Letter No.
222
Dear all,
OCTOBER Term
4 The first weekend
of term the kids and I went to Dreamworld
and White Water World. We have an annual pass which we need to get good value
out of. Dreamworld always seems to be
very under-utilised and there is never much of a queue for any ride which is
great. We did all the rides we wanted, had lunch and then went into White Water
World for a swim and a few waterslides. A nice day.
Sunday 12th
October was our 18th Wedding
Anniversary. We all went to a Spanish Tapas restaurant called Peasant in The
Barracks at Petrie Terrace. We had a nice family meal and a wander around the
markets afterwards.
A few days
into the term we were advised by BBC that Matthew had been selected as a School Prefect. This is a huge honour
and he was thrilled. There are 240 boys in his year and 110 of them had applied
for leadership positions. Only 20 prefects were selected from that group. House
captains and vice captains were also selected out of these 110 boys but
prefects are perceived as being a higher position. The School Captain and
Vice-Captain are also selected out of the Prefect group later in the term but
Matthew is hoping he will not be selected as he is quite happy as a prefect. He
thinks (and I agree) that being school captain or vice-captain is too much work
and will affect his grades at school.
The BBC Music Dinner was on 17th
October. Katie, Matt and I were all supposed to go and have a nice evening of
music at the Greek Club. Unfortunately, Jessica had come home early from school
that day throwing up, so one of us had to stay home with her. I had been to a
fairly long lunch, so came home while Matthew and Katie went for a nice night
out.
It was the Bledisloe Cup the next day and Jessie
was singing at the opening with the Australian Girls’ Choir. Fortunately she
recovered quickly and was able to attend. The choir sang “I still Call
Australia Home” and the National Anthem as well as running out holding a
ginormous Australian Flag which covered most of the field. A friend of ours who
has season tickets had loaned them to us so I was in the crowd watching her.
Just as the kick-off started I had to go outside the grounds and collect
Jessica and then go back into the stadium with her to watch the game. Jessica
was very pleased to get noticed as “one of the choir girls” in her uniform.
Australia was winning for the whole game until New Zealand scored a try in the
dying seconds to win by one point. We were robbed!
Next day
Matthew went on a three-day BBC
Leadership Camp at the Sunshine Coast. This was with the rest of the
Prefects, the Head Master, Reverend Cole, the Head of Senior School and the School
Sargent. They had a few days of leadership courses and lectures and the boys
were observed, to make a final selection for the School Captain and
Vice-captain. Matthew was pleased to go on the course but glad not to be
selected.
On 22 October
Jenny and Paul Cooper came for
dinner. They were in Australia for a wedding in Adelaide and just had to come
up to Brisbane to see us and another family friend. Their kids were at home
studying for exams so it was just Jenny and Paul on this trip. It was so great
to see them and hear all the news from England. Matthew was best friends with
their daughter, Victoria, at primary school and we knew them very well when we
lived in Hale.
That Friday
Jessica’s dance group, STAGE was performing at the St Aidans Quiz night. It was a trivia night for the students
raising money for “Hummingbird House”, a children’s respite centre being
constructed in Brisbane. Coincidentally AECOM is providing quid-pro-quo
engineering design services for them. STAGE
performed three dances during the course of the quiz evening. Katie and I
chatted with all the other parents while we waited to watch her dance. It was
the last dance performance for the year.
We have
wall-to-wall concerts at this time of the year. The last week of October was a
big music week for Matthew. He played at a Music Festival at Calamvale for
Brass Bands on the 26th (which we didn’t go to) and then the BBC
Grand Finale Concert on 29th (which we did attend and was
fantastic).
Katie and I
went to the STAGE Celebration Breakfast
on 31st October. It started at 6:45am and Jessie had to be there
with full hair & make up done by 6.15am. Katie finds these early starts a
bit trying, especially if they involve actually making conversation, so I took
Jessie early and Katie made it there by 7am. The Stage Support Group President
gave a nice speech and there were lots of lovely photos and videos of the kids.
The breakfast was also pretty good. Jessica and the rest of the girls were
awarded full colours for their blazers as they had won their category in the
Brisbane Eisteddfod back in May.
It was
Halloween on Friday 31st October. Matthew did a sausage sizzle in
the street to raise money for his trip to Viet Nam in December and was pleased
to raise over $350. We had 650 sweets that evening and tried to ensure that
kids only took one each but ran out within 1 ½ hours. We had invited the rest
of the street to join us for a sausage sizzle when they had run out of sweets
and had a nice turnout for a few drinks afterward.
The next night,
1st November it was a trivia night at BBC. Katie had organised a
table to support them. We were quite pleased to come 5th out of 16
teams without even cheating!
NOVEMBER Tuesday
4th November was a big day with both the Melbourne Cup and the BBC
Speech Night falling on the same day.
Katie had been invited to a Melbourne Cup lunch at one of our friend’s
houses in the street. There were about twenty ladies who all brought a food
contribution and bottle of French champagne. Katie made a four-layer lemon cake
in the shape of a hat which seemed to impress everyone. She had also bought
herself a large new hat for the occasion. There was a lot of drinking, some
eating and they may have even watched the race! They all stayed until the
champagne was gone. Katie had to lie down for a few minutes before I arrived
home to drive her off to the BBC Speech Night. BBC does these kind of formal
occasions very well, and the speech night is always a moving and emotional
time. Matthew was playing on stage in one of the Senior Bands and had also won prizes
for Geography and for Academic Achievement. It was a good evening. Only one
more year and it will be Matthew’s final one!
On the 8th
November it was the Australian Girls’
Choir Annual Concert. Another nice evening of beautiful singing. Jessie
managed not to lose a tooth in the middle of the performance like last time!
On the
weekend of 14-16 November it was the G20
Summit in Brisbane. There was a public holiday on the Friday as all the
world leaders were arriving. Matthew was very excited to see the Indian Prime
Minister’s plane fly low over our suburb and then watched him step off the
plane on TV a few minutes later. There was live coverage all day of people
arriving and we watched it on and off throughout the day. The Indian Prime
Minister was actually very impressive in his exit from the plane. Everyone else
walked off with a huge entourage of security but he just stepped out by himself
in simple white robes. The city was in a huge lockdown for the weekend with
roads closed all over the place. There had been so much publicity about it and
everyone had pretty much decided to go to the coast for the long weekend.
Brisbane Council then panicked at the last minute that the city would be a
ghost town and spent quite some effort trying to encourage people to come to
the city by offering free parking and free public transport all weekend!
On Saturday
morning we saw Barack Obama’s three Osprey aircraft (vertical take-off and
landing) as they flew along the river to the city centre. He had landed in Air
Force One at Amberley Air Force Base, which is not too far from us, that
morning. Obama was the last leader to arrive. He then flew in to the city
centre in one of the Ospreys. Whenever he travelled there were always other
identical helicopters or cars with a body double, as a security measure, so
that nobody knew which one he was actually in.
I decided to go for a bike ride that morning and cycled around the
convention centre and looked at all the barriers and security. There were
groups of 5-10 police on every street corner throughout the city. Six thousand
police had been brought in from all across Australia. It seemed ridiculous. I
rode down to see the protesters in Roma Street Parklands. All the usual
ratbags. There was a boy of about 20 calling for the violent overthrow of the
state and decolonisation of Australia, who claimed to have been repressed by the
state his whole life because he was aboriginal. He was actually whiter than me!
The protests were very peaceful. Actually it was such a hot day (about 37°C)
that people were not really interested in rioting, just keeping out of the sun!
I cycled
home in time to see Obama give his address at the University of Queensland on
TV. The audience had been told to arrive at 9:30am and didn’t know what time he
was actually speaking. It turned out to be 1:00pm. They had a long morning. Obama
was a very skilled orator. He mentioned a wide range of topics briefly to make
almost everybody in the world think that he supported their cause whatever it
was. It appeared he was speaking without notes but one of the guys from work
who had managed to score a ticket said he actually used two very sophisticated
head-up display screens. They were big panes of glass which appeared to be transparent
to the audience but had the speech projected onto it.
Matthew had
his Grade 5 French Horn exam that Saturday morning. Afterwards he went into the
city to watch events. He caught the train in by himself and walked over to the
Convention Centre at about 5pm, just as the world leaders started to leave.
There was a big crowd watching and they saw the motorcades of 19 of the 26
world leaders. Matthew knows every country flag in the world and was able to
tell people in the crowd around him which world leader was driving past, just
by the flags on the bonnets. Quite funny. The only problem was that the road he
needed to cross to get home was closed so he ended up catching a CityCat
(ferry) to the University and I picked him up. He had a great time though.
The G20
seemed to pass mostly without incident. There had been a lot of talk about
“shirt-fronting”, as Tony Abbot had rather unwisely stated that he would be
shirt-fronting Putin over the MH17 tragedy. In response, Putin brought a Russian
warship as backup, which was sitting just outside Australian waters. This was
all reported with great excitement in the media. Sadly and predictably, there
was no shirt-fronting whatsoever and they shook hands instead with forced
smiles. It was interesting to note that nobody really wanted to talk to Putin though,
or even shake hands with him and in fact he left early. The media gleefully
reported that this was because he had no friends /no-one wanted sit next to him.
As well as shirt-fronting, the G20 also created “Koala Diplomacy”. A team from Dreamworld
at the Gold Coast had brought up a number of koalas and stationed them on the
forecourt of the Convention Centre, so that the leaders could pop out of the
talks and be photographed cuddling koalas at any point in the proceedings,
while barely leaving the air-conditioning. Everyone felt that this was a great
move and would definitely boost Australian tourism. The leaders’ wives did not
miss out either – they had a private tour of Lone Pine so they could cuddle
koalas and hand-feed kangaroos as well!
It was a
huge heatwave for the whole G20 weekend with temperatures of 40°C and above.
Luckily all the world leaders were safely ensconced in the air-conditioned
convention centre. We decided to go down
to the Gold Coast on the Sunday, where it was cooler. We drove down very early
and had a few hours in the surf before heading over to Q1 for a quick drink
before lunch. Q1 is the 5th tallest residential tower in the world
and the 27th tallest building at 322.5m. There is a great
observation deck on level 77 and 78 with spectacular views of the Gold Coast in
all directions. Afterwards we had lunch at a restaurant overlooking Surfers
Paradise. It was a lovely 28°C when we left the coast. Half way back it was
36°C and when we pulled into our own carport it was 40°C! The house was pretty
hot and we have decided that we are going to treat ourselves to air
conditioning in our bedroom as a Christmas present to ourselves. It seems a bit
decadent as we only need it for a few nights every summer when it is really
hot.
Katie was
organising the BBC Year 12 Mothers’
Garden Party on 20th November as President of Parent
Connections. The weather forecast was a bit worrying and she was stressing all
week whether they would actually be able to have it on the beautifully
manicured lawn outside College House. Unfortunately the predicted storms
eventuated the afternoon prior to the event and it was too wet for the
marquees, so Katie had to change the venue at the last minute to the Boarders’
Dining Room. This was not a classy venue, so Katie went all out stringing up
bunting, pompoms etc and even managed to have half a dozen large palm trees
brought in to the room to add the “garden” touch. The event went well and the
ladies appreciated the air conditioning at such a hot time.
On Friday
21 November we went to the Sherwood
Street Festival. The kids came with us but disappeared within seconds of
arriving to go hang out with big packs of their friends. Katie and I just
wandered around looking at the nice market stalls and tasting all the food
nibbles, trying not to bump into one of the gangs of BBC boys or St Aidan’s
girls. The next night we went to the Regatta
Hotel on 22 November for 4pm birthday drinks for our friend
Libby’s birthday. We ended up staying quite a bit later than we expected and
then went on to other friends Lisa and David Sugg’s house for affogatos on the
way home. The kids had been expecting us about 7:30pm and we didn’t roll in
until after 11pm. It was a good evening.
Thursday 27
November was the day of the huge storm.
I left work early that afternoon to go to Jessica’s school where the students
were putting on a showcase of their Design Innovation Studies Project. Parents
and friends had to vote for the winner so Jessica wanted as much support for
her group as possible. Just as the event was drawing to a close, I looked outside
the hall. There was a terrific and very sudden thunderstorm in progress. The
rain and wind were ferocious. I looked on the weather radar and it showed the
rain intensity as black, the highest level. It was quite unexpected. There had
been a prediction that it could rain later, but nothing about the incredibly
high winds, which were equivalent to a Category 3 tropical cyclone. We all huddled
inside the school hall, the power went off in the school and we made some rapid
phone calls to Matthew back at home, telling him to bring in all the outside
things he could and hang on to the dog!
The storm
passed over us remarkably quickly. Within an hour the winds dropped and we made
a dash for our cars through the rain. We drove home very slowly through scenes
of devastating deforestation! There were huge trees down over roads all over
the place and bits of tree everywhere – on cars, on houses, on fences, on
traffic signs. When we got to Mortlake Road we found that there was a large gum
tree down on a neighbour’s house about five houses down and the power lines
were hanging about head height across the road. Watching the news later, we saw
that the damage was incredible across the city – there were literally hundreds
of houses which lost their roofs, thousands of cars which were severely damaged
by the large hailstones that fell in the city and many city high-rise buildings
where the glass curtain walls had been shattered by hail. There was also extensive
flooding in the city and the entire train network came to a standstill. For
days afterwards there were roads closed, schools closed, power lines down all
over the place, power out all over the city. At the private airfield near us
almost all of the small airplanes and helicopters had been flipped or damaged. The
insurance bill from this one 30-minute storm was over AUD$300 million!
I usually
park in an open air car park and every car that was parked there on that
afternoon was extensively hail damaged and most of them written off. It was so lucky
(for me) that I had driven out just an hour earlier. It was amazing that nobody
was hurt. We had almost no damage, just a bit of water in and some damp carpet
from an open window. Life is never dull with such extreme storms – the worst in
40 years. The kids and I went for a bike ride that weekend and were astounded
at how many enormous trees had fallen.
Anyway that is about all we have time for this time. I wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Regards, Derek, Katie, Matthew and Jessica
Matthew and Jessica
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