OUT IN THE STICKS

Yes, i am still out in the sticks. And the full moon is sending me slightly troppo. Or is it the tropical cocktail of corona, lemon and mary jane? I stand staring up at the clear midnight sky. A remote jumbo leaves a thin double trail of ice from horizon to horizon. It is flying straight into the Southern Cross.

Travels. Travels. There are plans afoot. Broome and Cape Leveque in early May, where i will meet up with Kylie for a few days in the sticks. Different sticks to those shown above, which i prepared earlier. Kylie is a researcher for the Australian version of the Celebrity Ancestry series, screened as "Who Do You Think You Are" on BBC TV. You will see it soon on SBS; it is coming soon to a TV near you. Poor Kylie has lived in Perth her whole life and has barely been out of the metropolitan sprawl. Travelled across Morocco, but scarcely out of the suburban sprawl whilst in Perth. Cervantes to the north, York to the east, and Busselton to the south. Well it's just not on. Those towns are just outer suburbs, really.

Kylie has booked her flight, and i am looking at a $200 licensed Datsun from Morgantown to get me up to meet her. No, no, its not the 200B. A Datsun 200B is just a Datsun 180B with twenty more mistakes. No, it's a 1200cc Sunny. It's twice what i paid for the last car, the Madaz, but it still works out at just under 17c per cc. Not too bad.

Richard The Oyster Farmer (see Cod Wrangling at the Oyster Farm) is just leaving, having helped us utilise a carton of Corona and some sundry embellishments. Richard The Oyster Farmer asked Mickey T, Louie and i if we would like to travel out to the Montebellos on one of the pearling company's sea planes. At all. Just for some skindiving, kitesailing and laying about on the beach. Oh, well, we suppose so, we said. Richard The Oyster Farmer flies to the islands every couple of months, and hunts oyster clams.

I was interviewing Richard The Oyster Farmer for the Coral Coast Happenings magazine. Getting across the minutiae of the operation. He was telling me how he chooses the breeding stock from the Montebellos, flies it back on the seaplane, and then takes an egg and a sperm, out at the Oyster Farm, and stimulates them to spawn. Oh, and how do you do that? Well, he says, usually i put on "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate. Uh huh, i say. And if that doesn't work? Barry White, he says.

It seems like quite an interesting operation, particularly the part about landing on crystal clear turqoise waters out at the Montebello Islands. That's the particularly interesting part. The other stuff, about fiddling with oyster gonads - well, whatever floats your boat. Which reminds me. I am now the proud owner of a slightly used three metre dinghy, courtesy of Richard The Oyster Farmer. It's a bit rough around the gunwales, but it floats. I am going to fit new rowlocks, and punt about on the Fascine. Richard The Oyster Farmer is worried the extra mass of the rowlocks, those crucial extra few grams, might drop the freeboard just enough to sink the boat. I think he doth mock me.

I like the boat; it's a nice shade of bleached orange.