Australia certainly knows how to do weather in a big way! No drizzle or bit of a breeze here, it is either glorious sunshine or rain of monsoon proportions and wind to match. We surpassed all of these this week and had ourselves a cyclone! It cannot really be termed 'cyclone' because we are not in the tropics, but it certainly displayed all the characteristics.
The weather forecast had warned us to expect high winds and heavy rain but they did not know the extent of what was coming.
It had been a wet, miserable day and, as we went to bed, it was becoming pretty windy. We are still sleeping in the caravan and the wind got stronger and stronger, we could hear things flying past and hitting the caravan which was being rocked from side to side by the wind. The power went off at around midnight and by 3am it had become so violent outside we decided it would be safer to retreat to the house so we gathered up Monty and the bedclothes and made a run for it. After a bit of a fight against the wind to get the caravan door open, we made it inside where we finally managed to get some sleep.
We woke in the morning to howling gales and torrential rain still, no power or phone signal. We managed to pick up the local radio station on Ian's phone and sat back to hear the extent of the damage.
The storm had claimed the lives of three people in Dungog, where they had 38cm of rain overnight, and a house there had been swept whole down the street (you can see it on youtube). 200,000 homes were without power and some communities were completely cut off. The low lying towns inland were the hardest hit, although there was plenty of damage around here, the worrying thing was we were now being told this weather would continue for a further 48 hours!
We were lucky not to have any damage, although there was a point when the water was fast heading towards our front door but Ian ran out and dug a trench in the garden to give it somewhere to escape to.
Eventually the wind and rain started to subside after a couple of days but we were without power for four days and still have no mobile coverage. The Hunter River still keeps bursting its banks, there are plenty of people who still have no electricity and some communities are cut off and food and water are being airlifted in by helicopter, so we have been very lucky. The picture with the truck is of the main highway from Sydney to Brisbane two days after the rain had stopped!
We went out to survey the damage once it had calmed down a bit and saw many boats with torn sails and trees down but only a few damaged houses, which is incredible with all the huge trees around our area. we realised why the other end of our street had no electricity yet when we saw the state of the overhead power cables that had been brought down by wind and falling trees.
A weather event like this is very unusual, they are saying there has been nothing of this magnitude for 25 years in these parts, so it was nice of Australia to wait until I arrived to put on such a show.

We have been working pretty flat out on the house lately and have not taken a day off for about three weeks so, as it was my birthday this weekend, we decided to take a break.
We took ourselves off into Newcastle to visit Fort Scratchley which was built in 1880 on the headland to defend against invasion from the sea. It was worth a visit and we enjoyed witnessing the firing of the 1pm gun. Fort Scratchley is in a fantastic position, it overlooks Nobby's Beach so looks down on the surfers but also has a great view of the coal ships as they are towed in by tugs to the docks. It is situated in a beautiful part of, what we are staring to discover, is a very interesting city.
Newcastle is a massive coal producing area and as you drive through the outskirts you pass the docks where enormous coal ships come from Asia mainly to be filled with coal, when we were there about five were being loaded in the docks, another was being towed in and a further seven could be seen queuing on the horizon. So you pass under endless huge bits of machinery that convey the coal from the mountain range of piles of coal on one side of the road to the ships on the other. There are also coal trains running alongside the road with an astonishing number of carriages, I started counting the carriages on one and reached sixty six before it was out of sight so I have no idea how many more there were.
Then, when you get to the part of the city where Fort Scratchley is, you find yourself in an area full of beautiful, ornate houses, independent shops and excellent cafes along a coast with world famous beaches and ocean baths. It's all rather nice.

Tomorrow I will be mostly grouting.
As you can see we have developed all kinds of new skills while renovating the house, some we enjoy, some we don't. Ian has been teaching himself a bit of plumbing, which is his least favourite DIY task, and has managed to install a new bath. Meanwhile I have been tiling, which I quite like. Thank goodness for Tommy Walsh and his 'How to' guides on youtube!
The kitchen is now half finished and, once that is done we just have a car port to erect and a bit of paving and graveling outside then we are ready for tenants.
We heard this week that our goods and chattels from England have now made it through the quarantine inspection apart from two pairs of shoes and a bin that I had to be destroyed because there was a speck of dirt or blade of grass on them or something. I had to pay for the pleasure of having my shoes incinerated and an ottoman has to be reinspected because they could not get it open and assumed it was locked, that has to be paid for too. The timing of this has worked out pretty well because we have given notice to our tenants in the other house and they are leaving in time for us to have all our goodies delivered straight into there.
We went to a barbecue at the Tilligerry Habitat today. This is essentially an information centre about the local native flora and fauna and a spot where tourists come to see koalas, like all things koala, sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. They have these barbecues every month and we went along last month to be polite because someone had invited us and we discovered a great bunch of people all bearing wine and beer and having a thoroughly good time! The Habitat is run by volunteers and they stage plenty of fundraising events, but no boring jumble sales and coffee mornings for them, every event takes the form of a party so, needless to say, we have joined.
It is well into autumn now and the clocks have gone back but it is still about 23 degrees most days and, when we were in Newcastle we saw the kids coming home from school, instead of a school bus, many of them have to catch a ferry across the Hunter River. One group of boys were swimming in the river pool while waiting for the ferry, imagine doing that while waiting for the 140! 

I think I am finally getting the hang of things here. I now know that Woolworths is a huge supermarket chain, Burger King is Hungry Jacks, sweets are lollies, crisps are chips, chips are hot chips, sausages are snags, rugby is football and football is soccer.
One thing that was a very pleasant surprise was just how green everything is. Australia is the country that makes up most of the continent with the least trees in the world but you would not believe it if you came here. Admittedly there is the huge middle bit with hardly any but the edges are full of them and they are massive, even Ian had forgotten how big they are.
The other delightful discovery is that so many of the trees flower and there is something in full bloom all of the time. When we arrived the jacarandas were in flower so there were gorgeous purple trees everywhere, in Sydney there are some residential streets where jacarandas are the trees planted along the roadside so the whole street is lined with purple.
My absolute favourites (so far, something else might spring in to life next week) are the frangipanis in the first picture, as far as I can tell they flower all the time. Not many of the trees are deciduous either so there is no really grim period with just bare branches, although that must mean no excitement when the first buds appear.

Ian has been telling me about the Sydney Royal Easter Show for years and the day finally came around for me to see it for myself and it really lived up to all the hype. It was sensational, a bizarre mix - sort of Sydney slick meets Women's Institute.
It was held in the Olympic Park and we took the train down from Newcastle right into the venue with only one change. When we arrived at the station at the crack of dawn we went to buy tickets but were told travel was included in the ticket price if we were going to the show - astonishing as we were travelling from another city!
The first thing we walked through was the huge funfair and then, Ian couldn't wait any longer and we headed for the vegetable displays. It is the centenary of the battle at Gallipoli this year so most of the displays were dedicated to that and were amazing.
Onto Arts and Crafts. The effort that goes into this section is just staggering, I now have a picture in my mind of a whole industry of country women on remote farms churning out crocheting, knitting, feltwork, embroidery, mosaics, paintings, quilting, leatherwork,quilling(?), scrapbooking!, lace making and so it goes on and everything labelled quaintly as made by Mrs so and so, it reminded me of my grandmother and her neighbours who all addressed each other as Mrs. Most remarkable of all were the cakes, there were hundreds of them so many that I have added a page of pictures to the blog for anyone interested in seeing more. They were so elaborate and intricate we could not imagine how these women had transported them, some for thousands of kilometres and many along unsealed roads. 

On top of all this excitement there were the animal competitions, these are deadly serious because to win a category at the Royal Easter Show is like winning Crufts and can make a huge difference to the value of a farm's livestock.
Then my personal favourite, the woodchopping. I could have watched this for hours, it goes on constantly for the

whole two weeks of the show and the quantity of wood they get through is incredible. We were lucky enough to see the presentation of the prizes for the Jack and Jill paired sawing...look what takes the place of champagne on the podium.

The New South Wales state elections took place yesterday and,although I am not eligible to vote yet, I went along with Ian to see if voting was any different here than in the UK.
It was completely different! Voting is compulsory in Australia so the turnout was a world away from the slow dribble of people wandering into the local church hall in England. Polling day was a Saturday too and, as with most events in Australia, had something of a party atmosphere about it with sausage sizzles and bouncy castles at many polling stations.
Voters can go to any polling station in their electorate to vote and there was even a website to visit (sausagesizzle.com.au) where you could find out which polling station was going to be laying on the best entertainment!
However, voters need a bit of sustenance here as voting itself is exhausting. When they arrive, the voters are given instructions on the best way to vote for each party. When voting for the Lower House (like the Commons) they can either choose to use preferential voting below the line where they number their choices or, if they would prefer not to do that, they can choose to vote above the line. This is selecting just one candidate which will automatically add the preferences chosen by that party, for example, the Labor party would have the Greens as their second preference, the Fishing and Shooters Party third all the way down to the Liberal Party as their last choice. Luckily there were only 5 candidates for Port Stephens.
Then, as if that wasn't complicated enough, we move on to the huge ballot paper Ian is holding up. This is for the Upper House (like the Lords). Again the electorate can choose to vote above the line, accepting the preferences of the party they have chosen or they can number their preferences themselves below the line where there were........wait for it....280 candidates, so you could go into your polling booth and number all the way from 1 to 280, no wonder there was a queue!

It was Ian's birthday at the weekend and we were delighted to see Zoe, Gill, Steve, Karen, Rob, Edith, Matt, Imogen and Georgia raising a glass to him, or gravy boat in Rob's case.
It actually poured with rain all day on his birthday, which is very unusual where we are, we get very little rain. So we racked our brains for somewhere to visit that was indoors then remembered we were a bit curious about Tanilba House which is in the next little town to ours, Tanilba Bay.
We had heard that Tanilba Bay had been the place originally chosen for the Prime Minister's country residence (it never happened, they built it in Kirribilli in Sydney instead) and we mistakenly thought Tanilba House had been built for that purpose. It wasn't but it was a splendid place to visit and certainly somewhere we will take our visitors. The house was built in 1834, which is old for a building by Australian standards and the original owners were given several convicts to build the house and tend the vineyards, there was even a little cell for use when a convict misbehaved. The present owner keeps a part of the house open to the public and it is stuffed full of an eclectic mix of bits and bobs, some of which match the history of the house and some don't at all but it is great fun. She shows visitors  around herself then makes them a cup of tea.
We really are living a different life here. I have added a picture of my set up when I do the washing. Our washing machine hasn't arrived yet so I use the laundromat that is down at the marina for the boatees. I cycle down with the laundry in Monty's trailer then sit on the bench reading my book and watching people setting off for a day's fishing. It's a tough life.