A Bush Town

Goondiwindi is a typical bush town. It's in southern Queensland, on the border with New South Wales. The name is pronounced 'gundawindy', and the place is frequently referred to as Gundy.

The main street. 

You can tell this is Queensland and not New South Wales because it doesn't have stupid reverse angle parking. The street is this wide because in the old days you had to be able to turn a bullock team around in it (the central island with its palm trees is a relatively modern addition).

The old and the new. 

On the left, a traditional weatherboard house on stumps (to protect against termites originally, and in this case raised up on metal stilts to provide usable semi-openair space underneath), an architectural style known as a Queenslander. On the right, a modern lowset brick home with an enormous footprint taking up the whole plot.

A nice old home, hunkered down under its verandah, which performs the same function as shutters do in France, providing shade and protection against weather good and bad.
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Ile de Ré Reflections: I've no doubt that plonger is strictly interdit, but I was quite pleased to capture this young rebel in mid leap from the sea wall.

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Orchard News: I picked our entire white nectarine crop yesterday. This amounted to two fruit. Delicious, but sadly meagre. The yellow nectarines and the pears seem to have stalled. They are all very small and rock hard.

In the potager I dug some potatoes, also with a disappointing result in terms of yield. I didn't weigh them but I reckon 5 plants have given about 10 serves of potato. I dug a few leeks as well, small but going to seed. The first tomatoes have been picked, mostly cherry types, but one largish variety which is very firm and dark red (it's lost its label, so I don't know what it's called).

The orchard is a sea of flowering Wild Carrot Daucus carotta (aka Queen Anne's Lace) at the moment. Normally the flowers that make up each umbel are white, with a few red ones making a little spot in the centre. I was interested to see that one of my Wild Carrots has almost entirely dark purply red flowers, with a few white ones in patches in the umbels. I've never seen one like it before -- perhaps I'd better patent it and make my fortune.

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Black Traffic Day: Yesterday Bison Futé, the traffic info site, was predicting a particularly black day on the roads, with holiday makers travelling in both directions (home and away) in great numbers. By 8am France Info radio was already talking about tens of kilometres of traffic jams throughout France. Last Saturday had close to record traffic, and today is expected to be similar.