I get back to where the computer has been stashed while I go to Canberra the week before Easter (the schoolmate of my elder daughter was doing the Irish Fiddle Master Class) and down to the coast at Corindi Beach for the ten days after Easter (teaching mapping and surveying stuff) and I log onto Mudcat to find this thread at the top of the list.

A very satisfying National bracketed by good times. Lynne Stone's exhibition at the Botanic Gardens was a bottler! Despite some shabby treatment by one of the staff (who concluded his press release on her with "a display of 15 flowers." when approx. 100 blooms of 19 species were exhibited) the Gardens apparently doubled their attendance of the previous March. Well worth seeing! And for those of you with broken guitar or banjo strings, Lynne has a use for them; fiddle strings are a bit too soft however.

I got to see the original documentation of various rellies Service Records at the National Archives; got the daughters to see some of the family history and remove some faulty interpretations. Went to the Aust War Memorial and found that the January-February 1943 part of Unit Diary for the Artillery Battery at Wilson's Prom (which I needed to check on the exact dates of a serious bushfire there) was the only part of the Unit Diary sequence that was missing. C'est la vie! However, I did find out that the swag my father had was originally issued to a bloke who got the MM at Bardia and the AWM accepted, with alacrity, my offer of it for their collection.

Saw a few performances but was in the Comms office for most of the ones mentioned above but I had some great times in the Session Bar with the concer; was cornered by various OzCatters for a gasbag or two. The festival ran much like clockwork from where I saw it. The 'issues' this year were 'fake wristbands' and 'nonpayers. There were 300 people detected with fake wristbands and removed just on the Saturday night! On the Sunday they reached a level of counterfeiting that was truly remarkable. Some had cut the fence to get in but the local adolescents have mapped out the stormwater drain system for about 1.5km and EPIC weren't able to do much about it on the weekend.

Caught up with lots of friends I get to see only at Nationals and had a great time. The daughters and their mate did very well at their busking, despite having lost much of their "cute" factor. The younger acquired one of the 'very bright' ukuleles to attend Mike Jackson's workshop and, like most of the others there, ended up playing songs on it in about 10 minutes. The elder started learning basic fiddle from her mate who'd attended the Master Class and ended up performing various BB&S tunes in the session bar. Now I've got to get her a proper fiddle instead of the 3/4 one she used.

Missed the Monday as we had to dash north for 12 hours so I could then drive a load of gear down to the coast. But perfect weather and excellent students got the Arrawarra fishtraps measured and compared with the inaugural survey of 2002; the seagrass is collecting lots of sand in them.

Perfect weather, lovely people, wonderful music, satisfaction all around! Can't wait for next year!

Cheers, Rowan