Kung Hei Fat Choi! May peace and prosperity be yours, for you and your family, in the Year of the Rat. I’m so unprepared for it that we must forego my usual foray into the […]
Horses were everything in the 1940s when my dad Jack and his cousin, my Extraordinary Aunty Joan, were growing up in rural New South Wales, Australia. They were work, transport and recreation, but of all […]
The continuing adventures of my honorary aunt Joan ‘The Bone’ Byrne, who left Australia with us in 1967 and went on her own journey while we remained in Hong Kong. Political turmoil meant Joan couldn’t follow […]
Joan Byrne, my Honorary Aunt, had a few reasons to land in London in December 1969, where we last saw her caring for her aged uncle – fulfilling the promise she made as a child […]
The continuing adventures of my honorary aunt Joan ‘The Bone’ Byrne, my father’s cousin, who left Australia with us in 1967. The plan was to travel across Asia and Europe and on to England but […]
…The Bolshoi theatre serving whole meals in the foyer at interval… the Arts Theatre, home of Stanislavski, where I saw a play in Russian… the woman sitting next to me trying to translate it for […]
A couple of years’ back Your Girl Reporter was at a family reunion – we hold them often, but not often enough. We’re a good bunch, by and large, and I missed them growing up. […]
My father Jack Spackman grew up in abject poverty, a widow’s son, in the tiny town of Grenfell, way out past the Blue Mountains in rural New South Wales, Australia. He was the second of […]
When the school year started in September 1967 my honorary aunt Joan ‘The Bone’ Byrne took up her post at Hong Kong’s Wellington College in Caine Road and I began my undistinguished academic career at […]
There’s a mountain in Kowloon called the Lion Rock which has come to embody the spirit of Hong Kong. It’s a spirit that had yet to rise in February 1967, when my family disembarked from […]
Copyright: Maria Spackman
