David, that is a very beautiful story of your first aurora, i find skywatching can be filled with strange and interesting co-incidences sometimes personally too, part of the territory when your dealing with the universe maybe.
The solar maximum related activity at either end of the 80's produced some of the best and most frequent displays ever reported, much better than the recent solar max.
That second one sounds like you are describing a corona (the best to see imo) I have only seen one once - and it is up there with on of the wildest things i have seen in skywatching - up there with a total solar eclipse, a 100º tailed great comet, 1000 plus an hour meteor storm, a fireball meteor shower. I was gibbering like madman in disbelief, turns out i was the only person in the southern hemisphere who saw it and ever reported it, I was on my own at the time, in april 2001 at 5 in the morning, looking over a brightly lit adelaide from top of darker adelaide hills, didnt have my own camera back then worst luck - i did ring up abc radio and they mentioned it in there news that morning - they got Steve Cook out of bed, laughed my head off heheh.
I once talked with a very good aurora photographer from tassie and he was telling me that a lot of people in tassie use to/and some still do think aurora's was sunlight reflecting off the antarctic ice - even his science teacher said that to him!!?
There is a number of ways you can improve your chances of seeing an aurora display - by studying internet resources. but that is hard to go into great detail in a few short words.
So I would suggest the simplest way would be to subscribe to Graham Palmer's aurora alert email service (he is very good) at gramy[at]globe dot net dot nz
if he says via email there is a good chance of action - then go and look at these graphs at
http://www.sec.noaa.gov/ftpmenu/plots/kp.html if the 3 hour increment bars go in the red over 5 or 6 - then it might be worth having a look in tassie (and over 7 for southern mainland Oz) - rarely, but still occasionaly these graphs arent up to date, so always check that the times are correct (universal time) there are many sites and little programs on this subject - but it would take a lot of writing to cover it all.
If you do see some activity reports are very welcome and appreciated at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/southern-aurora/ as well as here at IIS
I sometimes get the feeling that people think if you have seen one aurora display you have seen them all - they are as different and varied as sunsets are. And also there is a very BIG difference between a BIG MEGA display and a mediocre/mild one - just for the unitiated - its like the difference between a partial moon eclipse and spectacular total solar eclipse, as a rough guide.
Kearn
PS John I havent seen any reports of activity very recently - but who knows? there are actually cases of aurora been seen and none of the indicators indicated there should of been activity? - still a new science