Romance on a riverboat, the lights of the city in the distance. I wonder how many liaisons of more lasting import are born on the ferry returning from Manly to Sydney. In the grand days of Mississippi riverboats, theatrical troupes offered up stock melodrama. There, they found new audiences for theatre, such good audiences that more than once the actor playing the villain found himself in a stranglehold from an outraged, engrossed viewer. There is a place, in Western Australia, where you can practice the broad-jump from one hollow in the rock to another.
Dinosaur footprints step out of the sea.
Three years of time is not much time as we think of it, especially with reference to an old, old land and the way the water and weather mark it. Yet three years can pack in intensity and perspective like thirty could not. For every day of those years, I have lived as an Australian among Australians. Not one day as a tourist or mostly among Americans. I believe it makes a difference.