10 Things # 30

GH on the homeward leg

1/ So farewell the SCG….

….with three days on the road via selfies with Big Ted at the ABC.

2/ The Big Things continued with spiders at Pete’s…

…and included the inevitable photo op at Goulburn.

3/ See if you can guess where we stopped.

4/ Janeen drew the line at a hotel that looked a little too like the Manson family compound in One Upon A Time in Hollywood….

…but got into the spirit of the NSW Corrective Services Museum.

I take her all the best places.

5/ This, adjacent to Cooma Correctional Facility, is actually a great stopping off point: gold coin donation entrance, full of great artefacts and excellent expositions, and sufficiently weird that you needn’t be a student of penology to dig it.

6/ There is a functioning gallows, where I drew the line at pulling the lever, although apparently kids love it. I wouldn’t have minded a go on the cadaver trolley from Stockton Mental Hospital - my mum would definitely have asked.

7/ The museum is very cheerfully and informatively run by Andrew Weglarz, a former prison officer in the UK and Australia, with lots of attention is devoted the evolving culture of warders and governors, from this….

…to this.

8/ Cooma Correctional Centre, one of Australia’s oldest working prisons, has a fascinatingly chequered history. It was ‘the world’s only jail for homosexuals’. It hosted Roger Rogerson and Jarryd Hayne, and just lately Eddie Obeid. The museum is a complement. It sells some fantastic art by indigenous inmates, and exhibits in two rooms a fantastic array of model aircraft - the ‘Rutherford squadron’, named for the incarcerated builder of most of them.

9/ As a devotee of both loud music and Airfix, I was drawn to the Motorhead Heinkel HE 111 (above), in honour of Adrian Chesterman’s artwork for Bomber (1979) and in service of Lemmy’s immortal line: ‘The bad guys make all the best shit.’

It turned out that Andrew had seen Motorhead at the Brixton Academy in 1987 - the concert documented on Live at Brixton (1994) - which started us on a riff about model aeroplanes and epic gigs. Strange where cricket tours can take you….

10/ Anyway, home now, and back to cricket shortly. In the meantime, make sure to read Mikey’s and Athers’s takes on the two-tier con ($), while the miracle of Pat Cummins’s 1000 balls in the BGT has been revealed. Who knows the outcome had Bumrah stayed fit and Cummins not? Sydney reserved its rain for the women, alas, but we’re all set for Sunday’s first ODI. And, as Pete says, thanks for reading Cricket Et Al. Makes it worth all that driving….