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Salagram and Govardhan Silas

Learn to Play the Mrdanga

January 24-25, 2002

Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.

There's an ISKCON house here in Newcastle Australia which we stopped by to see. It's undergoing major renovation. Our main purpose in coming, however, was to do Harinam in downtown.

So after stopping by the local Hare Krishna Vegetarian Cafe, which seemed to be a fairly busy, we set out to go up and down the main outdoor mall. Newcastle is a shipping down. Reminds me of New Westminster in the Vancouver Canada area. Lots of young people. It was a great Harinam.

Yesterday we drove to the New Gokula farm, which is located near Milfield. It's about 3 hours from Sydney. The devotee that drove Devahotra and me was Amrtananda. He was a very congenial, talkative devotee who had an ancient 1979 Volvo car. The car was in mint condition and handled very well. Amrtananda let me drive it for most of the way.

On the way we drove through some extraordinarily scenic forested areas, which here in Australia they call "the Bush." (They seem to have their own unique vocabulary for quite a few Aussie-own lingo.) Anyway, we even saw a dead kangaroo on the side of the road - not a big one, maybe about 2 feet in length.

We stayed at the farm last night, and will stay again tonight after we get back from Newcastle. Newcastle is about an hour from the farm.

The farm, as I mentioned before, is called New Gokula, and the presiding deities are Radha-Gokulananda. New Gokula is the same name as our community in Vancouver, Canada, and Radha-Gokulananda have the same name as our deities at Bhaktivedanta Manor in England.

New Gokula in Australia consists of 550 acres of land and about 62 cows, bullocks and one bull. Out of that there are six milking cows. The president and general manager of the project is a nice Australian devotee named Kaliya Krsna dasa, who also was the one that drove us out here to Newcastle for Harinam.

It rained last night, but although it was generally overcast during the day, the sun did peek through a few times. I am thankful for the cloudy weather, because although Melbourne was actually cool at night, here we are further north, closer to the equator and the tropic of Capricorn, and it can get very hot, especially in the summer, which is right now.

There are kangaroos that come out of the "Bush" at night and graze at the edge of the fields. I've not seen any here (though I did see kangaroos at New Nandagram near Melbourne). Kaliya Krsna, however, saw some this morning behind his house.

There's lots of trees in this part of Australia, and hills too. Sometimes they have dynamited the road through thick layers of rock. We're definitely in a more remote area as I look about. We're in the vehicle driving from Newcastle back to the New Gokula farm. I'm typing on my handy-dandy Palm Portable Keyboard that attaches to my state-of-the-art Palm M505 handheld computer

Although it rained last night, there's been a draught and Kaliya Krsna said that in order for the rain to make any difference it would have to be sustained. What we had last night will probably dry up entirely within a few days and be as if it never happened.

The recent bush fires in this part of Australia came fairly close to the New Gokula farm. The fire has been put out now. and the danger is over.

January 25, 2002, 6:20 AM- New Gokula Farm: 

I saw some kangaroos this morning. Kaliya Krsna told me that they like to come out in the early morning, around 6 AM, and graze in the tall grasses behind the goshalla. So I went out behind the Goshalla around quarter to six. I saw what I thought might be a couple of kangaroos in the dim light of the dawn, and as I approached a little closer to see, suddenly they all sat up. There were four of them. They were not as big as the ones we saw at New Nandagram. These were about three, perhaps four feet tall. No sooner had they detected my presence then they hopped away. Behind the goshalla there's a barbed wire fence, which is about 3 feet high. They just hopped right over it as if it wasn't any kind of significant obstacle. Once on the other side they all gathered together and waited. I didn't move, but they still sensed my presence, and after a few minutes they started hopping away, uphill toward the woods, or as the Aussies say, "the Bush." There was no question of getting a photograph. They were too far away and the daylight was still dim, so the lighting was lousy.

We are scheduled to go back to Sydney today.

Amrtananda was very hopeful that I would give grains to his 6 month old baby boy today, but it turns out today is Ekadasi and I don't think that's a good day to do it. I think he's disappointed, but he fully understands why today isn't a good day for it.