We’d had a busy morning on our first day – Simpsons Gap, Standley Chasm, and the Desert Park. The afternoon was very different, with our visits in the town itself. Our first stop was at The Royal Flying Doctor Service. It has a small museum where visitors can read about the various pioneers of the…
The first day of our actual tour was very busy. Our group of fifty was divided into the reds and the yellows and each group set off in a bus big enough for everyone to have a window seat. Our driver, Roger, a knowledgeable Kiwi who’d been around the Red Centre for many years, was…
Alice Springs is often seen as simply a jumping-off point for tourists heading for Uluru and Kata Tjuta but there’s actually rather more to it than that. It was the site of the Telegraph station that connected Australia to the rest of the world via Darwin. The Ghan railway line has run from Adelaide to…
Quite a few months ago, before we decided to sell our house and move to a smaller property, Peter and I booked a short holiday to Alice Springs and Uluru. It had been many years – in the last century – since we’d been there and that had been with FILM cameras. Positively archaic. The…
When I first created my website it was all about my writing ‘career’ (such as it is). It was intended to showcase my books and maybe tell people about the latest Work in Progress. I don’t quite remember when it all changed. It happened slowly, as these things do. I’d get my knickers in a…
One of the most disgraceful things anyone can do in life is teach small children to hate. Adolf Hitler and his henchmen understood this well. That’s why they created the Hitler Youth. So what do we make of the pro-Palestinian (sounds much nicer than ‘anti-Israeli’) protest at the University of Sydney? ‘In a clip from…
On ANZAC day Australian and New Zealand remember those who served in war – men, women, and the many animals that supported them – horses, dogs, mules, donkeys, pigeons, and let’s not forget the cats which helped keep down the vermin in the trenches and on ships. I came across this great little article about…
It has been a busy week. We in Australia are lucky, living as we do in a stable, safe country. But that’s starting to change. As the world edges closer to war as Iran attacks Israel, here in Australia our comfortable lives, already disturbed by the rise of antisemitism and the rising prevalence of youth…
Parts of North America experienced a total solar eclipse the other day. You’re forgiven if you didn’t know about it, since it didn’t affect most of the rest of the world. But it was HUGE in the US. Facebook was full of people offering free or cheap eclipse glasses so people could look safely at…
I have to admit that it’s convenient to be able to pay bills online. No standing in queues at counters, no having to post paper cheques (remember them?). But as more and more of our lives are lived in the cloud, companies have had to take more and more actions to prevent the wrong people…