It has been a while, so I will put in several items of interest (interesting to me, anyway).

Looking from the War Memorial towards Parliament.
Click to see how tall Andrew is now.

We visited Canberra a couple of weekends ago.  It was very cold, but we were able to go to see the visiting Turner exhibition at the National Gallery, and also went to the Australian War Memorial (where this picture was taken).  It doesn’t sound very exciting, but the AWM is the equivalent of the Imperial War Museum in London, and was very interesting to visit.

One of the aspects of Australian society which is a bit of a trap for the unwary immigrant is the tedious but important subject of pensions.  Basically there are none.  If one talks to an Australian about a “pension” they think of a compensation-type pension, a disability pension, or sometning like that.  Fundamentally there are no old-age pensions.  There is a form of social security for the over-65s with no income and no assets, but that is basically at bad as that sounds.  So if you want to have a comfortable life in retirement, it’s up to you ….

Fortunately the situation is not quite as bad as this sounds, in that all employers are obliged to pay 9% (currently, and increasing to 12% over the next few years) into a superannuation fund, which the individual has very little access to until they reach retirement age.

I say all this to explain why Sue and I have had to become property magnates and art collectors!  I started off by putting our Super. money (sounds good!) into managed funds, to pay someone else to look after it.  The problem with this is that all such Funds are doing very badly over the last few years.  So instead we decided to put some savings into property instead.  This is the property which we have bought in Sydney:

Double click to see a bit larger ….

Of course this is an investment property, and the fact that it is firstly near Sue’s workplace and secondly somewhere that we would like to have a base in Sydney, has little to do with it.  The picture is taken from under Sydney Harbour Bridge, and shows the position of our unit in a 1970s block of flats, just high enough to have a view of the harbour, although the house in front does get in the way a little, as the second picture shows.

View from our unit

Has anyone got a little bit of dynamite?

The view over the Inner harbour is better.

View over in Inner Harbour

View from the unit over Darling harbour