Blossom August 2017

The spring blossom is well and truly  out in Melbourne, but in colder Ballarat it's still mostly  buds.
I'm walking down Sturt Street every work morning now, and yesterday I saw this lovely cherry tree dropping pink blossom over the footpath.

Catching up with November

I've had a paper to write, talks to give and a lot of research tasks so I've been a bit (!) behind here. 

The garden has been full of roses and jasmine and so, therefore, has the house. 

We've had four birthdays in the family. 

I've been up at the Ballarat cemetery looking for a 19th century Ballarat Chinese doctor who is buried here.

and found him.

The weather has warmed up, summer is almost here and I have not caught up with the weeding - but I have put up a post.

Spring 2014

Suddenly it's warm several days in a row and the back lane is full of blossom.

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.

Country outside Tarnagulla

Beautiful and dry, even in spring, the silvery-grey countryside north-east of Ballarat.

Escape from Ballarat

Today I took a break from work and study and took off in a mini van with fellow members of the Sebastopol Historical Society. I'm going to make several posts of this trip, but tonight I'm posting a pub in Dunolly which I fell in love with and would like to live in.

I want to live on this top floor and have beers on this balcony and go to sleep with the wind in these palm trees late at night.

Isn't it a beauty?

You'll need to click on the pictures to see them properly. 

Warm evenings, spring blossom

 

I  walked out barefoot yesterday evening among clouds of blossom.

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.

Purple

Everywhere, suddenly, purple.

Lilliypilly

Hibiscus by thye gate

Sage

Wildflowers in the park.

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.