Taking up the provocative example of the new genweb co-ordinator for Rush County, Sue Prifogle Otte, I seek to encourage a series of co-ordinator and indecatu-l introductions, hoping to hear what sorts of people sit behind the pages I've surfed in search of good examples. My apparent displacement to the other side of the globe has raised questions among a number of correspondents, and eyebrows among others. My links to Decatur County became apparent early this year, when I discovered the possibilities of long-distance genealogical excavation by web and was able to identify Decatur as the home county of my unkown and, I'd thought, unknowable Ballard grandfather, born in St Paul in 1856 (not 1859, as his MO tombstone claims). With the aid of Decatur genweb lookups I quickly pushed back a couple of generations and, finding the county page orphaned, decided that distance need not prevent my adding a range of links and materials. A couple of days in Indianapolis and Greensburg en route to a conference in Europe in June established some useful contacts and broadened my grasp on the extended family of Elijah Ballard, who trickled from WV to the adjacent corners of Rush, Shelby and Decatur in the decade from 1823. Mapping them has kept my detective instincts alive. Why Australia? Born outside Chicago, I grew up near Boston and embarked for an extended honeymoon and PhD research on decolonization in the most remote part of Africa I could find, ex-French-Equatorial, then taught in universities in Nigeria. When the Australian National University offered research in Papua New Guinea I jumped, and eventually settled into teaching and running the graduate program in political science in Canberra. Much of my research since the mid-1980s has been focused on the development of AIDS policies in Australia, with a chance to advise both here and in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. I retired from teaching a couple of years ago, but have been engaged in a series of consultancies at the ANU while based in the Graduate School. My sons have been infected by the peripatetic nature of their upbringing: one does research on mining companies and local communities in Irian Jaya while the other, a carpenter and nurse, plans to work for Doctors without Borders overseas. I can't offer the tantalizing library resources that Sue sets out, but can recommend to other co-ordinators a few obscure web links to be found on the Decatur page at http://www.rootsweb.com/~indecatu/indecatu.html Greetings from a late spring in Canberra. Dr J A Ballard <john.ballard@anu.edu.au> Graduate School, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Tel +61 2 6249 5487 Fax +61 2 6249 4829