It is Easter break here in Australia, and pretty much everything is shut down for this next two weeks. Good Friday and Easter Monday are national paid holidays. Easter also kicks off the start of 2 weeks of school vacation as it is end of the autumn term. So many people are taking annual leave, and Derby is a bit of a ghost town as many Aboriginal and local people have "gone bush" as they say here. The big activity this weekend is a fishing tournament.

Vicki and I have joined the local pool and have begun swimming laps every day. Yesterday we camped out in the shade of a huge palm on the swimming pool lawn and read and dozed the morning away. Unfortunately the pool is closed except for morning lap swims today and tomorrow.

Despite the stats that say Australia is overwhelmingly Christian, most of the emphasis on Easter has been on chocolate. Australia is said to have the highest per capita consumption of Easter chocolate in the world. At dance class Thursday night, we all had to bring a chocolate egg and put it in a basket for an egg exchange. Cadbury's holds the major market share, although the Lindt dark chocolate bunny has been biting their ears off in recent times. Despite reading about the Easter Bilby (instead of bunnies, which still have a bad rep in Oz), we did not see any in the Kimberly stores. Vicki and I still prefer the Whittaker's (New Zealand) chocolate bars. She likes any of the dark bars, and I could eat an entire block of the milk chocolate/hazelnut at any one go. These are hard to find, but I've tracked them down in Cole's in Broome. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find the Rum Raisin block so far on this trip.

Today Vicki is cooking up lamb for Easter, and a surprise dessert. She quite enjoys cooking I believe, although is having a bit of an adjustment to using the gas oven with its huge yellow flames visible at the back.

She also decorated with an egg tree. This was interesting, as we can only get natural brown hens' eggs here. She uses plain food coloring and tried a bit of wax tracing for designs. They are hung on a fruiting branch from one of our palms around the house. The results are a quite "earthy" egg tree, which is a rather nice effect. I have really enjoyed her creativity and artistic sense. Next to them she has placed our collection of carved and painted boab tree nuts. These are works of art done by local people from Mowanjum, and are quite unique to this area.

For the Easter Gallery, click on the picture below:

Easter Egg Tree