We have been mostly leading a fairly quiet life in Melbourne trying to save some money for the rest of our trip. Graeme found a job quite quickly, working at a mental health clinic where he feels right at home. Debbie has been working in lots of odd temp jobs, such as data entry at a clothing company, counting people getting on and off trams at the Grand Prix, proofreading documents through the night for a seawater desalination plant and finally ending up back in local government (is there no escape?), working at the bushfires Royal Commission.
We found ourselves a bedsit flat in a shared house in a suburb of Melbourne called Brunswick. We like Brunswick because it reminds us of Dalston (the area of London we used to live in), right down to the dodgy turkish corner shops and the shops selling tacky plastic bedroom furniture.
The weather in Melbourne has been pretty crazy since we got here. A couple of days after we arrived, the temperature hit 46 degrees, the hottest day on record. This was also the day that the worst of the bushfires started. We went to the beach at St Kilda and had a nice refreshing swim in the sea. Unfortunately, the sand was too hot to sit on and a breeze that felt like when you open an oven door blew it right into our faces. We headed into a nice airconditioned pub instead, and consoled ourselves with the thought that we could easily have been freezing to death in the in the uk.
One of the strangest things that has happened to us here was randomly bumping into our friends Miles and Cloe from back in Brighton. The last time we saw them was at our leaving party (and we only have a very vague recollection of that), and we had no idea they were even in Australia. We were crossing the road in Melbourne CBD when we heard a voice shout 'Damskiiiii!'. Since we were pretty sure there were no other Damskis in Melbourne, we turned around and saw Miles walking right behind us. Cloe is working and travelling in Australia and Miles had come over to visit, and they were living just down the road from us. Since then Miles has gone back home but we have seen quite a bit of Cloe and she even cut our hair for us!
Every so often we notice the occasional descent band touring over here, so continuing on from The Bug with Warrior Queen, Aaron Spectre and Operator Please in Brissy we have also seen Rusko, Gorilla-Step, Starkey, Damo Suzuki (who used to be in Can) and we also went to see local punk band the Useless Children.
At Easter weekend we decided to go on a pilgrimage to Airey's Inlet, to see the lighthouse from Round the Twist. Oh, and we also saw a bit of the Great Ocean Road on the way.
On our last weekend in Melbourne we found out that two of our all-time heroes, Cheech and Chong, were making an appearance in a record shop in Melbourne for World Record Store Day. so we queued up for half an hour, said hello to them and got a cd signed.
After nine months in Australia, we are leaving for Kuala Lumpur on Monday. Although we are sad to be leaving Oz, we are glad to be jobless and getting back on the road again.
