MONTVILLE

Sunday August 13, 2012. Slept well – all the shopping and sightseeing must be doing me good and woke to another beautiful but cold day.  We seemed to be living the Queensland motto “Beautiful one day: perfect the next.”

Wayne sleeps in on Sundays – which is to say he doesn’t get up before 5.00 a.m. to start his farming duties. So we sat and chatted and ate some of the best fruit I’ve had for ages. The citrus in particular, picked from their small orchard was sweet and juicy. I progressed from grapefruit to orange to mandarin/tangerine/naartjie – just what to call this fruit depends on which country you’re in! After a while Wayne fired up the barbecue to cook up bacon and eggs, a Sunday treat. It was very pleasant standing with the cook on the veranda with the pool sparkling in the morning sun. The smoky odour of the cooking seemed to draw out several of the Dunn brood who had spent the night. There were some we hadn’t seen for many years. It is always strange to see a little girl of ten or eleven now a married woman with a child of her own.

Breakfast over, we had a stroll around the grounds, admiring Adrian’s work and ending up under the huge Morton Bay fig tree with it’s banyan-like canopy which shelters the pavilion where patrons of their retreat will meditate and be massaged under the watchful eye of a statute of a Hindu goddess who looked suspiciously like Kali to me. I thought she was a dark and violent deity; a figure of annihilation, which seemed singularly inappropriate in an area given over to contemplation and peaceful thought, but found that recent devotional movements largely conceive her as a benevolent mother goddess.

As we stood chatting under the fig tree I spotted a mob of kangaroos loafing in the long grass of one of the paddocks. It is amusing the way they lie around most of the day, often on their elbows, to all intents and purposes like a bunch of Romans lounging at their feasts.

Back at the house we boarded one of Wayne’s larger four-wheel drives for a tour of the estate. He runs about 35 head of cattle and showed us the various paddocks, dams and so on as well as the nursery where Adrian grew the plants for his business. As canny in business as his father, he found some time ago that property developers tend to scoop all everything off a site when they are building or re-building and just dumping the soil and plants. Adrian goes around picking out the best of the plants and nurses them back to health, thus being able to provide mature plants when he completes a landscaping job. We put up a lovely big male kangaroo who gave us a very dirty look before hopping off into the trees.

I think Wayne was a little disappointed that I politely declined his kind offer for me to have a meeting with the nutritionist who had helped him with some of his health problems. As I said to him I’ve read many books and articles on the subject over the last sixteen years. It seems to me that there is general agreement among the majority of nutritionists on what the core diet should be to which each adds their particular area of expertise. Since they can’t all be right, confusion reigns unless you simply stick to the core issues.

I went off with Rod, another ex-colleague who lives up Noosa way and who had joined us for dinner last night – and spent the night rather than drive. We headed to the car hire to pick up the vehicle we had ordered and which had to be collected before noon because that’s when the office closed. Hey! It was Sunday .and people are entitled to some time off over the weekend. The vehicle was there a Nissan XTrail four wheel drive which went well and which gave us a good view of the road. Wayne and the rest of the party duly turned up and I followed them through the maze of traffic circles that are used in Noosa to control the traffic flow. I think there is only one set of traffic lights, but many, many roundabouts. I find that they tend to be a bit disorientating. Turning left, right or going straight on through an intersection gives me a better ‘feel’ for where I am and where I am going rather than going around and off traffic circles.

We dropped the XTrail off outside Wayne’s office to pick up later and  headed off to Montville which sits in some hilly country about 70 km from Noosa. We drove through some delightful country on the way with everything looking green and healthy – they’ve had good rain up there this year. We whipped past some stands selling pineapples at $1 a piece. Wish we could have picked up a couple. Wayne did pause on the way home at the stands, but by then the stock had gone. Montville turned out to be a very hilly little village with some magnificent views across to the coast. Parking was a problem, although as things turned out, it wasn’t a particularly busy day for the shopkeepers. The town itself was rather like the market at Eumundi, except that all the goods were in shops rather than temporary stands. Wayne was very surprised to see how many shops had closed since they were last there, including a couple of his favourites. We reckoned that much of the statuary scattered around the Dunn estate had come from shops in this area.

Among the places that had closed down was the restaurant where Wayne had proposed that we should have lunch. Again he expressed surprise because he said that it had always seemed to be so popular, but presumably the number of visitors to the area were down – or spending less. We easily found another likely looking restaurant which had a gypsy theme. Rather unusual for Queensland I thought, which isn’t  normally associated with those people. The young staff member who served us – the only one on duty it seemed – was very pleasant, but we waited for the best part of an hour for our food. We weren’t in a hurry, so it didn’t bother us – after all we could talk just as easily sitting around a restaurant table, but I did wonder if the lack of customers was the cause of this hiatus or a response to it.  I had a very satisfying meal - kidneys and bacon on mash. Not sure if that is typical gypsy fare, but Rab’s chicken filled crepe was less satisfactory.

While we were there I got an e-mail on Rab’s new phone from Jesse saying that I had left  on of the chargers at their home so I responded and said we’d pick it up on the way home. Turned out to be the charger for the camera, so I would have been a bit annoyed if I had gone on without that. I wonder why it is not possible to have universal connections for these electronic items that are so much part of our lives these days. I bought a charger at  Gelignite Jack’s for my iPad which is for use with the car’s cigarette lighter, but the iPad rejected it. No doubt there is an Apple appliance that would do the job at a significantly higher cost than Gelignite Jack’s $7.95.

We had a bit of a lie down when we got back to Kamo and then headed down to the clubhouse at Boreen Point on Lake Cootharaba for an evening meal. It was a comfortable down to earth place. The noisy bar and patrons at the back and a pleasant but basic restaurant in the front. Good food, reasonably priced and served promptly. There were many old photographs around the room of fisherman with enormous fish or catches of fish and also a series showing the pub being moved from it’s original location. Sawn in half and moved in pieces and re-assembled. I know that is old hat for people in countries where structures are made of wood, but coming from a country like South Africa where everything is brick or stone built, it is still an amazing sight for us.

An excellent day all round.