In Limbo

I’ve been in Limbo for the past two months and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Our beautiful family home at Gordon was sold at the beginning of February, a home we had lived in for seventeen years. It had been a little paradise in the midst of a big and growing city, situated in a totally safe and crime-free area, so quiet at night that the only sounds were those of the boobook owl and the fruit bats. We overlooked a valley of eucalypts and red gums, with a small stream that trickled along at the lowest point, and rushed in torrents after heavy rain. The birds were our constant neighbours – kookaburras, sulphur-crested cockatoos, rainbow lorikeets, magpies, currawongs, butcher birds, king parrots, rosellas and native pigeons. For seventeen years, we heard each new set of hatchlings nag at their mothers for food, and watched them take their first clumsy flights as fledglings. I could call the birds to me, and they would come and feed from my hand. Our human neighbours were just as friendly. In such a big, busy city, it was wonderful to be able to know and talk to all the people who lived in the surrounding houses, and as a dog owner, I also had the pleasure of making friends with other dog people at our nearby park.  We would meet each day, both morning and evening, and walk and talk while the dogs socialised with each other. At nighttime, being in a valley away from city lights, the sky was dark and the stars shone brightly, and you would never have known that you were only five miles, or eight kilometres, from the centre of Sydney.  The boys grew up in this place, rode their bikes to the local primary school, caught the bus to their local secondary school, belonged to the local Cubs and Scouts, played football with the local team and went to the local Kids’ Club.

However, now the boys are grown up and have left home, so it is time to move on. I love the cool climate and slower pace of Tasmania, so that’s where I’m headed. Between selling the Gordon house and buying a new one in Hobart, I have been living up in the New South Welsh countryside, in a little place called Kandos, with my friend, Oki. It has been good to unwind after all the cleaning and packing up of seventeen years of family life, and being in Limbo, between my past life, and my future one, has been great fun.

I’ve joined the local Community Club and have played bingo with the women and bowls with the men. I’ve even talked Oki into taking up bowls, and as a man who avoids sporting functions, and takes absolutely no interest in sport whatsoever, this is quite something. He has learnt quickly, is quite good at it, and now, even has a uniform and his own set of bowls! Having been a member of the Gordon Women’s Bowling Club, where we played strictly by the rules, the Kandos version of bowls is somewhat different. Whereas we would have a sip of water every now and then, during a long, hot game of bowls at Gordon, to help us concentrate, at Kandos, the preferred drink is beer, not in sips, but in large gulps, and to hell with concentrating on the game!  At Gordon, it was polite to pick up your partner’s bowl when she was playing before you, and hand it to her. During the game, it is standard procedure not to call out instructions loudly from one end of the green to the other, but to use designated hand signals instead, so that other teams are not disturbed by the noise. At Kandos, no-one has heard of such strange rules of etiquette, and the whole affair is one big, relaxed and very noisy party, with the actual game just an excuse for drinking and talking. Keeping score is irrelevant and the game is strictly for fun, and not for competition. This is nice, unless you want to improve your standard of play, and I think my technique will go backwards while I’m up here. However, it’s a lovely way to get to know the local people.

Being a city-slicker all my life, I have never before had the experience of finding out what country town people are like. When my middle son, Adam, moved from the city to the country to study, he discovered that they were quite different from him. He didn’t know how they could tell that he wasn’t one of them, but maybe it had something to do with his fashionable clothes, his cool manner and the way he spoke. Well, I’ve been finding the same. Nothing is said, but I can tell that people wonder where I’ve suddenly appeared from and what I’m doing here. I think differently from the locals and talk about different things, use different vocabulary and have different interests. My manner is totally different, and although I find them very friendly, I think it would take me years to feel I belonged here.

The town has only 1,200 people, most of whom work at the local cement works or in the local shops. The school has 500 students, which is quite a number for a small town. As long as the threatened carbon taxes are not brought into being, this town will thrive and grow, but if our idiot government brings this absurd tax into being, Kandos, and many other towns around this area, will become ghost towns as the cement works, limestone quarry and coal mines are closed down and people lose their jobs and homes. 

Although just a small place, Kandos has its own golf course, large swimming pool, tennis courts, bowling green, Scout Troop and museum. And although you might think that nothing much happens out here in the country, you’d be completely wrong.  A fortnight ago, the famous Bylong Mouse Races were held nearby. These races are a very important annual event, attended by people and their mice from miles around.  The mice are trained to run, and as part of the entry fee, spectators are handed a wonderful booklet that describes each individual mouse in the competition. There are ten heats and an important and very exciting final, known as the Bylong Cup.  The racecourse is a vertical, ten-storey affair, with an individual starting gate and track for each mouse. People can place their bets on their favourite mice, with any money they like from twenty cents upwards, and all money raised goes to local charities. I had a bet on two different mice in two different races and neither won a place. I also guessed that two others would win their races and they actually did win, but I hadn’t bet on them! Oki bet on two races as well, but with no better luck than I’d had. In one heat, Oki’s mouse didn’t appear until half way through the race, having fallen asleep while waiting for the race to start! Last year, when the Bylong Cup final was in full swing, and everyone was cheering on the mouse who had won all his heats, the little champion stopped just before the finish line to groom himself! What a disappointment for all those who had placed bets on him.

Last weekend, there was the Annual Astronomical Society of New South Wales Star Party. It ran for three days and nights, with most people camping out. We were very lucky to live close by and had the luxury of going home to our warm beds at the end of each night. The Star Party was a mixture of brilliant talks by leading, professional astronomers, star gazing sessions through a fantastic assortment of reflector, refractor and Dobsonian telescopes, expert guides who could point out the constellations and any other objects you wanted to view with the naked eye, and an astronomy equipment stall which sold red torches, laser pointers, eyepieces, planispheres, binoculars and telescopes.  There was a spit roast on the Saturday night and everyone sat together and was warm and friendly to talk to. Next year, I would be very happy to do it all again.

One of the talks was about the composition of the Universe which, with our current knowledge, seems to include 4% normal matter, 26% dark matter and 70% dark energy. We understand what the normal matter is, with its electrons, protons and neutrons. We don’t know what the dark matter consists of, but we do know that it has gravity. However, it does not interact with the electromagnetic force, so we really don’t have any idea what it is made of, just that there is a lot of it! Then there is the totally mysterious dark energy, which makes up the majority of the Universe, and we don’t have the faintest idea about it at all. All we know is that, whereas gravity is a “pull”, dark energy is a “push”, and it is such a strong push that it is stronger than the gravity that is trying to pull us all back into the Big Bang. The push is so great that the Universe is now accelerating outwards, and has been for some time. We now know that the Universe will end not with a bang, but a whimper… reminds me of a T. S. Eliot poem I once read at school. In the end, in a very long time from now, all the galaxies will be spread far apart until, when we look out into the night sky, there will be nothing much left to see, and finally, in an even more distant future, the protons will decay and there will be nothing left at all. We seem to have come from nothing, and we will eventually return to nothing. The talk also concentrated on what the Universe was like in the first hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. As particles fell out of thermodynamic equilibrium, and the Universe cooled and stretched, there was a period of time when the Universe was opaque. If you could have been there at the time (and not been squashed and burnt to a crisp), when you looked out across “the sky”, you would have just seen bright light from all the photons (light particles) bouncing around. Interestingly, you would also have been bombarded with a terrible noise, because the protons, neutrons and electrons were so close together that the photons would have set up vibrations and transmitted the sound through the surrounding particles of matter. I have never thought of Deep Space as being a noisy place, but it was, way back then. As the Universe continued to expand, this noise and opaqueness disappeared and the Universe became silent and transparent. It was filled with elementary particles, spread evenly throughout “the sky”, which, over further time, pulled themselves into clumps under the influence of gravity, and finally into the stars, planets and galaxies that we know today.  

The next talk was very peculiar and a big surprise. It has been thought for many years that the Universe is very homogeneous, with matter distributed pretty evenly throughout Space. Well, it looks as though this idea may be wrong! We have been brought up to think that there is nothing special about where we are located in Space, and that no place in the Universe is more different or more special than any other place. We have also been taught that the laws of physics are the same wherever we may find ourselves in the Universe. We might have to think again because the research that the second speaker has been doing suggests that there is, in fact, an area of the sky that is different, where the laws of physics are not the same as they are in our part of the Universe! This comes as quite a shock to most people who are interested in astronomy. The scientist who gave the talk has gathered evidence that suggests that the Universe may have two poles, one in the direction of 60° south on the celestial equator, and one in the opposite direction. In these locations, at very great distances from our galaxy, it seems that the electromagnetic force, and possibly the strong force, are weaker than they are in our vicinity and therefore that matter in those polar regions behaves in a very different fashion from the matter that we have come to know. Chemical and physical properties in those distant parts of the Universe would not be the same as we have come to expect in our part of the Universe.

I am due to leave Limbo quite soon, as I have just found myself a little house down in Hobart. It is a tiny, one-bedroomed house with a lovely garden, built in 1860 of brick with a tin roof. It is in a handy location, just near the shops and transport, and only a thirty-minute walk into the centre of town along a little path beside a stream. Mount Wellington looms up in the background, and in winter, when it is snow-capped, I will love looking up at it to admire its beauty. Sometimes on winter nights, the Aurora australis can be seen from Hobart, and as an amateur astronomer, I will look forward to seeing such a sight. It will be the start of a whole new life down there, in the land of the Roaring Forties.