The end of January

A week of amazing sunsets looking out to the Brindabellas...........

And our last chance for a special holiday outing with the girls before school starts again next week........

They chose Questacon when it looked like our Bird Aviary visit could be cut short by rain. We spent nearly three happy hours at our favourite Science playground, the highlights being the "Rocket Show" (10 rockets in 30 minutes!) and Madame Scar, the master face painter fresh from the horror movies.

Abi was very pleased with her "Pixie Bite".......

But we all found Ella's eye injury a bit too real - Poor Joshy was really shocked when he first saw it as we hadn't properly warned him it was only face paint!

 ....especially when she got the expression just right too!

Thankfully we've also completed our holiday jigsaw puzzle. We started Santorini about 7 weeks ago - a very difficult 1000 piece jigsaw that EVERYBODY has worked on....but it was mainly Jody's efforts that got us there in the end.

The Australia Day holiday is another marker of the end of the summer holiday season. This year there has been a more mature conversation (IMO) about the date we've chosen (relatively recently) for this "celebration". More people are realising that not all Australians want to "celebrate" a day that commemorates the arrival of the British on the basis of an illegal declaration of Terra Nullius (by Captain James Cook in 1770), in direct contravention of international law at that time........and in blatant disregard of Australia's First Nation peoples. I look forward to that conversation continuing to grow.....

In the meantime, all was calm at Coogee Beach today...lots of happy families and innocent fun; no drunken flag bearers about, no Southern Cross tatts on show, no alcohol and not even any litter - especially welcome after the Christmas Day debacle when 10,000 (mostly backpackers) people descended on Coogee Beach for a day of mayhem and mess. The locals will take long time to get over that one!