I have a camera again!

I didn't realise how much I missed having a camera until I was able to replace the one I lost a couple of months ago. Mr Pip and I took a long, warm walk this arvo and I took some blacktailed cockatoo portraits that did not work out - but here is the tree they were in.

 and the remnants of the pine cones they shredded for the seeds.

and the pic that did not work 

Spring landscapes in mining country

This Sunday we travelled out to Creswick and to Scotchman's Lead looking at energy efficient houses along the  BREAZE trail.
The goldminers left their mark everywhere around here - land stripped and degraded, tons of quartz mined out of the deep leads, hundreds of mullock heaps. There's a mullock heap, top right, in the hazy spring light here at the back of Creswick.

The house we saw here was just near the old Berry and Australasian mines, so we stopped off at the memorial to the miners who died in the 1882 New Australasian Mine disaster. One of Australia's worst, with 22 men lost when water flooded into the deep mine.

There's not much left of the mine or the enormous heaps of earth and rubble from the mine, and very few quartz boulders like this holding the memorial tablet. Most of the quartz from the mines went off to make roads, streets and railways around Victoria.

Just one or two big heaps are kept on here as part of a heritage zone.

  Then off we went  to Scotchman's Lead, south of Ballarat, where mining ruins lie everywhere.

Old tracks and bridges, the stumps of brick or stone mine works and gorse growing on the rough ground.

Wherever you are, on grassy verges in the towns, in the paddocks and the bush outside, you walk over fragments of crushed white quartz.

Click on these pictures and have a good look.

Old things

Much of the old industrial and engineering Ballarat has vanished, very quickly, and it's hard now to see that the city used to make trains.

 I took a camera out shopping and wandered off while Yin bought the fruit & vegies this arvo, so I could get some pictures before this signal box is burned down or the crossing is modernised.

I'm fond of this corner of the city .

Looking across to Black Hill from the old boom-gate crossing and signal box.

Engines waiting for Steamrail volunteers to get them back on the tracks

Petrol pump -  discard or salvage?

Misty, moisty morning with cloudy weather

(click on this)

Beautiful winter - water, mist and rain. 

I walk along here, on my way  to work. When I walk, that is!

French bread!

For the last three months this beautiful little French bakery-cafe in Creswick has been baking REAL bread. Ballarat is bereft of good bread - it comes in from Geelong (La Madre) or Trentham (Red Beard) or Castlemaine (Himalaya) or Melbourne (Babka) ......
I can bake sourdough and wholemeal and flat breads, but I can't manage the perfection of a traditional French baguette.  It seems that you have to have a French baker to get traditional French bread.

Sorry about the fuzzy photos but I got a bit excited, having brekky in such style this morning.

It was so delicious to be inside in the warmth of an open fire, the scent of baking bread and coffee brewing around us, gazing at the rainy street outside.

We took a baguette and brioche home but Yin ate most of it while I was still fiddling around on the computer.

This is what's left, just before I make up a tomato roll for lunch.

I love good bread and good coffee.You'll find both at the Peche Gourmande.

On the buses


These last few weeks, apart from writing (and working and cleaning the house and walking the dog...), I've been travelling about on the buses from Creswick to Sebastopol.
The landscape and streetscapes change radically over such short distances.Twenty minutes on the bus going north and I'm in Creswick.

 

Fifteen minutes on another bus going south and I'm in Sebastopol

Both were goldfields in the 1850s, both grew into little townships in the 1860s and were mining, farming and producing the machinery, clothing and essentials for their region.

No, it's not the weather - on a cloudy day Sebas looks just like this and a clear day Creswick still looks quite different. 

Winter quilt

June, and it's really winter now.

 After walking through the park on a dark and frosty morning, I'm thinking of sewing a dark winter quilt with icy glints.
(click on these photos - they will look better)

This image I took of the park made me think of a woven textile, a tapestry.  I got excited and found some fabrics to make a quilt of the same  mood.

with some frosty glitter.

Maybe oak leaf quilting

A quilt with lots of reds and browns and greys and shadowy blues.

I have five quilts just about finished, three more cut and partly pieced, two that are tempting piles of material - what is one more in the queue?