Wednesday

Off to the capital!     After a few days catching up at home (I love holidays, you realise how much work interrupts your life), we packed up, handed over the streetO accoutrements to Ray, and hit the open road.  It’s such an easy drive on the Hume, set the cruise control to 110, point your nose north, and follow the big green sign to Canberra.  In no time we’d crossed the border, and by 4.30 we were ensconsed in our new home for the next 6 nights.  Pete and Ilze weren’t scheduled to arrive for 2 days, so we luxuriated in our roomy apartment, located a few minutes from the Parliamentary Triangle and Lake Burley Griffin.  And we only had one geographical embarrassment when we took the wrong exit off the circle, lapped Parliament House, and shot out the other side 180 degrees away from where we were supposed to be.  Oops – a quick tour of Yarralumla and the embassy district followed before we got back on track.  We called it orientation.

Thursday

After the obligatory shopping trip, we armed ourselves with research implements and headed to the National Library. Ian wanted to read the diary of one of his ancestors, Elizabeth Bayley, who lived in Adelaide in the mid 1800s, and kept a sporadic day to day record for 4 years or so. It gave an interesting insight into life at that time, and allowed Ian to fill in a couple of gaps in his family tree research.  We also visited the Treasures Gallery, and it was definitely a treasure trove of the most important documents in the National Library collection. It included some wonderful maps from centuries long gone, Captain Cook’s handwritten journal from his Endeavour voyage, and all sorts of other fascinating items.  Then we took a guided tour which gave a glimpse of the inner workings of the library, including the vast stacks where much of the collection is stored, and the new automated trolleys, called “Charlies”, which transport things all by themselves. I wish we had those!  So much fun.  The National Library never throws anything away, so perhaps not on my list of places to work.

It was a very windy day, and a huge tree uprooted itself and fell across the road, just around the corner from our apartment building.  It made the evening news, and the front page of the next day’s paper.

Friday

No trip to Canberra is complete without a visit to the War Memorial.  Ian had the names of 20 relatives who are named on the plaques on the wall of remembrance, so our main task was to locate and photograph each one.  We also visited the exhibits, including some amazing film footage of a WW1 aerial dogfight – I’m not sure if those pilots were incredibly brave, or incredibly insane! Their skills were certainly second to none.  We also saw a short play about the women who manned the radios during bombing raids, which almost had me in tears.  There’s a new exhibit on Afghanistan, which uses a lot of film footage voiced over by Australian army personnel telling their personal stories. It shed some light on what has actually been occurring over there – like most people, I tend to just think of it as hot, dusty and unpleasant, without going much beyond that.  We had a nice picnic in the magnificent gardens, before revisiting the WW2 gallery.  The WW1 displays are being re-done in preparation for the 2015 centenary commemorations.

The rest of the crew duly arrived late afternoon, and our peaceful existence came to an end for a couple of days as our focus shifted to orienteering, and more importantly, food!