After yesterday’s efforts, I decided to take the morning off from conferencing and spend a little time checking out Perth. The first session was on Women in Leadership anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

Walked up Jacob’s Ladder and dodged a few people running up and down. Legs already sore after 10 minutes of walking, I wandered around King’s Park for a couple of hours checking out the views and taking some photos. Having the 200mm (well, 320mm due to the camera’s cropping) lens is great in “real life” use; I rarely felt as though I was unable to frame something how I wanted.

Made it back to the Perth Conference Exhibition centre just in time to see the last (fifth) person from Deakin present.

The major prize at this conference was a Sharp plasma TV of some sort, which I didn’t win. Unfortunately, it was made worse by the fact that someone from my office did win the TV. The rest of the prizes were crap so that was all I wanted to win. Least I left with my cheap two up set which I was given for presenting.

Fiona Wood, Australian of the Year gave the final keynote speech to end the conference, and was quite a good speaker. The speech had nothing to do with the conference at all, but was interesting and entertaining nonetheless.

After the conference ended, we made our way to Freemantle Prison for dinner. The prison has only been closed for around 15 years, and for the first two years they couldn’t do anything as the smell in the prison blocks was just too bad for tourists to stand.

I’m glad to say that the smell has gone (well, occasionally I think I could smell sweat and other things, but it might have been my imagination, or perhaps just the other people nearby) as we were eating in cell block A — the cell block where prisoners in jail for life were located. Dinner wasn’t particularly good but the location was great. Strange to think that while we were laughing and generally enjoying ourselves, there used to be people there who had only a lifetime of (probably well deserved) hardship ahead of them.

Caught the second-last coach back to Perth, which was a rather boisterous trip back. People singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “American Pie” (well, the first couple of verses) as well as someone playing blues on his antique harmonica… funny stuff, especially since we were on a bus leaving prison. Perhaps it was just funny at the time.

Got to bed at 12:45 before having to get up at 4:00 to catch the 6:10 flight back home. Much faster flight home due to the headwinds now being tailwinds.