The Beginning of the Year

Hello one and all. We're a couple of weeks into 2009 and things are beginning to start happening.

The new students will be turning up in the coming week, and things begin in earnest next Monday. I am still (at the time of writing) unsure of some of the things that I will be doing so I can't, at this stage, predict how busy I'm going to be. I suspect that I'll be very busy in the opening months of the year, as it'll all be new to Ruth and I. I think I'm teaching Old and New Testament, which appear to be the first two teaching modules. This might mean that I'll be packing a lot in before Easter, but I'm looking forward to the challenge. I'd be lying if I wasn't said I was apprehensive about it as well. It's all new and it'll be a steep learning curve - and we're right in the middle of sorting out the visa too. We ended up packing a lot in to the last six months and I think the next six will be even more tiring.


We've been in Sydney for a few days. It was nice to take advantage of the summer weather and visit the beach. We also traveled up the Sydney Tower, which gives a view of the city from high in the sky. I suppose it's a bit like the London Eye, but it doesn't move about. Actually, Sydney from the sky looks like any other city from the sky. The things you'd really like to see (such as the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House) tend to be obscured by high-rise office buildings. A good time was had by all, though we did a lot of walking and we left behind a box in Ikea.


So it'll be an intense couple of weeks, and an interesting few months. I think that one of the key things for me will be to keep trying to work God into the centre of what I'm doing. I can easily see all this becoming a comfortable 'routine' and that's part of what I was trying to avoid by coming to Cornerstone in the first place. I want to make sure that I don't end up wasting my time on projects that appear to be worthy but turn out to be secondary - or worse.

I'll let you know how things are going. God bless.

New Year Update

Hello all, and a Happy New Year.

Just thought I'd write you a quick update since we've finally entered 2009. I finished my Certificate IV course on New Year's Eve, which was a cause for celebration in itself - though I haven't had my work marked yet so it's possible that I'll still need to do a few bits and pieces to satisfy the assessor. This means that Ruth and I can finally begin the visa application process - and with only three months to go before we get kicked out of the country it's about time.

Ruth I have to work our way through medicals and police checks, so we're probably not going to be able to submit the actual visa for another month at least. If you're inclined that way, please pray for us as we negotiate with the bureaucratic Orwellian nightmare that is the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (if anyone from DIAC is reading this then I don't mean it. You're lovely people really).

Thanks to all of you who have kept reading through the dark times of 2008 - yes, that includes you Peter Idris. Hopefully I'll be able to keep you up-to-date with what's happening in Canowindra over this year. Provided that we're still here in a few months, that is.

That reminds me. I'd better change the name of the blog - The Webbs at Burrabadine is so 2008.

Hope that you had a great New Year, and keep watching the skies. Errr, I mean, this space. Keep watching this space.

Merry Christmas from the Webbs

So, all you people over in the UK will just be waking up to Christmas now (unless you've got kids in which case you've probably been up for hours already) and we've just put our kids to bed for the night.

We had a good Christmas day and hope that you enjoy/ed yours. Here are some photos from us. Now have a great New Year!

Little and Often...

OK, it's nearly 2009. Ruth and I have just moved to Canowindra to become staff at the Cornerstone centre there. I've nearly finished my Certificate IV in Workplace Training and Assessment and should be ready to apply for a visa in the new year. We've got a baby arriving in May. It's the perfect opportunity for a new start.

As a result I've decided that from henceforth I'm going to follow Ruth's rule of household cleaning - "Little and Often..." My goal is to update the blog a lot more frequently in 2009, but probably with shorter updates. It was too hard to write a long essay every week/fortnight/month/quarter, so maybe it will work if I write a paragraph or two a lot more frequently.

So that's it. More and less coming your way in 2009.

Have a great Christmas and a brilliant New Year everybody.

Tortured Genius...

I can't really do anything other than apologise profusely to the two people who are still following this blog (And I think that one of them keeps coming here by mistake). I have been very busy recently, but that's not much of an excuse. I just needed to manage my time better and make sure that this thing didn't drop off - but it did. So sorry about that.

I suppose that I could say that I haven't had much to actually write about. Yes, I suppose that would be a better excuse. It's been a combination of being busy and not actually living the exciting playboy lifestyle that I have previously painted of myself. I have, in fact, been living in a storage container on the Newell Highway for the past few months. Ruth came back from England and found a muddy footprint within a twenty metre radius of the house, so she kicked me out. My days have consisted of eating grass and scraping rust from the interior of my new home. I nearly have enough to make me a rust hat. Yessir, then I'll be set for the summer. Anyway, all of that is not really blog-worthy material so I haven't been keeping it updated.

Wouldn't that be the height of postmodernity, or irony or something, to update my blog with a post giving excuses as to why I haven't updated my blog? I am a genius.

Well, coming back to earth, I can let you know some real stuff that's been happening. I've finally finished the course that I've working on - apart from one bit that I'll tell you about in a moment. I've been doing this, on and off, for the past two years and it's nice to finally reach the end. It's been a long struggle, but I finally made it and that's good. Now we have to think about what we're going to do in the next year. Our ideal plan is to stay on at Cornerstone and join the staff at the first year centre in Canowindra. To stay on, however, we need to think about getting ourselves a permanent visa, and it would be easier for me to become a member of Bloc Party than get into Australia. Although you and I know the truth about my tremendous abilities, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship are not so enlightened. Apparently, I need to have a clearly defined purpose and role to come and stay in Australia, and for some reason vague descriptions such as 'brilliant genius' are insufficient.

So I have to do a little more training to acquire a qualification that Australia is actually interested in (unlike my Master's degree). It's no exaggeration to say that if I was a hairdresser, acupuncturist or private art teacher I'd be able to get in to the country a lot easier. Those are just three occupations that are on the Skilled Occupation List. "Tortured Genius", however, is not.

So, we'll be making some decisions over the next few months and I'll be working on more coursework (and filling our forms). And we'll see what happens.

This seems to be par for the course for Ruth and I. We find ourselves in situations where we've got an uncertain future and we have no idea how it's all going to pan out. I find it a lot more...exciting than I used to. We've been through this before and God has never let us down. I get annoyed that He leaves things so late, or insists on stretching us a little further each time but that's the way that growth happens. It would be nice to live an uncomplicated, safe life but I wouldn't swap our adventure for any amount of security. What Ruth and I have learnt about ourselves and God over the past five years is worth more than anything. The wisdom and experience that comes from finding yourselves unable to do anything other than trust God is priceless. Of course, more than ever we're now seeing the folly of investing yourselves in things that don't last. It's interesting to go through all this against the backdrop of a global economic crisis. Against the backdrop of a global economic crisis? That sounds like a great phrase to put in the trailer of the movie that our lives will become. "A MAN AND A WOMAN FACE AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE...AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF A GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS...WITH THE FATE OF THE WORLD RESTING ON THEIR SHOULDERS..." hang on - I've gone a bit wrong there.

I think I've said it before (in so many words), but I'll say it again anyway. If you're a Christian and life is not constantly challenging and stretching you then you're doing it wrong.

Actually, I have got a story for you. I was up on the roof this evening, trying to clean out our air cooler in preparation for the coming harsh, blistering summer. So I did what I though I was supposed to do and because I'm an awesome genius - I think I may have mentioned that earlier - I managed to short all the lights in the house. Oh dear. Apparently I was a little too indiscriminate with the hose. Now we have to wait until tomorrow to get an electrically-minded person to have a look and assess the extent of the damage that I've done. So I'm writing this by candlelight. Isn't that just the perfect mix of current and ancient technology. Blogging by candlelight. I really am a genius.

Home Alone

Hello all. No photos with this update because Ruth and the children are in the UK and she took the camera with her. She said that she "doesn't trust me with it" and put it in one of the suitcases. How long does a man have to live with the stigma of having once filled an entire memory card with photos of his own foot?

That never happened, by the way, but I needed to make something up to try and explain why my wife would have left me camera-less just so that she can selfishly take photos of friends, family and English grass. Where do her priorities lie? That's what I want to know.

I've spent some time in Canberra recently. I was down for a Warhammer tournament (Don't ask. Please. Don't) at the weekend and I stayed on to spend some time with Cornerstone Assistant National-Dictator Paul Roe. He was speaking at a conference for teachers in some of the Canberra Christian schools and I was there to - in his own words - 'make him look good' by not screwing up the photos and other multi-media things that he wanted. I failed in this task by screwing them up. Still, as we were talking to Christians they weren't allowed to think bad things about me so it all turned out OK in the end.

While in Canberra I got to visit Parliament House (where the Aussie leaders make decisions on big national questions - like "Prawns or Snags?" and "Who's bringing the stubbies?") and the National War Memorial/Museum. Did you know that the Aussies have one of the only four copies of the Magna Carta in the world? It's there at Parliament House. It was fascinating to read the Australian translation on a plaque next to the document. For example, the clause "At her husband's death, a widow may have her marriage portion and inheritance at once and without trouble" has been translated as "Don't come the raw prawn with me, mate. If Bruce carks it, then Sheila will be sorted. Fair Dinkum. She'll be apples."

That was another lie. She what's happening to me without Ruth to offer moral guidance?

The National War Memorial was very interesting. It's a massive museum really. Paul and I only managed to get around World Wars I and II and that was quite enough for one sitting. There's a closing ceremony every day - it included 'The Last Post' while we were there. The Memorial has been designed in such a way that you can see Parliament House across the city centre. The War Memorial is the place where you get a real sense of Australian identity, but it doesn't come across as being an identity that centres around the military. It's more that the Australian involvement in wars had shaped the identity of a very young country. The 'Spirit of the Digger', where you do the job without grumbling and trust your mates to see you through is very much at the heart of what it means to be an Aussie. I actually find it refreshing to be around a people who are proud of their history and acknowledge the way in which it has shaped them. I feel that we Brits are currently going through a stage of nervous embarrassment about our own national heritage and that won't help future generations to understand their own identity.

Canberra is a very deliberately designed city, which doesn't suit everybody. I liked it. It had a city feel, but it's pleasing to the eye and very green - I think it only has a population of about half a million people, which is pretty amazing for a capital city. It was also quite interesting to see all of the different embassies around the centre. They're quite noticeable and all in the same part of the city. The building style that the different nations have chosen really reflects their own cultural thinking. The Chinese embassy was full of stone dragons and Oriental bits and pieces, the Finnish embassy looked suitably Scandinavian and functional, the British High Commission was very understated and plain, while the US Embassy took up about four times the space of any other embassy and was crawling with security check-points. Fascinating.

Well, as there's no-one around to cook my dinner for me I'd better go and see what the mouse-traps have caught today. Thanks for reading, and have a good week.

The Hill is Broken

Hi everybody! Apologies for the lack of updates recently, but I've been a little distracted. I've spent the past month feverishly preparing a module on Acts to teach to the little sunbeams down at Broken Hill. Broken Hill is a Cornerstone first-year centre and they asked me if I'd like to spend a week teaching a module. Hence, I've been preparing for that.

Broken Hill is way out in the middle of nowhere, and that's saying something for Australia. It's a mining town and it's also notable for the being the area where they filmed the Mad Max films. The nearby village of Silverton is where they filmed the 'town scenes' from the first film. Ruth was able to go and see Silverton, but I wasn't able to because I was teaching. So I missed out on seeing something cool because I had to work. Here's a photo that Ruth took of Silverton Hotel. It was only when she was showing me the photos back here in Dubbo that I was able to point out to her that the car in the photo, parked in front of the hotel, is in fact the V8 Interceptor car from the film. The same one. Or at least one of them, as they used had about three I think. I've put another photo underneath - a better one of the car that I found on the Internet - and eagle-eyed readers will note that this is taken in front of the Silverton Hotel too. Of all the terrible things to happen to me in my life, not being able to go to Silverton and have a photo of me taken with this car is probably the worst. No exceptions.




Broken Hill is an interesting place. The houses contain a significant amount of corrugated iron, simply because it was light and easy to transport when they were building things. It's several hours from anywhere else in New South Wales and has a real outback settlement feel to it. The mining ensures that there are people and money around, but it also means that the local government had to regularly test soil, water and children for things like lead content. Everyone has filters for their tap water, and it's probably no coincidence that all three our of children were ill while we were there. In fact, I'm sure Ruth has been glowing since we got back - and I don't mean that she's pregnant. "What's a little fallout between friends?"

The teaching was a very encouraging experience for me. They had a really good group of first-year students and I hope I managed to fill their heads with some useful stuff about Acts. I enjoyed trying to make the lessons fun, and I also really like the emphasis that Cornerstone has on practical application - so as well as being able to pass on interesting historical trivia about Luke, Paul and Drusilla the Jewess we also talked a lot about how the principles of mission and church we find in Acts could mean something to us today. I wasn't sure about teaching Acts because my area of expertise is not really New Testament studies, and the group kept asking me difficult questions that I could only hazard a guess at - like "Where is the toilet?". They did seem to appreciate the course though, and I really appreciated them. I also got to play Risk 2210, which is like normal Risk but with a suitable Mad Max/Broken Hill/Apocalyptic theme.


For those who are interested, Broken Hill apparently got its name from a hill in the area which dipped at the peak so it looked like to was collapsing in on itself. The hill is now gone, I believe, to be replaced by a pile of dirt.

Here are a few more photos from Broken Hill, including a photo of me surrounded by my adoring students and one of the typical traffic problems in the town...





This'll be the last post before Ruth and the children are off to visit the UK. They're leaving on Thursday, so will be with you all very soon. Look after them for me. I'll write again some time - I won't say 'soon', but I will write again...