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Roodle-ooh, roodle-ooh! The melodious chortling of myriad black-and-white magpies wakens us here each morning in Glenelg, South Australia. Laura and I have been here among all the birds and flowers in this beach suburb of Adelaide since mid-September. We didn't invent this nonsense word - it was a Christmas gift from Ish Kabibble. It happened like this: In December Laura and I were in the Glenelg public library, a favorite haunt. Since our lovely garden apartment is fully furnished with a VCR and two TVs, we were looking through the old movies. Wonder of wonders, we discovered Round the World, a 1943 wartime production with bandleader Kay Kyser. Although this morale-building movie was made in California on a sound lot, it portrays Kay and his band of G.I. musicians supposedly whooping it up on leave in Australia. Now, Kay hails from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, just 70 miles from Durham. He married his statuesque blonde chanteuse Georgia Carroll, who also starred in this movie. Kay died quite a while back, but Georgia has lived on East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill for donkey's years. Ish Kabibble was Kay's trombone player and deadpan comedic counterfoil extraordinaire. He was my boyhood idol before he was later supplanted by Jerry Lewis. I had never seen this movie before, but because of its Australian theme it had survived and was still sitting on the library shelf. In it, Kay and Ish repeatedly used this hepcat nonsense word, "Roodle-ooh." Upon hearing them pronounce the word the first time, Laura, the tone-perfect musician, laughed and said, "That's what the magpies say!"


	Daily Fare: Glenelg, Australia Out of Town, by Michael Troy Roodle-ooh, roodle-ooh! The melodious chortling of myriad black-and-white magpies wakens us here each morning in Glenelg, South Australia. Laura and I have been here among all the birds and flowers in this beach suburb of Adelaide since mid-September. We didn't invent this nonsense word - it was a Christmas gift from Ish Kabibble. It happened like this: In December Laura and I were in the Glenelg public library, a favorite haunt. Since our lovely garden apartment is fully furnished with a VCR and two TVs, we were looking through the old movies. Wonder of wonders, we discovered Round the World, a 1943 wartime production with bandleader Kay Kyser. Although this morale-building movie was made in California on a sound lot, it portrays Kay and his band of G.I. musicians supposedly whooping it up on leave in Australia. Now, Kay hails from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, just 70 miles from Durham. He married his statuesque blonde chanteuse Georgia Carroll, who also starred in this movie. Kay died quite a while back, but Georgia has lived on East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill for donkey's years. Ish Kabibble was Kay's trombone player and deadpan comedic counterfoil extraordinaire. He was my boyhood idol before he was later supplanted by Jerry Lewis. I had never seen this movie before, but because of its Australian theme it had survived and was still sitting on the library shelf. In it, Kay and Ish repeatedly used this hepcat nonsense word, "Roodle-ooh." Upon hearing them pronounce the word the first time, Laura, the tone-perfect musician, laughed and said, "That's what the magpies say!" Five years ago, on our first trip to New Zealand and Australia, Laura and I discovered Adelaide and Glenelg. We were so taken with it we spent seven weeks here and still wanted more Since that time we have often spoken about and longed for this gentle place. Back home in America, where Laura developed Chronic Fatigue, we devoted four years to a fulltime search for medical assistance, trying anything that seemed to offer a possible answer. There were so many "experts," so many books, so many websites - the search was all-consuming, but we could never find the help we needed. In the end, we remembered Australia. We returned last June. With approximately the same land mass as the Lower 48 States, Australia has a population of about 20 million. The only large population centers, Sydney and Melbourne, are on the southeast coast and comprise close to half of the national population. Adelaide, with slightly over a million people, is the only city of any size in South Australia. Its residents describe it with pride as "a large country town." It was founded later than the eastern cities, entirely populated by settlers who chose to emigrate from England. There were no penal colonies in South Australia. Its growth was greatly assisted by the copper deposits discovered about 1840; thus it got a prosperity boost but was spared the boomtown excesses of the gold rushes in eastern Australia. Adelaide's beach communities stretch for 20 miles along the Gulf of St. Vincent, a large bay of the Southern Ocean. Glenelg, the approximate mid-point, is about five miles from the city center. We returned to Adelaide in mid-September, after spending June through August (Down Under winter) in Townsville on the tropical northeast coast of Queensland. Here, our two-bedroom garden townhouse is about a mile south of Glenelg's business district and a few short blocks from the beach. San Francisco-style antique electric trams run from Glenelg to the Adelaide city center. Public transport connects all of the greater Adelaide area, so we live wonderfully well using our bikes, feet, buses, trains, and trams. Many retired people elect to live as we do, without ever driving an automobile. To read of this story, please pickup a copy of the Urban Hiker at any of these places. Durham native Michael Troy may be best known for founding He's Not Here in Chapel Hill. An earlier report from Australia appeared in the August Urban Hiker.

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