In the morning Mother Anna gave me a brief tour of their land. The seven sisters live in a small former farmstead, the guest house is nearby, and they have a beautiful wooden chapel. Then she drove me over to the Holy Transfiguration Monastery at Bombala, where the Real Father Alexis is abbot. This drive is by tracks across farmland, and every so often we had to stop and open gates, which seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Mother explained that these were to remind us of the toll houses, the last being the gate of Heaven.
Fr Alexis’ monastery is set in a wooded area, and is like a fairytale. The beautiful church - which to my untrained architectural eye looked rather Armenian in style, - is half surrounded by a cloister of buildings, something like those you see in Westerns, with verandas on the front side. Inside the church is beautifully frescoed, as one would expect in a monastery headed by one of the pre-eminent iconographers of our time. After speaking with Fr Alexis and joining them for the midday meal, Mother Anna left me there, and before Vespers Fr Alexis took me on a tour. After looking at the various workshops, he took me to one of their “sketes,” - cabins hidden in the woods, where the fathers can go occasionally to have periods of quiet. He promised the monks we would return at the end of Vespers, which began at 4 o’clock. In the event, we talked sitting on a skete veranda, and at about ten o’clock at night a posse of kangaroos came to tell us it was time to get back to the monastery and so we returned just in time to go to bed. Mattins began at 4 a.m; it was chanted antiphonally, with one choir using Church Slavonic and one English. After a short break, Fr Alexis himself drove me back to the Convent, where he was going to celebrate the Divine Liturgy, it being Mother Anna’s nameday. She is named for the Prophetess Hannah.
That day, Matushka took me for a longer tour of the Convent’s 600 acres - much of it is like a filmset for a Western, with gullies, ravines, boulders and scrub. And after dining with the sisters in the evening she took me to the airport at Cooma to fly back to Sydney. The plane was delayed and I arrived back in the city just before midnight.
Early next morning, the Archbishop and I set off for Adelaide, where the Youth Conference was being hosted. On arrival, in what appeared to be one of the most cultivated, agriculturally, parts of Australia, we were taken to Saint Nicolas Church, whose pastor is Father Vladimir Deduhin. The ladies of the parish provided us with lunch in the church hall, before we set off for the camp site.
The Conference was held at the Dzintari Latvian Camp, some miles out of town, near Normanville, set in hills overlooking the sea, which was just over a mile away. On the Saturday afternoon, a moleben was chanted to bless the proceedings, and that evening the Vigil service was held in the hall in which most of the activities were to take place. A table was put up to the east with a Gospel Book and Cross, and two analoys with icons sufficed as an iconostas. In fact, I missed most of the service, as I was appointed as one of the two priests to hear confessions, and those continued for the greater part of the service. In the morning we returned to Adelaide for the Divine Liturgy at St Nicolas, and afterwards were treated to a banquet at the Russian House in town. Each day of the conference opened with Morning Prayers said in the trapeza, with participants taking turns to say parts, and some using English and other Slavonic, but booklets were provided in both languages.
After breakfast and in the afternoons we had talks or leisure activities, and the day ended with Evening Prayers said together. After the meals, the Archbishop had a question box, into which anyone could drop questions anonymously, and these he would hand out to priests of his choice to answer. I had one on why we don’t have female altar servers, and so told them about Mother Vasilia at Brondesbury Park! At the camp too, I met Fr Simeon Kichakov and his matushka. Fr Simeon had been in the same class as me at Holy Trinity Seminary in 1970 and I had not seen him since.
On one of the afternoons, the Archbishop hosted an impromptu Pastoral Meeting with the clergy, and on another he had the altar servers come in and practise the vesting of a hierarch, as each action was explained to them. The poor Archbishop was vested and de-vested about ten times, but bore it with his usual good grace.
The last night was Talent Night, and the participants put on a wonderful show, with songs, Cossack dancing, comedy skits, story-telling and whatever their talents provided. It was a great deal of fun (apologies - I don’t think that word is permitted in a church magazine here in the Old Country!). The Archbishop, the indomitable Protodeacon Vasili Yakimov and I were to be the judges of the contest, and as the one with the proper pommy accent I was volunteered to announce the five winners. It was a pity they could not all have won. That night proceedings ended just after midnight, but then continued with singing, dancing and eating back in the dining hall, with the wonderful cooking ladies setting to work again but also joining in the fun.
Next day, the Archbishop returned to Sydney, but I was posted on to Melbourne, where on arrival I was taken to see the Holy Cross Mission. We arrived as they were chanting Vespers, and Hieromonk Cyril, the priest, later invited us in for coffee and a chat. The mission is right off Parliament Square and in a former Anglican Convent. In fact, as they have subsequently found out, this was the place where the first Orthodox Liturgy in Australia was celebrated. The chapel is kept open all day and enquirers have someone there to speak with them and tell them about the Faith. Daniel Kisliakov, my “carer” at this juncture, then decided we should go to Chinatown for a meal, and the restaurant he chose was obviously the haunt of young Russians, and so we fell in with a group there who had also returned from the Syezd. We arrived at my destination, the home of Archpriest Michael Protopopov and his matushka Kyra, just before midnight. 
