I am sitting on the deck of a sorta-fast food shop on Rottnest Island. I have run outta gas.

Mary is still enthusiastically roaming about.

The park is in two distinct parts. There is your standard botanical garden, with labels and manicured beds. Then there is the wild part. The vegetation

One in a million? Two in a million. Wait! Eleven in a million. A family of emus; mom, dad, and seven half grown kids crossed and continued into the bush. All those long legs and long necks looked like

One in a million! The chances that in a thousand square miles of desert that you have been driving through for days, an emu will step out onto the highway in front of you, then saunter past you out into the desert.

We drove nearly two hundred miles without passing another car. From this I presume it is the off season.

This is mining country and the whole feel is working class. Exuberant, friendly working class.

We crossed the top end of the Big Sandy desert. Not much sand, mostly caliche, no tree at all, not even bushy ones. We then entered forest. Trees twenty to thirty feet tall.

This does not reflect well on my character: I have lost a bra.

We arrived in fine fettle and disembarkation went smoothly. End of smoothness. Everyone in the US said make Australian travel arrangements in Australia. It is Saturday. Every agency that survived COVID is closed weekends.

Brisbane claims to love visitors, but we’re parked four miles from town that is not easy to get to. Also, port security chased everyone off the boat. Some went on tours, some waited a long time for a taxi, some used Uber.

I love Australia and have travelled there, for various reasons, on three occasions. I’ve seen just about all of it except the Top End. As we often think of the US by regions—Dixie, Downeast, the PNW—and the perimeters of those regions may enclose parts of several states, so does the land Down Under have its regions. The Top End is Broome east past Darwin to the Gulf of Carpenteria and down a little way. It includes parts of Western Australia, Queensland, and Northern Territory [a side note here: in this country, that would be Tare-a-tory. In Australia, it’s terror-tree. Ofttimes the written language has little in common with the spoken tongue].

When I visited Iceland, the youngest…