His Excellency

Today we had the great honour of a visit to our conference by the Japanese ambassador, Mr Yamagami Shingo, accompanied by the very elegant Madame Yamagami.
The ambassador spoke for about 20 minutes in the beautiful Japanese Garden, and I have seldom heard such a moving address.
He focussed on the deep relationship between Australia and Japan, much of it stemming from the reconciliation following the famous breakout in 1944 by Japanese soldiers from the POW camp at Cowra.
It was poignant and meaningful but with no shortage of humour either. A most impressive and charming couple.

There wasn’t much left to go wrong but believe it or not, just before the ambassador got up to speak the sound system failed!
We were rescued by the bush poet, Greg North, who had provided several short “circuit breakers” during the conference by reciting his own, or the poems of Banjo Paterson, all in a very humorous manner.
Greg happened to have his own speakers (just in case) and it got us out of a potentially very embarrassing situation.

So that’s it. All in all a very successful event. To my mind the most satisfying part was the way the inevitable problems were addressed and solved. Probably most went completely unnoticed by delegates.
Now we are looking forward to a recovery dinner with the team before heading home tomorrow.