Turnbull will be accompanied for much of the visit by his wife, Lucy, and the finance minister, Mathias Cormann.
More than 100 volunteers handed out literature, and he was accompanied for a time by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
He was accompanied for all of it by the puppyishly grinning silver medalist, his training partner Yohan Blake.
But, this year, that shock has been accompanied, for me, by another: for the first time, I can imagine what the league might look like after he leaves.
July's keenly awaited launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would be accompanied for the first time by a simultaneous audio version read by Stephen Fry but Mr Newton would not reveal any new details about the launch.
The pair of ice-hardened, 12,700-ton ships, the Beluga Fraternity and Beluga Foresight, were accompanied for most of the trip so far by one or two Russian nuclear icebreakers as a precaution, although they encountered only scattered small floes.
"Steps to Heaven," on which he's accompanied, for the most part, by only a piano and a gospel choir, is out now; "Charlie Louvin Sings Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs" comes out in December.
So this past Saturday, the Rutgers football team was accompanied for the first time by a new version of those lyrics, retooled by Patrick Gardner, the university's director of choral studies.
Although he was accompanied for a time by the eventual founder of the Ajivika sect, Goshala Maskariputra, Mahavira spent the next 121/2 years following a path of solitary and intense asceticism.
He was accompanied, for much of the concert, by a string quartet that expanded his filigreed guitar parts with hints of fiddle tunes, swelling chords and flickers of pizzicato.
