Dear All

Happy New Year!

Click to see a Photo Slideshow of my year: Robin's 2008 Down Under

Shamed into writing by many of your Christmas and New Year greetings and messages, I have finally eliminated my procrastinatory excuses and now find myself attempting to summarise about a year of new experiences in a new job, new city, new country, new continent even.

Australia is a curious place, a strangely familiar in a European sense but strikingly different in terms of climate, flora and fauna. Bill Bryson describes it well in his famous book “Down Under” when he says “there is no place in the world like it. Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.” The other amazing fact is that modern Australia is just over two hundred years old (following James Cook’s ‘discovery’ of Botany Bay in 1770, the First Fleet arrived in Sydney in 1788 and everything man-made that exists now in terms of infrastructure, buildings, industry and all the trimmings of a modern world has therefore been created since that time).

Within a short time of landing in Australia in November 2007, Richard and I had been on a huge trip around the outback, South Australia and Victoria in our newly imported 4x4 from Thailand, had rented out an apartment in Double Bay and received both consignments of shipping from Thailand and the UK, and celebrated New Years Eve at my new place of work, Cranbrook School in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. This is all old news and appears on my last proper update from January 2008 at http://www.nagy.co.uk/News%20Updates/220108News.htm.

My first year at Cranbrook was not as easy as I had predicted. I suppose it is inevitable that whenever you start at a new school you have to build your reputation from scratch, but I had not been prepared for the boisterousness of some of my classes and was surprised to find myself committed to Saturday sport throughout the year. Cranbrook is a private boys school, similar in many respects to UCS and CLS in London, but differing in two key attributes: it is non-selective and it is non-secular (having a strong Anglican tradition). There are very few private schools in Australia which do not share these two characteristics. Nevertheless, as the year progressed, I began to find my own niche and to carve my own corners to the round hole my square peg was supposed to fit into. Naturally I got into the occasional argument, but generally I was pretty well behaved and diplomatic (you have to moderate that with your own view of what Nagy diplomacy suggests).

After a brief and somewhat lack-lustre performance as the 8B’s cricket manager (umpiring cricket games was a new and terrifying experience for me), I managed to successfully migrate to tennis, where at least I could offer some practical advice and join in the practise games. I am very much enjoying this part of my job. I also became involved in stage band, playing the baritone sax once again. In April, I led an outward bound group of Year 9 students into the beautiful Snowy River National Park, as part of Çranbrook In The Field’, where the boys trek with full backpacks for 10 days, sleep under a bivouac (aka a piece of plastic sheeting) and learn survival techniques and bush camping. It was a terrific experience and I watched 15 teenagers growing up into responsible adults before my eyes. Too bad that the moment they got back to school they reverted into adolescent irresponsibility, but I have no doubt it will have had a lasting influence on them nevertheless. I also saw my first squirrel glider – a magnificent and seriously cute marsupial.

I find myself actively looking forward to the new school year, particularly as I now have a reputation at the place, but also that I am taking some academically more challenging classes and will not be the new kid on the block. I have finally attained the New South Wales ‘Accreditation at Professional Competence’ after a year of evidence gathering and in the words of the NSW Institute of Teachers, “Your successful accreditation marks a significant stage of your teaching career”. Yeah – right!

In May I applied to be one of four contestants on a reality TV show for Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet, but the show (Unearthed Series 3) was axed so I didn’t get a chance to see if I had what it took to be a wildlife film-maker. Never mind!

Shortly after I wrote my last update, Richard was granted his resident’s permit and began looking for a job in the law. Through a series of introductions and friends contacts, Rich was given a temporary position as a paralegal with a big city firm of lawyers, Clayton Utz, (his UK solicitor’s credentials not being sufficient, according to the Australian Law Society, to practise as a solicitor in Australia). Richard applied for admission to the roll whilst at the same time achieving a good deal of success at Clayton Utz and finding himself rapidly doing the work of a solicitor even if he wasn’t officially recognised as such. By September, two things happened: firstly as a victim of his own success, the workload became preposterous and Richard found himself at the office at all hours and every day including weekends. His lack of status as a paralegal didn’t enable him to have the same clout or secretarial support in order to do the solicitor’s work he was being given. Secondly, his application for admission to the roll came back with the condition that he would have to do about two years more study and complete 8 separate courses, all at his own expense. Rich had not come halfway around the world to find himself without a life and certainly did not have the ambition or energy to go through ‘rising up from the bottom’ again. By October he had made the decision to quit his job and re-train as a teacher (which is what he had been doing for the past three years in any case).

In July, we bought and moved into our new 3 bedroom apartment in Pyrmont, just behind Darling Harbour, in a ten year old block of apartments with swimming pool, gym, squash court and snooker table. It is magnificent and we have had ‘strand-woven’ bamboo flooring laid throughout, which is both hard wearing and ecologically sound as well as being stunning. We have three terraces, the largest being a good 14 metres long and up to three metres wide, two lockup car places and a storage cage. We have a view of the south side of the city and can walk to the central business district in 10 minutes. We can even see the Darling Harbour fireworks every few weeks as they explode over the Novotel Hotel which is opposite us. We are very happy! Recently we have had a pair of sulphur crested cockatoos, ‘Cocky’ and ’Tooey’, who regularly come to receive sunflower seeds and monkey nuts from our fingers.

I have learned to play the Didgeridoo which Richard bought for my 40th birthday in June and we have both taken up surfing, in addition to golf, and are enjoying both pursuits enormously. See http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=439ZZ1NMWl8 for my early attempts to ride a wave!

In September, we travelled up the coast to South-West Rocks and Coffs Harbour and dived with up to 40 grey nurse sharks, truly an amazing experience. My photo slideshow can be seen at http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=xhQLNqjlnIM&feature=channel and I have successfully had some accepted by the marine themes stock photo database.

To round off an exciting and eventful year, my parents arrived at the end of November and we relived the trip around the Boomerang coast which we had made a year earlier, but taking in several new destinations and experiences including Aboriginal Rock Art at Mutawingie National Park, Sealions, Fur Seals and an Echidna on Kangaroo Island, wombats at Coolendel, and some amazing memories of Sydney in the summer, lazy days of surfing and barbeques. We spent Christmas this year in an Irish Pub in Melbourne and New Year’s Eve at a ticketed event at Mrs Macquarie’s Point in the Sydney Botanical Gardens and directly opposite the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

I have put together a slide show of our year, which you can see at: http://www.nagy.co.uk/News%20Updates/250109NewsPhotos.htm.

I will endeavour to keep in touch a little more often if current procrastination practices allow, and I do hope to see many of you on our next trip to the UK in July 2009.

Lots of love from down under,

Robin and Richard XXX