In this Land of the Long Weekend we are about to have another one: Australia Day 2014. It's a fitting time to think back over what will next year become my 50th anniversary of coming to this wonderful country!
Not that all those years merely passed me by and can be ignored nor the mistakes undone or the stupidities uncommitted again. And neither can I forget the shames and humiliations, the treacheries and betrayals as well as the prides and accomplishments and brief moments of happiness which I now call experience and which are supposed to be my recompense for the youth and the health and the energy left behind as I bounced through life, spending more time on planning my next weekend than on how I might spend the rest of my life.
While my decision to leave the "Fatherland" was made as hastily and as much on the spur of the moment as every other decision I have made before and since, it has worked out exceptionally well. I am proud to call myself an Australian and to call Australia my home, and to do so not through some accident of birth but because of my own deliberate decision and years of hard work!
Thank you, Australia!
P.S. I guess not everyone will celebrate Australia Day. Here's one response I received (name and email address withheld to protect the guilty ☺ ):
"Proud to be an Australian. Pigs Fucking Arse. My forebears were the first to settle Sth Aust. Even have a hill named after them . They would turn in their graves and would revolt in disgust if they saw what inhabits this country today. Should have kept the white Australia policy. Multiculturism does not work, even Angela Merkel and David Cameron admit that fact. Having said that, some of the white trash low lifes and trogledites [sic] add another sad and unfortunate mix to the burgeoning cesspool of human waste in this country. Sad but true !!! On that note i'm going surfing where i would rather take my chances with the sharks."
Another email gone from my rapidly thinning address book. Very soon I'll be talking to myself! ☺ "I talk to the trees... that's why they put me away"
