240725 Mary 4 Appreciation of Narrow and Wide Circles of Family, Friends and Neighbours
Audio file 240725 Mary 4.m4a
Appreciation of Narrow and Wide Circles of Family, Friends and Neighbours
In thinking about life in the last couple of decades, one of the really important things has been the outback trips, which Bruce and I have made roughly every second year with a group from the Campbelltown Rotary Club. These trips have taken us into Outback NSW as far as Cameron Corner, where we camped one night in the red dust, and through quite a lot of the Northern Flinders Ranges, as well as the Gorilla Rangers. These trips have been a source of great enjoyment to us. We met a lot of interesting people. We spent time with friends on the trip, and one of the aims of the trips that we made was to raise funds for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. And the couple who organised these trips have just recently been recognised for their work that they have done because well over $300,000 has been raised for the Royal Flying Doctor Service since 2006 or thereabouts. We've got really good memories from that. Bruce and I decided that we would like to have our own 4 wheel drive to take on these trips. So, in 2012, we bought a Prado, feeling that we were being a bit extravagant because we certainly didn't need it to drive around in the city. However, it has been a source of great enjoyment to us on those outback trips, and also when we've travelled interstate to see our family. So, we think that was one of the best purchases of our life. And, of course, it was a white car. Those trips were ongoing. The first one we went on was in 2008, and they were ongoing for over a decade.
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I also made an overseas trip with my daughter Linda in 2011. Linda was due to give a couple of papers at a conference in Belgium. And she said, mum, if you come with me, I'll take a week's holiday. We'll go to Paris for a week before we go up to a week's work for me. So, I very happily said yes, and we left Bruce and son-in-law, Marcus, in charge of the two little children Isaac and Olivia. And Linda and I went off and had a wonderful week in Paris, which was good for me because Linda had been there quite a few times before on her European trips. And she knew exactly how to get around. And when we went to visit all the places I wanted to see, we did not spend our time waiting on long tourist queues. We were there early in the morning because she had us on the right train at the right time, and we packed a lot into one week. The only thing on my wish list that I didn't get to do was to see Monets Garden. However, the day we could have done that, two Australian friends of Linda's were riding their bikes into Paris, because there was a group of people who'd ridden their bikes from London down to the English coast come across the the English Channel, and then ridden into Paris. Not quite sure how it would have felt on some of the cobblestone streets, bump, bump, bump. However, it was good to meet up with them, so I didn't mind missing out on that one thing on my wish list. But in the time that I was there, I did the usual things the Eiffel Tower, du Louvre. We've even got down to the Catacombs, and got to see the Foucault Pendulum, among other things, and enjoyed that week very much.
Then, we went up to Brussels, where Linda had to work. And on that week, Bruce has said to me you won't go wandering round on your own, will you? And I said, No, of course not. But for two days, I wandered around in Brussels. In the end, I found it very interesting city, but I got sick and tired of the beggars who kept accosting me. And I thought there's more to life than being accosted by beggars all day long. I was walking past the shop, and I saw they were advertising bus trips. So, I went in and bought 3 bus trips for the next three days. I was on my own, and that proved to be a really good thing to do because one day the bus took us out to brews [?]. Again, I found that really a fascinating day because I'm interested in history. Another day, we went North East towards the German border and visited a castle built high on a cliff above a river, the River Moors, and we saw how they had several hundred years ago, fashioned themselves a hydraulic system that brought water up a couple of hundred metres from the river, way down below to this castle that was perched up on the cliff top, in a very good military position for defense. So I thought, you know, we don't have all the clever answers to everything in the 21st century; people were thinking about things a long time ago.
The second day, we also saw the Waterloo Battlefield. And again, being interested in history, I had a very interesting day. The third day, we went up to Antwerp where we looked for a diamond dealers business, at quite a distance, because the security was very tight. I was very impressed with the port, and all the shipping and the development up there. And I do remember that from my time in Belgium, the church towers impressed me greatly because it's a very flat country, mostly apart from that one castle we visited high on the River Cliff. If they wanted to know if an army was invading, they used to build very high towers on their churches, and somebody would be up to top watching, and they could see an advancing army from quite some distance away, and sound the warning. But all too soon, the week in Belgium was over. And Linda and I took a high speed train trip back to Paris, and took an Air France flight on our way home to Australia. That was quite a highlight that week for me.
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Back on the home front, Bruce and I, in our retirement years, were involved with the Rotary Club. Bruce used to go out with some of the men on Wednesday mornings, where they would pick up second hand goods from people who were donating them. And those goods would be taken up to the Rotary shed in Benjamin St. Newton. And on Tuesday mornings. I used to try to get up to the shed to work with the crew there. As the second hand goods came in we would sort them, price them, put them on the appropriate shelves and have a jolly good time over a cup of coffee in the morning, working in a very enjoyable fashion, because there was a sale once a month at least. Sometimes there were extra sales, particularly of furniture that had come in, and those sales used to bring in the order of 70 to $80,000 a year for the Rotary to spend on their projects. So, it was a very enjoyable way of raising money for good causes.
Bruce and I have also been heavily involved with the Campbelltown Uniting Church, and some of the things that we did there we shared. Bruce was chairman of the congregation there for 26 years, and for about the same length of time, he and I shared the job of producing The Weekly Newsletter. Most years we did one month's work, but, for a few years there, where they were sort of people to do the job, we used to do two consecutive months of newsletters. It was a job we actually enjoyed, because quite often, items would come in at the very last minute, when we had actually closed the deadline, and had the newsletter all ready to be proofread, and then printed. It was quite a challenge to fit things in, and still have it looking nice. We enjoyed that challenge, it kept us on our toes.
I also sang in the church choir there for well over 40 years, and that was something else that I enjoyed. Speaking of choirs, I was a member of the Adelaide Harmony Choir for over 20 years from the early 2000s until Christmas last year. During that time, the choir had about four or five different conductors. I learned something from each of them, and enjoyed the time that they chose, the direction that the choir moved in, and the music that was chosen. It brought there different varieties of music, which I enjoyed. In 2017, a group of us were fortunate enough to go to Japan. It was an excellent trip because some of the choir members had friends in Japan. In fact, the lady who did most of the organising, she and her husband had actually lived in Japan for some years because her husband worked for one of the big motor companies. And so with her friends and her contacts there, we had a very, very enjoyable trip to Japan. We went over there and had singing engagements: we sang under a couple of amazing Japanese conductors, we sang on our own, and we also sang with Japanese choirs. And then, we had time to actually be tourists: to enjoy the cherry blossom, to see both modern development in Japan as well as some of the more traditional ways of life. We travelled on their super high speed trains, which was for us an amazing experience. Bruce, who had stayed home in 2011 and missed out on France, actually came to Japan with me in 2017, and we both really enjoyed that trip.
Unfortunately, by the time the choir went to China in 2019, under a different conductor, I wasn't well enough to be able to say yes. I did not think I would be OK for the duration, so I didn't get to go to China. However, one of the things that I realised, in looking back over the repertoire of music that I had the privilege of singing, over those years in the Harmony Choir, was that I sang songs in about 10 different languages. Though I didn't understand them all, I got quite good at getting my tongue around it, and make acceptable pronunciation of most of it. And one of the things I really enjoyed was singing in German, because quite often, I would suddenly remember words that I've heard my father use when I was very young. Because until he was seven, he was actually bilingual in English and German, but then, WW 1 started, so, the German sort of got forgotten. So, I was really pleased to tap back into a little bit of family history with that.
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One of the jobs that Bruce and I were doing until COVID struck was invigilating at university exams. I started doing it in 1999 while Bruce was still lecturing at the university. So I did it for just over 20 years. Bruce started doing it after he retired from lecturing. I was involved with the healthy students who went in mass to the Wayville Pavilion at the Showgrounds, where we could see almost 2 1/2 thousand people each morning, and again in the afternoon, for the two sessions. So, we dealt with large numbers of students in a great variety of subjects being examined each day. That was a physically very active job.
Bruce, on the other hand, was much more involved with students who had special dispensation because of illness or disability, who were then allowed to sit their exams up at the University of Adelaide. They were quite often in small groups, maybe even individuals. So, Bruce used to sit with his students where he could see them all quite easily because there were so few, and sometimes those students had extra time to do their work. So, instead of being present at paper for three hours, you could be present at the paper for 3 1/2, maybe 4 hours if the student chose to take that long. Those students also had special dispensation to take a little rest breaks to walk, to stretch their muscles, and so on, because the university wanted to give them every opportunity to be successful in their study courses. Whereas down at Wayville, it was a different kettle of fish.
Physically, for the people who were doing the invigilating, we had to have all the papers, the actual exam papers, plus the booklets that the students wrote, set out on the correct desks from quite early in the morning. And, when it came to the end of the mornings exam at around about 12:30, there was a frantic rush to get the morning 6:00 AM AMS gathered up counted, bundled up and packed off to the university, and then the afternoons exams to be laid out. Signs to be changed in front of each group of discs because different exams would be taking place and all of those papers not only had to be laid out, but they had to be checked by a hall supervisor. And so that when the students came in, the room looked as if it had been set up, and there hadn't been frantic behind the scenes work going on during what people would like to have thought would have been their lunch hour, but actually it was a very much a work hour. And, again, at 5:00 in the evening when most of the papers had finished, there would be the collecting up of the papers, and bundling up and checking off to make sure that numbers were correct, and everything was according to plan before people could go home.
For about 15 years, I did a whole supervisors job at quite a few of the shifts. I enjoyed that because I had to know who my team were, which other supervisors were working in my team that morning or afternoon, and check if there were special requirements for the exams that they were doing, to make sure that students did have everything that they needed, and particularly if there were special requirements. And, also, to be across the numbers of students who were coming in because as the years went by, the number of students went up, and the seating accommodation became tighter and tighter. And so, it was good to look across the list the night before, to make sure that there were enough seats for all the students, that no exams had been double booked, and that everything was ready for the students when they came in. I found that that kept me on my toes mentally as well as physically during the day because it meant that I was on the move trying to make sure that everything was going alright in each set of desks, and there were 60 desks in each set, and to make sure that any student who was ill was given the chance to recover, and see if they could go on with the exam, or whether we needed to give them a medical note, and send them off to the doctor in case they needed to actually do a medical supplementary to the exam.
Most of the students were really well behaved and did all the right things, but there was the odd one or two who occasionally tried to do the wrong thing. So, that meant that we had to have eyes in the back of our heads, to check on the students to make sure they weren't trying to cheat. And in this modern day and age of technological miracles, that has become harder and harder with students wearing smart watches, and being able to communicate in ways that were absolutely unthought of a quarter of a century ago. So I found that that was a job that kept me on my toes, and thought it was a privilege to have a job where you felt like you were helping young people who were trying to do something good in their own lives, so that they could equip themselves for getting good jobs, and also equip themselves to be good members of the community because they were studying in areas that could be very helpful to the community at large, whether they were Medical, Dental, Architectural, Engineering students, or a very special group indeed, from the Weight Institute who were the wine students. They studied their anology [?] subject. So we came across a very wide variety of students, and again, I would have said it was the people that I met during that time, which included the students and fellow supervisors that I worked with, that made life very enjoyable.
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Bruce has continued to play tennis until about a year ago. So, that was the physical exercise for him. Walking until recently has always been something that I was very fond of. Because we live near the Linear Park, I wonder how many kilometers I have run or walked along the banks of the Torrens in the last 50 years. It would be a lot. And so, quite often, if Bruce went and played tennis on Saturday afternoons, I would be doing a very pleasant walk by the river. At times, I have actually been accompanied by neighbors' dogs. If the neighbours were ill, they knew that there was a ready made dog walker available across the road or around the corner. And I have to say that that added to my enjoyment, because if you take a dog for a walk, it's a very interesting experience where you have to check out every other dog, and lots of smells, and lots of different things along the way. Quite different from running down there as fast as you can go or walking as fast as you can go. Special thank you there to Lulu, who belonged to the Iran [?] family. I had many enjoyable hours walking with her while Tony was very ill.
I think, in looking back over the things that I have done in my life, for me, the really important things have always been family, friends and the people that have formed the threads of tapestry that make up my life. Among friends, I would include some of our neighbours who have been here a long time like we have. In fact, on Wednesday of this week. I was lucky enough to be able to get three long-term neighbours to come and have morning tea with me because they were not only neighbours, but very good friends. One has been our neighbour for nearly 60 years. Another one for 35 years, and another one lived around the corner for 26 years, and she still lives in the district. So, she's still a neighbour. But our friends have been people that we've done things with over the years, and shared the enjoyment of the outback trips with. Whether sport or music, it's been shared activities that made life enjoyable.
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I have found actually, that our family are also part of our group of friends, a very special part. In looking back over life, I think a lot of the good times have been because of the people we have met.
And so really, I think that's where I need to conclude by saying when I look back, there has been some sad things in life that made some tough things at times, but there's been a lot of very enjoyable moments, and a lot of really good people that have shared life's journey with me and for that I'm very grateful.
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FINI
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