In essence you have joined a club, the clubhouse is the Harbour itself. The club was originally founded by the worlds oldest living culture whose conjuring chants sent reverberations flying far across still waters as rattling boomerangs told Ancestral stories on calm nights. Time and tide wait for no man. The Harbour sits and waits implacably, Club members come and go. Stories are the Club constant. The thread began with the First Nations thousands of years ago and continues today. Stories told and retold, memories savoured, accounts with and without absolute meanings, yarns bordering on the absurd; ancestral histories, all perhaps worth saving?

With a whole family of dedicated sailors, and his father famous for designing a distinct class of classic yachts developed from traditional hull forms, it should be no surprise that the ribs and shells of the Opera House share a strong geometric and functional connection with traditional Viking and Scandinavian boat forms.

Emotional Storytelling - The meta-communication of the clip, characters and setting, shapes how people connect with it - Hoana’s birthday provided a story, the Rally participants, the Sydney Harbour sailing, the representation of her young crew and the snippets of history provided by the interview against the backdrop of a historic clubhouse satisfied the criteria of emotional storytelling - we can claim success on that one.

“Nothing can be more ridiculous to my mind than our open boats here with their enormous sails and unseaworthy qualities, they are always on the brink of capsize and their owners seem to measure their sport to the nearness they can go to the inside of a shark.”

The idea has taken a life of its own! We now have an enthusiastic Committee dedicated to the task, and the Centenarians Rally is mooted as a bi-annual October event, taking turns with the Club's well-established Gaffers Day. An approach to the Australian National Maritime Museum saw them seize the opportunity with both hands.

HOANA, like most old wooden boats, has a tenuous monetary value. Humanity's notions of progress place little value on the thousand-year-old particles in her veins, even less on her vanished forest ancestry.