This site has featured a lot of beach shots, given our coastal location, but both Mr Shambles and myself grew up in the country. So today I’m sharing some of the great Aussie bush from a few years ago when Mr Shambles took the girls back to his home town for a holiday.

The first hint that our life in the city (Brisbane) might mean our children where a little out-of-touch with the country life was when we took them to my home town of Mudgee for a weekend. A pretty wine-growing area Mudgee has a population of 7,000. The girls remarked on how small the town was and how everyone seemed to know each other. “What ’til you get to Tumbarumba” I forewarned.

Tumbarumba is a tiny town at the bottom of the Snowy Mountains with a population of a mere 1,487 people. It didn’t take the girls long to realise Mudgee was a thriving metropolis in comparison. On my phone check-in they complained “Mum, it takes us hours to walk down the street. Dad knows EVERYBODY and they ALL stop and talk to him for AGES”. It had been a while since he’d been back so there was a lot of catching up to do. They were also surprised to discover a town existed without a McDonalds.

When I google the town Wikipedia informs me “Tumbarumba is one of the very few Australian place names mentioned in James Joyce’s prose-poem Finnegans Wake. Tumbarumba mountain is listed as one of the places of origin of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, one of the central characters of the Wake”.

The online encyclopedia also tells me “in November 1963, New Zealand Johnny Devlin (with Bee Gees on backing vocals) released the single Stomp the Tumbarumba”. One day if you are very lucky I might find a copy to play for you.