Not quite New Year but a great time spent in Broome.  After cyclone Laurence it was lacking humidity but still around 35 degrees.  Marg and I spent a few days relaxing, seeing local sights like Willie Creek pearl farm and enjoying a fabulous timeshare apartment.
We did spend 3 hours at the Broome hospital where we watched several aboriginal kids come in with stinger wounds and Marg was diagnosed with shingles.  All power to Marg - her very painful condition seemed to only make it easier to relax.

One of the highlights was the flight over Australia which was showing the signs of 4 inches of rain from the cyclone. Lake Eyre was full and Australia looked like one big lake from 30,000ft.   The Qantas pilot was thoughtful enough to take us lower and completely circle Uluru for great views from both sides of the plane.

Alison and Marg arrived in Canberra on Friday 22 January with the exciting prospect in mind to visit the Masterpieces of Paris exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.  Saturday was allocated and I tagged along with relatively low expectation.  After a solid 3 hours of inspection, audio explanation of 31 of the 112 masterpieces and respectful jostling with several hundred other patrons, I can say that I have never been so impressed.  It was awesome.  Everyone make sure you make it up here to see something that will give you a whole new appreciation of the fine arts.

We were greeted in the first room by Madame Roger Jourdain whose painted highlights on the dress was truely stunning.  I cannot imagine how paint (now over 100 years old) could be made to look like it was shimmering.  Absolutely stunning.  This was an example of how the Impressionists painted in a spontaneous and luminous style using a palette based on pure or unmixed colour.

The next room, to me, was the most revealing with examples of Pointillism and Divisionism where the artist used dots or small strokes of complementary colour side-by-side to create the new colour that your eye would see. Using pairs of opposites from the colour spectrum (red/green, blue/orange, yellow/violet) they are able to create greater vibrancy.

The next room was Cezanne and van Gogh. Starry Night is stunning.  How could someone apply colour to a canvas over a 100 years ago and it now looks like they have put little electric globes in little holes in the canvas (you know like those quirky pictures you can get for your bar).

After several more rooms, each with new revelations we came near the end after 3 hours of intense interest, reading and listening to the audio explanations.  Alison found her favourite, Les Muses by Maurice Denis 1893. 


I hope you all get a chance to go to Canberra and see this for yourself before 5 April.

So this is the start of a whole new world for us.  I hope that this site will encourage you to interact.

For a start, as I upload newsletter articles you can make direct comment on each article.  Just click on the "Comment" prompt in the top right hand corner of the article.  Put your name that you want people to see but don't worry about email or website address. I will try to get rid of those when I have studied this fully. Maybe I will also work out how to change the date format from US mm/dd/yyyy format.

Add some value to the article, defend yourself if necessary and perhaps respond to comments from other people.  It should all accumulate on the site.

So look out for some new articles that I know will be coming - New Year in China and the Whale Wars in the Southern Ocean.  Each of these to come from our intrepid reporters who are travelling the world over January.