Family Outings and Other Exhausting Events

This weekend has been one of many adventures. We started on Friday night (after swimming lessons of course) with a 45km trip to watch a film festival. "Madness!" I hear you shout. Indeed it would seem so. You must remember, however, that we live in the bucolic glory of the Perth hills, which entails an accompanying 30km trip to the city. We're pretty used to car trips that take a minimum of 20 minutes and are grateful for the reasonable speed limits that allow us to cover large distances in a relatively short time.

So Friday night began with the mad dash between swimming lessons and the film festival (here's the link if you're interested http://www.fti.asn.au/learn/mmr/), ensuring that children had first been bathed, were appropriately dressed for the chill that would descend and that we had food for a picnic dinner. Most normal parents would have dropped into the nearest fast food outlet on the way and picked up some fat-soaked, sugar-laden salt-lick to be washed down with tooth-decaying fizzy drink. However, I had watched Jamie Oliver's TED Wish recently (and here's the link for that http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html) and successfully managed to imbue myself with even more guilt than I thought possible. So vegetable pilau and tandoori chicken were our picnic fare. Besides, I figured my children should be subjected to the same kind of embarrassment that I was at that age. Turning up to picnics at Perth's outdoor arenas with tiffins filled with chapatis, curries or fried rice in the 1970s and 80s was tantamount to waving a banner and wearing large neon signs on our heads marking us clearly as the immigrants. As if the brown skins, saris and oily hair wasn't enough!

So having inflicted my childhood nightmares on my children, who remain oblivious to the cringe-worthiness of it all (and are actually quite proud of their difference!) we settled into the film show. All in all, it was great fun. There were some wonderful first attempts at film-making and the promise of another career and a different way of viewing the world was cause for real optimism.


Saturday night was another adventure. This time, with friends and their families. A fabulous evening of Salsa (dancing and music) at a local winery was precisely what we all needed. Each of the three mothers there had had a particularly awful week and had managed to argue with their husbands at some point in that time. Letting our hair down and kicking our heels up went a long way towards mending some of those buckling bridges. I haven't danced so much or with such abandon for many years. It was definitely enough to shock B1 and B2 out of their complacency that their parents didn't do "fun" things. I'm not sure they've seen me and the Love of my Life (LomL) dance together...ever! I do believe that it's always good to insert a moment of doubt into your children's lives. Just as they think they've got you pegged, go do something to surprise or even shock them. They'll gain new appreciation for you. And it's good for your soul too.

After two evenings like this, one would imagine that we'd done our dash for the weekend and were ready for a bit of R and R on Sunday. Did I mention that I've long suspected that LomL has ADD? So, far from resting on the day of rest, we hauled ourselves and my mother 130km north to the town of New Norcia. The drive out to New Norcia is through undulating land which is green and lush in Winter and Spring. It's very like driving in Tasmania, and how I imagine the English countryside to look. However, it's Summer in Perth. And a blazing hot Summer at that. The land is dry, parched, dusty and brown. It brings to mind Dorothea MacKellar's anthem, "I love a sunburnt country", in all its glory. This is the "never never" of International imaginings. For most Australians, the country we drove through is rural, reasonably populated and not that far from the city, but it never ceases to amaze me how these rural settings are considered remote by international visitors. Heaven knows what they'd make of places like Karratha, or Roebourne or Leinster! The tedium of our drive out to New Norcia was broken only by the excitement of passing the air-force base and the sight of an Emu. And the return trip was highlighted by a stop in traffic for a small bushfire beside the road.

The town itself holds many treasures. Not least of which is the thought of the austere gentlemen, the Benedictine monks, who set up life in what would seem to be the middle of nowhere at a time when it would have been even more remote from city life than it currently is. We were there on a day when the temperature hit 33C and it made me wonder how those gentlemen managed their daily lives and industry in those sweltering conditions. I marvel at the ingenuity and wherewithal of anyone who could successfully bake bread, mill flour, make wines, do laundry or turn wood in corrugated iron sheds in unmitigated heat.

I know the indigenous population has mixed (and very strong) feelings about the Benedictines and their influence in the area. And I don't marvel any less at the achievements of the extraordinary young indigenous people who worked the machinery, ironed, laundered and milled flour. I understand that these young people were separated from their families, languages and religions and that with the great advantage of hindsight, this was a phenomenal wrong enacted upon them. I don't doubt that we now live in greater privilege and in more enlightened times. However, walking around this part-town-part-museum, pickled for posterity, I was still astounded at how much industry was achieved in such exceptional adversity. There are lessons to be learned here. If nothing else, then the value of industry through adversity is one worth preserving. To quote my old school motto, per ardua ad alta... through work to the pinnacle.