These photos have popped up, while searching for something else.......
They're of me.
| The telegram had arrived. The cheeky application had backfired. Graduated from Wollongong Teachers College, I applied for a position in Sydney. I hoped to avoid country service. Instead, I was appointed to Riverstone Public School, Primary Department. With my parents, I drove out to Riverstone, from Matraville (Now Hillsdale). From Matraville, Riverstone, an outer-Sydney suburb, *felt* like _country service_. In my father's volkswagen, it was a 45 minutes' drive, on a quiet, sunny Sunday. I posed outside the school grounds. . When I travelled there by public transport, the first day, after the summer holidays ( Bus to Central. Electric train to Blacktown. Diesel train to Riverstone.) I discovered that this was the original school building, but now only the separate Infants Department. . As I left the train and the station, there was a man, walking ahead of me. He took the same turns as I did. Turned out to be Les Noon, with whom I'd be teaching. . The real school (primary department) was another two blocks away. It was 1964. |
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| My father was president of the Netherlands Society in Bankstown, a social club, which had grown out of a Dutch amateur theatre group. K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines made charter flights available. These flights were filled with members of the various Dutch organisations which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, in Sydney and elsewhere. In December (School summer olidays), 1969 my parents and I went back to visit Gouda, for the first time as a family, since we migrated in 1956. (My mother had been back by ship, in 1964, not long before her mother passed away.) We were allowed to sit in business class seats, in the DC10, because my father was president. I enjoyed those winter days, in Holland so much, that I did the trip again in December 1971. No business class seat, that time! Again I stayed with my favourite aunt, starting my scrapbook, while I was there! (Photo). (I included a 3-day train trip to Paris. It was much more fun, in 2005, when my daughter was there as well. Standing just below the Notre Dame, on a bleak winter's day, in January 1972, I realised that it's more fun to do this with other people.) |
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| In 1997 I was back again, in the Netherlands and took advantage of the deal which included a trip to the U.K. and Ireland. While I was taking the bus tour of Great Britain, happily posing in Killarney, beside a sign protesting against abortion, the broadcasters of Radio Gouwestad were awaiting my return to Gouda to do two hours with me, on the topic of being back in the city of my birth. I felt very important. I'd found the internet a year earlier and that's how they'd found me. There were two programs. One included pre-recorded segments, put on tape while I was driven around in the rain, through the streets where I grew up, talking about what I remembered. For the other some Gouda residents who had known me had been invited to participate. This included the boy who had lived in my street, with very strictly religious parents. They belonged to what was called by many: The Black Stocking Church. He was now a man, who'd been a sailor and forgot to tell me, when he invited me for coffee, that he lived above a sex shop and that from his window we were looking out on the apartments of "the girls". I have since blamed the coffee, served in mugs that tasted of detergent, but after fleeing to friends in The Hague, the next morning I woke up covered in hives. |
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| I returned home to Sydney where I was now retired (a bit early) to care for my aged parents. (One had Alzheimers. The other, already an asthmatic, had now had a heart attack and other health issues. Feeling a little trapped, sitting at my computer, in what I'd started to call my nursing station (granny flat) the president of the Free Beach Association turned out to be a sympathetic listener. Urged me to come and spend a few hours on the beach followed by coffee. I was soon on the Free Beach Association committee, as it gave me an outlet for my 'skills'. I looked after the website. I "published" the newsletter, for which Bob, the president of the FBA of NSW provided the content. River Island Nature Retreat, to which I'd first gone a few years earlier, now became a more frequent escape. |
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| The FBAofNSW was disbanded and I found (Was taken to....) Hazelhurst, Art and Crafts Centre, where I rediscovered my urge to paint. There *had* been one other major interest, via Bob Reed, I found myself involved with the Keep Australia Beautiful Clean Beach Challenge, and, affter making all sorts of arrangements for the care of my father for those few days, from 2002, until 2007, in September, every year, I was off assessing beaches. Most enjoyable |
| ....and then I turned 65!!! |
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