The hills around Womboin were alive with the sound of renditions of Dylan, The Beatles, James Taylor and Neil Young. The lyrics were elusive, verses were repeated or lost until someone came up with the obvious. Google them! Lyrics and guitar chords up on the large TV we gave the karaoke queens a run for their money.
A group of school friends now dispersed to all parts of the country came together to laugh, talk and make new friends with partners of the same. The wild and woolly kids, the unconventional and the rebels all came to show how they had changed. Middle aged and middle thinking? Not likely. Conversations ranged from death and dying to death and religion with a good sprinkling of politics and law thrown in. These school friends moved onto university, mostly together, and these musings were long removed from pot induced conversations from the 70s. Or were they?
So who were these people who were never going to stay in 'the Shire', well all bar one? An environmentalist, a river specialist, a lawyer, several teachers, a palliative carer, and a government official.
So what did these non-captains industry do besides sing and eat? This interloper was intrigued by a very strange game, perhaps peculiar to Sutherland Shire, which involved finding a non-funny transposition of the word love for knob in popular songs. Various offerings included the obvious She loves you, Love is a many splendoured thing, and This is just another silly love song. But of course the winner was My love is like a red, red rose, which some unkind person pointed out was actually a poem and in fact the funniest. (you have to do the substitutions yourself and speak them out loud. They are funny. I was told so.)
We ate some more and then decided a walk was in order. In the gloaming we raced up a Womboin hill to see the lights of Canberra starting to twinkle. Magnificent and so quiet. We descended and retreated into the warm fire-lit house to observe the falling frost from the inside and to talk some more!
