More about Weather

In November and early December this part of Australia was as hot as Britain was cold, and bushfires were raging across the Eastern States. We've just seen a form reversal with our region being deluged with water and Western Australia now alight. However, things haven't changed much in Europe, with freezing weather and snow much in evidence.

For the record, Armidale has just recorded four successive days of what we call "English Weather". This comprises dreary dull days and persistent light rain. The last four daily totals were: 12mm, 24mm, 35mm, and 12mm for a total of about 83 mm (or nearly 3.5 inches). The last of these was particularly "English" and it didn't stop raining for about 12 consecutive hours.

Compared with places across Northern NSW and Southern Queensland, 83mm was not heavy and the rivers in many locations are in flood, much to the delight of farmers. I wonder if all these weather events can be tracked to the same source - the almost total absence of sun-spots for a large part of 2009.

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Gara Gorge

One of the places we treasure the most is Gara Gorge which starts at the Blue Hole - a local swimming spot in Summer - and then descends 250 m (about 750 feet) in a series of waterfalls into a secluded and beautiful valley, which is barely accessible to anyone. This gorge country winds for tens of kilometers as part of the World Heritage Listed Oxley - Wild Rivers National Parks. It is completely uncommercialised and full of wildlife. Two of the pictures show the rugged nature of the countryside.

At the top there are some great walking tracks with ever wider views as one gets farther from the Blue Hole. Along the eastern edge there are historical relics in the form of a flume, which once carried water to Australia's first hydro-electric scheme built in the 1890s to power the nearby town of Hillgrove - site of a gold mining boom at the time. Some of the concrete-sided flume is readily visible in the attached photo.

We walked about 6 km today around one of the walking paths, thankfully in dry, although threatening, weather. It started pouring just after we left the national park! A couple of photos show members of our party walking though steep terrain and at one of the lookouts en route. We couldn't help pulling faces at the latter having just had the scary experience of stepping over a large black (or tiger) snake. Perhaps I should say that Greg had that encounter and I was close behind. Max ran up to have a look, but was restrained!

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Geocaching

One of the things I like doing is finding geocaches. These are containers hidden in the landscape, city or country, and identified by their latitude and longitude. Armed with their GPS devices, millions of people globally hunt for perhaps a million of these caches located just about anywhere. I've planted two of them in the Armidale district and Greg, who is an ardent cahce finder is staying with us for Xmas. Naturally we've been out tracking down mine and a varietu of others despite awful weather. It's not so much cold and wet as prone to very heavy monsoonal showers! Our present climate resembles the hills of Assam and if it continues like it has over the Christmas period we're going to drown - despite being on a hillside 1000m up!

Anyway, we've visited six in the last two days at some nice spots. The accompanying pictures show (1) the Gara Gorge (one of my caches); (2) the Thomas Lagoon (an inland drainage area near us); (3) the cache site at the Armidale Arboretum; and (4) a termite mound with some seekers in the Armidale pine forest. We had great fun finding them and logging our visits both at the cache sites and on the web home page. I've found about 40 that are logged and Greg has found five times that number!

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Christmas Lights

All across Australia, the owners of many homes decorate them with lights and other decorations. Armidale, for example, has an annual competition (prize funded by the local electricity retailer) and the list of winners is published - along with their locations.

Tonight, we piled several of us into a car, along with Max in the child seat, to take the light trail around town. Many of the displays were impressive and not just for the thousands of coloured lights they contained. The best had images of Santa, sleighs, reindeer, and so on, some of which had moving parts or programmed changes to the light displays.

The sort of thing I mean is shown in the attached pictures.

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Christmas Dinner

There were 8 of us for dinner today. It was not the usual northern hemisphere event because we did not have a hot meal - just salads and cold meat, plus fruit salad to end with. I might add that the dessert came 5 hours after the main meal! Unlike the traditional dinner we also downed almost 2 kg of cooked prawns, each of which had to be shelled, beheaded and de-tailed before eating, which was a great chore.

As a nice touch, Emily supplied home-made Xmas crackers. These had much better jokes than the commercial variety, each tailored to the individual guests, and more useful presents. I, for example received a book of Soduku puzzles. And we avoided the silly headware usually contained in crackers!






The pictures show the table and the individual crackers Emily made.

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Water Pistols at 10 Paces

It's Christmas Day here and nice and warm (30C). Four of us received water pistols as presents - Greg, Rob, Max and me. This, I might add, was pre-arranged.

Just after Xmas dinner, three of us - excluding Rob - donned board shorts and otherwise stripped off for a classic duel with water pistols. We all finished absolutely soaked, but it was great fun for an hour or so. Emily even joined in towards the end, but she and I were handicapped by having smaller capacity pistols. So we had to keep on refilling our machines to remain in the fight, which was a chore.

The picture shows Greg and Max facing off just before lunch. They only got a little wet in the process and the afternoon fight was much more serious.

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Another Devilish View

A friend of mine has just emailed these pictures of yesterday's bridge game! The attendance was massive - 18 tables and I had the foresight to deal two ikdentical sets of boards so that I could run two movements, but score a cross the field.





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A Devil of a Party

Yesterday the Armidale Bridge Club held its final Saturday pairs tournament for 2009 and I agreed to organise and direct the event, which was to be followed at 5.00 by the annual Christmas party. I developed the theme of 'wicked deals' in which I confronted the players with some wild hands culled from a variety of books and articles. I also rotated the deals (from N-S to E-W and vice versa) to even up the balance of the high card points and make more of a competition.



Anyway the players were ecstatic about the challenges and opportunities they found and I can see demand for a similar event next year. Because the play was so complex, the players made a lot of mistakes contravening the laws of the game and I was run around the room attending calls for the director. That was only part of the difficulty. I also had to judge the indiscretions in bidding and play for my 'wicked awards'. You know the sort of thing - a prize for the worst result; the self immolation prize; the prize for the loudest laugh! Luckily my friend Bruce Tier did the scoring, otherwise everyone would have left for home long before the scores cam out!

I had the brainwave of dressing up as director of the wicked tournament and awards. As you can see from the picture, I donned horns and a cloak for the purpose, not to mention a long forked tail, all worn over some board shorts - the kind of attire one would expect from Satan's Australian representative. There was a roar of approval when I entered the room to start the tournament! Fortunately. I did not have to go to a theatrical costumier for the outfit. Dot had another brainwave and discovered the required item lying in Emily's bedroom. Presumably she went to a fancy dress ball at some stage!

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Long Distance Commute

Dot thinks I'm mad, with perhaps good reason. I travelled to a 2.5 hour meeting today and guess the round trip distance and the whole trip took 10 hours. Was the distance 200km, 400km, 600km, or perhaps 800 km?

I've forgotten to mention that I went by air and the return distance was closer to 1800 km involving 4 separate flights. The journey was to Canberra via Sydney! Moreover, the journey was so fast that I missed seeing Beck and Max completely and saw Emily for about 30 seconds. That was a chance meeting in the entrance to the Department of Education and Employment and Workplace Relations. They employ her and my contact was in the same building!!

Was I mad to go that distance for a 2.5 hour meeting? Perhaps I should add that the meeting was successful, though I'll keep the subject matter under wraps for now.

Meanwhile, the flight was incredibly bumpy through massive cloud formations and it has now started to pour in Armidale.

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After the Smoke

The last post reported great heat and smoke from bush fires. Now we have almost the opposite. Would believe almost 40 mm of rain (1.5 inches) in 20 minutes and a plunge in temperatures from about 27c to 15c in a few minutes? The garden was afloat for a while!

I'm not attaching a picture because most of mt readers are intelligent enough to know what it looks like. I went on to the bureau of meteorology website and saw a massive storm cell about 50 km (30 miles) across which went right over the top of the city. Alas, there was some damage. Part of the roof of one of our shopping centres, Armidale Plaza, collapsed, closing the centre. That's terrible for the traders who are entering their busiest period in the year.

Anyway, it's back to normal today. The forecast is for about 28C and it's now brilliantly sunny.

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Smoke Haze

Armidale has had the strangest start to summer I've ever experienced. Day after day has been hot, with temperatures in the 32-24 C range (about 90 to 94 F). All the hot weather has dried off the vegetation west of here, although Armidale is still green. Unfortunately, lightening strikes about 100 km from here started some major bush fires and, although we're in no danger, the roaring fires, aided by strong westerly winds, have driven masses of smoke over our city and created red-brown skies as the attached pictures show.

It will only clear when the winds turn southeasterly as they should be at this time of year. That brings coller and damper weather capable of dousing the fires. And we badly need rain to remove the dust from the atmosphere. It's not causing us harm, but some people may be hospitalised. The nearest thing to current conditions I can remember is the great London smogs of the 1950s and 60s.

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Tranquil Bellingen

On the way home today, the route took us up the Bellinger valley through the little town of Bellingen. The Waterfall Way (the name of the road) has indeed many spectacular waterfalls, some among the highest in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Bellinger River is peaceful and picturesque in the lower reaches - as shown in the accompanying picture. As the road drives inland, the scenery gets wilder and wilder as it climbs firstly to the Dorrigo Plateau and then towards Point Lookout (1,600 metres) near Ebor. It is for us one of the most attractive roads in the whole of Australia, and our mother compared on stretch near Dorrigo to the Swiss Jura mountains when she visited. The whole area has been drenched by heavy rains throughout 2009 and it reminded me of parts of Ireland I visited last year.

Anyway, back to Bellingen, which is a 130 year old timber cutting town now turned into a simultaneously up-market hideaway for the rich and famous (film & TV stars for example)and downmarket hideaway for alternative lifestyle seekers interested in arts and crafts or less legal pursuits. It's a good place to eat out and shop - as we often do when passing through. One picture shows we three seated at a coffee shop awaiting bagels and drinks (like Chai Latte, which I've found to be very pleasant).

The main street has lots of period shops, most of which have gone upmarket in pursuit of dollars. The Commercial Emporium used to sell what's advertised on the building - it was a general store. However, it's now an expensive boutique - as Dot and Judy found when rummaging through the merchandise. I suppose its a cross between most Australian vernacular shopping architecture and the US wild west where I've seen similar streetscapes.

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Wild Seas

Whilst in Sawtell, a southerly buster sped through dropping the temperatures from about 36C to just 22C. For British readers, this means a cold front ripped through bringing strong winds and rain (mainly overnight). And the wind turned from the north to the south (the direction of Antarctica).

Yesterday (Tuesday 1 December), the strong winds led to a 2-3 metre swell and we walked along the beach to the nearby headland to see the waves crashing over the rocks. It was very picturesque, as the accompanying pictures show. We could have watched scene for hours!

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Brush Turkeys

The most recent post showed the view from our cabin. Later on we discovered some company in the form of Brush Turkeys which inhabit the slopes down to the lagoon and the ocean beaches. I guess the specimens pictured look something like a turkey, but unlike our American cousins who hunted them for the table on Thanksgiving Day, we left them alone.

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A Sawtell Interlude

We've just been down to the coast for four days - me Dot and Judy. Judy won first prize in a raffle many months ago - several nights in a caravan park at Sawtell staying in one of their 'villas'. If that conjures up images of a villa in Tuscany, you're wrong. It was an up-market cabin, but actually very nice provided one ignores the air conditioning failing on a day when the temperature reached 36 C. Anyway, we all needed some R & R and sitting atop some of the best coastal scenery in NSW was a good location. Even the weather stayed mostly fine, though hot on the first day. And anyway, we didn't spend long in the villa because there were lots of beach walks, not to mention attractions in the nearby towns of Coffs Harbour and Sawtell.

The caravan park, it was a relief to find, was spacious and green with lots of trees and even two croquet courts. The attached photos show the view from our 'villa' and the beautiful panoramas from adjacent beaches north to Mutton Bird Island and south towards Scotts Head and Southwest Rocks. Mutton birds (which used to be eaten - hence the name) still inhabit the island, but they're safe now because it is part of the local Marine Park.

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Perth #2

I have just returned from my week in Perth, which turned out very well. My keynote address to the State of the Cities (SOAC) conference was reasonably received and sparked some long debates. And the social side was good, too. We had opening drinks at the Royal Perth Yacht Club (RPYC), famous as being the home base of Australia's yachting team who finally lifted the America's Cup off the US in the 1980s, after many decades of trying. That took place off the New Jersey coastline, but most Australians can remember the then Prime Minister telling employers that anyone who fired a workers hung over from the celebrations was a bum! That line was recorded for posterity at the RPYC. However, on this occasion there was no sign of Alan Bond who financed the attempt.

Two days later we also had the conference dinner at the RPYC, and very good it was too. In between there was a civic reception at the Perth City Hall. My slides show the view from the RPYC to the city centre and the view in reverse! Perth is very attractive along the Swan River, home to many of the wealthiest in Australia!

A long-time colleague of mine, Roy, and his wife, Chris, entertained me to dinner last night in Freo (Fremantle) near where they live - at a Turkish restaurant - and they ran me all the way to the airport. We'd met in July this year in, of all places, Maribor in Slovenia - we were attending the same conference. And they looked after Rebecca when she was in Rio a few years ago.

I left Perth at 3.00am Eastern Summer Time, three hours ahead of Perth where it was midnight. And I arrived back in Armidale - via Sydney at 10am, just 7 hours and 4000km later. Amazingly, the return trip to Sydney was faster by one hour than going: 3.5 hours to 4.5 hours. That reflected the jet stream accelerating aircraft speed on the return to 1100 km per hour. So I turned up to bridge this afternoon with 4 hours sleep under my belt last night - not a success!

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Another Trip

I am now in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and one of the remotest parts of the world. It's certainly an isolated city and closer to Jakarta than Sydney - 4000km from home!

I'm here to deliver a keynote speech at a conference, not to look at the sights. I doubt I'll see anything of the city except for what's out of my hotel window - pictured - or the 4 km to the University of Western Australia where I'm spending the next 4 days closeted in the conference room. As Ned Kelly said, such is life! The city centre looks impressive and the hotel has about 10,000 vehicles a day past the window on the freeway.

I'm back in Armidale on Saturday morning after this 8000 km detour - possibly the last of the year, though I've just been invited to Brisbane and I may have another trip to Canberra for the day!! Poor Dot, She'll have forgotten what I look like if I'm not careful.

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Heatwave

It's still only Spring - the equivalent to mid-May in the northern hemisphere, but things are hotting up. Armidale, whose average maximum summer temperature is about 26degrees C, has recorded 15.00 temperatures for the last three days of 30.6, 33.1 and 31.5.

Well, if it's hot here it's diabolical elsewhere. A mate of mine is researching near Windorah in SW Queensland and that was 44C a short while ago. Longreach, which I visited a few months ago, was cooler at a mere 42C. Narrabri, which I visit quite regularly in my Cotton industry research was cooler still at 40C. And Canberra was a mere 29C.

There is an upside to all this. Meteorologists explain that hot early summer leads to very wet summer after the New Year, especially about north from here.

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Music Library

Armidale City library has an astonishing collection of CDs for loan - hundreds, if not thousands of them. I've just returned with 6 borrowed CDs comprising:
* the hits of 1190 - works by that household name, Perotin (whose name translates via Latin into the French Pierre);
* two symphonies by Joachim Raff (1822-1882);
* three works by Christopher Rouse (born 1949 - he's a little younger than I am!);
* Satie's Gymnopedies;
* songs and walzes of Vienna (more conventional); and
* a bizarre disc of Lute Music written by that well-known composer and Lutenist, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648).

Few small town libraries anywhere in the world would be able to offer that kind of choice!

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Second Re-birthday

Well, Folks. I'll be celebrating my second re-birthday in two days time. If you recall, I had a near terminal event on 19 November 2007. However, I'm not expecting any cards and presents: just happy to be here!

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Ornithological Cornucopia

It is now Spring and we have had wonderful seasonal conditions - warm weather and some heavy rainfall - so that everything is looking lush and green. and, currently, we have a procession of lovely birds through the garden attracted by the flowering native shrubs and Emily's five-star bird-feeder hanging from a tree. We keep this topped up with large volumes of mixed seed suitable for just about all sizes of birds.

The flowering shrubs, including lovely bottle brushes (look that up on Google), attract the 'Varied' and White-eared' Honey-eater and, yesterday, we even saw an army of green plumed finches also dining on the nectar. The bird feeder attracts a procession of parrots: King Parrots, Grass Parrots, Galahs, Sulfur Crested Cockatoos, Crimson Rosellas and Eastern Rosellas - all with bright plumage. The males out-perform the females in that regard. In addition, we find finches, silver-eyes and the common sparrow frequenting the feeder, together with the odd crested pigeon. In fact, the garden also hosted some starlings yesterday, somewhat to our surprise since starlings are rare for much of the year. On top of all these we know that some laughing Kookaburras (a member of the Kingfisher family) live around us, along with the omni-present Magpie.

The Magpie lives just about everywhere in Australia and has better adapted to humans than just about any bird. They are large, very tuneful, and - in the nesting season which has just ended - highly aggressive. They look similar to the Pied Currawongs, but are in reality a quite different species. The Currawongs are much more secretive and wary of humans.

So we have a large number of friends in all shapes and sizes. Apart from these we sight lots of other birds from time to time, including ducks, wading birds, plovers, eagles, and so on.

Alas, I have to report that we had a sick bird in our garden a few days ago. It was a beautiful female King Parrot - a large bird. I saw it looking sorry for itself on a branch outside of my study window. Several hours later it was on the ground feeding from fallen seed below the feeder and it seemed unable to fly. That was a worry as our cat, Honey, was stalking it. So I caught the bird by throwing a blanket over it. Dot and I put it in a cardboard box along with a dish of bird seed and called an organisation called Wires, which looks after injured wild-life. By this time it was dark and the Wires staffer turned up early the next morning to collect the bird for treatment. The next day, we heard that the King Parrot had sadly passed away.

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Shine Dome

The real reason for being in Canberra last weekend was to attend a symposium run by ASSA (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia) and delivered by members of the Australian Research Council Research Network on Integrated Social Science (ARCRNSISS).

That's enough of acronyms for the moment. I'm a member of that network and I and a colleague from UNE explained our ARC-funded research into change and adjustment in Australia's agricultural heartlands: down on the farm and in associated country towns. In fact, I was only on the floor about 7 minutes last Tuesday (3 November), but enough time for the network to pay my expenses for the trip. However, the entire day was relevant to my research interests and very entertaining.

Proceedings took place in the Shine Dome (!) pictured here, which is owned and operated by the Academy of the Sciences. It was a wonderful venue, whose auditorium had great acoustics and ultra-comfortable seating. And the presentation we made went down very well.

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More Rain

I have reported on heavy rain received in this region during 2009, and I apologise for raising the matter once more. Coffs Harbour, just east of us, has just had another 460mm in two days. In imperial measures, that comes 18 inches, or just a little under the annual rainfall received in the drier parts of England. Further inland, the amounts taper off, partly because Armidale lies well west in the rain shadow of the coastal mountains rising to 1600m (5000 feet). So we've only received 35mm or so (about 1.5 inches) from what we call English weather. The skies are dark grey and the rain is fairly light but constant.

By the way, Armidale is running about 800mm (32 inches) for the last 12 months (or above the average of c. 765mm). Coffs Harbour is much wetter at 2200/1690mm (88/67 inches). The grass is now growing wildly in a brilliant shade of green.

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And after that

Having got back safely to our car, we took off for an adventure playground to meet up with Beck and Max. It's now Max's favourite because there are large climbing frames and a flying fox among other things, although a long 20 km drive from where they live in the suburb of Dunlop. By the way, the suburb is not named after the tyre company, but after a famous second world war army officer.

Max displayed his usual energy despite the heat and he even joined in Frisbee throwing with me and Greg, though his eye-hand coordination, not to mention throwing technique leaves a lot to be desired.

After that, it was off to the swimming centre for an hour in the pool - Max can now swim, while Em did 800m (many laps of the pool) to recover (?) from the hike and Beck did about 400m. I stayed in the shallow end with Max to nurse my sore legs! Then it was back to Beck and Rob's place for a barbecue and a guitar lesson for Max. What a day!

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Gibraltar Rock

Some of you can readily locate the Rock of Gibraltar, which I saw from the Moroccan side of the Mediterranean a couple of years ago. But have any of you heard of Gibraltar Rock? I hadn't until yesterday when Emily, Greg and I set off to climb it. They were practicing for the Overland walk in Tasmania, which they hope to complete over a week in December.

So they climbed the rock with their heavy backpacks yesterday to simulate Tasmanian conditions and I went along for the ride with only a light day-pack. I was worried most of the time that Em would expire, not only because of the steep climb (up about 400m), but also on account of the heat (about 32 degrees). It might be the middle of Spring, but Summer temperatures are already here.

We made it to the top and back in about 3 hours, though only 2 hours were spend going up and coming down. The pictures show some of the scenery. We also saw quite a few kangaroos in family pods, including a mother and joey in her pouch - see photo.

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Soccer Match

Living in rural NSW, there are few opportunities to attend major sporting fixtures. I used to watch a lot of soccer when living in the UK, and haunted the terraces at various grounds, including Newcastle United, Manchester U, Liverpool, West Ham, and, dare I mention it, Brighton. The last match I saw live was in a distant suburb of Buenos Aires when Rebecca and I stumbled across a second division match and paid to go in after being frisked by riot police. We ended up in the visitor's end of the ground behind a steel fence patrolled by armed police ready to throw tear gas grenades into a rioting crowd. Well 'our' team was losing and, towards the end of the match, 'our' crowd staged a riot. Beck and I exited rapidly from the ground!

I'm now in Canberra to attend and present at an Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) meeting. Arriving three days early to socialise with Em, Beck and Max and their families, I was invited to Bruce Stadium on Saturday night to witness an A - league clash between Central Coast Mariners (based at Gosford, north of Sydney) and Adelaide United. I have little idea why they were playing in Canberra, except it's located between the home-town cities. Anyway, there were some Australian internationals on display and the standard of play was quite good. However, both defences were well on top and the attacks rather unimaginative. So, I, Emily, Greg, Rebecca amd Max endured a scoreless draw. Most of the thunder and lightning was aerial. Max was there in body if not spirit as the event seemed to bore him greatly. I guess 5 year olds want to roam everywhere and not remain seated.

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Strange Weather

After a rather dry Winter and early Spring,things have suddenly turned wet, with something like 50mm of rain in the last few days. You may remember me saying a few months ago that Dorrigo just east of us had about 800 mm of rain in few days. That's just risen by another 400 mm! Let's hope that Armidale has even more rain to give us and the local farmers a great start to the summer season. Our garden looked fairly brown until last weekend, but it has visibly perked up in the last few days. The only downside are the 'cold' temperatures ... about 17 degrees C. That might seem wonderful to my UK readers, but we were getting used to the low twenties until the rain arrived.

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Twitter

In an experiment, I've just signed up for Twitter, but haven't yet tweeted. Could you please let me know if you have aa Twitter account so that I can follow your tweets? For example, I tried to find Emily Sorensen and Rebecca Sorensen but you'd never believe how many of them have got accounts ... and none identifiable as my daughters!

By the way, my Twitter name is a boring: TonySorensen. To follow me, or anyone else, you need a Twitter account.

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Decoupling

I'm currently invovled in several projects which involve long-term scenario construction or more general forecasting. For me, the future has always been more interesting than the past.

I've just been reading about the awesome potential computing power of future quantum computers and am looking forward to the day when my computer with a few hundred qubit capacity could store more numbers than there are thought to be atoms in the universe!! And I'm writing an article with a colleague from the University of Queensland on wicked problems, social messes and the relevance of quantum mechanics for the solution of increasingly complex urban planning problems through the extension of the idea of private - public partnerships (PPP).

And, as consultant to Australia's cotton industry, I'm looking at the future of Australian agriculture. This is mind-boggling task, not least because I'm trying to balance still explosive population growth, a likely decline in productive agricultural land, rising unavailability (and price) of conventional fuels, galloping technolgical development (which are vast in agriculture alone), huge economic growth in south and east Asia (and the GRIC countries) with associated consumption of different agricultural commodities, the transformation of agriculture from family operation to corporate enterprise ... now well under way in Australia, and the globalisation of agribusiness (now also well under way here with Chinese companies now buying up the Australian farm so to speak. On top of this, Australia's population is now expected grow faster than the world's in the next 40 years ... the only developed economy in this position. Our current 22 million population is now forecast to be c. 36 million by 2050, with an annual growth rate >2%.

Well, all this is considerable fun, even if hair-rising. Perhaps my acute lack of hair reduces the fraught side of the equation. Anyway, I've long thought that strong future orientation is one of the elixirs of life, so perhaps i'm in the process of extending my life span by a decade or so.

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Advance Planning

I had January River as the venue for the 2016 Olympics at about 5-1 on, and the outcome was no surprise. Indeed, I can't imagine how anyone in the world picked Tokyo, Chicago, or Madrid. Anyway, I have very good friends in Rio and humorously congratulated them by email on their win. I've met Ana and Scott every year for the last decade or more in 10 different countries on 4 continents (North America excepted) and we share common research interests. And now, as of this morning, Dot and I have an invitation to stay with them in Rio in 2016. That's good planning.

That sets me thinking. Would any of my UK readers be able to put us up in 2012 for the London games? As a quid pro quo, we run an open house here for those dropping by, but business has been a bit slow in recent years!

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170th Birthday

Armidale turned 170 today and the local historical society staged a play, or rather a series of six replica events, to mark the event before a large crowd of admirers. The scene was Armidale's McDonald Park, the precise spot where in 1839 the naming event took place. The NSW government's Commissioner sent out to survey the frontier area was George McDonald, who named his tent (there were no permanent buildings) Armidale after the castle of Armadale on the Isle of Skye - the seat of the Clan McDonald. The misspelling, we are now told, was deliberate because the Commissioner was highly literate and a poet. He would have known the exact spelling. He even rustled up a bottle of champagne to celebrate the event, though how that got here in drinkable fashion is anyone's guess. At the time there were no roads or railways and the Commissioner's party, including police, took weeks (May to September) to make the journey from the Hunter Valley.

The pictures show a local farming family and carriage; Sir Arthur Hogbin (grazier, L) taking to Commisioner McDonald (R); Governor Sir George Gipps (who gave Mcdonald his commission); John Everett (grazier, L) arguing with McDonald (R); and Ms Annabella Boswell. You can also the two-piece 'band' which played period music and the large number of school-kids of all ages in front. The whole event was very well done, all the way down to the costumes made locally, the acting, the research needed for historical authenticity, and its overall direction. Well done, and entertaining.

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