My piece of Australian history

I guess that not many people will have heard of this place – Wollongong is a coastal town, about 2 hours by train down from Sydney. It’s meant to be New South Wales’s 3rd largest town (think Herne Bay with a million times more space) but when we got there it was almost deserted, apart from the Max power boys and their blinging Ute’s.

The reason for going there was we wanted to see where my mum, my uncle and grandparents had lived when they moved to Australia back in the sixties. We didn’t think that the building would still be there as the trend in Australia is to knock anything down that is over 20 years old, but we found it, pretty much next to the beach (apart from the new Rugby stadium which is now in between), and it was a bit strange to think that my mum had lived there all those years ago. Why they moved back to England I’ll never know, Wollongong is so tranquil and beautiful, and so much better than Medway! The beach was amazing, the sand squeaked when you walked on it, which was a bit odd, and the water was a bit cold as it opens on to the Pacific Ocean, but so clear – and only 3 bits of seaweed along the whole stretch we could see!