Travelling North

We're travelling North. First stop was Sandy Beach on the Coff's Coast for some three sisters' time (aren't we lucky!!). Just two nights for now, but enough time for lots of laughs & family talk, beach walks, a couple of whale sightings and some dolphins, lunch at the Park Beach SLSC and time to enjoy Ros & Pete's beautiful home and living environment.

We all drove up to the Yurrawarra Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Corindi Beach, about 20minutes North of Sandy Beach yesterday. We were lucky enough to meet and talk to Alison Williams (a local Aboriginal artist) and three wonderful women artists from the Tiwi Islands on a two week workshop tour of this part of NSW, to coincide with the opening of their print exhibition at the Grafton Art Gallery.

Those are not mobile phones that Alison and the Tiwi artists might look like they're holding in the photo above. They are actually clever tools made out of iron wood for stamping beautiful dot patterns on the women's paintings.

Alison's great grandfather was a very significant elder in the local community about 80 years ago when the remaining Aboriginal people in the area were forced to live in an enclosed reserve (in the forest just opposite the cultural centre). The area has a very brutal history obviously including a tragic massacre affecting a large number of local Aboriginal families late in the nineteenth century.

We loved Alison's art work in the exhibition at the cultural centre's gallery. We have bought this wonderful monoprint/drawing that tells some of Alison's peoples' story.

Spring

Ella and I really enjoy our special place on the hill above our house. There is an outcrop of big boulders that seem to inspire some very intense imaginary play. Ollie & Angus love to pretend that Spiderman lives there, but Ella and I love to play at being Cinderella and the Prince in our separate castles. This week Ella told me that the stepmother and stepsisters had died so that got rid of a few complications in the story, allowing us to focus on the more fun aspects of the Cinderella story. Our Cinderella and Prince had a pet cat called Jimmy Choo. They also have "sleep overs" and eat croissants together and have macaroni cheese for dinner.



Ella broke her arm two weeks ago (just a "small" break from landing the wrong way on a big trampoline jump) so some of her favourite games are very awkward at the moment. We had Rob's compact camera with us on the hill and she took a great sequence of shots of me. I could tell she was really using the viewing screen and pointing the lens to get the right shot!

This has been our best Spring in many years. The grass on the hill is almost knee deep and emerald green. The wattle is blazing yellow and Canberra dams are 79.1% full.

Even with a broken arm Ella is getting better and better at catching and throwing small balls.

Up close

We decided to ignore the rainclouds last Thursday and spend some time in the garden, spreading cow manure and experiencing all the joys of nature with Ella.

Although the piles of "tow poo" were very exciting to jump in, dig in and fill her shoes with, the most entrancing thing about our garden was the tiny little caterpillar Ella found on the driveway. She spent hours investigating and admiring it, especially its little black mohawk and its capacity to make its way over or around every obstacle placed (very gently but insistently) in its way.



After an hour or so of uninterrupted love we noticed that the caterpillar's cute black mohawk had disappeared. I hope it will grow back in time.

All this close observation is having an amazing impact on Ella's drawings. Over the past month they have become much more descriptive and detailed. She amazed us a week ago with this portrait of a "very cross" cat with eyelashes like Nellie (the Beagle)......

Rutherglen (near All belly!)

Our three day trip to Rutherglen provided an opportunity for Jody to celebrate a birthday dinner and get together with her friend Elissa (they both celebrated their birthdays this week, although Elissa's was more of a milestone than Jody's was!) while Josh was doing some "PD" in Melbourne. We just loved having an excuse to spend some quality time with our gorgeous girls (Ella AND Jody) in this gorgeous part of the country.

We took a leisurely approach to driving to Rutherglen on Friday (past All Belly), leaving us plenty of time to explore the grounds of The Tuileries in the mellow afternoon light of this cold wintry end to August. Ella is addicted to her pink Micro scooter at the moment so she was impressed with being able to scooter around all the pathways circling the villas and the vineyards bordering the property.

I was entranced with the play of late afternoon light on the rows of heavily pruned vines around The Tuileries. Later, that night we found we were just as entranced with the wonderful Bobbie Burns Shiraz produced by Campbells (of Rutherglen), recently awarded a 5 star winery rating by James Halliday in his 2011 Wine Companion. James Halliday awarded the Bobbie Burns Shiraz a 93/100.

I was stoked to see that Campbells use a similar image of the winter pruned vines for their classy wine labels.

Saturday morning dawned sunny but cold, a perfect start to a day in the country. We set off for Beechworth, about a half hour drive South-East of Rutherglen.

Beechworth is Victoria's best preserved gold mining town and full of shops, B&Bs and foodie destinations for the "quite well heeled". We found a wonderful (and very cheap) bucket of pavement chalks in one of the chi chi little shops in the main street. Ella couldn't wait to create her impressions of winter storm clouds on the dusty pavements of Beechworth, quite oblivious to other activity going on around her.

We eventually managed to lure her away from her artwork by the opportunity to be "a big girl on the tuckerbox 5 miles from Gundagai"! (That was her joke, referencing our attempts to sing that old Australian song the day before as we passed through Gundagai.)

We've visited Wardens Food & Wine in Ford Street Beechworth for lunch before and loved its honest Italian inspired flavours and great choice of wines. It was wonderful this visit to see Jody and Ella enjoying it as much as we always have. Ella ate her parmesan crusted flathead and tartare sauce and roast pumpkin and dressed salad with gusto.

While Rob tried a number of tapas plates and Jody and I had the wonderful kingfish and eggplant carponata.

Saturday night was Elissa's big birthday bash at The Tuileries Restaurant in Rutherglen. Ella was quite happy to stay home with us (and her Koko Black chocolate loveheart on a stick) while her Mummy and the other girls went out partying.

This morning was sunny, clear and a little warmer in Rutherglen. We took Ella for a longer walk after breakfast, past the sheep and alpacas grazing in the paddocks adjacent to The Tuileries vineyards. Ella was a bit shocked to find the wheels of her pink Micro scooter were getting covered in country dirt on these rough bush tracks and she kept stopping to clean them down.

I couldn't work out if this was a typical reaction of a city girl in a foreign environment or if it was just an expression of her gene pool (neither her Daddy nor her Grandpa allow their cars to get dirty either!).

Either way it was an endless source of curiosity for the alpacas.

Driving home Rob fulfilled his dream of exploring the old HMAS Otway at Holbrook with Ella, something he never got around to doing with Joshy on our trips to Melbourne back in the eighties.

Ella gave her now famous "Now don't do that!" salute as she disappeared down the hatch. It will be quite hard for her Mummy to teach her when it is appropriate to do this and when it is not, as we find it very amusing (and can't help laughing) when she uses it either appropriately or inappropriately!

Rob was suitably rewarded for his guided tour of the HMAS Otway!

3, 4 and 6

The day after a rather sobering election day was a good day to forget our woes and get into celebrating Angus's fourth birthday.

At this stage Josh was feeling a lot more stressed than Angus, taking responsibility for transforming Optimus Prime back into a Prime Mover. It seemed a lot more difficult than back in the Eighties when he was starting his Transformer collection.

Ollie, the six year old has achieved a milestone this week - losing his first baby tooth - left front tooth on lower jaw.

The kids were all in a gorgeous mood this afternoon; just a quiet, family only, celebration of a birthday - the best kind!

I've included this shot of Ella (at 3 years and 3 months) because it shows two milestones this week: line drawings of people now include legs and arms (and bodies, as of last night) AND she is able to cut around the shapes she draws with quite a deal of control, even around the curves.

Emerald City

We laughed our heads off watching the 1988 film of David Williamson's Emerald City on ABC2 last night; especially at the inept househusband antics of the Colin character (John Hargreaves) in the midst of his midlife crisis brought on by his (and his family's) move to Sydney from Melbourne. There was Nicole Kidman too, lighting up the screen, as an EIGHTEEN year old!

Avaricious, self centred, superficial Sydney......22 years on it seems that everywhere North and West of the Murray River has caught the superficiality disease and our Emerald City seems more lustrous to us than just a shallow, glitter city now!

This weekend there were so many events in Sydney for us to choose from: the Moran Portrait Prize Exhibition at the State Library, the Ferrogosto Italian Festival at Five Dock, the Young Blood: Designer's Market and Sydney Designboom Mart at the Powerhouse Museum......

I opted for a long session at the design market at the Powerhouse Museum,


which gave us just enough time to squeeze in some QVB scanning in the afternoon and a refreshing Guinness at the Royal Hotel Randwick on the way home. We had a lovely time at the pub, enjoying a lively conversation with an intelligent, well informed older woman about the election campaign. She left us in very good humour to get ready for a concert that night at the Opera House: Let it Be with John Waters, Doug Parkinson and a cast of thousands.

We'd met up with Tania and Aine the afternoon before at the Rosewood Cafe in Roseville and watched hundreds of expensively uniformed private schoolies emerging from the railway station and being picked up in the assortment of late model 4 wheel drives lining Hill Street. Tania is looking forward to "outing herself" next Saturday by handing out How to Vote cards for the local Labor candidate (with no chance of winning this very safe Liberal North Shore seat in Sydney (Bradfield)).

Travelling by bus from Coogee to the CBD and seeing all the posters on display made us very aware of the high profile candidates for the federal electorates we were passing through: Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith), Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth) and the beautiful and intelligent Tanya Plibersek (Sydney). This very strange election campaign is an insistent backdrop to the gorgeous, late winter sparkle of this emerald city.

Doing better than Julia

I can't claim credit for either of these photos, but they represent wonderful moments in our weekend; a much better weekend than Julia has experienced I am sure!

We looked after Ella yesterday while her Mummy and Daddy were celebrating Christmas in August with the workers. We met up with Angus and Ollie and C&J at the beautiful Lowe Street Park for a long afternoon of scootering, having crash kaboom rolls on the grass and playing "stacks on" on top of Robbie's stomach. It was all quite idyllic!



I was much too busy last week organising "PD" at the National Museum of Australia to have a good look at the wonderful new Canning Stock Route exhibition myself. Rob and I indulged ourselves this morning with a long interrupted look at what is one of the most amazing and inspiring exhibitions I have ever seen.

The Canning Stock Route was first established around a 100 years ago (although not used now). It's nearly 1900 klms long and runs through three great sandy deserts of Western Australia, allowing movement of cattle southwards, from the Kimberleys. The paintings and objects (and multi media) in the Canning Stock Route collection tell the story, so vividly, of the impact on the Aboriginal people whose Country was bisected by the stock route.

I'm still absorbing the richness of the material but one of the first sparks of realisation for me was that the world renowned Papunya and Turkey Creek Art movements (e.g. Rover Thomas) are only based in the areas they are because these amazing artists were forced off their traditional lands around the stock route. The government blocked off their access to water and sent shooting parties after them if they killed any of the cattle for food!

The exhibition is dominated by the large collection of paintings completed by over 90 Aboriginal artists who participated in this collaborative project to tell their peoples' story of the Canning Stock Route. Despite the injustices, the tragedies and the ongoing disadvantage it is a joyous, exhilarating, spiritual and celebratory exhibition. Every Australian should see it.........even Tony and Julia!

This picture shows three elders from the Martumili Art Centre working on The Seven Sisters painting from the exhibition.