My Bloggable Day

Regional Arts Australia Summit opening night

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Bec

It’s been a long time since I neglected my blog for over a week, apologies! Last week was absolutely crazy with the Regional Arts Australia Summit being held in my home town. I was involved in a Young Reference Group for the Summit, known as Create Tank, as well as having to cover the conference for work. So busy doesn’t really begin to explain it…

But anyway. It was an absolutely amazing week. I saw so many incredible performances, met wonderful people and just generally soaked up the abundance of arts not often found in a mining town. As per usual I took about a million photos. Starting with the opening ceremony on Thursday night:

It began in the auditorium at Goldfields Arts Centre on Thursday night. Speeches were spoken and performers from the Gascoyne Circus and the Pundarra Dancers from Carnarvon wowed the audience. We then headed outdoors where there were more performances and, importantly, FOOD:

Dumplings

Crumbed barramundi

And drinks:

Care for a prospectors pick?

Or a Kalgoorlie sunset?

I met these guys;

The conversation was pretty stilted…

It went way over my head…

I got arty with the settings on my camera:

Then the Gascoyne Circus did some aerial silks and trapeze performances. Outside. Hoisted above concrete.

The lady on the silks (I think Jade is her name) did an incredible routine to a Florence & The Machine song. My heart almost stopped every time she unwound the silks from around herself and plummeted towards the ground, jerking suddenly to a halt just a metre or so from the bottom.

Theaker was on the trapeze and just as she got up there the rain and wind began.

But she went on undeterred. It was incredible. And scary.

No hands!

After that we headed to the Kalgoorlie Country Club, which had bands on every night and called itself ‘Krunchy Club’ for the duration of the Summit. I’ve been there maybe twice before and never have I seen it so fantastically decked out and full of people. Such an under utilised space.

It felt like we could have been in Melbourne. Or Perth.

Obsessed with these lights

Kellee and Owen, also from Create Tank

An excellent start to the Summit. More to come!

Posted in Art, Misc | Tagged Art, Regional Arts Australia Summit | 8 Comments

Good morning Friday

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Bec

How has your week been? Mine has been OK, I’ve been plagued with a sore neck and headaches all week which has spelled disaster for anything productive I wanted to achieve after work. Instead I’ve been retreating to the darkness of my room as soon as I get home. Via the fridge of course. I definitely didn’t look as chic as Marilyn does, stuffing my face with corn thins.

This time tomorrow morning I will be nervously broadcasting Saturday breakfast radio for my very first time. Hopefully without too many “uuummmms” and “aaaahhhs” as I try desperately to remember which button to press and how long I have before I have to throw to the news. Even typing this has raised my heart rate a little! Wish me luck.

What are you up to this weekend? Perhaps you’d like to go work out with Marilyn Monroe?

But maybe don’t lose too much weight, otherwise people might start reacting like this when they see you.

If dessert is more your thing check out these cookies and cream baked chocolate donuts. Insane. But not as insane as these cakes, would you eat them?

But to help start the day right, check out what these kids around the world eat for breakfast. (I’ll take one of the Istanbul breakfasts please)

This video made me cry yesterday.

Have you heard Twin Peaks is coming back in 2016? I studied the series at uni but I never knew the show had so many fabulous sweaters, here’s a ranking of all 118 of them.

Have a great weekend!

Posted in Misc | Tagged Links | 9 Comments

Flowers & Eggs

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Bec

On Saturday morning I woke up as fresh as a supermarket bouquet daisy, by which I mean I wasn’t hungover, but I had convinced myself I’d heard footsteps in the hallway around 3am so I wasn’t particularly rested. Wilting slightly at the edges perhaps.

My housemate Bec usually looks after the garden stuff, but with her away it was my duty to water all of the green stuff outside our house. It sounds like a simple task, but fumbling around with sprinklers soon left me completely drenched. One of the front sprinklers has the will and might of one of its football oval counterparts. Still, it was an opportunity to stop and smell the roses, while the neighbour’s cat wound herself around my ankles.

There really is nothing more twee than a white picket fence, is there?

Having ~~endured~~ enjoyed hearing about my boss’ rose garden almost every Monday for the last 4 months it was good to finally whip out my phone and show him these photos this morning. He said these roses were called Double Delight:

I didn’t have the heart to tell him the Double Delights are now distinctly dead after copping a beating from the harsh Goldfields sun all weekend.

After feeling rather self righteous about my newly established green thumb, I went off to have breakfast with the girls. Following advice from one of my breakfast companions I ordered Eggs Benedict with bacon. I can’t tell you how what a relief it is to cut into a perfectly cooked egg in this town.

Yolk lava

They are often devastatingly overdone. I was also pleased with the light smattering of Hollandaise sauce, as opposed to the usual deluge.

The rest of the weekend involved good friends, good drinks, good cheese and a very good amount of couch time. How was your weekend?

Posted in Food, Misc | Tagged Breakfast, Flowers, Garden | 6 Comments

Cape Range National Park & Exmouth

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Bec

On our last full day in Exmouth we drove to Cape Range National Park for more snorkelling and sight seeing. Being horrifically sunburnt I tried my best to cover up, but I guess that doesn’t really work when you’re at the beach now does it?

Turquoise Bay

The first place we stopped was a well known place called Turquoise Bay. Nothing like a nice, obvious name to let you know what to expect.

Magic

And we weren’t disappointed.

Don’t let these photos fool you, it was a very popular spot. And being used to sleepy Esperance on the south coast of WA, I kept getting irrationally irate when people would set up towels near us. Spoilt brat!

Attempting to cover up

We headed into the water and saw some really amazing coral and fish, I think Turquoise Bay was definitely the best spot we went to. I spotted an octopus and we watched it for a while, seamlessly blending into the coral until it would shoot off a few metres trying to shake off a few pesky fish hanging around.

Mandu Mandu Gorge

Unfortunately we didn’t have the right shoes for walking the full track into Mandu Mandu gorge, but what we did manage to see was pretty great.

It’s kind of hard to tell how massive these rocks are without some perspective:

Andrew looks tiny!

Quite possibly risking getting clocked on the head with a rock

Oyster Stacks

We’d heard that Oyster Stacks was a great spot for snorkelling. We were certainly very close to the fish because even at high tide it was pretty shallow.

It was good but I think I was a bit snorkelled-out at this point. Plus there was sea cucumbers everywhere and I was petrified of stepping on one. Gross.

Vlamingh Head Lighthouse

The Vlamingh Head Lighthouse was built in 1912 after the SS Mildura sank when it hit the reef in 1907. There are amazing views over the coast from the lighthouse.

Andrew, supposedly imitating ‘my’ pose in front of the SS Mildura’s anchor:

Whatever, mate.

You can actually see the wreck of the SS Mildura from the beach:

Eerie

Apparently the crew made it to land safely, but the many cows onboard didn’t make it 😦

Back in Exmouth

We drove back and went to check out the Big Prawn. I thought The Prawn was Ballina’s thing. Controversial. Knowing what little regard the east coast of Australia has for the west coast, they probably don’t even know Exmouth has ripped off their ‘big thing’.

We caught the fourth sunset in a row by the road.

We couldn’t see all sunsets bar the last

And went to Grace’s Tavern, which is an American themed bar and grill. The country music channel played on at least seven screens and the walls were covered with posters of Johnny Cash.

Those are definitely bales of hay

I had pork ribs, brought by a waitress in Daisy Dukes and a cowboy hat.

Andrew had a seriously long hot dog:

And we shared a cookie ice cream sandwich for dessert.

It was all delicious.

Feeling sufficiently stuffed, we had an early night so that we could get up early and watch the sunrise over the water.

Delightful

We had a rather average breakfast (I left most of it behind and went to the bakery around the corner) before packing up the car and driving to the airport.It was such an amazing little trip to such a beautiful part of the world.

See ya Exmouth

I highly recommend you go there. Now. As soon as you finish reading this. Bye.

Posted in Travel | Tagged Cape Range National Park, Exmouth, Snorkelling, Turquoise Bay | 5 Comments

Happy Friday

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Bec

How was your week? Mine was pretty good, considering I was battling post holiday blues and the aftermath of sunburn.

Most importantly though, last night I chopped my hair:

It only took about two months of talking about it, annoying my friends about it and looking at photos of bobs on Pinterest for me to finally cut it. What a loser.

In other news, I’m enjoying seeing so much about Lena Dunham around the interwebs as she promotes her new book, Not that kind of girl, which I’m hoping will eventually arrive in bookstores in regional Western Australia so I can read it. In the meantime, I laughed out loud at these advice videos Lena released and I got 12 out of 15 for this awesome quiz Who said it? Lena Dunham or Hannah Horvath?.

This week I enjoyed the hoopla surrounding The Bachelor finale here in Australia and this hilarious ballet with choreographed mistakes. This made me remember how much I love The Nanny and marvel at all the dirty jokes that went straight over my head as a child.

A friend of mine Ellenmary posted this article on my Facebook wall and it made me feel better about the lack of extreme sports, waves and mountains in my GoPro videos.

Plans for the weekend? I want to do very little and I have a feeling I shall succeed.

You have fun now.

Posted in Misc | Tagged Friday, Links I Love | 6 Comments

Coral Bay & Exmouth: day 2

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Bec

On our second morning in Coral Bay we woke to blue skies and plans to spend the entire day snorkeling, again. Being super ~~lame~~ keen early birds we actually had to kill time until the snorkel hire place was open. So we grabbed breakfast at the bakery and took a stroll to the beach.

I perched my camera on a rock and took a self-timed photo of both of us.

Gotta love a straight horizon in a photo.

We grabbed some snorkels and headed to the beach, doing the requisite warm-up on the sand before heading to the water.

It wasn’t freezing, but spending ages in the water just kind of floating around looking at fish had me covered in goosebumps. So all day I was in and out. How tiring! Ha.

Ombre water

Snorkel Steve

I didn’t bother with trying to photograph fish, having had so little success the previous day.

Sporting quite the plumbers crack. Whoops.

At about 3pm we called it quits (a good thing, seeing as we had both unknowingly burnt ourselves to crisps at this point), packed up the car, said goodbye to Coral Bay and headed up the road to Exmouth.

We headed to the marina and city beach to check things out.

To my delight the Exmouth Fishing Boat Harbour has a bar and was serving $3 gin and tonics.

Refreshing

So I sipped as my sunburn really started to set in, making sitting down kind of uncomfortable. At least it kept me warm.

It was also steak night, so I ordered the meal I’ve always wanted to order but never had; surf and turf. Which is steak topped with prawns.

It was pretty darn good even though my rare steak came out well done. Don’t you hate that?

We ate and watched our third sunset in a row…

Posted in Travel | Tagged Coral Bay, Exmouth, Ningaloo Coast, Ningaloo Reef, Travel | 8 Comments

Coral Bay: day 1

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Bec

After arriving in Coral Bay we woke up on our first morning to this:

How many shades of blue?

Which is fortunate because I live in fear of overcast skies on beach holidays. A charming first world problem I know.

We booked a three hour snorkelling tour on a glass bottom boat that would take us to see sea turtles and then to two snorkelling spots on the outer reef.

Tis a fine vessel (ours was the one on the right)

Before we got to the sea turtles we saw a shark, which was just fantastic knowing we too would soon be swimming in the same water. Shortly after the shark we spotted a huge sea turtle, to which the shark appeared to be headed towards. We thought we were in for a shark v turtle showdown but thankfully not.

Sea turtle!

We saw many turtles the turtle scene from Finding Nemo played in my head. Fin, noggin’, duuuuude.

We headed to our first snorkel spot and jumped off the boat.

Andrew and I

The water was absolutely teaming with fish of all shapes and sizes and colours. I proceeded to take as many terrible photos as possible. Apologies in advance.

Underwater ballet

The second snorkelling spot was even more packed with fish. So much so I felt like they were just blindly bumping into me on their way past.

Woah

Sea turtle!

We flippered our little feet off chasing fish and swimming against the current after turtles.

A good reminder to wipe the lens after using the camera underwater…

On the way back to shore we saw some pretty impressive coral.

And then it was over! We grabbed some lunch and ice creams and went to look at the views over the bay.

Silver Magnums? What is this?!

After that we went for one last swim for the day

And settled in to watch the sunset again.

We were pretty apprehensive about eating out because the reviews we read for all the restaurants in town were shocking, tales of terrible food and even worse service. But we went to a place called Bills, which I assume was new because it didn’t have reviews yet and we were pleasantly surprised. It was pretty standard pub grub, but very tasty.

I had local fish and Andrew had a steak sandwich.

Such an amazing day.

Posted in Travel | Tagged Coral Bay, Exmouth, Ningaloo Coast, Ningaloo Reef, Snorkelling | 7 Comments

Arriving in Coral Bay

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Bec

Last Thursday my boyfriend Andrew and I flew to Exmouth, Western Australia, having made the last minute call not to head to our planned destination, which was on fire. Literally. So we swapped Karinjini National Park and its (fiery) gorges for crystal clear turquoise water and white sand beaches. As you can imagine I was devastated.

Before I proceed, I feel like I need to include a map of where I was because today on the phone my mum asked me if Exmouth is near Perth. I’m not criticising, after all it was me who used to think Darwin was in Western Australia and Launceston in New Zealand, so I’m clearly not one to judge. So in the interest of general knowledge:

That’s where we were, 1270km north of Perth

The area is home to the Ningaloo coast, which includes the amazingly beautiful World Heritage Listed reef. To confuse things further, we didn’t actually stay in Exmouth for the first two nights but in Coral Bay which is 138km from Exmouth on the other side of the stretch of land that kind of juts out into the sea:

The red pin is where Coral Bay is

So after flying from Perth to the airport nearest to Exmouth, we grabbed a hire car (a Jimny, which is a hilariously small four wheel drive) and hurried along the winding road to Coral Bay so we could get to the water before sunset.

The winding road.

We past hundreds of termite mounds along the way and after what seemed like forever we arrived here:

Sigh.

Such a beautiful spot. I have no idea why the people who checked us into the hostel were so damn surly. I mean I know working in a hostel would be awful but at least you’re in a stunning part of the world!

Can’t even handle how good this is

We jumped into bathers and headed for the water. My friends Dave and Lauren very kindly leant me their GoPro camera for the trip so I tried it out, first above water:

And then below.

I quickly learnt that I have no future as an underwater photographer:

So blurry

Oh well.

After our swim we grabbed some ginger beers and took front row seats on the beach to watch the spectacular sunset.

Alcoholic ginger beer = the best

Sid the seagull

I love a good sunset, but the sky after the sun had gone was far superior.

Those colours

How is this real?!

After the sunset we had a BBQ back at the hostel and then went to bed early ahead of a big day of snorkelling. More to come!

Posted in Travel | Tagged Coral Bay, Exmouth, Holiday, Ningaloo Coast, Travel | 10 Comments

Not headed to Karijini

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Bec

The plan for over a month has been to fly to Karijini National Park today and enjoy the wonder and beauty of gorges in the Pilbara. However since a bushfire is burning out of control in Karijini, we ignored advice to simply take extra marshmallows and cancelled our flights up north. Which is disappointing, but we managed to get flights to Exmouth instead! So this afternoon we will be enjoying the sights of Coral Bay and Ningaloo Reef and at some point, we will swim with whale sharks, a prospect as terrifying as it is thrilling.

So after work yesterday we flew to Perth.

And I played a hilarious game of peekaboo with a small child sitting in front of me all the way.
We checked into an airbnb place near the airport, ordered pizza, watched tv and fell asleep.
This morning we found a breakfast place on Urban Spoon, walked over (using Google maps, apps for the win) and were delighted to find it was actually decent.

Off to Perth airport now, can’t wait to get there. I’ve borrowed a GoPro (thanks Dave!) so underwater selfies are likely. Apologies in advance.

Posted in Misc | 2 Comments

The great Australian jaffle

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Bec

A jaffle is a toasted sandwich made in a device that seals the corners of the bread. They are equal parts delicious and dangerous, with the sealed edges trapping heat and steam inside the sandwich, often resulting in a burnt chin with the first bite.

I used to love jaffles as a kid. But the varieties were pretty much limited to ham and cheese or tinned spaghetti (in a sandwich, I know, outrageous!). But now jaffles are taking a gourmet twist. There is a bar in Melbourne called Bad Frankie, which has an extensive collection of Australian spirits -liquid, not ghosts, as well as jaffles on the menu. They even have a dessert jaffle using lamingtons.

Anyway, Bad Frankie is hosting a jaffle competition and whoever comes up with the best combination wins a bar tab, a jaffle iron and the glory of having their culinary creation on the menu.

Entries are now closed but my brother-in-law Nick is hellbent on winning. Here is his creation, inside are gourmet homemade baked beans made with cannellini and butter beans in a spicy tomato ragout and delicious molten cheese:

So called because it has beans

An excellent option for the vegetarian in your life. Like my sister.

Anyway, Nick asked me to help rally some support for the Has Beans so I would really appreciate it if you could take time out of your busy schedule to click this link and click like on Nick’s jaffle.

Nick has promised if he is in the top three to make me jaffles on demand for the rest of our natural lives*. And he clearly needs to win the jaffle iron in order to get the sealed edges on future sandwiches. So please, go ahead and click the link! I’ll be your best friend.

In the meantime, do you love jaffles or toasted sandwiches? What’s the best filling? Have you ever entered a food competition?

(*he may not have agreed to this)

Posted in Food | Tagged Australian Food, Jaffles | 15 Comments