Life In Australia

Very sad reading about the young lady killed by sharks just off the coast near Brisbane. I’ve been myself to the island (Amity Point – a weird coincidence with Jaws being set on Amity Island.). Amity is a beautiful place with clean, white sand and calm shallow water. Apparently the water was muddier than usual when the attack happened.

According to the newspaper,

“Another island visitor, who wanted to be identified only as Jess, 18, said she had been about 20m from the shore when she heard a woman screaming from the beach for her to get out.

“I saw dolphins and thought she might have been talking about them,” she said.
Amity Point fisherman Miles Scott, owner of Fresh Local Seafood at Amity Point, said locals had long been concerned about sharks.

“We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. We’ve always thought someone was going to be taken here.
“I’m a crabber and at this time of the year massive bull sharks come over the bar.

“It’s nothing to see 10 or a dozen bull sharks under our boat when we are crabbing and they are really aggressive – they are not like normal sharks.”

Rod Farrell, who owns Amity Point Waterfront Cabins, said the woman had been swimming in a channel that locals avoided.

“We’re forever telling little ones and tourists not to swim late in the afternoon or at night, especially in the summer,” he said.

Water police and parks and wildlife staff plan to search for the shark this morning, with a 2km stretch of beach to be closed during the hunt.

Will it put me off swimming? Putting it in perspective, more people in Australia are killed by bee stings than sharks. I think I’ll stick to beaches with shark nets for a while though.

It looks like there are plenty of opportunities in Brisbane right now for anyone seeking to start up a childcare centre.

The newspapers are warning that even though the Federal Government has begun subsidising childcare, wage rises for carers this year will more than wipe out the subsidy. Fees per child in childcare centres are now around $210 per week.

Apparently it’s so hard to get places for children in inner-Brisbane parents are being forced to use more expensive nanny-agencies instead. In inner Brisbane, childcare centres charge $50 per day.

It sounds like there may be a good opportunity for anyone with experience in childcare to start a childcare centre here. Perhaps even a migration business plan?

In the worst drought in Brisbane’s history, it looks like my fellow citizens have been saving enough water to delay the start of level 3 water restrictions. We’ve now been spared until mid-March at the earliest.

Normally we get rain on summer afternoons – often dramatic lightning storms – but we’re not getting them this year. The water levels in the dams that feed Brisbane are falling.

Brisbane City Council had told us the city needed to cut water consumption to 920 megalitres a day. We’ve done better than that, cutting to 860 megalitres a day. We’ve been rewarded by the delay of increasingly severe water restrictions. I just hope we get a bit of decent rain between now and March.