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. 

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.

Bunjil returns to the lake

Warm evenings, spring blossom

 

I  walked out barefoot yesterday evening among clouds of blossom.

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.

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.

Blue metal

I moved a cubic metre of blue metal (coarse bluestone gravel) over the muddy drive and the muddy front path. We have embarked on a fix-up of the house and garden. It's certainly going to make me fitter.