Helen returns home

Eldest arrived back from Europe at 5am this morning after her six months away in Copenhagen. Needless to say, her father was very excited!

One of the things we chatted about was her changing perceptions of Australia following her first deep immersion in another culture. As I found myself all those years ago when I first went to Asia, I came back seeing Australia in new ways. We see ourselves best from outside.

I didn't ask her about all this, although it's a topic I am interested in. Rather, the reactions were those of a tired and somewhat jet lagged girl talking about things of interest to her.

She was struck by the positive perceptions about Australia, about the number who really wanted to visit. She just found this nice!

She found Australia and Australian society much more open, more relaxed, less formal than Europe. She was also surprised a little at the lack of ethnic and cultural diversity as compared to Australia. She commented on the migration debate in the English language papers, about the concern to maintain cultural homogeneity.

Her mother wondered if her equivalent living in Australia for a period and reading the Australian papers might not form the same view about Australia.  While H. understood the point, she didn't think that this was quite the same thing.

I think that H. is right.

I will explore this a little more in a later post. But for the moment I am just too tired and still suffering to some degree from the flue that afflicted me last week.

Just at present, I have a lot of basic housekeeping to catch up on, including some blogging backlog. I hope to get my own box back soon with a new motherboard. In the meantime, I am still limited.

Helen's return home also required a major tidy up. When we moved from a big to a smaller house, we used her bedroom as a box storage area. With her pending return, major sorting was required. The study now looks like a disaster area.

All this is a long winded way of saying that for the next week at least my capacity to post here will be limited. You can expect posts, but they will be short report or aide memoire posts.