Australia is exceptionally large. The length from top to bottom is equivalent to the distance between arctic Norway and Southern Greece and from west to east that between western Portugal and eastern Ukraine. There is a time difference of three hours between east and west Australia. In fact the eight provinces, or states as they now call themselves, are almost autonomous, with the Federal government only seeming to intervene in Foreign affairs, immigration and national disasters. The Federal Government do seem to make a lot of noise though, at least internally. It is obvious that we are unlikely to see all of Australia, but we have made a good effort at seeing the southeast corner, and will eventually have seen all the east coast from Sydney northwards.. When we arrived at Coffs Harbour in November we were immediately struck by how green New South Wales is, although Queensland , which is just above NSW, has had record rain and flooding this summer (November to March). The Federal parliament are presently debating whether the Australian people should be burdened with another tax to compensate flood victims. They probably will be.

We were delighted that Stephen and Susan could come out to Sydney to join us for Christmas and New Year. We had a really great time with them but especially on Christmas day when we had a wonderful sail around Sydney harbour, which is called Port Jackson here.

Our friends Mike and Devala, from Sea Rover, with whom we had seen the Nutcracker Suite at the Opera House prior to Christmas, took a wonderful picture of us from their anchorage at the zoo. They sent the picture with an email saying we were blocking their view!! They have since sailed to a windy and cold Tasmania en route to New Zealand for the rugby world cup. We wish them good sailing.

We anchored off the beach at Manly for Christmas lunch, and had scallops prawns and lobster as well as Morton bay bugs which taste of a cross between prawns and lobster.

Boxing day saw us joining the throng watching the start of the Sydney/Hobart annual yacht race. There were some enormous yachts in the race as well as a myriad of smaller yachts, our size but much faster. All yachts were monohulls. There were a number of helicopters in the air and rumours were that a press boat had collided with a competitor. It was all very busy.

As indeed was the harbour when we watched the fireworks close to the Harbour Bridge on New years Eve. The fireworks were spectacular and it was well worth the twelve hours at anchor, waiting at an excellent vantage point, for them to light the sky. Not all the locals were well behaved though, with a lot of loud extraneous noise and quite a lot of anchor dragging and poor administrative boat control. It was great to be there however, and is certainly another Hogmanay to remember.

We had a lovely sail up to Broken Bay and the scene of where they shoot the TV soap ' Home and Away'. Stephen and Susan went surfing but they found it a little trickier than skiing. There were no great white sharks there as far as we know.

They sadly had to leave us to go back to the snow and ice of Scotland, but not before we had hosted Bernard, Ishbel and Elaine Emery to a quiet cruise around Sydney Inner Harbour. Elaine lives here and has just received her Fellowship to the Australian College of General Practitioners. She has been extremely helpful to us during our visit here. It is nice to see how well all our progeny are getting on .

Sport is very much to the fore here, being on the radio much of the time and with results filling half of the newspapers. The ashes were good to listen to with their English victory. The Aussie commentators cheered up a bit though when the Australian team soundly thrashed England in the warm up matches of one day cricket for the world cup. In view of the present world cup results it seems England was also unfortunately practising losing as well.

We went to the centre of Sydney for Australia Day celebrations ( the day marks the landing by the British to form a colony at Sydney in 1788). All the people were waving Australian flags as well as the presence of about 1000 vintage cars. Will, or his family seemed to have owned a considerable number of similar models in the past. A real trip down memory lane. We didn't remember a first hand experience with firemen in brass helmets though.

We were pleased to host Adrian ( another flat mate of Wills) and Lynne, on Atlantia for ten days.

We visited Broken Bay and Cowan Creek again and watched wedge tailed eagles defending their territory and white bellied sea eagles with their young.

Atlantia was also assaulted by sulphur crested cockatoos when we stopped in Cammeray marina in Inner Harbour.

We were delighted to go to see the opera Carmen at the Opera house with Adrian and Lynne and Mike and Devala. An occasion to dress up, or at least put on shoes and socks! The Opera was stunning and a translation of the singing appeared above the stage during the performance,It certainly assisted our enjoyment of the experience. We can still hear the music in our heads. The Australians are very good with classical music having a number of excellent classical music radio stations, giving full performances of many pieces, rather than the sound bites given in Britain. The radio programs also give much more history of the composers, which is very edifying.

We hired a Holden ( Oz brand and built) sedan car and drove to Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide and back to Sydney. This was to see Claire, Will's cousin who he had not seen for about fifty years, and also Tony her husband and their very grown up children, Mathew, Geraldine, Libby and Angus. The whole family seem to be wine buffs, very sympatico with ourselves although they know a lot more about it than us.

It was a must to go to the purpose built capital of Canberra. It is the capital of The Commonwealth of Australian States and Territories. The parliament building has been beautifully designed by American architect Romalgo Guirgola and was opened in 1988 by the Queen of Australia, Queen Elizabeth ( also Queen of the United Kingdom) The building is placed in the original city layout won in another design competition by a colleague of Frank Lloyd Wrights, Burley Griffin in 1918. The idea of the design of the legislature building is that the external lawns stretch over the houses of parliament, thus showing that the lawmakers are always beneath the populace. There is an access restriction at present , due to terrorism suspicion.

In Australia voting is mandatory and based on a rating preference for individual candidates. Both upper and lower houses are elected this way and there are quite a few independent MPs and Senators. The Greens presently hold the balance of power and have forced the present Prime Minister, Julia Gillard (Labour) to commit an about face to bring in a Carbon Tax. It seems that the type of voting here often produces hung parliaments. It is perhaps quite representative of the people though and we have found the great majority of the populace to be helpful, pleasant and enthusiastic with no class consciousness whatsoever, very refreshing. Australia is a very young country only really being their own boss since 1986. Our guide at the parliament building was asked when Australia would become a republic. He answered 'when the UK becomes a republic. Unlikely! Queen Elizabeth is not only head of state of The UK but also of most of the British Commonwealth nations, including Fiji who isn't even in the Commonwealth! The British Royalty, even if not the British people still have a say in the world. Australia now sinks or swims by itself. Most people here think it always did, and it will most certainly swim (another gold medal, dug out of the ground!).

The original inhabitants of Australia, Melanesians from Indonesia came to this continent 40000 years ago and , as Aborigines, have been hunter / gatherers ever since. They were not well treated by the original colonists, of whom a considerable number were convicts from Britain, and there is a political groundswell of discontent from the inhabitants whose culture has been superceded. It is unlikely their demands for land rights will be met but they are nowadays being treated as a significant minority rather than being ignored and discriminated against, as in the last century, or exterminated, as in Tasmania in the nineteenth century. Nowadays New South Wales seems to have a large population of Asians and the Fishmarket in Sydney seems to be a mini South Asia.

We loved the purpose built Capital and found the idea of government buildings in a parkland setting to be very uplifting. It seems probable that it uplifts the parliamentarians as well since they have very robust debates in the parliament building, never failing to call 'a spade a ( expletive deleted) shovel'.

We stayed in an old railway carriage dedicated to Jane Mansfield after seeing the spectacular buildings of Canberra. We had hoped to see kangaroos as well but they seemed shy, we only saw one beside the road.

We passed a number of vineyards on our way to stay in the Victorian Alps (hills in the state of Victoria, nothing to do with the nineteenth century). The Alps seem to reflect those in Europe and since our hosts came from Switzerland and Austria we felt very European. They had a cottage called 'Edelweiss' with an apartment, on the lower storey of a A frame, for us. The view of the valley was superb although there had recently been flooding upriver and the forest fires of the year before had decimated the trees on the adjacent hilltops.

Our trip the following day was to see Ned Kelly country. He was one of the only Australian names, besides Rolf Harris and Dame Edna, to have filtered through to Britain at the end of the twentieth century. He was a sort of nineteenth century folk hero who resisted the police dressed in beaten plough blades. Our opinion , having read much history about him and seen where he was tried before he was sent to Melbourne to be hanged for murder, was that he was a thoroughly bad man with a huge chip on his shoulder. Certainly no Robin Hood, although he obviously had a good idea wearing armour against bullets. You can still see the dents in the breastplate. In the end he was captured after he had been shot in the legs.

We found Melbourne to be a lovely city and we were hosted by Geraldine and Libby who showed us the free trams and tourist buses to see the town and also the nearby famous vineyards of the Yarra valley.

We enjoyed our short time in Melbourne ,staying in Mathew's flat inside the old Victoria Brewery. Melbourne boasts the oldest building in Australia. It is the house where Captain Cook was born, painstakingly transported there brick by brick from England, and is set amongst rows of elm trees.

They could probably effectively transport a few elm trees back to Britain now that the trees in the UK have been ravaged by disease. On the way into Melbourne we had passed through the sad looking forests that had been the area of the considerable bush fires two years ago that killed over two hundred people when villages were caught in the inferno. On the way out of Melbourne we passed through flooded countryside caused by a flash storm the previous night. Australia is indeed a country of huge extremes, and who's attacking elements have yet to be tamed.

We went via the Ocean Road to Adelaide, past the twelve apostles( natural offshore stacks caused by collapsing cliffs)

and a pelican roost,

over a free ferry at the the mouth of the Murray River swollen by rain, and through rolling and lush countryside full of vineyards before reaching the forest enclosed village of Stirling, the home of Claire and Tony. We had hoped to see Koalas in their extensive garden but regrettably they were in someone else's garden during our visit.

We did however see a number of beautiful new holland honey eaters.

We were wonderfully hosted, visiting Adelaide, its seaside docks and play beaches and several wineries, as well as a traditional Australian pub where we had a great meal.

Tony also found somebody to mend our radar plug and a warehouse selling decent material to recover Atlantia's cockpit cushions. He introduced us to some friends,Chris and Neil, who had just restored an old racing car, which looked very sporty.

It was good to see how people live in the country areas. They keep an alpaca which we kept well clear of since they spit.

Our route away from our hospitable relations took us past the Great Desert. Over the past seven years it was probably very brown and dusty, but now it was green, although not lushly so, and there were a number of scrubby bushes dotting the huge fields. We passed through a thunder storm which chucked buckets of water at us, and we stayed the night in a one horse Australian gold town, where we met a South African shepherdess who had just bought a number of Dorpers sheep which actually shed their coats rather than having them sheared. She complained you can't get the staff in Australia compared with South Africa. At least you probably can but it will cost you an arm and a leg.

We climbed up the winding road into the blue mountains, and it is obvious why people from Sydney found it so hard to cross this mountain range to the plains and gold fields beyond. There are huge cliffs on the west side and the only way down is not via river valleys but via ridges and saddles. We arrived at the famous 'echo point' where the view is spectacular down to the river below. We never saw it since the fog clung to the side of the valley, blotting out all sight. It was hard enough to drive the car around the road at the top of the cliff. We were however lucky to see an eastern rosella.

Despite the kamikaze drivers of Sydney we managed to get the car back to Budget Rentals across the harbour bridge without having to pay the enormous excess they require in insurance. One of the yachtsmen that met were not quite so lucky, through no fault of their own. Their car was backed into and it cost them over $3000.

On our travels we had seen two buildings that Australia is famous for, buildings in the shape of large animals, in our case a huge marino sheep

and a rather creepy lobster.

We had also visited Peter Crisp's glass gallery. He is an internationally renowned glass maker and had produced gem encrusted glass plates for the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla. They are very impressive plates. Peter gave us a personal tour of his gallery and the wool shearing shed he is re erecting to house not only shearing machinery but also carding and weaving machines.

In his pretty garden we saw some superb fairy wrens.

After our road holiday we were back to the boat on a mooring in Cammeray marina in Sydney's inner harbour, and with an enormous amount of help from fellow yachtsman Derek , who with his wife Anthea have sailed their boat Sukanuk all over the world, we put the generator on Atlantia back together again. There is still a little more to do with the generator however, since it doesn't yet stop when we press the off switch!!We are now anchored in Roselle bay , under the Anzac bridge, before heading north again for hauling out and antifouling. We are obtaining prices for this at present.

The weather has been very mixed in Sydney with a heatwave whilst we were away and cloudier weather and showers at present. The end of summer was officially at the end of February so now no doubt we will see the autumn leaves falling. We saw a few come down yesterday in a substantial gust of wind. We hope you like the pics. This one is an australian white ibis.

Love from ATLANTIA