2007

Well its been a long time since my last post. My time has been taken up with a heap of family history research, an ongoing project that I doubt will be completed in my life-time. I was fortunate enough to make contact with a fellow family history researcher in France, who was most helpful in organizing some of his contacts to look at various French records to give me a family tree going back to the 1600s. It's a good starting place to continue my own research on my maternal French grandparents.


During a visit with my cousin Richard Collett in Adelaide, I was given an old post card album that belonged to my grandmother Gertrude Annie Collett. Thank you Richard! I have now scanned all of these post cards, and they are available to look at on my flickr page. There are a lot of other photographs there as well. I have a few hundred other photographs that I want to post, but it's a matter of finding the time to up-load them to my flickr page.


Next year I'm off to Poland, Sweden, Russia, France and the UK, so no doubt I'll have many more images to post on flickr - when I have time. My best friend Kevin is getting married in Poland in 2008 - the main reason for my trip to Europe. Its been quite a long time since I was last in Europe.


During the past few months I managed to fracture my left foot, and yesterday I managed to fracture it again - not the same bone however. Is it a sign of getting old or something more serious? I'll certainly miss my walking - having only just gotten back to it after recovering from the first fracture.

My mate Chris Murphy at go2wo ( http://www.go2wo.com/index.html ) and I have been looking forward to the up-coming federal election - with the fervent hope that John Howard and his cohort of political no-hoper's will be tossed out of government. I found it difficult to accept that he was elected last time - I had my doubts about the sanity of the Australian population then. Now it's their chance to redeem themselves - surely they can see, at last, how evil and immoral John Howard and his government are! John Howard has caused my Australia to become a place in which I feel fearful. Not from some outside force, but of our own government and its various agencies.

Australia has become police state, a place where Australian citizens can be locked away at the whim of the government, without redress to the law courts. How many Australian citizens were locked up by Amanda Vanstone and Philip Ruddock might never be known. How many non-citizens remain locked away - we do not know, and my never know. What more evidence do we need! John Howard is evil and immoral - it make me laugh every time I see news reports of him attending church - what a hypocrite!

God help us all if John Howard gets back into office.