Hello!
If you've stumbled upon this page by accident you might be wondering who we are. So...
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The Shears family are Nick Shears, Audrey Shears and Thembi Shears. We have lived in South Africa and in England, and in November 2001 we moved to Brisbane, Australia. Why? We decided it was time for a little more adventure in our lives, and Brisbane offers us so many things we were looking for: a sub-tropical climate, a laid-back lifestyle, myriad opportunities, easy access to fabulous travel, and friendly open people. We intend to stay put here, too. (The picture on the left shows us enjoying a theme park ride on the Gold Coast in December 2000.) |
Why?
We created this website mainly as somewhere we can post pictures and reports for our old friends and relatives to see. So when this site was put together in April 2002 we posted a few recent photos, many of which were not really intended for public consumption - this was just a quick way of making them available to a few friends and family. In time to come we'll add lots more photos. However, real life has a way of forcing procrastination upon us, so now in early 2004 this site is pretty much what it was almost two years ago.
Thembi has her own home page, which she used to update rather more frequently, but which aparently now is waiting to be redesigned and reborn completey.
The site also gives us a chance to ramble on about our passions. So there's a growing set of musical pages (see below), a short list of recommended technical support newsletters, and an embryonic page talking about books we love. Talking about books, I have to make a quick plug for the wondrous BookCrossing site - it costs nothing, and encourages us all to release our books into the wild where they can be enjoyed and shared by others.
Old friends
The second reason for a site was to make it easier to re-establish contact with old friends. We've tracked down a few people by entering their names into search engines, and just in case anyone did the same on our names, we wanted to make it easy for them to finds the right place. Before this website existed, it was actually possible to find an email address for Nick Shears by typing his name into Google, but you'd be lucky to find the right link amongst the pages of irrelevant search results.
So if you're looking for the Nick Shears who grew up in South Africa, used to go to Northcliff High School, and then to the University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), and then returned to England, you've found him. If you're looking for Audrey King, who went to school at Maryvale Convent and Potchefstroom (and one or two others), and who became Audrey Shears in 1976, you found her. And if that's the case, do please email us.
Music
Music is central to our lives. There are loads of photos, reviews, memories and suchlike to come. In the meantime, the music pages added 19th May 2002 consist mainly of some shots from South Africa in the early 1970's, especially from one of the legendary Free People's Festivals held at Wits University.
This page was last updated on Thursday, 29 April 2004.