Today was a busy day, jumping from one school to the next and also having a media interview and a visit to a war memorial.
The Bishop’s House where I am staying in Geraldton is a very well-designed single-level building with a central courtyard pictured here.At the other end of the block from the Bishop’s House is the cathedral, a picturesque building.Rosemary Taylor took me to the cathedral where we met Geoff Vivian from the Geraldton Guardian who interviewed me.Then we went up the HMS Sydney memorial. The Sydney, sunk off the Western Australian coast in WWII, was just found in 2008.Then it was for the first of four schools we visited. This the primary section at St. John’s School. They were great.The next school was Nagle College near the cathedral.We had to really watch the time at Nagle because they were going to have a lockdown drill–these staff members are preparing for it–and we needed to get out of the building before the alarm went off.Then we went to St. Lawrence Primary School in Bluff Point. I talked to the whole school—630 students–in their assembly area and some parents attended also.Australia has a very high incidence of skin cancer and so most students wear these Aussie-style floppy hats. In the primary grades, children are not allowed to play out in the sun at recess time if they do not have a hat.After lunch the fourth school we visited was St. Francis Xavier Primary School which is on the same grounds as the Bishop’s House where I was staying.
