Blackseed

While most of Australia (according to the TV) drank bubbly wine and watched the Melbourne Cup, I read a good book, planted out the coriander and drank green tea.

I found this unusual leaf-shaped tea bowl at the Ballarat artisan market last Saturday.   I have a couple of more tradtionally shaped tea bowls, but this one is surprisingly pleasant to hold and easy to drink from.

I was impressed by Blackseed Ceramics which was one of the few stallholders at the market to offer well made and individual work.
The other pieces I saw on the Blackseed stall were of less traditional colouring than the bowl I chose. There were some beautiful turquiose-glazed bowls and some fine, white porcelain painted in delicate paisley patterns and gently textured on the outside to suggest traditional paisley textiles.

Spring garden, Dunnstown

 

Some beautiful gardens around Ballarat are opened to visitors on Melbourne Cup weekend. Some years the gardens are mostly town gardens, but this year they were all in the country.
I went out past Warrenheip, through Dunnstown, to see this one.

The garden wrapped dense shrubs and trees around an old bluestone house, with small clearings full of sunlight and brilliant flowers appearing and disappearing as I walked around.

Careful planting allowed magical views into the hilly paddocks around the house.

In Lydiard Street, Ballarat

Lydiard Street, where the great old shady verandahs have survived the destruction of the 1970s.

And the art gallery,  a Ballarat treasure. Sometimes I pop in every week, but the past couple of months I've been a bit gloomy and inert.

Now, however, I'm warming up with the weather.

I didn't go in to see the latest exhibition. Instead I caught up with

works by Clarice Beckett, Rick Amor, Joy Hester, Bruce Armstrong and Criss Canning -

and the Eureka flag.
Because entry is free I have the luxury of going in whenever I feel like it and spending time with my favourites.

I wish the Eureka flag wasn't going off to a pay-for-a view place in the new Eureka Centre.

Now look at what I found in the street outside -

Weird how the light is so different in this image, but I like it a lot.

Then I had this to look at while waiting for the bus, just a block down fromthe gallery.

Finally  I bought samosas and milky, fudge-like sweets from Masala Valley near the bus stop.

I ate them  in the newly cleared and beautiful back yard when I got home.

Purple

Everywhere, suddenly, purple.

Lilliypilly

Hibiscus by thye gate

Sage

Wildflowers in the park.

Garden blitz

Three days of pruning and weeding and digging out the blackberry wilderness. Then a day in the ruby recliner with a bucket full of rose clippings and a book.

Couldn't even  bring myself to throw a ball for the dog.

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.