Forbes Family Blog: April 2015

Letter No. 223

Dear all,

It was the AECOM Christmas Party on 28^th November. It was at Cloudland again, a fairly wowy venue but very like last year. We had a nice evening but left at a sensible 10:30pm unlike last years’ 2am effort. That Sunday we had a lunch with the family for Matthew and my birthdays. Mum & Dad and Lisa & Andrew and the cousins came for a BBQ. Isabelle brought her orphan possum with her as it needs regular feeding and Mum and Dad brought an orphaned baby bird for them to look after as well. Molly knew there was something interesting to see but was shut out of the house all day so she could not get a good look at these strange little animals. Poor Molly.

DECEMBER We went to a local Italian restaurant for dinner on 4^th December for Matthew’s 16^th birthday. It was a few days early but he was off to Vietnam the next day and was going to be away on his actual birthday. Matthew was given mainly car-related presents as he is now old enough to get his learners’ driving permit and start driving – scary. We gave him “L-Plates” along with a course of ten driving lessons. Jessica made him a beautiful book about all the things she loves about him – he was quite touched. Jessica makes the best presents!

The next day, Friday 5^th December, was the last day of Term 4 and also the day that Matthew set off on his three-week trip to Vietnam with Antipodeans Abroad and 30 other BBC boys in three groups of ten. They were going to Northern Vietnam to work on a community project for a kindergarten and primary school. The boys had raised $7500 for the project between them and they were going to the village to help build the project, with local tradesmen training them how to do the work. It was a very good scheme. The boys are also going to Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hue, Hoi An and Saigon as well as a few days trekking in the mountains. They arrive back just before Christmas.

December was a whirlwind of Christmas parties. I had a big all-day lunch on the 5^th December which finished about 8pm and on the 6^th we went to one of my work colleagues’ Christmas drinks, followed by dinner at Nantucket in Indooroopilly with more friends afterwards. The next weekend we also had three parties on the same Saturday night but only made it to two. Kyle & Alf Graham had a Christmas party in their garden from 3pm. It was a lovely mild afternoon and their garden was beautiful. We left Jessie there with her school friend before going on to another party at our neighbour Steve & Sheila’s house on Mortlake Road. There was a bit of excitement at this party around 8pm when one of the guests, an elderly gentleman of 78 who lives across the road from us, flopped down into a chair and passed out. Katie saw it happen and rushed over to him while I found his wife and called the ambulance. He lapsed in and out of consciousness for the next 15 minutes. His daughter showed up just as the ambulance did and was in a bit of a state. We all thought he was not going to make it. The ambulance guys were great and quickly worked out he had low blood pressure from the medication he was taking and took him off for a night in hospital. Very dramatic and naturally we all had to stay on for another drink afterwards. About 9:30pm we realised that Jessie had still not made it home from the first party so I went back to get her. Amazingly the Grahams’ afternoon garden party was still going on and I got talked into staying for another hour or so until Jessica decided she was having a sleepover anyway! I left about 11pm but found out when I picked up Jess the next day that the last guests had stayed until 2am and the hostess was a bit underwhelmed!

Jessica had lots of carol singing with Australian Girls’ Choir during December including Waterfront Place and Queen’s Plaza in the City and the Southbank markets. One of us went along to watch each time. We both went to the Southbank performance and then had dinner for my birthday at the Greek Seafood restaurant overlooking City Beach. Afterwards we wandered down to the river bank and sat with our feet dangling over the edge of the embankment and watched the Christmas fireworks from two barges moored in the river. It was very spectacular.

We had our Christmas Drinks Party on 20^th December. We invited around 50 people who we knew from various school or work connections and nearly everyone turned up, starting at 4pm and going on until 10pm. Katie had been preparing for the previous two weeks, and served lots of yummy canapés like mini quiches, Thai chicken balls and salt beef on crostini. Jessica and one of her school friends were waitresses for the evening. I was busy at the bar making champagne Christmas cocktails all afternoon and didn’t perhaps eat as much as I should. The next day I was horizontal until about midday and unfortunately by the time I managed to drag myself out of bed, Katie had done most of the cleaning up. It was a very successful evening and definitely the proper start to our Christmas!

Matthew arrived back from Vietnam on Tuesday 23 December and we all went to the airport to meet him. He had been away for three weeks which is the longest we have been apart and we had only received one group email and had one text! We had really missed him. We spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on all his adventures. They had a great trip by all accounts.

We had our traditional roast turkey family dinner on Christmas Eve with champagne and all the proper trimmings. It felt very special having Matthew back home just in time for Christmas. As usual we spent Christmas Day at Lisa & Andrew’s and it was a busy day with all of Andrew’s extended family. We opened our presents to each other at home over breakfast, which was very lovely. Even Molly got a Christmas stocking this year and was delighted with her presents (a ball, a toy and a biscuit). We went to Lisa and Andrew’s house for morning tea to open presents with them and my parents and then over to Andrew’s parent’s house for Christmas lunch with 14 adults and 16 children! It was a long leisurely lunch and then we had a fun game of quoits with all of us sitting around the lounge room. We spent the afternoon back at Lisa’s with the kids in the pool before heading home and slumping.

On Boxing Day we hit the Sales for a while before going to the movies. Katie and I saw The Hobbit but the kids were not too keen so they saw something else and our movies all finished at the same time. We headed home to watch Dr Who and eat Christmas leftovers!

We had a fairly lazy weekend packing for our trip to Sydney and Canberra. On the Saturday night our friends from Hong Kong, Paul & Diane Hart and their kids Caitlyn and Jack came over for a BBQ. We had a lovely time catching up with them. Unfortunately it was pouring rain all evening but the kids still went swimming. Caitlyn and Jack are really lovely children and a real credit to Paul and Diane. The kids all got on amazingly well despite not having seen each other for many years!

We discovered that the roof had a leak during the evening and water was pouring in through a light socket in the upstairs bathroom. I spent most of the next day sticking huge quantities of sealant in every gap I could find on the roof. I hoped that I had managed to fix it as we were leaving the next morning!

CANBERRA On Monday 29^th December we got up early for our flight to Sydney, picked up a hire car and drove to Canberra (due to a complicated arrangement with free frequent flyer flights). It is only 280km so didn’t take long and we stopped on the way for lunch at Berrima. According to its website, Berrima is the best preserved example of a Georgian village on the Australian mainland. I guess that means there is a better one in Tasmania but it was very nice anyway. It dated back to the 1830s and had been a very booming place in the 1840s to 1860s when there were 13 pubs in the town for a population of just 400 people. In the 1860s the railway bypassed the town and so the village declined until WWI years when the jail became a German concentration camp. It is now a quaint little village with lots of lovely brick and sandstone buildings, housing lots of little shoppe-shops selling art & pottery etc.

We had lunch at the Surveyor General Inn which is the oldest continually licenced pub in Australia and was established in 1841. After lunch we went to the Historic Court House which was opened in 1838. It was the scene of the first Trial by Jury in Australia in April 1841. The display gave a history of the town and the first fleet. There was a list of all the convicts and soldiers on the first fleet and we found an Ann Forbes on the HMAS Prince of Wales. There was a good re-enactment of a real trial from the 1840s where a man and woman were found guilty of murdering the woman’s husband and taking over his farm. They were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, their heads removed from their body and sent to Sydney for scientific experiments and then it was directed that they be buried standing up so that their soul could never rest in peace. Fairly harsh justice! We went for a quick wander around the shops before pushing on to Canberra. We arrived in time to buy some food for dinner, the kids to have a quick swim and me to go for a run. We had dinner in at our apartment then watched one of the kids’ Christmas DVDs.

The next day, Tuesday, we had breakfast in our apartment before setting out to see Canberra. There is a lot to see in Canberra with some excellent free museums. We started off at Parliament House. The Australian Parliament House is one of the world’s most architecturally acclaimed buildings (according to their own publicity) featuring an 81m tall flagpole flying an Australian flag bigger than a double decker bus! The rooftop is covered in grass slopes and has panoramic views all over Canberra. There are numerous avenues all leading to the building which sits at the centre of a huge roundabout. It is really quite spectacular. There is a collection of Australian art in the halls around the Senate and House of Representatives. We wandered around the halls and Katie and the kids got a belated lesson in Australian Federation and political history, along with the past Australian Prime Ministers and current politicians. This had made up some of the gaps in their education from not going to an Australian primary school! Jessica knew more about this as she had visited Canberra earlier in the year with the Australian Girls’ Choir and had sung in the Great Hall.

Next was the National Museum of Australia, which explores Australian history and culture – both modern and indigenous – along with history, landscape and people of Australia. The highlights were a cannon from Captain Cook’s ship HMAS Endeavour, which was thrown overboard when the ship ran into a reef off northern Queensland in 1770. The cannon was underwater for 199 years until it was recovered in 1969, restored and displayed in the museum. There was also a copy of the Magna Carta, one of only four copies outside England and the second that we have seen. The building itself was a spectacular construction of curves, slopes and unusual construction techniques.

The final stop for the day was the Royal Australian Mint. We detoured on the way to drive past all the Embassies around Parliament House. Matthew was really excited to see the embassies of New Zealand, UK, USA, Japan, Ireland, South Africa, Egypt, Malaysia, Turkey, China, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Korea, Greece, Thailand, Israel, Nigeria, Canada and the future site of the Iranian Embassy (a vacant lot). Matthew recognised all the flags. He is such a geography geek! We also drove past The Lodge (residence of the Australian Prime Minister) which is about 400m from Parliament house. The Mint was actually the one thing I really wanted to see in Canberra as I am a bit of a coin-collecting geek. Katie and the kids waited patiently while I inspected every display and every coin. I even minted my own 2014 $1 coin!

That night we went to Manaka for dinner. This is supposedly one of Canberra’s main eating districts and we were surprised how quiet it was. Canberra is definitely not a hip hopping place. We ended up at Bah Mecca, a groovy Turkish Restaurant, and ate kebabs on very long skewers.

On Wednesday we went to Questacon which is Australia’s National Science and Technology Centre. It was really fantastic. We were there much longer than we had expected and went back to some of the interactive scientific displays over and over again. It is by far the best science museum I have ever been to. There was also a very entertaining show called “Rockets 101” in which a mad scientist with a bad Russian accent made ten different types of rockets and shot them around the auditorium.

We didn’t leave until 2:30pm which didn’t leave us much time to visit the three other attractions we had planned for the day, so we had to do speed sight-seeing. We made a lightening visit to the National Library of Australia Treasures Galley. These are rare and historic books and letters on display including Captain Cook’s Journey from his voyage on the HMB Endeavour (1768-1771), the Gallipoli letter from Keith Murdoch to Prime Minster Andrew Fisher (1862-1928) and many others. We then went on to the High Court of Australia which appeared to be open but was in fact closed. We peered in through the large glass windows and that gave us a good enough feel for the place. Our final visit was the National Portrait Gallery – a large collection of portraits from the 17^th Century to the current day. We liked the modern ones best. There was a special exhibition called “In the Flesh” which was a slightly disturbing series of realistic wax models of mainly naked people but in odd poses, grotesquely pregnant, with the heads of foxes, tiny babies surrounded by frogs, children petting weird, naked alien animals. It was quite odd but was the best bit, we all decided.

We then went back to the apartment for a rest before New Year’s Eve. While the kids were swimming I went for a run around Lake Burley Griffith to see the National Carillon, a huge bell tower on an Island which was given to Australia as a gift from England on the 50^th Anniversary of the formation of Canberra.

That evening was New Year’s Eve so we went into the Canberra Civic Square for the community celebrations. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant and then went to see one of the bands playing. The band, Eskimo Joe, is reasonably well known but I only knew one of their songs. The fireworks at 9pm were directly behind the stage. We were actually surprised at what a poor venue it was for NYE. There was only one food stall and only hard pavers to sit on. There were no more than 2000 people there which felt a bit underwhelming. It would have been so much better to have the event in one of the beautiful parks surrounding Lake Burley Griffith with the fireworks in the lake. We stayed watching the bands for a while but decided to go back to our apartment and watch the fireworks on TV! Perhaps the criticisms of Canberra, such as “A cemetery with lights”, “Six suburbs trying to be a city” and “A waste of a good sheep station” are somewhat justified!

The next day we went to Cockingham Green Gardens, for a break from museums. This is a display of miniature buildings, railways and gardens from the UK and around the world. The international ones are all sponsored by the various embassies from around the world. The models and gardens were exquisite. We had planned only an hour there but enjoyed it so much we stayed for 2½ hours! We had a very brief stop at the Australian National Gallery. There were some beautiful paintings in indigenous, Australian, Asian, Polynesian, Pop Art, Cubist and Impressionist Galleries. There was also “Blue Poles”, purchased in 1974 by the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam for $1.3 million and currently valued at between $20-$100 million. I didn’t like it that much though!

Our final stop for the day was the Australian War Memorial. The Memorial houses an amazing collection of pictures, dioramas, relics and exhibitions and art collection. The Hall of Memory houses the tomb of “The Unknown Australian Soldier” and the memorials surrounding it list the 102,000 Australian dead since the Boer War. The Museum is fantastic and so interesting we wished we had allowed more time. At 5pm we attended The Last Post Ceremony which is held every day. Every day they read the history and story of a different fallen soldier and it will take 280 years to get through every one! It was very moving and was a good way to end our time in Canberra.

That’s all for this letter,

Love

Derek, Katie, Matthew, Jessica and Molly