G'day All, yet again,

Helen, your memory of Kuranda is also nearly a decade old. The National ran at Woodford in 1989 ... and was the first National to break even for several years, so Queensland got the nod two years running. The 1990 National was way up north at Kuranda, up the mountain behind Cairns.

It's startlingly beautiful country - when the rain stops ... which it did not that Easter. Lass in the paper shop said: "Oh, it's always a wet Easter when you don't get a proper Wet Season." I commented that I thought the Wet was pretty wet ... Tully got one metre of rain in one hit ...! She replied: "That wasn't a Wet Season ... that was just a storm."! Anyway, Kuranda stayed veiled in light rain all Festival, but it was good fun anyway - I had gone up in a bus with the Illawarra Folk Club ... most of Wongawilli Band ... and Jim Haynes in the next seat for 2 weeks, so it was hardly dull.

Kuranda's other claim to folkie fame is that it is the home of Ron Edwards, one of the most primal figures of the 1950s Folk Revival. Ron and John Manifold, then in Melbourne, although they both gravitated north, started publishing the Bandicoot Ballads in ~1952, the first publishing of the inchoate revival. Ron's address is in Fairyland Street, Fairyland! ("Suburbs' of Kuranda are named for Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon's Wood and Titania's Glade on either side, if I remember correctly.)

John: I certainly didn't think I was "maligning" Woodford - it's a great event and countless thousands enjoy it. (However, I do remember being im Canberra for the National when one of the walking wounded from the Woodford/Maleny/Corporate stoush vented his leftover spleen to the National papers and tried to take the National down with him.

The Canberra Times ran his whinges about "totally Anglo-Celtic closed event" between the photgraphs of a Mexican dance troupe and a Tibetan monk, but there was a lot of blood seeping down over the northern border for a year or two.

Murray: I have an invite to a New Years bash inside a nicely placed North Sydney IT firm ... but I don't know about fighting 3 million mad revellers celebrating 999/1000 of a millennium ... and walking the last 3 kilometres, because it is all going to be blockaded by 6.00pm.

The Blue Mountains (Clarence) sounds better every day. I might take my binoculars around to the middle of the Darling Causeway ... the ridge between Mt Victoria and Bell and see what the fireworks look like from 90 km.

Regards,

Bob Bolton