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.

Bobby Gatto moves to Brunswick

One day Bobby Gatto came to live with me again. Bobby is my cat. He had been living with my daughter and her two gigantic dogs so his life was not always peaceful. However I was anxious that he might not adapt to the urban environment, having been a suburban cat who lords over vast expanses of gardens and peaceful neighbourhood streets.

I was wrong. 

Hope Street bus service

The old man walked tentatively towards the speaker. He held his walking stick aloft, to gain attention, but it looked as if he was advancing to attack, albeit in slow motion.

It was a beautiful spring afternoon and the speakers had been addressing the gathering about the impending closure of the Hope Street bus, Route 509. They talked about how the bus line serves the community, how essential it is, linking two major roads, the railway line, the medical, sporting, shopping and other public facilities. The densely populated area, is set to become even more densely populated with more high rise development. The area needs not more cars, it needs the bus service. For the elderly, the bus is an essential service, and the drivers are their friends.

One of the speakers, a retired bus driver, guided the old man to the centre of the circle. The MC, local resident Shane, introduced him as Joe, a man who has lived in the area for all of his 91 years.