The prime minister and the queen discussed the latter’s visit to the Floriade flower show and Canberra’s sunny weather.
“It’s a beautiful morning again,” the monarch said.
The queen went on to say she was delighted with her visit to Floriade, and was touched volunteers had worked so hard to ensure the show, which officially closed last Sunday, was back to its full glory for her visit.
“I had no idea they do that every year. I can’t believe they did it all up,” she told the prime minister.
The rest of the queen’s conversation with Gillard and her later discussion with Abbott will remain confidential in accordance with royal protocol.
She began by expressing her joy at being back on Australian shores again, and went on to describe how the country has grown during 59 years on the throne.
“Prince Philip and I are delighted to be back in Australia,” she said. “I find it difficult to believe that it is already five years since our last visit.
“Ever since I first came here in 1954, I have watched Australia grow and develop at an extraordinary rate. This country has made dramatic progress economically, in social, scientific and industrial endeavours and, above all, in self-confidence.”
The monarch also lauded Australia’s economy, scientific achievements and contributions to “world peacekeeping”. She then paid tribute to everyone affected by the Queensland and Victorian floods, Cyclone Yasi and the Christchurch earthquake.
“The world witnessed the anguish of Australians as they lived through a summer of natural disasters,” she said.
“We were all impressed by the courage and resolution shown by those affected, in the face of crippling desolation. Prince William also saw first-hand the fortitude of people during this testing time.”
Prime Minister Julia Gillard honoured the queen in her speech, praising the royal’s dedication to Australia over her years as sovereign.
Gillard also alluded to the possibility of Australia becoming a republic in the future, but reassured the queen that no matter what happened, Australians would honour and respect her as long as she lived.
“Your Majesty, we do not know where Australia’s path of nationhood may lead in the times to come,” Gillard said.
“We are, as you once so rightly said, ‘a country on the move and will go on being so’. But we know this for a certainty: your journey of service will continue all the length your of days.
Opposition leader Tony Abbott also addressed the reception, and was a surprise hit, keeping guests in fits of laughter throughout his speech.
“Your Majesty, while 11 Australian prime ministers and no less than 17 opposition leaders have come and gone, for 60 years you have been a presence in our national story and given the vagaries of public life, I’m confident that this will not be the final tally of the politicians that you have outlasted,” he quipped.
Abbott also poked fun at Prince Philip’s infamous sense of humour, recalling an anecdote about the Duke and Cate Blanchett.
“To your Royal Highness, Prince Philip, may I say that you have brought humanity and irreverence to what might otherwise be a stuffy institution,” he said.
“When introduced to Cate Blanchett as someone who works in movies, you asked her whether she could help to fix the palace DVD. Only locals are allowed to joke about our Cate so that makes you at least an honorary Australian.”
On a more serious note, Abbott spoke in support of ending discrimination against women in Britain’s line of succession and allowing royals to marry Catholics.
The royal couple spent 45 minutes mingling with guests before returning to Government House.
Tomorrow, the queen will attend a Trooping of the Colour ceremony at the Royal Military College, Duntroon.
Your say: Do you think Queen Elizabeth has been a good head of state for Australia?
Queen Elizabeth with basketball player Elizabeth Cambage at Parliament House this evening.
As a queen, Elizabeth II is not used to looking up to anyone — but she had to crane her neck tonight when she came face-to-face with a 7ft female basketball player
The 5ft 4in monarch was visibly delighted when she bumped into Australian Opals forward Elizabeth Cambage, 20, at an official reception at Parliament House hosted by Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Elizabeth — who is 6ft 8in but was taller this evening thanks to a pair of kitten heels — was stunned when the queen approached her, smiling and with a twinkle in her eyes.
In what is sure to incite some fiery debate between the sexes, a recent study has found that men are funnier than women… just.
The University of California San Diego found that men held the title by the slimmest of margins, with research — published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review — showing men won by just 0.11 points, the Huffington Post reports.
Researchers used a novel method of reaching this conclusion, tasking 16 male and 16 female undergraduates with writing humorous captions for 20 New Yorker comics.
A judging panel — made up of 34 males and 47 females (just in case you thought that’s where the bias might have been hiding) — used a system of elimination to determine the results.
The judging seemed to indicate that the men found the other men funny, which was bad news for those looking for a boost in the romance stakes.
“Sad for the guys,” the report’s co-author Nicholas Christenfeld said, “who think that by being funny they will impress the ladies, but really just impress other men who want to impress the ladies.”
Christenfeld also suggested that men might be slightly ahead as they try harder to get a laugh and do so more often.
Thousands of women silently nod their heads.
Your say: Do you think men are funnier than women? Tell us at [email protected]
Subjected to incalculable child abuse, Kim Noble’s young mind shattered into multiple personalities when she was just three years old. In an exclusive extract from her autobiography, this extraordinarily brave woman explains how she survived, became a mother and what it feels like to live a life literally in pieces.
Kim Noble was born on 21 November 1960. She grew up in Britain with her parents and sister and enjoyed an ordinary family upbringing.
Her parents both worked and, from a very early age, Kim was left with a number of childminders — although they weren’t called that in the 1960s.
Sometimes it was family, sometimes neighbours, sometimes friends. Communities stepped in to help in those days. Most were kind and loving.
Some were different. They didn’t look after Kim Noble. They took advantage. They subjected baby Kim to painful, evil, sexual abuse. Regularly and consistently from the age of one.
Kim was helpless. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t complain. She couldn’t fight. She didn’t even know that the abuse was wrong. But she did know it scared her. She knew it hurt.
Yet she was so small, so weak, so dependent on her abusers for so much, what could she possibly do? And then her young, infant mind found a way. If it couldn’t stop Kim’s physical pain, it could do the next best thing. It could hide.
At some point before her third birthday, Kim Noble’s mind shattered, like a glass dropped onto a hard floor. Shards, splinters, fragments, some tiny, some larger.
No two pieces the same, as individual as snowflakes. Ten, 20, 100, 200 pieces, where before there had been just one. And each of them a new mind, a new life to take Kim’s place in the world. To protect her.
At last, Kim Noble was happy. No one could find her now.
Chicago, September 2010. I never imagined the day I would find myself sitting in a television studio on the other side of the Atlantic.
I certainly never expected to be invited by the most powerful woman in world media, Oprah Winfrey, to appear during the final season of the planet’s leading chat show.
But here I am and, as I take my seat facing Oprah’s chair, I can barely contain my nerves. The most-watched program in America is about to be filmed and I am that episode’s star guest.
And yet, as soon as Oprah sits down opposite, my inhibitions disappear.
“Do you remember what happened to you as a child?”
Three hundred people fall suddenly silent. A few sharp intakes of breath. Then nothing, as they all crane forward expectantly for my reply.
“I remember parts of it,” I reply. “Not any abuse.”
Murmurs buzz around that vast hangar of a room. Oprah looks momentarily thrown. If you watch carefully you can almost see her thinking, I was told this woman had been abused!
Oprah maintains her composure. Then, ever the professional, she rephrases the question.
My answer is the same. “No one did anything to me.” But I know what she means and decide to help her out. “I have never been abused,” I clarify. “But this body has.” And then she understands.
Throughout our interview, Oprah referred to me as “Kim”. I don’t mind. I’ve grown up with people calling me that. It’s all I ever heard as a child, so it soon becomes normal.
I’ve grown up accepting lots of things that seemed normal at the time. Like finding myself in classrooms I didn’t remember travelling to, or speaking to people I didn’t recognise or employed doing jobs I hadn’t applied for.
Normal for me is driving to the shops and returning home with a boot full of groceries I didn’t want. It’s opening my wardrobe and discovering clothes I hadn’t bought or taking delivery of pizzas I didn’t order.
It’s finding the washing-up done a second after I’d finished using the pans. It’s ending up at the door to a men’s toilet and wondering why. It’s so many, many other things on a daily basis.
Oprah found it unimaginable. I doubt she was alone. I imagine millions of viewing Americans were thinking, “This is mad!”
After all, it’s not every day you meet someone who shares their body with more than 20 other people — and who still manages to be a mum to a beautiful, well-balanced teenaged daughter and an artist with many exhibitions to her name.
Queen Elizabeth beamed throughout her visit to Floriade today, and the Duke of Edinburgh seemed heartily amused with the first official engagement of the couple’s 16th Australian tour.
The 85-year-old monarch and her 90-year-old husband took a barge from Government House to the annual Canberra flower show.
After a few tense moments while a blushing naval officer struggled to moor the boat, the queen emerged smiling broadly and adeptly deploying her famous ‘royal wave’.
The monarch looked lovely in a Lavender-coloured outfit with matching hat and her ever-present black handbag.
Prince Philip was similarly dashing in a suit and jaunty hat, and took time to smile and wave at crowds while Elizabeth accepted flowers and gifts from local children.
The royal couple then got into a Range Rover for the short drive into the centre of the gardens, before getting out to stroll through the displays of flowers.
The queen took great interest in the flora, asking a multitude of botanical questions of her guides, including Floriade’s head gardener.
Philip, on the other hand, seemed to find the whole affair rather amusing, cracking jokes almost continuously.
“The queen was asking lots of questions, smiling and seemed very interested,” Floriade volunteer Ankie Dunn said.
“She obviously loves flowers but the Duke… he has a very dry sense of humour. He certainly made a lot of comments. We couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he was chuckling away.”
Nicknamed the ‘Duke of Hazard’ by British media outlets, Philip is infamous for his many gaffes.
In his 60 years as royal consort, he has said hundreds of culturally insensitive things, including asking a driving instructor in Scotland how he kept the locals sober long enough to pass their tests, quizzing a group of Australian aborigines if they were “still throwing spears” and enquiring how a British student trekking in Papua New Guinea had managed to avoid being eaten by the “natives”. If he said any similar comments today, the volunteers who overheard were keeping it to themselves.
Pregnant women with pre-eclampsia or those at risk of developing the condition will be encouraged to learn that a study published by the British Medical Journal has suggested particular dietary supplements can significantly reduce their risk of having the abnormally high blood pressure and other symptoms which can lead to premature birth.
A team of researchers in Mexico and the USA provided a group of women who were at high risk of developing pre-eclampsia with two nutrition bars daily, each containing the amino acid l-arginine and antioxidant vitamins C and E.
They found that the women taking the l-arginine and vitamins combination were nearly 10 percent less likely to develop pre-eclampsia than those taking bars containing just the vitamins.
Although the exact reason why the combination works is not fully understood, the study concludes that it is a “relatively simple and low cost intervention in reducing the risk of pre-eclampsia and associated preterm birth”.
Your say: Do you know anyone who has had pre-eclampsia?
According to a study by researchers from Melbourne’s Swinburne University, published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, a family history of ‘pink disease’ is a strong risk factor for developing autism.
Never heard of pink disease? Its official name is infantile acrodynia, and it was a form of mercury poisoning that was quite widespread in the first half of the 20th century, courtesy of the widespread use of teething powders that contained mercury.
In those days, it’s estimated that pink disease occurred in approximately one in every 500 children who were exposed to the powders, resulting in symptoms of speech loss, apathy, hypersensitivity to pain and/or light, and in some cases, death.
When mercury was identified as the cause, it was eliminated from teething powders and similar products, effectively putting an end to pink disease.
However, the Swinburne study suggests that this genetic sensitivity has far-reaching ramifications, with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) being six times — an astonishing 500 percent — more likely to occur among the grandchildren of pink disease survivors.
This study adds more weight to the existing argument that ASD is the result of a combination of genetic and environmental factors and, although there is little one can do about an inherited sensitivity to mercury, there is a great deal that can be done to minimise a child’s exposure to it, including opting for amalgam-free fillings and preservative-free vaccines (mercury may otherwise be included), and being careful about which fish a child eats, and how often.
The Australian Marine Conservation society offers a downloadable sustainable seafood guide covering over 100 seafood species sold in fishmongers and restaurants, including canned, imported and regional species, to help you decide which fish are healthiest for you, your family, and our oceans.
Your say: Do you know anyone who suffered from pink disease?
Year after year I wonder what I’ll put in our front flower bed, and year after year, after tossing up between stocks and delphiniums, or California poppies, or a froth of nemesia or dianthus, I plant the same again — petunias.
They’re not always the same petunia. These days I go for the ‘spreading petunias’, preferably in purple, which I love, though other years the bed has been red, because fire engine red looks good against the dark stone walls behind.
We’ve never had a bed of white petunias, because I am married to a man who hates white flowers. Why waste time and garden when the flowers could be coloured, he says, refusing to admit that white is a colour at all, insisting that it is just an absence of colour.
This year they’re mauve petunias, the wonderful spreading variety that can grow to about a square metre per plant.
Petunias also look fabulous spilling out of hanging baskets or pots. They grow fast, give more flowers per square metre than possibly any other annual and are very, very hard to kill, unless the snails get them in their first few vulnerable weeks, in which case your petunias will vanish faster than the dog’s dinner.
Like most annuals, petunias grow readily from seed, and seeds are certainly the cheapest way to get an abundance of petunias. But although I am an eager seed planter, I mostly buy my petunias in punnets.
I reckon that no one needs a bed of flowers to tend in mid-summer that is bigger than four punnets of spreading petunias, minus a few square metres to the snails.
Petunias can begin to bloom a few days after you’ve planted the seedlings or even while they are still in punnets if the weather is hot and they are watered well.
Otherwise they sulk and sit there till the days warm up and they go zoom.
They’ll survive droughts, and the two weeks you are away on holiday and can’t water them, but they won’t grow much either.
Petunias do best when lovingly watered and fed every month or so, so they keep putting out more and more blooms.
Trim them back if they get a bit straggly, especially in hanging baskets, and give them another feed and water when you do.
But otherwise what they need is just sunlight (good strong Aussie summer sun) and there will be a thousand petunias in the front garden, a shaded pergola, friends to lunch with and something cool to drink. Summer doesn’t get much better.
You shared each other’s lives, possibly a house and maybe children. But can you really share friendship with an ex?
We’ve all got a couple of exes knocking around. How to deal with them can be a dilemma. Impossible as it sounds, some choose friendship. But can a platonic relationship ever replace an intimate, sexual one?
“Yes… and no,” says relationship coach Frances Amaroux (www.lovecoaching.com). “It depends on the type of person you are and the type of break-up you had. What you need to do is be honest about why you want to be friends.”
It’s nice to think you’re just being grown up, but maybe you have ulterior motives. Perhaps you never wanted to let your ex go, or you’re keeping them as back-up. Maybe you don’t want anyone else to have them, it’s an ego boost to keep them dangling, or you want to make a new partner jealous.
“If it’s for any of those reasons, you’re not helping anyone,” says Frances. “Spending quality time with someone, which is what you’re doing if you’re making a concerted effort to see your ex, means strengthening the bond with them. This can stop you both moving on with life.”
That includes meeting someone else. If your ex is filling a certain role, particularly if you’re indulging in sex with the ex, you might stop looking for someone else to fill that role.
Dramas also occur if you’re not on the same page. “If you want to stay friends but you know your ex is still mad about you, tread carefully,” says Frances. “They won’t be able to complete the grieving process — that’s what happens when a relationship dies — if you give them hope reconciliation is on the cards.”
Children also complicate things. Arguing won’t do them any favours, but playing happy families could give the wrong message.
“It’s great if you can stay friendly,” says Frances. “But make sure the children understand. Explain you still want to spend time together as a family, but you don’t want to be a couple.”
Jo Comans has done just that. Her marriage to Richard ended in 1977 after seven years and two children. She married her current husband Ray three years later, and they had a child. Meanwhile, Richard also married someone else, Jo’s friend Narelle, who was a bridesmaid at their wedding. They have four children.
“We have a wonderful extended family life,” says Jo. “We visit each other, celebrate our children’s milestones together and share four grandchildren. Some people don’t understand, but we’ve worked hard to achieve this and our children are grateful.”
Such a success story requires effort from all concerned. And although Frances believes this scenario is becoming more common as the family unit evolves.
“It’s no longer always one mum, one dad and a couple of kids,” she says adding it might never be possible for some.
“Like anything, what works for one person won’t work for another. So just be honest. If your ex wants to be friends but you’re not ready, say so. It might become possible later. If it’s the other way around, give them space.”
Once a person is no longer your partner you might not want them in your life anyway. But if you do, honesty really is the best policy.
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