It's a long trip from Europe so we made a stopover in Singapore before we flew on to Brisbane. Our recordcompany MRA is in Brisbane and here I also started the tour with a concert at "The Healer", a great bluesclub in what used to be a church building.

We did the whole tour by rental car - it took a while getting used to driving a right-hand drive car on the left side of the road but fortunately traffic was very relaxed. (In Europe we're used to go a lot faster than 100 km/h).

Australia is very thinly populated and the distances are enormous. All gigs were on the Eastcoast in places with names like Woombye, Tamborine, Malumbimby and Merimbula but also in the big cities like Sydney and Canberra.

I played even 3 times in Sydney - once in "The Basement" one of the most famous clubs in Australia and twice in the "Bridge Hotel", a wellknown blues- and live music venue. At the "Bridge" I played a 2-days mini-festival that also included Pete Cornelius and The Devilles from Tasmania and Michael Hill's Blues Mob from New York.

The Eastcoast Blues & Roots Festival in Byron Bay held it's promises - a big, fantastic music festival with several stages with names like Crossroads -, Jambalaya -, Mojo - and Juke Joint Stage. Apart from lots of Australian acts the festival also presented lots of wellknown US bluesacts - the only continental Europeans beside me were JT Lauritzen & Buckshot Hunters from Norway. The festival offered a well-balanced program of acoustic and electric roots oriented music with blues as the main ingredient.

We met some old friends like Marcia Ball, Luka Bloom, Eddie Clearwater, Duke Robillard, Kristina Olsen, Eric Bibb (I played mandolin on Eric's "Painting Signs" CD - recorded live in Edmonton Canada) and Bob Brozman (we're planning to play some european gigs together next year).

My gigs at the festival went real well and on the spot I got several invitations for my next OZ tour.

It was also great seeing Joe Louis Walker again after several years. We had a little backstage session and Joe invited me to play an acoustic duo-set with him. Great fun!

There are quite a few blues and roots radio broadcasts and I played on many radioshows - still a great way to reach your audience and spread the word.

In Sydney I met my old youth-friend John Eggers (in Holland his name was Aggie but aparantly this was to hard to pronounce for the Australians). We were very close during the first 10 years of our lives - he and his family left the Netherlands in 1960 to emigrate to Australia. It was wonderful to see him again.

During the tour we were never far away from the ocean and we hit the beach whenever we could. With water temperatures of 23 degrees and almost empty beautiful beaches this wasn't a bad side-effect (always nice to get away from winter for a while). Fortunately we only saw sharks from the distance!

We really loved the landscape - wild and mighty. I was especially fascinated by the birds - the place is full of parrot-like colourful birds that we europeans rarely see outside a cage. I got carried away and our digital camera didn't get much rest; the result being loads of little colourful spots in trees - not too interesting in hindsight but we got some good shots too that you might want to have a look at.

On our way back we stopped for a few days in Kuala Lumpur to get over jetlag. Malysia is a multi-racial place with great food - we did our tourist bit in Kuala Lumpur and had a good time.
We had hardly used shoes in the last 5 weeks and we had to get used to the snow on the ground on arrival in Vienna.

This was the first tour of Australia - but hopefully not the last one - we'll be back!

All the best,