A quiet Easter

On Good Friday I ate my hot cross buns in bed. And read three books. And a magazine. And three sale catalogues.
With great pleasure, I discovered I wanted nothing in the catalogues.

On Saturday I wrote and knitted until late in the night. At 12pm I was still wreathed in a web of knitting,  dreaming away, working by lamp and firelight.

It was the quietest Easter-time for years. No egg painting party, no outings, no Easter egg hunt - just a little family lunch on Sunday. 

I didn't even go out to the Highland Pipe Band Competitions.

A chocolate bilby, a chocolate wombat, some eggs.
No rabbits.
Chocolate Rabbits aren't really lovely symbols of fertility to me - they bring to mind Malthusian overpopulation and destruction..
(No offence meant to any bunny in its right place).

I've been feeling a bit wobbly lately. The rest was very welcome.

Natives and newcomers

I met the corellas when I went off to Victoria Park on Friday evening, to take part in a City of Ballarat community consultation about its future.

The park is a huge and beautiful grassy space in the city, and as a former gold mining site has been torn up, planted  with pines, oaks and other exotics but still retains remant native grasses and trees.
It  has a thriving population of native birds including magpies, crows, kookaburras and the seasonal visitors - corellas, cockatoos and galahs among others.

I'd love to see more planting of the native vegetation supporting local birds and insects and beasties in Victoria Park. It's a big park, there's lots of room for us all.

Down in North Melbourne a day or two earlier, I'd found this old, grey, cocoon among the fallen leaves and berries of some peppercorn trees.

Hope you can see where the moth has broken its way out at the top. It got a bit squashed when it fell to the footpath.
It feels like silk mixed with papier mache.

It's the outgrown cocoon of an Emperor Gum Moth.

This huge and beautiful moth has amazing blue-green, pink tufted caterpillars. When I was a child my friends and I would keep the caterpillars in shoe-boxes, rear the moths and release them. The caterpillars ate enormously, and as well as eucalypt leaves, they happily munched on peppercorn tree leaves. Peppercorn trees were imported from South Africa and grown in every 19th century school yard, railway station yard and country town in Victoria.

And here is the old peppercorn tree in the Carlton cemetery, that grows near Yin's great grandma 's grave.

I walked around Victoria Park that evening  with my head full of peppercorns and Emperor Gum moths, thinking how we might all, natives and newcomers,  look after each other.

Two Melbourne cemeteries

I enjoy visiting these two old Melbourne cemeteries every year about Easter, which is when Chinese families here carry out a tradition of visiting and cleaning family graves, making offerings and having a big family feast. 

The oldest Melbourne cemeteries have been built over, so Carlton is about the oldest cemetery in the city now,  right near the university in central Melbourne. 

Pines and peppercorn trees dominate. It is a dry, scratchy bent over old place.

Coburg cemetery, further north, higher up and looking down on the Merri Creek is greener, full of gold green cypress and palm trees,

South Melbourne Temple

This Sunday the family ccelebrated Qing Ming, visiting and cleaning family graves, getting together and remembering everyone.This means a full day travelling to three Melbourne cemeteries and to the See Yup Temple in South Melbourne to make offerings there too.

There's another good link here if you are interested in the temple, which is about the oldest in Victoria and built by one of early Melbourne's leading architects.

Mary Finnin in the State Library

Last week  (yes, I've been a bit behind in writing up the action around here) I set off at 6.30 to spend a day in Melbourne.

First I met Jess at the A1Bakery in Sydney Road for Lebanese coffee and hot, fresh-baked flatbread with zatar. So fragrant and delicious! You would never guess from this photo that there were in fact a lot of people in A1. I have a real knack for people-free photos.

 

 

Jess kindly gave me an Iphone training session so I can start to use the old Iphone I've been given.
 Then he went off to his lab and I went off to the State Library.

The best place in the city.

Paradise.

If only I could live in the dome and browse on books every day.

I spent the day in the rare books & manuscripts room reading Mary Finnin's poetry, and lazing a bit in the autumn sun on the lawn out front, with the rest of Melbourne.

Isn't this the most steam punk of sphinxes?

Stormy lake

Late last Thursday's blustery afternoon,

 windsurfers were flashing over the lake - and dipping in and out of it.

A little rain fell and I came upon this fisher right by the path.

She was so busy fishing I was able to walk right up to her before she took flight,

 

to finish swallowing her catch in a less public place.

I love the dark light before a storm.

A formal feeling

After a week of reading handwritten, nineteenth century documents,

and miserably cramped 19th century directories,

 (20 cent coin included to show how very miserably cramped the print is).


After wrestling with the internet, image-editing software, refractory cameras with missing attachments and sitting up far too late, I packed it all away, cursing both the 19th and the 21st centuries, and walked down to the Botanic Gardens.

 The gardens were very bright and stately.

Just right after a week of immersion in colomial bureaucracy.

I should have dressed more formally and twirled a parasol as I walked.

or taken a  book of Tennyson's poems to read by the fountain.

So refreshing.