June 2015

houses

I’m sure you will all be very pleased to hear that speculation about house prices here in Australia, just as it is in England, is a very popular pastime indeed. There is much ongoing chatter and I did list some of the scary headlines I found in Google in my recent article UK and Australia: [...]

Dark MOFO

Dark MOFO. Image courtesy of Paris B-A Doesn’t sound very pleasant, does it? It even sounds a little scary. It’s not though, here’s what it is. MONA FOMA is an acronym, it stands for Museum of Old and New Art: Festival of Music and Art. Of course, MONA FOMA is still too long, so that [...]

rates

Rates, council tax, community charge, poll tax, whatever you want to call it, if you live in a house, you have to pay some kind of tax. In the UK this tax is called the Council Tax and here in Australia, certainly in Brisbane, it is known as Council Rates and Charges. Comparing UK Council [...]

Market

It’s not often I get up at 6:15 AM on a Sunday morning, but that’s exactly what I did yesterday. If you read Friday’s post called A Trip to Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, you will know that my daughter Elizabeth took off on her latest school trip on Sunday. It would have been a little [...]

Canberra

We like to travel and since we’ve been in Australia, which is about 7 and a half years now, we’ve done quite a bit of it. When we had a holiday in Perth earlier in the year, it meant we have now been to every single state or territory capital in Australia. Except one. One [...]

ANZ

Last month the reprint of one of my Australia and New Zealand magazine articles was on the rather contentious subject of housing; it was called UK and Australia: The House Price Debate. Nothing contentious about this months reprint though, it’s about going to the beach for a long weekend. Long beachy breaks are what Australia [...]

Multicultural Australia

In a moment I’m going to show you a series of maps of Australia’s state capital cities. I’m sure they will instantly remind you of the kind of maps that are thrust before us as the election results come through on election night. Don’t worry, it’s not that, there’s no need to hightail it out [...]

cone snail

I have mentioned cone snails before on this website and I have a video about them on my page called Dangerous Creatures of Australia: More Bad Things! On the same page you will also see a list of some of our other dangerous sea life. I think it’s fair to say that danger lurks in [...]