Australia south and west

We flew from Melbourne to Adelaide moving from the hospitality of old friends to the hospitality of old friends

I have known Bill and Ros Hague since we were at Cambridge together in the late 60’s, they then came to Thomas’, Bill for his clinical and Ros to do the graduate nurse course that was just starting. They have three young, roughly contemporaneous with ours and so there was much to share.

Adelaide is a gentler city than most, apart from a Saturday night when the town is busy, boozy and boisterous as we inadvertently discovered when we were returning late from a concert. They were wonderful hosts and arranged some meetings with the local educational leaders and some worthwhile outings. We had a bush tramp seeing a koala at close quarters in the wild, many birds; laughing and blue winged kookaburras amongst others. We had a highly informative visit to the marine and immigration museum. This explained the manner of immigration to Australia better than any other account I have seen in our whole trip. It explained what happened in a graphically, with old photos and contemporary film strips to colour the picture. There was considerable hardship involved and in our age of material sufficiency one wonders at the privation and poverty that the immigrants were escaping from, to seek a better life in what was a pioneering situation, as recently as fifty years ago.

The social highlight of our visit was a trip to a concert in Bundaleer forest. This was an enormously engaging musical festival in t a the woods of northern South Australia. A contra punctual element was added by my tooth, which chose to ache on the day. It was a severe ache which engendered sympathy, which in turn led to action. We were driven to the concert via a winery in the grounds of a Jesuit monastery; the others were hungry and suggested lunch which was bacon, egg and sausage sandwiches, good in their place but a mistake for the sore of tooth. My beloved seeing my anguish enlisted the help of the paramedics, who did not have much else to do and we experimented with penthrane, which I am sure is good for some sort of pain but not this particular variety of toothache. It was then decided that I should be bundled in a truck and driven to the local hospital, by one of the charming paramedics. This is one of the spin-offs of relative misfortune, it opens avenues not normally available. We were told that Jamestown, the site of the concert was a much safer place to bring up children than Adelaide, and Charlie’s, the paramedic and local builder proudly pointed out his son who was playing cricket on a pitch we passed on the way to the hospital. His daughter was taking part in the concert, which had a mixture of local input and internationally famous performers. The hospital was neat and welcoming and under threat! We were given the medicine necessary to alleviate suffering and returned, with the accommodating Charlie to the concert. Pain in temporary abatement we had a pleasurable two hours hearing engaging performances as we walked from glade to glade, al capella singing, oboe and cello solos, then supper and, what do you know, more anguish So I was taken to the coach, where, a useful discovery, there is a bed. When the pain was under control sleep overtook me, and I was awakened by some wonderful singing, by Simon O’Neill a tenor from the metropolitan in NY and Teddy Tahu Rhodes. They are both New Zealanders and we were treated to a masterful display of the most wonderful singing. Whether it was therapeutic or not it marked the beginning of the end of the self absorption that pain leads one into.

The next day, before church I was seen by a delightful oral facial maxillary consultant who deemed the tooth worth persevering with and with that Bill and I went to church. They worship in the oldest Anglican church in downtown Adelaide. It has several services on a Sunday. Ros and Jane had been to the early one and Bill and I went to a lively family service in the next door cinema. This use of secular venues has some virtues, not least in putting the Christian message into a place where it is not normally expected to be heard. The message was a good one, and we have learnt a lot from the various service we have attended on our trip.

One of the privileges of this trip has been being involved with our hosts’ families; we have sat down to dinner with the children of all our hosts, and what a delight it has been. They are all confident, polite, the girls beautiful and the boys handsome. They all do different things, but often one can see glimpses of their parents as one used to know them.

We left Australia via Perth, a place I have longed to visit as it is the home of David, my brother in laws’ family. It too is a gentle city; we walked rapidly around the centre that is possible downtown in Australian cities. Perth has a unique site for city viewing, in Sydney the harbour is the place, in Brisbane the river, in Melbourne the south bank on bicycles and Adelaide the northern parkland, in Perth it is a concrete staircase, much used by joggers and those hoping to get fit. We strode up it in the gathering dark and had a glistening view. Too little time to do anything more than walk eat and sleep, before we set off again to another continent for the last phase of our journey, today Australia and today Africa!