Intentions for this Winter

Autumn is just about over. It's refreshingly cold, rain has fallen every night for a week, and some days as well.  I always revive a bit once summer really ends.
I've been feeling miserable, tired and incompetent the last few months. It's not just been the summer heat. I've let the research project take over all my time, got too tired and have been diagnosed with, among other things, an allergy to sunlight - not really surprising for a woman who is not fond of summer!  So I have done my yearly winter review and decided to  slow the research project down a bit, and pick up the blog again.
I began this blog to keep in touch with family in Melbourne and Cairns. I soon discovered it was a very satisfying way to keep in touch with me. So as well as sewing again, pottering about the house, writing stories and visiting friends, I am going to put up at least one post a week. I don't know why I  stopped doing such things!
Tomorrow and Saturday I'm catching up with good friends over the best coffee in Ballarat. On Sunday Yin and I will drive to Kyneton and visit friends in their new house and garden.

This is the quilt, put aside for over a year that  I am going to finish by the end of April.

In June I am flying up to Cairns to spend some time with my eldest son. The tickets are booked.

Velvet soap

I found a couple of desirable cottages when I went walking round Soldier's Hill this weekend.

Just look at that velvet soap ad! My Grandma used velvet soap, my Mum used it, I use it.

Clothes, floors, hair, dogs - Velvet soap washes all.

The packaging has changed from yellow and blue to patriotic, but there's a 1901 baby on each block.

Reflections

This morning the car mirror framed a landscape I didn't recognise at first. I love the way mirrors show you the strangeness of familiar places. Usually as photographer I have too much control to achieve the random magic of a mirror.

Then walking the dog a little later I found a reedy place of fishermen and islands far away from the city.

Street stories

Summer evening, Sturt Street Ballarat

Last Tuesday evening the Ballarat Historical Society and the Ballarat branch of the National Trust had a little walk and quiz, up and down Sturt Street. We had to find the details that would reveal the stories of the buildings along three blocks of Sturt Street. It was fun and tricky and  I still haven't located the Sennitt's icecream advertisement.

Looking closely, up, down and around, revealed some other stories built into the street. 

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This building was once home to the Australian Native's Association. These particular natives were not indigenous people, they were locally-born British-Australians. The people who worked for Federation and built the unions that fought for safe and fair working conditions and wages.

And here is the spot where the Australian Workers Union began.

 Unions are deeply unfashionable at the moment. Does anyone remember the musical Reedy River, full of union songs and bush ballads, which I was brought up on? I can still sing every one of those songs! The music for the Ballad of Ninety-One (1891 Queensland shearer's strike) is here if you want a rousing song.

Of course Federation also marked the legal establishment of the White Australia Policy, enthusiastically sought by the unions, and  which caused Yin's family, among many others, a lot of pain and difficulty.

Then at the end of the walk I had a good look again at this.

This recent acknowledgement of the original owners of country is opposite the Ballarat Town Hall. Nowadays the Ballarat Town Hall flies the Australian flag, the Eureka flag and the red, black and gold flag of the first people of this country.
When I look at the list of land of the local Wada Wurrung clans I see the Wada Wurrung bulag of the Barrabool Hills. That's where the farm my family took up in the 1850s was. Along with many other families from the cramped towns of England, they came over to farm in the new colony of Victoria.
It's been five years since the nation apologised to it's first people. We've still got to follow up 'Sorry' with a constitutional acknowledgement, and last week Parliament  began the legal process.

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.

Light Horse

Some early morning photos, taken in Sturt St, of the statue just in front of the town hall. From one side it is a mounted soldier on a war memorial, triumphant.

Walk around the other side.

It's actually a rescue.

This is a memorial to the local men who fought in the bitter and infamous Boer War in support of Britain.

It is a memorial of imperialism - it also celebrates mateship.
 Of course I am susceptible to myths of  mateship. I was brought up on the old Victorian School Readers.  Childhood heroes are unforgettable.
(Those school readers will get a post to themselves very soon!)

There are light horsemen in the district still.

I watched the Creswick Light Horse riding down the road to the reopening of the Ballarat Arch of Victory last year with mixed feelings. Reminded of the old wars, but delighted by the horses  - one of them nibbled the Governor General's posy!

Water dragon

 This is the hazy, moody sky on the very hot evening of  Tuesday after Christmas. We'd just had the first heatwave (4 days) since last summer, and I was desperate for a cool change.

The temperature stayed in the thirties, but it got a bit sticky and some rain fell briefly, and just as the dogs and I were pottering out the gate for an evening walk - too hot to walk them earlier - over the gate glowed a double rainbow.

 Such a beautiful beginning to this year of a watery dragon.
The dragon - in fact the water dragon -  is my birth year in the East Asian astrological cycle.

 The real  New Year of the dragon doesn't officially begin until the end of January. Then there'll be a big bash with Yin's family and lions dancing among the fire crackers in Little Bourke Street. 

It's about a month between our two big family occasions, and these few weeks between Christmas and Chinese New Year are a quiet space out of everyday life. The frenzy building up to the 25th of December has lapsed into reading and making and dreaming a bit. Then after a bit of craziness with drums and gunpowder and yet more feasting, I return to work and real time.

Water dragons bringing a little rain and rainbows.

Winter work

Winter is a time when I  wrap myself in dreams

It's a good time to spin new yarns and weave ideas into new patterns.

 Arachne's sisters are still making works to admire and wonder at before the cold bites too hard.

And I am busy making too.

Samhain offering

For Ceres and Proserpina, for Demeter and Persephone.

Yes, I am mixing my seasons and myths, but  the year is turning to winter, here in the south of the world, and violets are flowering - my mother's favourite flowers.

Easter and Anzac Day

Easter and Anzac day came close together this year

Making quince jelly, setting up the Easter decorations, thinking about my Mum and my Dad who both came back after overseas service in the Pacific. Thinking about those who did not.

Ruby red banana lounge

 

This year, with the help of my brand-new (if old-fashioned) ruby red banana lounge, I am going to take the time I need to think things through. 

 

This year I am not going to get into frenzies. Luckily the technology for thinking things through hasn't altered much for years.

Pick me up

A tough meeting tonight. I'm drinking home-made lemon and ginger tea so I have the energy to deal with it,

then I'll splash on some home-made orange-water for some extra zing.

And when I come home I'll work off the discouragement by reading about sensible, happy  people doing great work overseas and in Ballarat too

And I'll stop being so peevish and cheer up.

About time too, say the doggie people in the house. 

Expatriate?

Grace at Windthread found a caterpillar in her garden that is a native here. It shouldn't be living on the other side of the Pacific ocean and in the opposite hemisphere. Here's one in my garden last year. How did its cousin get over to Grace's place?

I've always loved these little creatures who travel around in their camouflaged sleeping bags. I don't know if these Australian insects are desirable residents overseas, however, and I assume they hitchiked over to the USA with the eucalypts.

Here are some pics from the wonderful book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie written in Sydney in the 1920s and an Australian childhood staple ever since.
It struck me, looking at Alicia's summer reading list on Posie gets Cozy, that while Australians read the great books from the UK and the USA, very few people outside Australia know about the fantastic, marvellous books that get written and read here. Pity really.

If you watch the beastie for a while, Grace, you may see it poke out it's head and front legs and haul itself off to a gum tree - or a rose bush. They seem to like rose bushes as much as the old gum tree now. They are completely harmless to people. Don't know about rose bushes.

I took the pictures from my very old childhood copy of  The Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, so the pages are torn and faded. I hope they worked out well enough.

Tapa and tea trays

The Ballarat art gallery is showing an exhibition of Tapa cloth from the Pacific.  The exhibition comes from Queensland which has some very old pieces of tapa cloth - with the permission of the relevant communities. The tapa in the exhibition comes from Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Niugini  and I think also Vanuatu, and some is made by families living in Australia.

 A collection of the traditional tools and materials accompanied the various cloths.

I have a few treasured bits of tapa rescued from Op shops and now I know that my piece (above) comes from Fiji.
The tapa reminds me of the tea tray cloths I also find in Op shops. A shared idea of honouring a guest or occasion by covering an everyday object with a beautiful cloth.

The fragment of lace I found last week harmonises well with the tapa.

Intangible heritage

First of all, something intangible. I think this place must be rainbow city, it's amazing how often I walk out of the gate here and look straight into a rainbow. I've never seen so many in other places I've lived in. I don't always catch them, and in fact I was trying to film the evening cockatoos, but this is all that I managed to take.

Now the heritage bit.

(If you don't know what 'intangible heritage' refers to, check out the Heritage Victoria site)

I had a good morning on the Alfredton bus where I caught some intangible heritage that's pretty much missing now from the buses in Melbourne. I caught these words and phrases; 'plenty of dough', 'dill', 'strewth', 'good on ya' out of the chat behind me. This is the natter of my childhood, and despite Heritage Victoria I reckon it'll soon be gone.

Hard to take a picture of 'intangible heritage' but last night's meal comes close to it.

Red roast pork ribs and dried beancurd and peanut soup.

Bak choy and Chinese broccoli with dried scallops

 Rice, and at the very edge (of the pic) offal simmered in a soy and anise stock.

140 years ago Ballarat would have been redolent with thousands of similar meals as the huge Chinese population cooked up dinner.  All Yin's dried goods, typical of Cantonese cooking , would have been for sale in countless little shops along Main Road. The vegetables would have been growing in the market garden allotments along the creeks and the pork would have come from the backyard. Just about everyone -  Chinese, English, Irish, Welsh, German - kept a pig or two in the backyard.

This weekend Ballarat is showing off some of it's tangible heritage and lots of buildings and gardens and collections will be open. It's worth a visit to the Ballarat Heritage Weekend if you are in the neighbourhood.