From South Australia

Greetings from South Australia in Springtime, a beautiful time of the year. According to Wikipedia, Adelaide continues to rank highly as a livable city, being in the Top 10 in The Economist’s World's Most Livable Cities index. It is Australia’s fifth largest city with 1.2 million people. Adelaide is coastal city surrounded by hills. It looks south out onto the Southern Ocean where there is said to be mostly emptiness until Antarctica. If you ever get the chance, visit Adelaide.

Australia’s Aboriginal Flag over Adelaide’s Victoria Square

Most of my time was spent meeting with foster carers in their own homes around Adelaide. We were reviewing how they were getting on with comparatively new placements and managing weekly recordings of their involvements with children or young people living in their homes. Most of the children now in their care had been moved from 24-hour residential care around Adelaide. Its referred to as “commercial care” since most of these services are run by commercial organisations and there is a steady turnover of care workers, temporary staff, and mostly untrained carers. Does any of this sound familiar to readers in your parts of the world? Needless to say, relationships and quality of care relationships were prominent themes which ran throughout my week in Adelaide.

Queen Victoria and the Church

One afternoon I got off work early and took the tram all the way from my beachside apartment to Adelaide City, a trip of about 30 minutes with some 25 or more stops. I found a seat and before the tram left, 3 women joined the tram and sat opposite me. They were two older women – not quite middle age – and a younger woman, perhaps in her late teens. They had with them a soft carry bag, some towels in a plastic supermarket bag, and had clearly spent the day at the beach. We rode together all the way into Adelaide City. Shortly after leaving the oldest woman said she felt ill. Her younger friend or sister removed the towels from the plastic bag and gave her the bag to be sick in. Expressions of gratitude were exchanged in between gastric outbursts into the plastic bag. The provider of the plastic bag said she “always took a plastic bag wherever you go because you just don’t know when you might be sick”. ... “when I was once sick on the tram without a bag, I went to the Conductor and told him I’d been sick, and he thanked me”.

Reflections on British Empire and the Industrial Revolution

The tram line into Adelaide incorporates two elevated areas which cross over motorways or railways. As we approached the first, the older woman bent all the way down to the floor claiming a fear of heights. Her younger friend was similarly fearful and bent down and the two older women kept asking their younger colleague whether they were back on the ground. The younger of the two friends explained how she had once gone on the ferry to Tasmania when during a storm ride she had tried to force herself to stand on the top deck to conquer her fear of heights. But in the end she couldn’t do it. The procedure for crossing the tram’s second elevated section was repeated. These were well travelled women.

Majesty’s Theatre: When the Rain Stops Falling

As I walked around Victoria Square, through Adelaide’s China Town and admired the city’s curious mixture of architectures, I couldn’t help reflecting on the caring gesture that woman had displayed to her older friend. And of how widely travelled she was!

Entrance to Adelaide’s China Town