I can’t believe that it has been five months since I last posted on this blog. A lot has been happening but mostly small things, the next round of building will be in February when the double glazing arrives and the plumber and electrician get started. I think I will just have a ramble about a few things as I’m still a bit tired after New Year’s Eve. We went out to try a friend’s new pizza oven and were late getting home, travelling at 30km an hour most of the way due to the wildlife on the road. Then I managed to contract cellulitis after a spider bite and had a couple of visits to the hospital in Launceston for IV anti-biotics, still not out of the woods but getting there.
Most of our time recently has been spent on the garden and wrapping up our studies. I really enjoyed my writing course at RMIT and found it interesting and inspirational; I will be doing more of that soon as time permits. I dropped Cultural Studies at the end of last semester as I found the Macquarie Uni course very poorly organised and the curriculum very American centric and dated. I recently did a photography course with our local arts group and have learnt a bit more about how to use my camera so will be doing some experimenting when time permits.
Bryon was receiving very good results for his BA Fine Art but has had some artistic differences with Curtin University and they have parted company. He had planned a very interesting body of work for his third year project but the uni insisted that he do something outrageous to draw attention to his work. He told them that was not his way but did they listen? No! They sent him back some suggestions that included paintings of animals with severed heads (not well received by a vegan) and a bizarre interview with a man that rolled his own faeces into balls and exhibited it on pedestals. Enough said on that score.
The rains have been fantastic this spring, we recently has 253mm in one night, that’s ten inches!!! So far this year 1400mm, which means that everything we plant grows with very little intervention from us. I still can’t get used to planting a tree and not having to water it every week, I often do a walk around the garden and the bush after breakfast and marvel at the speed of the growth we are getting here. As I sit writing this the rain is falling on the roof, sometimes it gets a bit noisy as there is only tin and sarking up there at the moment. The passive solar design has been working well through the winter and we have been warm and toasty, with the help of a wood stove. Many a night was spent dozing in the big armchairs by the fire, life’s good in so many ways. Here’s a few shots of the garden . . .
I caught up on my reading this winter and spring, and must make mention of one book in particular. Walden by Henry Thoreau. I’ve read it twice so far. The book was written around 1840 so the language is a bit archaic but easy going, the guy’s philosophy is so close to how Bryon and I feel about things that it’s unbelievable and everything he says could have been written last week but it was written 170 years ago. He spent two years living off the grid by a lake in the hinterland behind Boston in the US. Of course his hideaway is now an outer suburb of Boston but his descriptions of life in the forest and being self sufficient are exciting. His reasons for dropping out are similar to ours and his views on government and life in general are inspirational. I recommend this book to anyone questioning our modern materialistic existence.
We recently completed a large bookcase in the lounge (with help from a friend) which is made from the recycled floor of an old basketball stadium from Camden Park in South Australia. It is 2.7m high and very strong as the timber is a hardwood called turpentine and it was so hard I could barely drill it. The next project is to fit out the walk-in robe in the master bedroom, for that we are using recycled Remu (a NZ pine) taken from the old Treasury Buildings in Adelaide.
The birdsong in the mornings is great to hear and we have had quite a few visits from a flock of black cockatoos, they seem to come down from the mountain when the weather is rough. The swallows are nesting on the shed and the robins and wrens are also nesting nearby. The crows have a chick in their nest too so it seems to be a good season if you are a bird. We often watch the hawks circling in the hollow behind the house, the fly very low over the undergrowth and then suddenly drop down in the bushes on some poor unsuspecting rodent or lizard. The eagles are still around, we hadn’t seen them for a while and were a bit concerned that some idiot had shot them, but they came back. I got a great shot of three of them together in a tree down at Seymour, we were only 50m away, they are magnificent birds.
There have been some wonderful scents in the bush through the spring, one plant in particular which I think is a native broom, it gets covered with small yellow flowers and on a sunny day it smells of honey. You can smell it from a distance and it permeates the garden along with the oriental lilies. The wildflowers were spectacular through October and there a still a few things blooming in the bush. Hibbertia and of course the orchids, we had a lot of double flying ducks this year and all manner of small flowers in the bush.
We have built a new enclosure in the veggie garden using the same method as the poly-tunnel but covering it with net instead of plastic. It is keeping the creatures out and it looks like my third attempt at growing corn is going to be successful. I harvested the garlic recently as it wasn’t getting any bigger. It looks like it had got pot bound in the tubs before I planted it out so I will be starting it a lot earlier this year and getting it out in April so that I can harvest the mature plants in December. I still managed to get a couple of kilos of good quality garlic so I can’t complain. We have been harvesting cucumbers and raspberries by the kilo. We are getting an average of 1.5kg of raspberries a day so have made a year’s supply of jam, and next will be cordial and we are giving anyone that visits a big tub to take home.
Work on the firebreaks is ongoing and we have finished a large part of it, but still more brush cutting and mowing over the next two weeks before we will feel secure. We have been doing a bit of star gazing lately and enjoying the clouds and sunsets. Bryon has been cutting more bottles for the bottle walls, it is a huge job, and we have been spending time at Mt Elephant Fudge Café and socialising around the town.
St Marys is a very friendly place. A tourist was complaining recently that everything is shut here (we don’t have seven day trading in the country) and I just smiled as that is why we live here, the shop keepers can spend the weekend with their families. It isn’t hard to plan ahead and make sure you have petrol and food for two days, I’d hate to see how these people would cope if there was ever an interruption to the supply chain.
Anyway, this was just a ramble to catch up, more news between now and May as we are planning on pretty well finishing the house by then.
Banksia Hollow 
Great stuff as always x