queenstown

Dear Kelly

(see comment for this post)

I'm sorry if I upset you with my comments about Queenstown.

If anything, my feelings about Queenstown are coloured by arriving at 5pm on a dark grey afternoon and my memories of last time I was in there, many eons ago, on a family trip around Tasmania. (You have to admit it is a slightly eerie place.)

I have always, even as a child, been slightly spooked but that time of the day. It goes back, once again to being a kid, out on family drives (which in my memory seemed to happen every weekend with full thermos and home made biscuits) and coming home late in the afternoon and just wanting to be safe and warm and tucked up tight in a glowing house. Bacchus Marsh was especially one of those places that for a long time just made me get home quick smart. I can not explain it. It took me years of going to BM on sunny shiny days to lose that sense of dread. We always seemed to drive through Bacchus Marsh when it dreary and drippy and getting dark. It's funny how we carrying those irrational things and feelings from childhood with us all our lives.

I like that to you Queenstown is safe and warm and loving. And that part of those memories is about 70s craft. As we moved into the eighties unselfconscious craft somehow died in a way. Consumerism took hold. I have no desire to go back in time, be a fifties housewife hitting the Bex, a thirties woman stirring the washing in the copper, but I do wish we could embrace the fact that 'making stuff' was just what people did, it was a way of life not something fashionable and 'oh so po-po-mo' (post-post-modern!).

I do bet that Queenstown was one of those places you had to make your own fun and that, as is so often, 'Isolation can be the Mother of Invention', craft isn't always about running off to the supply shop to buy the latest kit.

All the best

Pen

birthday shmirthday

If you have been reading this blog for a while you'll know that I always run away at this time of the year. It's partly that it is mid-semester break (and after teaching first year students for three quarters of a school year a break is desperately needed), the downhill slide into Xmas is about to start and ....... it all coincides with my birthday. Being the freaky little Virgo that I am I just can't deal with the stress of birthdays (do they ever live up to expectations?..... sometimes, often with disastrous- and sometimes hilarious- results! all that attention...... eeeekkk!) so over the last few years I've instigated an escape plan. 

I get to have a break, I get to remain quiet for a day, I receive lots of lovely phonecalls, text messages, etc and I don't have to deal with other peoples expectations of how I should spend that day. Perfect really.

So on the 2nd of September (day before birthday) I pushed through from Hobart to Queenstown. A long winding drive through farm land that gave way to amazing World Heritage Areas. Stopped at Lake St Clair, drove across the bridge at the Franklin River, saw snowtopped Frenchman's Cap in the distance and wound through the denuded hills down into Queenstown. 

It was late in the afternoon when I got there and being in a valley it was already getting dark...... and very depressing. Queenstown is one of those places where you can feel the isolation of a hundred years pressing in on you and I felt surrounded by 'bad juju'. I couldn't stay and decided to make it to Strahan in the last of the light from a beautiful setting sun.

And Strahan was a good place to have a birthday. All dripping rain, big fat globules of pure Roaring Forties water, soaking and thunderstormy giving way to beautiful washed clean light. 

just couldn't help myself

I had plans for a bit of doily graffiti whilst I was away.

Then I got to Devonport and realised I'd left the bag of doilies sitting next to the back door at home. A quick scour of a few oppies and I had the materials I needed. Luckily I had remembered the needle and thread.

I had visions of moss covered tree trunks cloaked in white doilies but when the crunch come I found that very greenery off putting. How could I sully its such intense beauty with something so very man-made? I began to realise that so much of yarn graffiti is tied in with an urban environment. I may clothe a tree in lace in the city but its primary purpose is really to draw attention to the tree. Does that make sense? I don't need to 'beautify' something as amazing as the forests of Tasmania- they are already stunning. 

But maybe a rock from Mersey Bluff Beach in Devonport, carted up to Cradle Mountain, stitched in a doily and then popped under running water is different.

Or perhaps a magnolia tree in a Hobart park.

 

(I got sprung doing this one but it was by a trio of visiting artists so it was ok....)

how about hobart?

You have to love a 'city' that has its CWA shop smack bang in the middle of town.

Well the address maybe North Hobart but that just means it's 20 metres up the road from Hobart central. 

Chock full of handknits and jams and preserves and eggs and -BEST OF ALL- cakes made fresh every day and delivered by members in the morning.

Hence the photo of the slightly squashed, and about to be scoffed, jelly cakes! Light as a feather and filled with fresh cream. Dreams are made of this.

 

You also have to love a place that has its 'tip shop' really in the midst of town!

Thanks to Jo, ex-Hobartian who I work with at RMIT,  for putting me on to this. "Collectables' is the recycling arm of the Hobart tip and they have a shop in town that is a hodge-podge of their more 'collectable' donations. Let's say there was a slight breathlessness and bingeing here. Things every girl needs.... a set of antlers, a map of Great Britain, a leather satchel, the cutest miniature of a wooden 50s sideboard, an annual, an old handmade metal tin (label says 'olde worlde tinne'- you gotta love a sense of humour like that!)......... and some other stuff.

The down side to the whole 'Collectables' experience was that I had picked up a flyer about them when I was at the shop and didn't read it until I got to Strahan the next day...... to discover they have another store at the actual tip in South Hobart. I was retching in frustration and nearly jumped back in the car to hot-foot it back to Hobart. 

and then there was evandale

Sunday was set aside especially for Evandale.

Not far from Launceston, Evandale is a lovely Georgian village, beautiful buildings tight up against the road.

And the sweetest Sunday market ever.

Set around an old hall, people set up tables and sell stuff. Like Camberwell Market minus everything I hate about that place. And a tenth of its size. 

It was a quiet Sunday (everyone was commenting) but it was an absolutely glorious sunny morning and how exciting when the couple walking in the gate ahead of you is Adrian from The Collectors and his wife. But that's Tasmania for you. (The woman who took my order for a cuppa in the hall was the woman who served me at the bookshop in Launceston on Monday morning.)

I so wanted to buy a whole tray of crocuses, so very beautiful in the early sun, vibrantly purple.

Still being half asleep I decided I really wanted the ceramic koalas-on-a-tree-trunk too late but I shouldn't complain, I had to make a couple of trips to the car as the morning progressed.

Ah, Evandale Market, this morning as I lay in bed, I longed to be tootling off to sample your wares!

the isle of thrift

Eight days in Tasmania.

What did I do?

I decided to forsake culture and history and opt for the op.

I've decided that this is the way to actually get to know a place.

'By my op-shops, you will know me.'

Tasmania is a strange ol' place. So informed by its landscape and isolation (a lot like New Zealand so I've heard!), it's bountiful and wildly extreme at the same time. It feels as if you open your backdoor and the wildness is right there. There are lots of people 'tree-changing' and involved with the tourism industry and, at the other end, there are lots of people on welfare. For a place of 500,000 people there is more op-shops per head of population than I think I have ever experienced. Even the smallest town will have a Salvo's (red sign) and a Vinnie's (blue sign) and, perhaps, a Lifeline or City Mission. 

the isle of fecundity

You might have noticed a lack of posts for the last week or so. (Or maybe you haven't!)

I've been away. On holiday. Having a break. Driving like a manic around the Isle of Fecundity.

Also known as Tasmania.

The state that has announced its drought is over. I haven't seen that much rain in a very long time. And they reckon it's going to keep on raining right through October as well. Amazing.

So straight off the ferry this morning. Home to shower, put the washing on and then run out to get Jethro from the vet/cattery. 

The photos have been downloaded, the car half unpacked and I have to open the shop at 11am.

My apologies if you come in and I speak gibberish at you but I've been a fairly quiet soul for the last 8 days, soaking in the landscape as it wizzed by and hanging out in op-shops........ but that's a story for another post!