Things to Look At

Sculpture by the Sea in Sydney

I am not sure if I should be apologizing for the lack of Posts over recent weeks. If I thought that what I was doing would be interesting for others to read about then I would write something, but mostly what I am doing is not, so I don’t. 

But I know what its like to have a few favourite web sites that you click on for updates every so often, and to be disappointed when nothings changed. I don’t like to disappoint visitors to this Blog too often so Ive decided to accept my responsibility as a Blogger to the loyal readers and post something a little more often – maybe once a week?

At present I am in Burnie, a small  city on the northern coast of Tasmania, and I will be here for a couple of months. The hospital is up a steep hill from the coast road and many of the rooms have a sea view, out across the notorious Bass Strait that separates this Island state from the Mainland, 125 miles to the north. Today theres a strong Northwesterly, probably 20 to 25 knots by the look of the whitecaps and the big seas out there.

Later in the week, further east, a fleet of maxis will be racing across the strait in the famous annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race. They leave Sydney Harbor on Boxing day and if the wind stays like this they could do it in record time.

I am doing my usual thing, Obstetrics and Gynaecology , in a modern fully equipped up to date hospital with every modern convenience and no expense spared. It gets boring at times because my role here is to supervise and advise the trainees who are desperate to do just about everything, so I get relegated to being the assistant. One consolation is that late at night, once the tricky part of emergency surgery has been done I can go home and leave them to finish off, and I don’t have to bother with any of the paperwork. 

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Before coming here, I was in my favourite place once again, Darwin. It’s a four and a half hour flight from Sydney, and a 2 hour time difference. One thing I look forward to, on the journey there or back is having a window seat and looking down at the extraordinary patterns and colours of the vast Australian outback. At first glance it looks bleak and orange and empty but if you look much more carefully at it, you see wonderfully intricate patterns and subtle color changes and almost everywhere, remarkably, but far far apart, thin mostly straight lines of tracks roads and fences, a very occasional outstation with an airstrip, and the odd  dam with radiating spidery cattle tracks. Its hypnotizing beauty.