Still Rushing

I once attended a conference in Amsterdam for 2-3 days and the lapsed time for the entire trip from Armidale and back was less than 6 days. Now I'm retired, I'm still at it and I should know better. On Thursday evening I addressed a small crowd at RMIT Hamilton for about 45 minutes and the return trip took a shade over two days.

Nothing remarkable about that? Well, it's a long way to Hamilton - about as far as going to Cairns in the opposite direction. This is a big continent and flying there took about 6 hours and three separate legs in various aircraft, including the last one from Melbourne's Tullamarine airport to Hamilton in the famous flying pencil. This aircraft has only two seats abreast one on either side. The return journey was even longer because it took well over four hours sitting in two buses just to get from Hamilton back to Tullamarine for the flight home. That was my fault as I'd specifically asked to look at western Victoria's countryside from the ground. I saw the southern end of the Grampian Mountains (the name seems familiar), Dunkeld (ditto) and the old gold-mining city of Ballarat with its grand 19th century Victorian buildings - a bit like Manchester and other large English cities.

Fortunately, the trip was a success - and not just for my presentation. My host, Paul Collits - who is one of my doctoral graduates, and I discussed a mass of stuff. We're writing a book together, co-edit a journal, and I'm an advisor to a program that he has developed in a successful tender to deliver regional development practitioner education for Economic Development Australia (EDA). Paul and his wife Melissa gave up a life in suburban Sydney six months ago to move to Hamilton as part of what we call tree-change and sea-change. The former is a move to a rural setting and the latter is the same but coast hugging. So they swapped a back garden for 10 hectares and much more space. Both are happy - so much so that Melissa is now doing a law degree through my own university!

AS

PS You could all do programs through UNE if you want a happy productive retirement or a career change. Emily, for example, is doing our Master of Applied Linguistics through UNE while in Baltimore.