28 Kendall St.,
      Charlestown NSW 2290
      8th. December 1997
     

Dear People,

      Another year gone, back to wishing you all the best for the season and the coming year. It seems like, oh, a couple of weeks ago I was sitting here telling you of the last 2 years, and zooom, here we are again. Yet things are subtly different - there's an inkjet printer and Windows 95 and a phone line hanging out the back so we can dial the Internet (cashin@iniaccess.net.au for those that are interested). Nothing momentous to tell you, no births, no deaths, not even a serious illness. And we are thankful for having our year of being unremarkable - remarkable things so often seem to be things you didn't really need. You don't see people on 'Neighbours' having a quiet BBQ or going to an amateur theater production or just reading a book. To be remarkable you have to at least have a serious row, preferrably with violence and a couple of visits to the hospital each month.

      This year we hosted Poss's neice Kate (Poss's sister Barbara's younger daughter) for the first 6 months. This is in reciprocation for the four times Barb has had our children. Well, I can tell you other people's children aren't your own - when we had students from other countries stay with us in past years, I put the different behaviour patterns down as cultural differences or language problems. But Kate changed my thinking, it has nothing to do with ethnicity, we're just all different. It was not exactly a trial but the need to adjust to the thinking of a person from a different background and upbringing certainly keeps you on your toes. Although I have remarked in the past about how different our children are from each other, they still retain a stamp which makes them part of the family - don't know what it is but it means you understand each other without the need to explain, something which just doesn't work with a stranger. I don't know what Kate thought of the whole affair. At least she behaved identically to my brood in that respect, information extraction was even more difficult than dental extraction. "What did you do today" - "Nothing". "Did you do anything interesting" - "Not really" [Does this mean children do some very interesting virtual things, but nothing real? They never say "No"]. Maybe I'm getting inflexible - I'm referred to at work as "the cranky old bastard" and when I realise that I'm at least 10 years older than anyone else in the section and most are in their 20s then I guess it's not far from the mark.

      Christmas last year was at Michelle's (Barbara's elder daughter) farm about 40Km from Coffs Harbour. There were about 18 people staying there and we packed the place out. The farm was just beautiful when we were staying, lush grass, green everywhere. It is set in the Orara river valley, there's some river flat but the residence is on slightly higher ground the other side of a road. Michelle is doing a lot of horsy things and has had built an undercover dressage arena which is HUGE. It is a giant roof with no walls and no internal supports. We had the traditional christmas cricket match in the arena and nobody came near hitting a ball into the open - better than SPF15+. The residence is unusual in that it is a house built in the end of a machinery shed. Internally it is a normal house, but above the ceiling is storage area with about 3 meters to the shed roof. Very practical. I gather the enterprise does little more than earn its way at the moment, but for the time and effort Michelle and her husband Peter are putting in, I hope there are some bigger rewards on the way.

      Summer slid past uneventfully until the last weekend in February. I drove down to Melbourne for my eldest daughter (by first marriage, she's 28 now) Emma's wedding. Joanne and Nicole went with me, Em had invited everyone but Poss felt it wasn't something she wanted to do. Sandra and Beth also opted out and Nicole only came because she could visit her longtime friend Michelle and wasn't in the least interested in the wedding. Joanne at first was nervous but the people were very friendly and she had a ball. It was very hot driving to and from Melbourne, temperature in the high 30s, maybe even low 40s in places. But Melbourne itself was in a band of cooler air, the day of the wedding was overcast and about 22C, just right for an outdoor wedding. The setting was beautiful, a sunken garden near the banks of the Yarra. The reception was on a boat cruising the river, everything was just right. Joanne and I were invited back for a smaller gathering for the evening, there were a lot of people I hadn't seen for 25 or more years. It was very enjoyable and just a wee bit spooky, an episode from "this is your life" maybe.

      In July we (except for Sandra) headed back to the Coolangatta timeshare, the first time for three years. We had traded the weeks from the previous two years for stays in W.A. in Nov 96. We went to a Swans game in Sydney on the Sunday, then on the Tuesday travelled north via friends in Armidale and Brisbane, taking two weeks in all. I visited my old workplace at ABRI, the first time during the working week since leaving in '89. Many people I knew were still working there, but half of them were on holidays or travelling! Reminiscing with the other half filled in quite a few hours, probably a good thing they weren't all there or I'd still be chatting. Between Armidale and Brisbane we went via the Gold Coast, dropping Nicole off to stay with Michelle (yes, the one from Melbourne, on holidays). By the time we got to the timeshare, we'd run out of energy and just vegged out for most of the time. The girls and I went to Dracula's theatre resteraunt one evening, and we took in a few movies. I also discovered I still can't handle boats, took out little dinghy and turned it over. [people with long memories might remember us beaching a houseboat in the upper reaches of the Clarence river some years back].

      That's about all the major family happenings for the year. Joanne moved away from home about 2 months ago. Her boyfriend of most of the year has been Ryan, who is Sandra's boyfriend's brother. It seemed a bit quirky at first, but now I don't even think about it. I guess boyfriend/girlfriend is not really appropriate terminology, Joanne is 20 and Sandra 22 next month. I said last letter if Joanne has income she'd leave home. Well she has a Saturday job working as the counter person in a Caltex service station, and works alternate Sundays also. She and Ryan moved into a flat about 15 minutes walk from here, so she pops round quite often. For a while there I thought we were going to do the extended family bit where everyone comes to the parents' place for Sunday tea. It's happened that way for a while, Sandra and Leif borrowed the mower or the whippersnipper most weekends then came round for the evening, then when Joanne moved it was all of them.

      But it was short lived. Sandra and Leif moved to Sydney two weekends ago and Leif has been working there a week. He is a cadet with the power company, I think he is employed by Pacific Power but works for Transgrid. The way his cadetship is structured, he works a year then studies a year. This year is the year of work and it is economically and career wise better to do this in Sydney. Sandra has completed three years Arts/Law which (dependant on her passing but everyone thinks she has) gives her an Arts degree majoring in Japanese. She was going to do the fourth year, which is all Law, at a Sydney uni; then come back to do the last year at Newcastle. But she has been offered and has accepted an assistant teaching position for a year in Japan. It doesn't start until April and the arrangements are not final but it is too good an opportunity to pass up. Her job I understand is to assist a Japanese teacher who is teaching English. The idea is that Sandra, being a natural english speaker, can correct pronunciation and syntax problems that the Japanese teacher may not pick up. As a byproduct she gets an excellent finishing off for her language studies. But it throws the personal side of her life into chaos, how she and Leif will deal with it I have no idea. Also her studies will be disrupted, the year away runs from April to March so if she wanted to pick up her studies, she will have some catching up to do or will miss two years. Keep tuned...

      Joanne struggled with the psychology part of her Arts/Psych course for the first half of the year, she thought it was really uninteresting. She elected to drop it in the second half and just continued with French. She passed well at mid year despite her misgivings, and is hopeful of a good result for the second half.of the year. At this stage she's thinking of continuing half time but it's not a clearcut decision so I guess we'll wait and see. She has turned into a really nice person, nothing like the horror of four or five years ago.

      We are still waiting for Beth to give us a hard time. She is 16 and a few months and by that stage both Sandra and Joanne were giving us a teensy weensy bit of a headache. But Beth fills her days with school, music, work, movies and a boyfriend, it seems in about that order. She works fairly hard at her schoolwork and manages to come in the top group in most subjects. She didn't do end of year exams because they are now doing year 12 work, getting an early start. That means they are still doing serious schoolwork now, when the rest of the school is just filling in the days to the break.

      She still loves her music, probably more than before. She got her expensive clarinet and is paying it off slowly from her Saturday morning job at the hot bread shop. She still plays with the University of Newcastle Concert Band, which was elevated to the A grade junior section this year, and they won the National Band Championships. The Wind Orchestra cleaned up for the University by being the A grade open champions. I guess Beth will be with the Concert Band until she is 18, then just maybe she will be invited to play with the wind orchestra. The problem is not if she is good enough, but if there is room - they have about 20 clarinet players and most of them are very very good, so openings don't come up very often. I went to the Nationals for most of a day to listen, the standard was excellent and one of the pieces the Concert Band played sent goosebumps up my neck, it was awesome.

      Also Beth has continued playing with the Metropolitan Players band, this year they did '42nd Street' and 'High Society', both of them very enjoyable. A good thing about having children do things is you feel compelled to go, and if they are good then it's a bonus. 42nd street was OK, entertaining but it showed in places that it was an amateur production - still worth the money. High Society on the other hand was very good, the casting was spot on, the music (of course) was excellent, the sets were slick, and the acting was good enough that you could forget it was a play and get immersed in the action. If that wasn't enough, Beth also played for another theatre group, the Roxy. They did 'Anything goes' and for a bonus, she got complementary tickets for us. The theatre itself is wonderful, just a small box of indeterminate age but at least 50 years old and holding at most 150 people. This was real amateur theater, no pretence of big budgets, but a very solidly produced play even so. The play itself is a riot and I recommend it to anyone regardless of who is performing it.

      The school bands are still on Beth's agenda although we only got one chance to hear them this year - a waste really because the jazz band is good enough to go professional. Last letter I wondered if Beth could keep up the pace - well she seems to have picked up the pace this year, the odd moment she has time at home she watches all the TV we've videotaped for her - red dwarf, good news week (until last week), movies.... She still wants to do something in the movie/TV line, her HSC drama project is the production of a video, she's already looking for ideas and techniques.

      Another spinoff of Beth's interests is she previews all the latest movies for us. Poss and I have been along three or four times this year (which is probably as many as the previous ten years), and I've been along to a few others with one or other of the children. Probably the pick of the crop was the Kenneth Brannah 4 hour version of Macbeth - breathtaking scenery, well constructed scenes so the pictures augmented the words when the language gap was widening and we were in danger of losing track of the meaning. Can't believe I'm saying I like Shakespear.

      Well, we've dwindled from a somewhat sporty family until Poss and Sandra are the only ones doing anything active. Poss is still playing Tuesday tennis and Thursday volleyball. I was given the heaveho from the volleyball team early in the year, I was disappointed we were not so competitive and it was suggested I might like to leave, and in a moment of weakness I thought it was a good idea. Sandra and Leif were in the the team most of the year and they all performed pretty much as before, not the best, not the worst. Any competitive urge I had, has been well and truly squashed, there is an end of year touch footy comp at work and the team I play with is on target for the wooden spoon. Since I manage about 20 minutes per game on the field and the other 20 getting my breath back, I can't take all the blame.

      Yes, Nicole, our wonderful gymnast and not so bad soccer player is now a slob like the rest of us. She's turning into a bit of a loner, spending a lot of time playing computer games, reading, listening to noise tapes (I have trouble identifying some of it as music - sure sign of age). Her schoolwork is excellent, her social life is intermittent but she has some what seem to be reasonably sane friends, and she appears happy enough. Her bottom braces came off yesterday so she is very happy about that after having hardware top and bottom for more than a year. Unfortunately there is a wayward tooth not descending the way it should, so the top braces stay a little longer (but we believe not too long). She still has no idea what she would like to do later in life, but seeing the way Sandra just went with the flow and it eventually lead somewhere gives me hope that everyone can find their niche.

      She has continued her piano studies and plays well. Luba, her teacher, finds some very enjoyable pieces for her to play. They are mostly classical pieces but there is a good smattering of blues pieces too. Nicole still doesn't want to do any tests, so we don't really have a yardstick on her progress. But she practices every morning and also goes to the piano to fill in a lazy half hour which is much better in my mind than picking up a game boy (doesn't use as many batteries for one thing).

      Poss seems happy with life, she has recovered from her low iron levels last year but she is on HRT and says it isn't the answer to a woman's prayer, but it will have to do until something better comes along. Her cleaning work went through some sort of a milestone when her original employer had to discontinue her services. He is a builder and had a financial disaster of a year, had to sell the house that Poss cleaned. He still brings ironing so hasn't disappeared entirely. Things were slack for a few weeks as another job cleaning for a 90 year old lady fell through after a few months. She liked to help and I think Poss might have been too quick for her and didn't leave her enough to do. But there's always someone looking for a cleaner so the books are full again.

      Life for me is OK. The closing of steelmaking in Newcastle will have some adverse effects on BHP Information Technology in Newcastle. There are around 200 people in IT Newcastle of about 2000 worldwide. If there is no new work from other quarters, that number is expected to drop to 150. Most of that will be in sections which directly support the steelworks. Our section is probably the least dependant and it may mean the loss of one or two people out of 15, although at the moment we are expanding our work as we are supporting people in far flung places such as Groote Eylandt and Cannington (a few 100km southwest from Mt Isa). Most of the configuration, monitoring and support can be done remotely, with fairly unskilled people acting as 'eyes and hands' when remote operations cannot fix the problem. None of my work is steelworks related so there will be no direct effect on me. What I fear is that Newcastle will become the poor cousin and will not get high quality work. However someone remarked that "Melbourne form a committee to review it, Wollongong write a procedure for it, Newcastle gets it done" and many other BHP businesses prefer to deal with Newcastle IT because we get the results. So maybe the future is not grim.

      I'd like to add a little plug for BHP, the Newcastle issue has had a lot of bad press. The steelworks over the last 15 years has laid off 12,000 employees to make the steelworks more efficient. The closures in 1999 will result in a further 2000 jobs being lost with around 1000 people retained. So it really is no different than what has happened over the last 15 years and nobody was up in arms about that and Newcastle is still a prosperous city. BHP will make most of its steel in the future in W.A. in a new steel production facility using Direct Reduced Iron technology which produces less greenhouse gasses. The steel finishing work (production of reinforcing rod, wire products and merchant bar) in Newcastle will be doubled, rationalising work currently done in 4 different centres. They will close most of the heavy pollution producers in Newcastle so it will be a better place to live. BHP couldn't continue to make steel in Newcastle economically. There are good arguments to say they need not do business in Newcastle at all but this would result in many jobs lost in flow on industries. BHP is closing a loss making business, retaining (even expanding) steel finishing and flow on jobs, reducing greenhouse emission, and reducing pollution. That seems pretty responsible to me.

      I fell back into bad habits and did a bit of renovating. It involved moving a wall and it has all gone OK except we are having trouble at this time of year finding a plasterer to finish it off. It all started when Poss thought we ought to replace our light fittings. Most of what we had was fake mexican wooden rail and oil lamp kitch. It's all gone and we have the low voltage halogen lights which are brilliant in both senses of the word. I had always thought the wall was in the wrong place so I decided to move it before the lights went in so the lighting and switches didn't have to be moved later. Seems to work fine, one of the motivations was to stop noise travelling through the house, especially upstairs to downstairs, and that works fine. Now we can watch TV downstairs without having to yell "turn that %^&*$@ stereo down" every 5 minutes.

      Since we moved to Newcastle, our finances have been on a knifedge. After selling all our assets in Armidale and buying here, and paying the estate agents and mortgages, we still ended up with a house with a mortgage. It's not a big one but it ensured we used all our income, nothing to spare. I'm sure anyone with teenagers can sympathise with that. Now that two girls are mostly self supporting and Beth has a job the pressures have dimished and we actually can save for the first time in 10 years. We might even have enough to get the ouside of the house painted, it certainly needs it. But the cars are both in need of TLC (well the Peugeot is probably past that, it just needs shooting so maybe another car...). Joanne has taken the Datsun and now maintains it, which is excellent.

      Poss's parents have made another lifestyle decision, they've now moved to Darwin, staying with Poss's brother David. You'd think at their age they would settle down somewhere but it seems gypsy blood flows strong. They both have their aches and pains, Norm is having trouble with his eyesight, but they are both fit and still go for early morning walks that would wear me out. Poss's sister Bronwyn and brother Stewart are still living in the Stuarts Point area, still providing a steady flow of interesting gossip and juicy titbits. At least Norm and Dawn aren't close enough to the action to get sucked in all the time, one good outcome of moving to Darwin.

      Barbara and Gordon are still living the life in Boston, Gordon's company has (it appears) 'made it' and they now are liquidating some of the tied up money so they can renovate the house. We are envious of a steady stream of letters as the plumber, tiler, electrician and kitchen fitters move through. They have expressed the intent of coming back to Australia but we fear they are now Americanized (?!) and may not find it so easy to come back to the laid back she'll be right manyana country.

      And what a great country it is, despite our best efforts to ruin it. I hope you are each enjoying your bit of it this Christmas and New Year (unless you happen to live overseas - what can I say - unlucky!) and that the coming year is all you wish it to be. Peace and good will to all of you.

      Sandra, Poss, Nicole, Klu the cat(still with us), Joanne, Beth, and Alan
(reverse alphabetical if you're wondering on the order)