For people who know me as a thingie (and if you need a translation, then you don't), then you know I have a bit of a reputation for getting what I want. For those of you who don't know me as a thingie, I should point out that I have a tendency to get my way. It's the power of, "Because I said so!" (BISS!)

This is the power that let me find a new house a week after I had received an eviction notice and a week before I had to go overseas. This is the power that let me teach at a conference in the US despite my tutorial initially being refused. It's a sort of dogged determination teamed with a certain amount of luck [touches wood rapidly.] "Because I said so!" lets me find the last copy of the book I want on the shelves, the nearest cab home in the rain and gets that little bit of extra help from the person behind the counter.

But it has stranger powers than that. Let me demonstrate...

On Good Friday each year in Victoria, the Association of Surfing Professionals holds the Bells Beach Rip Curl Pro surf carnival at (strangely enough) Bells Beach. Surfers from around the world come to compete for the honour of 'ringing the bell' at Bells. In conjunction with the carnival, a three-day music festival, the Offshore Festival, is held in a sheep paddock (strangely enough) offshore.

A close friend and her boyfriend had invited me to come with them to the 1998 Offshore Festival. Ordinarily, I'm not the 'camp in a paddock for three days and go see bands' kinda girl, but this year, The Tea Party were playing and I was going to be there with bells on. Pun not intended.

The Tea Party is Of The Good.

Jeff Martin is A Sex God.

His voice makes me want to Do Naughty Things.

Camp in a paddock for three days to see them play live? Hell yes! Besides, lots of other neat bands such as The Cruel Sea, The Mavis's, Primus, Everclear, The Avalanches and The Living End were playing as well. I needed a holiday and this would be it. So it began...

Tickets were purchased, camping gear was organised. I was put in charge of the 'kitchen', as I was the only person able to get her hands on a camp stove. I bought a box full of food, the stove and a billy in order to make billy tea. For the not-Aussies out there, billy tea is prepared the following way:

Fill billy (tin with handle and lid) with water and boil over campfire or stove.
Throw in a handful tea leaves for each person plus one for the pot.
Stir with a eucalyptus twig (to add flavour) until black as pitch.
Serve steaming hot in enamelled mugs with plenty of milk and sugar.

My friend's boyfriend (whose name escapes me at this point in time, although I'm tempted to call him 'Bonehead') brought the tents. I don't recall what my friend contributed to the weekend. Certainly nothing tangible.

We piled into the boyfriend's car (I shall refer to him from now on as 'the BF') and drove the couple of hours down the coast to Bells, hung a sharp right and found ourselves in a sheep paddock with approximately 14,000 other people. And not a lot of sheep.

We negotiated the Festival organisers and the sheep shit and found a place to camp. Tents were wrestled out of the car and assembled. It was at this point we discovered that my tent was conveniently missing its second tent pole. "No worries," says I. "She'll be right." It was a glorious day, we were there and The Tea Party was going to play Sunday night. Day one and I was in an expansive mood.

Once the campsite had been set up, we wandered the festival, marvelling at the other campsites, eyeing the beer tent and checking out the food vendors.

You could buy everything from chips to espresso. Best of all, the Hare Krishnas had set up a tent. Two dollars could buy you a plate of brown rice, two vegetable curries, pappadums and fruit pudding for dessert. (Note for the 'Merkins: pudding in Australia is not like pudding in the US. Over here it's a moist cake-like dessert usually baked and served hot with sauce of some description.) Cheap, filling and very, very yummy.

A huge stage had been assembled at the bottom of a long slope, forming a natural amphitheatre. To one side, skate ramps had been set up, along with a Nintendo tent (for those who couldn't bear to be parted from their electronics) and buses ran regularly from the site into Torquay (the nearest town) and Bells for the surf carnival.

It seemed like an ideal set-up for a great long weekend.

To be continued...