THE STARS
End of free PTV, dog unemployment, babycinos.
★★★★★ Shizuka Ryokan
Drive an hour and a half up the Calder Freeway, exit at the bucolic town of Hepburn Springs, follow directions down Lakeside Drive, park, walk up a cobble-stone path past a shedding yellow-leaf gingko tree, and find that you have arrived at your destination: rural Japan. Well, Shizuka Ryokan, at least. Shizuka’s resolutely untrendy website describes it as a traditional inn “founded on the Japanese concept of omotenashi—deep respect for hospitality.” It’s the kind of place we never would have booked ourselves for fear of it being too expensive and weird. However, we received a gift voucher from our friends Marina, Charlotte, and Rob, so we headed to the ryokan for two winter nights. Reader, it was bliss. Bliss! Everything about the experience was a sensory delight. Our room was warm and cosy, with straw tatami mats underfoot, a soft cotton futon bed on the ground, a spacious bath with fragrant salts and a wooden bucket for tipping warm water on yourself and/or your bathing partner (we didn’t pay extra to access the magnesium-rich traditional bathing experience, but if you have cash to splash, presumably it’s good). There is no TV. No reason to be on the phone. Rice paper sliding doors open onto a private courtyard garden with a burbling bamboo water feature and a view of gumtrees. After a breakfast of salmon, green tea, egg, miso soup, gingery roast pumpkin, broccolini, eggplant, capsicum, and chewy rice sprinkled with some delicious salty purple shit, we went for a bush walk. Hepburn Springs is Dja Dja Wurrung Country and home to abundant mineral water. On the walk, we tasted these waters, dredged up by pumps along the path. Flavours ranged from metallic and disturbingly fizzy to sulphuric and rank, and made us appreciate an afternoon glass of Suntory whisky (BYO) even more. May we also suggest a game of Scrabble at the possibly evil Hotel Bellinzona bar? A mushroom foraging expedition, with the variety sought contingent on your risk tolerance and predilections? Some time just chilling and reading a book on the futon, tapped out of the Naarm grindset? TPE certifies Shizuka as an excellent lavish present for yourself or others.
★★★★ Deathbed Confessions and Promises
We recently came across a fascinating episode of SBS’s Insight program, about people whose loved ones had sprung dramatic revelations on them just before dying, leaving them to pick up the pieces, Earthside. The host Kumi Taguchi had a warm, plain-spoken, and reassuringly competent way of drawing out stories of mendacious husbands and mysterious dads with secret second families (it’s really not that uncommon). But there was also an extraordinarily strange outlier character: Bill Edgar, a shark-eyed, hoarse-voiced, Bob Katter-ish private investigator who moonlights as a “coffin confessor.” As he explains the job: “In short, I crash funerals on behalf of the deceased.” Bill and his first client, Graham, plotted for Bill to attend Graham’s funeral. There, Bill accused Graham’s best mate of trying to sleep with Graham’s wife while he was on his deathbed. Bill also removed three people from the funeral whom Graham hadn’t seen in 30 years. Watch and gape alongside the studio audience here.
