Well. Here we are again. I hope you all had a wonderful Easter break and didn`t eat too many Easter eggs!

We celebrate Easter much in the same fashion as you. With the hot weather though it is hard to stop the Easter eggs dribbling all over the floor of the car!

In Australia lately there has been a drift towards saving historic items, buildings etc. Being in someways a very harsh country, most of our Bush features are and have been destroyed by termites, and bush fires. If you go looking though you can find some interesting relics. During the great gold rush days most houses ,shops and hotels were just built on a temporary basis. When the gold ran out, they would move on. And most of the old townships would be overgrown by the scrub.( Oz: Weeds etc..) When visiting these areas one has to be very careful as most of the miners never bothered to fill in the mineshafts in those days!

Nearer to coastal towns most of the older buildings were constructed by convict labour. Quite beautiful blue stone churches, and bridges. The poor old prisoners worked from dawn to dusk.

I hope you all realize most of the prisoners came from England. They were put on ships in Portsmouth harbour and sent to Australia!!

I cannot get too excited about a piece of black stone that was used as a axe head, can you?

But, give me a coin or a piece of roman pottery or uncover a bit of roman road!!! My imagination goes quite crazy! I wonder who carried this coin in their pocket. Did they have pockets in those days? And this earthenware pot. I wonder if it was filled with water, oil, or wine? What do you reckon?

I once dug a huge hole in my back garden (in Portsmouth), very deep! And I found some coins, and lots of white long clay pipes. I guess they used to smoke pipes instead of cigarettes in those days. Shocking habit that, makes you smell like an ashtray, don`t you think?

Another time some friends and I went to the River Meon and took a sieve. Do you know what that is? Up to our knees in water, putting handfuls of pebbles into the sieve and shaking it. We found a really really old watch,(it didn`t work though!!) and a few silver coins. They were pretty worn out. I suppose they had tumbled along for hundreds of years! I wonder how they ended up in the river eh?

I suppose my prize possession was a “Gobstopper Bottle” which I pulled out, when duck diving down from the Hayling ferry pontoon. It had a picture of the Guildhall, done in glass on one side. The Guildhall had a dome on the top.

I've tried the same thing out here in Oz. You sometimes find a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny speck of gold. And of course, me being so clumsy, sneezed and blew the bloomin` thing away!! There are quite a few gemstones in the creeks (Oz: streams) I don`t really know much about them. Blimey! When I think of it, my driveway could be worth a million!!(How many is that?……….Lots. Sorry Teach!) More later. Regards, Gerry Martin. 26°C. (It is of course cooling down in Victoria!! Ed.)