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Currawinya, Barraba, NSW

S 30°22'45" E 150°36'20"

Sun 6 - Sat 12 Nov 2005


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photo of the curawinya rose
Sunday 6th

The weather had cleared up so I did the laundry.

Needing a bit of a rest from strenuous activity, I spent the best part of the day working on the dump point database.

The Samins are going away on Tuesday and won't be back until after I leave to go to Sydney so I joined them for happy hour.

Monday 7th

I thought I'd rig the pump to feed water from the new tank to the kitchen tap before I got stuck into the real work. As it turned out, the job took all day.

When I tested the installation I found that the pump wouldn't turn off. I sought help from the guy at Landmark who sold us the tank and the pump. He thought I would be better qualified than he to sort the problem out but he rang his mate at Clark Tanks who gave him the phone number of the guy who imports the pumps from Italy. He recognized the problem and provided some instructions for adjusting the pressure switches. I did what he said and all was well. Having used up all my energy for the day, I took some afternoon tea and a rest.

Tuesday 8th

I was up early as usual and did a fair amount of work on the dump point list. It is beginning to look as though I will be able to produce an authoritative list using all the sources at my disposal. I was quite impressed to find out that I know about 20% of all the sites listed from personal experience.

Before lunch, I started to remove the bath. One of the lesions the dermatologist burned off last week was on the knuckle of the little finger on my right hand and I found that I was having to stop every few minute to deal with the blood running from the wound when I knocked it while working on the job. I eventually called it a day half way through the the removal. I will have to provide some protection before I resume the work. His advice is not to use bandaids as this stops the nature healing process which needs air.

I went back to the work on the dump point list which doesn't cause any bleeding.

Wednesday 9th

I thought to do some simple jobs but only managed to draw blood from a wound on the other hand. I resolved to leave mechanical jobs until the wounds are all healed.

Thursday 10th

I spent most of the day working on the dump point list and some other CMCA stuff.

Friday 11th

I went to Tamworth to buy some tools and some supplies. I also visited The Homestead and had lunch while the iBook downloaded an update of its operating system.

Saturday 12th

I got a fair amount of work done, none of it physical, but important none the less.

I picked up on a tip from Bigman that an Organisation in the US called Leave No Trace might appreciate that someone in Australia was seeking to achieve similar objectives. The Leave No Trace philosophy informs the Burning Man gathering in the Nevada Desert. Even though 25,000 people spend a week or more at the site, after the clean-up (done by a team of volunteers) there is an inspection by the Park Rangers. A condition for the issuing of a licence to use the site for the next Burning Man is that no trace of the previous gathering is evident. The Burning Man organisation is, I believe, a partner in Leave No Trace.

I spent some of my surplus internet connect time to visit their website . The Leave No Trace seven principles are pretty much what Ross and I were about when we developed the CMCA Self-containment Scheme. We can use one of their publication to check our effort at writing a Bush Camping Code against another authority. I eventually found a link to Leave No Trace Australia and I made an application to join.

Watching a TV documentary, "The Natural History of the British Isles", I discovered that Australia's problem with introduced species such as foxes has been repeated seen in the western Scottish isles. In the 1970s, someone introduced one of my favourite British animals, the hedgehog, to an island habitat which used to support many nesting wading birds. The birds are now threatened by predation of their eggs by hedgehogs. We seem to keep on making the same mistakes, perhaps our decision makers haven't studied history with sufficient care.


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Created: 6/11/05 and last revised 12/11/05
Author: Robin Chalmers Copyright in all the material on this site is asserted by the author
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