Letter No. 259
Dear all,
APRIL There are so many long weekends in April that I seemed to be at home more than at work! Brisbane opened up just in time for the Easter weekend, so we had dinner with my sister Lisa and family on Easter Friday, dinner at Sue & Brad’s house on the Saturday, a family lunch at home on Easter Sunday and afternoon drinks at Libby’s house on Monday.
The next day (6th April), I flew up to the Whitsundays – not for a holiday but to visit a site. AECOM is rebuilding the ferry terminal at Shute Harbour which was destroyed by a cyclone in 2017. There is only one sensible flight per day and I had carefully planned my trip so that I could have two hours around the pool in tropical North Queensland. Annoyingly, our stupid plane developed a fault after we had got to the runway so we had to change planes and I was two hours later than expected. All my pool time evaporated! I had a nice evening in Airlie Beach and was on site early the next morning before a 2pm flight back to Brisbane.
Katie is about half-way through her uni semester now. She’s doing three courses: a non-fiction writing course, one on professional practice in the publishing industry, and one on academic research techniques which she’s finding quite challenging. She is really enjoying the steep learning curve, although she does keep telling everyone that she is the oldest new girl in town. She has quite a few assignments to do and a couple of seminar presentations coming up.
We went to Cabarita Beach in Northern New South Wales from 8-11th April. Katie had booked a beautiful AirBnB. It was a studio apartment just for us, as the kids were too busy to come. In the end Matt did come down for one night and slept on the sofa. We didn’t do too much, went out for some nice dinners, mooched around the markets and went to the beach. A nice mini break. It was Mum’s 80th birthday in April and we all went for lunch at my sister’s house to celebrate. We had been planning to do something a bit bigger but with all the snap lockdowns, it was just easier to go to Lisa’s. As usual Lisa and co did a fabulous lunch and it was nice to see everyone.
The following weekend I had a garage sale. It wasn’t too much effort and I made $600 selling mainly junk that we don’t want. I also have been selling quite a bit of stuff on Gumtree and made another $1000 or so. We then spent most of that on an upgrade to Matt’s (now mostly empty) bedroom and study, putting in a new guest bed and study cabinet. Katie bought new bedding and I got a full WFH kit from AECOM, with two large computer screens and a headset, so it all looks great and I can work from home if I need to.
On Friday 30 April, both Jess and Matt went to the UQ Law Ball. It was the first time they were going to the same ball, and they hadn’t planned it. Matt went with a small group of friends and went to a nice pre for a cocktail beforehand at a friend’s house. Meanwhile Jessie hosted a pre at our house with about 20 people which was pretty wild and involved a lot of pre-loading. Amazingly they bumped into each other in the crowd and texted us a nice selfie of the two of them together all dressed up.
MAY Katie, Jessie and I went to see the production of Grease at UQ’s Schonell Theatre on 6th May. It was a joint school production between Matthew and Jessica’s high schools. It was quite good actually and Katie ran into lots of her ex-colleagues from BBC and caught up on all the gossip, which she really enjoyed. The next week the theatre was closed down due to an apparently unacceptable level of asbestos in the seating coming from the ceiling space. I guess we will find out in about 20 years or so whether that was a problem for us!
The next night we went to our Winosaurs club. A group of people in the street decided to have quarterly wine tasting evenings at rotating houses. We are actually some of the youngest people who go but it is always a nice evening, and some people bring along some pretty special bottles. About 24 people go and we take turns talking about our wines and having a small taste of 12 or so bottles over the course of three hours. It’s actually very informal and a lot of fun. Katie was very restrained as she was volunteering at the Brisbane Writers Festival all weekend and didn’t want a headache!
Matthew and the boys had a house-warming party at their now-finished house on Saturday 8th May. Naturally we got roped into helping them set up. I had mainly helped him string fairy lights around the garden and set up a fire pit while Katie had helped with styling and candles. We were even invited to the party which was quite surprising. Katie went along after her shift at the Writers Festival and had a few cocktails with Matthew and his friends. I couldn’t go as I was already going to the Rugby at Suncorp Stadium that night. It was a very exciting game with the Reds (Brisbane Broncos) vs the Brumbies in the final. The Reds came from six points behind to win by one point, six minutes after full time. It was Mother’s Day the next day. We had a quick brunch at a cafĂ© in Toowong, then I dropped Katie back at the Writers Festival and went to help Matt clear up. The mess wasn’t too bad surprisingly. Matt said it was a great party.
Mum and Dad had another Clearing Sale at their farm on 15th May to get rid of all the stuff they should have got rid of at their previous sale. I went up to help, mainly by looking officious and making sure people took everything that they had bid on so that no junk was left behind. The auctioneer is really very good and there were only a few lots which didn’t sell. I had to rush back home in the afternoon to do a bit of gardening before a dinner in Graceville with friends.
The following weekend Matthew had another party. This was his Annual Eurovision party, which he has done for a few years (except last year of course). All his friends pick a country, bring a food or drink item from their country and dress up – not just in national costume, but in something a bit more creative. Katie and I attempt to dress up as well but we are always amazed at how clever the kids’ outfits are. This year Matt was Ukraine, so he dressed in a white lab coat, gas mask and stencilled a Chernobyl nuclear logo on the back of the lab coat. One of Matt’s friends was the UK, so he came as Dead Prince Philip and brought a Victoria sponge cake. Another was Malta, dressed as a Maltese knight complete with armour, sword and large bucket of Maltesers. We joined them all for drinks and nibbles and Katie awarded the costume prize to the Russian baboushka doll with a series of different sized buckets on her head. We left them all to watch in the studio while we watched upstairs.
On 29 May I went off for a Camping Weekend with a group of five mates. We stayed at a friend Jason’s farm on Boonah on Saturday. We had lunch in the Commercial Hotel in Boonah and then helped him moving electric fences in the afternoon after we had set up our tents. He gave us some motorbikes to ride – I had forgotten how much fun bikes were! It was pretty easy camping as we had a fridge, power, gas BBQ and hot showers. We had a BBQ dinner and ate in Jason’s beautiful dining room in his architecturally designed house. We had drinks around the campfire and spent the night in our tents.
On the Sunday we had to get up at 5am for a big hike. It was still dark and about 5 degrees Celsius and we had breakfast and were on the road about 5:50am. We met our guide Teresa in Boonah and it was another 45 minute drive to the NSW border. We were climbing Mt Superbus which at 1375m is the tallest mountain in Southern Queensland and the second highest in Queensland. When we arrived where we were leaving the cars it was blowing a gale. I had unpacked one of my jackets as it had been warmer in Boonah, and this turned out to be a big mistake. It was just above freezing in the wind and I was very very cold; we all were. It took us two hours to get to the top of the mountain and then finally the wind stopped and it warmed up a little. There were spectacular views from the top but this wasn’t our final destination. We hiked on for another two hours to the wreck of a Lincoln Bomber that crashed in 1955.
The wreck itself was pretty impressive. In the early hours of April 9, 1955 an RAAF Avro Lincoln Bomber had crashed into the side of Mt Superbus. The plane had been en route from Townsville to Brisbane transporting a sick baby when it crashed and exploded. All six people on board were killed. Even 66 years on, the scars of this tragedy are very evident, with wreckage strewn just below the southern summit. The hollow fuselage of the plane dominates the landscape. Twisted metal remains strung in trees and litters the forest floor, becoming one with the mountainside amid moss and fallen leaves. Trees have grown around some of the wreckage, while some sections remain untouched. It was a very sombre sight. If the plane had been just 50m higher it would have cleared the mountain summit.
We had lunch just above the wreck and then had a four-hour hike back to the cars. The whole hike was through thick forest up steep and slippery rocks with no marked trail. We would have never made it without our guide. We made it back to the campsite about 5pm just as the sun was going down. It was bliss to have hot showers after such a hard walk. We had dinner and drinks around the campfire but it was not a really late night as we were all pretty tired. The next morning we had breakfast before packing up and heading back to Brisbane. A great weekend.
Katie had a study weekend while I was away, focusing on her final assignments which were all due the following week. They were all worth about half the assessment credit for her courses. She also had a friend from her course Olivia staying over for the weekend and they had studied together. I didn’t think they would get much done but apparently they did, although they also managed to squeeze in a Pilates class, a movie and a few glasses of wine. Matt and Jessie were also under the pump. Matt’s final thesis was due on the 4th June and Jessie had assignment deadlines as well.
JUNE On 5th June we went for a fundraising lunch for Outback Futures, a charity which provides mental health and wellbeing services for people living in remote and rural communities in outback Queensland. Katie has been quite involved with fundraising events for Outback Futures over the past few years. This one had been initially planned for 2020 but postponed to this year and Katie is now their Event Consultant. There were 170 people there and about 60 of them were people that Katie had “encouraged” to come along. We had a bus of 60 going from Graceville and we knew most of them, so it was a pretty fun bus trip.
The lunch was at Spicers Hidden Vale, a lovely country hotel about an hour’s drive from Brisbane. There was welcome champagne to start and then four food stations, all with matched wine, followed by a desert station. The food was a fabulous “paddock to plate” experience and the wine was pretty good too. It was a perfect blue sky winter’s day and there was an acoustic guitarist playing, a raffle, a charity auction and a whip cracking station for people to try cracking a whip. I am quite good at whip cracking and when the instructor realised that I was actually better than he was, he let me take over. Novices cracking whips when they have had a lot to drink is quite funny! I had brought a speaker to play music on the bus on the way back and lots of people were dancing in their seats (and a few in the aisle) so it was quite a raucous trip. The event was hugely successful and raised $80,000 for the charity, so Katie was delighted.
Katie finished her first semester of her Masters in Writing, Editing & Publishing (WEP) on 11 June. She and a group of 15 students went out for a celebratory dinner at the Burrow in West End. The average age of her group is around 28 but they have accepted Katie into her group and she has, in her usual fashion, become the social organiser! They went bar hopping through the gin bars in West End afterwards. I was long asleep by the time she got home.
On Friday 18th June we went to the Regatta for dinner with Katie’s study buddy from her WEP course, Olivia. She is a lovely American 30-year-old stuck in Australia since last year’s lockdown, who decided to make the best of it and study. She and Katie are getting on like a house on fire and meet up before lectures every afternoon to compare notes and review each other’s work. Olivia found herself temporarily homeless for a few days and ended up staying with us. We also ended up with the contents of her house while she found new accommodation. In a sad twist, she then got herself a temporary job in Sydney for three weeks, flew down there and has been stuck there ever since in the Sydney lockdown – double stuck! Not sure if she’ll make it back in time for the start of next semester.
That Sunday we went to a Winter Wine Festival at the West End Hotel. There were over ninety wines on offer to taste and I thought I did quite well getting to 39 of them. Unfortunately, by that time I couldn’t really remember any of them! We all went for pizza in the pub afterwards. Some people kicked on but we had to go home and have a little nap. It was a good afternoon.
I went to Darwin for work from 22-24 June. I nearly went a day later and thank God I didn’t, as there was a Covid Positive passenger on that flight and I would have had to go into self-isolation for two weeks. I had to catch a taxi or a lime scooter everywhere in Darwin because there were no hire cars available. Apparently, the car hire companies in Darwin sold off the majority of their car hire fleet during last year’s lockdown. Also, it is peak season (school holidays) and no one can travel overseas, so Darwin is a hot destination.
Brisbane went into another snap five-day lockdown on 29 June. Now that I finally have a good office set up at home, I worked from home for the whole period. Lockdown finished at 6pm on Saturday night. We had previously planned to go out that night, to Slipstream Brewery with some friends. We ended up walking in on the dot of 6pm (ignoring the fact we were technically not meant to be out driving before then). We were with the Biddles and Rasmussens. We worked our way through about half of the craft beers and had a nice pub dinner. Not sure how much longer this will continue. There is a major Covid outbreak in Sydney, and there are also lockdowns in parts of NSW, Victoria and South Australia. Queensland has managed to escape major outbreaks so far, but it’s unlikely to last forever.
Cheers, from Derek, Katie, Matt, Jessie & Molly
