The world from my window

My great-uncle's last resting place is in a cemetery on the outskirts of Casino, the beef capital of Australia. Mr Grigg and I walked through the rows and rows of headstones in the baking New South Wales heat. A shout went up from the left. 'Here it is,' Mr Grigg said. We had finally found it. 'In loving memory of James Walter Hull, died 13.12.73 aged 76. Always remembered.' I pondered for a while and thought of the adventures Uncle Jim must have had since landing in Australia in 1925. Driving the post coach and horses, seeing and buying the 4,000-plus acre farm at Rappville and then setting up home there with his young cousin Percy, who was to die a few years later in a flu epidemic. Mr Grigg and I sat and drank beer in the Commercial Inn, built in 1911 and still stuck in place between the pioneering days and the 1960s. We were told the town had been used as the set for 'that Pommy show Heartbeat ', which is being broadcast on Australian TV in the autumn. T...

Hi there... Haven't blogged in ages but so much has happened on our Antipodean adventure, and much of it without the aid of the internet. Since my last post, Mr Grigg and I have been Waltzing Matilda in Sydney, driving up the coast to Brisbane sampling the delights of the Hunter Valley, looking at the Richmond Valley sugar cane fields through the expert eye of a Somerset farmer who emigrated out here in the 1940s and exploring the sub-tropical rain forests. And the highpoint? Finding remnants of my great-uncle's life, with a TV series of his adopted town in the offing. Though, sadly, not from my pen but the creators of the Australian version of TV's Heartbeat , who obviously spotted the potential of Rappville, north New South Wales, before we got there. A one-horse, one-track, one-railway track town screaming out for a movie based around it. And in the screenplay I will never write, my great-uncle will be played by Eric Bana. Anyway, more of that later. Today, Mr Grigg an...

Belly boarding on Bondi, Mr Grigg says he does not need the board because his belly is big enough. The waves greet me like the famous scene from The Perfect Storm . I have a fear of being underwater that goes back to a time when I was saved from drowning at Instow, North Devon, as a child. So I slink back to the beach to watch the beautiful people go by. We are staying with The Fit Family in a cool Art Deco apartment building. Bondi suprises me because the residential areas are so green and shady. The city is like that all over, I realise, when I take in the view from the Sydney Tower. I look out across to Centennial Park, where at Sydney Showground my grandfather enlisted in the ANZACs nearly 100 years earlier. This is a holiday about the past as well as the present. Lord and Lady G near Noosa, My Beautiful Cousin and the Twins in Adelaide, The Fit Family in Bondi, Mr Grigg's cousin - officially Australia's Laziest Man - in the sleepy coastal community of Harrington up the coa...