Writing from Flinders!

There were 5 girls and a van
To Flinders they went with a plan
They travelled the land
Walked on the sand
And gave the locals some bags

The van!The bags!

What could be better – a week of normal uni, or travelling a beautiful island, meeting people and talking about what we do? After a week of the latter, I know my choice! Flinders Island is a beautiful island – there are many picturesque bays, inlets, lagoons, and beaches, all with the ‘East Coast’ orange lichen on the rocks and light blue-green water. Although I very much enjoyed trying to capture these sights with a camera, there is much more to Flinders than the landscape. We have been privileged to meet ‘locals’ along the way who have given us a glimpse of ‘island life’. There are some aspects that are just like anywhere – there is good internet, people watch TV, listen to the radio and mow their lawns. Other parts are what you make of it – you can live in your own kingdom, visiting town once a month, and enjoying your own company, you can retire to a fabulous house, entertaining guests regularly, and getting groceries every week, or you can run the shop. In this particular rural community, people are friendly, everyone knows everyone, and kids and dogs are safe to roam. I enjoyed the sense of community – by show day I could bump into a handful of people and say hi, and easily chat to others I hadn’t met. I could even pick out some of the prize-winning artists, sculptors and chutney makers as kids we’d met and ladies we’d Scottish Danced with! For me, the trip was a success – we shared our interest in rural health, we met some real rurals, we climbed a mountain and we patted not one but two wombats.

Arne and I

Coffee with Arne

Beach on the track to Arne's place

Dolce the wombat - about 2 years old

Dolce sleeping

From part way up Strzlecki. There was only a view of cloud from the top!

Delicious scones at Cape Barron Primary School

Another person on the island also has baby wombats to look after - very cuddly!

Playing on the rocks at Wybalenna

Flinders Show - local! (The chap in the purple shirt was part of Circus Infurneaux who performed at the show)

Another Adventure!

It has come to another one of those weeks when I am like my little profile says - I am a student but I try not to only study. (Perhaps it should really say, that I am a student and occasionally I try to study.)

Anyway I'm off to Flinders Island this afternoon for a week. I'm going with a couple of other medical students, but not actually as part of my course. We are visiting the school and the ag show, Cape Barren Island and probably the health centre. It will be fun to see some of the place, see some 'rural life/health' and, most likely to force myself to survive with limited telecommunications capabilities for a week!

Hopefully I'll have some good photos when I'm back, as well as being a week closer to the looming exams. If the weather stays as nice as it is in Launceston now, it'll be fantastic - although it may well be a bit cooler if weatherzone.com is to be trusted. The only shame is that I'm not around to write a good blogpost for the Blog Action Day competition - with great prizes and for an even better cause!

Stand Up

I was looking around for something to show at church in a few weeks for 'Stand Up' - a potentially world record breaking event counting people all over the world who will STAND UP to support Make Poverty History and keeping to the Millenium Development Goals. There's lots of youtube clips made for the cause so I thought I'd add a couple here!





If you feel like it, it is easy to register a 'Stand Up' event on the Make Poverty History Website - all you need to do is register, then have an event and count how many people stand up. There are resources for how to run an event (not ecessarily a churchy thing...!)