Emma and I are having a city holiday this week after Dane was kidnapped by his grandparents. We decided to check out the Biennale of Sydney art show on Cockatoo Island, and caught the ferry over from Manly to dodge the throngs of Catholics in town to hang out with Benny the Pope. The art itself was generally self indulgent crap, but I think the main problem was it all suffered from being overshadowed by the incredible venue. We ended up zipping through most exhibits to check out the amazing old building and workshops, and you literally just needed to point the camera in any direction to get some great shots…

I sat down with Emma’s mum on the weekend (Dane & Theo’s Grandma Jenny) and had a look through some her family tree research.

One side of her family line goes back through the Kingsmills of Basingstoke (just up the road from the Lansburys in Romsey) and includes a long line of landed gentry and knights back to the 1200’s. The 4000 acre family estate at Sydmonton Court is now home to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Another family line is the Tanges, who came to Australia from Odense in Denmark in 1853. Emma’s great great grandfather, Anton Tange, became quite a wealthy tea merchant in Sydney, and in 1878 built a stately home for his 11 children in the southern highlands. Emma remembers visiting the derelict house when she was a child, but it has since been restored to its former glory, and was snapped up recently by Nicole Kidman & Keith Urban for $6.5m.

The Tange’s fell on hard times after a mistimed agricultural foray, but Emma’s great uncle Arthur Tange made his mark by being an influential public servant through the second half of the 20th century, working in the establishment of the Department of Foreign Affairs and then as Secretary of Defence in the 1970s. Arthur Tange’s biography has a great first chapter on the Tange family history in Australia.

More stories from this side of the family to come…

The snow season started well back in April with a big dump, then went into hibernation until last week. Some reports were predicting up to a metre over the course of the week, but the first part of the front turned into a total fizzer. Al, in his eternal optimism, had caught a bus down to Termeil with the plan to zip up for first tracks on Wednesday morning, but there ended up being no point rushing. Instead, we enjoyed a leisurely cruise through a beautiful sunset down to Jindabyne, thinking Thursday would see some action from the next front. Again, a bit of a fizzer, but it did start dumping through the day and accumulated about 25cm by nightfall, right down into Thredbo Village. Al had been amongst it all day, starting with rock hopping early, turning into freshies by the afternoon, while I’d just hung out in the Alpine Hotel doing a bit of work and waiting for it to fill in.

We zipped up to Dead Horse Gap on sunset in the peak of the blizzard, and there was enough snow accumulated to ride about 2kms of downhill pitch on the main road towards Thredbo. The chaos on the road back to Jindabyne was amusing to begin with, but the novelty soon wore off after an hour of 20kmh behind a bus that refused to yield for faster cars…

It was all worth it on Friday morning though, as a total of 45cms had fallen in 24 hours, really filling things in properly. I wouldn’t call it “all-time” as we couldn’t access some of the better terrain, but it was easily one of the better days you’d expect to get during the season…

We splurged on a nice 10 megapixel digital SLR camera before the end of the financial year (for half the price of a 4 Megapixel camera I bought 5 years ago), so I needed to test it out on the only subjects at hand. It’s got some great manual features, and allows you to get some nice low-light effects…

We’ve now decided not to tell Dane about when other kid’s parties are on, as the days leading up are too fraught with anticipation… “Is it Mali’s party today Dad?” - “No Dane, it’s on Thursday” - “Is it Thursday now Dad?” - “No Dane, it’s Monday” - “Awwww - when will it be Thursday Dad?” - “Three more sleeps Dane” - “Awww - that’s too long! Thursday’s are stupid!” - and on it goes for three more days…