Canberra Hit Us Hard - A Big Lap Stop We'll Never Forget

-

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Clearys Ireland to Australia

-
Image
  “OUR CLEARY CLAN IN AUSTRALIA : the first and second generations” The following document contains extracts from research substantially compiled by Paul Box, and with some additions by Ross Cleary.  Paul and Ross are 3rd cousins, being great-great grandsons of Thomas Cleary.       Our Cleary heritage can be traced back to Ireland to Thomas Cleary and his wife Bridget Heffernan.  …  Thomas Cleary was born in County Clare, Ireland around 1816-1818.  He was from good Catholic farming stock.  The marriage of Thomas and Bridget took place on 16 September 1847 at Doora in the Diocese of Killaloe, County Clare in Ireland. Doora is just east of Ennis, the principal town of County Clare.   Bound for Australia .     A little over 12 months after they were married they were to say their farewells to the country of their birth and begin a new life in a new but distant cou...
Read more

Ypres Salient

-
Image
 It is a challenge to drive a bus into Ypres, and Phillippe manages it in the unflustered style we are rapidly becoming accustomed to. As you approach the city centre, the cobblestone streets are narrow and the corners sharp. Apparently in the near future buses are going to be banned entirely from the centre. I wonder how this will affect the economy of the town, which is strongly built on battlefields tourism. It's Sunday 6 October 2024 and this is my second visit to this city. 25 years ago, Robyn, Andrew and I had planned to stay here, but with no accommodation available we stayed in the neighbouring town of Poperinge. It was Andrew's gap year after the HSC and he was travelling with us on this segment of our first big overseas holiday. Michelin maps provided our only navigation guides, and Andrew proved to be an excellent navigator. Ypres was our first battlefields stop on a trip that was taking us from Amsterdam to Paris. So there is a familiarity as our bus edges through t...
Read more

Second World War Service

-
Image
  The Second World War Service of John Francis Cleary NX21853 Frank Cleary turned up at Paddington on 25 May 1940 to enlist in the newly re-created Australian Infantry Force (the 2 nd AIF), the volunteer army which would fight in the Second World War. This would probably have been the Victoria Barracks, bounded by Oxford Street and Moore Park Road, and to this day still a functioning Army base in Sydney. War in Europe had been declared on September 3 1939, finally triggered by the German invasion of Poland, the step too far after a series of expansionist moves in various European countries. In a memorable radio address, a sombre Prime Minister Robert Menzies, accepting that Britain’s declaration meant that Australia was therefore itself automatically at war, informed the nation of this event, on the evening of Fathers’ Day 1939, 3 September.   Although memories of World War 1 (1914 – 1918) – “the great war”, “the war to end all wars” – were still fresh, there seems to have ...
Read more