Day Trip: destination Junee

Rural NSW is full of interesting towns within day trip distance of Canberra. My friend the Ancient Submariner (he's not really ancient at all, but I like the name!) decided the licorice/chocolate factory at Junee would be a good destination for a Sunday ride. The two magic words (licorice and chocolate) were all I needed to haul the Bomber out of the shed for a 9am start.

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Junee is a bit over 200kms from Canberra. We did a sort of loop - went there via Harden (stopped there for a cold drink) and Cootamundra, and came back via Gundagai (where we stopped for another cold drink). It's a great road from Junee to Gundagai, passing through places like Wantabadgery, Nangus and Eurongilly (where I saw a willy-willy), and with lots of bends that were a cross between twisties and sweepers - very nice!

Holy dooley it was warm! I discovered two important things - this bike cooks my legs in hot weather, (the previous two were fully faired jobbies, and I bet that made a difference) and mesh pants are crap on longish rides. It's like sitting on fly-screen. Oh my delicate petal legs! Next time I'll wear my leathers.

The licorice factory is brilliant! It's all organic, offers tours of the factory, a gift shop, a cafe (with live music on Sunday!) a factory shop, picturesque outdoor area...

Even in the heat we couldn't resist one of their hot chocolates - and it was well worth the trip!

Junee itself is an old railway town, and the buildings erected in its boom days are gorgeous - lots of long two storey buildings with iron lacework balconies. It's also the birthplace of many rugby league luminaries, and home to Australia's most haunted house, Monte Cristo - another place well worth a visit. I went there a couple of years ago, and it's seriously atmospheric!

The giant grasshoppers that bothered me out that way a few weeks ago have gone - now there's just searing heat and dryness. Carrying an extra waterbottle is a good idea. I soaked a bandanna before tying it round my neck, and poured some cold water inside the front of my jacket, for some fabulous evaporative cooling. Next time I'll remember my neck sausage.

Now there's a nifty device! It's a flat tube of fabric, just long enough to tie around your neck, and it contains some gel crystals. If you soak the tube in cold water the crystals swell up to about fourteen MILLION times their size, and you have this cool damp sausage to tie around your neck so you can keep your cool for HOURS! (It also acts as a shield for some of the flying beasties that you encounter on the road - and believe me, that's a good thing! I once found a bee embedded in it - better the neck sausage than my neck!)

By the time I got home (and we got home as fast as we could to stop the chocolate melting!) my delicious bag of chocolate coated licorice was a little the worse for wear - oh, the HEAT! - but fifteen minutes in the fridge restored it, and it was truly delicious!

I was not so easily restored, and needed several glasses of iced water, a cool shower, and afterwards, a glass of chilled white wine as I wandered around my garden , fighting off mozzies and checking my baby plants for heat damage.

It was a lovely Sunday - thanks, Ancient Submariner!

Bike Gear and Helmet Hair

According to Trinny & Susannah's Body Shape Calculator, I'm a Skittle. A shortish one. There are some things I should not ever wear - capri pants, wide belts, ankle strap shoes... that sort of thing. Thank God I'm a motorcyclist and I don't worry about any of that!

I have my summer bike gear and my winter bike gear - and all of it makes me look a bit like the Michelin Man! All that protective armour takes up space and adds unwanted inches all over the place. There's no point asking "Does my bum look big in this?" because there's only one answer when you're all geared up.

But I don't care that my bum looks the size of a small country in my protective pants - I want all the protection I can get if I go for a slide down the road on it!

And then there's helmet hair. There's no escaping it, although some lucky people don't seem to suffer from it as badly as others. Those people are inevitably men. Why is this so? Is male hair somehow genetically predisposed to come out of a long day inside a helmet looking good?


I suspect there really is a difference between boy hair and girl hair. This is the only explanation for the fact that boy haircuts only cost a fraction of what girl haircuts do.

Here's a true story. I asked a barber for a haircut once - short back and sides, I said. I don't cut women's hair, he said. I pointed at the bloke whose hair he'd just cut.

But I want a haircut just like that! I said.

He wouldn't do it. So I went to a hairdresser, got it cut super-short, paid the lady and went straight back to the barber. He took one look at my hair and said "Sheesh, if you'd told me that's what you wanted I could've done a better job."

He's lucky I wasn't PMSing.

I go to him now all the time. My hair is so fine and it grows in several different directions. It's plagued by cowlicks. The barber agrees that for me, shorter is better - especially as I'm always sticking my head into a helmet. He is a whiz with the scissors - a proper old style barber - and he cuts my hair just the way I want it!


Now I can forget to comb my hair and no-one can tell the difference! I can ride all day and my hair looks the same at the end of the day as it did at the beginning!

I save heaps on hair product, coz I just don't use it - and because I hardly have any hair, I hardly use any shampoo! WIN-WIN!

Don't I look like a boy though? I guess not - the bumps on the front help - and those special bum-enhancing padded pants would give just about any girl "childbearing hips"!

I love my gear!

three years...and counting.

I haven't blogged for a few days. It's not laziness or apathy. It's a kind of fear.

What I want to write about today has been floating about in my head, nudging harder and harder at the edges, and I've been resisting it. I'll tell you why later.

On the weekend I reached the third anniversary of the attack that changed me and my world.

Three years ago a stranger called Shaun Burke broke into the house I was looking after, raped me at knifepoint and escaped into the night to stalk his next victim. I was one of several victims in his horrible 5 year "rape-fest".

It's a matter of public record that Burke is now serving a well-deserved 25 year non-parole period of a 37 year head sentence - probably the most just sentence ever handed down to a rapist in the Australian Capital Territory, thanks to the late Justice Terry Connolly of the Supreme Court in the ACT.

I'm not going to say anything more about serial rapist Burke, or about his attack on me, apart from the fact that he was a calculating and evil monster.

What I want to talk about is - gee, this is why I've been avoiding writing about it - it's so hard to put it down and give it a heading. I think what I want to talk about, three years after the event, is why I am finding it so hard to write about it.

After Burke was sentenced I asked the police who had conducted the investigation if there was anything I could do to give something back - to show my immense gratitude for the tireless work that they had put in to catch Burke and build the case against him. And that was the beginning of a very rewarding road for me on my recovery. Speaking up can be very empowering.

Publicly I have spoken twice to groups of trainee detectives, to give them a victim's perspective. I will undoubtedly do it again next year.
I have spoken on radio and television about "sexual behaviour" education.
I have spoken to football teams and groups of schoolboys about inappropriate sexual behaviour.
I have taken part in surveys about restorative justice.
I have helped to launch a government publication to help rape victims navigate their way through the legal system.

I have only ever done this by invitation.

Privately (no invitation necessary!) I speak out against "humour" that uses rape as its basic premise. I'm afraid I don't think there's anything funny about non-consensual sex, no matter how it's dressed up and "funnified" - and I'm speaking from the pointy end of it. Acquaintances, colleagues and even friends who send those e-jokes cop it from me. It's all about making a statement and raising awareness of the fact that HEY, THERE'S NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT RAPE.

This is where I tell you about the fear I mentioned earlier.

Why was I reticent about mentioning this anniversary in my blog? After all, this is something that looms large in my life. It's with me every minute of every day. It's part of who I am, whether I like it or not (and I have to tell you, I don't like it one bit.) In my down moments it nearly destroys me. In my up moments it simmers and threatens, and I fight it off by talking about it publicly to raise consciousness, to reinforce the concept of recovery to myself and hopefully to help other victims realise that it doesn't have to be the end of the world. It sucks. It's crap and it's hard and you sometimes think you would rather be dead, because trying to drag yourself out of that shitty mindset is so hard - but dammit, if you don't it means the rapist has won. It means the rapist has succeeded - has managed to demean and dehumanise you to the point where you give up.

My rapist will never win. He is scum, and I suspect that is all he will ever be.

So- the fear I told you about ... why didn't I want to mention this?

Several weeks ago somebody sent an e-joke to a motorcycle forum of which I am a member. I thought the content was objectionable, and the word RAPE figured largely in the punchline. I kicked into activist mode and said I found it tasteless and offensive, and inappropriate in such a forum.

And another woman took issue with it. The private email conversation (initiated by me) that followed ended with her telling me I was nothing more than a publicity seeker, and that she didn't believe (and had never believed) that I'd been raped anyway. She thought that my speaking out against rape "downgraded the real victims". Hello?

Strangely enough, she'd been someone masquerading as a friend of mine who'd come along to one of the hearings. If I had any respect for her I suppose I might've been really hurt by what she said. Instead, I was furious.

Recently I read a news snippet online about the courage of a Miss World entrant who had been raped. She went public with her story to help other victims, and to send the message that it's ok to speak out against rape. I was so thrilled to read about her!

But in the "Comments" section below the story, sure enough, somebody had accused this courageous young woman of publicity-seeking.

And then there's Tegan, an incredibly gutsy young woman who became a victim of gang-rape at the age of 14, but who spoke out, louder and louder. She refused to be cowed by lawyers during the court case - what courage - when the FATHER of her rapists played the race/culture card... She was subjected to cross-examination and scorn by the Defence, but maintained her dignity and integrity throughout. I'm sure I would've fallen apart - that Tegan is a legend. I'd love to give her a hug.

And while there was overwhelming support for her courage in the onlne comments, there were some amongst them who wanted to criticise her...

I suppose it was reading about those things that made me decide I would actually blog the passage of this awful but significant third anniversary for me, and to reinforce the notion that speaking out really does help.

So how did I spend the awful anniversary night? I did nothing. I spent the evening home alone. I felt a little creepy and irrationally fearful as I went around the house checking locks. I went to bed very very early. I woke, unfortunately, at around the time that it had happened... but was able to go back to sleep. That's a plus. Usually when I wake in the night (which is pretty much every night) I have a bugger of a time getting back to sleep.

I take that as I sign that I am getting better.

And as I believe that speaking up has been so instrumental in this whole "getting better" thing, I will continue to do it. And if some people don't like it, it's their problem.

Ernest(ine)? Is that you?

Remember this, from my 18 December post?

The giant spider currently in my kitchen may or may
not be Ernest(ine). It's a lot less bulbous in the abdomen these days. I have
pondered this, and come to the following possible conclusions:

• It is a rival giant spider - which could mean I have
  TWO giant spiders in my house at the moment.


• It is a rival giant spider and it ate Ernest(ine).
  If that's the case, I have one giant spider, but it's clearly of the predatory
  persuasion. And it knows where I sleep.


• It is Ernest(ine). She has laid an enormous egg-sac
  somewhere, and regained her girlish figure.

As you know, the spider I thought was Ernest(ine) - or someone rather like her - was sadly despatched just before Christmas when she broke the Prime Directive. I am, however, assuming the new and terrifying (as yet unnamed) giant spider in my loo - which looks a lot like the old Ernest(ine) of the big belly - may in fact be the original Ernest(ine), empowered to reappear by the demise of her rival giant spider. Or of course, it could be the ghost of Ernest(ine), come back to haunt me for murdering her. Or it could be a new giant spider altogether - it's not like there's a shortage of them in Canberra. Great.

I learned some interesting things this morning; chiefly, that the presence of a giant spider in the loo:

• can actually inhibit the peristaltic imperative!
• can cause a normally sane person to develop a sudden insane desire to be at the office instead.

My bedroom is across the hallway from the loo, and my vantage point - that is to say, my bed - is probably 3.5 metres away from where the hairy behemoth is currently located, high up on the loo wall. I was disturbed to realise that I could see the whites of her eyes from that distance! OK, teensy exaggeration... Even from such a distance, though, I could count all her legs - count all the hairs on all her legs, even - and was fascinated to watch as she scratched her bum with an enormous hairy leg, and then lazily turned around 360 degrees before scratching it again. Maybe she has worms... That's all I need - a spider with worms.

I'm glad I didn't make a New Year's resolution along the lines of "I will be braver about giant spiders", coz I would've broken it only 2 days into the new year...

Ambling Irresolutely into 09

I have had about 50 New Year's eves in my life. Some of them have been memorable. There have been - in no special order of importance, frequency or chronological correctness - drunken frolics, wild parties, city celebrations, quiet nights at home, abstemiously pregnant early nights, kisses, misses, broken resolutions, falling asleep on public transport nights, arguments about driving too fast, and once even a looong walk home in fancy dress after being thrown out of the car by the person whose too-fast driving I had complained about. That one was kind of embarrassing. Even more embarrassing was the fact that I still went through with the wedding, even after such humiliation. I should've known better...

Then there was the night that was supposed to bring in the much talked-about y2K disaster... what a fizzer that was, although I must confess to a certain amount of relief. I watched the New Year's eve telecasts from around the world, and when the New Zealand one didn't go dead at their stroke of midnight, two hours ahead of Canberra's, I went into the garage and looked at my understocked y2K cupboard with a faint sneer.

"I knew it wouldn't happen all along," I said to fourteen tins of baked beans and a packet of celery seeds.

There was no fanfare this year. Just aches and pains, lots of green stuff and a killer sore throat. I spent the entire day and night of New Year's eve in my bed, moaning and groaning and being woken occasionally by the arrival of cheery text messages from hordes of other people who weren't being misery gutses and wallowing in their own mucous. Eeeew, now there's a mental picture!

This morning, as the aches and pains and the tide of snot recede, I remember that I forgot, in my enfeebled state, to make any New Year's resolutions. This is immensely cheering.

Resolutions are a yearly reminder of my total inability to stick with anything that might improve me as a person. Annually I resolve to be tidier, to lose weight, to exercise, to save more and to drink less - and annually I don't do any of these things. My resolve lasts anything from 10 minutes to about 3 weeks before I inevitably slide back into my shambolic lifestyle, a glass of red in hand and my feet up on the coffee table. If I bother to remove my bike boots I'll notice there are holes in my socks - and I won't even care.

So.... this year I may have missed the fun, but I've also avoided the failure! Wheeeeeeeeee! Now.... out to the bike shed to wish The Bomber a Happy New Year and to decide where to ride my messy flabby badly dressed (but contented) self to today?