The Claibornes’ Australian Web Site
Life in Oz for an American-Australian Family
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Greetings to family, friends and acquaintances everywhere, particularly those of you in the northern hemisphere whom we don’t see as often as we’d like, but also to those casual viewers anywhere who may have heard about these little pages of essays and photographs and are merely curious to learn more about a naturalized Australian family’s life in the antipodes. On
this Home Page you’ll find links to ongoing pages, by which I mean the Check out the descriptions accompanying the underlined links you see below and click to visit the various pages of pictures and text containing an American immigrant’s view the “lucky country down under." When you are finished looking at a web page, click on the "Return to the Home Page" link to get back to this index. If you would like to view some older web pages that I’ve archived, go to the second links box below the box you are now reading. That will lead you to more than 50 web pages that I’ve created over the past five years. But the best place to start is the LIFE IN OZ link, which will quickly bring you up to speed on what we’ve been up to on the far side of the world for the past 10 years. This web page is refreshed with new content from time to time, so stop in occasionally and have a look.
NEW! IRELAND ADVENTURE: We’ve recently returned from a trip London and surrounds, and thence to Ireland, where we hired a car and for two weeks drove completely around the Emerald Isle’s coastline, stopping in villages and cities along the way. We had never been to Ireland and we both concluded that it is an incredibly beautiful place with delightful, friendly people. CLICK HERE for a travelogue and lots of photos of our journey.
See the OUR HOUSE link for details and pictures of the new (old) house we bought close to the hustle and bustle of the city. This wasn’t just a move, it was a lifestyle change for us, from a lovely but somewhat boring suburb to a lively, more diverse city neighborhood with a younger and far less one-dimensional demographic.
A recent travel destination was INDOCHINA, which we now put near the top of all-time favorite places we’ve visited during our 50 years of globetrotting together. Vietnam and Cambodia both provided surprises at nearly every turn as we traveled top-to-bottom of both countries by car, train, plane and boat. Click on the above link and hang onto your chairs. These are amazing places, both.
The “HACKS AT WORK AND PLAY” web page is a nostalgic gallery of snapshots of old newspaper mates and me taken while on the road during a 42-year career in the news business. The REMEMBERING PRIMITIVE COMPUTERS page is a look back at the dinosaur age of personal computers, particularly the old TRS-80 and the Tandy 200 laptops that we used on the road in those not-so-good old days of DOS.
Did you ever wonder which of Australia’s two largest cities is superior? The MELBOURNE vs. SYDNEY page, an unabashedly biased analysis by the creator of this web site, answers that question once and for all. The writer’s tongue is firmly planted in cheek, so stay calm you Sydneysiders.
Go to the CRICKET page for an appreciation of a game I have come to admire, after years of resisting it. You may think I’ve “gone troppo,” but it really is an interesting game. Once a year in Melbourne, in January, it’s Australian Open Tennis time, and if you go to the OZ OPEN link, you’ll find out how sports-mad Aussies, including this family, head for the courts to see the action.
Check out the KIMBERLEY page for great photos and a story about
our
Go to the JAPAN PAGE for a story, pictures and a day-by-day diary of our trip to fascinating Japan, where we sped around the country in bullet trains visiting a dozen historic cities and discovering a whole new (to us) culture. It was an adventure we will never forget, and I’m happy to share it with you. Check out the MAGGIE page for a view of Magnetic Island, just off Australia’s northern coast, where we’ve had holiday jaunts a couple of times with Lisa, Jacob and the kids. It’s one of numerous little islands along the Great Barrier Reef, all great respites from the cool winter climes of Melbourne.
A transcontinental TRAIN JOURNEY across Australia on the famed Indian-Pacific line is a glorious way of seeing Australia’s stunning “red center” and the vast Nullarbor desert. We traveled from Melbourne to Perth by train, and then drove southeast along the coast to Albany for some amazing whale-watching and visits to rain forests.
Finally, if you are really hard up for something to do, visit the SILLY PHOTO OPS for a gallery of pictures of Bill posing for ludicrous gag shots around the world from 1978-2007. I’ve formatted this page so that I am able to easily update it with new Silly Photo Op pictures as they happen. Yes, you’d be surprised how long I’ve been able to prolong adolescence!
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Email your kudos, complaints and crackpot rants about this website to: william.claiborne@gmail.com
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Below are a few links to some of this site’s more interesting archived web pages. If you fancy a trip down Memory Lane click on one of them. Later, you can click HERE if you would like to go to some more—even older—archived pages. I’ve kept this web site going for most of our 10 years in Australia, so there’s quite a large selection from which you can choose. New pages are being added from time to time.
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Photomontage of the Family in Australia Sarah Morse Claiborne
July 13, 1965 - May 27, 1985
She’s in Australia, too, in our hearts
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