Feb2015_MT MEE RAMBLINGS
by Ian Wells
The festive season has come and gone and we are all licking our financial wounds as we face up to another year of stress and toil. Your writer experienced his first Christmas at sea – of which more later, perhaps.
The Mountain has seen some rain – but nowhere near as much as nearby places such as Woodford or Mt Kilcoy. As I write only one worthwhile storm has fallen on Kalahari Downs. It brought about 30mm and did wet up the ground for a few days, and the grass began to grow – especially the kikuyu. But we are still about six weeks behind those more favoured places that had earlier storms and good follow-up, and we have still to see any water rain. Dams and creeks are as thirsty as ever. However, local cattle are picking up after six months of dieting, and happily, the market for both store and fat cattle has improved out of sight. Not before time, I hear you cry! And, there should be plenty of wet season yet to come.
The Woodfordia Festival of Small Halls concert in our Hall just before Christmas is reported to have been a huge success, with more than 150 paying guests. Your writer was all at sea at the time, but hearsay is that there was a distinct Country music flavor to the programme this year, and that went well with local patrons! The Mt Mee Hall Committee is once again indebted to Cr Adrian Raedel for supporting this event from his private ‘goatbag’. We love working with Woodfordia to put it on, and Adrian’s pleasure is obvious too. Our Committee is looking forward already to another effort late this year. Go Adrian!
The next great Hall attraction is the Celtic night, which is to be held on the evening of Saturday March 28th. This will feature the popular Brisbane folk group ‘Celtic Fusion’, playing and singing traditional Irish and Scottish tunes. There will be the opportunity to dance on our beautiful floor to the lead of two skilled callers, and there will be some special guest artists. Read all about it elsewhere in this ‘Grapevine’ and book early. This is really going to be a fun night.
It will be followed by the Brisbane Pops Orchestra (aka St Lucia Orchestra) on Sunday 31st May and the Savoyard singers on Sunday 13th September. You can book for those now if you wish – call Kay on 5498 2104 or Denton on 3425 3049. As I write, the situation with the ever popular Sunshine Coast Symphony concert remains uncertain. I’ll keep you posted.
In the absence of a progress association, it was the Mt Mee Hall Committee that approached our federal member Wyatt Roy during 2014 regarding the pitiful mobile phone coverage afforded to our Mountain. Wyatt came to understand that our difficult terrain and patchwork isolation means that the poor coverage is not just inconvenient but is potentially mortally dangerous. He took the matter up promptly with the relevant Minister, but we don’t yet know of any outcome.
Those travelling Settlement Road in recent weeks will have seen the slow but steady construction of the long planned Church hall for the Mountain-Top organization. This is to be a truly mammoth building and it has had a long and often turbulent gestation. All going well, as you read this the roofers will be getting a wonderful view of the plethora of water tanks that were conditional to the building permit. Internal and external fitting and finishing will take some time though, and I don’t know at this time of a realistic target date for completion.
And now some brief reflections on the Christmas cruise that, despite misgivings, I undertook at the behest of family.
The ship is a substantial structure, 294m long, 32.2m in beam and with a draft of just 7.8m – the latter is somewhat alarming with no less than twelve decks towering high above the waterline. We had a complement of some three thousand souls, being just over two thousand paying guests and nine hundred crew.
The cruise was for a nominal eleven days, with five of those offering shore leave to Port Vila, Noumea and some of the outlying islands of Vanuatu and New Caledonia. Those shore trips were most enjoyable – we mostly chose to make our own way rather than book on the expensive excursions arranged by the ship, and this proved to be a good decision.
The sea passages were a far call from recollections of my youthful sea-time with the RNZN. No fun firing the ships’s armament and hunting fish meals with depth charges, and no gainful instruction in the mysteries of seamanship, minesweeping, asdic and whaleboat handling. (I still happily remember that order to ‘get the gripes’ when we were securing a whaleboat and hoisting it aboard!). We were issued with just one condom for shore leaves too!
Indeed, this ship only offered opportunities for eating to excess, drinking to excess, gambling to excess and presumably (I wouldn’t know though), excessive horizontal gymnastic activity. There were several on board entertainers, but, except for a clever and personable magician who moved around our tables one mealtime, they were uniformly crass and their abominable attempts at music were at almost inescapable volume. In short, the ship wasn’t really ‘my bag’ at all. But I did get through a couple of Charles Dickens novels and a wonderful book on Sir Charles Kingsford Smith…….a bucket wish achieved!
Back at home I was surprised to learn from Google that our ship is in the same ownership as the cruise ship that overturned in the Mediterranean recently after striking a rock, and that since launching in 2001, serious engine room failures have forced this vessel to cut voyages short and limp to port on several occasions. And that’s not all – it suddenly developed a severe list and threatened to capsize while at sea on one trip, (there were injuries to some passengers and much glass breakage), and it has collided with another cruise ship while berthing, causing serious structural damage to both vessels. Not hugely reassuring really, and I don’t think that I’ll be going again.
As they say on the bumper stickers, “I’d Rather be Sailing.” The weather was fantastic!
