Hi,

I am Andris Heks, a retired Hungro-Australian Senior Social Worker, TV journalist, awarded' Best Actor', playwright, performance poet, stand up comedian, psychodramatist, pain, stress and Kookaburra Laughter specialist, Yoga practitioner for 50 years, educator and Yoga therapist.

I have been living now for 36 years in the glorious kookaburra laughter rich environment of Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia.

I have developed a simple format through which I can enable groups of people ranging from a handful to thousands, to laugh wholeheartedly like the Kukaburras have been doing from before sunrise until after sunset and in between without fail every day for the last 16.3 million years!

The kookaburra like laughter sessions result in the laughers experiencing laughter-induced u n c o n d i t i o n a l l o v e, that bonds them to one another in a spirit of joyful cheerfulness, even when these people have been very different and strangers to one another before their wholehearted laughter together.

You can get a sense of that in our Kookaburra laughter film video trailer above called - WHEN THE KOOKABURRAS LAUGH-

Our ten minutes documentary about this was shown on Hungarian National TV recently; this Hungarian language film called NEVETÉSTERÁPIA can be viewed below.

Now we are working on the extended English film version - see trailer above-

WHEN THE KOOKABURRAS LAUGH, for which we need to raise an initial $20.000 so that we can take over the community building kookaburra laughter to Hungary and film the events for the 70th anniversary of the famed 1956 October Uprising in Hungary when the Hungarians attempted to overthrow the Soviet imposed dictatorship and usher in democracy.

But the Soviets brutally crushed the revolution.

Please see my poem-SMILING AGAIN- about my experience of that revolution as a 10 year old in Budapest; one that changed my life and which resulted in my defecting from Hungary and settle in Australia.

Now, by the 70th anniversary of the 56 Revolution, the Hungarians managed to oust their autocratic government and establish democracy, thereby at last fulfilling these principal goals of the 1956 revolution.

Hence, there will be huge celebrations in Hungary to which we wish to contribute with an authentic native Australian gift- wholehearted mass Kookaburra-like communal laughters, to enable the celebrators to have the biggest and most cheerful mother of all kookaburra-like laughs.

of their lives.

SMILING AGAIN by Andris Heks

It’s good that past traumas have eased grip on me,

To feel at long last what it’s like to be free!

Beginning to smile, not just rarely, but often,

With a lightness inside, I‘ve almost forgotten!

I recall the carefree Western tourists in Budapest,

Whom I, as a child, hassled at their hotels, like a pest.

I enjoyed being near them, trying to catch their mirth,

Swap matchboxes, foreign coins for more than mine were worth.

I won’t forget their light-hearted banter- smile on face,

We locals felt downtrodden, but they just loved the place!

We had shabby clothing, our faces stern and sad,

But the visitors were elegant, cool, and laughing mad.

Why wouldn’t they! They had the money, freedom and future,

While we Hungarians just had Marxism, but hearts in our culture.

Things in communist Hungary could be so grey:

The houses, the roads, the shops - even the sun ray!

It was like a black and white movie, but when the Westerners came,

Colour arrived to Hungary and Pest sparkled like a grand dame!

Oh, those happy smiles! Were they made exclusively to the West

And we locals couldn’t afford them, even if we did our best?

I gave up hope that I’ll ever smile in public,

Till, for a few magic days, we ceased to be a ‘People’s Republic!’

Oh, those unforgettable times in October 1956,

When the revolution triumphed and the country was ours to fix!

Strangers smiled at each other, hugged and danced in the street,

Westerners eat your hearts out; it was our turn for a treat!

But the Soviet tanks froze our smiles as they rolled over Hungary in force

And they put us, wayward Hungarians, back to the communist course!

In 1964 I escaped to the West,

But for those who stayed behind, life wasn’t the best!

It took another 35 years for the Iron Curtain to rust,

For the Soviet empire to collapse and crumble to dust...

It’s good now that past traumas eased grip on me,

To feel once again what it’s like to be free.

At last my motherland, you ousted autocracy to ease the pain,

So, let’s smile and laugh, you Hungary and me, for now we are both free again!