Autumn Parade

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first Armidale Autumn Parade and, as far as I could see, it was the biggest and best yet with 66 different component entries - social, cultural, commercial, community service, historical, educational, theatrical, musical and so on. And the length of the parade was amazing. It must have been something like 5 km long and it took something like 80 minutes to pass by as it wound through town.

I took over 60 pictures of the event, but I cannot provide them all in this post, so I'll just select some of the more interesting to give you a flavour of the parade. As with the other events I've written about this morning, the weather was poor, but that didn't seem to faze either the performers / participants or the sizeable audience. So, we start with the Armidale Pipe band heading the Parade.

Followed by some enormous pieces of scary Council equipment like this machine for tearing up road surfaces.

Then came a community bus from the little town of Guyra to our north.

And a parade of antique cars like this 1907 model.

Then came some school floats like this one containing Aboriginal kids, followed by marching students from various university colleges like this group.

Next we saw an amazing array of nationalities living in Armidale, starting with Antigua, Barbuda and Bangladesh, and going on to such nations as Bhutan, Syria and Vietnam.

Here we have the Tamworth Pipers heading up another stage in the proceedings.

They were followed by a whacky duo on models of antique vehicles and soon after by a whimsical theatrical group, some boy scouts, and another school contingent that was a bit more razzmatazz than the others.

Next came various community groups including these environmentalists, medieval warriors, theatrical participants in a show called Monty Python's Spamalot, and the Marching Koalas!

The next elements in the parade were service providers like the Armidale Community Carevan, a group providing tourists with conducted motorcycle tours, the army, hunters, and emergency service workers.

They, in turn, were followed by private machinery suppliers, lovers of old farm machinery, and more vehicles form state emergency services, some of whom didn't look quite human!

AS

A Drizzle of Music

The weather at this time of year is often warm and sunny, but today we experienced Scottish weather, which was perfect for one of the events I'm about to describe. By Scottish weather I mean temperatures of around 12 C and a heavy drizzle dripping from a leaden sky ... or should I say Skye? I once attended a pipe band competition at Portree, the main town on Skye. It took place one evening and the weather was not too different to what I experienced here today, and moreover perfect for the event in question, which consisted of a series of bands playing highland laments!

The first musical event attached to the Armidale Autumn Festival was the traditional breakfast with the band. By the way, Armidale is named after the town on the Isle of Skye that's home to the clan McDonald and it was named in the early 1830s by Commissioner McDonald of the NSW government. I wonder if there's a link! The breakfast is a fund-raiser for the band and while we eat breakfasts prepared by various service club's - including mine, which is Armidale Rotary North - the band keeps us happy with a range of familiar tunes. Band membership runs right across the age spectrum and even includes under 10s. Breakfasts are normally held outside in a park, but today's weather conditions forced us under cover, as these pictures show. Since the band HQ is close to one of major car-parks, the event was split between the two.

So here we are cosy in the Band Room, and some of my readers may recognise Dot. However, other diners preferred to eat outside in order to hear the band better. Outside in this case was the ground floor of a two-storey car park.

And here's the band all dressed in their smart uniforms.

And here, also under cover, were the chefs preparing the rather good breakfasts, with the second of these sowing the team from Armidale Rotary North.

An hour or so later, with the drizzle getting heavier, I was in the Mall to welcome the massed pipe bands of Armidale, Tamworth and Moree. The weather must have been a shock for pipers and drummers from Moree where temperatures for the last 3 months have averaged over 30 C daily. Still, they played brilliantly a medley of traditional Scottish songs ... along with Waltzing Matilda.

I found their performance very atmospheric and had, in my mind, images of much of Scotland which I've visited over the centuries from the southern borders, and central lowlands including Edinburgh and Glasgow, to Aberdeen and Inverness in the north-east, Caithness, the western mainland, and both the Inner and Outer Hebrides. I find the countryside so atmospheric I'm resolving to revisit many of my old haunts and especially take Dot to such islands as Mull, Iona, Staffa and Skye.

AS

Brand Armidale

In recent months I've been invited to work with other community members and a team of consultants to develop a 'brand' image for the newly amalgamated Armidale Regional Council and yesterday was invited to the brand's launch in the Beardy Street Mall outside the courthouse.

Here's the Council Administrator, Dr Ian Tiley, introducing the launch, backed by the core slogan: 'unleash the opportunities'. Ian and I were linked on LinkedIn long before he was appointed administrator by the NSW State Government, and he did his doctorate at UNE supervised by one my colleagues there.

The event was watched by a fair crowd of people, some seated but most, like me, standing .

You can see in the first two pictures and the one below the Council's logo - a stylised capital A in the shape of a multicoloured triangle, which has all sorts of symbolism represented by colours and internal lines.

Here is the consultant team about to explain their decisions / recommendations developed in conjunction with me and other team members.

And the ceremony was recorded for posterity ... and I presume some TV channel.

And, at the end, we saw a movie featuring a local school-kid (his mother beaming in the audience) with the new logo and his T-shirt and skate-board navigating his way around town - mostly on the skate-board. I guess the symbolism here was that we're entering a new world which is opening up opportunities for young people.

AS

Cloudscapes

After an especially hot and dry first two months of 2017, the weather has suddenly turned muggy and a little cooler, with rainfall increasing somewhat. Today I suggested to Dot that we go out for lunch and see some of the greening countryside and we chose, perhaps bizarrely, a trip to Kentucky. That's not in the USA, but a tiny hamlet of perhaps 300 people lying about 40 km southwest of Armidale up on the northern tablelands. It has a tiny primary school, a couple of churches, a village hall built strangely in 1940, and a general store that also doubles up as a cafe and post-office. Strangely there was no pub. I have seen pubs in tiny settlements in Queensland - one place having as far as I could tell just two residents - the publican and his wife. And Dobson's Distillery at Kentucky is a major business producing craft beer, wines, and such spirits as gin and vodka. Oh well, I suppose they serve as the local public house!

Well, we both had BLAT for lunch - basically Bacon, Lettuce, Avocado and Tomato on Turkish bread and it was delicious. And the surrounding countryside was attractive. But what really captured our attention were the lovely cloudscapes. Huge billowing cumulus clouds dotted the landscapes in all directions, some dropping their contents on our car as we sped along and others brooding darkly in the distance. For example, here are three images of the clouds taken from near the cafe, and as you can see there's an awful lot of rolling pastoral countryside:

We returned home via a round-about route. To start with we took Terrible Vale road, which fortunately didn't live up to its name. It was a good quality sealed road, albeit only one lane wide, all the way to Thunderbolt's Way where we turned northwards towards home. One of the attractions of this route is passing by Dangar's Lagoon an area of internal drainage that, after heavy rain, fills up and becomes a water birds' paradise. Well, on this occasion, recent heavy rains at the end of 2016 and in the last week meant the lagoon was full. So, we stopped at the public bird-hide on its shores and looked out for ducks, swans, and other water birds. Well, there were some in the distance as shown on this picture:

You can see how pretty the site is, and also the black swans which were probably 200 m away. However, the bird life wasn't prolific but I can probably explain that. The local rivers and farm dams are running high and provide alternative venues to Dangar's Lagoon, even though the latter is semi-permanent. Also. it's not the start of the nesting season, so birds have probably scattered on that count too. But what really caught our attention, as we cautiously trod the path to the shore-line to avoid possible snakes, was again the cloudscapes. Once again, they were riveting.

OK, we drove 80km - about 50 miles - there and back to get these views, but in our view it was worth it. Fortunately, we have had no rain today at home, an none seems imminent, which means I can head off on my bike for another 10+ km ride. And to make life a bit more interesting I've been invited in a couple of weeks to attend the launching ceremony for Brand Armidale to be held in the Mall between the post-office and the historic courthouse. Armidale's administrator  invited me to be involved in two meetings with consultants to develop the brand and while I know much of what they're proposing, I'm keeping quiet for now!

AS

An Extraordinary Concert

Dot and I went to a live concert in our town-hall last night and came away thinking that it was one of the most unheralded and remarkable performances we’d ever heard. To start with, I'd never heard of either of the two pianists who performed duets most of the evening, both of whom I gather are Australian citizens. One was Elena Kats-Chernin, who was born in of all places, Tashkent, in what is now Uzbekistan. Given that she's now about 60 years old, she was a citizen of the Soviet Union, but somehow managed to escape and her English is excellent.  The other performer was Tamara-Anna Cislowska, who turns 40 this year, so we had two female pianists. Despite her name, Tamara appears to have been born here in Australia and has the unusual distinction of being the youngest person to have won the Australian Broadcasting Commission's (ABC's) 'Young Performer of the Year Award' when she was only 14 years old.

Well this duo were extraordinary people. Their techniques were flawless, indeed excitingly brilliant, as had to be the case for the avalanche of notes that they unleashed in works that almost seemed almost impossible to play. Both, throughout their careers, have won numerous awards for their virtuosity, including in Tamara's case two recent albums of the year ... and yet have not become household names, or at least not in the wilds of Armidale. Elena is not only an accomplished pianist, but also an established composer in just about every genre, something I didn't know either. And last night the program mostly contained her own works, apart from one or two items by some lesser composers like Schubert and Rachmaninoff! By the way I think the program got the latter's birth-date wrong so that he was born in 1973 and died in 1943, leaving me wondering how anyone can die at -40 years old. 

Anyway, Elena's music includes music for film, opera, ballet, adverts, popular genres, symphony orchestras and so on. Do my UK readers remember Lloyds TSB celebrated ad campaign 'For The Journey'? The music for that was Elena's. She wrote works played at the opening of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney and the 2003 Rugby World Cup. Recently, she premiered works with such unlikely titles as 'The Divorce', a TV Opera; 'The Witching Hour', a concerto for 8 double basses and orchestra; and 'Unsent Love Letters - Meditations on Erik Satie', just released on CD!

All this said, the town-hall was completely packed; the works were hugely complex and remarkable; and, at the end there were calls for encores twice! The audience was really enthusiastic and humming. I keep on asking myself ‘how can a small town like ours a long way from a large city put on such a stunning concert?’ I was so taken that I bought a double CD of works by Elena with most of the items involving two pianists – duets. Then I was surprised to discover that the CDs were produced by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. Not only that, but of the 31 works on the CDs, no less than 14 were world premier recordings. Would anyone be interested in receiving the CDs as a present? Despite my enthusiasm for this pair, I suspect that I'm not going to be rushed with requests!

Anyway, here's a picture of the duo who wore highly creative clothing yesterday evening - but not here. Guess which is which.

AS

Boom time?

According to figures just released, Australia's quarterly and annual GDP growth shows remarkable resilience. In the December quarter, the growth rate reached a massive 1.1% (c. 4.5% annualised), while the actual annual rate was a more modest 2.4%. Even that annual rate was higher than in most of the world's developed economies. Those figures also mean that Australia has now had something like 25 continuous years without a formal recession (two continuous quarters of negative growth), which is an impressive track record. The numbers just quoted were also much better than economists' guesstimates, possibly reflecting (i) higher prices for mineral and agricultural exports, (ii)  fairly good seasonal conditions in many parts of the country and (iii) strengthening in-bound tourism.

AS