  Somewhere over the South Pacific, on the
Qantas flight to Melbourne, Australia:Nicki: "How long have we been
traveling?"Rich (misunderstanding): "About two
weeks."Nicki: "No, not how long are we going
to be in Australia; how long have we been on this flight?"Rich: "Oh! About two
weeks."# # # #
It takes a long, long time, even by air, to
travel from North America to Australia. Well, maybe not two weeks, but it sure
seems like it. It was the farthest from home either of us had ever been, to
the most southerly Worldcon ever. Like many of our trips, this was a voyage of
discovery; by the end of the trip, we felt we knew our way around a part of the
world that had previously been as remote to us, subjectively, as the surface of
Mars.The trip actually began two years earlier,
in San Antonio, at the 1997 Worldcon. It was there that the Los Angeles fan group,
SCIFI, won the bid to host the 1999 North American Science Fiction Convention, which
was to be held in Anaheim the week before Aussiecon Three, the 1999 Worldcon.
NASFiCs don't happen too often, only when the Worldcon is across an ocean from here.
We'd only been to one previous NASFiC (the 1979 NorthAmericon in Louisville) and,
indeed, had no plans to attend the 1999 one either (Australia and Aussiecon were on
our minds even then). But a telephone call from Bruce Pelz a few days before the
1997 LoneStarCon changed all that; he informed us that SCIFI wanted us to be their
Fan Guests if they won their bid. It was a surprise; we haven't attended all that
many conventions in the past few years, and there are certainly many other fans who
are deserving of the honor. Nevertheless, it didn't take us long to accept. The
bigger challenge was to figure out how we were going to pack the NASFiC, Aussiecon
Three, and other parts of Australia all into one trip.With the 1999 NASFiC, ConuCopia, we've now
been fan guests five times. At 2,000+ attendees, ConuCopia was by far the largest
convention of the five, and we were treated quite lavishly -- a two room suite at
the Anaheim Marriott and a special liaison, Genny Dazzo, who went way out of her way
to make sure everything we wanted was there. We're not sure they got equal value in
return; we were only asked to be on a handful of program items and the ice cream
social that opened the convention. That was a fun event; instead of the usual 'Meet
the Guest' cattle call, ConuCopia set it up as a High School Reunion of George
Orwell High, Class of 1984. There was even a small Photo Remembrance Book showing
various pro guests and attending authors as 'teachers' and us as the Homecoming King
and Queen. There were also pictures of the various scholastic organizations such as
a the 'Light Saber Fencing Club', actually made up of local fans and members of the
concom. A few times during the event we were even asked to sign the book under our
photo. It was a pleasant way to start the convention.We elected not to do speeches or be
interviewed for our Guest of Honor event. Instead, we did a 'live fanzine', A
Mimosa Fanthology. We felt the successes of Mimosa were probably the
reason we'd been invited to be guests in the first place, so it seemed only right to
let the fanzine (and thereby, our contributors) have much of the honor. So we
brought a complete run of Mimosa to the convention with us, and picked out
articles throughout the run that we would probably want to publish in a Best of
Mimosa some day -- one or two articles from each issue. It turned out to be a
*lot* of material, way too much for even the three-hour slot of time we had
available (we'd have needed double that to get through them all). The audience was
a bit small, only about ten people -- another sign that fanzine fandom has become
just a small segment of science fiction fandom. Still, there were some avid fanzine
readers there, and even one pro writer (Larry Niven); to keep as many around for as
long as possible we enlisted some of them as readers; Mike Glyer, for instance,
'channeled' Ron Lee when he read Ron's article "The Wrath of Khat" from
Mimosa 3, while David Bratman pretended he was Mike Glyer when he read
Mike's "A Child's Garden of Hugos" from Mimosa 14. Mike Glyer later
wrote in File 770 that by using other fans as readers, we had "hit on a
clever way to draw an audience to the marathon readaloud." Thinking all the time,
we are!Being in the film center of the world, it
would have been unusual if the convention committee had not taken advantage of the
available resources and people who work in the industry. Media-oriented panels and
events abounded, and there was even a Hong Kong movie festival, featuring some
strange but yet pretty entertaining films of reasonable fantasy content (some
featuring Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan when they were much younger). The strangest
and maybe most entertaining of them all was The Bride With White Hair, which
was described in the ConuCopia Pocket Guide as "the best sword and sorcery
movie ever made by anyone anywhere." It might very well be! How best to describe
it? How about: a 'Magic Realism' fairy tale where Chinese martial arts meet up with
sorcery, with an heroic fantasy leading man, a mysterious beautiful witch who could
ensnare victims in her long hair, and a fantastic yin-yang male-female villain who
was leader of an Evil Cult. And on top of this, it was also a love story!Besides the movies, there were also some
television-related items, including a Buffy the Vampire Slayer panel (that
Nicki was on) which had the misfortune of being scheduled the same time as Harlan
Ellison's one man show. It resulted in a smaller audience than expected, though
they made up for it in exuberance which carried through the divider walls -- some of
the attendees at the Ellison hour wondered if an even bigger event was being held
next door. J. Michael Straczynski was there, too, and his one panel item,
expounding about the success of Babylon 5 and his new series Crusade,
filled the large meeting room where it was held. Most of the cast of Crusade
actually came to ConuCopia, supposedly to publicize an upcoming media convention
being chaired by the chairman of ConuCopia. Their appearance seemed to be mostly
sitting behind a table and signing photographs for fans at five dollars a pop. They
were the consummate ensemble cast; they stayed as a group when they weren't in the
convention area, even eating breakfast together at the hotel restaurant that morning,
one table over from where we were sitting. That resulted in an amusing moment when
Rich accidentally stole two slices of toast at the buffet bar from Marjean Holden
(who plays the ship's doctor). It might have been a good time to get introduced to
them, but it was early in the morning and we really didn't seem to have much in
common -- other than a yen for buttered toast!ConuCopia was a good convention, very
competently run, and we had a good time. It was also an essential convention for us
-- there wasn't much overlap with people who attended ConuCopia and those at
Aussiecon Three the next week, and if we hadn't gone to ConuCopia, we wouldn't have
seen them. Our friends Lowell Cunningham and Dorothy Tompkins from Knoxville,
Tennessee, were there; we were pleased to learn that the success of the movie made
from Lowell's Men In Black series for Dark Horse Comics is still bringing
income for them. Once and future fanzine publishers Dick and Leah Smith were there,
too, and we had an interesting dinner expedition with them one evening that also
turned into an informal tour of downtown Anaheim. Elliott and Carole Weinstein
brought a boysenberry pie with them for a late night snack with us and some other
friends in our hotel suite. And then there was Bruce Pelz, who spent much of the
convention sitting behind the Guest Sales table where he sold more than 100 copies
of Mimosa over the weekend, not to mention the hundreds of dollars worth of
books by the other Guests. It was a good place to sit down, rest, and watch the
convention roll by, while talking with him about a far range of topics such as fan
history projects, worldcon politics, and vacation cruises. Much to our surprise,
Bruce didn't go on to Aussiecon, breaking a worldcon attendance string much longer
than ours (which now stands at a relatively puny twelve years in a row). But
an even longer string than that was broken for someone we had hoped to see at both
ConuCopia and Aussiecon -- Forry Ackerman had other commitments, in Europe, and so
broke his worldcon attendance string that dated back to 1952.But we're getting ahead of ourselves. All
too soon it was Monday night and we were at Los Angeles International Airport, where
outside the departure lounge window there was a huge airplane with a kangaroo on its
tail...# # # #
"Tonight we will be flying fully one-third of the way around the world." -- the Pilot of Qantas flight 100, Monday,
August 30, 1999The world is a big place, especially the
Pacific
Ocean. It took seventeen hours to go from Los Angeles to Melbourne, just about all
of it over water. You 'lose' a day in transit when you cross the International Date
Line, and so Tuesday, August 31, 1999 for us will always be 'The Day That Never Was'.
We were seated smack in the middle of the plane, in the center of an interior row,
right over the wing; we were also smack in the middle of a group of about twenty
science fiction fans who were also going to Australia for the worldcon. Before the
flight even got off the ground, there was a mini-convention of sorts in the Qantas
departure lounge at LAX airport. It might have been bigger yet, but another large
group of fans had instead booked on the United flight, which left about an hour
after the Qantas one. There was one intermediate stop, in Auckland, New Zealand,
which has a very nice airport. Some day we'd like to see more of the city and
country than just that. And at a time other than 4:30 in the morning!
It turned out that we didn't get to see much
more than that of Australia -- just Melbourne and Sydney; there wasn't enough
vacation time left, after five days in California, to take an extended tour of the
country like some other fans were able to do. We had to content ourselves instead
with a vicarious tour, listening to descriptions of various friends' travels, from
Ayers Rock to the Great Barrier Reef, from Darwin to Tasmania, from the Blue
Mountains to the Indian Ocean. But on the other hand, it turned out there was
enough to do in Melbourne and Sydney that we never really felt pressed to take
extended day trips. The only one we took our entire stay in Australia was a bus
tour to the Healesville Animal Sanctuary north of Melbourne. There, we saw examples
of just about all the indigenous wildlife of the continent, up close and personal.
We found that echidnas and platypuses were a lot smaller than we'd imagined,
kangaroos and wallabies a lot lazier, wombats and koalas a lot more gregarious, and
lorikeets a lot more ubiquitous. Gift shops, though, seemed to be just about the
same -- the tourist dollar rules, no matter where you are.Aussiecon was in Melbourne, so that's where
we were for most of our stay Down Under. And the first thing we learned about
Melbourne was to watch out for the traffic when crossing streets! Motorists drive
on the left side of the road in Australia, and it wasn't five minutes into our first
walk outside the hotel that Rich was almost run down by an automobile because he
looked the wrong way for oncoming traffic. A much better, and safer, way to see the
city was by riding the Melbourne city trams. They go practically everywhere, even
out to some of the nearby suburbs. There's even a special nightly dinner tram -- a
restaurant on rails which travels a random path around the city as the night falls
and the lights come on. (According to two of our friends who tried it, the meal is
a bit pricy, but the experience is unique.) A free City Circle Tram line loops
around the rectangular-shaped business district of the city, and it's a good place
to learn more about Melbourne -- at each stop, a recorded message tells you a bit of
history about one or two of the notable places nearby. It's a haven on chilly
September days there, and not just for us tourists. We boarded the tram one
afternoon for a 'circle tour' and sat down next to a much older man who seemed to
welcome the opportunity to tell us even more about some of the buildings along the
route. He was a pleasant traveling companion, and proved to be a veritable font of
knowledge about the city. But he never got off the tram; he was still there when we
disembarked after about 45 minutes. We decided that riding the tram was probably a
cure for loneliness for him. Meeting and talking to people on the City Circle Tram
was his life after retirement, and he was happy. We only hope we can find that much
contentment in whatever we decide to do after our working days are over.As far as sightseeing went, we had mixed
luck. The tram tour worked out fine, but the day we reserved for visiting museums
was a bit less successful. The Immigration Museum was fascinating from a cultural
and historical perspective, but it was small enough that it didn't take very long to
go through it. The Victoria State Museum, which is supposed to be a wonderful art
museum, was closed for renovation while we were there; all of it we got to see were
a couple of interesting fountain sculptures outside. Not far from the Victoria
Museum is a large park that featured something unusual -- a flower clock on the side
of a hill. It was in full bloom, but, being early spring, nothing else in the park
was. We eventually walked as far as the Melbourne Observatory grounds, passing
through a large War Memorial along the way. The Observatory's snack bar, where we
had lunch, set a new personal record for us -- it was not only the most southerly
point in our exploration of Melbourne, it became the most southerly place either of
us have been in our lives!The major things to do in downtown Melbourne
are shopping and eating. Especially eating -- there must be a restaurant in
every other store front there, and there are many wonderful cafés and ethnic
restaurants. Not so pleasing, though, were all the American fast food places,
including 7-11 and McDonalds. As usual, we didn't bother with those, but it was
clear from the advertisements we saw that their usual fare had acquired an
Australian essence. For instance, the Big Mac (a.k.a. the 'Big Oz') had all the
usual fixings -- as well as a slice of beetroot!While we enjoy eating, it seemed that much
of our free time was spent shopping. The U.S. dollar is robust compared to the
Australian dollar, so once we did the conversions, we found that the prices for just
about everything were very affordable. There are several multi-story walk-through
shopping malls in downtown Melbourne, but the best place to shop is the Victoria
Market. Located on several acres of valuable land just outside the center rectangle
of downtown, the mostly open-air Market had just about anything you could ever need,
all in one place -- there was everything from farm produce to tourist souvenirs.
It's where we bought most of our souvenirs and holiday gifts, and even the skirt
Nicki wore at the Hugo Award Ceremonies. There's a guided 'foodie' tour of the
Market that Nicki and several other fans took on the Friday morning of Aussiecon,
which included a plastic fork and napkin for tasting some of the foods available
from the food venders. It was the one tour of the trip where stomachs got tired
before legs did!The Centra Hotel and the adjacent convention
center that hosted Aussiecon was located on the north bank of the Yarra River, just
outside the circuit of the City Circle Tram. The view from the foyer lounge of
ninth floor of the hotel, near where our room was, looked out across the river to
the large gambling casino complex on the south bank. One of the features of the
promenade between the casino and the river was a series of eight tall rectangular
towers, situated like monoliths about every fifty meters along the terrace. These
we came to know as the 'Pillars of Fire' because they had one other distinct feature
-- starting in the early evening until midnight, every hour on the hour they lit up
the night sky with an orchestrated display of pyrotechnics as natural gas was
discharged from their tops and ignited into large fireballs. When you viewed the
display from the hotel across the river, you could see that the fireballs were shot
off according to a programmed sequence -- individually from left to right, then two
at a time, then four at a time, and finally all of them at once. Then, to conclude
each five minute show, they shot off some really *big* fireballs; from across the
river, these looked to be about three stories tall. If you were standing near the
base of one of the towers when one of these went off you might have thought the end
of the world had arrived. You'd think that all this commotion every evening would
serve to keep all the seagulls out of the area, but it doesn't -- between
'performances' we could see gulls using the tops of the towers as convenient lookout
perches. We concluded that they must have some kind of warning when one of the
fireball shows is about to begin -- either that, or some of the restaurants in the
casino complex have found a ready source of instant-cooked poultry!The worldcon itself was pleasant and
friendly. There were far fewer people attending Aussiecon than who go to a North
American worldcon, so there weren't many instances of overflowing crowds at program
events. One exception was the Buffy panel, which had a larger attendance
than even the one at ConuCopia had! Nicki was once again on that panel (she was a
last-minute addition); it was the only program event, other than the Hugo Award
Ceremony, that either of us was on the entire convention.As for the Hugo Awards, we were pleased and
honored to be a nominee, but it was no surprise to us that Mimosa was not
voted the Best Fanzine; we thought it unlikely Mimosa would be more popular
with the voters than the local Melbourne-based fanzine, Thyme. It was a
surprise, then, when Dave Langford's newszine, Ansible, was announced as the
winner. Dave, who was at the convention, may have felt the same way, too -- his
acceptance speech mostly expressed condolences to Thyme's editor, Alan
Stewart, who is also Ansible's Australian agent. It was one of the few times
we'd ever known Dave to be somewhat at a loss for words!Not being on many program items does have
its advantages, actually -- you have a lot more time to do other things such as
seeing what's going on outside the convention center, or seeing other parts of the
convention, or our favorite, meeting and talking to people. We did a lot of that
during Aussiecon, with people we already knew and some we didn't. We're beginning
to think that Charlie Brown is starting to like us; he invited us over to his table
one morning for breakfast, and the Aussiecon issue of Locus had a reasonably
nice photo of us. And Greg Benford, the Guest of Honor, gave us some nice egoboo
about Mimosa -- he asked us to reconsider our decision to end publication,
and even said he'd write another article for us for a future issue.
One new acquaintance for us was Justine
Larbalestier, from the University of Sydney, who is researching a new book about
the New York Futurians fan club of the 1930s and '40s. There was a memorable dinner
expedition with Mark and Vanessa Loney (and about a dozen other fans); we had met
Mark and Vanessa during Mark's three-year job-related assignment to the Washington,
D.C., area earlier in the decade. Mark was in charge of Aussiecon Publications (we
were his 'Maryland Branch Office', in charge of production and distribution of the
last three Progress Reports). That dinner featured good food and excellent
conversation -- when we could hear it! (We had been seated next to a very good,
but very loud, folk music group.) Our friend Adrienne Losin was at Aussiecon,
usually camped out behind her table in the Dealers Room; we've known her since 1980
when she was traveling in North America and came to Tennessee (where we were then
living) for one of the Chattacons. And finally there were John Blum and Kate Orman,
who live in Sydney and write science fiction. We hadn't met them before, but were
on the lookout for them and finally ran into them the next-to-last day of the
convention. The reason we wanted to meet them? John's father, here in Maryland,
asked us to. He's our dentist.There were fewer parties at Aussiecon than
at any other worldcon we've been to, no doubt partly due to its smaller attendance.
The ones that did happen, though, became focal points for the convention after the
program events were over each day. The ConJosé bid party was originally
scheduled to go two nights, but was cut back to one when it became apparent that the
bid was going to win handily (against a semi-hoax Roswell, New Mexico bid) and that
the party budget wouldn't be sufficient for two nights at the exorbitant catering
rates the Centra Hotel had forced on them. Maybe it's just as well; with the large
crowd of people there, it wasn't all that enjoyable an event. There was almost a
competition to grab food while it was still available; a constant feeding frenzy
developed as people jostled for position around the food bar, as if they were in an
aquarium instead of a multipurpose meeting room. A much more laid-back affair was
held in the same space the next evening by the ConCancun-in-2003 bidders, who
actually did dress up the meeting room to look like an aquarium. A better
use of resources for light snacks instead of dinner fare actually provided more to
eat at a lower overall cost. And because it wasn't a substitute for dinner, the
party was less crowded as people cycled in and out more frequently. The best party
of all, though, was the one hosted by Japanese fans the last night of the convention.
Upon entering, you were met by one of the hosts who gave you a cloth headband and
helped to tie it around your head. Their secondary party, upstairs, even served
saki in an ornamental ceramic cup that they then presented to you as a souvenir!
Most of the Japanese fans who come to worldcons speak English, but not all. The
young lady dressed in traditional costume who greeted us at the door was having a
nice time meeting people, but it was obvious she was having trouble with the
language barrier. When Nicki commented to her on how wonderful her dress was, she
was so anxious to understand what Nicki had said that she rushed across the room and
dragged one of the other Japanese fans back with her to act as translator. Rich,
accidentally standing in the way of all this, had to step lively to avoid becoming
part of the carpet!
Even though Sydney is the largest
population center in Australia, all three Antipodean worldcons have been held in
Melbourne. That's where most of the fans are. The local fan club, the Melbourne
Science Fiction Club, meets every Friday night, and the number of people who attend
is about the same for that of a typical Washington Science Fiction Association
meeting. One of the reasons we spent an extra few days in Melbourne following the
worldcon was so we could go to a MSFC meeting, and we weren't the only ones who had
that idea. The meeting we attended, on September 10th, also had several other
out-of-towners. Kevin Standlee and Cheryl Morgan from California were there, trying
to interest local fans in buying memberships to the 2002 Worldcon, ConJosé.
Janice Gelb, the DUFF delegate, had completed her month-long stay in Australia and
had gone back to the United States by then, but the current GUFF and TAFF delegates,
Paul Kincaid and Maureen Kincaid Speller, were at the meeting, like us with cameras
primed. (We'd taken several photos of each other during the convention -- so many,
actually, that we came to call them 'drive-by shootings'.) The MSFC meeting and the
group dinner that preceded it turned out to be our best opportunity to meet local
fans, even more so than Aussiecon. It was the only time we really had a chance to
talk with the 1998 DUFF delegate, Terry Frost, and Aussiecon's Fan Guest, Bruce
Gillespie (whose fine fanzine, SF Commentary, was surprisingly not a Hugo
finalist). We didn't stay with fan friends during our additional time in Melbourne,
but we did have meals with some of them -- Alan Stewart and Donna Heenan one evening
and Irwin Hirsh another. We'd been looking forward to meeting Irwin, whom we'd just
missed several times during the convention. After our meal with him, he led us to
the site of the previous two Melbourne worldcons, the former Southern Cross Hotel --
now a moribund site, fenced-off from the street and undergoing either a massive
renovation or outright demolition (we're not sure which). If we'd stayed in
Melbourne one more day, Irwin was going to get us into an Aussie Rules football
game, which would have been fun, but by then we were in Sydney.# # # #
"Sydney is a glittering, lively city with a fabulously beautiful harbour at its centre." -- Lonely Planet's New South Wales
guidebookSydney is a city that more than lives up to
its reputation. We spent only three days there together -- a severe miscalculation,
as there's a lot more to see and do in Sydney than can be fit into a long weekend.
We tried to maximize our remaining time, so we did some of the most obvious,
touristy things, such as a tour of the Opera House and a Harbour Cruise, at first
opportunity. In fact, we might have done the Harbour Cruise a bit too soon
-- our first night in the city we reserved for an evening cruise, but the recorded
commentary that pointed out all the notable things to see on the shore was the same
one used for daylight cruises. So when we were told that some of the mansions on
the shore of Double Bay were owned by movie stars such as Kevin Costner and Tom
Cruise, what we saw out there was mostly darkness. And when the recorded commentary
described how you could get to the Sydney Zoo by taking an inclined railway from the
ferry terminus at the harbour, all we saw up there was a black hole. Still, both
the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge are spectacular at night, and the best view
of each is from the middle of the harbour. So was it worth the fare? We thought
so, but ours wasn't the only opinion. One of the other passengers on the cruise, a
teenager with a backpack, must have been disappointed by the view, or else he'd
seen it all before. Not two minutes after the ferryboat left Circular Quay he was
sound asleep, and didn't awaken until the tour was almost over. We left the pier
wondering if he had found that a gently-rolling boat was a personal cure for
insomnia!
The more time we spent at the Circular Quay
waterfront, the more certain we were that the real 'signature image' of Sydney, the
one you remember best about the city, is the Harbour Bridge, not the Opera House.
It's one of the largest steel arch bridges in existence and dominates the harbour
skyline, though not everybody in Sydney likes it very well (some refer to it as
'The Big Coathanger'). You can see the bridge from almost every point of interest
in the city, and we found that it crept into many of our photos of Sydney, even the
ones where we weren't trying to include it. About the only way avoid it was to
actually be on the bridge when taking photographs! There's a pedestrian
footway that crosses the bridge on its east side, the side the Opera House is on,
and there are several places midway that are ideal for photographers. The only
problem is the brisk winds, but there's a high mesh fence that will capture a hat
on even the breeziest day. For the more adventuresome, there's the Bridge Climb,
where it's possible to actually walk up the arch of the bridge to its very top,
about 150 meters above the harbor, with only a waisthigh railing between you and the
abyss (though you're tethered to the railings for safety). The view up there is
said to be spectacular, but the price is, too -- about one hundred Australian
dollars per person for the experience. We decided to take a pass on that.
Something we found a little more accessible (as well as affordable) was the Sydney
Observatory, located on a hill not far from the bridge. There was more to see there
than we thought; besides the usual complement of telescopes there were also some
interactive video games that served to educate schoolchildren (and us oldsters too!)
about the nature of the cosmos and some of the deep sky wonders it contains. But
best of all, it was located in a picturesque park, on the site of an old fort, right
there in downtown Sydney; it's not only a good place for astronomy, it's also a good
place for events like wedding receptions, and there was one going on the day we were
there. We might have joined the festivities, but we were dressed a bit too much
like fans. Besides, our accents would have given us away!
Time passes too quickly. After our three
days in Sydney, Nicki's vacation time had just about expired; as much as she wanted
to extend the stay, it was time to return to North America. Rich's stay was
actually a bit longer than that; he had a technical conference to attend in
Singapore before he came home, so he remained in Sydney an additional five days,
taking walkabouts in the scenic headlands that separate Sydney Harbour from the
Pacific Ocean, trailwalking Pacific vistas near Bondi and Manly Beaches, and even
spending a day touristing and shopping with two North American fan friends (Jeanne
Mealy and John Stanley, from Minneapolis) who were still in the country. Our trip
to Australia was a true voyage of discovery for us, and what we'll take away from it
are the myriad images and memories of people, things, events, and sights encountered
along the way. One of them happened the second night of our stay in Sydney. Susan
Bellenger, a fan we'd met on the day trip to Healesville, invited us for dinner out
to her home in Merrylands, where the skies are much darker than in Sydney or
Melbourne. It was there that we finally got to view something we'd been wanting to
see for decades -- Alpha and Beta Centauri and the stars of the Southern Cross. The
total unfamiliarity of the southern sky served to remind us how far we were from
home, and how exotic the southern hemisphere was to us; the Southern Cross, like
Australia had become for us after two weeks there, was the only part we felt we
really knew anything about. There's a lot more to see and do Down Under; someday we
hope we'll get another chance. But as for finally seeing the Southern Cross, it
turned out there was a hidden connection for us that we hadn't known about: the
second brightest star in the constellation, Beta Crucis, also has a more
formal name. It's known as 'Mimosa'. All illustrations by Sheryl Birkhead Photo of Rich, Kate, John and Nicki by Adrienne Losin Photo of Nicki, Rich and Irwin by restaurant waitress. Photo of bridge by Nicki Lynch All other photos by Rich Lynch |
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