Category Archives: Yarn

Southern Yarn Nov-Dec 2025

The Southern Yarn is once again ready for your enjoyment. It will be in the collection on our Yarns page, as well as via the image here. Thanks for sticking with us through our 75th anniversary in 2025 and we look forward to the year ahead with you.

Here’s Charlie’s editorial to get you started…

Many of you know, of course, that our Down Under Club meets for several of our events in the Scandinavian Cultural Centre. This has been a happy and convenient arrangement for many years now. For those who haven’t been there, we meet upstairs in a central open area adjoining the kitchen. Around that area are five other rooms dedicated for each of the SCC member countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Those rooms are mini-museums and serve to help keep their cultures alive and educate and entertain the public, especially during Folklorama.

This year marks 150 years of settlement by the Icelanders in Manitoba. The Winnipeg Free Press has recently run a few nods to this major milestone. A good one to read is “Icelanders’ Manitoba saga marks Year 150”, by Conrad Sweatman (WFP 16Oct2025).

Meanwhile, as we’ve been highlighting throughout the year in the Yarn, our little Club has been celebrating 75 years! We will reflect on this achievement at our upcoming AGM – hopefully there will be a good turnout to help inform our start for the next 75.

In this issue there is the usual mix of Club news, travel, remembrance, trivia and birding. Thank you to my editorial assistants Jenny and Brian and our other contributors and advertisers. And, in case you have wondered – yes, we do make extensive use of AI to produce the Yarn — Actual Intelligence. 😊

Yarn September October 2025

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We recently had a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio, and enjoyed some great sights, sites and scenery going and coming. But in all seven states through which we passed, smoky skies reminded us of the northern Manitoba bushfires.

Over 2 million hectares are affected, making them the worst on record. Which is why it was heartening to learn of the assistance from Kiwi and Aussie firefighting teams [July 13, 2025]:

“Fire and Emergency New Zealand deployed an additional 43-person taskforce to Manitoba, Canada, to bolster the local response to more than 500 actives wildfires currently burning in the region.

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Southern Yarn July/August 2025

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The Yarn is once again ready for your reading pleasure.

If I had a bucket list, it would now be one item shorter: I got to witness the “Toast to the Haggis”! This rare excitement came about while volunteering (mostly flipping pancakes) at the 57th Manitoba Highland Gathering last month in East Selkirk.

Selkirk is an apt choice for hosting this event as it was named for Lord Selkirk, who sponsored the Scottish settlers to the area in the early 1800s. [read more: www.lordselkirk.ca/the-settlers]. Congratulations to Margaret Walker and her team for pulling all the bits together that make the Gathering such a culturally significant event. It was fun and also an opportunity for Judy and me to make good use of our little Boler camper for its first outing this year.

In fact, the Selkirk campground was the perfect spot. One of the birding trails brought me within good range of a couple of good specimens – a great blue heron and a bald eagle (see p. 8).

Thanks again to those who contributed other articles of significance in this issue – Sam Dawson for the Club gathering at OEB (p. 1), Jenny Gates for our proud moment in the Legislature (p. 3), Michael Workman for the AFL report (p. 7), and everyone for our Club’s memories and reflections (p. 6).

Our advertisers are always appreciated and we hope you take advantage of their services whenever possible.

Southern Yarn – May June 2025

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25-Yarn_0506-MayJune The Yarn is once again ready for you to read.

At the risk of overdosing on folate, I have no plans to change my regular enjoyment of Vegemite and toast (p. 4). Hopefully the powers that be will take note of the nationwide, multi-generational “study” that has been in progress for more than a century down under with no warnings coming from the Australian medical profession, and add fortified spreads to their allowable imports.

In this issue, we also farewell a long-standing member (p. 3), offer some viewing ideas (p. 5) and get the low-down on the AFL (p. 7).

This resident ornithologist is taking a break this issue. And instead of my Birds I view column (p. 8), we share (with permission) Gord Mackintosh’s entertaining and informative bird tour of Manitoba. In case you’re of the Scottish persuasion, we have inserted an announcement for the upcoming Manitoba Highland Gathering (p. 3).

All this and so much more – for your reading pleasure.

Yarn March-April 2025, plus Trivia

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The March-April issue of The Southern Yarn is ready for you in glorious full colour. Come check it out by clicking on the image of the front page, or perhaps you are one of our postal subscribers, in which case you will be eagerly awaiting the swift delivery of the B&W version on distinctive yellow paper, by our venerable postal network.

As promised on page 5 of the newsletter, the answers (and JUST the answers) to the trivia questions are below. Don’t look until you’ve tried to answer from the questions first.

Australia Trivia Answers

Wombat
Steven “Bradbury”
“Harold Holt” Memorial Swimming Centre
1932
Daintree Forest
Hugh Jackman
Macquarie Island
Parkes, NSW
1974
Neville Bonner
Daryl Braithwaite
Sydney Opera House
Women first gained the right to vote in the Colony of South Australia in 1894
Opal
Platypus

New Zealand Trivia Answers

Green
Edinburgh
For Valour
Xena
Black Ferns (are one of the top women’s rugby teams in the world).
Moas
Peter Jackson (for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
Rutherfordium
Sir Russell Coutts
Australian and Pacific
53
Baldwin Street in Dunedin is the world’s steepest residential street a gradient of 1:2.86 at the steepest point.
Lemon & Paeroa
Adventure
Blow on it