Around Australia with the Ralphs 1990 - motivation, planning and preparation

By Ian, . Permalink

About this blog

Sources

We kept a diary with entries for each day - 3 volumes in all.

Nearly everything you read in this blog was transcribed directly from the diaries.

Videos, film camera and audio cassettes

We took with us a Sony video camera, a Pentax film camera and an audio cassette tape recorder. The audio tapes made for Elaine and George Ralph, Ian's parents and his sister Karen Moule have been lost. I have scanned and included many of the still photos and some of the most pertinent and entertaining video content. See the end of this post for some information on the path the videos took from camera to this blog.

A few statistics

We made it right around Australia. And a long way round it was too.

  • Total distance travelled in the car: 27,000 km
  • Money spent on fuel: $2758
  • Mentality: calmer except for insanity due to being cooped up with kids when it rained for 5 weeks in Qld.
  • Time away: 5 1/2 months (4/1/90 until 20/6/90)
  • Money spent: every cent we had (our house was rented to pay the mortgage)
  • Flat tyres: 6. 3 on the 'van & 3 on the car, Each required the purchase of a new tyre
  • Mechanical problems with the car: replacement of a waterpump, the front shock absorbers, a broken windscreen, punctured air-lines to rear-shocks. On the camper trailer we had broken pipes to the water tank after travelling over rocky roads to Hawker in SA
  • Longest distance travelled: 800 km in one day from near Eucal to Esperance in WA
  • Most expensive fuel: 89.9 cents per litre at Balladonia Roadhouse on the Nullabor
  • Weather: 10 days of rain in the first 5 months, then almost non stop for the last few weeks, max temperature of 40°c in Victoria, in general hot and dry
  • Most expensive camping: $21 per-night at Inverloch Victoria
  • Cheapest camping: $0 all over the place

The transcription of our diaries begins here

This is the diary of an extended holiday taken by the Ralph family: Ian George Ralph, Jacqueline Ralph, Anja Ralph (3), Lachlan Ralph (5) and Rohan Ralph (2). 

Our aim is to travel around most of mainland Australia and Tasmania. Fortunately I, Ian, was able to take long service leave on half pay - one advantage of having been a teacher in the NSW Department of Education for 14 years. 

We have rented our house unfurnished and thanks to the generosity of Elaine and George and Basil and Judy Marlow we are travelling in a Jayco Lark camper trailer which we bought in July 1989. 

Our Jayco Lark Camper trailer on 14th March 1990

The weeks prior to our departure were hectic as we packed all our furniture and many of our possessions into the downstairs storage room. Christmas and New Year were also taken care of in the usual overindulgent manner.

We had originally planned to leave on the 3rd of January 1990 however preparing the house to rent and packing the ‘van took longer than we expected and would have taken longer still if it was not for the help of Elaine, George and Nicky who cleaned packed and painted as well as took on our cats and fish etc. 

So, our trip actually begins at 12 midday on January the 4th 1990.

I suppose the best place to begin, is with the germination of the idea to attempt such a trip. Early in 1989 Jacqui was working at The Forest High School four days each week. I was working full time at Barrenjoey High School, Lachlan was at Elanora Primary School in kindergarten and Anja and Rohan were going to child care.

Each morning brought chaos, acrimony and tension as we attempted to get out of the door and to our respective destinations on time. After one particularly hectic morning, it became obvious that there must be something wrong with us to be putting ourselves through this just for the sake of money. Independently we arrived at the same conclusion; a trip away would do us all good.

So the idea for the trip was born and we began to act on it more or less straight away, preparing our home to rent out, applying for leave, working out the best way to camp and so on. Our original plan was to take a large tent in a small box trailer, but the thought of struggling with such a structure every few days and having water run across the floor during the inevitable storms soon brought us to our senses. We decided to buy a campertrailer.

Basil and Judy (Jacqui's dad and step mum) along with Elaine and George (my mum and dad) were very generous in providing financial assistance which enabled us to buy an almost brand new campertrailer from Kit and Ken Strange (parents of a close friend) at an excellent price.

My long service leave on half pay was approved by the Department of Education, which gave us the first two terms of 1990 plus the 1989/90 Christmas break and the July 1990 holiday.

The end of the 1989 school year finally arrived and I must admit to a sense of smug satisfaction as I sat amongst my colleagues in the beer garden of the Newport Arms Hotel, happily pointing out that it would be exactly seven months before I would be required to respond again to a ringing bell  

However, as the task we had set ourselves became clear, we started to doubt that we would ever escape from Sydney. The task was to deal with Christmas and New Year celebrations, whilst packing away the accumulated possessions of 11 years occupation in the same house (during which time we had acquired 3 kids) into what started to become a very small downstairs storeroom.

The task was completed, again with the assistance of close friends and relatives, and we finally departed for Merry Beach on the south coast of NSW at 12 midday on Thursday 4th of January 1990.

 


Departure

Some background on the videos

The Sony video camera used 8mm cassette tapes and stopped working in the mid 1990s.

Lachlan using our Sony video camera at Dubbo Zoo in 1992

To preserve the recordings the videos were copied from the 8mm tapes to VHS tapes. These tapes could be played on the VHS video cassette players that everyone owned at the time. VHS cassette recorders ceased to be used sometime around 2008. The videos on those tapes were copied over to DVDs as everyone owned a DVD player. You know what happened next! DVD went out of favour and most people now consume their media online. To preserve these videos they were copied to a hard disk on our home computer network. The AVI format of the videos is, at the time this blog was created (during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020), a format that is no longer widely used, especially for online presentation. To include them in this blog, they had to be again converted to mp4 format and who knows how long that format will last.

All this is a long-winded explanation as to why the videos are of such poor quality and low resolution.  

We hope you enjoy the story of our adventure. Please feel free to leave comments below.

An insight into what happens when a teacher takes leave

Below is a letter sent, most likely, by Shirley Martin, a science teacher and colleague of Ian's from Barrenjoey High School. I [Ian] can't recall who took over my classes while I was on leave, but from this letter it was a lady called Helen. As you can see, Helen left and 2 other casual teachers took on my classes. Shirley's reference to Jacqui remembering "what that was like" is because for many years, while our children were young, Jacqui did fill-in casual work, often splitting the role with another person - Jacqui might do Monday to Wednesday while the other person did Thursday and Friday.

Links to other posts

In the beginning: Motivation and Planning 

NSW: Merry Beach, Bournda State Recreation Area 

Victoria Pt 1: Mallacoota - Lakes Entrance, Lakes Entrance - Melbourne 

Tasmania: 1st - 18th February, 19th - 27th February

Victoria Pt 2: 28th February - 12th March

South Australia: 13th March - 27th March

Western Australia Pt 1: 28th March - 17th April

Western Australia Pt 2: 18th April - 5th May

Northern Territory: 6th May - 17th May

Queensland Pt1: 18th May - 31st May

Queensland Pt 2 to Sydney: 1st June - 20th June

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