Antipodes

One of these days, my native town of Grafton in Australia will have a new bridge over the Clarence River. The northern area, which includes ...

Apparently my father "Bill" Skyvington , as a teenager in Grafton, had made friends with a well-known family, named Clunies-Ro...

It was only a few years ago that I started to become obsessed by asking various practical questions, and attempting to find answers. Our mod...

I've often thought that some of our greatest friends in Waterview (South Grafton, Australia), in the late 1940s, were the Howley family....

When I was a schoolboy, we were expected to learn an assortment of curious old units of weights and measures. One of the strangest of these ...

In the dark lounge room of the Walker house at Waterview, there was an upright piano. I had started to take weekly piano lessons from an old...

My mother used to tell us an amusing anecdote about a car excursion from South Grafton to the beach at Yamba. Her oldest brother, Eric Walke...

If Don Skyvington were alive today, he would have turned 70. Our father Bill Skyvington happened to die at this same date, four days short...

My mother’s eldest brother, Eric Walker , liked to point out in his typical loudspoken manner that I was conceived under Bawden’s Bridge , l...

I've acquired the latest version of Photoshop Elements . Bewildered by its amazing visual gimmicks, I'll need to get used to employi...

When I was out in Western Australia with my son François , in 1987, at the time of the fabulous America's Cup regattas, we collected var...

My uncle Isaac Kennedy Walker —known variously as " Farmer ", " Ken " or " Bargy " (baby talk for the word ba...

The coloring of this portrait of Don and me is simplistic: That's because the tints were applied manually by me, when I was about eleve...

Click the above image to obtain the original scanned photo. After several decades of cerebral problems, difficult to elucidate and apparentl...

Over the last couple of days, I've started work on another chapter of my maternal genealogy, concerning ancestors from Ireland. In fact,...