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Thought you were doing a life term? Seems the tide may have changed. Found a buried treasure at the bottom of the garden? I'd love to leave but financially would be worse off .Still live in hope though.

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Always intended to go back on retirement, when I could no longer earn the same. Buried treasure would be lovely, but the decision was forced on me a little earlier than expected by serious illness issues back home, which mean I cannot risk the covid border closure issues hitting me again. I know, everyone says "ït won't happen again" but the fact is it happened once therefore cannot be ruled out. I shall be much worse off financially and will be looking for some kind of work, but sometimes there are more important things in life than money.

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You can certainly never count on the border remaining open. Some things are certainly more important than money, though an ever number of Australians would disagree these days. I'm in the early process of attempting to acquire an EU passport which would be more ideal in my circumstance. Brexit along with Covid really knocked my planning and set back departure by a number of years.

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The saying went back in the day Aussies were not discriminating. They simply hated everybody.

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Well I’m sending you every good wish for a smooth landing back in the UK 🤞🏻💜

Last white hot Christmas too 😀

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I thought Covid had destroyed all my plans, and it certainly threw the financial planning into chaos, but as you say, some things are more important than money, hence I'm going as son as I realistically can, even though I'm surrounded by people pointing out it doesn't make financial sense &its a bad time to move. The other thing they say to me almost daily is that 'ÿou're only a 24 hour flight away" - my retort to that is that they have short memories as our office was heavily involved in border closures and quarantine arrangements. Nothing to stop it happening again.
Life is too short.

Thank you :)

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

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I have known many many people who stayed in their adopted countries for financial reasons and while a small few were okay with their decision but the majority are not happy despite money in the bank, large homes etc I hope you have a fab time upon your return “home” and remember “money really cannot buy you happiness” x

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Sometimes, what expats miss is not so much the country they were born and grew up in, as their home towns. I was an Australian expat overseas, but have morphed into a British expat. Home is where I live, but if I ever had to choose between Australia and Britain, I would choose - not Britain as such, but a specific area of Britain. My new home would be a specific place, and that place would be in the neighbourhood of Bath, in Somerset. (Yes, yes, I know... but we colonials of a certain age don't recognise the "new" counties! "Avon"? That's some kind of deodorant, isn't it?)

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According to wiki, Avon was only a county from 1974 to 1996 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_(county)

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Do you know what ! I hadn't actually really realised that Avon was no more. I still think of Bristol & Bath to be in Avon, perhaps because I spent so much time up there with my Mum at the Min. Hospital. There was a road sign 'County of Avon' with a crest on the route up to Bath from Bournemouth & as I left Wiltshire somewhere after Warminster.

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The main reason I stick with the old counties is that I'm a long-time family-history buff. So because my English ancestors all lived in the old ("real"!) counties, and Linda's Scottish ones, those are the ones I record and remember. Mine were mostly from the West Country. (Does Herefordshire count as West Country? It does with me...) If anybody on BE has any connection with the village of Tintinhull, I'd be glad to hear from them.My mother's paternal great-grandfather was the blacksmith there, back in the day.

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Do you know what Avon county was before 1974? Found some older maps that suggest my have been part of Gloucestershire - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...ies_of_England

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Partly Gloucestershire and partly Somerset - Bath was part of Somerset

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Thanks Polly - was finding it hard to judge.

Just found this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ingdom#England - which seems quite extensive. Doesn't show how new counties were formed though.

My mum was from Warwickshire, which has always been a county, but I think the West Midlands area would be part of the original area covered by Warwickshire

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Yes, you're right, Birmingham used to be in Warwickshire, many moons ago, and is now part of West Midlands. My knowledge is just based on memories of places I knew at the time of the change - we lived on the Shropshire/Worcestershire border in 1974, which is how I remember Birmingham changing. And my Gran lived near Bath, I remember Dad used to complain about it being in Avon whenever we went down there, he never accepted it as a "proper" county!

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For anybody reading this thread who is interested in his or her British ancestry... the best places to start are the County Record Offices. I always found them extremely helpful. Only occasionally, are parish registers found in the relevant parish churches, and it's always a thrill to see the names written by the parish priests or their deputies, for baptisms, marriages and burials.

But what can be frustrating, is the reluctance or inability of some uncaring writers in the registers to get the surnames right. My family lines include surnames Hain, Hayne, Haine, and Haynes all of the same family! Even from one generation to the next! I was once in contact with a distant cousin in Australia who told me that when her Haynes-etcetera emigrated to Australia in the late 1800s (from the same village in Somerset), they gathered together and decided that henceforth they would go by one single name: Hayne. Good for her!

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I spent many thousands of hours back in the 1970s and early 1980s poring over parish registers in our various churches, as certainly back in the 1970s the majority of churches retained at least some registers in the vicarage/rectory. However there was an issue, which got worse as the 1970s progressed, whereby we actually had to start restricting access to the registers. I remember at one point it had been normal for me as a teenager to go through the registers with parishioners, or interested parties from elsewhere tracing ancestors, but that had to be stopped, and the Vicar/Rector (my Dad) had to always be present also. A lot of parishes invoked similar rules. Eventually it became such a problem that the majority of churches surrendered their registers to be held in county archives.
The reason behind this was a practice undertaken by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), under which they would baptise people into their church, even though those people were already dead.
Neither the person being posthumously baptised, nor their family, had any connection with the Mormons, and the family were never consulted before the person was posthumously baptised. The idea was that the person's soul could be saved at the time of the Resurrection, even though they had not been baptised into the church until after their death. In the early-mid 1970s this was a very common practice - teams of Mormons would go round British country parishes, taking details from the baptism registers going back in some cases to the 1700s, and then use those details for the dubious practice outlined above. It really came to light when some families received notifications from the Mormons to say that their grandfather John Smith, or whoever, born in 1898, was now a member of the Mormon church. I remember there being a kind of Vicarage Hotline in our county, where if a team descended on one parish, the incumbent would phone all the surrounding ones and warn them.
Need less to say this misuse of people's details caused distress to a lot of families. The depositing of the records into the county archives was an attempt to control this practice, as it greatly restricted access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_for_the_dead

Remember that back in the day many people will not have actually known how to spell their surnames. I even remember cases in the 1970s when people would come in to see my dad to organise baptisms, and they would ask him for the correct spelling of various forenames, as they liked the name but had no idea how to write it.

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I can assure you pollyanna that is the most disturbing thing I have heard today, the spiritual equivalent of necrophilia. Far out.

In the 60s, 70s and 80s, my grandfather helped many people overseas trace their family histories. He lived in a small village on the Cavan/Monaghan border in Ireland, where most families had experienced chain migration out to America and Canada in the 19th/early 20th century (including our own). He was well known as the genealogy expert in the village, so other families would send their visiting Americans up to Granda to fill them in on their families’ lore, where they lived and farmed, which families they intermarried with, where they were buried, etc. . He would also visit all the churches (Catholic and Protestant) to consult their births deaths and marriages records and write back to people overseas. It was all very tea and jam sandwiches. But such a nice history when I think of it.

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Pollyanna. I didn't know that about the Mormons. I thought they only "baptised" the ancestors of members of their church (who - the members - might not yet be Mormons, of course). They were very helpful to me (the London Temple, this was) when I was just beginning. They never followed up on my research - which means they never knew who I had found. So how could they "baptise" any of them?

Rainy: no disrespect to you, but I really don't think we can equate the baptising of dead people as akin to necrophilia! Cripes. And whether their spirits are in the care of Jesus or The Bad Guy, they (the spirits) ought to be safe enough from any kind of interference by anybody living today. No?

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True enough, but the parish clerks or whoever wrote down the surnames should surely have checked in the book and matched baptisms (for instance) with the parents. In my experience, most clerks (or the parsons) kept the faith in that regard; and it was only a small minority of backwoods-parish registers that failed to do the matching. Deepest Somerset parishes were prone to inaccurate matching, deepest Herefordshire ones were not. I would be interested to discover - if it's possible - the histories of the parish clerks in backwoods parishes. (I presume that the parish priests would be educated enough to be accurate, and conscientious enough.)

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Parish clerks? Not in your little country parish, my dad would've given his right arm for a clerk, to save my mum and I acting as unpaid secretaries :lol: Back in the day most records were written up by the priest/vicar/rector (usually in their best handwriting!) and whilst the majority of record-keepers would've been as diligent as possible, once you go back to the mid-1800s and earlier, you see "errors" in the best kept registers for so many reasons, not least because of the family and the recorder having different views on spelling - or even on what their actual surname was. The variations in spelling you mention earlier could be attempts to correct a previous mis-spelling, as much as an error creating a new variant ANd if there is a change of vicar, and the new one believes the name has been spelt wrong all along, so records it a different way........ its fascinating to follow some of the trails back and see how names change over the years for whatever reason. One parish we had, we took over from a vicar who must have been in his 80s and you could see how his writing deteriorated over the years, making it nigh on impossible to see at times what the name was supposed to be!
Some parishes kept various records besides the official registers and notes could be quite enlightening - things like a girl who has been known by one name all her life, coming along with a fiance to discuss marriage, and discovering she is officially known by a totally different forename - her father went off and registered her birth, and provided the same name for her baptism, but didn't use the name his wife liked. So the child got known by the name the wife liked & only discovered her "real" name when she came to get married :D

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Lol Fair enough, but my instinctive response was to feel it was a nonconsensual act upon a soul as opposed to a body. I’ll quit now because I’m drifting off topic into bizarre philosophical territory!

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In 1981 I visited the little town of Drom in Tipperary where my Dad's Hickey & Leamy ancestors had been dirt-farmers. I looked up the Catholic priest there, and he showed me around. I told him of the hostility that existed in my home town of Toowoomba. between Proddies and Micks. He was horrified. "We've always had a great relationship here", he said. "Your ancestors would have helped build that Protestant church over there." Nice to know! My Mum (Cornish-Congregational) married a lapsed Irish-Catholic, and twenty-three years later was still "that woman" to some of his family. Sigh... Wisely, they split the difference and married in the Church of England, and we kids were brought up C of E. Two fingers to both teams!

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Good going.

My parents’ mixed marriage (Catholic/COI) resulted in a bit of kicking the can down the road, with the result that I can remember bring Christened age 7 into COI. That said, my other Granny still took me regularly to Mass. We were the classic “fallen between two stools” Irish family.

Interestingly my mother says it was relatively common for her contemporary mixed marriage families to religiously split the family by gender. So eg all the girls would be raised in their mother’s faith and the boys in their father’s one.

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I wrote that Toowoomba was my home town, but that was only after Dad retired from the sheep farm out on the Downs. Before then - up till I was 15 - my "home town" was just a collection of sheep farms of various sizes (1500 to 10,000 acres). There was a general store down by the railway "siding", and our little school was a mile south of that. Beside the school was what we called a "bower shed" - a roof with tree-branches lying on chicken wire, with open sides all round. That was where our community held its quarterly church service, with a visiting "Bush Brother" and a borrowed piano. The Bush Brothers were parsons - possibly not real ones - who serviced the whole state of Queensland (I'm guessing about that). It was a Protestant service, I think, but I'm not sure about that, either. There was never a visit by any RC priest - so either there were no Micks in the catchment area or the RC Church just left it to the Brothers!

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Well, it's that time of year when conversations around the barbie focus on reminiscences - of old friends and adventures, and that sort of stuff. If I were at one of the barbies, this here would be my first reminiscence.

I got a Christmas greeting last week from my old chum David in Christchurch, NZ. He & I found ourselves sharing a cabin on the ship to England in 1963, with my mate Bob and one other. We shared a flat with four others in London that winter. When I hitched over to Hamburg to buy a car, we met up in Berlin and drove back together. Fun times! He hitched back to NZ via Afghanistan, while I went on the road with Linda through the Middle East and behind the Iron Curtain. I phoned and invited him to be my Best Man in '67, in Toronto, but I knew it was too much of an ask.

I stayed with him and Trish in Ch-ch with Linda in 1970, and with Ross in '85. Ross was almost ten, and still remembers David driving his 1942 Jeep like a madman - a wild event nobody could forget. Any BE member with old memories... it's your turn to tell us!

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I have plenty of lovely memories from my childhood at Christmas time (I truly believe christmases back then we’re much better than in this day and age) memory is from not so long ago really but it “stuck” with me but this morning even more so, I was driving our eldest “over the tops “ this morning to just north of Leeds, it was -3.5 frosty a full moon but dark (It was 6am) and I was telling him about how it reminded me of our first Christmas back in the UK after nearly 8 years overseas and that we were actually “doing” the same thing in 2004 on the same date, roughly the same time, just the two of us (back then I was taking our son for trials at Sheffield Wednesday) at the time “Driving home for Christmas”came on the radio, it felt like the song was made for us lol and we sang along and both said to each other how Christmassy it/we all felt and that we were thrilled to be home at that time of year and just as I was recalling this to him (he remembered anyway) “Diving home for Christmas” came in the radio…perfect timing …now our Son is a grown man…. but just where the flipping heck did the years go….gulp.

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Ahh, but it's the memories that keep us young, brits! I hope you've got photos all over your walls at home, to remind you. My favourite in my house here is one of me and my son, standing on each side of the signpost outside the village of Barlow in Derbyshire, taken with one of those delayed-snap cameras resting on the top of the car. He was 14, and I had just signed him up for his boarding school over near Uttoxeter.

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Its “funny” how certain memories/photographs stay with us, I take tons of photos but are hardly in any Lol. I have for many years sent postcards to ourselves (sounds mad) but in The early 1990’s we had a our first holiday overseas with our sons who were very young and as usually I sent postcards home to family and friends when I thought I would send one to our home and describing the holiday on the back etc and I have done it ever since (only when we have been overseas) and to this day it’s still lovely to see the colourful postcards and read what we had been up to. I have never been to Barlow, is it worth a visit?

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I haven't visited Australia for 30-odd years, but I have friends there, and am interested in what interests them. The nationwide surge of interest in the culture of the country's original inhabitants is a hot topic these days, and it's worth putting a few more shrimps on our BE barbie to cover it.

Where I grew up - a sheep-raising district on the Darling Downs - aborigines were rare. There might be a few men who turned up at our annual gymkhanas, but that's all. No women. I've no idea where they lived: not on any of the farms I knew about. Maybe in some of the little country towns - Tara, Surat, Miles... But they were invisible to us. In Toowoomba, too - population 70,000 at that time. Even at my boarding school in Brisbane, there was only one - and he was a member of what came to be called "the lost generation".

Today, there is a flourishing "black heritage" movement, loosely based on the "black power" one in the USA. An Aussie friend of mine is very sympathetic to the cause, and has been educating me about its progress. It seems a suitable topic for this thread of ours. What do you reckon?

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Just a time-out opinion on the title of this thread... I began it in March, in response to a question as to why this Australian Forum was less active than its Canadian cousin. There has never been a satisfactory answer. Visits to The Barbie are still a lot fewer than visits to The Maple Leaf, it seems to me. Are Canadian immigrants more sociable than Australian immigrants? Maybe. Is Australian culture somehow less welcoming? Hard to say.

Ah well, it is what it is. I opened a thread on The Maple Leaf, in June I think it was, which has a more interesting title than this one! "Life's Turning Points", if you want to check it out. Each of my two threads gets about 2000 visits a month, which is not bad. That's reason enough to keep them both going. What do you reckon?

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Gordon. Mr Barlow.

Anything but anything that adds interest and difference into the ancient halls and corridors of BE these years is very welcome.

I could wax on about why one is more inviting than the other but most everyone knows why really. Tone is everything sometimes.

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BEVS. Maybe I should have started my "Back in the Day" thread here in the Barbie instead of in the Rest of the World; but RoW needed a boost, too. As for the General forums, our masters tolerate far too much back-biting in some of those, so I keep well away from them. Ah well, what can you do? (A rhetorical question, by the way!) BE's business tenets need a bit of a shake-up, but all in good time, I guess.

(PS. I loved your story in the "Small World" thread in RoW! I had to ask Professor Google what a Yam-Yam is; is there anything that fellow doesn't know?)

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I am intrigued, and a little amused (in a nice way!), by the current "First Nation" political movement in Australia. Speaking/writing as a foreigner these days, it's interesting to see how much it seems to have borrowed from the platforms of similar movements elsewhere. The "First Nation" label comes from Canada's "Indians", and the "Blak" label is copied from the descendants of African slaves in the USA. I like the "Blak" label, but am not comfortable with its application to white (i.e. the colour white) descendants of aborigines. I see what the political spokespeople mean by it - and the invented spelling helps a lot - but in my current homeland (a little island in the Caribbean with a mixed-race population of 70,000, including immigrants), "black" is a colour, not a political statement. Here, "black" is the colour of the paint you buy in the hardware store. We have many black people living here, and a fair number of "dark" ones - ranging from "very dark" to "pretty dark" - and many more "brown", ranging from dark brown to light brown down to white-ish. The point is that nobody cares. Although...

When I first came here, I was pulled up friendlily by one of the young women in my office who told me she didn't consider herself black because she had a grandmother over in one of the eastern islands who was a Carib. (Caribs were a dark-brown South American race who lived in the eastern islands when the Europeans first invaded.) So when I asked what colour she considered herself, she thought for a while and then said "dark chocolate". Fair enough. Not that it ever came up in conversation again, but it was good to know!

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Sorry, brits, but I've only just realised that I never answered your question about the village of Barlow in Derbs! The short answer is "NO". Sadly, the village has nothing to recommend it at all! Some of my forebears lived in wonderfully romantic villages - mainly in the West country. Even Bathampton (outside Bath) where a Barlow great-uncle lived is nice, down by the pub and the Kennet & Avon canal. But Barlow the village isn't worth a visit. My Barlow ancestors were from Sheffield - scissorsmiths since 1650 or thereabouts - and might well have come from the village, but it was never proven. I've done quite a lot of family-history research in England, over the years, and loved to wander around the graveyards attached to small country churches. Have you done much of that? Anybody?

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Happy New Year, I hope it’s a good one for you and yours. lol my DH literally drags us into any graveyard of age on our travels lol both here in the UK and overseas and I can now say I also find it really interesting. In the 1700’s my husbands family were living in Cromford Derbyshire prior to that they had “migrated” from Buckinghamshire via Stoke looking for work (part of my family were doing the same thing via Devon,Wales and then through Stoke, they were in Stoke at the same time….a small world) other than that my side of the family came from Wales and Scotland all moving to find work. Our DS has a lovely girlfriend from Sheffield (just off the snake pass) and her family are German/Scottish and Lincolnshire decent….and most of our friends have lived in the North West for a few generations but all of them Originated from all over England….that ruddy Industrial revolution lol

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There was a lot more internal migration in Britain that many people think. I found a lot of it in my family-history research - and even a lot of travellers to and from the British colonies. An ancestor of Linda's went from southern England across to California and came back, before heading for Victoria (Australia). One of mine went from England to New South Wales and thence to the USA and then back to NSW. He had earlier moved from Cornwall to Leeds as a strike-breaker during the early days of the labour unions in central England, working for a Mr Salt in his mill outside Leeds. Back in Sydney after his US adventure, he dragged his wife and sons up to Queensland, where they (the boys) first ferried goods up and down the Brisbane River to Ipswich, and then went into the timber business. Hancock is still a reasonably big name in timber in the district.

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I was telling a friend about this and she said the furthest her family had moved was from Lancashire ( looking from the early 1700’s) to just a mile over to Yorkshire where all of the close and extended family still very happily live, I sometimes think people like her a very lucky indeed.

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Returning to Page One for a minute... I haven't yet found an answer to my original question: why so few shrimps on the Barbie? It's still a puzzle.

Are British immigrants in Oz more sedate by nature than those in Canada, for instance? Maybe. "The Maple Leaf" - BE's Canadian counterpart of "the Barbie" - has many more active threads. Why is that? Are Australians more wary of dealing with anonymity than Canadians? Could be. Online sites like BE may well be a dying breed, in the face of Facebook and its like. We have anonymity, Facebook etc doesn't. I wonder if that is a factor..

I have three BE threads on the go: this one, the Canadian "Life's Turning Points", and "Back in the Day" on The Rest of the World Forum. I keep a rough tab on how they compete. Canada gets about 2000 visits a month, The Rest of the World gets one thousand, and this one comes in the middle. There's no problem. It's not a matter of problem. But it's a puzzle. Does Canada get more British migrants than the others? Maybe that's the answer.

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A recent Daily Mail had an article on Australian slang-terms old and new, and which old ones had passed their use-by date and which hadn't. Reportedly, men no longer "have to see a man about a dog" somewhere among the trees; and nobody is urged not to "come the raw prawn". However, among the survivors is ""fair suck of the sav/saveloy", I'm glad to say; and winning the lottery is still in most places "better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick". Nice to know.

I am always suspicious of new slang terms. Too often they originate with a bunch of drunk ockers deliberately inventing stupid new stuff. "Flat out like a lizard drinking" is one of those, and I hope no immigrants give it legs.