This is the 400th post. I started this blog shortly before I met my wife, and have tried my best to write at least once a month. We celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary this year. May this blog lives on for at least a little while longer yet!
Melbourne is still in lockdown - in fact, we went from one of the world's most liveable cities to the most locked down. Yes, apparently no place on earth has endured longer "stay at home" order. The irony of that just has to make you laugh. With the projected number of COVID patients is set to increase over the coming weeks, I don't want to talk about COVID anymore. Yet, let's just see, the modellers might get it wrong, and if so, it won't be the first time as you just can't model human behaviours to the tee, right?
Yet it's just so hard not to relate our everyday life to COVID... If not for COVID, we might just have returned from a day tour of the Daintree rainforest and enjoying sunset in Port Douglas as a family of four, in this second week of Term 3 school holiday. So I'm thrilled to hear the Queensland government struck a deal with the local Aboriginal people to protect Daintree. Clearly a long time coming but at least it's a start. We must go to Daintree when this calamity is over.
Australia, the government and it's people, of course, remains a bit behind the Kiwis in mending their relationship with the First People of the land. The recital of the "Acknowledgement of country" before a meeting still sound hollow and pretentious every time I hear it and is no where near as natural as, for example, hearing someone closing of a speech in NZ with "tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa". But then again, that might just be my kiwi bias.
