Aussie Bloggers

As I wrote in a previous post on Aussie Bloggers, my place of origin is the country town called Mildura. Mildura is located 550 kms north west of Melbourne and is a river city, with an agricultural based economy. Grapes and oranges are the dominant produce, but many farmers grow a wide variety of crops.

We visited Mildura over Easter and again I was impressed with the generosity of the country folk. Every time I visit, I return with a car full of fresh produce. My family doesn’t have a farm in Mildura, but friends of our family who do, and know that we are visiting will drop produce off to my parents for us.

This time we received a fantastic stash. One part of which was a huge bag of almonds. They were in their complete raw state – straight off the tree. It was a great lesson for my kids who had never seen almonds with their husks on them! Pumpkin soup is on the menu at our house for the next couple of weeks, as we also received a large bag of butternut pumpkins.

My sister’s in laws grow grapes and also have a large vegetable patch. When we visited them to show them our new baby, they gave us zucchinis, capsicums, eggplant and spinach.

I am always impressed by the generosity of country people. Whether it be sharing their freshly grown produce or opening their house to visitors, their warmth is over flowing.

This is not to say that Australian city folk are not generous people either, but to me the generosity of country people is a stand out attraction of visiting the country.

Have you experienced some country generosity?

Image by Mushroom and Rooster

Having made my Melbourne my home for the last 20 years, there are many things that I love about this great city. Its unpredictable weather I could definitely live without, but on the whole it has so much to offer that I can tolerate this!

A definite attraction of Melbourne that is the plethora of festivals and major events that the city has. There is often so much going on it is difficult to choose where to spend your time and dollars.

This started me thinking about whether it would be possible to get to a major event or festival in Melbourne for every month of the year? Well it is certainly possible! Many months there are a number to choose from. For the sake of brevity I have only chosen one per month and created a year of Melbourne Festivals!

January: Midsumma Festival

February: Sustainable Living Festival

March: Melbourne Food and Wine Festival

April: Melbourne International Comedy Festival

May: Melbourne International Jazz Festival

June: Melbourne Winter Masterpieces (Dali this winter)

July: Melbourne International Film Festival

August: Melbourne Writers Festival

September: AFL Grand Final (Australian Rules Football)

October: Melbourne International Arts Festival

November: Melbourne Cup Carnival (Horse racing)

December: Boxing Day Test (Cricket)

I would love to try attending all of these events one year. It would be exhausting and cash depleting but lots of fun! What is your favourite Melbourne Festival?

Image by Archibald Jude

Different seasons can make me nostalgic for very different reasons. In summer, I think fondly of my childhood in a hot spot in rural Victoria. Summer holidays were spent almost exclusively outdoors finding ways to keep cool – at the local pool, by the river, in a waddling pool, but quite commonly running around underneath a sprinkler.

Now I am not lamenting the enforcement of water restrictions in Victoria, which prevent sprinklers from mains water being used. They were badly needed and we adhere to them strictly, but it did occur to me recently that my children will never have this experience.

My dad had a range of sprinklers, so depending on which one was in use, we would play different games. The arched sprinkler above gave you the challenge to try and run underneath it without getting wet. (Image by Madaise)

This rotating sprinkler provided great amusement for something to leap over as it made its way around. (Image by Toby Esterhase)

When I tell my children about the hours of fun that I had with my siblings as a child playing underneath sprinklers, it makes me feel quite old! Reminiscing of a by gone era that will most likely never be part of their Australian life.

Whilst trawling the internet to find a name for our fifth baby, I came across names from all origins: Gaelic, Nordic, French, Germanic, Italian and so on. This made me think, is there such a thing as an Australian name?

I racked my brains (and the internet) to try and come up a list of common “Australian” names. This was what I achieved:

Male:
Barry (my beloved dad’s name) – with the eloquent abbreviation of Bazza
Darren – with its abbreviation of Dazza
Jason – Naturally shorten to Jas
Craig – Maybe this list is too influenced by my teenage years of watching Neighbours!

Female:
Kylie – meaning curled stick; boomerang
Sharon – and of course the abbreviation of Shazza
Raelene – cited as a modern invented name!
Narelle – cited as Aboriginal for a companion.
Lyndal – cited to mean a waterfall.

So what do you think? Is there such a thing as an “Australian” name? A name when you hear it immediately identifies itself as being from Australia, like for example Seamus or Sean does with Ireland? What names would you add to this list?

I’m still fairly young at 25-years-old and I only owned about one or two mobile phones before predictive text became ubiquitous in mobile devices so I didn’t really get into the whole SMS language thing with messages like “c u soon” and “wat time u ova” where saving individual letters meant shaving half the time off writing a text message. I admit I’m no master of the English language but I like to spell my words properly and completely with capital letters where appropriate and punctuation – so it’s good to see that SMS culture slowly died off with the introduction of predictive text, mobile devices with full QWERTY keyboards such as Blackberries, web-enabled devices, the availability of email on mobile devices and uptake of short message micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.

Why the ACT Government has only in the last year or so decided it was cute to try and use SMS language on anti-DWT (Driving While Texting) awareness signs like the “DRIVE N TXT U B NEXT” is beyond me … they missed the boat by about 10 years and is embarrassing.

I wonder how many people still use SMS language and shortcuts given that technology nowadays means its no longer necessary. From what I’ve observed people in general want their messages to be well-formed, correctly spelt and appropriately punctuated and formatted – and that applies to phone SMSs and other short messages such as those posted on Twitter.

What are your thoughts on SMS language? Is it dead? Is it cute? Does it have its place still? Was it a temporary travesty of the English language?