Iris May Lofting .....

It’s a sad time for us as we’ve heard that Marilyn’s mother passed away on Sunday evening. Marilyn is now on her way to Mudgee for the funeral service which will be held on Friday. Unfortunately, I’m not able to go. This photograph, taken about 5 years ago, shows Iris (on the right)with my mother who has been her friend since they first met in 1951. She and her husband ran a corner shop in the small town of Russell Vale which is where we first settled when we arrived in Australia. Iris was a florist and made the bouquet of flowers which Mum was given when she stepped off the ship.

Iris Lofting was 93 earlier this month. She moved to a nursing home soon after her 80th birthday and her health since then has not always been good. In her later years, she suffered from macular degeneration and was effectively blind. A number of times we have been told that she is ‘fading’ but her strong will has always brought her back. Her husband, Bill, always said he would be with her at the end and he was.

Iris was a 5th generation Australian who can trace her family back on her father’s side to her great-grandfather, William Chapman, who arrived in Sydney from England in 1841 on the ship Susan. His wife was Bridget Hayes from Tipperary. Iris’s grandmother was Elizabeth Campbell, who added her Scottish blood to the family.

Iris’s mother’s family can be traced back to George Waples who arrived in Tasmania in 1831 on the ship Strathfieldsay. George was a guard supervising convicts arriving at the penal colony. Later, he moved to the South Coast of NSW and established a farm at Mount Kembla.

Iris was working as a nurse when she met her husband-to-be who was serving in the Australian Army. They married and had 2 children, Anne and Marilyn. There is a picture attached of the young family at their home in Morton Street, Russell Vale. Iris’s parents, and brothers and sisters all had their homes within walking distance of each other. On the escarpment in the background is the South Bulli coal mine which provided work for many of the Chapman family.

Iris left instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes brought back to Wollongong to be placed near those of her mother and father. She also asked for a particular piece of music to be played at her funeral. Thank goodness for iTunes which provided a choice of 50 versions of Beyond the Sunset for Jamie to download last night. We settled on the Pat Boone version which is suitably sentimental.

Half way there .....

Marilyn noticed the other day that one of the campers was packing up ready to leave. They had been there when we arrived about 6 weeks ago. It was a slide-on style with an annexe and the owners had gone to the trouble of putting out solar-powered garden lights, to make it more homely I suppose. We hadn’t spoken to the people and the ‘van seemed to be deserted most of the time.

Of course, when Marilyn saw them pulling up stumps, she stopped to say Hello and came back to report that they were from Burnie and were camping here because the fellow had been going in to hospital each day! That sounds familiar ….

I wandered down to introduce myself and found out that he and I were in the same situation. He had just finished a course of 39 treatments but we had never met up at the hospital as his appointments were all around lunchtime and mine were concentrated in the early morning. The hospital in Burnie doesn’t have the facilities to provide radiation treatment so patients from that area are offered a daily bus journey to and from Launceston. It takes all day so Peter decided he would be better to set himself up at the caravan park for the 8 weeks.

Sadly, his treatment has not been easy for him. He has suffered badly from side effects particularly in his ‘waterworks’ as he called. He has been running to the toilet with little notice and has had a very bad kidney infection. He was very distressed and couldn’t wait to get home. I’m sorry I spoke to him as I have convinced myself this is a breeze and I’ll sail through with no problems. Anyway, I’ve had 18 ‘zaps’ now and only have 19 to go. That's why I've called this episode 'Half way there .....'. Cross fingers, it’ll be fine.

Marilyn had a call last week from one of the tutors she worked with at Grammar. A few of her old staff were getting together for lunch and were keen that she join them. She was delighted to be asked and was pleased to see them again, especially as she was treated. It’s wonderful that she has not been forgotten by her girls and tutors (both female and male).

We spent a few days in Deloraine this week. There was morning tea to celebrate the opening of the new staffroom and the Principal, Anne was keen that I be there so that my involvement could be acknowledged. We also wanted to spend a bit more time sorting out our storage and moving a few more things from the house. Deloraine’s Youth Drama Festival was on again. This Festival has been held for over fifty years and attracts groups from all over Tasmania. It runs over 5 nights and a matinee on Saturday and is a good example of what makes Deloraine such an extraordinary town. Marilyn only managed to make the Tuesday performance (while I was at Rotary) but she does make an effort each year to show her support.

Jamie and I went to the (real) football today – a pre-season soccer match between Melbourne Victory and the Central Coast Mariners. It was a good match with a reasonable crowd but no goals. Isn't this a great picture for a Caption Competition? "Wasn't me!"

Aurora Stadium is designed mainly for AFL matches but is a great venue for soccer as well. Like Victoria, Tasmania is obsessed with AFL and the state government spends millions on bringing top teams here for matches. In fact, the government sponsors the Hawthorn Football Club so that they will keep their connection with the state. There seems to be an economic benefit but it just seems odd that taxpayers’ money should be spent in this way.

It was decided, apparently, years ago that Hobart would be the venue for top-class Cricket, and Launceston for top-class AFL. Each city now has a very good venue for its allocated sport. But the old North-South rivalry has kicked in and the people of Hobart want AFL matches there as well. I suppose that’s OK but the government will now allocate more millions to upgrade Bellerive Oval, the world-class Cricket ground, so that two or three AFL matches can be played here each year. That money can only be spent once so what other area will miss out – Health or Education, perhaps? Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad (or something like that).

On the way to the soccer match, we passed a political rally. We have a Federal election coming up on August 21st and all the candidates are striving to get their faces better known. Hadspen is on the boundary between two electorates: Bass, whose current member is retiring, and Lyons which has been represented by a member of the Labor Party for many years. His name is Dick Adams and he is a very large man. Those of us who remember Monty Python call him Biggus Dickus, but a sign in a nearby paddock has taken the cake for slightly smutty humour. .
There’s a clever double, double entendre in this sign as a candidate in the Bass electorate is Geoff Lyons. Now, is it the electorate LYONS which needs a new representative, or the candidate Geoff LYONS who needs a new appendage? Maybe we’ll never know.
Thanks to Jamie for the photographs taken with his new Fuji camera with 10x zoom. My little Canon would not have been able to get anything at the distance we were from the field.

A Day at Home .....

We haven’t poked our heads out of the door today. We had heavy rain last night and today is not much better. I plan to be up at 4.30am to watch the World Cup final so it’s sensible to have a quiet day today so that I won’t be too tired to watch the match.

Last night was the last of our current theatre program. We went with old friends, Brian and Jenny Haslam to see the Bell Theatre Production of Twelfth Night. The weather was miserable but you have to take the bad with the good in Tasmania or you wouldn’t do anything.

We heard an interview with Max Cullen, one of the cast, on the radio and were surprised to hear that the production was drawing parallels with the devastating bushfires in Victoria last year. We knew that Twelfth Night was the story of a group of survivors of a shipwreck and wondered how they would bring in a bushfire.

Well, nothing seems to be beyond the Bell Shakespeare Company. The story unfolded as a group of survivors of a bushfire took refuge in some sort of building. The set was a pile of clothes about 2m tall, and the cast of 7 were apparently passing the time by performing the play from a book found in the building. A bit tenuous, but once the cast got past the initial few minutes, the audience became absorbed in the story.

The script was supplemented by extra lines, songs, references, snippets of TV News, and so on. Max Cullen is a great old trouper and, in our eyes, stole the show.

Again we went to the after- party to meet the cast and enjoy a glass of local wine.

We have nothing else arranged at the moment but there’s a lot more coming up in the next couple of months.

On a day like today, we tend to fall back on the freezer for meals and luckily we still have a few boxes left over from our last big cooking day. We made a soup this week in the dreampot and it was, again, terrific. Marilyn made the stock the day before from some chicken bones we had been saving and I simply added vegetables to finish it off. Five minutes cooking and then two hours in the pot and it was perfect.

We chased up some more caches this week but were stumped by one which did not give us much information to work with. We found the coordinates and stood on the spot indicated but the only clue was that there was only one possible place the cache could be hidden. In fact, at GZ (Ground Zero, I imagine) there was nowhere to hide a cache. The GPS suggested that it might only be accurate to within 12m so that wasn‘t much help. We finally gave up but went back another time for another attempt. This time, two young fellows wondered what we were doing and ended up giving us a hand, but still with no success. I think we’ll write that one off.

I’ve been catching up on some favourite books now that I have some time to spare. I have downloaded several hundred books from the internet in electronic format and stored them on my computer, Every now and again, I load eight or ten on to my e-book reader and devour them over time. There’s nothing which stretches my intellect but sometimes escapism is the way to go. At the moment, I have books by Jack Higgins, Dick Francis, Jonathan Kellerman, Faye Kellerman, Patrick O’Brian, Ellis Peters, Jeffrey Archer, Robin Cook, Stephen King and Tim Willocks. None of them will win the Booker Prize, but they are an enjoyable read, nonetheless.

Culture Attack .....

Against our better judgement, we booked to see Are You Being Served last weekend. The reviewer in the local newspaper said it was predictable and full of double entendres. Of course it was! Did he never see the TV original?

The performance was in a small theatre with only 180 tiered seats, so it was quite an intimate atmosphere. The amateur cast did a great job in replicating the original characters and the old jokes ran thick and fast – Mrs Slocum’s pussy rated a mention, Mr Humphries was as camp as a row of tents and Captain Peacock was as self-important as ever.

The audience were all of a certain age seeking a nostalgic evening out. Getting up and down the tiered seating was a bit of a struggle for several of the less able. All in all, it was an enjoyable night.

A more satisfying experience was going to see La Traviata later in the week. Opera Australia has two travelling companies which take opera to regional Australia. The company which came to Launceston (the Cognac Company!) has 10 cast members, a chamber orchestra of 11 and the usual bunch of back-stage workers. They carry their own set and equipment and can perform in community halls, local theatres and even al fresco if needed. Each cast member learns two parts which they alternate.

We went with a couple of friends who, like us, had little experience with opera so it was an eye-opener for all of us. We also had tickets for the after-show party and enjoyed having a chat with the cast.

On Saturday night, we are booked to see Twelfth Night, presented by the Bell Theatre Company. This group can always be relied upon to give a modern twist to Shakespeare, so it should be good fun.

Sadly, this week, we said farewell to Cherry, one of the Filipinas I employed at Giant Steps. Cherry is a Speech Pathologist and did a great job in the 2 and a half years she was there. She is going back to the Philippines to take on some extra study.

Her friends organized a party for her and we were happy to take part. You can imagine the terrific food, games, dances and karaoke. Filipinos certainly know how to enjoy themselves. The photo is of Shiela, Cherry and Siaren. Shiela and Siaren are Occupational Therapists who came from Hope Intervention Centre and are now settled in Tasmania. Siaren is being married in September and Marilyn and I will be there to see it.