With baited breath, I waited for the DNS to update for the Bourke Aboriginal Health Service, and am extremely happy to report that the site has now gone live successfully, and their email still works.
No reason it shouldn’t have, but after a major email outage after their last DNS update a few years ago, I’d been warned that they’d had little success and that I should proceed with extreme caution.
I received an email this morning from Judy Johnson thanking us both for our generosity to their organisation: “we all
appreciated the hard work done by you both”.
Well as you probably read in a previous post, we arrive in Bourke on Sunday and it was over 50 degrees in the shade.
We had planned to meet Judy at the Aboriginal Health Service the next day, but forgot it was a public holiday. Tuesday morning we found out she was on holiday. But all was still well, as Michel helped us out, introduced us to everyone and we got to work getting their requirements down and collecting as much information about them as possible.
Having recently played with WordPress again (for this site) I felt it would be ideal for them, and started looking at plugins and themes to get something up for them as soon as possible. Today, 2 days later, their site is hosted and ready for content editing, so we’re running a training session for them tomorrow. I’m always impressed at how well open source applications can help with rapid application development. I’m not surprised, given its nature, but still always impressed. (End Open Source semi-rant.)
We went on a tour of Bourke yesterday with Stu (Judy’s husband who runs the Bourke Tourist Information Centre), saw the local vinyards, cotton fields and citrus farms. As it was the last day of grape harvest, we were also able to go out and pick what we wanted, and came away with two shopping bags full of grapes! And fresh of the vine they taste absolutely beautiful.
I came to Bourke wondering what there’d be. I arrived and was warned that it’s a rough place at night – watch your step. I met others who were not so alarmist, and now think it’s a great place to live. I don’t think I could do it for ever, but you never know, we might come back for a year or so some time.
As the locals say: once you cross the North Bourke Bridge, you’ll always come back. I think we will.
Published on
January 5, 2006 in
Travel.
We stayed in Dubbo from the 30th of Dec until the 1st of January. New Year in this town was interesting. No fireworks (fire danger), no streets of crows with big screen displays and a major celebrity counting down to midnight, just people going to pubs, big scary bouncers giving out (and wearing) paper tiaras and blowing those funny horn things with the paper that unrolls and gets soaked in your beer.
We left the pub at 11pm just after the police arrived to take away a very drunk and very loud young lad to go back and drink a bottle of bubbly outside our cabin.
Well, I was going to tell you about Dubbo Zoo, or so the title of this post would lead you to believe! There will be pics up on the photos site as soon as I get round to uploading them (probably when I get home and I have faster access to the server). The zoo itself is great – they’ve designed it so it appears there’s nothing between you and the wildlife.
With the exception of really tall wire fences around big cats that can jump higher than small cats (which is still quite high), most enclosures are small lumps in the ground (think levy) with a fence on the other side of the mound, no higher than the mound. In other words, you can’t see the fence. The animals also have plenty of room to move around – must be great.
I’m thinking of updating my reincarnation wish from cat (just laze around) to any chimp type animal. Imagine having the best aerial trapeze skills in the world, and getting bored with how long you can dangle by one arm before throwing yourself 30 metres to another tree. I’m sure he was showing off, but so would I if I could do half of what he could…
Published on
January 5, 2006 in
Travel.
We’re well into our road trip now – for those of you who don’t know, Sandrine and I have taken two weeks off (in addition to a week over Xmas at BogieBush) to ride to Bourke and write a web site for the Aboriginal Health Service for free. There’s no link yet, as it’s not live yet. I’ll post again when it’s all working.
1 day into our holiday at BogieBush, Sandrine decided to drop a beam on her finger, as you do, and was forced to relax instead of work. Anyone who knows Sandrine knows this simply meant struggling with all the work anyway and prolonging the finger-healing process (still ongoing…).
The long and short of it is that I rode back to Melbourne to fetch the car, and we’ve driven up instead. It’s actually a “good thing” as the temperature the day we arrived in Bourke (I’m getting ahead of myself) was over 50 degrees.
So, back to West Wyalong. We drove up to Dubbo from BogieBush, and one of the rest breaks was in a little town called West Wyalong. It scared me. The first thing I saw was a banner across the street (you know those heavy duty plastic ones – like the protesters hold up at rallies) that read “And a saviour was born”. The other side read “Happy birthday Jesus”. I won’t go into the whole “was his birthday really the 25th December” routine, but was taken aback at the banner. It’s unusual to see blatant community support for a single religion, especially in a country as diverse as Australia.
As we walked down the street trying to find somewhere to get a cold drink, my subconscious ignored the shops you see in all towns (banks, bakers, etc) but noticed a little bookshop sown a side street – the Christian Bookshop.
No offense anyone, but I don’t think I’ll be moving to West Wyalong for a long time…
