A postcard from friend Rachel who’s currently touring around Australia.
Rachel says at this time of year south-western Australia is warm during the day but still nice and cool at night. Ideal spring weather.
The Margaret River region of WA is one of Australia’s premier wine-making districts. It also has some fantastic beaches, and some significant sites of Early European settlement.
It is thought that Margaret River is named after Margaret Wyche, who was a cousin of the founder of nearby Busselton, John Garrett Bussel.
A postcard from friend Rachel who’s currently touring around Australia.
This has to be one of the longest wooden jetties in the world. In fact it IS the longest wooden jetty in the Southern Hemisphere – so long that you need to catch a train to get to the end of it.
Busselton is a town in the south west region of Western Australia with a population of about 20,000.
A postcard from friend Rachel who’s currently touring around Australia.
She’s currently worried about a leak in the van she’s driving, and doesn’t know where to look to fix it.
Pay someone else, Rach!
The French Vessel Naturaliste visited this cape in 1801. It was visited earlier by the Dutch vessel Leeuwin in 1627, but there are no records which remain today.
La Naturaliste, the ship, under Captain Hamelin was part of a French expedition led by Nicholas Baudin which explored Australian waters around 1801. She was a bomb-corvette which Baudin sent back to France in 1801 with numerous Australian natural specimens.
The headland itself is at the western edge of Geographe Bay, in the south-western region of Western Australia.
Our friend, Rachel is currently driving around Australia.
She has promised to send us postcards of her journey, and I’ve promised to scan them and put them on a map for her so she has a record of where she has been.
Here’s the first few postcards which arrived recently.
I finally managed to track Bob down the other day.
He was surprised to hear from me after such a long time, and came round for a while on Saturday afternoon.
It was strange looking at him for the first time in 33 years. Age has changed us both, but I could tell it was still the same old Bob I knew in the 70’s.
We reminisced about our school days. I’d completely forgotten that we both went to our first rock & roll concert together in 1975: Skyhooks at Festival Hall in Brisbane. He also came to my 13th birthday party that year and still remembers kissing Leslie Hillhouse when we played spin the bottle.
I got onto Google Maps and showed Bob some of the streets in the town where he lived before his family migrated to Australia. I’m hoping he’ll bite the bullet and go back there one day soon. When we were kids, he always said he’d do it, but he never did.
Bob has taught me that friends can change your life. Not through heroics. Just by being friends.
So when you look at it like that, friends are very important.
This was the day Mum, Dad, Karen, Kevin and I flew to the UK, aboard a BOAC Super VC10 flying to Darwin, Singapore, KL, Abu Dhabi and eventually London (Heathrow).
It was really good of Robert and Bob to come up to the airport to see me off.
I used to sit next to Robert in grade three in Henry Palasczuk’s English class. Henry was really strict. He’d sorted the class into rows according to ability. If you didn’t do well on your weekly spelling test, you’d have to go down a row. Eventually, if you didn’t do well while you were in the lowest row, you ended up getting moved to lower level English class next door.
Robert and I used to do science experiments in our spare time, mixing up whatever chemicals we could find, or wiring up old radios to see what we could do.
Robert and I discovered our love of Science together.
When my mum and Dad needed some time alone together in the early seventies, Roberts parents (Brenda and Marshall) kindly let me stay with them for a while.
Bob was a ten pound pom like me, but he arrived in 1972. His family were from Nelson (near Manchester) in Lancashire. I actually visited Nelson in 1997 when Liz and I went back to the UK. Where their family moved to in Rosella Street Inala was much nicer than Nelson, although the view of some of the green hills around Nelson was quite pretty.
Bob and I used to ride our bikes down the bush and smoke cigarettes that Bob used to magically procure. He and his brother Graham were brilliant at soccer, and I think Graham actually went on to play it profesionally.
Bob was the main reason that I decided to go to Oxley State High School instead of Inala High or Richlands. That decision changed my life.
The schools in Inala were rough. As a result, most kids under achieved. I went to primary school at Serviceton South in Inala. I found it very difficult since I was younger than most kids in my class, and smarter than most of them. So in their jealousy they made life tough for me.
So Oxley High was a big step up for me.
I ended up being School Captian of Oxley High, and am very grateful that I did well academically, eventually being able to get into Uni.
It was at Oxley High that I eventually ended up getting mixed up in the church, which in a way was a good thing, because it’s how I got to meet my lovely wife, Liz.
So Bob, I owe you a hell of a lot, mate. You changed my life, and neither of us realized it at the time.
I am so glad I met both Robert and Bob, and I very much regret not keeping in touch with either of them.
