I went to the Sydney Museum yesterday and absorbed some history of the white colonizers and the Aborigine people who lived in the area. I didn't know that Captain Bligh was one of the Governor Generals !

But really my main activity is just being here to try and pick up the interrupted conversation with my grandmother. Trying to catch up the threads of my past and tie them up... slippery things knots. I leave Manly and catch a ferry, then a train and change trains then I get a bus from Gordon Station (yes we have a station named after us !) and finally after about two hours I arrive in St Ives in the retirement community my Grandmother lives in. We have a cup of tea and sit in the shade. Talk about current matters - my brother has just bought a bigger house - probably to try and contain the Cutest Niece In the World (TM)'s ever expanding toy collection - and I bring a print out of the detials from the estate agent 10, 000 miles away in Cambridge. Then we move to the past. The three brothers from Russia one who went to Ireland (her grandfather), one who went to America and one to Australia. Moskewitz? I must ask on Monday. The French relatives who are all dead and unknown and unnamed. 'My mother never spoke of them' without a name I will never be able to trace them. Nearer in time visiting the UK in the 1980's without my grandfather. Staying near the Ritz in a small hotel but sailing into the Ritz and getting the receptionist to post her letters. She was and is a tiny but very elegant Grandmother so I'm sure she had the style to pull that off. She travelled a lot with my grandfather, in style and first class. She saw Nureyev and Fonteyn dance inLondon it must have been at Covent Garden. Apparently tea and cakes was served in the interval - they must have had a box.  They also heard Callas sing (my grandfather fell asleep!).  I hunger for stories. Never enough.