Past tense

August 19th, 1963... me at 3 and a half years of age, my mum 32 and my dad 39 on a not-too-cold winters day in Byron Bay, Australia.

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My parents had arrived in Australia some 6 years earlier and were busy building up a new life in a country they were having difficulty understanding and yet loved dearly. My father had just finished his studies, we'd moved away from Sydney to the Northern Rivers (some 100km south of Brisbane) where my father had been appointed a few months earlier and life was on the up and up. I had a little brother by then, who was 15 months but not on this photo for whatever reason.

We lived about 30km inland from where this picture was taken, in a small village with about 200 inhabitants in which we felt truly at home. A time and a place in which life was easy-going and uncomplicated, children could be just that and didn't need to worry about all that much. Where trust was a given and not something that needed to be achieved time and time again. Strangers were taken up well in the community, nobody really made much fuss beyond the blatently obvious and we just got on with our lives together.

How much different than today, when even our next door neighbour can be subject to suspicion for being just slightly different, foreigners mistrusted at best and vilified at the first signs of non-acceptance of "the rules" dictated by an "in-crowd".

How sad.