AUSTRALIA, Sydney (written 31st July)

How hard it is to draw myself away from the luxuries of family living once again. Returning to Sydney was like coming home. Another warm welcome from Roger, Joanne, Sam, Alexi and James. They have made me feel so much a part of the family here, my little room was all ready for me and plans were quickly put in place for showing me the famouse Blue Mountains before I galloped off to Melbourne.
This morning I was up bright and early (remarkable considering lack of sleep after the inevitable Saturday night) and gliding along in Roger's cosy car out of Sydney and up into the Mountains. "They are not looking very blue today," lamented Joanne but they looked pretty damn blue to me and quite breathtaking. View points are dotted along the cliffs, jutting out on pinicals over huge valleys and canyons coated in thick bushland and they do indeed have a bluish tinge, a result of the rising vapours from the eucalyptus. The scale is what had me clutching to the railings of my overhang and breathing "wow". The space is truly emmense, over 1,000,000 hectares of sandstone peaks and deep-cut valleys, a proportion of it still unexplored. It makes you feel painfully small. Anyway, we 'did it' in a very civilised way for so cold a day, and with so short a time availble. We drove to the pretty little town of Leura for a delicious brunch and surveyed the Three Sisters from what Joanne assured me was the best vantage point, tourist-free. She was right, the town on the other side was a chaos of tour busses and jostling bodies all struggling to grab a peak. We sailed past happily to more remote cliff-tops and photo opps.
On our way back to Sydney we stopped at the home of late Norman Lindsay an artist, engraver and illustrator of the children's book series "The Magic Pudding" (familier to those growing up in Australia in the middle part of the last century). Along with his children's illustrations he spent most of his time paying a questionable tribute to the female form. Based New South Wales he created quite a storm with his daring potraials of wicked-looking nymphs and strumpets with spikey, deamon-like features, limbs akimbo. His large garden was full of buxom, betailed pan-like figures lurking in the undergrowth and frolicing around his huge Roman aphitheatre-style swimming pool. A workaholic and doubtless impossible man, his sucess could mainly be attributed to by his industrious second wife who got him organised and sold his work. In a moment of wavering wifly loyalty, she scarpered to America with a trunk load of his best pieces. On the train the box in which there were stowed caught fire. When faced with the singed images, the train porters where so horrifed that such 'filth' could be transported into their country that the merely fed the flames leaving nothing but a pile of ashes and a rather sheepish Mrs Lindsay who returned to Australia and broke the news to her husband.
"Nevermind," he said "I'll just have to start again." This, I think, goes to show a degree of patience that is bordering on saintly and must make up for his tricky artistic temprement. He painted well into his 80s.
So another wonderful week in Sydney...
And now off to Melbourne to lounge in arty cafes and catch up with Adam and Charley.