lady nelson

 mum volunteers on this replica tall ship ' The Lady Nelson '.  She just loves it, and got us all out on the harbour - no engine, just silently sailing along. this week she's also volunteering on the Endeavour, the ship that Captain Cook sailed to charter the east coast of australia.

She's boat crazy, and very clever. janu and I are making a book about boat rules (and car rules, and plane rules) and we don't have to go far to get our answers...

fossil cove

there was a crazy wild day, and people were surfing on the estuary! this is a small cove 10 min drive from our house, the other direction from the beach. the long tinderbox road we live on is all along the derwent river -  lots of places where it drops down to the water. 

one from each?

I love this about australia. don't make the posty go down all those long winding roads, just bung them all together at the turn off. 

tinderbox water

this is tinderbox beach, just a 5 min drive (just a little too far and hilly for us and little fella to walk). He is not scared of going out in boats anymore. He was.  Now he’s happy to paddle waaay out to sea (well, just a little way) and watch ripples, seaweed, rocks veering close! He ‘helps’ to paddle. Dad has a saying: ‘do you want help, or are you in hurry?’. It’s like that.

  

finally we've arrived at my parent's house in tinderbox. heaven. follow a short, steep track down the bottom of our property and you reach the mouth of the derwent river - salt water and bull kelp tries to convince you that it's not really the sea. janu likes coming down to search for penguins.

T'box

i will take more pics of the beautiful house here, but this is looking over from near dad's grapes over towards the house.  is the rainbow landing in the kitchen? you can see the brown house below...

Tinderbox. Blue sky. Windows looking out to tree tops. Derwent river sashays past, wide as the sea. The hum of crickets, the water tank buzz. Big kitchen, looking over the water. Countless (attempts at) cakes, cookies, rice pies – a cooking heaven.  Janu head down, over my ancient collection of dolls. Dad used to bring them back from (innumerable) overseas trips. There are dolls from china mingling with jamacains; dutch dancing with Kenyan, thai warriors meeting girls of the prairies.  Amazingly, before janu got to them, they had never staged a battle. I don’t know what I did with them – I suspect I played ‘house’.  Now they are in teams, fighting for their lives. This whole gender business is really something.

 

Dad taps at his computer, mum rushes from boat to garden, from beach to mountain.  When it rains, it taps lightly on the windows, and the tree tops outside the house roll gracefully. The house is on a 30% slope, poles reaching to the clouds with the house built around them. 

My dad has a filing system in his brain – someone says ‘grapes’ and his brain shuffles, and comes up with at least 2 jokes about grapes. He’s one of those insuperable (he told me to write that) people that remember jokes. He thinks of jokes faster than anyone I know. It is exhausting (and funny, if you like puns, which I do).     He is always sending me ‘joke of the day’ if they are good ones – can I repeat them? No.

Parrots cluster at the gum tree outside, screeching for nuts.  Flapping the shallow tray of water.  I follow, barefeet enjoying the hot prickly grass, the path to the washing line. The wet flaps dry in a matter of hours, blasted by the sunny wind.  Further along are the falling-down steps to the vineyard, where dad has planted row upon row upon row of pinot and chardonnay. And where his faithful hound, Mello, is buried.  My favourite rows are the boysenberries, a single row at the end yielding end-of-summer fat, heavy black berries. 

Follow the bumpy track even further, and an old shed holds memories of growing up in ratty boxes.  Almost cleared now, we can still unpack boxes of letters from my 100s of penpals growing up, the dolls, odd bits that I thought I couldn’t live without, and are now on the bonfire pile.  Then there is a small orchard of apples, falling now in the new autumn light.  A field beckons us to build on it, but for now it’s empty.  And old chook run abandoned. The whistle of a car passing.  Eucalypt oil wafting from sun burning into leaves all around. 

A valley drops into a small dam (almost always empty when I’ve been here).  If you scratched through the undergrowth, or back-tracked back to the house, another track leads down to the river.  Giant bull kelp grows up from the dark water. Flat rocks hold the sun.  the neighbour has secured a dingy for abalone excursions, or secret lobster pots.  The river is salty, leading out into the Tasman Sea.  Next land mass: Antartica.  Miss that, you might hit South America. I love watching the ice-breakers head out – they are tough, small ships. My favourite is the Aurora Australis, a brilliant red.  One day…

swish

 in tassie at last!

Leaves threaded on, thrown out into the water. Warmth from sun. even at 6pm.  Summer has flooded on.

We can play with water for the longest time.  I often build fences – lines of small twigs along the water, Andy Goldsworthy style.  I hum.  The twigs grow along the shore, sunk in mud. Janu digs with sticks. We notice all sorts of footprints: stork, kangaroo, maybe wombat.  In the night it poured. In the morning we saw a little strong fence, still stuck in the mud but now in the middle of a slurry river. 

leaving mainland

 it's pretty exciting stuff, driving through the dawn-y streets of port melbourne - seeing a giant ferry looming up. janu loved every minute of this 10 hour ferry!! it's an understatement to say we did laps around the 13 decks, 13 times, 13 different ways...I did actually enjoy it too. there's something about ferries.

we saw a pod of about 150 dolphins leaping beside the ferry - janu's eagle eyes (and the captain's announcement). 

bush-bye

what a wonderful gang - soon going our separate ways. see lovely don and sue hiding at the back...you may have previously seen don as a bearded extra in the last ned kelly film (they advertised locally for men with real beards to turn up!)

cobbin

 cobbing! the old ute powered the mixer, and we kept filling it with fine clay and water. beautiful slurry.  there was time inbetween for catching up on other jobs - tractor rides, chainsaw demos anyone? kid heaven.

archie and janu found lots of frogs hiding in the dirt - good motivation for keeping on digging.  macie wasn't sure about the feel of mud on her hands, and the hand prints bridie left all over the panelling are still there!

poo gang

just a normal lunch, with at least 13 of us crowding around the table. 

 

this was dubbed the 'assualt course', with kids crawling and clambouring all over it.

back in dayles

we found our way back to daylesford, victoria. this time, instead of being the only ones on the farm (except for owners Don & Sue) there was a teeming nest of woofers! from, america, australia, england and belguim - aged 3 to 60. we all got along beautifully, and of course I fell for the beautiful kids macie, bridie and archie. we had the most wonderful time together - gardening, 'poo gang' (scooping out from the compost loo!), making playgrounds, cobbing walls, exploring, playing, jumping - - these are the best kids ever. and thier mum and dad were pretty fun too.