Hip to be a Square

Road trip was full of events that pushed me out of my comfort zone. I have already discussed this a little in an early post where I talked about Terrigal beach and Camron but there were many more events that pushed me out of my comfort zones, chanting in Manly, running down a tunnel in central station making that huge scene I discussed earlier and leaping around Gosford dressed in pink are all things that I struggled to just "go with the flow" of but none of them matched up to the Martin place stunt. Planned to be a massive media stunt with both the New South Wales team and the Western Australia team resulted in over three hundred people trying to perform a choreographed dance we all learnt the night before. It looked like a disaster waiting to happen.
Three hundred young people filtered down into martin place in an attempt to look natural and not draw attention to ourselves. (I don't know how well that worked)
With every one in place two large speakers started to boom out a song through Sydney CBD and four of the team started the dance. The dance was a square dance with the same ten moves repeated over and over each time rotating to a different direction. As the starting four turned to face a new direction people joined the dance, and it continued with each time the dance changing direction more and more people joined until all three hundred of us were doing the dance. When it all finished all dancers fell to the ground to represent the dieing people across the globe, while an announcement was made about the Make Poverty History campaign. It all went like clockwork and I believe was highly effective.
Latter in the day we performed the dance again down in Circular Quay. The photo here shows the end of the dance.
I somehow got past my fear of worrying about how stupid I looked and I'm glad I did. I would hate to look back on the event ten years from now and say I did not have the courage to be part of something that changed the world. This photo is stolen with permission from Sonia Presser.

City of Sights

When you live in an area for an extended period of time you slowly grow numb to the awesomeness of the local sights. I feel i am no exception to this, growing up on Sydney's Northern Beaches the sights from North head, Manly or Palm beach are now the norm. Even the local shopping center Warringah Mall is fairly impressive for an open aired shopping mall. Seeing these things semi-regularly, you lose appreciation for the splendor of them which I am sure happens to everyone within their own communities and we are pleasantly reminded of how amazing some of our local sights are when a visitor pops in and reminds us of it. This also seems to apply with the spectacular sights of my home city which are known globally. Sights such as darling harbor, the opera house and the Harbor Bridge have also slipped into my field of everyday sights that I'm tired of. Departing from my home for a small period of time and returning again I thought I would possibly appreciate these sights more, however I did not. That is until I came across some photos from a fellow road tripper who was more then willing to share these photos with me. These are the photos I am sharing in this post and the photos were all taken by Sonia Preisser who does use her photos in competitions so I am thrilled to have been given permission to publish them in my blog. The photos caught me with the beauty of the locations shot just as much as some of the engineering involved in building some of these structures. As I'm sure you will agree I do have some awesome sights in my home city its a shame i have grown a little numb to them.

3 of 3 Highlights

The third highlight was a attention grabbing stunt the New South Wales team tried when walking through the tunnel under central train station in Sydney city. A large Congo line with a bongo drum i the middle was all that was planned. To describe the out of control chant and uproar that actually went down as epic would be a gross understatement. The stunt echoed across the streets of Sydney and drew all sorts of attention including police. How effective was it? who knows but it made everyone stop for 150 adolescents charging through a public walkway chanting and clapping. I pray someone filmed this as I would love to share it with the world. I am very proud of this photo as it not only captured the magnitude of what was happening (look how far back it goes) but it caught everything in one shot, the girl with the bongo drum in the right hand lower corner and the chant going up through the tunnel, in addition to this I was running backwards and holding the camera above my head. Not a bad effort if I do say so myself.

2 of 3 highlights

After bombarding uuniversities we were released for lunch just outside the gates of Sydney Uni. A quick glance at a few of my fellow team members and we knew we were all thinking of the same thing. We quickly scurried off towards the uni quietly praying that one of the other two with me knew where they were going. I already knew that one of my companions was from Newcastle so the chances of her having any idea where we were heading were slim. Once out of earshot we established that the third member of rebellious trio was a student at Sydney Uni and led us straight to the watering hole. Uni bar was a very impressive sight for what I imagined would be a grubby pub. Sneaking in lunch time beers was not the highlight, the highlight was returning to the group early whilst the rest of road trippers were still making sandwiches for lunch and having three of Sydneys homeless approach the trio.
The first two were men who politely asked if we could give them something to eat from the table set up to feed 150 people, it was a fair enough request. A few fellow road trippers happily set about making them several sandwiches and they were very grateful and were on their way. The third, a lady who wanted to sign the petition and eagerly reached out to sign. I noticed things my companions did not on the lady's arms and quickly realised that the person in front of us was a Ice addict with severely disfigured skin from picking and scratching at it. She stop mid way through writing, when the petition asked for her postcode (it did not require her full address) and announced "I don't have a postcode". I don't recall how I felt at that moment but I do recall her face and i think it will stick with me for ever.

Thank You Mr Philip

Captain Arthur Philip named Manly Cove after witnessing the masculine behaviour of the local aboriginals in 1770.
Day two of Make Poverty History Road Trip was filled with an assortment of things all taken in very quickly and rushed through. Thankfully the second stop of the road trip was close enough to home for me to refer to it as my home town. Manly Corso was the destination for us and i felt a small amount of pride when i stepped off the bus and took in an area i had spent many hours of my youth in. This feeling of pride quickly diminished when reports came back from fellow road trippers of verbal abuse and in one case physical abuse towards ambassadors on the road trip who were on a mission to raise awareness about poverty.
I was troubled by these reports as i had only had positive experiences of the place both on the day and in the years past. A high income end of town seemed to lack the compassion for fellow human beings in dire need of help. Fortunately latter in the day some more positive feed back came back to me, yet in hindsight Manly was at the top of everyone's list for the most negative stop on the road trip.

Latter in the afternoon I wondered off to the beach and sat on the cold concrete steps and thought through the days scrambled events. Why was I so proud of this place? Why did it let me down so much to the point that many fellow road trippers now despised the place. The people of Manly had let me down and I felt a little hint of shame creep into my mind. I concluded that I am not responsible for peoples attitude and behavior, I am responsible for myself and my behavior, I represented those people on road trip and weather they liked it or not I feel I did them proud. People can change and my home tribe so to speak needs a lot of work but those with the most need to change are those who need the most attention. People who are self absorbed and selfish are those who most needed to hear our message. So I concluded that whilst Many may have become the most negative stop on the road trip it was possibly the most important.
I still love Manly if for no other reason then it is Beautiful. Give the people time I will change their minds.

Operation Red Fox

Stupidly I choose to wear my fathers old military issue pants over the top of my thermals this morning. Multiple nights camping in temperatures around the minus three mark meant that for three days I was wearing thermals under my normal clothing. This was highly effective at keeping my body temperature up with the exception of toes and fingers. Returning home I failed to add up that the close to freezing temperatures in Canberra in the early morning were somewhat opposite to the crisp autumn day Sydney was experiencing. I stepped of the bus into Sydney central station, said my goodbyes and carried out the line up of required tasks to get a heavy pack and myself on a train. It was here I realized that the heat of thermals and a lack of necessity for them was causing my body to shed liquid very rapidly and made the train ride somewhat uncomfortable for both myself and the Chinese lady sitting next to me. Someone did tell me this past week I was rubbish in the forward planning department.

Saturday afternoon I wrapped up a massive, massive week on the Make Poverty History Road Trip hosted by the Oak Tree Foundation which has taught me many things. I have yet to sit down on my own and really pull apart the week in my own mind. I still have to look at the events, what I learnt, who I met, what mistakes I made and what the campaign achieved but felt the need to get something up on the blog quickly and to give you a heads up there will be many posts to come in relation to The Road Trip.

Whilst I do still have to have a serious look at the past weeks happenings I am certain that one thing I truly value out of any style of event like this is the networking of people with common interests. This was no different, I seemed to bond very well with one particular individual who had an equally relevant common interest in bourbon. This event was intended to be alcohol free so the term red fox was developed between us when ever discussing the sneaky off to a pub for a quick drink. Before long others on the trip seemed to have the same idea and by the end there were an assortment of colored animals spending money in pubs in Canberra.