| |
I occasionally do tours for French tourists here in Tasmania. I was about to go to one when this photo was taken. The prospect of spending the next few days with 32 strangers is somewhat overwhelming!
I love doing tours, it takes me away from my computer for a few days, a very good thing!
I was born In Velars sur Ouche in the heart of Burgundy. Velars is a very small town not far from Dijon. It is a beautiful place and some of the best wine in the world is made there. I grew up in Dijon with my aunt until I was four and then moved back with my parents for a short time and then moved to Talmontier in Normandie with my grand parents.
 I'm about to go on a trip
for a week all around Tasmania
46 years ago, age 4 in Dijon
where I was born.
|
|
| |
My parents in Nice in 1946
My father was born on the 13th of December 1893, he was 35 years older than my mother. He also fought in the great war as a lieutenant of the Alpine corps (Chasseurs Alpins). He died in 1964, I was 6
My father the day he graduated as an officer in 1913. He left the army after the war, sickened by what he saw. |
|
| |
My grand father who lost (literally) an arm and a leg in the great war. He stepped on a jumping mine and was left for dead for three days. The Red Cross finally found him, still alive, but with gangrene. Horrific stuff. On the wall there is a poster of Charles de Gaulle. For my grand father, De Gaulle was a hero and I was named after him...
I stayed with my grand parents for a while when my father was sick. When he finally died, I went back to my mother and stayed with her for a few years. She remarried when I was eight and we moved to the south of France with my step father.
After that, we moved form town to town, my mother never able to settle down anywhere. In 1968 my sister Elizabeth was born and I was sent to boarding school, I was ten.
|
|
| |
Then in 1970, my mother got pregnant again with my brother Stéphane at which time the social worker who was looking after me offered my mother to place me in a home. She gratefully accepted and I was sent to the "Institut Terrefort" in St Loubès near Bordeaux. I was then 12 and I never lived with my mother again after that. A year later I was sent to the "Foyer des Templiers" in Bordeaux where I stayed until I was eighteen.
L'Institut Terrefort |
|
| |
This photo was taken in 1971 by my step father on one of my rare visits. I'm with my mum, my half sister and brother.
Then I went to the army and when I came back, I stayed with my sister Françoise for a while, until I embarked in the "Quidam" adventure for two years. (See the music page).
The army,
not a very pleasant experience!
Eventually I ended up in Toulouse for a few years until it was time for me to travel. I headed east to Greece and Turkey for six month and there I met the love of my life! (or so I thought at the time!), and moved to London waiting for her. She never went back, but that is another story! Anyway, I was now on my way to London to a new life, a new language, a new beginning.
Adieu la France, tu ne me manqueras pas!
|
|
| |
My first year in London
It was great!!!
|
|
| |
Me in 1982 in my first bedsit in London, just arrived from Turkey.
I was then working at "Chez Nico" in Battersea. I didn't know it then, but that was going to be my working visa to Australia six years later...
|
|
| |
Kathy, my first wife
with our baby in front of our house in Finchley
|
|
| |
Me doing Tai-Chi at the ITTCA in London.
Master Chu King Hung was our teacher and an incredibly powerful martial arts expert.
One of the reason I wanted to visit China.
Years later, I started Aikido. After breaking my little finger and being covered with bruises after each practice, I decided that I wasn't meant to do martial arts...
|
|
| |
Hydra in Greece
In 1987, we decided to travel. We sold our house in London and went on a trip around the world which lasted almost 2 years We ended up in Australia for the bicentennial in 1988. We started in France, then Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia (still the USSR), and then traveled on the Trans-Siberian to China, via Siberia and Mongolia. |
|
| |
Irkutsk station
We arrived in China on a warm winter day. The temperature on that day was a nice -10! Quite a relief after the -30 of Siberia... |
|
| |
A lone horseman in Mongolia.
I took this picture through the window of the train, so it's a bit grainy... Fortunately, the ice on the track made the train go very slowly. It took seven days to reach Bejing from Moscow.
|
|
| |
From Bejing, we went to Chunking in Sichuan province to get on the boat going from Chunking to Wuhan and Shanghai on the Yangtze Kiang. After reading "Destination Chunking" by Han Suyin, I also wanted to see the city she struggled so much to reach.
It's hard to pull a cart in Chunking
Cities in China are mostly very flat. Chunking is the exception! |
|
| |
In China it was really difficult to take pictures of people. They just don't like it! But in a market in Wuhan, someone tapped my shoulder and using sign language, asked me to take a picture of him smoking his pipe. So here it is... |
|
| |
Eventually we arrived in Shanghai and then Macao and Hong Kong where we first learned that 1998 was the year of the bicentennial in Australia. That was good news since our next stop was going to be
SYDNEY...
And we loved it so much that we decided to stay...
(Well, eventually go back to england and emigrate, but that was the boring bit!).
I took this picture of the Opera House from the deck of the Spirit of Tasmania 3 coming back from Devonport
|
|
| |
Us in Launceston
And 20 years later in sunny Tasmania with Susan. I hope Tasmania will be my last port of call. We're here for the long haul. This little island (well not so little, it's the size of Ireland after all!), is the most beautiful place in the world, and I'm happy to call Tasmania home...
Back to top |
|
| |
|
|
