27th June 2011
I represented Britain at the Trooping of the Colours on 11 June. In Australia, the Queen’s Birthday weekend is a public holiday. It was a crisp sunny day but cold, and the backdrop of Lake Burley Griffin, around which Canberra is sited, looked spectacular. Australia’s Royal Military College, Duntroon, is celebrating its centenary this year, […]
24th June 2011
With a group of colleagues from the High Commission I attended the Canberra opening of a new film “Oranges and Sunshine”. It’s about the 7,000 child migrants who were sent to Australia between 1945 and 1967, and the heroic role of Nottingham social worker, Margaret Humphreys (tautly played by Emily Watson) in helping many of […]
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16th June 2011
I visited Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory this week. Although NT covers a vast land area, as seen in the Nicole Kidman film “Australia”, it represents only about 1% of Australia’s population and GDP. Once a sleepy backwater, Darwin is poised to become a major oil and gas hub for the vast offshore reserves […]
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27th May 2011
London was looking beautiful in the sunshine when I travelled there for the annual conference of all our ambassadors earlier this month. The Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor all came to tell us what they expected from our network of embassies around the world. William Hague announced a significant strengthening of our footprint in […]
28th April 2011
On 25 April I got up at 4.00am to attend the ANZAC Day Dawn Service at Canberra’s magnificent Australian War Memorial. It was a very moving experience. I was deeply impressed to see a crowd of some 20,000 people so still and silent that you could hear the cockatoos screeching in the trees – a […]
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21st April 2011
Hobart, capital of Tasmania, is only a four hour flight from Australia’s Antarctic research stations. Whilst there I had a fascinating visit to the Antarctic Division, the equivalent of our own British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. Scientists there talked about some of the fascinating research they are doing on the impacts of climate change, which […]
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15th April 2011
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd invited the diplomatic corps to visit his home state of Queensland to see how well it is recovering from the terrible January floods. I went with some 70 High Commissioners, Ambassadors and other diplomats. Having been up in Brisbane with William Hague shortly after the floods, it was good to return […]
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8th April 2011
The most controversial subject in Australian politics right now is climate change. The Labor government, with support from the Greens and some independents, is currently pursuing legislation aimed at introducing a carbon price leading to an emissions trading scheme. This is being heavily attacked by the Opposition coalition, who says it will increase the cost […]
28th March 2011
Last week I was away from Canberra travelling all week. That’s par for the course when you’re based in a continent-sized country. We hosted a large reception in Sydney to mark the milestone of “500 Days To Go” before the London 2012 Olympics. This attracted a lot of interest in a city which hosted one […]
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22nd March 2011
It has been a hectic eight weeks since I took up my post as High Commissioner in Canberra. I was delighted to be coming to a great country which I had visited quite a few times and where I had family connections (two of my Mum’s sisters had emigrated here as “ten pound poms”). On […]