Many Voices

This is all that remains of the Welsh Church built more than a hundred years ago in a little township south west of Ballarat. The congregation here spoke and wrote and worshipped in Welsh. So many languages spoken on the goldfields; Chinese, Italian, Welsh, Gaelic, German were all significant languages. 

Now they are all subsumed into English.

Just recently someone is putting up little signs in the local and ancient Wadawurrung language which has been spoken here for tens of thousands of years. I would love to be able to speak even a little of this first and original language.

Cool Summer 2017

I've had a long break of two years during which I've been sick and got better, worked on and off on a thesis and stopped taking photos.

I've tried Facebook but it isn't as much a pleasure as blogging.

There's a rosella outside my window and blood plums ripening on the plum tree. I feel like celebrating living in Ballarat again.

Here's town and city in the eighteen seventies with the Yarrowee River in between.

Deep winter, July 2015

Seven in the morning.  It's minus 4 centigrade. Yesterday morning it was minus 6. Really cold and beautiful. Even the dog hesitated before going out. His nose, my nose, both numb.

We waited for the sun to rise before going out for our walk.

   It was still very cold!

The marigolds have kept blooming as the winter has been mild until a few weeks ago.

 

 

 

It was icier, more frosted and slippery, outside our protected garden. We had to walk very, very carefully.

Autumn 1 April 2015

Autumn at last!

I'm having a break from the obsessive research and writing. Pottering with the camera, a bit of quilting, visiting friends.

Setting up the table on Easter Sunday morning.

Pom poms

At St John's Op Shop,  one of the many wonderful op shops in Ballarat, I found some yarn for about 20 to 50 cents a ball.

Since it was acrylic yarn, not real wool which is too good to waste, I felt free to potter around making a life-long love.
Pom poms.

The basket is still filling up as I make one or two whenever I take a break from staring at the computer screen.

Wintry day in August

Winter is the season when I can be quiet, think about things, calm down.

This morning was chilly,  thick with fog and drizzle.  The dog and I rugged up and walked around the lake.

Only a determined fisherman and a mad kayaker were out and about. Flashes of orange in the grey morning.

There was no sign of the town surrounding the lake.

Even the ducks were invisible. But we heard them quacking madly in the dense reeds and brush of the islands.

Midwinter ice

Freezing winter nights, frosty mornings and ice sealing over the water for the birds. I had to break  thick ice in  Mr Pip's water bucket too. Despite ice and the frost, and on the grey days the rain, it has been a dry autumn and a dryish winter.

Southerly posts has been frozen for a while as I plunged into a postgraduate degree at the University of Ballarat. I'm managing everything a bit better now, and have a good working relationship with my new computer, so I'm breaking the ice on this blog and having some fun again.

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.

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?

Winter energy

I hibernate through the hot months and start wanting to make things as the weather gets cooler.

 I found some interesting materials over summer, washed and sorted them and now, of course, I have to include them in various quilts.

Last night I got out the unfinished quilts (all of them) and began to get organised.

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.

Cooling down

It's been a very hot weekend and of course we had friends around to lunch in the middle of it. Poor Yin was exhausted from the shopping at various city markets and then the cooking. 

But the food was eaten, we talked and gave the children lots of water and ice to drink and paddle in and it was lovely.

Today it rained buckets. 60mills. Lots of lovely water.

This is not a creek, it's the road out front.

And there go the neighbours.

Hot

Summer, city, concrete, graffiti.

Jasmine

The jasmine is flowering over the side fence and I can fill the house with it. Some people find the scent of jasmine cloying, but I cannot have too much of it. Creamy and confident, it goes with the everpresent smell of new mown grass as everyone in the street tidies up ready for summer.

I've had an intense few weeks of thinking about where I want to put my energy this year and of learning new skills.


After a couple of years of just taking potshots with a huge and heavy donated camera, I finally bought myself a tiny camera from Aldi and have done a workshop with Aldona Kmiec whose evocative photos I saw at the Foto Biennale recently.

I've always loved black and white and have been experimenting madly.

I've tried a few portraits, some of which I'll keep.

 

I've done a lot of playing on the internet trying out things like  Flickr, Zotero,Google maps....fascinating stuff, some of it useful, but so time consuming! I can now edit a video with sound (barely), have decided NOT Facebook, found a net of interesting contacts on Twitter, but I haven't had much time for sewing or writing, let alone just walking around and looking. Time to log off, I think, and smell the jasmine.

May days

May is a misty, smoky, melancholy month. I love these mild days on the edge of the wintry cold.

This is good sewing weather. I am ready to start quilting the new quilt. 

It's good walking weather too. I'm walking down to Main Road tomorrow to have a second look at Maria Cook's excellent quilts.

Green tea weather

Last night , walking the dogs, I heard the first cicada of the summer. Just one tentative trill as we walked out the gate. Cicada weather is green tea weather.

There was still dew on the bamboo at 6.30 this morning

and for a brief moment I had the lemon tree in my tea cup.

I have settled back into place.