Thursday 14 March 2013

Cockatoo lace




This morning  I stopped by this old house in Sturt Street which I love for it's unusual iron trim around the front verandah.

Here is the central pillar.



Left






Right





If this were my house I'd be tempted to paint the cockies' crests yellow - they have to be sulphur-crested cockies, which hang around here over summer.
There's a lovely 1920s letter from  an old man who came to Ballarat as a boy in the 1850s, saying that flocks of cockatoos filled Sturt Street in the early days of the town. Lovely birds!

Although some people hate their noise they have a lot of fans - why else were these patterns made and then chosen to go up on the verandah?
If you haven't seen the house yet, it's beside Rosenhart's bakery.






4 comments:

head in the sun said...

OMG - that is GORGEOUS!
I was standing watching the cockies in the trees yesterday, thinking about that screech they make.
So pretty??!!
Do you ever see any of the black ones in Ballarat?

Elizabeth said...

Huge, yellow-tailed black cockies riot about for a month or so in Victoria Park, ripping pine nuts out of the stonepine cones. Magnificent birds! Ballarat people are so lucky having cockatoos and corellas and galahs about town.

Suzanna said...

This is so beautiful Elizabeth....I just love how local creatures are given homage in the architecture of your town...

Elizabeth said...

I am picking up just the things i love her! Glad you like them too.