and i’m finding it all insanely interesting.  I can see how incredibly useful the chronological history, the formal grammar, and the phonics has been to me already. This sort of stuff may not be on most school curriculums, but it’s the sort of thing I find myself using regularly (and feeling cheated that I was never taught it). And the more I give them, the more they want. Two weeks into this year’s work, I was feeling frazzled with our new workload-and they were asking me if I had anything else they could do. Like Chinese, and poetry, and can I please find some more maths puzzle books for them to do? They want more of everything (except dictation, which they believe is evil torture even as they acknowledge how useful it is to them).

  I have come to the conclusion that unschooling just isn’t for us. Looking critically at my experience, I can’t see how it works effectively for anyone over toddler age, if your goal is to have a well-educated child. I have also come to the conclusion that childhood is by far the best time to learn as much as you can, while you’re young and hungry and have no other commitments, and it is my job to make it easier for them. Unschooling seemed a bit like requiring your children to reinvent the wheel-sure, you can saturate them with words, and lots of kids will pick up reading all by themselves. But it seems a cumbersome, difficult process to require them to puzzle it out when you could sit an eager child down and do some phonics instruction, explain how English works, and have them reading in a tenth of the time. (And so that’s why that’s exactly what I did, and i’ve had three five year old readers so far. Frosty is working on it, and Shorty runs to his own timescale, incomprehensible to the rest of us). I never understood why unschooling seems to require your child stumble around in the dark, until they have their lightbulb moment and can finally puzzle out exactly how Latin verb endings work after much frustration-why not explain it and have them memorise them, and that’s that? Or, to paraphrase Ruth Beechick (because I can’t find the quote), why expect them to be creative when they have nothing to be creative with?

  Unschoolers tend to portray any curriculum work as a violation of freedom, but when it’s by choice, it can be wonderful. Seeing the unbridled excitement and pride of my girls when they finished FLL 3 was wonderful-they had worked hard and achieved something because of that. What a valuable lesson. They have in no way lost any freedom. They have hours every day of total freedom, and now they appreciate it because they feel they’ve earnt it. They have a balance between time they’ve scheduled for learning and free time, so they appreciate and value both much more than ever before.

  So, unschooling? Been there, done that-not impressed. We’re too motivated and eager for that. Bring on the bookwork!

My family is weird

  While transferring photos from the camera to my computer, I came across this.

  Lols, holding a chicken chopping-block style, on the table in front of a photo of the husband holding a chook on an actual chopping block. This table is in the kitchen-thankfully not the one we eat at. On questioning, this is because they wanted to see if this rooster (bought as a day-old brown Leghorn, but most definitely is not) is a Rhode Island Red. The only photo they could find of our mature Tasmanian RIR roosters were harvest day ones. So they were comparing.

  Conclusion-we don’t know what he is. And the hatchery (Darling Downs, aka Peak Poultry Supplies) is ignoring us, so I guess we’ll remain ignorant. Sadly, after we pick out the sub-standard appearances from our purchase, we’re only left with about 12 breeders in the three colours. These seem perfect, so we’ll cross our fingers that we don’t get any funny-coloured throwbacks when we start hatching them.

My life’s so picturesque it even makes me want to vomit

  It’s been especially nice, recently, to realise that this farming life of ours really is the most wonderful way to live. This was emphasised at 6am a few weeks back, when the alarm went off  and the husband offered me a morning off milking and a sleep in-and I refused. On my 30th birthday, I much preferred to get up early and spend time with our goats and cows, outside in the fresh air, than sleep in for the first time in months. Not many people can say they’re so eager to get out of bed every morning.

  I feel fitter and healthier than I have in my whole life. I’m outside every day, using my body for meaningful tasks. I have better muscles than I did when going to the gym, and I got them without really noticing. Hauling bales of hay and carting wheelbarrow loads of manure will do that-the husband and I call it ‘farm gym’. We’re eating like peasants, with plenty of vegies straight from the garden, raw dairy, and sourdough bread. The kitchen is a chemistry lab of good things to eat, with ferments bubbling away, preserving jars filling, and of course the magical alchemies of cheese and butter. And really, anyone would be happy when the amount of cream passing through the kitchen can be measured in litres.

 

   Poor confused calves, they think i’m their mother

Most surprising to me is just how much i’m enjoying the animals. I wouldn’t have called myself an animal person before now-although I like chickens I don’t like dogs and i’m indifferent to cats. And I hated the guinea pigs. Now the kids call me the crazy goat lady, because I really like my goats. I regularly wander over to sit down and have a scratch and a chat with them, they follow me around like dogs, and fondly nibble my hair while i’m milking them. I spoil them rotten with warm molasses water and armfuls of organic silverbeet that city folk would pay $30 for at a farmer’s market.

   Not sure why they call me the crazy goat lady…….

  It’s also been exciting to have our future farm take shape. We’re getting a real picture of what we plan to do and why. While we’ve always known we wanted to have land, we didn’t really know what we planned to do with it, and how we planned to turn it into an income. Which is why we didn’t last at our first acreage-we bought it because we liked it, without the cold hard light of practicality and forethought. Now, with another five years of experience in gardening, animals, and life in general, and many more mistakes under our belt, we’re rather older and wiser (I hope). We’ve started slowly looking for our piece of land, but we’re in no rush. In the meantime we’re concentrating on setting up with our herds and flocks, and continuing to skill ourselves up.

  This is not to say we’re perfectly content-the lure of travel still calls, and i’m really not sure if we’re ready to settle down just yet. The thought of more travelling, this time in a caravan (oh, the comparative luxury!) still has some allure. And we like change, and new challenges so much that everyday life can seem a bit……..everyday, sometimes. But we’ll decide all in good time-until then, i’ll keep eating ice-cream every day. It’s a hard life, but i’m up for the challenge.

Unradical Unschooling

  When we first decided to home educate, about 7 years ago, I did what I usually do upon gaining a new interest-I read. I read my way through every home ed book in the Tasmanian library system (there’s many, the wonderful place) and fell in love with unschooling. With a houseful of toddlers, it worked for us. Then, about 5 years ago I noticed more and more popping up online about radical unschoolers, so I investigated. Basically, it’s about removing all limits, rules and expectations. The child decides everything, and trust is the buzzword-just trust that your child is doing exactly what they need to do, right now, even if you don’t understand why (even if it’s killing related, completely clashes with your beliefs or involves 14 hours a day on the computer). That when you get in touch with yourself, and your true way of being, you would understand, that you would be free! Then the world will be a better place, populated with ‘free’ people.

  Well, call me a reject, abjectly out of touch with my true self, because I really don’t get it. Oh, I thought about trying it, but I never accepted the reasoning behind it. It sounds all lovely and wonderful, but it’s like every other extremist viewpoint-all dressed up in flowery language and sounding suspiciously religious (you just have to believe, to have faith, to let go, then you will be truly free). It doesn’t respect the family’s value systems. And of course, there’s lots of criticism of schools. While I don’t see many positives in the school system, I also tend to distrust beliefs that need to knock their opposites down for them to climb up-if it’s as good as you say it is, it’ll speak for itself.

  I finally realised that I really don’t like the philosophy because we’re technically not child-centred. We’re family-centred. There’s seven of us in this tribe, and we all need to get along, which means we all need to take everyone’s needs and wants into account. I’m happy to cater to every whim of a three month old, but as they get older they learn to compromise too.

  Old fuddy-duddy that I am, I believe in bedtimes, for their and my sanity. My kids eat what they are given. They contribute to the running of the household, the garden and the animals. Screen time for them is non-existent (and nearly non-existent for me, I practice what I preach).And sometimes i’ll make them do something, even if they think they won’t like it. Usually, after the initial push, they enjoy it. (A recent incident with Sparkles and handwriting practice comes to mind. She said she didn’t want to, I said it wasn’t optional. Fifteen minutes of copywork later she was ecstatic to see how much she’d already improved, and now happily does it regularly). Sometimes you need a kick to try something-and when the kick is given by someone who knows you well, it’s usually a kick in the right direction.

  RUers seem to believe that if a child must fit to some of the parent’s needs, that the parent is selfish and enforcing their will upon the child. It seems to me to be a sure recipe for stress, guilt, and the extension of extreme natural parenting philosophy (which also seems to be a sure recipe for stress and guilt). And if I have to honour every decision of my child, what is that saying about my knowledge and experience? I definitely don’t know it all, but surely nearly 30 years of life counts for something? The kids certainly seem to think so-they trust my judgement and respect my recommendations, and are generally happy and eager to see what I suggest. In return, if they have a go at something and hate it, I don’t force them to continue.

  Over the past couple of years, i’ve found myself adding a qualifier when asked which education method we use. ‘Unschooling…………but not radical.’ Unschooling seems to have gained more and more of a radical aura, to the point where most people who once would have called themselves unschoolers seem to be using the term ‘natural learners’ instead. Unfortunately, unschooling now seems to mean the extreme end of the scale-no rules, no schedule, no educational goals.That is completely not us, and to be honest I really wouldn’t like people to think that it was.

  However, after the initial raves, RUing seems to be losing popularity. I’ve started to read accounts of people who have tried it and found that their lives descended into chaos and their kids were unhappy (such as Owlet-there’s also good comments there). Most people seem to adore it when their children are young, then by the time they’re reached about 8 they’re looking to add a bit more structure (usually at the child’s request). I think it’s because toddlers can generally pick up what they need to know in their everyday life. But when they start wanting to learn more complex skills and knowledge, structure really helps. It also helps Shorty, who doesn’t pick up much intuitively, and requires more repetition and graded increase in difficulty to really master a skill.

  Anyhow, I don’t even know if we could call ourselves unschoolers anymore-I have a houseful of academics now! But i’ll save writing about those changes for another day.

Hello Mareea

  It’s funny what happens when you meet a few people and let it be known you’re looking for animals. They just appear. And on hearing our girls really, really wanted a pony, our landlords mentioned they had an old one up the back paddock we could borrow. We didn’t hear any more for a few months, then one morning they rang and said their son had caught her, and would we like to come and get her? Only……..someone had to ride her home. Guess who was nominated?

  Lucky me. As the husband can’t ride, and I had a somewhat horsey childhood, I got to ride the cunning old Mareea home about 4kms. After not riding for thirteen years. I went across country, through creeks and gates, and had her show me some of her tricks-like turning circles while mounting, and her astonishing inability to walk. Even at walking speed she can canter. I had bruises the size of my palm on my thighs from stiff stirrup leathers and my core muscles were agonising for days. Who needs the gym?

However, she is a lovely horse. She’s not nasty at all, just clever. And knowing the three boys (now men) who rode her I can see why-they would have been encouraging her all the way! The kids love her, and ride her daily. And i’m breathing a sigh of relief that we get to try out this horsey business without any outlay of money.

Settling in and settling down

  So. We are here. After many years we don’t have anything that needs doing somewhere else. No big move to plan, nothing elsewhere to worry about, no big plans for the future. We can be be here………….and live.

  It’s really weird.

  I’ve almost forgotten how to have a home, how to settle down into a place and belong there. I’m used to being the fly-by-nighter, with it always in my thoughts that in six months, I won’t be here. When that’s always in the back of your mind, it does affect the way you live. Lazy with friendships, no involvement in the community, always living in the future-that’s me for the last few years.

  I’m used to having a big something ahead of me. I can plan, I can pack, I can get everything in the house into a storage unit and be on the road with very little disruption to our life. The kids don’t even notice. I’m really good at being busy and efficient and getting an insane amount done easily. It’s pretty normal.

  Normal, however, is not normal. In the three months since we moved in here the husband and I have had many freak-outs. Maybe we should have moved somewhere else instead! Oh no, it’s cold-let’s go to the tropics! I find myself feeling antsy and irritable, and realise that it’s because i’m a bit lost. I’m not used to this normal stuff. The idea of finding social circles and groups and putting down roots is rather daunting, and I think it’s because this is it. There’s no more changing things by taking off somewhere else. We’re here, and there’s really no reason at all to go elsewhere. One thing I realised in our travels is that there is no utopia. We went to notorious alternative areas, intentional communities, and places people raved about. They were all pretty disappointing. The alternative places were full of drugs and not somewhere you’d want to bring up kids, ICs were not full of farmer-types like us, and most of the other raved about places were yuppie-hippy-wankery. So while here is completely unremarkable, it’s perfect precisely because of that. It has the climate, the beautiful land, the relatively safe town. It’s a good place to bring up children in a farm lifestyle.

  However, I have gained some wisdom-I am doing nothing. Which means i’m not trying to expand my business, throwing myself back into study, or coming up with any other hare-brained schemes. We’re not madly searching for a property to buy or doing anything else huge for a change. I’ve definitely gotten the urge to, but i’m not acting on it. Instead, we’re collecting animals, making a garden, and attempting to make a home (furniture would help). I’m knitting a lot while the husband plays the guitar………..and we’re slowly starting to feel a bit more human. The stress is draining away and i’m feeling less raw. Like always, I didn’t realise just how stressed I was until I had time to stop and pay attention. I still don’t feel like getting out much, even though i’ve met some lovely people-right now we have everything we want right here, and as right here is where we’re planning on staying, we’re enjoying it. There’ll be plenty of time for life here, and it’s a good feeling.

7 months and 10 days in Tasmania.

  Not that I was counting or anything. Oh, but how glad I am it is all over-and so quickly! We expected to be there for much longer, living in limbo, waiting for the freedom that selling our house would give us. And it was all over and done with before winter began. 

  We decided to make the most of it, and while renovating our house started visiting the local attractions-North-East Park

  Ralph Falls and Cash’s Gorge

The majestic White Knights, at Mathinna. Somewhat ruined by the astonishing amount of leeches there, and us not having salt in our kit.

 

I forgot the camera for Columba Falls. Oh, and Lilydale Falls. The site of the infamous snake episode, years ago. None spotted this time thankfully!

And basically tried to settle in as much as possible-and when you’re us, and you have half an acre of beautiful soil at your disposal, that means producing food. Hello meat, for the first time in four years! We bought five sheep, and ate three. As my sister-in-law told us, we lost our vege-tinity.

Doesn’t he look tasty? But Sam the Lamb escaped the slaughterman (for now), and was sold with the house.

  13 Rhode Island Reds kept us piled with eggs.

And hatched seven babies!  A chicken book the husband was reading recently stated that RIR’s do not go broody. Obviously a book Mrs Broody hadn’t read.

   Um, we ate three of those babies too. Our friend was willing to teach us how, so we had a tatt-covered bloke turn up with lots of very sharp knives. We had lots of giggles about being friends with him-i’m sure most people assumed that with the overload of tattoos and dreadlocks between the three of us, we were up to something more illegal and interesting than sitting around drinking herbal tea and talking animal husbandry.

  I’ll keep the photos of the next part of the process to myself though, as i’m sure the vegans wouldn’t appreciate them. Come to think of it, most meat eaters wouldn’t either. IF slaughterhouses had glass walls etc…….

  We gardened. This is what a couple of months, a pick and a shovel can do to a patch of grass.

  Considering the hail storm we had in late October (see below), we ended the summer pretty well. While people rave about gardening in Tasmania, i’m not a fan. Give me more pests and a longer growing season any day. We literally got about six weeks of okay summer growing weather, and by the start of March when we left we’d had two ripe tomatoes. Considering we’ve lived in places where we’ve had tomatoes all year around…………..they can keep their brassicas!

  I finally started my herbal medicine study, but that’s on pause, maybe never to be resumed, as I was horribly disappointed with the quality of the course. I’m still waiting for a resolution of my complaints about references and accuracy-it’s time to go to the next stage of making sure they can’t ignore me, I think. But we grew many herbs, I made infused oils from comfrey and calendula that work amazingly, plus many other practical experiments. I feel like a mad scientist, which is probably why I like it so much.

  And that was about it. After living in a few places in a row knowing they were going to be temporary, I just couldn’t muster up the energy required to get out and do permanent-type things there. So I spent most of my time at home, got a hell of a lot of sewing and tie-dyeing done, got obsessed with the classical method of home education and began weaving that into our life, and basically kept myself manically busy while I crossed my fingers that this last hurdle of ours towards a permanent, stable life would be over quickly. And it was! When the house settled we had grand plans of travelling all around Tasmania. In the end we spent four days at Lagoons Beach (spectacular, free, highly recommended)

Then we decided we’d had enough, booked tickets, spent six days enjoying the north-west, and got on the Spirit of Tasmania. A night in the ocean recliners was enough to convince us that we never want to live on an island again (the mainland doesn’t count), we all cheered when our tyres hit the ground in the morning, and we were ready to head north again.

So, we were happy there. But now it’s done, and i’m nothing except glad. Phew.

Feeling nostalgic

   I used to get all depressed that we hadn’t ‘settled down’, and then frantically try to do stuff that meant we could ASAP. As you may guess none of this worked, as we’re still traipsing around, with another two states to be lived in this year alone. I’ve sort of accepted this, but when I look through old photos I really get the settling down bug! We owned our acreage for about 2.5 years. For the last year we didn’t live there, and for the last six months we didn’t even GO there. But when the husband dropped in, this is what was there after all that neglect. Imagine what we could do with somewhere we lived and tended to the whole time? Now we don’t have a newborn, and all of our kids are a couple of years older?

Lemonades

Our first pineapple

Always bananas around the mulch pit

And paw-paw!

Coffee beans…….

  This doesn’t include the hundreds of passionfruit, the self-seeded tomatoes-or the damn avocadoes.

  I’m at the stage again of just wanting to get started, to stop living in limbo, but we’ll get there……….eventually. And I like to think that when we do, it’ll be especially sweet.

Struggling with educational snobbery

  I am an education snob. This is mostly due to everyone having had high expectations of me as a child geek, effortlessly topping my classes and doing every extension available. This carried on into the accelerated class (with extra-accelerated maths) at high school. While working, partying and drinking copious amounts I managed to keep up the A+ grades with quickly-scrawled essays. I always had the expectation (and the expectation of me) that I would go on to a spectacularly impressive degree at an impressive university, and I did, beginning Behavioural Neuroscience at Monash at barely 17.

  Then, things started to go off the rails. While lots of my classes were interesting, I was failing to see how they would lead to a career that I actually wanted to do. And I realised that many people had been studying while I was doing the working/partying/drinking thing, and had a much more solid background than me. All of a sudden I actually had to work at learning, without having the appropriate motivation for doing so. I agonised for a short while, spending many hours playing Command and Conquer (at the husband’s house) or The Sims (at my house), instead of going to lectures (but I still passed first year-barely).

  So I deferred. And got a job as a cleaner (can you hear the screams of horror from where you are?) And I really, really enjoyed it. It was at a hospital so I spent all day talking to lovely senior citizens while scrubbing their rooms, and I earnt excellent money for an 18 year old. I was soon doing three different jobs there, also doing kitchen work and talking myself into a job as a data clerk at Breastscreen. I was able to buy a car, get my licence, and rent a brand-new little unit with the husband (then boyfriend), where we played endless Xbox while getting shitfaced. Then I managed to drag him to Queensland for a holiday, he realised it was far preferable to Melbourne, and we began our nomadic life. And decided babies were better had sooner, rather than later, and money was most easily got by renovating crappy old houses.

  The education thing has always niggled at me, though. I have always wanted a qualification of some sorts, and started a Bachelor of Nursing externally when I had Oods, which lasted two weeks (laugh at me, thinking with a newborn i’d have so much time on my hands). Then I began a Bachelor of Health Promotion (spot the health/medical theme here?) when pregnant with Shorty. This time I completed a semester with HDs-but then PND hit and I couldn’t continue into the next one. I then began it again when pregnant with Frosty but my heart wasn’t in it-and I don’t think i’ll go back to it. I chucked the books for a few years, deciding to teach myself dressmaking/pattern drafting in more depth instead, thinking something suited to me would come up eventually.

  Then some friends we met travelling kept talking about their friend the herbalist. Herbalist? People still do that? Like, as a job? And I have since found that they certainly do, and so could I. Me, who attempts to grow every herb I can get seeds from, who doses up the kids (and the pets) with all sorts of weird stuff rather than medicine, and who has a whole shelf of herbal books already. And I can also extend it to a qualification in nutritional medicine-considering how much time I spend cooking, and my obsession with wholefoods and fermenting, plus the fact that Shorty’s medicinal garlic chomping has actually been recorded in his audiology file, well, i’m sort of seeing that I just may be suited for this. I began to think of teaching rather than practicing, running short and day courses, and enabling people to treat and prevent their own minor ailments.

  Which is where the educational snobbery enters. I never really considered anything but a degree-while i’d had a cursory look over TAFE handbooks, a degree was the only way to go. I’ve always considered that you go to TAFE for trades, not for academics. What use is a diploma for an intellectual course? It’s not like a proper qualification, is it? Well, I can’t do the only Bachelor of Herbal Medicine offered, on-campus at a college. Not with five children, and not in Brisbane (city, argh!). So it has to the the external………..are you ready…………Advanced Diploma. From an independent college, no name-dropping kudos there. I’m having trouble getting my head around the fact that it’s not a degree. From a university. This is compounded by the fact that you cannot register with industry bodies after doing the external course, as it’s not considered good enough. (You can register, however, after the course and six months working in the field). And it costs $21,600 in VET_FEE-HELP fees (with the 20% surcharge), crikey! For two years off-campus it seems a bit steep, especially as it’s so much more than the HECS fees were for my on campus Neuroscience degree, complete with gel electrophoresis experiments and real cadavers. I’ve been dithering about enrolling this whole year, and have reached the point where i’ve collected my various academic transcripts for RPL ( I should get 6-7 subjects out of 28 written off, reducing costs considerably), and am trying to wheedle the husband into letting me pay upfront with the coming guv’mint bribes, thereby receiving a 30% discount. If that all works, the cost for the qualification drops to around $9000. And I can use it as credit for a Health Sciences degree in the future, if I decide to, effectively halving the subjects for that.

  Also, all of these colleges are…….well, somewhat woo. While I am convinced of herbalism’s medicinal qualities, some of the electives i’m offered sit on shakier foundations of evidence. Like homeopathy. (But it’s OK-I can do nutrition and other more stable electives.) I have the feeling i’ll be leaving my comfortable scientific realm of epidemiology and double-blind studies into a world of anecdote and n=1 studies. I don’t think i’ll fit in well. Call me blinded by too much education, as woo-fanatics do to anyone who chooses to put more stock in scientific evidence over anecdotes (with all of their biases), but I prefer the cool-eyed, well-thought out rigor of science to a collection of emotion-charged anecdotes being called ‘proof’ against all other evidence (see the ‘vaccines cause autism’ brigade for a perfect example). Maybe I could call myself the scientific herbalist?

  So I have a week or so in which to decide whether I really want to do it and whether it’s worth it. And whether i’m ready, right now, to jump back into the world of structured study.

Travels, part 2-the Fleurieu and back again, via the Red Centre

September-November now!  After spending a few weeks north of Adelaide, where we got hailed on and frosted up, we had a hissy fit and true to our style decided to go somewhere warmer. Like Alice Springs. I bought myself a digital SLR in Port Augusta as a birthday present, but didn’t realise i’d need a different card, so was unable to use it until we got to Alice Springs (you’ve only missed Coober Pedy, which didn’t grab me at all). As it worked out, I finally got to use it on my birthday, heading out to the West MacDonnell ranges. And what a landscape to practice on. Alice Springs was so much more beautiful than I expected, in a rugged, sun-bleached, ancient sort of way. I can see how people travel to the outback and end up living there, it’s spectacular in a whole different, much more peaceful way than the coast.

  Ellery Big Hole was gorgeous, and we stopped and ate cake. Note how tiny the kids are in the lower right? It was discarded as a possible camping area because there was no shade, and it was very hot. We had to go out and buy summer clothes when we got to Alice because we had nothing suitable-my morning there in jeans was almost intolerable.

  We carried on to Ormiston Gorge which was even more beautiful, dumped the camping gear to set up later, and went swimming for the rest of the day. Happy 28th birthday to me!

 

That evening we had the whole gorge to ourselves and stayed there until dusk. Then we went back, the kids went to bed and the husband and I sat up spotlighting dingoes prowling around. Absolutely perfect. A dingo stole the full wetbag on our last night, and I found it 50m off the track in the morning. We then got to say ‘A dingo stole my wetbag!’ in bad Australian accents.

  After a few days, however, the heat was getting to us in a big way, and we ran out of sunscreen, which was an absolute necessity when you could get burnt in under 10 minutes. So back to Alice, the caravan park, and the pool! Where we spent most of the rest of our time.

  The view from Anzac Hill

At sunset.

Dirty desert feet-honestly, the dust got smeared on everything, especially being hot and sweaty. It was impossible to keep clean. We were scrubbing all feet before bed to try to preserve our bedding somewhat.

While the husband kept spotting jobs advertised and trying to convince me to stay there, I was more realistic. The cost of living is astronomical-and to tell the truth, I felt uneasy being somewhere that is so unsustainable. All the food is trucked in, the water is pumped from the Great Artesian Bore-it all felt a bit like a house of cards to me. While were were keen to go to Darwin everyone heading south discouraged us-it was late October and the build up to the wet, and having lived in Cairns for four years we knew what that was like. Bearable in a well ventilated house with fans, but in a plastic tent it wouldn’t be so fun. So we decided to go south-west and check out the big rocks. Originally we planned to go west again through the MacDonnells via the Menindee loop through Aboriginal land and onto Kings Canyon, but apparently the road was terrible-30km/h, flat tyres sort of terrible. As we weren’t particularly equipped for serious 4WD conditions we wussed out and took the main roads to Yulara. It’s about 450km from Alice, and 250km off the Sturt Hwy-much further than I would have guessed before going!

Uluru (well, duh). My advice? Skip the sunset viewing, it’s crowded and not very impressive. Instead, spend dusk at Mutijulu waterhole, and watch the animals appearing to drink. Much better.

 

Kata Tjuta, which is about 50kms away.

    

I was surprise by how much there was to see around Uluru, the general media view is of a big featureless rock. But there’s lots of trees, waterholes, caves, sacred sites and historical sites around the base. There’s also an awesome mudbrick visitor centre which cannot be photographed. I was not happy, as I wanted a house like it so needed photos as a reference. It was insanely touristy of course (and we were there at the quiet time) and Yulara, being basically a resort for tourists, was sterile and unremarkable. But there was a free air-conditioned bus that we did many laps on around the complex. We did a bushfood session which was wonderful-the indigenous woman who ran it was lovely, she ran to no-one’s schedule and showed all the kids one by one how to use quandongs for sunscreen and make a honey drink from grevilleas.

We had lots of Steve Parrish moments up there-I do like reptiles so the desert was fun. Seeing a big goanna near the kitchen and alerting the Japanese tourists was hilarious-they were scared but intrigued, with lots of squealing. Not so fun was finding a centipede in the tent under my pillow, and hacking it up with a spoon.

 

This snake was the funniest. We were walking back from the Mutijulu waterhole at Uluru at dusk, and spotted this snake crossing the path. We yelled ‘SNAKE!’ and all started running towards it to get a better look. It was hell-bent on reaching cover away from the seven giants thundering towards it, and we didn’t get any closer than about 20m away before it was gone for good. The international tourists behind us were horrified though. We must have confirmed all of their stereotypes about Australians all being lunatics like Steve Irwin, leaping on poisonous reptiles. They stayed very close behind us while the kids checked out the tracks, and didn’t leave us until the carpark was in view.

Then began the looong trek south again, with the vague view of settling down somewhere there, overtaking cattle-filled road trains….

…..past the opal diggings at Coober Pedy….

….and the last desert sunset for a while.