Sent to me recently

Dear Sirs,

In view of what seems to be happening internationally with banks at the moment, I was wondering if you could advise me… if one of my cheques is returned marked "insufficient funds," how do I know whether that refers to me or to you?

Yours sincerely,

Social butterfly strikes again!

Yes, you all know how much I like to get out and about. This past week is no exception. Last Friday night we enjoyed our first Christmas party of the year at our old haunting ground, the Sunshine Coast. Our friend Sue from the Caribbean apartments where we once lived invited everyone across the road to the cafe for dinner and drinks. We wandered back across the road around 11pm - I sort of fell over in the process, no major wounds except to my pride and right foot (oh, and my right knee). The beer and wine certainly flowed well. A whole bunch arrived back at Sue's apartment for more drinks and merriment, and I fell asleep around 2:30 and dear old Rene (the consummate party goer) came to bed around 4am. We had to get back to Brisbane to open the gallery for 11am, I had to cook dinner for seven people that night up on our deck. The dinner party was terrific, the food a great success, but we were too tired to go to a pub afterwards when we had previously arranged to meet friends there. I'm afraid at 58 my powers of recovery are no longer in the super hero class.



Tuesday saw us at trivia. Thanks to all the people who helped with the photo question - it was in fact Roddy McDowell, from Batman TV series 1966, playing The Book Worm. Sadly our team still came fourth (but we had lots of fun).

Last night (Wednesday) just before the storm we attended the "Creative Southbank" function in the restaurant at the Southbank Institute of Technology where our friend Sue works in the Indigenous Arts School. Fabulous finger food, stunning wine and brilliantly displayed student works made for a stimulating evening. We toured the galleries, workshops, music studios etc in a complex just four months old. The facilities are phenomenal. Rene and I met a lovely didgeridoo player and artist called Ricky plus a student who has a brilliant past as a makeup and hair designer and is now learning more about other artistic fields. Adam was certainly the standout find of the night. His paintings and sketches are brilliant. One charcoal sketch called 'Indigenous Queen' so looks like the diva Eartha Kitt, whom he did makeup and wigs for when she toured here. Bris Vegans, go forth and venture into the facilities of Southbank. I guarantee you'll be amazed (sorry, the food and wine was just for the opening).

Tomorrow night we are attending the exhibition opening at Footsteps Gallery in the City of the artists from Lajamanu, the first art centre we visited in the Northern Territory last year. There will be some of the artists and the new art centre manager to meet. What fun! I hope I'm not burnt. I'm spending tomorrow at a swimming carnival with one of my schools. It is forecast to be 30 again tomorrow. Yuck!

Saturday sees us hosting another dinner party. This one is an Indonesian rice table prepared by Rene. We'll have four guests and many courses. Rene does this sort of food brilliantly. One of the guests is a Dutch journalist who has written several pieces on the gallery for Australian and Dutch magazines and newspapers.

Rene even got interviewed the other day over the phone by a newspaper in Toronto doing a piece on tourism in Australia. A recent sale to Italy plus a couple more to Germans visiting the country means every bit of publicity counts and can lead to further sales.

Storms ravage Brisbane three times (so far)

It certainly has been an amazing past few days. It's Thursday evening and storms have again hit parts of the city, localised flooding continues, and this is the fourth night in the last five nights. Tonight is 'minor' with only 4500 electricity consumers losing power. Sunday night saw 25% of the entire region losing power, and many didn't get it back on for 48 hours. Ghastly images emerged from suburbs near where one of my schools is situated.


This morning Rene and I woke up to water views, with the sound of rushing water quite audible from the deck. Rene took these pictures near our home after I went to school this morning. Kedron Brook was close to overflowing its banks but it was quite safe. This evening as I write it is still visible from the deck but lower, although the latest downpours across the city haven't flowed through yet. A good test on our site and the worst rains and damage since the 1974 floods that caused the city to come to a complete halt.


It's going to rain on and off all night again. I hope it doesn't cause even more chaos. Fortunately only two people have lost their lives. That is amazing considering the super cell storms are so erratic.

My brother Stephen's home was safe, just the power cut off for around 24 hours. My nephew Simon came close to inundation but was spared - just! Near Toowoomba where my brother Mark lives they had over 245mm of rain, that's around 10" in the old measurement. We had no damage at all, and even kept our power. We have been extremely lucky.


Damage from the storms has affected thousands of South East Queenslanders. Over 4000 homes damaged, around 40 uninhabitable. Many schools have been damaged, some closed. My brother Stephen's school at Morayfield was closed after 125mm of rain and strong winds damaged a few buildings and brought down dozens of trees. Many of my children this week have been very tired because they haven't slept through the night for ages. I know two teachers who lost roofs and another two who moved out of their bedrooms at 1:30am this morning for fear of sleeping near trees and power lines that might finally blow down. They didn't blow over, and they did get some sleep.

I forgot Rene

I meant to add a couple of pictures of Rene when he was in Central Australia last month with his sister and brother in law.

Here he is walking along the road to Kings Canyon. Note the sign that says next services are still 127km away. Also note the bitumen ended here.

Err, what's up doc? Rene and his sister having a typical Dutch snack. Claartje and Jan raved about the flavour of Australian vegetables and fruit. Not as force fed as a lot of European produce. I do have to be reminded of all this stuff, I sort of take it for granted.

Now the picture above is not from Central Australia. It's from across the path in front of our house here in Brisbane. A water dragon sunning himself on the branch of a tree. We are constantly amazed at just how fortunate we are to live in this beautiful house of ours in this idyllic part of Brisbane. Lovely!

A kookaburra on our back fence here in Nundah, Brisbane, capital of the known world! Yes, I admit, I do get a little carried away.

News at last!

OK, I'm not dead, but on occasions it felt like it. Yes, I came down a fortnight ago with that dreadful bug going around Brisbane that seems to attack the head, chest and that's all. I have had a dry ticklish cough for ages, but the serious symptoms long ago passed through my system.

I'm sure you are all extremely interested in what has ailed me (not!) so I'll move right along... Rene's gorgeous sister and new brother in law left a fortnight ago after having had a monumentally fabulous visit. No hitches, even their flight back home was without a hitch. They've seen more of Australia in five weeks than most Aussies. We miss them a lot.

(Claartje doing her 'Priscilla Queen of the Desert' routine at King's Canyon).


Claartje and Jan have wasted no time at all back home getting their new holiday home in France in order ready to spend a fortnight at Christmas there. It was repainted while they were in Australia. Nice blue trim. Now, all Rene and I have to do is find our way to France to use the house as their guests. Such a nice thought, such an unlikely possibility for the foreseeable future, but one can dream.

One forgets about how fascinating visitors find our wildlife. A simple galah - all pink, grey and quite stupid, appears captivating, and in reality it is beautiful. It's lovely having visitors remind oneself of the beautiful, if commonplace, things we have in this stunning country.

We just came in from a lecture at the QUT in the city about Central Desert art, then we finished off with a walk across to South Bank where we had a delicious dinner at the Ship Inn. Brisbane was looking very attractive this evening with a full moon and a cooling breeze. It's a nice city.

Rene had visitors today from the Gibson Desert. These people are Aborigines from a community over 600 km from Uluru. After driving to The Rock, they flew to Sydney, then on to Brisbane. They're here at the Queensland Art Gallery as part of a new exhibition of indigenous art. They all came to the gallery around noon today to visit, have tea, and Rene also bought some of their art to sell here. They are all off to Melbourne on Friday. I was working so missed out on meeting them.

Three weeks until I have seven weeks vacation over Christmas. Our first Christmas party is at the Sunshine Coast, this Friday, after work. We are joining some 30 people from our old apartment complex for dinner and drinks and a terrific time I'm sure. We come back in the morning for Rene to open the gallery by 11 and then that evening we have guests for dinner. It's such a dull life (ha!).

We had a soiree last Friday afternoon for the staff at my various schools here at home. They drank bubbles, toured the exhibition downstairs and checked out our new home upstairs. It was very relaxing, fun and of course extremely social (I like that a lot).

Merle sitting in her new car in front of the Three Sisters, OR

The picture above is of my friend Merle from Portland Oregon. She rang me last week after President elect Obama was confirmed as the next US president. We had a marvellous conversation for an hour. Earlier, emails and calls were flying back and forth between myself and friends here and overseas excitedly talking about the election result. Brilliant acceptance speech, horrific time to take the reins of Office. I'm not going to dwell on the economy except to say we in Australia are better off than most nations to weather the storm, but I really don't have a handle on the whole situation other than to state that the anecdotal evidence I'm hearing about and reading about is very scary indeed.


Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day, and all across Australia we stopped at 11am to remember the fallen and those who fought in the war to end all wars, plus the many more since. I have no idea why, but all day I had this image in my head of Rene and I sitting in Comfort 1 on the Thalys train hurtling through the northern French and Belgian countryside at 340km/h sipping our wine and eating our meal in a deep and sumptuous armchair whilst the famous WW1 names flew past the enormous picture window. I remember being deep in thought for many minutes back there in 2004 reflecting on what had occurred in that beautiful countryside so long ago.


Well, it's done for now. I have to finish. There may be more added in the next day or two, but for now I leave you with a picture of some nuns in a bar sent to me this week by a friend. I'm sure they were checking the results from the Melbourne Cup held last week here in Australia. I, incidentally, for the grand outlay of $2 won $14 in a sweep at one of my schools. No, I didn't race out and do anything truly exciting with the winnings. Until next time...

World Cup Qualifier 2010

I forgot to mention in last night's update that last Wednesday I attended the Australia/Qatar football match, the latest round in the Asian qualifying matches for the 2010 World Cup.

It began with an enormous storm, quite the loudest and heaviest I've been out in for ages. Of course the acoustics of the stadium encouraged the sound of the thunder claps to be magnified even further, and it was quite depressing to be there at 6:30 for a 7:30 kick off (delayed later for 30 minutes) and watch from 6:45 the players warming up whilst wading through masses of surface water.

The pitch drained away quite quickly after the deluge was over (storms never last more than an hour here in the sub tropics) but it was forecast for around 3pm, so its late arrival was an unusual problem.

The 4-0 result to Australia (The Socceroos) was indicative of a match that IMHO was lack lustre in the first half and then only moderately interesting in the second. Some of the Qatar players were lucky not to be fined by Actors Equity for acting whilst not being paid up members of the union. The Saudi ref was adequate, but I had little faith in him after the first half hour.

One lonely photo from my phone shows the action in the first moments. 34 000 spectators helped me enjoy the evening - you can't beat the atmosphere of being there 'live' - but it wasn't quite the fabulous game I had hoped for. Now the quarter final I saw in the 2000 Olympics between Brazil and Cameroon (the deciding goal for Cameroon in the 12th minute of the second half of extra time) was mind blowingly unforgettable. Cameroon later won the gold in Sydney. Now that's memorable football!

Australia is unbeaten in their round. Their Dutch coach, Pim Verbeek (keeping up the tradition of Socceroo Dutch coaches lately) was very happy with the team's performance. They go on to meet Bahrain next month and Japan in February. Let's hope the Socceroos feature in South Africa in 2010.

PS Thanks Kit for inviting me.

Dutch Visitors

We're more than halfway through a visit by Rene's sister Claartje and her husband Jan. After 31 years of living together they finally decided to tie the knot on October 2nd on a beach on North Stradbroke Island, off the coast of Brisbane.

They arrived on the previous Monday to an unusually hot 35C day, mind you after hot and humid Hong Kong it didn't seem to them to be all that bad. It was a total delight to be seeing them after nearly four years.

We all talked, drank, visited friends, saw sights and generally had a wonderful time. On the Wednesday our friends Di and Torquil headed off to Italy for a month and we left for Straddie - not Italy, but paradise all the same. At just 50minutes by ferry from Brisbane it is a million miles away from the rush of the city yet just across the bay.

The search was on before lunch for koalas to satisfy the visitors need to tick off their long list of things to be seen in Australia. At Amity Point we saw not one but three in the same tree. After a delightful lunch at the Seashells Cafe (highly recommended) we drove to pick up the keys to the apartment. I had been entrusted to book it, and I did well. 'The Lookout' turned out to have 180 degree views on two levels from Moreton Island across to Point Lookout. We could even see whales from the balconies.

Next we met with the celebrant. She is a Dutch lady who has been on the island for 41 years and a celebrant for the past 17. Ingrid lives in a stunning rain forest garden - the source of Claartje's wedding bouquet, generously supplied by the celebrant the next day fresh from her garden. Ingrid was very businesslike going through all the formalities; asking questions about Jan and Claartje's lives, their likes and dislikes, the colours we'd all be wearing the next day. We left after 40 minutes with a brief to select the site for the ceremony from three suggestions. We made our choice and let her know the following day two hours before the 3:30pm start.

A walk around The Gorge; spotting whales, dolphins, turtles and manta rays, used up the remaining daylight and we later had dinner at the brand new Straddie Hotel.

The wedding day began in brilliant sunshine with another walk around The Gorge, this time in the opposite direction, and loads more whales, some breaching, were spotted. Lunch was prawns from Amity Point (straight off the trawler that morning) complete with bread. Rene and I had been to Ingrid's home to let her know that Deadman's Beach was to be the site for the ceremony. The bouquet was still being finished off, a stunning array of colours and perfumes all wrapped in paper bark. Very Australian! With lunch over and bouquet safely delivered it was time to dress for the wedding.

Ingrid was already set up on the beach. The location was picture perfect, we all looked marvellous, and our delightful 69 year old Dutch celebrant started proceedings. She blended the formality required by law with the familiarity of someone connected spiritually to the persons gathered in front of her. What a phenomenal woman she turned out to be! Such poise, such warmth, such sincerity. She won us over totally. It would have been wonderful with an ordinary celebrant, but this lady added something very special to what was an already special occasion.

Most was in English, but their vows were expressed to each other in Dutch. Jan sang his using two iPods programmed with the music and lyrics from the same Limburg artist performing at their wedding party this December back home. Their party for family and friends (90 of them) will be in an art gallery in the south of Holland. But they won't get to hear Jan sing - in fact nobody will ever hear him sing in public again. It was very emotional and simply beautiful. I had the printed lyrics translated into English for me by Jan, he and Claartje listened to one iPod, Rene and Ingrid listened to the other. At this time I noticed two pairs of whales constantly breaching in the background, in fact they remained for the rest of the ceremony. The local Aborigines say it is a sign of great luck.

Claartje said her vow in Dutch to Jan, and I could work out enough to keep along. There were tears from all of us at various times, even the celebrant. Thank heavens for sun glasses.

We eventually arrived at the restaurant for drinks in the Sunset Bar. Ingrid joined us for the first couple of bottles, then she left us and we moved to our table downstairs. We had a most wonderful three courses accompanied by marvellous wines, and all in all a splendid time was had by all. I can highly recommend Amis Restaurant at the Pandanus Resort for fine dining.

We left the car there and walked a short distance to our accommodation. Next morning I collected it and we packed and headed back to Brisbane after a walk around Dunwich, the little port.

As a conclusion to the wedding I suggested to Claartje that she throw the bouquet into the sea, in the wake of the ferry, in the hope that it may float back to the island. This was a lovely final gesture.

There is lots more to tell; like the box, the package (another much smaller box) from an exclusive jewellers in Eindhoven, the 'ah haa' moments...but putting them into print doesn't do them justice. These are the shared stories that will bind me to Claartje, Jan and Rene for life. These are the moments that fill a story with colour and life, yet also a comfortable intimacy. I'm so proud to be in their family. Thanks.

Sunday saw the newly weds fly off with Rene to Alice Springs. During the course of the next week they drove 2200km to Uluru, Kings Canyon, three art centres and generally spent time seeing the real Australia that many don't see. Jan and Claartje are now one week into a two week camper van holiday driving from Sydney to Melbourne via a very circuitous route. Rene came back last Tuesday and I was very glad to see him. Meanwhile of course I was back at school this past fortnight slaving away at the coal face. It's alright for some!

REALITY CHECK !

I have tried to ignore the current economic tsunami embroiling the world but cannot. My superannuation statement that arrived last week proved that times are indeed tough. Things will once again improve, but it'll be quite a long while before they do. As to the causes? Greed and the desire for smaller government. An international expert in banking described the Netherlands and Australia as having the best controlled banking systems in the world (something about a two pronged regulatory system - or something). I actually forget since I heard it on radio and didn't read it. Yet we are suffering still because we're so globally interconnected. I hope Americans learn from this and bring into force more accountability. Mind you, as I see and hear some Americans on television openly stating that they fear Obama because he's an Arab, I really wonder if the USA as a whole is intellectually and emotionally up to the challenge.

IN CLOSING...

Closer to home, work has begun on a massive tunnel project near our home (http://www.brisconnections.com.au/). We had a community meeting in the neighbouring park this morning. 'Airport Link' is an 11.8km network of tunnels and ramps that begin under Kalinga Park, right beside us. It is across the opposite side of the park (800m away), but nevertheless close enough to make itself known to us during the 2 year construction phase. Ultimately we will have our park returned better than before, with additional facilities and improved creek flows etc, but the work site is going to be behind a dense row of trees, a blight on the landscape for two years. They appear to be going to extreme lengths to minimise any impact on residents. The proof of the pudding.....

Rene's gone to sleep, I'd better join him. I'll add pictures in the morning and then post this update. In closing I should just mention that I finally saw Mamma Mia (good fun) last weekend plus a preview of the new film Brideshead Revisited (really brilliant). I plan to see the new Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading tomorrow with Rene. I have heard nothing but rave reviews for this movie, plus I love anything the Coens put together, and throw in George Clooney and I'm in heaven. Tot ziens!

Yes, J & C at Uluru at sunset. Of course, Rene took the picture. I'll post some of Jan's pictures of Rene in the Red Centre next time. Looks great though - I haven't been there yet, Rene has now been twice, lucky fellow!