The Visit to Australia

Tom's sister Mary and her husband, Ross, live in western Canberra. The city was planned from the ground up in the late 1940s to overcome the conflict between the cities of Sydney and Melbourne over which should be the Australian capital. It's in a four season weather zone although it doesn't have winter that we'd recognize as one in Wisconsin. It's late summer here right now.

Mary and Ross have a large yard and are avid bird watchers so we've been able to see a lot of new birds without leaving the breakfast table. Tom has photos of a lot of them. There are a pair of aging Eastern Rosella parrots in the back garden that attract a lot of other small parrots to the yard and a flock of cockatoos that gather in the front in the evening. They are without a doubt the largest birds I've seen at home bird feeders and the noisiest. Ross says there are sometimes as many as 100 cockatoos here at once. That's probably because there's a golf course across the street where the birds have lots of room to nest. Various kinds of parrots seem to be the most common here along with ravens and magpies, all of them huge birds by Wisconsin back yard standards. The smallest bird we've seen and one of the cutest is a little blue wren. All of these are common birds here. We are jealous although they don't have hummingbirds in Australia and I think they're much more fascinating than any parrot even if they aren't as smart.

Ross knows I'm a wombat fan and they sometimes stroll through the yard here but so far all I've seen is one of their burrow holes next to the highway. We have seen several mobs of kangaroos in the local parks, though. They're the same kind of road hazard here as deer – a wombat collision can apparently total a car. It's rained here the last two days and cooled off so in the morning we went down to one of the local creeks to see if any of the wombats had left their burrows. No luck sighting them. The bush here smells like eucalyptus since those are the most common trees here. There are also red deer here hiding from us tourists. They're pikers compared to the white-tails at home – just a 4' tall fence keeps them at bay. We also spotted a couple of large butterflies and an interesting big, yellow beetle that's been cruising around. I'm going to have to do some research to figure out exactly what I'm seeing.

Ross works in security for the Federal government - we've been touring some of the buildings he's worked in. We went to the old Parliament house one day and then the new complex that replaced it. The new building is certainly worth taking the 45 minute guided tour. The designing architects had to meet a book of standards 3' tall to even submit a plan. The new parliament is on a high hill but built into the terrain so it doesn't “loom over the population it represents.” We had a guide named Bruce and he was fantastic. 

We also spent one day touring two astronomy sites which was perfect for the Hudsons. One is the Mount Stromlo Observatory which used to do deep space research (their data confirmed the universe is continuing to expand which was worth a Nobel prize). Now they concentrate on solar research. We also went to the NASA/JPL Canberra tracking station. We looked at the all the displays at both places and were lucky enough to see them move one of the big dishes into position to start receiving data from the New Horizons probe that's now past Ultima Thule. Ross couldn't have picked two better places to show us.

We've met several of Mary's coworkers and discovered that Ross's brother is a model maker. He's working on a wooden ship and welcomed Tom into the family when he saw photos of some of Tom's space ship models. The partner of one of Mary's coworkers is a sci-fi freak, too, so Tom is very popular here.

Tonight we're off to celebrate the birthday of Mary's youngest son. He's followed in the footsteps of Tom and his sister, Trish, and gone into IT. He works for the Australian government and has already had the opportunity to travel to Antarctica for work. He's 24.

Ross and Mary have taken a couple of days off work so we've had company on our explorations. They're coming back to Sydney to fare well us. I know all of you are cleaning up after the big storm. Stay safe. We can't pretend though that we'd rather be home than here in beautiful Queenstown.