I met Gabby at the Brisbane airport late on Friday evening, 5 February. We stayed at an AirBnB near the airport, then started our trip by car south early Saturday afternoon. We stopped in pouring rain in Byron Bay for supper, then continued to Evans Head where we had a hotel room for the evening.
On Sunday we continued to Coff’s Harbour, arriving at our motel room mid-afternoon. The previous day’s damp weather changed to a bright summer’s day and we spent some time wandering around the beach.
The next day we drove to Port MacQuarrie, again arriving in plenty of time to check out the beach and wander around the town. The following day’s trip to Manly beach in north Sydney required negotiating a great deal of traffic. On Wednesday we took a morning ferry to Circular Quay and spent the day wandering around that part of Sydney. We had tickets for a concert in the Opera House that evening, and thoroughly enjoyed performances of Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto and 4th symphony conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, with Garrick Ohlsson performing as soloist.
Selected pictures from this part of the trip can be seen here.
On Thursday morning, 11 February, we headed south through Sydney along the coastal highway to Kangaroo Valley, arriving at the home of David Loneragan and Rose Andrews in mid-afternoon. I had visited David here twice in 1989 just after he had acquired the land, and it was truly amazing to see how the place has developed (David and Rose have used permaculture techniques) and how even more lush and green it is than in my memory.
We visited various friends of David and Rose’s around the valley and also went to the beach on the coast a couple of times. Selected pictures of various places around Kangaroo Valley are here.
Selected pictures of David and Rose’s property, Green Ridges, in Kangaroo Valley are here.
On Saturday 20 February we left Kangaroo Valley and started the drive down the coast towards Melbourne. The first evening we stayed in Eden and the second evening in Lakes Entrance. On Monday afternoon we arrived at David Arnault’s house in Mirboo North. Over the next few days we made a number of trips to the coast as well as a bike trip along a rail trail from Mirboo North to Boolarra. On Thursday we hiked for about three hours along the Bass Trail, which mostly skirted the edge of cliffs along the coast south of Melbourne, running between Kilcunda and Punchbowl Beach.
Selected pictures of Gippsland and our time with David Arnault are here.
On Saturday 27 February Gabby and I took the train from Morwell into Melbourne to meet with Cam Ford, whom I hadn’t seen since around 1978 or thereabouts when he was involved with Co-op Radio in Vancouver. When I asked Cam where he had gone after leaving Vancouver, he said that he had worked for the CBC in Prince Rupert, B.C., for a short while in the early 80s. I was shocked: “You mean you were working there with Mike Ura and Bob Nicholson?” Yes, he said. I couldn’t believe it: Mike Ura was a friend from Kitchener and Bob Nicholson is married to Peggy, Barbara’s sister, and (obviously) none of them knew each other prior to moving there. I had been surprised enough in 1991 when I discovered that Mike and Bob knew each other. To find a third person in the mix, from a different part of the country, stretched credulity.
Cam, Gabby, and I spent most of the day having a pleasant time wandering around an older, downtown section of Melbourne. The two of us returned by train to David’s place that evening, then packed up the next morning to drive back into Melbourne to visit Marie Kennedy. Marie and I had been among the first students admitted into the Integrated Studies program at the University of Waterloo in 1969, but she has spent most of the last forty years in Australia and Bangladesh. I hadn't seen her since the early 1980s. It was great to see her again, although her physical activity is much constrained as she recovers from a pedestrian accident.
Later that day I dropped Gabby off at a backpackers hotel, and we bid goodbye to each other as I headed back to Sydney for my return flight home. She stayed in Melbourne for several more days, then flew back to Townsville to spend the rest of March with friends there and in Cairns. At the beginning of April she flew across the continent to Perth, where she joined a school friend from Canada who was visiting her Aunt. On the first of May, Gabby finally boarded the plane for her return flight to Canada — actually to British Columbia, where she spent most of the next three weeks working at a whitewater rafting camp in the Fraser River Valley. Our family reunited in Calgary on 22 May, with Barbara, Amelia, and I flying to Calgary for a Hankins family wedding and Gabby joining us from B.C.
Selected pictures of our time in Melbourne and my return trip to Sydney are here.
I arranged my flight home to go through San Francisco with a nearly twelve-hour stopover so that I could visit my cousin Phyllis Wong and her husband Les, and also an old friend from Montreal, Cass Brayton. I was much more tired on the trip east across the Pacific than I expected to be, but I still had a great visiting these folks, which included a tour of the Frank V. de Bellis Collection at San Francisco State University, where Les is president. The collection includes some wonderful examples of early printed books and centuries-old musical instruments. Information about this collection can be found here.
Cass (who we knew as Frank in the 70s and 80s) was a key advisor for those of us starting up Dumont Press Graphix forty-five years ago. We hadn't seen each other since 1988. Some pictures from San Francisco can be found here.