Here are some group emails that I prepared earlier, without knowing how to use a semi-colon ;;;

SEPT '09:

A couple of years ago, my Tetun translator Ina and some friends decided to go on a trip to the mountains.

While tackling a particularly brisk incline, one of her friends collapsed. Turns out she had a heart condition she hadn’t told anyone about. She died. Right there on the mountain. She was 37.

Needless to say, this had a decisively negative impact on the rest of their itinerary. So instead of enjoying the sights, Ina found herself tasked with going through her friend’s former room (or former friend’s room?) to get her stuff before they left. Finding that many of her friend’s clothes were dirty, Ina did what any Ina would do: she burnt the lot.

The moral of her story was pretty straightforward.

“Always take clean clothes when you travel,” she told me minutes into our trip to Baucau this week.

What, so if you die unexpectedly it makes it easier to clean up after you?

“Yes,” she said, eyeing my shirt.

Ina is one cool cat. Conceding only that she is “above 30” years old, she seems to have already seen it all many many times over, and remains decidedly underwhelmed by it.

Take the Flamboyant Hotel in Baucau. This is one of the oldest hotels in Timor, and is considered the best place to stay in the whole country. The pink building dates from the Portuguese occupation, survived the Indonesian firestorm, and today stands dripping with bougainvillea and ringed by water features. It even has a family of monkeys on staff.

It’s actually called Pousada de Baucau, but to Ina it will always be The Flamboyant Hotel, or just “Flamboyant” once she knows I’m keeping up with her. To her it smacks of all that is wrong with a new coat of paint and too many steps.

“Last time we stayed in the Flamboyant,” she sniffs. “I don’t like the Portuguese food there. It’s too oily.”

Thanks to my new friend Murat from UNPOL, Ina and I found a happy medium for our digs in Baucau, which was beautiful. The lush old town overlooking the sea is overrun with aqueducts funnelling water so clean you’d swear you could read the cigarette health warnings off the LA Lights packets lying on the bottom. Well, if the packs had health
warnings, that is.

The overnight trip was ostensibly about going to see the media centre up there and then on to meet the paper’s correspondent. He’s a dude who has scrawled “FUCK OOF” in big letters across the side of his house, and that kinda set the tone for our meeting.

He was nice enough; just not really that into inverted pyramids, prisms, or anything else I was selling that wasn’t a new dictaphone. Fair enough, really. This was, after all, the former guerrilla who had just handed the paper the scoop of the century.

For those of you who missed it, the Catholic Church in Baucau has found a cure for AIDS.

SEPT '09:

I have discovered that I possess, most innately, what it takes to become a good teacher.

They’re called breasts, and they’re a key element to maintaining attention when explaining the value of the inverted pyramid news structure to my Timorese colleagues.

I’m writing this now in Unlit Room Number Two, because there’s only so much theory you can run past reporters before coming across as, well, a training editor. It’s interesting to note that journalists write, fold, and then distribute their own papers here. I casually told them that in Sydney we have to fill out our own timesheets as well. It was
a moment of transnational solidarity.

In my brief role as training person, I have built on some of the very hard work done by Monica by explaining the concepts of rounds and outlining the structure of the newsroom. Examples of which are as follows:

Publisher: Often detested by staff;
Chief of Staff: Responsible for telling journalists the desk is not interested in any of their stories this week, but could they quickly knock out a brief from this press release? Cheers;
Senior reporter: The person whose byline runs first;
Interns: Important during a hiring freeze, see also “general reporter”.

Jose Belo, the director here and stringer for SBS and the ABC is a bit of a gun, but he’s not around much. He basically comes in at the start of each week and hands out half a dozen confidential government documents showing corruption, before asking the two reporters to follow them up and heading out.

Belo also hates the body that has just been given $1.8 million over five years to improve Timor’s journalism. I went and visited them today in their air-conditioned, wifi office and they were very nice. For this and other reasons they have more than two journalists to whom we can repeatedly point out the merits of the inverted pyramid structure. Even if next time it was be done in a bikini or wet t-shirt.

The wind beneath my wings this week has been a translator called Ina, who often looks at me in silent reproach or expresses wonderment at why anyone would choose to become a journalist. I tell her it’s because in Australia we’re given free parking. Swap “reproach” for “yourbullshittingme-ness” and you pretty much see how this one goes
down. She could have a bright future.

Otherwise, Dili has been good. You get to know most expats around here pretty quickly. Evenings have been spent going to the beaches that are so coral-strewn it’s like swimming in a Gold Coast gift shop, or heading to someone’s farewell party to drink their alcohol.

Tonight, before heading off to Baucau tomorrow, I’m seeing a Man About a Rabid Dog for one of my own stories. I’d mention that it’s about something in Timor, but why ruin the punchline.

SEPT '09:

Greetings from East Timor, where the mosquitoes are social, and the dollars American.

It's really bloody hot here. The beaches are amazing and the infrastructure pretty under-developed. The office where I'm working is basically three rooms in the 'burbs made entirely of concrete, with no lighting and half a computer. I stopped in and said hello on Friday.

But seeing as it's the weekend, I've spent most of my time getting to know - and then making fun of - the expat NGO/UN social scene with a couple of parties and a day out to the Island north of Dili. Building on established occupier traditions of the Spanish, the French, and the Indonesians, these are the people who introduce each other as acronyms and know the Timorese as the people who clean their houses. So far I've discovered they have parties pretty much every night – when there’s no reason, they make one up. As the alcohol is usually free, I try not to be too scathing about their apparent definition of sustainable development as a grant with a generous expense account, or how they mix a cocktail.

The most fantastic addition to the expat UN crowd (who refer to themselves as "internationals") is the Portugese police. When these guys arrive at a party they tend to alter the atmosphere like a clandestine fart: they're not referred to directly but everyone seems to find their presence quietly confronting - more so because it bothers them much less than they’d care to admit. These guys are basically a bunch of identical frankentorsos who glisten and jog shirtless (in packs) up to Timor’s other icon, the statue of Jesus Christ, every afternoon. It’s hard to believe they’re not just a figment of collective imagination, but I’m assured there have been enough independently verified accounts of people sleeping with them to confirm every single one of them actually exists a few times over.

They're not allowed out after 11pm anymore, however, after a shooting incident at a bar a couple of weeks ago. More's the pity.

The counterinsurgents of sorts in the battle to make the world a better place tend to be journo types. They tend to have scruffier jaws and less refined drinking habits. They’re at the popular bar a day too early. They have bad facial hair and mumble. It’s my theory that these people tend fall at the periphery of the social set because they are
yet to grasp that success in this field can be partially attributed to colourful shirts. Given what I’ve been up to the past couple of days, it’s fair to assume that I haven’t actually met many.

On to other stereotypes, the Timorese people I’ve met are absolutely lovely. Shorter than me, as a rule. They also tend to have strangely positive affirmations on their t-shirts. “Say No To Drugs” and “I Love My Body” made a showing in the first couple of hours. “No Bullets, No Bitches”, a bit later.

There are about seven tourists in the country, defined as anyone staying for less than a month for any reason. I met them in my first few hours here at the Jesus statue amid jogging Portugese visions. The main front here is a group from Albury Wadonga studying eco tourism and they're quite a friendly bunch. It seems places considered out of
the way and poorly serviced by regional air carriers have somewhat of an affinity for each other.

On to other impressions of Dili, taxis here at night make changeover in Kings Cross seem like the Silk Road rush hour. You won’t find a taxi on the road after 8pm, and there’s a fair chance that those that are doing the rounds wouldn’t mind knowing what your intestines look like. Lucky for me that I’ve had access to one of the UN-like peace
tanks known as a Mitsubishi Pagero through Lucy, who has been wonderful.

The president also lives next to the supermarket. If I were running that business, I'd put that on a logo or something.

Anyway, this is probably all too long, but I don’t have a Twitter feed.

MAY '07:

Being stupid and dozy in a Sichuan teahouse feels much like falling asleep inside a Monet painting. I spent my morning progressively melting into my chair and the view of lilly pond...If someone hadn't interruped everything to try and sell me a massage I think by now I would have been framed and for sale in a giftshop somewhere.

In any case, welcome to Chengdu: my six-hour-old city.

You'll have to excuse the poetics. I have spent two days and two nights on a train travelling overland from Lhasa, which I think has sent me a bit mental. Patrick White for one couldn't take the trip - 'The Eye of the Storm" broke up quite literally somewhere between chapter seven, chapter nine and the watercooler between two of the carriages.

The high point of the journey passed us on Thursday night when we reached 5100m, causing some of my less sturdy carriage companions to get nose bleeds. In parts the track run over permafrost, meaning the rails have to be kept permanently refrigerated or the single line in and out will buckle. When the Chinese built the line about a year ago they first called in experts from Switzerland who said the task would be imposssible. The Swiss may have factored in the mountains, the altitude and the frost, but they hadn't reckoned with Sino pride and flexible labour laws; the Chinese built the line anyway, and Lhasa has been becoming more of a tourist trap ever since.

But Tibet was great, I didn't want to leave. A couple of friends and I spent our last night sneaking into a Tibetan school to play a game of basketball at 3700m. I'm pretty sure I will be the only one who has done any sort of altitude training when Broadmeadow's Women's Division 2 meets in the coming weeks. For this reason, along with my diet of rice and MSG, I anticipate a stunning return to form.

In a nutshell, I spent a couple of days travelling to Tibet's highest salt lake, Namtso, disputably the highest in the world, and out to Gamden, a monastery on the top of a mountain, which was being rebuilt after it was pretty much destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The monastery was really cool; a couple of friends and I hitched a ride with a busload of Tibetan pilgrims, who sung the whole way there up a pretty dodgy cliffside road and did the kora round the ridge of the mountain.

But now it's all Chengdu and pandas and teahouses and backpackers with their cheapfuck eyes. I had wondered where they had all gone, but it turns out they had been hanging around a converted printing house hostel down an alleyway, a block or two from the People's Park. But hey - I'm here for the pandas.

MAY '07:

I have found the place where pollution was invented. It is called Datong, a city where the wounded screams of mother nature are drowned out by car horns and megaphones. I'm in the heart of China's coal country, and despite my expectations it is nothing like the coalmines of the Hunter Valley, where workers still take time out to crack a nice local wine and talk about any OH and S issues.

If something doesn't smell like soot here, it's because it smells like petrol. Your eyes and nose sting all the time, and I have developed a bit of a smokers chuckle. I arrived last night by train and it felt vaguely like I had booked a one-way ticket into the Great Leap Forward. No one speaks English, which is fine, considering it's China, and everyone else except me is Chinese, which again, is fine, considering it's China.

I seriously didn't think I would get out of here (remember it's a public holiday, all the very crowded trains are booked) until I was rescued by a 22-year-old French countess who speaks fluent Mandarin. I now have an overnight hard seat ticket to the tourist trap of Pingyao, which should be cool. To repay her I had to be her chaperone last night and today as she fought off the unwanted advances of a Chinese financial engineer who followed her all the way from Beijing. We went to dinner at a local restaurant - he staring deeply into her eyes while I finished off the beer. Laughing in the face of danger and smartraveller.gov.au, I even tried the cold pork.

Why did I come here, you ask? Just outside of the city there are more than 1000 buddhas carved into the side of a cliff (and directly opposite a coal mine, which is ringed by apartment buildings) and a monastery that is somehow perched on the side of a mountain, and has remained just so for about 1000 years. Both were pretty amazing. The countess and I speculated as to why the founders of Taoism decided to build the monastery halfway up a vertical incline rather than the very comfortable-looking valley below. I guess the Chinese invented "let's just have a crack at it" along with noodles and gunpowder.

Yeah. My train doesn't come until 11pm, by which point the wind will have picked up and it will have gotten quite cold. I might see if one of my colleagues here at the Internet cafe will let me play Warcraft with them, or, failing that, huddle in a corner in the train station and think about a few of my favourite things while rocking slowly back and forth. It's fine, I'll buy a lump of coal to keep me warm.

MAY '07:

Sometimes it's the choice of transport that can make or break a trip. Scott of the Antarctic had his ponies, and today Leesha in Beijing had her bicycle. It was meant to be a leisurely cycle through the gable-roofed hutong (courtyard houses) district that I have been staying in, meandering gently down to Tiannamen Square, but I got a bit lost. I went off the Lonely Planet map of "Greater Beijing" (which is crap and out of date btw) not once but twice - first in the
southerly direction, and then the north-easterly direction, which is quite impressive I think considering I thought I was going west.

I stopped and asked five people for directions, which consisted of a "ni hao" followed by a waving of the (aforementioned completely crap) map in an effort to get back on track. Two of the people I asked were cab drivers who refused to give me and my filthy bike a ride, but were kind enough to point. One cab driver did finally find it in his heart to leave my rental bike hanging halfway out of the boot while driving me back to the hutong...blowing me kisses and trying to touch my knee the whole way. The whole ordeal took about four hours, but I did see a lot of Beijing.

Since then I have discovered the answer to world peace and inner contentment is a couple of beers with some people from your dorm and an hour-long foot massage (for the princely sum of $6).

But I digress. The rest of the day was spent at the silk markets looking at really tacky Mao trinkets and then heading over to Tiannamen Square. The China Daily reported that 1000 people were reported lost in the square on Tuesday alone, and still the beast that is the May Day public holiday rolls on. Despite the chaos, and difficulty securing a train ticket, the government is apparently happy that a reported 1.6 billion have looked upon this time as an opportunity to travel. That figure sounds a bit high to me, but how can you not trust a newspaper that puts an exclamation mark at the end its lead sentence? It's all so exciting.

The wall yesterday was good, but pretty heavy going. Because the section I did required some degree of fitness and a lack of any heart condition, it was not as busy as it could have been... if you excuse the American computer technicians trying to find themselves. It's also pretty hard to complain about an incline when a 90-year-old Chinese woman is keeping pace while trying to sell you a guide book, or fret about a narrow walkway and a sharp drop when a two-year-old appears to be taking it all on board two metres ahead of you.

But yeah. Tomorrow I leave Beijing for Da Tong and its hanging monastery, cave carvings, and depressing industrial infrastructure It's about 1mm from Beijing on the LP map, but will take close to half a day to get there. It's a pretty big country.

Scrap that, I'm in the circus. I want to go home.

Books about teenage vampires are lame.

Sometimes it seems like it would just be easier to run away and join the circus. 

Imagine if they had circus Contiki tours. Wonderful idea. You could just go and hang out with the bearded lady and elephant man, have a couple of D&Ms, find belonging in your shared sense of hopelessness and isolation, and then come home. Refreshed.

With loads of case study material, of course.

GAARRRRRRRRGHHH!

In many movies - you know the ones, let's not go into them here - a character regularly makes the mistake of thinking another character is dead as a drink bottle, only to have them pop back up and scare the bejesus out of them much later.

TWO YEARSish later, even.

So here I am. Sort of. But I never actually went away...(I'll leave that one a bit vague and mysterious, it's a thing I'm trying)...

Some bits and pieces; it's been a while.

A whale washed up outside my house today. Weighted and slack like a wet sock. I don’t know who found it, probably an early morning surfer or jogger, but by mid morning the councilmen were sending out papers on what was to be done with it.

What does a dead adolescent sperm whale rotting on the beach look like? Weeping grey and ghastly cream. Very Big. There are slashes across its guts from a boat roater. Sharks have made a meal of its sides.

The councilmen don’t know why it died, or how to get it off the beach. They announce a plan for the second day of its stay in Newcastle: they will dig a hole on the beach, three metres deep and put it there. It will become part of the dune. Children will play over it and dune grass will grow. People will talk of the day the whale washed up out the front of my house.

The councilmen tell the surfers the stink will dissipate in time.

....

The paper today congratulated 23 year old Kathryn McFeeney from Brisbane for becoming the Rose of Tralee and though she is hundreds of kilometers away I feel my mother purse her lips.

The Rose of Tralee is a beauty pageant/talent quest for the daughters of Irish families living abroad. It takes its name from the title of a 19th century song about lost love. The pageant allows Irish girls from California to Canberra to put their wares on display and to show the Irish nation what they’re missing out on.

I had not heard of the competition until last year when The Other Irish Family my parents knew from home and who also live in Sydney came up in conversation. It seems in the series of tasks each more mundane than the last, their only daughter had triumphed. Thus began the talk of one of us stepping up to the plate and winning the pageant for the family - of “rosing” to the occasion.

My youngest sister is the obvious choice; she is beautiful. All long locks of hair and lily white skin, she could stop a room. I would be the PC choice; community service credentials might be enough to steal victory and a free trip to Ireland in a lack luster field. Once there though, only my older sister would enjoy the scenery. But you'd have trouble getting her into a dress.

You see then my mother’s problem. So we do nothing and girls from Queensland win and give us one less opportunity to show up The Other Irish Family’s daughter with her earnest dreams of world peace.

And that annoys us all.

...

I interviewed a woman today who is turning 100 next week. We talked on her childhood in Glasgow and life during the war, till she grew tired. She said the world is a less happy place then it used to be. Her secret to long life? Everything in moderation.

...

For my birthday I went home to Sydney, where friends and I ran through the damp-cornered streets of Newtown, bottle of Moet in hand searching for jasmine flowers.

I like the way a whiff of jasmine hangs. The smell makes the air warmer; it coats everything around it even after rain. This also means though you know it’s nearby it can take you a while to find it.

It was one of my friends who gave me a 3am jasmine flower from someone’s front gate while we talked about the road trip up to my house in a few weeks. He said when the weather is a bit nicer we’ll go to the beach, and I told him it was nice to have a drink on the balcony.

The next day was Sunday and the jasmine flowers got a bit crushed in the rush to get back to Newcastle and to work and to my dirty laundry. I put one small bunch in the kitchen anyway and brought the other sad smudge of blooms to work. They don’t look very pretty but now I can smell jasmine everywhere.

...

I had a conversation at work the other day about migrants. Jeff and I both agreed that greater diversity was a good thing. He said each generation of Australians grows more tolerant of new comers just as the second and third generation of migrants become more adept at language, more comfortable with social customs of their adopted homelands and so on.

He said that many migrant groups that come here are violent and need to realise that they must to adapt to the ways of Australia. He said Muslims, for instance, need to know they must to treat their women better. I said it is dangerous to generalise.

He then told me the story of his niece. She married a Pakistani Muslim, converted and had five children, They live in Australia and her family is quite fond of him; he is a loving husband and father.

Things did not go so well when his parents came to stay. The mother-in-law beat the niece for not waiting on her correctly. She was told she had failed to properly manage the household. When Jeff’s brother, a big burly Anglo-Australian, heard of the beatings he immediately made the three-hour drive to his daughters house. When he got there he found that his son-in-law had thrown his parents out and had been disowned as a result.

Jeff said without generalizations we’d never be able to talk about anything.

Something angsty.

The life of Newcastle drains out after dark. At sunset, lines of cars wink down Hunter Street towards the highways or disappear over The Hill. The city, barely busy at nine, has washed out completely twelve hours later.

Stand on foreshore though, and you can watch the massive, silent hulks of container ships lumber and purge through the night. They are the one constant in what – seen by the departure of BHP – can be an uncertain place. Even now they remain the metal heart and lungs of an industrial town.

But to stand by the foreshore of Newcastle at dusk can be a lonely activity. This is not my town. At early evening its crust of terraces and knotted industrial trees remind me of the bigger city further down the coast. I look for traces of it fixed in odd shadows; it is my only, my daily escape from the fickle ebb and flow of this evening tide.

You can’t set the turn of water here, but you can decide whether or not to follow it. The doyennes of civility have long fought a losing battle when it comes to adding pretension to this grand, but essentially gruntingly working class city. In 1887 the Newcastle Morning Herald proclaimed that one of the “dullest spots by way of amusement in the colony” was to finally strut into the new century. One can only wonder if the brand new Continental Café it was introducing - another building with all the best connotations of wicker, potted palms and ladies in white - ever was any match for the sweltering practicality demanded by a North Coast coal city. As long as foggy black soot found its layered way to doors of a morning, this would always be a pub town.

But perhaps the tide, at long last, is finally turning. The region with the second highest concentration of pubs (and, one would assume, its fair share of $5 steaks and schnitzels) was visited by Gourmet Traveler this year. Stand alone amidst that achingly industrial beauty of the harbour and the sparkling but quiet aluminum and glass apartments behind you carry million dollar price tags.

“This is the yuppie part of Newcastle, so you’ll find it’s really safe at night,” says Kate. She is standing with me and Jdango opposite Merewether Baths – beautifully art deco sea pools singled out by the camera of Gourmet Traveler’s photographer. Like most of the city’s architecture, they were carefully planned and generously public, but the nearby change rooms lie derelict behind a rusty fence.“One day local government will realize this is not just a working class town,” says Jdango.

Indeed. This is why I am here. So say the faces of shopkeepers and neighbours and co-workers. “Merewether, but Sydney,” I hear at the back of the office; two café girls talk of ‘townies’ and ‘carros’ and I nod into my coffee. Compliments at the surprising beauty of the city are taken in two spirits; of course it is. It always has been.

Newcastle never really bothered with the shiny new things that its whoring southern sister always seemed to scramble for. Maybe that’s why people don’t seem so much to move here as move back here. But I am a bastard blow in from Sydney, not a treasured prodigal son. I have my morning coffee overlooking the beach and its horizon of tankers, but all it does is make me thirsty.

I am going to Splendour (Splenda? No? Just the old-fashioned way then?) in the Grass in Byron Bay, though as of yet have no way to get there.
I am going to throw out the rest of this take away fried rice and seriously dispute the presence of "ginger" next time I visit my local Noodle Box.
I am not going to say "local" again because it is a sin according to my style guide.
I am going to try and get up tomorrow and go to the gym.
I am going to proof read more.
I will probably go home and watch "medical incredible" late night TV, although perhaps I won't eat anything at the same time. Lessons learned.
I should call my mother.
I expect to get told off any minute now for a confusing lead sentence.
I ought to get back to work

There are many things that you can point out about people from regional Australia. Many of them are about being hokey and pokey and other words that you never get to use because they seem slightly outdated, derogatory, and never quite work in other contexts. Irksome is such a word. As is scrunchie-wielding redneck bogan.

While it is always fun to make these observations (and I may make them later), I would like to draw your attention to what seems to be a hokey and pokey and bitsy country tick. It's trivial and quaint, yes, but not funny. Only annoying.

Example:
Leesha (names have been changed) meets Betty Sue in the tinned goods section of the supermarket. Betty Sue reaches across Leesha to get tinned tobacco from shelf.``Sorry,'' says Leesha.
Nothing, says BS.

Leesha buys an apple at a fruit store and only has a $20 dollar note.``Sorry about the note,'' says Leesha.
Nothing, says the Fruitperson, Betty May.

Someone attacks Leesha in the street, all 'appearances' of `accident, not looking.'
Sorry, concedes countryperson. Finally. After much screaming by (semi-conscious, bleeding etcetc) Leesha.
"THAT's OKAY," says Leesha.

Us city slickers may live hectic lives and never appreciate the good things, like a home-baked apple pie or a first cousin, but we still find time for insincere social niceties. And to comb our hair.

WHAT'S WITH THAT REGIONAL AUSTRALIA?