Saturday - Wednesday, October 1 - 5 2011 (diary)

My friend Malveen White just won the Wide Bay Australia 1st prize Award for watercolour, at the Bundaberg Art Festival this year with adjacent entry.
(Bundaberg is a prosperous sugar cane town on Australia's East coast, about 400 km north of Brisbane.)
All Malveen's paintings consistently reveal this artist's impressive technical skills (attained through a long period of never faltering patience and tenacity) with which she conquers this so difficult medium of watercolour painting.
During her working career Malveen was the financial manager first for one of Queensland's Universities and later for the two (formerly) Pacific Gateway International Colleges in Australia run by my daughter Babette.

This preference for, and insight into, the fundamental details of business reality during her career have continued through Malveen's present artistic life. Here too she clearly feels most comfortable and motivated by artistic interpretations which closely reflect the visual detail of the interplays of shape, body language and light of day to day reality.

Over the years I have urged Malveen on occasions to move towards more impressionistic or abstract interpretations, but apart from a few isolated forays in that direction she has always returned to what she knows best.
Only very recently have I come to realise that I much prefer reality over imaginations and abstractions myself. For I love to write, but only when dealing with facts, realities, associations. I much enjoy intelligent analysis or the correlation of sometimes apparently unrelated objects, subjects, facts, conditions. But these are all aspects of reason or reality.
I could not write a novel, fairy tale, poem or fictional short story in any shape or form, for one simple reason : it does not motivate me. I do love reading novels, but when it comes to my own urge of self expression I prefer (no, need) to do that directly, "in your face", rather than taking the "scenic route" through metaphors or imagined stories.

So, much to the surprise (I am sure) of both of us, Malveen and I have more in common when it comes to the modus operandi for our creative self expression than we had ever realised before.

Thursday - Monday, October 6 - 10 2011 (diary)

It definitely has been a week of revived old contacts and establishing new ones.
My son Jeroen and wife Lisa have returned from Taiwan where they collected their newly adopted child, 7 years old Jia. They had a pleasant flight back home, stopping off on the way in Bali for a few days. Jia has now been in Australia for a week and shows no signs of homesickness whatsoever.
I met him yesterday (Sunday afternoon) for the first time and he is quite a lively young fellow full of energy.

As I write this (Monday morning) he has his first day at school. The Primary school in the Northern Darwin suburb of Moil has special facilities for children like Jia (adopted children, refugees, etc.) who are new to the country and speak little or no English at all. There is another adopted child from Hong Kong in Jia's class and one of the teachers speaks Mandarin. Jia had a look a the school last week and loved his classroom.
I believe Darwin to be the ideal place for him, with a similar climate as he is used to and a multi-cultural Asian society. From what I saw of him so far he feels already quite at home here.

After spending a couple of hours with my new Grandchild I went on to have dinner with Bas and Jantine.
Bas studied Geology at the same University as I did and arrived in Newcastle, Australia, with wife Jantine just two weeks after our own arrival there.
So the first year (in 1966) the four of us went together through the totally new experience of starting life in this wonderful new country. After one year they went off to Canberra while we remained in Newcastle for another two years, but that first year together was a most memorable one.

After that we only met on a few rare occasions and I believe the last time we met was around 40 years ago, so the three of us had much to talk about.

One of my two sponsor children through World Vision, José from Brazil, has left school and got a job, and with that has left the sponsor program.
I am very pleased to have been able to help him financially through his education. It is great to see that he now can support himself.   Consequently World Vision offered me another child to sponsor, a 10 years old girl, Kamila, also from Brazil, and I have agreed to that.

Another even older connection to my past came through an email from Ingrid, the oldest daughter of my father's best friend Tom Jerne. It was nice to hear from her.   Inge now lives in Mexico and, who knows, perhaps we too will catch up perhaps in Europe on day in the future.   The Internet has made it so much easier to find and maintain contact with friends or acquaintances from the past. That is really great.