Convicts and Beer

H claims that I am going to get into a bar fight if I keep declaring Australia to be the land of convicts and kangaroos. I see this as nothing more than an entertaining declaration of truths. Australia was the recipient of British convicts who opted for life on a new continent in lieu of staying behind bars in their homeland. And despite not seeing a live one yet, Australia is most certainly the country of kangaroos. Where else can you find grocery store meat departments full of ‘roo meat, including “Kanga Banga” sausages, road laws detailing what to do if you hit a kangaroo (stop and check its pouch for a baby ‘roo and if there is one, wrap it in a blanket and bring it to the nearest vet), and statues everywhere depicting these adorable creatures? Kangaroos are even in the news with coverage ranging from what to do about the overpopulation problem to a kangaroo getting into a house and a man wrestling him out in nothing but his “Bondie” underwear.

Today we checked out some of WA’s convict history in Fremantle at Fremantle Prison, a limestone jail built in the 1850s and used as Perth’s maximum-security prison until 1991. We met one of our Japanese friends, K, there and took the Great Escapes tour which led us on an interesting tour of the prison during which time the guide told us some stories of a few of the most notable escapes and escape attempts from the prison. To read about some of them, visit the Fremantle Prison website. After the tour we walked around Fremantle, admiring its 19^th century mostly convict built architecture, and walked through some nice looking cheese, meat, and produce markets, and some tacky souvenir and handicraft markets.

As we walked around, we noticed multiple groups of people collecting money for Sea Shepherds, a whale conservation group that takes it upon itself to patrol a whale sanctuary in Antarctica from Japanese whaling vessels. There is a show that follows the group’s activities on Animal Planet , called Whale Wars, that H and I have enjoyed watching. Recently in the news, we heard that a Sea Shepherd member, Captain Pete Bethune, had been arrested for boarding a Japanese whaling vessel to serve a citizen’s arrest warrant to the captain for ramming and shipping his ship, the Ady Gil. He was transported back to Japan on that whaling vessel and is awaiting trial in a prison in Tokyo for a variety of charges. I suspected that the press coverage in Japan of the group was fairly intense and asked our friend K if he had heard anything about the group. He had and viewed the group as a terrorist organization, a representation that seems to be common in the Japanese press. K saw nothing wrong with collecting whale meat for research and using the remains as food, apparently he views whale meat as quite a delicacy. I disagreed saying that not only are whales endangered species, but they are so cute and so helpless. He asked me if I am a vegetarian and I said no but I don’t eat animals that I view as cute such as sheep, baby cows, rabbit, and whales. He had to concede that chickens and fish aren’t really cute so the argument went to me. The loser should have had to make a contribution to Sea Shepherds ;)

To end the day, we visited Little Creatures Brewery, located on the Indian Ocean in Fremantle, where we sampled some of their great food and tried out some more of their beers and their Pipsqueak Cider. The Pipsqueak Cider was quite good, I like it better than Strongbow, which was recommended by an Australian friend, but my favorite is still Savanna Dry, a South African cider that I discovered in Qatar.