Veronika Wild

Most Australians celebrated Australia Day on the 26 th of January. Traditionally this is a Public Holiday which ordinary Australians like to celebrate with a few beers and a barbie (BBQ) and perhaps a day at the beach. Usually there is an Honours List (good to see scientist, Emeritus Professor Alan Mackay -Sim being named Australian of the Year this year) and there are also Citizenship Ceremonies. While this is mostly pretty harmless, it does offend the descendants of people who were not on the winning side on January 26, 1788, when the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay.   Many of our Indigenous people who make up   around   3% of the population today,   call it “Invasion Day” and see it as a day of mourning since this marked the beginning of their dispossession, annihilation and oppression.   For this reason many people are calling for the abolition of Australia Day, or at least holding it on another day. The argument goes like this: Not all Aboriginal people feel thi

Another day lost in space. This clearing out business is taking a lot longer than I thought. Yesterday I came across a box of tapes and couldn’t resist looking through them. I haven’t owned a cassette player since 1998 and some of the tapes unravel as soon as I put them into the machine. Let me tell you, nothing except perhaps smell, transports you back in time as fast as music. You only have to see that movie “Alive Inside” in which virtually catatonic Alzheimer’s sufferers in homes for the aged were reanimated by the sound of music from their heyday. The transformations were positively miraculous. The first tapes to see the light of day again were those of music from the 20's, 30's and forties.We still have the original LPs of these somewhere too, but haven't been able to play those since the early '80s.  I used to play the tapes as background music in the tearoom I had and it was not unusual to have people shed a tear or two when Vera Lynn came on singin

The Science news of 2008 anyone? The weather is fine and the hills beckon, but I am stuck indoors sifting through past lives -mine and my children’s, and even that of the previous generation. My youngest son, having given up his flat in preparation for a move has brought three rooms worth of goods down to my little house and we have now have to sort through them. Two households into one simply won’t go and worse than that, I am being reunited with things that I thought I had managed to pass on years ago – old furniture, kitchen tack, books and bits. Usually I am the leavee with new adventures to pursue and have never had the slightest regret or thought about having to leave behind a few worldly goods. Not so this time. Easiest to deal with is the impersonal but useful stuff – kitchenware, tools and such, to which little emotional baggage is attached, though it is rather sobering to see some chain store bought items now being advertised as ‘vintage.’ It made me thin

The Entrance to Villa Howrah is through immaculately groomed gardens     Too bad it’s not a leap year this year.   I have just seen the place where I‘d like to spend my next honeymoon. I was treated to a surprise Alice in Wonderland Party there recently and had a thoroughly   enjoyable time, surrounded by an assortment of   white rabbits, fairies, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, a very sexy Knave of Hearts, a Mad Hatter and of course, Alice herself. I had no idea where we were going. I was only told to wear black – easy since that accounts for 80% of my wardrobe, given long black gloves and the hat shown in the New Year photos, then I was spirited away to become the Queen of Hearts in a place I had never heard of - strange, given that I thought I knew most places in Tasmania and especially around Hobart.    These accoutrements are not usually part of the normal arrangements, but the picnic baskets of food and the games of Croquet on the lawns are.   What made it magical, apar