50th anniversary

Exactly fifty years ago today, a group of us including Rafflesians Teo Hock Hin (Roy), Teo Oon Hock, Khoo Pong Tiah (Paul) and Mak Fong Keng (from RGS) landed in Sydney with much excitement and enthusiasm to pursue various courses under the Colombo Plan Scholarships.

The locals were also looking forward to the day - no, not for our arrival, as Asian students in those days were more of curiosities than anything else, but to the Decimal Currency Day when the old imperial currency system of pounds, shillings and pence (and other denominations) was to be replaced with dollars and cents.

Of course we were quite familiar with the British currency for we were required to learn them during our school days under colonial administration, even though Singapore was mercifully given the decimal currency right from the beginning of British rule. But just like everybody else in Australia, we had to learn to cope with the inter-conversion of the two currencies during changeover years.

As Australia marks the half century of currency change, we look back at some fond memories!

Australia's first fifty cent coin.

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Terrys Creek

On Yvonne's anniversaries, we usually go for a long walk. Today was expected to be a bit hot, so we took a short walk to Eastwood via the Terrys Creek Walk instead. We were not aware of the existence of the  Terrys Creek Walk until recently and were quite surprised by its beauty. Could not resist a selfie!

Something among the clivias . . .

I spotted something among the clivias . . .

On closer look, I realised they were tiny spiders, just hatched !

Pity I do not have a more powerful close-up equipment, but this gives an idea of what they looked like:

Tiny baby spiders from Kin-Mun Kan on Vimeo.

Christmas 2015

Sally and Ashok joined us for the Christmas dinner. It was quite a gastronomic experience!.

Petti Pathiri (like curry puffs)

Mallicharu (Curry chicken)

Ashok's vegetable dish

Sally's salad

Kay's spectacular layered dessert took 3 days to make!

My ham looked terrible, but no one complained !

Fire! Fire!

Our coffee grinder, the heart of our espresso making system, spontaneously went up in flames this morning. Kay quickly covered it with a fire blanket and it was brought out into the garden and hosed down. Just to be sure, Kay also emptied the fire extinguisher on it.

The grinder minus the hopper lying on its side in the garden.

The grinder drenched in fire extinguishing foam.

The view from the bottom of the blackened motor.

The hopper

Base of the hopper melted.

It was lucky for us that Kay happened to return to the kitchen to answer the oven alarm that went for something else she was doing.

The grinder had been playing up for a while. We guessed that it had overheated after the last grind and coffee grounds remaining in the machine self-ignited.

Amazingly, the twenty year-old fire extinguisher still worked.

Auspicium Melioris Aevi

Auspicium Melioris Aevi

I had previously thought some clever guy who knew Latin, perhaps an old school principal, had thought it up as a motto for my alma mater, Raffles Institution. 

Then one day I read that it was Sir Stamford Raffles’ motto. That did not surprise me, after all he founded  RI back in 1823.  It is still the family motto of Raffles' descendants.

Imagine my surprise when I found this in Melbourne's St Paul’s Cathedral last week.

 

It prompted me to search further, and I found that the Orders of St Michael and St George was established in 1818 and are awarded to holders of high officers in the British Empire. The Order has several classes, the highest of which is GCMG. Many heads of state had been awarded this title, including former President Ong Teng Cheong of Singapore. Whether or not Raffles received the award and therefore adopted the motto is unclear (to me).

Then I discovered that the same motto is being used by Ipswich State High; This was news to me even though we used to live less than half an hour's drive from that school.

There is so much in just a motto.

And here is one brave Rafflesian showing off his singing skills.  (click here)

Melbourne - Chinese old and new

During our short trip to Melbourne last week, we spent a morning at the Melbourne cemetery primarily to look up memorials of explorers and prime ministers, but there was an intended discovery – dozens and dozens of old Chinese graves that dated back as early as the middle of the 19th century, the days of the Gold Rush.

Most interesting were the origins of those old Chinese immigrants, which by tradition were indicated on the gravestones; they all invariable came from Taishan and Xinhui, two of the Siyi (“Siyup”) or Four Districts west of Guangzhou, where my paternal grandfather was born. People in Siyi all speak a special common dialect which is a variation of Cantonese that predominate in the Guanzhou and Hong Kong area, a dialect which I do not speak because I was brought up using my mother’s Hokkien dialect. Dad had told me long ago that many Siyi people emigrated to Melbourne (and San Francisco) and there in the Melbourne cemetery I found were the proofs! What I did not realise was that most of the Chinese immigrants of the Gold Rush days came from the Siyi area.

Like Sydney, there are many Asians in Melbourne today and many of them from China. Some are obviously students, while others travel in groups as tourists. Associated with the growth of the tourist industry has been the proliferation of shops supplying goods and services to Chinese visitors, same as what we have noticed in Sydney. The shops not only sell goods popular with the visitors but also arrange for the goods to be sent separately back to China, saving them the inconvenience of carting the goods themselves.

To Kay and I, the most interesting of all was the nature of the goods that the shops stocked. Apart from items such as lavender bears made popular by Xi Jinping and his wife, there was a big range of products made from sheep and goats, and not just the traditional fleece and lanolin but far more exotic such as placenta of sheep, added into moisturisers or in tablet form as health supplement! Who says Australia does not have a manufacturing industry!