Labor Day long weekend.

As I said on May Day proper, the holiday is celebrated on the fifth of May in Queensland and NT. Townsville has historically been a very Labor-oriented place, and last year the May Day march saw 5,000 people turn up.

Photo from the Townsville Bulletin.

It wasn’t quite this big this year. There were still a buttload of people there, mainly union members. We marched along the beach, from one park to another. The march was fairly organised—each union stayed together, followed by the community groups like Amnesty. The Stolen Wages mob was in that section of the march. We carried placards and banners, we shouted till our throats were sore, and we got a whole lot of media attention. Once we reached the destination, two people from our group were amongst the speakers for the event. Listening to them speak gave me goose bumps; they were really deadly. Later on, the event organisers gave awards to the best represented union and community group—and we won!

Unfortunately, I forgot my camera. But, there were plenty of photographers there, so I will get some pictures off them to jog my memory when I’m writing. Because I wasn’t preoccupied with taking photos, I was able to fully absorb everything I saw, have really good, in-depth conversations with young and old activists, and just generally have a great time. This was the kind of day that makes me love doing a PhD. I get paid (well, a scholarship) to go to this and have these conversations. Sure, there’s a lot of reading and eventually writing in addition to these days, but it’s totally worth it.

After spending several hours in the sun at May Day, I came home, wrote up pages and pages of notes about the day, and then got stuck into a cookie baking extravaganza.

I made cherry chocolate chip cookies.

And Vegan with a Vengeance ‘sparkled ginger cookies’.

I made Anzac biscuits, too, but they seriously didn’t work. The dough was really runny, but I’ve never made Anzac bikkies before so I tried baking them anyways, with disastrous results. They were thin, hard, and inedible. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

The cookies went into a box along with a few other things to sustain Andy between food barge visits up at Lizard Island. I don’t want to give away any surprises, since he reads my blog from the island, but here’s a peek.

During the cookie baking I managed to eat a lot of cookie dough. Like, seriously, too much. I had a headache from all the sugar I had ingested. To counteract some of the sugary effects, I made a very healthy dinner (which was also ridiculously easy to make). Step one, boil soba noodles and drain. Step two, boil water, add wakame flakes and chopped ginger and garlic. Step three, turn off heat and stir in a scoop of miso. Step four, pour broth over noodles. Ta. Da.

Miso soup. Delicious, and much better for you than cookie dough.