 Good day, May 40 here, the Riverside food court in Brisbane. It's a beautiful Thursday afternoon, December 15, 2022. And one reason I enjoy wearing a Yamaha out is that it really helps you meet your fellow Jews. So just sitting here by the Brisbane River, got a lovely Hebrew greeting by a bloke who just moved here from Melbourne a couple of years ago and apparently is quite the growing Jewish community in Brisbane. So here in Brisbane he can afford like a five-bedroom home with a swimming pool. I couldn't afford that in Melbourne. Melbourne is the traditional centre of Jewish life. It's where you get the most intense, most numerous Orthodox Judaism participants, institutions, right? So Melbourne tends to be much more Eastern European in origins. Sydney tends to be much more central European and Western European. So a lot of Hungarians moved to Sydney. People from Germany, Jews from France, Spain, England and the Jews of Melbourne tend to come much more from Eastern Europe. So they tend to be more traditional, more intense in their Judaism. So in 1918 there was an observatory remark that Australia of all the countries in the world is probably the least influenced by Judaism. Right? Judaism made the smallest imprint on Australia, like 1918, than any other country. So after World War II a lot of Holocaust survivors moved to Australia. And now Australia is definitely in the top ten of Jewish countries. And Jews are mainly in Melbourne about 30,000 and in Sydney about 20,000. And when I was here 22 years ago there were about 2,000 Jews in Brisbane. But the community is growing. They've got a day school. They've got four major synagogues including a liberal synagogue. Ah, a bud is growing here. And a hundred families have moved here recently. It's building up Jewish life, kind of grassroots from the bottom up. You have to put more of an effort in. It's not like living in LA or San Francisco or New York where Judaism is just in the air. So when you live in the Jewish outback, right, you have to be more deliberative. You have to plan. You have to make much more of an effort. It doesn't come nearly as naturally. So as I've been walking along, people say, he's Jewish. So very, very rare. In fact, I've never seen anyone walking around with a Yarmulke in Brisbane. And I have spent probably a total of six months of my life in Brisbane since 1989. And yeah, never ever seen anyone walking around with a Yarmulke. But it's a wonderful opportunity for me to come here and say a Bracha Jewish blessing where maybe no one with a Yarmulke said one before. So I was talking to my mate Tim Humphreys about Queensland politics and apparently Bob Catter, who's about the most right-wing member of parliament, the Catter Party. He, one of his claims to fame, is that he egged the Beatles when they came out here in the 1960s. Because he thought they were a disolate bunch. So I, on my mother's side, have three generations from central Queensland. And about six years ago, due to a quirk in the Australian political system, central Queensland elected a national senator, Fraser Anning, who's pretty much a white Australia bloke. So he only got something like 75 votes, but due to the quirks of how the ballot works here, he became a member of the Australian Senate. And he gave speeches praising the traditional white Australian policy. He got thrown out after one term, but he created quite the stir. So he was the most right-wing member of parliament. Then after him would be the Catter Party and Bob Catter. But Fraser Anning, he was too racist for the Catter Party and for Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party. That's how far out he was, mate. So I noticed that Aussies have taken up queuing. And this is new, right? This is since COVID. So during COVID, people were asked to separate to queue up. And now when the bus comes in, I notice there's not always a big jumble waiting for the bus. There's often a very orderly queue, which is not the Australia I remember.