Skip to main content

That was quite some week.

Photographers call the periods just before sunset and just after sunrise "the golden hour" because of the colour of light and because its strong directional nature makes for some great shots - sometimes at least. This is the golden hour in the countryside just outside Canberra in Australian Capital Territory. 

I've been away, and here is a diary of the last week.

Friday 31 May. Flew to Australia via Auckland. Flights around New Zealand were delayed because of bad weather, so our flights were all late. got to Melbourne about 9.30 pm, picked up our rental car and found our way to a small but perfectly formed AirB&B on the 14th floor of a building in the docklands area.

Saturday 1 June. Breakfast at a wonderful cafe in Footscray, then went to some favourite places in Melbourne - St. Kilda and Prahran, before driving into the city. We had seats for the two parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Princess Theatre. First show 2.30 pm, second 7.30 pm. About 5 hours of theatre all told. It was stunning. Between shows we met up with Kate, Roger and Cordelia Prowd for dinner in an excellent restaurant.

Sunday 2 June. Drove to Canberra via the coastal route, through Lakes Entrance and the Snowy Mountains. Gorgeous countryside. Rivers. Beaches. 2-300km of forest. Really great lunch at an odd wee cafe in the middle of nowhere, and made it to Canberra about 6 pm after 11 hours of driving. Found our AirB&B and had an early night.

Monday 3 June. Went to Rachum, my sister in law's retreat centre about 50 km from the city. Spent the day sweeping and exploring the place, and had a picnic lunch in the covered visitor's space. Dinner in Canberra with Alison's 3 daughters and their partners.

Tuesday 4 June. Drove to Melbourne via the Hume Highway. Arrived at Clemency's cousin's house in Carlton North around 4, after a 7 hour drive. I dropped the rental car in to Central Melbourne and met Kate Prowd for dinner. Kate was, late last year, consecrated as assistant bishop in charge of the Oodthenong region of the diocese of Melbourne and she had asked me to present at her first clergy conference. She drove me south to Point Lonsdale where I was staying.

Wednesday 5 - Thursday 6 June. I spoke to the clergy of the Oodthenong region. There were about 65 present, representing churches in Geelong and the rapidly developing Western and Northern parts of Melbourne. I've been to many clergy conferences and this was one of the good ones. The other presenter, Dorothy Lee, a lecturer in New Testament at Trinity College, was superb, and I managed my bits without falling over. Kate herself was magnificent. She's a very different person from Jacinda Ardern, but when I watched her give her inaugural Bishop's address I thought often of our PM, in that Kate was pioneering and modelling an entirely new way of being a leader. She's physically small, and displayed at times a touching vulnerability, but her intelligence, strength purpose and integrity were obvious and her people responded with quiet enthusiasm. They are in good hands and they know it.

Friday 7 June. Conference ended. Long talk with Kate over lunch about a developing crisis in my wider whanau. Drove back to Cathie's - 2 hours to cover 50km, with the last 10km taking half of that. At dinner, Cathie's daughter Esther, a Rabbinic student, led us in Welcoming the Shabbat.

Saturday 8 June. Taxi arrived at 6 am for the airport. Flew home. Dunedin freezing cold. Lit a fire. Went to bed and slept well.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more