Livin' La Vida Local

Summer, Aussie style, is coming to an end y'all, and I'm just gonna have to accept it. Things in the shop have been slowing down for weeks - post-Christmas rush is over, schools are back in session, people aren't thinking to spend tons of money on dive gear at the moment. So shifts are being cut back and I've got more free time on my hands. This last week I thought about taking a road trip because I was only rostered for one shift on Saturday, but I gave it some thought and decided I'd rather stick to the area and do some local touristing instead!

First up: Maritime Museum in Fremantle. The second Tuesday of every month they do donation admission pricing, so what better time to go and get some local touristing on the cheap!? The museum was so, so neat. Filled with cool sailboats, including the Australia II which won the America's Cup race back in 1983 and put Fremantle on the international map, the whole place pays homage to the local maritime history: sailing, fishing, military, pearling, conservation, you name it. I spent a great long while learning about the Italian immigrants that broke up the fish market monopoly in Freo (Freo = Fremantle) back in the 1930s, and ushered in a sustainable fishing economy there, and about the pearling economy in Shark Bay in WA and up north in Broome - two of the largest pearling stations in the world.

Learned about Jon Sanders, the first person to complete a triple circumnavigation of the globe. He has since gone on to complete 7 more circumnavigations (as recently as 2018) with plans for an 11th now that he's 80 years old! There's a great article about him deciding to do an 11th trip that includes this amazing explanation of why he's going to go ahead with an 11th attempt after saying he was done after 10: “I’m back here, I’m bored, I know I can do it, I know how to do it, I’ve got nothing else to do. What’ll I do, stay home? Just because I said it?” Again, he's 80. What a boss. 

The boat Jon Sanders completed his triple circumnavigation in 

Loved learning about the general hoopla surrounding the 1983 America's Cup that marked the first time, in 132 years of the race's existence, that the New York Yacht Club lost the race. The Australia II won and popularized the image of the fighting kangaroo in the process (they needed a flag and the main competition was using one with a bulldog smoking a cigar).

First time the America's Cup left America

1983 America's Cup jacket

The punching kangaroos became the iconic emblem of the victory 

 The museum also has a megamouth shark specimen! They're super rare (or at least super rarely seen by humans), and this one beached itself locally in the late '80s. This one was only the third ever found and recorded (only 50 specimens have been collected to date), so when it was beaching itself, onlookers apparently didn't even know it was a shark - they thought it was a whale. It's got rows and rows of gnarly teeth, but they actually eat plankton. Super neat.

Megamouth shark

Aussie military submarine

Boats everywhere

My other big adventure outing for the week was to the Cohunu Koala Park!

It's basically a petting zoo, but if you pay extra and use some hand sanitizer, they let you hold a koala and feed him. Obviously I did that.

Freshie

It was VERY HOT, so this dude was just like "please feed me popcorn but don't make me move for it" and obviously I obliged.

Ostrich

Red Kangaroo

Emu

Broski just really wanted his head scratched

Emu on the loose

They also had dinosaur statues scattered about because why not?

Albie and me

Friends forever because I fed him

 

He had a kinda Yoda vibe going on

Albie was very interested in eating the eucalyptus and generally just chilling. Again, it was VERY HOT (the high for the day was 41 C, so 105.8 F), so he wanted to snack and then go back to napping (koalas nap 20-23 hours per day because the eucalyptus apparently has very little nutritional value and it's easier to just sleep all the time than to find a better food source). He felt a little wooly, like a sheep, and I mostly just feel phenomenally lucky to have gotten to held this little critter when so many of his compatriots in the wild aren't doing so hot with all the bushfires. Which, update, are finally contained! They've had torrential flooding the past two weeks (which brings about its own problems, clearly), so a bunch of the fires are extinguished and those that are still burning are at least contained by firefighters. YAY!

Anyway, those were my two big excursions this week. I didn't do any diving, worked very little (though I did end up getting a second shift when my co-worker called out sick), but I got to cuddle a koala. Win.