Rottnest Island

things I loved about Rottnest Island :

• no cars - the kids could safely ride everywhere.
• the kids rode everywhere - on their own, with their cousins, in smaller packs.  Even Lily.
• no one owns Rottnest - everyone is staying in similar fairly basic accommodation, no one has more of a claim on the island than anyone else, no matter how rich or poor they might be.  It lends a very egalitarian air to the place.
• the beaches are unbelievable.  Really unbelievable.  I'm reminded again why it is really never worthwhile travelling overseas for a beach holiday  -unless you are going for super cheap massages and hair braiding, rather than the actual beaches.  The water was perfectly clear and so clean, the sand so fine and white, the scenery so spectacular and everywhere we went it just seemed to get better.
• my (extended) family.  We went with my brother and his 4 boys and his amazing wife, Jodi, a local Perth girl who has been going to Rottnest annually since she was a kid.  Jodi is the sort of person who effortlessly plans a week's worth of meals and snacks for 12 people and thinks to pack a decent knife and a cleaning mitt.
• the weather - perfect 23-25 degree days and cool evenings.
• walking through the salt lakes, to the lighthouse, down to remote beaches where there was not a soul in sight, listening to podcasts and getting my steps up all in one fell swoop.
• lino floors. The accommodation is basic and the fact that half the beach was brought inside each day mattered not a damn, when the floors are lino, everyone is wearing sandals and there is  broom that can be used every so often.
• Lily and Jack making sand balls for hours.
• the endless hunts up trees, in water, and in dunes, for the frisbee.
• our proximity to the beach.
• the way my 14 year old nephew spent hours fishing, rigged up some PVC piping to his bike so he could carry his rods, then filleted and cooked his catch for lunch.
• the little baby quokkas in their mothers' pouches.  Less appealing was the way they went through your bag at the pub looking for food.

Such a great holiday.

The Looooooong Weekend

I don't work Fridays and I took Monday as an annual leave day, so combined with Cup Day I had a 5 day holiday.  Hooray.

We didn't go away. Instead we had Halloween and lunch with my oldest friend and her family.  Bruce came by for some help making kitchen curtains for his new house.  We went out for dumplings and took the kids to 'Kiki's Delivery Service' at the Astor.  I don't suppose there was a share house in Melbourne without the Astor program poster on the back of the toilet door in the 90's.  Nothing like knowing something is closing to make you rush out to go again, filled with waves of nostalgia.  I try not to succumb to 'how great things were back when....' thinking, but I do feel a bit sad about all those old cinemas that were so formative and no longer exist - the Genferrie Hoyts on the corner of Dandenong and Glenferrie Road, with foot warmers in front of the seats, where I saw 'Blade Runner' and 'The Muppet Movie' and 'The Elephant Man'.  The Carlton Moviehouse in Faraday Street, where I saw 'Betty Blue', the Metro where we didn't see 'Storm Boy' because it was sold out and had to go to something else instead - can't remember what.  At the Astor I saw 'Agnes of God' with my Mum one afternoon, and 'Casablanca' and a million other films.  Some are still left - the Rivoli, where I saw 'Children of a Lesser God', the Classic, where I saw the first 'Superman' with Christopher Reeves and the Valhalla - now rebadged the Westgarth and thriving, where I saw 'The God's Must be Crazy' and walked to Camberwell with my oldest friend with whom I had lunch last Saturday.

I got Lily some Hansel pants (I guess they are really some form of imitation lederhosen, but in our house they are Hansel pants) at the fete but the straps were a little short and gave her a wedgie, so I lengthened them with ribbon. 

Our pathetic gardening efforts over the winter were rewarded with one small and very sorry cauliflower.  Look how bug eaten those leaves are! I hope to do better (what I mean by that is that I hope Craig does better) with the tomatoes and basil for summer.

I took the three younger girls to the gallery to see the Romance was Born show - fun for the under 8's - and to ride on the golden carousel in the foyer.  We had afternoon tea in the gardens across the road.  I forget, sometimes, how wonderful Melbourne's public gardens are and how much fun kids can have with a police memorial, a fountain, some assorted fallen seeds from nearby trees and a bit of sunshine.  I dosed off in the sun while the kids pretended to join a circus and ride ponies in the ring.

Cup day I forgot to even watch the race.  Some years I get quite into it and enter the sweep and have  a flutter and a BBQ and give a damn and other years I don't.  This was one of the don't years.  I dragged out all the drunkard's path quilt patches I had made way back here and tried to decide what sort of strapping I should use to join them - dark, patterned, bright, neutral.  Sewing has been in a bit of a hiatus, partly because of the fete, partly because we are revamping our dining room/my sewing room (we've actually got a table that can seat not just our family but some friends now too!) and partly because of Breaking Bad which I am very late to get to but which I find quite riveting.  I need to have some handsewing but I'm nursing a minor crafty injury  - overuse of my left thumb, which interferes with hand work.  

Cup night we went to half moon bay for a swim and fish and chips on the beach.  We never go bayside and, if I didn't have family south of the Yarra I'd probably rarely get there which is just ridiculous. The kids were very impressed that this little picturesque place was just a short drive from home. Must explore Melbourne a bit more and stray from the well beaten paths we tread.

And now Lily's fifth birthday is upon us and we are careening toward the end of the year.  I can't believe it's more than 12 months since we departed for America.  A whole year gone and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

Halloween - an evolving perspective

Once upon a time I would have agreed wholeheartedly with Susan Brown, of Frankston.  I didn't think Halloween had any place in Melbourne.  It certainly was unknown in my childhood (though familiar from TV and movies) and it did seem to me that participating would somehow dilute our 'Australianess'.

It was my friend, Bridget, who changed my view.  For years she has letter-boxed her neighbourhood prior to Halloween, offering people the option of participating in trick or treating.  In this way she has met most of her street and befriended many of her neighbours and they now have Christmas drinks, and street-wide garage sales and ladies nights out.

So the last few years the kids have dressed up and we've wandered the neighbourhood - finding more and more houses with a pumpkin, or some cobwebs decorating their hedge each year.  The kids have absolutely loved it, and increasingly, so have I.

Though it might be an imported event, let's get real - so is Christmas and Easter, and, for goodness sake, the Queen's birthday!  Our uniquely Australian celebrations - Australia day (culturally divisive at best) has no traditions other than a day off work and Melbourne Cup day is really a celebration of gambling and getting pissed (not that I'm rejecting the public holiday mind you).

I reckon there is room in the calendar for something that focuses on kids, fun, and local neighbourhoods (and fancy dress - who doesn't love fancy dress?).  I'm not rapt in the lollies, and it is a bit rich paying $20 for a pumpkin just to carve it up, but Halloween around our neck of the woods is a delight.  It's getting dressed up and painting faces.  It's figuring out how to incorporate Nina's crutches (soccer injury) into her costume.  It's seeing Ruby transformed into a teenager, albeit of the skeleton dias de los muertos kind.  It's groups of kids, with someone's Mum or Dad or both, dressed as pirates and mummies and vampires and princesses, wandering the streets on a balmy evening, running into school friends.  It's people having a glass of wine on their front porch while handing out lollies or chocolates, their dogs dressed as dragons, with panniers full of loot to hand out.  It's a crowd of adults catching up over a beer at the local pub while their kids plundered the street, in a (mostly) polite and gentle fashion.  And it's all over by 7.30.  

There is a minimum of planning, a minimum of fuss.  It's so good to see kids in the streets, feeling confident, feeling like their neighbourhood is a place they belong and a place they can be safe. And maybe it would be nice if we could come up with uniquely Australian thing that incorporated dressing up with wandering the streets - and there'd have to be lollies or the kids wouldn't go for it - but maybe it is uniquely Australian to appropriate everyone else's traditions and refashion them in our own way.  So   I understand Susan, I really do.  But I don't agree.

Fete Day Again

So our annual fete came and went again.  It's something I craft for pretty much all year, and so it is the culmination of an awful lot of effort, not just from me but from many many people in our school community.

Every year I get a bit more of a glimpse of exactly what is involved in putting on a day like this.  The hundreds and hundreds of hours spent in planning, figuring out how electricity can get across the grass area to the snow cone machine, where the spit roast will be located and whether balls from the 'knock it over' will run into it, how to comply with the new council regulation that all dish washing be done with hot water, when our washing station is only plumbed with cold, how many signs are needed, who will put them up, where will reuseable plastic glasses be sourced from.  All those thousands of small things even before we get to the sewing and knitting and cake baking and planting, the sorting and folding and hanging, the pricing and donating and procuring and face painting and hair styling and fortune telling and nail polishing and on and on.  Truly an amazing effort.  There are so many things I love about it, but one thing that particularly struck me was both the lack of martydom in the hard work put in by so many, and the total lack of power play that events like these sometimes attract. Instead there is simply a sense that people are chipping in and doing what they can with, dare I say it, a sense of joy about the whole thing.

For once we got the perfect fete weather, and it translated into a calm, relaxed kind of day.  I scored a poncho for Grace which she has been wanting so badly all year.  Definitely born in the wrong decade, that girl - she still wears her awesome kilt most weeks, which she can now team with her poncho for added 70's effect.  I bought a few other things, including all the summer vegies to plant, a couple of books and DVDs, some jigsaw puzzles and jam.  But mostly the day was about seeing how much the kids just love 'their' fete, the sense of ownership they have, and the pride they take in their school putting on this enormous effort.  A day like this just ticks all my boxes.

Scenes from the Fete

The weather held! A few drops of rain late in the afternoon was the worst it got. We even had sunshine break through whilst we were setting up early in the morning. This year's fete was particularly special.

My personal highlight was probably the donation of ALL these hand carved swords, made by Pip, a grade 3 boy, and carefully priced (way too modestly) at 50c  - $1.99.  We re-priced them to a more reasonable $3 and $4 and sold out in about an hour.

You can't really see the adorable little mice tucked away there, but here is proof that there were moments of sun.

Gotta love a wooden version of minecraft.....

Baby goodies were popular.

My lunch: 'chilli con kanga'.  An aussie take on chilli using kangeroo meat.  Delicious and healthy.

I'm not sure what gives away the fact that this is an inner northern school fete most - the skinny jeans, the predominance of dark colours, the baby carrier, the beanies or the fact that this stall is selling vinyl records.  What do you think?

A new activity at this year's fete - fairy terrariums, or dinosaur terrariums if you prefer.  A big hit.

Flower garlands were popular as always.

The pizza ran hot all day.

The crazy hair booth did a roaring trade, as did snow cones, despite the cooler weather.

I'm always blown away by the guys who run the woodwork.

And simple pleasures like the Box Maze still get kids tossing their shoes and waiting for ages for their turn.  The Spooky Forrest was welcomed back, after a year away, by queues all the way down the stairs.

Gayle and her husband made boxes (and boxes) of wooden cut outs - shields, animals, shapes, to decorate.  Just lovely.

So simple, so popular  - toss keys and 'treasure' into the sandpit and let the kids dig for hours to see if they can find the key that unlocks the treasure box.

This is just a tiny section of the always-amazing plant stall.

And finally a cameo appearance by Harvey, the school's unofficial mascot.  Harvey lives in the same street as the school and sometimes wanders into class uninvited, or visits more formally with his owner who talks to the kids about multiple sclerosis.

If you've read this blog for a while, you've probably gathered that the school fete is a very big part of my crafting.  Partly it is because I really like making little projects which are ideal for fetes, partly it's because I enjoy crafting with others a lot and partly it's because I want to contribute to the school community.  Each year I am so impressed by and proud of our fete and feel so pleased and lucky that this is the community I get to be a part of.  The kids just love it and I love that the day is devoted to creative, interesting, funny and unusual ways to entertain, unite and (not unimportant) raise money.  This year I hardly bought anything myself, as we are in the process of packing up before heading off for 3 months.  I did win an item in the silent auction though, that I am extremely happy about - flea treatment, worm tablets, dental care food, a new leash and collar.  Our poor old terrier Pablo had his eye out last week (I'd post a photo but it is a bit gruesome), so I thought he deserved a treat.