20170416 – Sunday – Exhortation, Regatta, Play and Bonfire

20170416 – Sunday – Exhortation, Regatta, Play and Bonfire

This morning our little group, Ali and Trev Gore and Leigh and Sherrie Samwell had to move four rows back from where we had been sitting each meeting, so that the stewards for the memorial meeting could take over our front row on the river side of the hall. I have acted as “place holder” for Ali and Trev and Leigh, so I have got to the meetings early each day.

In my new seat therefore, I found myself sitting next to John McColl which was great because we were able to have a great “catch-up.” John is son of Don and Lois McColl (nee Hawkins from Melbourne) and his wife Esther is daughter of my old buddies from Woodville days, Barbara and and Michael Jonees. Both Barbara and Michael are dead now but they are firmly in my memory and I miss them and love them.

Well, John and I had so much too talk about. I can’t get over how much he looks like his father Don. Don and I were in Sunday School together and were very good friends. Don is a geologist and has written and had published two books on meteorites and tektites (I think, or something that fell from heaven, anyway.) Don and I used to go hiking together when I was about 18 years -20 years of age. It was always quite funny, I thought. He would walk with his hands behind his back, looking for interesting rocks on the ground and I would look upwards into the the trees and the heavens, dreaming and thinking as I walked, and that was the difference in our personalities way back then.

Lois, Don’s wife comes from Melbourne, and she is a relli of Leonie and Peter Dangerfield (my cousin). Leonie is also from Melbourne and she is daughter of Mary Lawless who I met with my father on a trip to Sydney just s before I got married and she sewed my trousseau for when I got married. I still meet Don and Lois on occasion, usually at the French cafe in Burnside Village where they make beautiful omelettes. Memories, memories.

Well, it was the exhortation this morning and up to now Nev’s talks have been, in my view, simply brilliant, but his exhortation this morning was quite exceptional; an amazing Bible student is Nev. It was all about the animals that Job mentions and how they are in symbiotic relationships and God feeds them cares for them without Job’s help, and how there has to be in this age, those who “prey” and “those who are preyed” upon, but God is not unjust and will bring it all to a wonderful and righteous conclusion when the inequities and injustices and plain “unfairness” of this world will be no more and God’s glory will cover the earth as the waters do the sea; that wonderful time when the lamb of God will become the “Lion of the tribe of Judah.”

In the evening it was the play night and Matthew Wigzell and sundry others had written and produced a “musical” for the benefit of campers and their children. Well, it was really wonderful and a credit to all involved. What I liked about the night was there were no tedious prizes and presentations to the children and these were apparently saved for them to receive in the Sunday sessions. It certainly made for a much more enjoyable night, I thought.

I decided I would record it, which I did, using my phone and I gave Ali my iPad and she occupied herself taking photos and videos of the play. That was good for me because it meant I could just listen and enjoy and not have to worry about what shots to take and what not to take. So the pictures I will put up shortly are all of Ali’s taking and she is far less “hit or miss” than me. She is a good girl, is Ali. How she has put up with me all these years I really don’t know. Sometimes we drive each other crazy. Ali is so “task oriented” and she’s pretty bossy underneath all that sweetness, and Trevor is a saint to put up with her driving him to do more and better as she does. Alongside Ali I am positively lazy (no smart comments from you Trevor). Trevor is very phlegmatic and nothing ruffles him, and of course, he is my cousin and therefore “my flesh and blood.” Ali’s son Darren has been my companion too since he was four years of age when he was a little ADHD monster, and he became my business partner from age of 16 onwards and now remains my very close and good friend and I love him a great deal. He lives up in Darwin now, with my niece and grand niece and grand-nephew.

After the meeting I was sitting talking to Ali and Trev when this great big guy with a beard walked up using a walking stick. I had no idea who he was, so I asked him his name. He looked at me and said, “Fay! You know me!!!! Oh dear, who was he? Then the penny dropped it was Willie Pitt, dear Willie Pitt . I haven’t seen him for years and years and I remember him when he was full of energy and with india rubber in his joints I feel sure, and he had a wicked sense of humour and so was always up to mischief of some sort or another.

After that there was a bonfire (a very large one) for the young people to stand around and socialize. I think back to other bonfires in my youth and there was one thing that is very different these days to what it was then. In those “good old days” (that we are not to look back on and say that they were “better than these days”) in those good old days, what was different in the young people was this. There were a lot less young people so every outing you did not feel overwhelmed with the sheer multitude of people that there are today. Everyone knew all the same hymns. The popular songs of that day were kind of “innocuous” and so we all knew them and sang them. We all knew many “Boy Scout” song book songs, and “call and response songs” and so when we traveled on outings on bus or tram or train, we all sang the hymns, the pop songs, the Boy Scout rounds and and “response” songs so there was lots of singing, lots of rhymes and we all knew them. I can remember being on a hike to Silver Lake up in the foothills and walking along with my friend Phyl Matthews with her singing endlessly a stupid little ditty that went like this, “how does a little liver pill when your ill know where your liver is, Eh!” She very nearly didn’t survive that trip, everyone wanted to ‘kill” her.

I sat in my walker staring into the flames of the bonfire and Ernie W. came up and we chatted again about old times and also about Nev’s exhortation about the interaction of all the different “animals” in human kind and the symbiotic relationships that develop all designed by God to develop our characters to become “lamb-like” because the “cross must come before the crown.”

Well, that was the last main day of the camp and I am so glad I came. I don’t think I have ever felt so dirty as I have at this camp. I have dust in my hair, in my shoes, my car is a disgrace and my trailer is very much in disarray. Never mind, my friend Afiena and her husband Robin have invited me to come to their place at Nuriootpa on my way home from the camp and stay with them for a day. They have promised to prepare me the biggest, hottest bubble bath and probably, knowing Robin and Afiena, a beautiful dinner to help me recover.

Friends are wonderful.

So this is my second to last post. And here are some photos.