Narelie Fletcher
1972 - 1974
Email: nez@austek.com
Having just discovered this wonderful website I have spent a couple of hours
trawling through the many pages of photos and stories. It has taken me back
to some of the most memorable, impressionable and exciting times of my life.
We were the luckiest people in the world. Strange though, when I look in the
mirror these days I see a fat, grey grannie instead of that skinny, long blonde
haired creature in the photo's.
My memories start at a doctor's office and the series of tests and injections that followed, then deboarding the plane and stepping out into a wall of humid heat that pressed me to the ground like a magnet, my mother sitting and crying when we got to our new home, the smells - horribble in those first days and weeks but know etched into my mind whenever I recall those days - durians, fresh goats heads dripping from hooks in the Penang market, fish drying in the sun, saccharine laced syrup oozing through a snow cone, mah mee at the Eden cafe. I think that's why I love to visit The Valley in Brisbane as often as I can, wander through the supermarkets drawing in deep breaths, chatting and laughing with the local shop owners, being taken to the local temple, Chinese New Year celebrations with the dragon dancers, crackers, food and noise.
To this day Asia is my favourite holiday destination. In fact, My husband and I took my father on an Asain tour about three years ago from Chiang Mai through to Singapore. We stayed on Penang for a few days and hired an indian mini bus driver and a guide (who turned out to be freeloading for the chance to visit a special temple where he needed to finalize his priestly quest, we were happy to oblige) to drive us down through the peninsular for a trip down memory lane; the ferry trip across to the mainland, a stop in Butterworth at Bagan Ajam to look at our old duplex house, geckos, ceiling fans, bars on the doors and windows, tiny pet monkeys attached to fine chains sitting on fences, my pet ducks saved after a school science experiment but finally given to the kampong behind us (no prizes for guessing what happened to them then), professional wailing mourners accompanying funeral prosessions along our street, motor bikes carrying a whole family with shopping bags and chooks hanging off on all sides, the same motor bikes involved in fatal accidants and everyone coming out of the woodwork to take a look at the remains strewn across the road, our morris minor with it's essential accellorator and horn hurtling through the village, electronic organ lessons, walking home in the drenching rains (yes, those uniforms were very thin), the makan carts, the fish monger with his basket on the back of his bicycle who would gut and scale at your gate, the Irish Linen man with his case of goods, the park and a show with an enormous boa constrictor cooling off in the monnie drains, the beach and the meals of pipies which our amah, Paru, would fry in sugar and soy, Paru's fish head curries so hot the tears would stream down her face as she squatted on our back kitchen step, made to measure groovy clothing, toe thongs and flour sack bags, the base, the pool, the badminton courts, the guides, the cinema, quinine tablets and painful injections, journeys through dangerous areas w ith machine gun toting locals and flights in the belly of cargo planes with a cardboard box full of chips and chocolates as the in-flight meal, the cool relief of the Cameron Highlands, the tribes, rubber plantations replaced with palm oil... AND, those marvelous school days; the sports, the dances, the assembles, the fake milk, and the day three of us were sent off to the batik factory for project research - just us and the driver.
After leaving these heady days we were dumped in Sunshine, Victoria. What a shock! My stomach couldn't handle the richness of real milk and my mother couldn't get out of the habit of trying to bata for all her supermarket purhases. I spent my last two years of high school at Sunshine West High, and survived! But it wasn't all bad because it was also there that I met my my husband. I went to teacher's college in Bendigo after which Vince and I married. We lived in Sunbury for several years before an opportunity arrived to take us overseas. Yes, I was the one who was full of excitement and encouragement to go. We spent almost 10 years in four countries where I taught at the international schools. We returned to settle in Manly, Brisbane. We have a 26 year old son and two granddaughters. We run our own business from home and have regular PR visits to Spain.
I will e-mail those of you with familiar names and faces and I would welcome contact from those of you who may remember me.
The 2010 reunion in Penang looks awfully tempting!
Hoping to make contact soon.