Sydney Opera House

One of the things that you have to do in Sydney is go to the Opera House. So what do you go to see if you're from Brighton? Well, the Lost and Found Orchestra, of course, mostly funded by our council tax, and featuring a large range of people who look as though they spend too much time walking around North Laine.

We booked our tickets way back when (this Interweb thing is very useful), and had talked up the occasion to the children immensely. Georgia was therefore very insistent that we should all be smartly turned out, and even Ethan insisted on getting a new white shirt. And she was right; we were still slightly underdressed. Despite the prejudices we were exposed to before arriving in Oz, we've found Sydneyites rather smartly turned out, and given the opportunity, they will put on very glamorous clothing.

Helen had planned a perfect Sydney evening out. We travelled into Darling Harbour, where we stopped at the Blackbird Cafe (does a great children's menu and it was Happy Hour). We then caught the ferry around to the Opera House, seeing glorious views of the CBD, the Bridge, and the Luna City amusement park. We arrived with time for a glass of champagne on the Opera House veranda, soaking up the architecture and excitement. The show itself is excellent - lots of great theatrical moments, focused on making music out of recycled objects - the music is actually very good. Georgia thought it was great, and Ethan enjoyed it until he fell asleep.

Canberra: It's a capital, it's beautiful and it's empty

The drive up to Canberra from the coast is through the Great Dividing Range, going from sea level through wooded mountains, and even high rain forests. Lots of very twisty well-maintained roads, which is good fun for the driver, less fun for the passengers. We stopped at a little town called Braidwood for lunch, where we had some quintessentially Australian experiences. First, the town appeared to be just one main street, the continuation of the highway. This was wider than some English villages, and the buildings were of the wild west persuasion, with delightful verandas.

Then we discovered an olde fashioned sweet-shop, with hundreds of jars of sweets that seemed to have disappeared - does anyone else remember Blackjacks? Georgia and Ethan behaved like, well, like kids in a sweet-shop, and stocked up on confectionary and bought Cyrus a birthday goody bag. Across the road was the pie shop, selling award winning pies, which it seemed everyone in town was coling to buy. So we sat and ate pies for lunch, bacon and cheese in gravy, curry, and steak. Everything contributed to the feel of a town stuck in some fifties time-warp. I'm sure that behind the lace curtains they all have plasma TVs and Internet connections, and are up with all the latest fashions, but it hasn't made an impact on main street.

We continued along the highway to Canberra, past the surprisingly high numbers of very large road kill. We saw kangaroos of course, but also wombats and what seemed to be a bear. I suppose the putrifying corpses is another good reason for air-con and keeping the windows closed.

The Medina apartment in Canberra had two large bedrooms and a reasonably equipped kitchen, so we planned to cook most of meals at in the apartment. Nigel and Chris were in town visiting rellies (that's what the Aussies say, although it seems a strange spelling), so the children were keen to hook up with Ollie and Cyrus, their two boys. And it all worked out as a most excellent week. We saw

• National Museum of Australia
• Telstra Tower
• Old Parliament House
• The Diplomatic Quarter
• New Parliament House
• Questacon
• War Memorial
• Captain Cook Memorial Fountain by pedalo

We also went swimming with the various Larcombes at the art deco classic lido in Canberra, had a great day at Nigel's cousin Sandy's house up in the hills, and finally went to our first BBQ, hosted by Sandy and Caz at their house. Even though they didn't know us, Sandy and Caz extended great hospitality to us, letting us stay overnight after we were turfed out of the apartments, endured my drunken explanations of how reputation systems will let me walk into their house and control their appliances and not even complaining when Ethan was copiously sick the next day. We are eternally grateful to these wonderful people.

We enjoyed Canberra immensely. A lot of money has been invested producing well designed attractions, and there is a well-heeled feel about the town, coming from servicing the needs of the politicos and influence operators. However, it seemed sometimes as though we were the only people looking at these great attractions, and driving on the streets was surreal - this was the nation's capital, but nobody was going anywhere. Its very different from Sydney.

Ironstone Pressings on NYE 2006

The first in an occasional set of entries about interesting wines we drink whilst we're down here. Having spent rather a lot of money over the years on good Aussie wines such as the D'Ahrenberg Footbolt Shiraz, I thought I'd write about some of the more exotic things we come across. These are probably really boring for most people, and probably only of interest to Martin W and myself, but hey, I probably have too much time on my hands anyway (did you think Helen would be writing these bits?)

So the first wine of interest we came across was a D'Ahrenberg. New Year's Eve, and we'd just left the smelly hovel of Murramurang, and arrived at the luxury of a Medina two bedroom apartment in Canberra. Even though we weren't in Sydney, we thought we'd go look at the fireworks after dinner, so our plan was to cook dinner using the excellent facilities of our apartment (do you think they'll throw us a bung for all this hype?). I wandered out to the local supermarket, an IGA, which I think is the Oz equivalent of the Co-op. Now Australia Capital Territories have different licensing laws to NSW, and I was surprised to see a range of wines on sale. Even better, when I looked closely, there were some very fine wines in a locked glass cabinet, which looked as though they hadn't
been touched for years. I scanned with eager eyes through the possibilities, trying to find something to match the pancetta and scallops, then the fillet steak planned for the family meal. And then I saw a bottle that I had many a time coveted in Oddbins, a bottle of D'Ahrenberg Ironstone Pressings , but had always refused to buy since it would have broken my rather arbitrary limit on wine prices. However, here the price was a rather more reasonable $54, which immediately became better value when I saw it was a 1997, rather than a 2003 or 04 which are normally on sale. I grabbed it with eager hands and carefully carried it up to the counter. I was rather put out that the checkout person didn't treat it with due reverence. How do they train these people nowadays? But I was rather happier to find that the price had dropped by another $7 to $47.

Our plans to see the fireworks were somewhat stymied by the fierce thunderstorms which broke the seven year drought over Canberra. Weather warnings ran across the bottom of Groundhog Day on TV, so we thought it might be serious. Instead we concentrated on enjoying the wine.

The scallops were mostly eaten with the D'Ahrenberg Olive Grove Chardonnay (what else), and then we turned our attention to the Ironstone. This is a Shiraz whose first taste brought forward aniseed and fennel, but after resting in the glass and tasted with food we found a round richness of cocoa and blackcurrant, with a long throat enveloping finish. Every glass was enjoyed as we anticipated the year
ahead, the big Wakeman-Moss adventure in Australia.

Murramarang

It had been a hard slog through Autumn, trying to get everything done, and we had planned to stay at a beach resort down the South coast from Sydney, at a place called Murramarang Eco-Resort. Our vision was of days spent playing in the pool, learning to snorkel and surf, with walks through strange forests, whilst learning to deal with Oz culture. Unfortunately, when we were given our "villa", we discovered it to be a smelly, dirty, dingy, tiny hut. We tried to air the place to erase the horrible smell and blind ourselves to the decrepitude, but after returning from an hour on the admittedly gorgeous beach, we realised we couldn't live like hut trash and complained. The resort was full so we got our money back, and were given a decent beachfront villa that was available for one night only. The experience from there was pleasant, with kangaroos bouncing around, but we're all still staggered that any reputable company should try and sell such accommodation.

From there we went up though the hills to Canberra, where we stayed in a five star apartment with two bedrooms, for less than we were paying for the hovel. We have a whole year of beaches coming up in Sydney, so exploring the rather beautiful and empty capital of Australia was a better option than competing for crap hotel and resort rooms with vacationing Canberrites.

Arriving in Sydney

24 hours is a long time to sit in a metal cigar tube. Fortunately, most airlines now realise this, and provide various ways of keeping the hoi polloi pacified, ranging from the 30 bottles of wine consumed by the guy next to us, to the opportunities for Helen to cry once again at "Love Actually". The children sat and played with the Nintendos, watched Pirates of the Caribbean, and even had a sleep.

Singapore (Changi) airport was a delight after the overcrowded chaos of Heathrow. Big wide spaces filled with few people, large numbers of palms, and even an open air bar where we could experience equatorial heat and humidity. Georgia and Ethan thought that the airport smelt of the rainforest dome at the Eden project.

Arriving at Sydney was relatively painless, even if Helen was stressed that I might have sneaked through illicit mud on my walking boots and been arrested under the strict quarantine laws. For the first time ever, we walked up to the carousel and found our four cases immediately. Taxis were easily found, and the Unilodge Hotel was a happy place to finally arrive to, although lacking in expensive interior design.

We went to sleep at around 11pm, after we'd showered and eaten, but still we awoke at 5am. Luckily we could walk up to the roof garden to see the dawn, and be amazed by both the skyline of the Central Business District and that cockatoos were ambling around instead of pigeons. Time for an early bus and a visit to see the harbour proper...

Encountering the apparatus of immigration

If, like us, you live you life in the country of your citizenship, and
only ever go away to other countries on holidays, or the occasional
conference jolly, then immigration is rarely encountered. Indeed, if
you're lucky enough to live in Britain, then our imperial history has
ensured that there are very few countries in the world which even
require tourist visas (is someone anal enough to count them and see if
the visa-requiring countries are in the majority and so correct me?).

But when one starts gearing up to relocate for an extended period of
time, then the pandora's box of bureaucratic worries is opened, and
your lives are given over to feeding the ever-increasing appetite for
paperwork of the visa service. One goes through the web-site, and at
first it seems that one just has to fill out a form and present your
passport. But then you find a checklist. Hurrah! you think. Someone
has done the hard work of assembling a list of the bits of paper that
need to be sent. But then you discover there are inconsistencies
between the form and the checklist. Do we need to provide a letter
from my own university or not? And then you realise that on another
corner of the website there is another list of requirements that is a
superset of everything that you've already gathered from the form and
the checklist.

The list builds - forms, letters from every university involved, birth
certificates, marriage certificates, bank records, and so on - until
you wonder why you just don't send them every piece of paper that has
been accumulated over one's lifetime. At last, the paper mountain has
been brought to my arm, Ed. You purchase the largest jiffy bag
possible, and find that it isn't quite big enough - at least it wasn't
until the "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" labelled card has been
rolled and screwed to the shape that fits the spare corner of the
jiffy.

But then you realise in your careful attention to detail that nowhere
on the list of things to send has it specified passports. Surely
you're not meant to send off everything without proving that you have
a right to cross country borders. So you find out how to query the
visa folk, send off the email and wait in hope, carefully picking your
way around the mountain range of paperwork in the kitchen in the
meantime (it may have started off as a single Everest, but small
children have mighty erosion properties). Eventually they reply, and
yes, they do want our passports. So we send off our lives, and hope
that the UK immigration service doesn't choose to check on our lives -
since we now have nothing to prove that we live in the UK.

One week later we must have convinced the good folk of the visa
service that we really don't intend to stay in Godzone country
permanently and steal their very limited amount of air-space and
land. Everything came back, and now we have our very own 419 visas,
and can join the 419 club - or do we need to tell people about the
death of our close friend, the former dictator of Bwaniland who has
left $17 million ($17,000,000) IN AN UNCLAIMED BANK ACCOUNT...

Relevant links:
Australia High Commission
419 Visas
Checklist
147 form

So our family are off to Sydney for nine months, relocating temporarily from Brighton. Enough friends have suggested blogging our way through the process, that we've at least created the blog and will try and write regularly about our experience.

The introductions:

• Ethan, the six year old gourmet of the family with the palate which will be delighted by the variegated tastes that Australia has to offer;
• Georgia, who has already decided she's going to become a surf chick and reef snorkeller, and will probably become so enchanted by the place we won't be able to persuade her to return. She's nine years old;
• Helen, the carefree and eternally optimistic half of the adult partnership, who cares not that of the ten deadliest animals on the planet, eight of them are native to Sydney;
• and Ian, the over-burdened computing academic, who spends his time eternally worrying about exactly how to punctuate lists, and whether semi-colons are line terminators or separators.

S-day is currently three months away, but the preparations are now in earnest.