Aussies – You lucky people!

Tweet

My feet have now – just about – touched the ground after our whirlwind tour of Queensland and New South Wales, ‘down under’.

Apart from memories of a “holiday of a lifetime”, my one abiding “take away” from the visit was: how lucky the Australians are! They have a country of vast, vast resources – most importantly, space. Flats and terraced houses are rare. Virtually everyone has their bungalow with a large garden. In Queensland, if they want to build more bungalows they just cut down another sugar beet field (apologies for the exaggeration).

Perhaps the clearest indicator of the vast resources of Australia is in the fresh fruit and veg of Woolworths (yes, it lives! albeit as their equivalent of Tesco).

Over here, you walk round Tesco fruit and veg section for quite a while before you find the handful of items produced in the UK.

In Australia, you have to spend ages trying to find the items not produced in Australia. I found two items in one Woolworths. One of those were dates produced in the USA.

Australia has such a stupendous range of climates! from the tropical regions in the north to the more Englishy climates in the south. They grow virtually everything including melons and tropical fruits. Indeed, my photo lists the tropical fruits we sampled in North Queensland at a fruit farm.

There is even tea grown in North Queensland at Daintree – see my other photo.

Mind you – I should even this out and say that, as well as the vast resources referred to above, they also have cyclones, floods, bush fires and a whole encyclopaedia of creepy crawlies to contend with.

Tweet