As I’ve largely been on web mail this last couple of weeks, blogging has had to take a back seat, especially as the new issue of The Specusphere goes live on Tuesday and I've been nose-down-tail-up with writing and editing. In this issue you’ll find over a dozen reviews, including one of Dreaming Down Under, a new anthology of Australian short spec-fic edited by the inimitable Jack Dann. There are interviews with several prominent spec-fic authors, too, including Glenda Larke, Alison Goodman and Alistair Reynolds.

I’m currently house-sitting for my friend Juliet, who has temporarily abandoned her lovely old cottage in Guildford (site of one of the earliest settlements in Western Australia) in favour of a tour of the Baltic countries. Now a suburb of Perth, Guildford snuggles within an elbow on the Swan River so it’s almost an island. Having so much water around has given the town its own micro-climate. Oak trees, for example, do not generally grow well in this part of the world, but I came across quite an impressive little stand of them while walking the dogs by the river.

Three dogs and a cat share this house with me. One dog is on loan from a pet rescue centre and I admire Juliet for taking on such a task. It is hard to have a temporary pet, knowing that if you send it back to the shelter it stands a pretty good chance of being put down. I don’t think anyone will be putting Sarah down, though. She’s a Bichon Frise; a fluffball with a cuteness factor that’s off the top of the scale. Being old and almost blind doesn’t stop her trying to lord it over the two resident dogs, both of whom are bigger than she is. In fact, she’s almost got Outlaw the Kelpie bluffed into giving up his bed for her when she growls.

All the dogs, however, give Sonia the Cat a wide berth. Sonia is a law unto herself and will take any bed she chooses, knowing that a smart swat on the nose will send any dog whimpering away. She’s a tortie-and-white long hair. They are not, in my experience, usually so pretty, but Sonia, being a lady of a certain age and an aristocrat to boot, knows that she needs to take care of herself properly. She seldom needs grooming because she does such a good job of it without assistance from human hands, and she sports a magnificent tri-colour ruff that would put Queen Elizabeth the First to shame. I’ll try to get a photo of Sonia for next time I post.

I'm a bit late posting because internet access was limited over the weekend. On Saturday I travelled from Mount Gambier to Adelaide by coach - a distance of about 400 miles. It took six hours. On Sunday I travelled from Adelaide to Perth by plane - a distance of 1800 miles. It took under three hours. I curse the six hour coach ride, but I also know it would take at least three weeks to walk and not much less in a bullock dray, which is how the early settlers of Mount Gambier would have arrived.

The south-east of South Australia is replete with history. It cannot, of course, boast the kind of history that has ancient monuments and centuries-old homes to document its passage, but it has deserted old farmhouses from a century or more ago, and a fascinating landscape that includes defunct volcanoes and limestone caves. Aborigines lived in the area from time immemorial but tragically, they were rendered extinct by white settlement over a hundred years ago.

There is much to love in the Mount Gambier district, but its winter is too cold for me! I am glad to be back in the relative warmth of Perth, which lies some three or four degrees closer to the equator. I have two house-sits lined up here and lots of people to catch up with, too. I'll do a proper post next weekend, when I am fully settled in.

This has been a pleasant week. My niece Linda visited from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, largely because yesterday was the 83rd birthday of her mother, my sister Erica. The week passed too quickly with fun family times, shopping, eating, talking, celebrating - my sisters and I were sad to bid Linda goodbye this evening as she flew out of Mount Gambier bound for Adelaide and, in a couple of days, Brisbane.

One day, we visited the nearby seaside village of Port MacDonnell. It was to this little township that my second husband and I moved from Sydney in 1972. The contrast could hardly have been greater as we went from the rush of a bustling city to the isolation of a place so quiet that the sound of the southern sea was the loudest noise to assault our ears. It was the first sound we heard in the morning and the last we heard at night; an ever-present reminder of the power of nature. Cold winds blew from the Antarctic all year round. I remember my children going for swimming lessons at the height of summer. The pupils had to squat in the water, or their upper bodies would have turned blue. The instructor, of course, could not squat so she wore a thick woollen jumper over her bathers.

This picture - my first attempt at uploading an image to Blogspot! - is of the very first house my second husband and I bought. It was a century old even then: a four-roomed limestone cottage of the type typical of its era in this area. It had an iron roof in those days, and we paid $600 for it! Eighteen months later, we sold it for $1,800. I hate to think what it would bring now - certainly 100 times as much or more, being only a block from the beach. In this picture I'm pointing out to Linda how I came out of the side gate one day and stepped over a tiger snake that was wriggling along in the gutter, minding its own business. I don't know which of us was more astonished. Certainly Snakey and I hastened off in opposite directions! Snakey was hissing. I was probably squealing.

I have loads of critiquing and reviewing to catch up on before heading back to Perth in a week's time. I have promised the Specusphere a couple of exciting interviews as well, involving two of Australia's best-known speculative fiction authors. Deciding on questions to ask each of them is occupying a big corner of my mind this weekend. So it's back to work - no partying, shopping and country drives this week!