To compensate, I’ve looked again at places closer to where we are staying and have discovered a little fishing village, Tomo-no-Ura, which is an hour by train and 30 minutes by bus from Osaka. It’s on the Inland Sea and in the Edo period was a stopping –off place for Korean diplomats. Apparently, it’s quite beautiful and we’ll be able to visit a factory where they make prawn crackers and a distillery where a famous herbal wine is made.
One of the last things we had to do was organise visas and China is the only country which demands this. We will arrive in Tianjin on June 12th, travel to Beijing for a one-night stopover before flying to Singapore. We had to apply for a five-day visa – cost $60 each, plus $110 service fee. $230 total!
We decided to shout ourselves some new suitcases. With all the airlines becoming more stringent with weight limits, we decided we would have some new lightweight cases. We carry mid-size (70-litre) cases which are easier to handle than the bigger ones and the Samsonite ones we bought weigh just 3.2Kg each. I bought my old suitcase in Kuala Lumpur one time and I reckon it might weigh about 6Kg so I’m happy that I’ll be able to carry a few more essentials. Marilyn has a very nice carry-on bag which she bought a few years ago but it’s only small and weighs 3.2 Kg as well. When you consider you’re limited to 7Kg in a carry-on, the weight of the bag is a significant factor.
I’m having a night off from Rotary. I slept badly last night and have been seedy all day so I thought I should keep my germs to myself. Still, being home gave us a chance to watch ‘Where Did You Come From?’ with Melissa George as the guest.
It’s a very emotional program and people are confronted by the tragedies that their forebears lived through. Melissa discovered that her great-grandparents, on her mother's side, came from England after the First World War as child migrants sent to Fairbridge Farm School in Western Australia. Their stories were tear-jerkers – as one of them said, they were ‘dumped’ by their parents and sent to a strange land where they were expected to work like slaves – the boys being trained as farm labourers and the girls for domestic service. The myth was that the migrant children were orphans rescued from institutions or from the street. The reality is that many of them were handed over by their parents for one reason or another – poverty was probably the most common reason but, in many cases ,the children were told that their parents had died and Australia was their new home.My aunt worked for a time at the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong in NSW so I always pay attention when I hear the name. It was quite a big place as the aerial photo shows with a number of cottages, mini-hospital, dining room, hall, etc. They killed all their own meat and grew most of their vegetables.
My brother and I spent at least one summer holiday at the farm and we thought their life was idyllic. Of course, we saw only a few weeks of life there, when the weather was good and the pressure of school was off. The stories we hear now of the hardship and the poor education and the brutality of some of the staff make you wonder. Of course, Kingsley Fairbridge and others like him had the best of intentions but they were products of their class and did not consider that their patronising attitude to the children could have been counter-productive. Even though I was young, I can remember children who told me that they were only at Fairbridge for a short time and that their parents would be coming soon to collect them; I don’t know why I knew they were kidding themselves.Still, I have very good memories of a wonderful summer yabbying, riding horses, hitchhiking into Molong to swim in the pool and having dozens of other kids to play with. I was about 12 and I remember hitch-hiking alone into Orange (about 30Km) to meet my mother. Couldn’t do it now!
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