Here’s an mp3 for Jillian from Footprints Diary, of me playing The Steadfast Love Of The Lord Never Ceases on my flute.

The Steadfast Love

Hope you like it! Everyone else can download and enjoy too! 🙂

Light Harmony Vocal Group (my Mum’s singing group, she’s first on the left) They sang the national anthem and Botony Bay.

My aunty and uncle watching the ceremonies.

My stepfather Andrew Taylor with his Citizen of the Year award.

After the Lions Club lunch and a cuppa at Mum’s I went to the Echunga cemetery searching for relatives 🙂 John Barton Hack (my distant, distant relative was an early pioneer of Echunga.)

A quick stop in Echunga and a reminisce, I went to primary school here.

Hagen Arms Hotel, Echunga

Echunga sights

An old horse trough.

St Mary’s Anglican Church, Echunga

St Mary’s cemetery

This is an amazing oak tree in the bottom corner of the cemetery.

I didn’t find any relatives here but did find the grave of a good school friend Mandy Young. I still remember going to play at her house. She was only seven. I cleaned up her grave a bit.

I came across this article today in my search for information about a distant relative of mine John Barton Hack.

John Barton Hack was one of the pioneers of Adelaide and, at first, one of its rising stars, a dynamic figure around the small, bustling settlement from the moment he arrived from his native Cheshire in February 1837……….

In the end, he gave his name to an insignificant laneway in North Adelaide and a range of hills and a track near the township of Echunga, a place he singlehandedly established and where he prospered until setbacks, unwise investment, and the ruthless treachery of his ‘friend’ Jacob Hagen set him on a downward path from which he never recovered.

The rest of the article is here: Forgotten Hack lacked killer colonial instinct – Eureka Street

It turns out the writer of this article is the father of an old primary school friend of mine. They lived on Hack Range Rd just out of the township of Echunga where Hack settled.

I have Hack listed as being born in Chichester and all the other articles I’ve found state this, so I’d be interested to hear where Mr Matthews got this information from. I have so far been unable to find Hack’s birth certificate. He also says that part of Hack’s poor fortune was due to the ‘ruthless treachery of his friend Jacob Hagen’. This is intriguing and also unique to this article. Another small mystery to unravel!!! I love it! 🙂

He looks like such a forbidding figure in this picture however it’s also said of him

Hack was too soft-hearted to be a successful pioneer; he paid high wages, gave generous credits and neglected to cover himself. Although he became a Wesleyan Methodist he was a Quaker by upbringing; he befriended Aboriginals and ex-convicts, advocated temperance, presided over the Mechanics’ Institute, looked after James Backhouse and George Washington Walker during their Adelaide visit, and gave land in Pennington Terrace for a Friends’ meeting house.

You may’ve closed the pop up window when you first came to my blog so I thought I’d write a bit about it and why I don’t support the Australian government’s proposed Internet censorship.

I’ve taught computing for the last ten years and a lot of this has been to parents. I’ve made a point of teaching them how to help their children when they’re using the Internet. Just like you have rules or limits for everything else with your kids you need to set up rules for Internet use too. www.cybersmart.gov.au is the government’s new online safety website. It doesn’t look as good to me as the old www.netalert.gov.au which is still up but doesn’t contain the good content it used to. I might have a look and see if I’ve still got some of their printed materials.

Don’t get me wrong, if you choose to use Internet filtering software at home for your family then that’s entirely up to you. That’s your choice. 🙂 If you do use it just remember it’s not the entire solution.

I think everyone should be able to choose for themselves what Internet content is suitable for them and their family. I would hate to see censorship and filtering go overboard and start blocking websites dependent on their religious beliefs or if they criticise the government. Homeschooling is illegal in some countries the Australian government might decide to filter out pro-homeschooling websites.

When you think about it has censorship of any kind ever really worked? Did burning books work? People will always find another way.

The government is pushing the need for a filter as ‘Child Protection’ but it isn’t actually going to protect children and here is why:

A web page can be made and uploaded to the world wide web in an hour or so. I doubt that the government’s filter can keep up with the thousands of webpages being uploaded every day. Google can’t, so how can our government?

Illegal material is most often shared via peer to peer file sharing and in chat rooms. Kids know how to use peer to peer file sharing and will access content if they want to. The government’s filtering system will not prevent this from happening.

Also

We stand to join a small club of countries which impose centralised Internet censorship such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The secret blacklist may be limited to “Refused Classification” content for now, but what might a future Australian Government choose to block?

This quote is from the Great Australian Internet Blackout website:

There are sites uploaded all the time to teach kids how to bypass filtering such as www.beatfiltering.com

Please research this issue for yourself and see what you think!

Last year I got in touch with a cousin of mine through our online family history research. Today we met and it was wonderful! We all got along extremely well. These are the photos of all of us- Tony and his family, my brother Michael and my daughter Jessica.