End 2006 Personal Indulgence

This end year post is pure personal indulgence. If I can make it work within the blogger format, I wanted to share a few photos with you from recent years in no particular order.

Photo: Helen holds the floor. Year 11 camp 2004. Note the sunglasses as hair band. One of the problems today in a more complex and risk averse society is to give young people the type of experiences that their parents took for granted. School camps have become one way of doing this. I write a lot on this blog about the nature and process of change. When I look at Helen's friends from school, a remarkably powerful group of young women, I have no fear for the future.

Photo: Sis indulging. Harry's Bar, Venice January 2005. This is one of Venice's most famous expatriate bars. The girls loved Europe. Australia's European heritage remains strong as one national thread.

Photo: Clare's birthday 2006, four friends, six ethnic ancestries, one country. Clare's friends span all cultures and ethnic groups, and that's important as we track into Australia's future. While very different from Helen's friends, they are also a remarkable group of young women.




Photo: i luv this picasso. Paris, December 2004. Both girls, but especially Clare who loves art, thought that Picasso Museum was the one of the Paris highlights.



Colwell Bush birthday party 2005. Opening the gate. The impact of the drought can be seen. Australia will change, but it is very important to me inthe midst of change that my daughters retain some links to their country heritage. We -Belshaws and Colwells - were astonished to discover at a school function that there was a strong family connection between the two families.

Colwell Bush birthday party 2005. Raging on. I loved the country social functions in and around Armidale - Picnic races, woolshed dances, B&S's, Recovery Parties etc. It's interesting how things replicate themselves. One of Clare's friends, a lassie who originally came from from Cambodia, is presently going out with a country boy who is a boarder at my old school in Armidale.



Denise and I ready to go out to dinner in Rome January 2005. Dee is wearing her new leather jacket, I my new Italian shirt and tie. The Italians really do make good clothes! I come from the generation that first discovered Asia. I was 34 before visiting the UK and Europe for the first time, and then was surprised at the degree of resonance. Australia is an incredibly lucky country because of the way we link and can access so many different traditions.