Nobody turns down a free concert do they? Well, I don’t. Though on this occasion, I almost did. My mate Neil has a knack of spotting random things happening nearby. He reads newspapers and magazines and keeps up to date with what’s going on, much more than I do. This means it’s great to travel…
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What is a Carillon? I’m not really sure and I’m not going to look it up in a dictionary, and the first time I’d heard that word was January 2010, while in Canberra, Australia’s under-rated and often over-looked capital. Sitting nicely and obviously in front of Lake Burley Griffin, lies this “Carillon”, which is actually…
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I’ve always liked the word “Gorge”, and one of these days I’ll look up what it means. It has a mystic endearing quality to it. Like on a script of a fake Poirot thriller “death at the gorge”, like a footballer who beat everyone “gorge best” or for the one i love “you’re gorge…
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There are so many FREE things to do in Canberra I was finding it hard to believe. On the north side of the city, where the Parliament lies, beyond lake Burley Griffin, there are all the National Buildings of Australia. This part of the city is so obviously artificial and manufactured that it could easily…
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The barbecue in Aranda proved to be another random and special night. Aranda is a suburb or area in Canberra. Canberra is a big city, taking up a large area, but everything seems so far apart. The area of Aranda is a fair few miles outside the city centre. My friend from Canberra, Evan Tattam…
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You hear talk about it when you’re in Australia. People that hear you’ve been to Canberra will say “oh, did you go to the war memorial?”, so you’ve kind of got to go there, just so you can give a positive answer to those questions. But really when I first heard of a War Memorial…
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A trip to Australia’s Parliament House was in order when I was backpacking in Canberra in January 2010. I have never been inside my own Parliament! Neither Belfast’s Stormont nor London’s House of Commons or House of Lords. Yet I’ve done Canberra, Australia. There are two Parliament buildings. There’s an old one at the…
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In July 2007 I visited a northern suburb of Auckland known as Devonport. Come February 2010 i was in Devonport, a totally different one, also in the north of an island. This time it was Devonport, Tasmania, which has been my home now for about 8 weeks. I believe Devonport is the third largest city…
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On Friday 2nd October 2009 I finally left the UK behind, after 29 and a half years. It was time to emigrate and move on. The horrors of 2009 had to be left behind (and they still haven’t been, and probably won’t ever be). I worked that day, finishing off my 4th Summer out of…
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Or Devonport as the case may be, “where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone, as she wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow singing ‘cockles and mussels, alive, alive, OH!’”, basically that song, based on a supposed pretty fish seller in Dublin whether fictional or not…
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