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.

Temple of cedar and corrugated iron

I've just come back from a week in TFNQ (an acronym on the signs on state government buildings in Cairns). It stands for Tropical Far North Queensland.
It's the first time I have been up to Cairns.
I was visiting my eldest son who is very much settled in up here. I mostly pottered around, admiring the veggie patch with the new orchard of tropical fruit trees and going for easy walks in some of the tourist spots. Mossman Gorge was one which has retained a powerful beauty despite the walking tracks, viewing platforms signs and numerous visitors.
I didn't take photos as I left my camera behind in Ballarat, and I only really regret that because I like putting up photos on this blog.

We went up to the nearby Atherton Tablelands and Jake did kindly act as my camera man for our visit to the Chinese Temple. Miraculously it has survived the dispersal of the Chinese community living around the temple in Atherton for WWII (Anglo) soldier settlers. It was saved by local Chinese families and it is now cared for by the National Trust.
It is a beautiful, but simple construction, well-designed to survive the tropical climate.

This temple is a perfect combination of  corrugated iron

Local timber such as cedar

and together with carvings and fittings from China

it was built to suit the needs of the local Chinese community up here.

Look at this nifty and elegant chimney for the little side kitchen of the temple.

I haven't seen this building in a coffee table book of vernacular Australian buildings, or of corrugated Aussie beauties.  I'm not an expert or regular student of architecture, so I am ready to be corrected here, but I think this is another example of how only Anglo-Australian heritage is considered to be the 'real Australian ' heritage.  A loss for us all.
I'm reluctantly adding a label Chinese Australian heritage to this post. Reluctantly because it is in some ways selecting out what is not Anglo-Australian from our culture and our community.

An old town dreaming

Tarnagulla last Sunday.

A quintessential goldfields town made of bricks and local, golden stone

Low wood and iron verandahs across the whole width of the street

Houses with weathered corrugated iron roofs and wire fences engulfed in roses. 

Grey worn wood, rusted iron back fences.

Looks like my mum's old copper ended up here.

Looking across the road.

Then we drove off to Dunolly.

Tannery Lane

This week we explored an old industrial site dating from the 1860s. Tannery Lane, south of the township of Ballarat East, was a a tannery site for a long time.

While the stinking tanneries producing leather for the boots, horse gear, mining equipment and furniture of Ballarat have long gone, Tannery Lane is still a work site.

I'm fond of the foot bridge, which is a nice example of industrial recycling. 

The Yarrowee has been given a chance to breathe again now, replanting, no more noxious effluent and a walking track keep it alive.

Up by the Woollen Mills (more of them later) you can see how the old creek has been straightlaced into cement and bluestone corsets in the late nineteenth century, to keep it from its natural flood plain.

Clunes Bookweek happiness

 Cold, bright and dry, a perfect autumn day for the annual Clunes Booktown weekend. The town was so packed with booksellers and books for the weekend, that I spent five hours blissed out looking at books, and only got halfway round the town. I also forgot to get a ride behind these beautiful horses - maybe next year.

 I took these pictures at the end of my day, sitting on one of the straw bales scattered through the town, waiting for the free (thank you booktown committee!) bus back to Ballarat.

 I was sitting right by my favourite bloke in Clunes, and saw across the road that we're still in a fire danger period. It's been so dry, with no real rain for a months.

 See that little group with a banner just at the right? (Just click on the image and you'll see them)

Yes, the Clunes footy club (and netballers) were raising funds with bags of spuds and sheep poo - both local products.
For those not familiar with the Australian idiom, 'Yoohoo!' is what my Mum and my grandmas would shout over the back fence when they wanted to have a chat with the neighbours.

I was sorry that I didn't have room in my backpack for either spuds or poo, although I did get a jar of quince jelly - but not from these lads.

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. 

.


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.

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.