It was a pivotal moment in time for Victoria. In 1851, gold was discovered in the area we now know as Ballarat. Thousands of adventurers and risk-takers rushed to the region and turned the muddy goldfields into a bustling town, all-but overnight. Within two years, there were more than 20,000 miners of countless nationalities working on the field.

Visit Ballarat today and you can still see grand Victorian architecture everywhere, all built on gold. (Not literally you understand. At least probably not).

And just around the corner you will find Sovereign Hill, a place that recreates the atmosphere and events that existed in the 10 years following that momentous first discovery of gold.

I love a good historical tourist-attraction, I really do.

{Side note: when I was little I loved to visit Old Sydney Town and imagine myself travelling back in time. There was a “Time Tunnel” that you walked through to get from the place where you bought the tickets to the actual town. Eight-year-old Naomi harboured fantasies that she could do this MUCH better. For example, I would have built the Time Tunnel so that you couldn’t see one end from the other. And I would have had swirling coloured lights (something like the ones on the cover of ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ which I was totally into at the time) throughout, deliberately creating a disorienting experience as you walked through the tunnel. Half way into the Time Tunnel, when you could no longer see the entry or exit points, there would be change rooms and the biggest dress-up box you had ever seen, with enough clothes to fit everyone. And you would have to get changed into period costume so that when you emerged in Old Sydney Town, you and everyone around you would look the part. That way, nobody (let alone a very romantically-minded eight-year-old girl), would need to suspend their disbelief. Pretty cool huh?}

Back to Ballarat…

At some point during Primary School, everyone in Australia learns about the Eureka Stockade, which happened on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854. It was a rebellion, and the most significant of its kind in Victoria’s history. The rebels objected to the imposition of a Miner’s License, an exorbitant form of taxation on their gold findings, and at least 28 men died, with many more wounded. It was a classic (and in this case tragic) Australian story of the common man standing up against an abuse of authority, despite the odds and regardless of the consequences.

So this is Sovereign Hill, circa last Saturday:

One of the handy things about being the mother of a toddler is that you can go to these kinds of places and pretend you are doing it for your child, when really it is all about you.

Actually Madeleine could not have cared less about where we were or the cool costumes people were wearing or the historical significance of the town. Her key interests were: climbing up and down muddy steps; looking at turkeys in a sheep paddock; imitating the calls of the crows flying above us; licking my toffee-apple and then smearing sticky, red, stains all over her face. Most of these (minus the turkeys in the sheep paddock) we could have done at home, without the entry fee.

We tried to interest Madeleine in panning for gold, but she was more interested in walking at top speed into the creek, completely oblivious to her inability to swim or the sudden-return-to-winter climate of the day.

For my part, I loved the whole shebang. In particular, the toffee apple was the first I’d had since I was about 10. It was really REALLY good. Better than I remembered the toffee apples of my childhood being. And I went home with a red, sticky face, too.

Junior fashion notes: Madeleine’s adorable, furry vest was a gift from Target Australia. I must thank them (again) because it kept her warm and cosy on a very cold day, she LOVED wearing it, and I think she looked cute as pie in it, especially when teamed with skinny jeans and little love-heart sneakers (also from Target, purchased by me).

Please don’t blame me for the non-matching hat (knitted by a kind volunteer at Mr B’s work). Madeleine loves her hats, and she chose that one all by herself before we left the house.

This is my mother as a child, in a snowball fight with her best friend Lorna (they are still friends). Aren’t they delightful? (And can you possibly imagine how cold Mum’s bare legs must have been?) She grew up in a tiny mountains town north-west of Sydney, Australia, called Leura.

When my mother was 10, her school burned down. You’d think that having your school burn down would be every 10-year-old’s dream come true, wouldn’t you. But the day my mum’s school burned down, it very nearly took the children with it.

The school fell prey to a devastating bushfire that destroyed more than 158 homes (130 of them in Leura), shops, churches and a hospital. Four bushwalkers died while trying to outrun the bushfire up a steep slope at Blackheath.

It is terrifying to think how close those little students came to disaster, back in the days before fire drills and ‘orderly exits’. Can you imagine, today, a school principal racing through the halls yelling “Everybody run!” and watching the children scatter?

Recently that same school asked Mum to write down her memories of the fire, to share with the Years 3 and 4 children who attend the school today. This is Mum’s story.

A fierce mountains day*

When I was a little girl I lived in Lett Street, Katoomba, with my mother and father. My dad was an electrician. His job was to put electrical wires in houses and buildings, so that the lights and ovens and other electrical things worked. He would have to get up very early to do his job, and I used to eat breakfast with him at five o’clock in the morning. Even though that was many years ago, I still like to get up early.

Every year in December the owner of Everglades Gardens, Mr Sorenson, held a Christmas party for the children. I think I remember going to that party the weekend before the fire. When I woke up on the morning of the big bushfire in December 1957, I was thinking about how much I had enjoyed that party. I remember that it was a very hot day, even at five o’clock in the morning!

I was 10 years old. After I had breakfast and got dressed for school, I met my friends from next door, Lorna and Allen, and we walked to Leura School together, carrying our school cases. Our school cases were called Globite cases, and you carried them in your hands. They were very heavy. You could buy little leather satchels like the backpacks you have today, but they didn’t hold very much so most of us didn’t use them.

To get to school, Lorna and Allen and I walked up the steep hill to the Mall, then crossed the road and walked past the church. (In autumn, we liked to collect the leaves from the Liquidamber trees outside the church as they changed colour, and use them for art projects.) Next we walked over a wooden bridge to get across the railway lines, and finally crossed the highway, which was not very busy or dangerous back then, to arrive at school. Leura School had been converted from a little house, and each class was in a different room of the house. The stairs to that old house are still in the front garden of the school today.

When the bell rang, we sat down to our lessons with no idea that this was to become one of the most frightening days of our whole lives! We worked until the bell rang for Recess (which we called Play Lunch). No-one had much energy to play because it was so hot, but we still enjoyed the short break from lessons.

Not long after we went back to class, we heard the voice of the Principal (then called the Headmaster), Mr Hartcher, sounding different and a bit panicky. He hurried into our room, saying “Run! There is a fire coming very close to the school!” We could hear him running through the hallway with the same message in all the other rooms. When we ran into the hallway at the entrance of our school, we could smell smoke and the sky looked red and angry.

Some of the parents had realised the fire was heading for the school, and they arrived to pick their children up, but they blocked the doorway of the school so we couldn’t get out! They hadn’t realised that we all had to run away quickly, and they were blocking the only door that faced away from the fire. Mr Hartcher ordered them to move, but many of us children were too shy to push past them. I think I was one of the last to leave, because I did not want to squeeze past a mother who had started to panic.

At last I ran out the door and across the highway without even taking my school case, trying to get home as fast as I could. I ran across the railway bridge and the fire was so close that I could see flames in the grass next to the railway tracks. When I ran down the stairs of the bridge and onto the street, I caught up with a little boy who was only in Kindergarten. I ran with him for a little while, and the flames came closer and closer in the bushes and gardens behind us. Suddenly, the little boy cried out and I turned around to see he had dropped his school case, which he had been clutching tightly all this while. He tried to pick it up, but the fire was almost on top of us by now so I grabbed his hand and told him we needed to get away, and that he could always get a new school case.

By this time, some of the parents had gone to the school to pick up their children, only to discover that we had all left. So they were driving around the streets of Leura and Katoomba, looking for the children. The little boy’s parents arrived in their car, and took him away with them, leaving me alone. I kept running, and was very relieved not long afterwards to see my Dad’s car! Dad and I drove back home without really knowing what was the best plan for escape, as the fire seemed to be moving behind, in front and all around us.

It was a very scary time at our house. My parents packed our car with things like clothing and family photographs and insurance documents, thinking that these were the most important things to keep if our house burned down. We had to evacuate to the theatre in Katoomba Street. A truck stopped by our house and the driver offered to pick up anything large that we wanted to save, but Dad said “No thanks,” the important things like people were his only priority. Then the Principal Mr Hartcher and his wife arrived looking hot, with burns from the fire, to check that all the children had made it to their homes safely. Finally Dad drove us to the theatre. Mum and I waited there with all the others, while Dad went back to help fight the oncoming fire.

It is interesting how different people react to dangerous times. There were a few people in the theatre who tried hard to take our minds off worrying, by telling jokes and stories. Other people were quiet, some were agitated, and one or two were crying. Mostly, we were worried about our family members – usually men – who were fighting the fire to save their own and other people’s homes.

Later we heard that one of the teachers, Miss Nelson, had stayed at the school to make sure the children all made it out. That meant she was one of the last to leave and as she crossed the railway bridge, flames licked around the supports. I don’t really remember, but I assume those supports were made of wood.

The school burnt down completely on that day, but my Dad managed to save our house and some others in Lett Street. The fire came so close to our house that our garage wall was black and charcoaled. Mum said that the truck carrying everyone’s belongings was piled high, and there were things like fur coats (which were very expensive) with a goat sitting on top!

I seem to remember we had a very long holiday after Christmas that year, as we had no school to go to when the New Year began. Christmas was always exciting, and I usually thought it was the best thing about the summer holidays. But this year, it was hard to be really excited about Christmas. Some of my friends had lost their houses as well as all their Christmas presents, and it just didn’t feel right to be celebrating. Normally we went to visit my Nanna in Sydney every Christmas, but we didn’t go this year. Everybody was a bit unsure what to do next, and how to reorganise our lives after such a big change to our normally peaceful Mountains lives.

Finally in February 1958, a few days after everyone else, we started school again. But we still had no building to go to, so we had school in the Church of England hall in Leura. We were given pencil cases to carry to school every day, and exercise books and other supplies, but we didn’t have any library books. Since there were no computers in schools in 1958, library books were the only way we could research our projects. Encyclopaedias were very important but they were expensive, and most of us didn’t have them in our homes, so we just had to muddle through until our school library was replaced.

Eventually our new school was built. It was just one building (the one your office is in now), and it seemed very spacious and clean to us. It was wonderful to have desks to store our books in again, and stationery, and a library with exciting new books to read. We missed our little ‘house school’ but soon became used to the new one, and settled in nicely.

As long as I live, I will never forget the day of the 1957 bushfires. That day, the fire burned all the way from Katoomba Hospital right down as far as Springwood. It burned down many houses and buildings and trees.

* When Mum wrote this story for the children at her old school, she called it “A fierce mountains day” because when she recently went back to visit the school, the children sang a song by a local composer called “A mountains kind of day.” Mum said, “The song was very evocative and talked about mists and trees. I loved it.”

(All photos of the 1957 Blue Mountains Bushfires used here are from the Blue Mountains Library’s Flickr stream. The ‘before and after’ of the school are from an invitation to the official opening of the new school in 1958, that Mum kept.)

ps. This last photo is of a family in front of what used to be their house. The little girl’s name is Marion Weiss, and she went to the same school as my mother. In the comments under the photo another of my mother’s fellow students, Jean Collins, wrote this:

“I used to play with Marion Weiss when we were pupils at Leura Primary School – also burnt out in the 1957 fire. I remember running from the school that day, up the highway, with fireballs flying through the air and houses exploding. We took shelter in corner store, down past the Baptist Church. The church burned down, so did the corner store. Our house caught fire, but my brother Barrie put it out, and also saved the house next door to ours, in East View Avenue. The owners gave him five pounds reward. I have lots of memories of that dreadful day.”

Honestly it was a relief to get out of bed, even at 4am, because bed was so hot that sleep said “Ha ha, surely you jest!” while the fan droned ineffectually on through the long, dark hours and all I could think was, “When is it time to get up?” (Actually I thought one or two other things, mostly about Melbourne weather and weeks on end of heat and humidity, but those thoughts are not suitable to be shared in polite conversation).

On the flip side, there never was a better time to escape to the cool mountain air.

It was a four-day visit with Madeleine’s grandparents and, even though they were wonderfully well-prepared for us with a cot, a car seat, multitudinous toys and even a supply of nappies, packing Madeleine’s bags still felt like stocking up for the apocalypse. She took the early rise in her stride, laughing with glee as she crawled, commando-style, around the floors of the Qantas lounge at 5am; and entertaining fellow passengers with a very charming rendition of “bouncing not crying” once the plane took off.

Once in the mountains, Madeleine had more Nan and Pa kisses than she will ever be able to count, even if she grows up to become a mathematical genius (which admittedly is not particularly likely, given her genetic heritage). She had at least two baths a day because, unlike us, Nan and Pa actually have a big bath in their home. For Madeleine this was a splashy paradise. Baths were also popular with us because Madeleine has become quite a fan of custard… in her mouth, in her hair, over her hands, feet, arms, legs and anywhere else you can think of to dribble, flick, toss or smear a sticky, eggy substance.

The weekend was mild and verdant, full of apple pies and old-fashioned roses and a giant pumpkin from Mum’s garden. There were gentle walks up winding country roads; mountain ranges still and silent and old, just over there; picnics; a fairy garden; country cafes; an old dog wearing a Cone of Shame; and dear friends visiting for food and gossip and wine and table tennis and croquet and laughter.

My dad dug out some old papers that he had never read himself, and we discovered records of our family going back to the 1650s, all in one tiny village in England. So then we Google Street-viewed the village and it is adorable – farms and thatched cottages and Iron Age archaeological sites and all – and I got itchy feet.

Madeleine has discovered how to make a kissing sound, and the only thing she loves more than making the sound is having it reciprocated (same goes for the also-popular eating sound, raspberry sound and tom-tom drumming action). Yesterday morning Mr B reached over to kiss me and suddenly a big baby-head appeared millimetres from ours, making a “kiss, kiss, kiss” sound, accompanied by a massive grin.

My baby was so full of joy and love the whole weekend. It was so wonderful to watch her begin to form a real relationship with her Nan and Pa. She liked them so much that Mr B and I were able to go out for coffee each morning, just us, which is something we hadn’t done since she was born. It felt strange and free and lonely and lovely.

This parenting gig is so extreme, and working around a baby’s need for sleep and food – as well as the same baby’s desperate need to be close to her parents every. single. second – can feel incredibly limiting when it comes to doing anything for us. Not to mention it is colossally exhausting. But I don’t think I have known a happier time in my life than the days and weeks and months since Madeleine was born.

Before Madeleine was born, people told me about this weird time perception thing that happens when you have a baby. “The days are long but the years are short,” they said.

It is true. A day can drag on – and on and on – while baby refuses to sleep or feed and you can’t figure out why they’re crying and you just. want. to. sleep. And yet time flies by! One minute you have a tiny, floppy-headed, wrinkly-skinned newborn nestling into the crook of your neck and snoring, and then, in the blink of an eye, they are big and fat and bright-eyed and trying to make you laugh when they should be asleep.

The lesson, of course, is to cherish the moments. Even the frustrating, exhausting, tearful ones. This is something I have been trying to do, and I think it can apply to all of us, not just those with little children.

True to form, 31 December 2011 feels like about a zillion years ago, as well as yesterday. I thought I’d take a look back over some of my favourite moments, as captured on this blog.* Sure, some of them are profound (to me), but some appeal simply because they are pretty, or a bit quirky, or fun. I’m treasuring moments of all kinds.

* January: Noticing moments is also about noticing little and lovely things, like butterflies
* February: For Valentine’s Day, I shared the condensed version of a graphic novel I made for Mr B, recounting our long-distance romance
* March: Food, games and George Calombaris were at the local school fete
* April: A spot of creative writing. Insights into McArdle’s Mind, a man who gets lost in the world of his own thoughts, plus stunning ghostly trees by Irene Suchocki
* May: Do you remember this wonderfully redundant automated postcard machine?
* June: I’m kind of proud of this post on eternal life. I don’t often get too philosophical on my blog, but I did here. And this moment, also in June, was the doozy of all moments
* July: It was the strangest feeling to be no longer carrying my baby inside me, learning how to be an individual again came slowly and in fits and starts
* August: I love doing surprise little guerilla community projects, like this one
* September: The day I discovered my local herb and spice merchant was a very happy one!
* October: Pulling together this garden party for my dear friend Tonia was kind of a big deal for me, but super fun (plus my Mum & Dad were in town – hooray!)
* November: I visited the Mr Burger food truck and it was sublime. This post marked the beginning of my new Meals on Wheels series for this blog. Best research ever.
* December: This three-day hike in national parkland along the Great Ocean Road was stunning, and exactly what I needed

I’d love to hear from you. What are your favourite moments from your life in 2012?

* If you’ve been reading my blog for a little while, you’ll know that between August and October I switched across from Weebly to WordPress. In the process, I lost all the comments you had left on any earlier posts. I’m sorry if you look back and find your insights and conversations missing. Please know they mean the world to me and I still look back of them in the old Weebly editor from time to time.

Sometimes you don’t realise how desperately you need a weekend outside of the city until the ocean air is in your lungs, dense forest canopy shades your face, and your mobile phone is useless.

We are just back from three days of hiking in the bushland surrounding the Great Ocean Road as part of a group that’s raising funds to support cancer patients.

Madeleine absolutely loved it, singing lustily from her carrier as we hiked our way through the trees, and laughing every time anyone talked to her or squeezed her chubby cheeks (which happened quite often).

She kept on laughing while we trekked through rainforests, up mountains, along clifftop paths and over sand dunes. She laughed when we got back to our cabin in the bush wayyyyy past her bedtime, and laughed at the very suggestion of going to sleep while the sun was still up. She laughed even more when I gave in and took her down to have dinner with the rest of the group.

We all sat together around long tables on a wide verandah, drinking wine and eating cheese and making our own pizzas in an outdoor oven. In the darkening sky, koalas growled and kookaburras chuckled. Without warning, a big, blustery, summer storm broke overhead, sending down sheets of rain and at some point, while thunder rolled and lightening split open the sky, Madeleine finally fell asleep in my arms.

Later I put her down in a travel cot beside our bed, a gift from Baby Bjorn, and she slept beautifully all night. Slept like a baby, in fact. She barely moved until I woke her up for her next feed.

I’m so thankful to Baby Bjorn, because the cot was fantastic. You just pull it out of the case and it bounces into place: you don’t need a physics degree to put it together. It was small enough to fit in our tiny cabin room, but big enough for Madeleine to keep using it as she grows. The sides are at a kind of pyramid angle, making it super sturdy and safe, something very important to me because when she HASN’T been hiking all day, Madeleine thrashes and bumps around in her sleep like a washing machine full of towels. Plus there’s mesh all around which means my baby gets all the airflow she needs, and I can see her through the sides, but she still feels snug and secure.

I also used the travel cot as a playpen for her during the day when we weren’t hiking, putting it out on the verandah in the late afternoon sun to give Madeleine somewhere safe to roll around and play with her toys and show off how good she is at tummy time nowadays (really good).

How was your weekend, dear friend? Have you had a chance to get out of town lately?

* This post was sponsored by Baby Bjorn and Digital Parents Collective. Thanks so much for your support you guys. We couldn’t have left home without you!

Have you heard of the Capture the Colour competition? You post your travel pics in blue, green, yellow white and red, to potentially win prizes.

I love the theme of this competition, and the concept of storytelling that is to go along with the photos. So while my photographs are nothing special visually, I thought that just for fun, I’d use this idea to take myself (and you) on a little armchair journey through some old memories.

Blue
Steel blue water, blue sky and a blue warship, all reflected in the cool blue glass facades of Manhattan skyscrapers…

In 2009, two Australian warships HMA Sydney and HMA Ballarat sailed into New York as part of the centenary celebration of the Great White Fleet. I was lucky enough to be one of four Aussie journalists taken out by the US Coastguard to greet the frigates. I will never forget the early morning salt-slap of water against my face as we headed out to the mouth of the Hudson River; nor the surge of patriotic pride that took me completely by surprise as Sydney churned into view, white-clad officers lining her deck, and the strains of a band playing “Down Under” bouncing over the waves.

Green
On a trek through the Sacred Valley in Peru, we came across this group of school children playing football. The players and the field appeared seemingly out of nowhere as we emerged from dense forest. What with the green field, the green mountains and the thick forest, it was as though these boys were playing inside a green globe, above, below and around.

Yellow
I snapped this little fellow with his yellow truck, yellow striped mat and almost-yellow hair at the Lee Street fete in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year.

It was a poignant day for me. I was six months pregnant with my first baby, and Mr B and I had recently moved to Melbourne, the fourth state we’d lived in in less than a year and the fifth interstate move for me since I’d left New York only two years earlier. Finally we were settled, creating a home. And since the Lee Street school was where our little one would eventually go, we decided to visit to the fete. I think it was on this day that I really started to get clucky, and the reality of our baby-to-be sank in.

White
The white sails of this yacht, and the white sea-foam created by our own yacht, stood out in wonderful contrast to sea, land and sky during a sunset cruise in Newport, Rhode Island (USA).

I had taken two weeks away from steamy August in New York and stayed in a B&B that was a 300 year-old rum runner’s house overlooking Narragansett Bay. In between harbour cruises, I spent a lot of time visiting remote graveyards in the wilderness, researching the bizarre stories of vampires that plagued this corner of America as recently as 100 years ago.

Red
A sea of red terracotta rooftops, curving away into the distance in the Old Town part of Nice, France.

This was taken during our family holidays last year. Everyone else had gone down to the beach, but I wanted some time out so I climbed alone up stone steps cut into a cliff, to a kind of belvedere lookout from what was once, so I read, a Celtic castle ruin. I remember the sensation that you could almost reach out your hand and touch the roof tiles, although they were actually very far away. I didn’t know it at the time but I carried my baby with me on this climb, a tiny speck of a promise only a day or two old.

Part of the Capture the Colour initiative involves tagging five other bloggers who you think might want to take part. Finding five fabulous photographically-talented bloggers with a penchant for travel was easy. LIMITING the list to five was a lot tougher! Here they are:

Melissa of Press Play
Brandi of Not Your Average Ordinary
Deb of Bright and Precious
Katherine of Through My Looking Glass
Kate of Our Little Sins

Ladies, will you join me?

In which I woke up at 4am because my body knew I had to get up at 5am. I flew from Melbourne to Sydney and, when I arrived, the sun was high just like I remember it always being in Sydney and I thought all those Wettest Season Ever claims must have been imagined.

In which I had toast and tea with my parents in a cafe in my old neighbourhood of Surry Hills, and it was oh so familiar but also not. I realised that yet another place no longer felt like home, but that I was ok with that.

In which my dad and I roamed around The Rocks taking photographs, and my mother exercised the patience of a saint. Also, on seeing the photograph of myself at the top of this post, I realised I really should invest in some actual maternity clothes.

My parents have just returned from China and they brought back a bounty of cute outfits for Baby B, and a hand-engraved ink stamp with Mr B’s and my name and the symbol for ‘love’ to celebrate our first anniversary. While opening these presents I devoured a Thai lemongrass and basil stir-fry for lunch, and the chilli gave Baby B the hiccups.

In the evening my friend Sarah and I met up in Chinatown for noodles and dumplings and green tea ice-cream. The owner of the noodles and dumpling place came outside and played his violin for the crowd while we waited for a table. Once inside, Sarah and I had one of those brilliant creative brainstorms during which everything fit into place. Don’t you love it when that happens?

Later that night I watched incredibly bad reality TV in bed in my hotel room, and it was an unspeakable luxury.
Morning. In which I caught a taxi out to Rozelle to meet my friend Cara, and the driver was friendly and actually knew the way. This being such a short visit, Cara and I sipped chai tea and fresh juice and shared our lives on fast-forward. It is amazing what you can get through in just an hour when you have to.

Cara and Sarah had booked a private room for all my friends at the 3 Weeds, but we arrived early and I had to submit to the indignity of being a pregnant woman loitering on a pub stoop until it opened. Once indoors, I proceeded to sit like a fat, round queen bee for the next five hours while my friends dropped in as the afternoon suited them, to say hi.

My mum made a black forest cake for Baby B and it was sublime (and very cute). I was thankful, not for the first time or even the 100th time, for the wonderful friendships I have, and that love trumps distance.

How was your weekend?

That time when I was 16 and I saw a rainbow end at the bottom of the horse paddock so I ran down to see if there was a pot of gold. There was: the pure gold of looking up to see a magical band of colours begin just out of reach of my outstretched fingertips, curving up, up into the unending sky.

I danced under the end of the rainbow and my brother’s friend, still at the top of the hill, said it looked like I was dancing inside all the colour.

Somewhere on Route 66

It was more than 100 degrees outside the car. As I rolled the window down to place our order at Burger King, I swear my eyelashes singed. The sun-faded speaker box asked what I would like for lunch today.

Me: One fish burger, and…

Speaker box: Chicken nuggets, yes. Y’all want somethin’ else?

Me: No, a fish burger.

Speaker box: Ah beg pardon, two chicken nuggets. Got it.

Me: No chicken nuggets! None at all!

Speaker box: Take a deep breath, honey. We’ll get there. Speak slowly.

Me: F-I-S-H burger. Fish, like, um, fish swimming in the water.

Speaker box: Got it. One water. Anything else?

I met Mr B when I had been living in New York for just one week. He was there on a conference. He’d spent the past nine years based in Richmond, Virginia, but had moved permanently back to Australia a few months earlier.

What were the odds?

Two years later, when I moved back to Australia to live with him, I made him a little graphic novel of our crazy romance, for our first Valentine’s Day together. Here is the Reader’s Digest-esque condensed version.

(Sorry about the sometimes blurry text. I no longer own a scanner and these were snapped on my iPhone.)

Happy Valentine’s Day (week), all you lovers. And if you are searching for love right now, I hope you take heart from my story. You never know what (or who) awaits you in the strangest of places and circumstances!