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Returning Home

 

When our cruise returned to Sydney on the 2nd March there was no Covid-19 check. The alarm had not yet sounded.

Thanks to our chats with the old hands over various meals we were becoming more cruise savvy. So to avoid another tiresome queue we carried our bags off ourselves and went straight to the Mosman ferry - which was conveniently waiting, as if for us to arrive.

My car had been parked, at my usual place nearby, for a fortnight. Unfortunately it was under a tree and the birds had been unkind. Quite a lot of cleaning was required! Yet it was good exercise - and I had the time - as the washing machine indoors and the sunshine without - refreshed our big pile of well travelled clothes.

Now where was that waiter with my afternoon tea?

***

Yet little did we know that just six days after we returned another cruise ship, the Ruby Princess, would set sail from the same terminal in Sydney for New Zealand. on an 11-day cruise to New Zealand.

As could just as easily have happened to us, someone infected with Covid-19 had boarded the ship in Sydney, either on the 8th March or on the previous cruise that left in February. The Ruby Princess evidently provided a more crowded and boisterous cruising environment than the Queen Elizabeth.

By the time she returned to Sydney on the 19th of March at least 100 passengers had become infected.  Due to a miscommunication between authorities passengers were allowed to disembark, some to interstate and international destinations, with nothing more than a vague recommendation to self-isolate.

In the weeks that followed, the Ruby Princess would become infamous as the sauce of Australia's first large coronavirus outbreak. Around 666 people (the devil's number) would test positive and 28 people would die.

This death toll was soon put into the shade by Melbourne's hotel quarantine debacle, that would kill 768 people. A hard lock-down in Melbourne, lasting almost four months, would be necessary to refine the Victorian strategy and eliminate further community transmission.

By year end, over two million people worldwide had been killed by the virus; and despite the development of several vaccines and their emergency approval, the death toll remained substantially unabated as we began 2021.

So it turned out that the local administration in Rabaul had been well advised. Papua New Guinea remained largely unaffected throughout 2020. Unfortunately this quarantine did not succeed indefinitely. Papua New Guinea fell victim to the pandemic in 2021, initiating an emergency response in March 2021, assisted by Australia, as cases escalated.

 

 

 

 

 

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Travel

Istanbul

 

 

Or coming down to earth...

 

When I was a boy, Turkey was mysterious and exotic place to me. They were not Christians there; they ate strange food; and wore strange clothes. There was something called a ‘bazaar’ where white women were kidnapped and sold into white slavery. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or was it Errol Flynn, got into all sorts of trouble there with blood thirsty men with curved swords. There was a song on the radio that reminded me over and over again that ‘It’s Istanbul not Constantinople Now’, sung by The Four Lads, possibly the first ‘boy band’.

 

Read more: Istanbul

Fiction, Recollections & News

The McKie Family

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

This is the story of the McKie family down a path through the gardens of the past that led to where I'm standing.  Other paths converged and merged as the McKies met and wed and bred.  Where possible I've glimpsed backwards up those paths as far as records would allow. 

The setting is Newcastle upon Tyne in northeast England and my path winds through a time when the gardens there flowered with exotic blooms and their seeds and nectar changed the entire world.  This was the blossoming of the late industrial and early scientific revolution and it flowered most brilliantly in Newcastle.

I've been to trace a couple of lines of ancestry back six generations to around the turn of the 19th century. Six generations ago, around the turn of the century, lived sixty-four individuals who each contributed a little less 1.6% of their genome to me, half of them on my mother's side and half on my father's.  Yet I can't name half a dozen of them.  But I do know one was called McKie.  So, this is about his descendants; and the path they took; and some things a few of them contributed to Newcastle's fortunes; and who they met on the way.

In six generations, unless there is duplication due to copulating cousins, we all have 126 ancestors.  Over half of mine remain obscure to me but I know the majority had one thing in common, they lived in or around Newcastle upon Tyne.  Thus, they contributed to the prosperity, fertility and skill of that blossoming town during the century and a half when the garden there was at its most fecund. So, it's also a tale of one city.

My mother's family is the subject of a separate article on this website. 

 

Read more: The McKie Family

Opinions and Philosophy

More Julian Assange

 

 

A friend forwarded me an article by Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 12.  Read Here or click on the picture.



It appears that Assange's theories about petite and grand conspiracies are well founded; and illustrated by his own case.

Read more: More Julian Assange

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