Australia

We had been in England for five or six years, and my dad had itchy feet. He talked about us all moving to Canada, and maybe starting a fruit farm. (This was at the time when I was studying Canada at school, and researching the country) He decided against it - too cold, really.

Then my class was studying New Zealand, and I was collecting all sorts of brochures about the country. Dad applied to emigrate - but we hadn't been in the UK for 10 consecutive years, so they didn't want us. Huh!

THEN I was doing a project on Australia. Dad filled in a brochure and sent it off ... and was surprised to get a phone call from London saying that the Director General of Education, WA, was in London for a few days, and if he was serious he should get on the train and come up for an interview right away.

He did, and - although it took a full year to be worked out - we all migrated to Perth in 1970.


We came by "assisted passage", travelling First Class BOAC - simply because it was a chartered jet, and we were the first to arrive at the airport. After a month in a hotel in Scarborough, we moved to a house in Viveash, just out of Midland.


While we were still in the hotel, Mark came down with meningitis, and John with mumps - and the little puppy, Minnie, was an attempt to help Mark get over his headaches.


With six  of us all needing to go to different jobs and study, and Midland not having great public transport, we soon had 7 cars in our driveway (and all over the lawn). People wondered why there always seemed to be a party at our place.

I met Peter at Uni of WA, and then we both went to Claremont Teachers College.

Peter and I got married in 1974. We taught for 3 years in Rockingham, then we went to the Bible College of South Australia, in Victor Harbour to train as missionaries, with intensive training in Linguistics with SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) and Cross Cultural Communications. Then we did "Jungle Camp" in PNG.

We worked on Murray Island in the Torres Strait, Queensland, for the '80s (1981 - 9). Life was primitive (no electricity, running water etc), and I kept in touch with my parents by typing out letters on our little manual typewriter. My mother kept all my letters, and later gave them back. I copied them into a blog: "A MERry Life". It's also available as a book from Blurb: A MERry Life

After our adventures in Saudi Arabia, we returned to Australia for a short spell. My blog for that interesting patch was called: "Not Riyadh".

Some jobs came up in Toowoomba, Queensland, so we moved across. We worked in the TAFEs, teaching ESL. My blog is: "How Woomba is TOO woomba?" 

While doing that we realised that we really needed to move on and get qualified with "Masters of Education". So we moved down to Brisbane, and studied hard.
 My blog was: "Brisbane Master Class".

Then we got jobs in Malaysia, and went to work there for 3 1/2 years. 

Returning from Malaysia, we went to live in Northam, in Western Australia. My blog was:
"Northam Knight St".

After 3 1/2 years in Northam, we have moved down to Butler on the coast north of Perth, and retired. So here we are with "Retiree Diary".





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