Tuesday we are booked on a "Behind the Hedges" tour, one of a number of visitors' tours and this one is to provide a look at people and places on Norfolk you wouldn't normally get to in your hire car. Our driver today is Bonny's friend, Edward. Somehow we make it to the start by 8.30am.
We head out of the township
and right, up towards Mt Pitt. Note the cattle stop enclosing the central area.
First stop ahead is a cattle farm. One bull, 15 cows, producing meat for the local butcher, There are no dairy farms on the island. Australian health regs prevent raw milk from being sold to the public, and a pasteurisation plant simply prices itself out of the market. A few small holdings have a cow for their own use.
We head up towards Anson Bay. Island roads are not wide: hence the habit of driving hard left more or less automatically.
There's a good swell coming in.
And here we are
Well, almost...
As the lady speaking to us points out, it's just not big enough to make a profit out of, but there's a living to be had.
Here's Randolph the bull and his ladies... They get a decent feed off kikuyu, and unlike New Zealand, where it is regarded as an invasive weed, here it's more highly thought of.
Eddie has found some hibiscus to decorate the front of the bus.
We head on to the pottery.
This is my territory. I've paid my dues, made my 25,000 coffee mugs and once threw sixty in an hour.
Steve's been here some thirty years, I believe. He uses a kick wheel, and imports his stoneware clay from New Zealand and his porcelain from England, as we did.
Potters like Steve are hard to find now in New Zealand, and take it from me, his work is good. Even allowing for the exchange rate his pots are very reasonably priced - mugs at $AU15, for example.
This is one tourist attraction where the prices are less than you might expect. I buy a couple of mugs and Steve packs them in bubble wrap and a carton to take back with me. I could have taken a whole bunch more just to have it around me and handle it and look at it.
There's a hint of Peter Stichbury in some of the decoration
I'm not sure wheher Steve or Alison, his wife, does the decorating. I heard somebody say that Alison loves working with fish motifs. Whichever, this is a pot I could live with forever. And when I find myself saying, I wish I'd made that, I know I'm somewhere near home.
Alison's work is finer, and more highly priced: porcelain lustre ware, some of it fired up to thirty times to get the kind of colour development she wants. It's a fine line between pottery and jewellery sometimes. I think of Judith from our pottery at Centrepoint.
Eddie the bus driver keeps a quiet watch on the time, and soon it's off to Anson Bay for morning tea.
I catch Bonnie at a good moment.
