Pitt Street

One morning not long ago there was a garage sale in the Buddhist Centre in Pitt Street, just off Lygon Street. As well as buying a great vintage blouse there, I also had the chance to observe this fascinating little street. On the corner there is an old fashioned hardware store, then a few industrial buildings of different eras.

Teatro do fin do ano

As usual we spent New Year’s Eve quietly, however it was wonderful to be able to see quite a lot of the Melbourne midnight fireworks from the window of the front room. Vince always laughs at me when I say the Brunswick flat has “city views” but indeed we could see most of the pyrotechnics that were set off from the tops of buildings.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to resume an old connection with my childhood penfriend, Rosario, in Portugal. When we were schoolgirls and later students, we carried on a long friendship by correspondence. It was one of those legendary exchanges of letters that went on for years, accompanied by the sense of excitement when one opens a letter that has travelled through time and space half way across the world.

Break from Brunswick: East Gippsland.

With the teaching year at an end, we left Melbourne for a few days. On the way to Bairnsdale, we stopped as usual at the Art Gallery in Sale, and this time we saw a wonderful exhibition of the Donald Thomson collection of Arnhem Land bark paintings.

But here I want to write about Jacarri Cottage at Goongerah. This is about seventy kilometres north of Orbost, in a beautiful location on the edge of the Errinundra National Park. The main reason I wanted to stay there was because I am a supporter of Environment East Gippsland and I had heard so much about Jill Redwood.

Brickworks

Walking or driving around Brunswick you can see many kinds of bricks. It is a suburb of bluestones and bricks. One of the biggest recent residential complexes is called Brickworks, and it is a redevelopment of the former Hoffman Brickworks which opened in 1862 and produced bricks and pottery until 1990.
In an amazing aerial photograph from 1920 the deep pits are evident. Now they are parks.

The time of lilacs

 

There are some flowers that only appear for a short time. Lilacs are an example. The pale lilac variety only blooms for a few weeks in October and then they go brown and quickly fade away. The white and dark purple variants extend the season a bit.

Tales of Sydney Road

This is not the tale I wanted to tell about Sydney Road, a road so full of places and stories. 

Windows on Weston

Recently I called in at Northcity4 studios in Weston Street. Inside a former factory or warehouse, with its translucent roof and exposed beams, there is a wonderful studio space for a number of artists and craftspeople. Looking at their window, now transformed into an art work, it occurs to me, why do so few of the windows on this stretch of Weston serve their original purpose of looking in or looking out? As it is, one can do neither with many of them. Some are boarded over, some are painted over. But they are all intriguing.