Wagga Wagga

Went to Wagga Wagga for a weekend - the biggest inland town in NSW. The Botanic Gardens were cute, and the peacock became quite a friend.

Who's a pretty boy, then?

No visit to the area would be complete without a trip to the Licorice and Chocolate Factory at Junee where an old flour mill houses some sweet and salty treats (plus an excellent restaurant and gift shop). The tour of the mill makes you feel like a guest of Willy Wonka's, and the samples are received most enthusiastically.



Ale and Pie

Here's Him Outdoors brewing beer. It is a good thing, and although he takes over the kitchen and uses every piece of kitchen equipment in the house (and garden - look at that watering can), it keeps him happy. I also assist in the enjoyment of the end product.

It keeps him happy

This is sparging, apparently

And this chicken and kumara pie (now known as Le Tour pie, obviously) is my contribution to the happy domesticity.

Le Tour pie

Australian War Memorial

We paid a visit to the Australian War Memorial. It is supremely moving as a memorial to those who gave their lives so we might enjoy our freedom.

This is Simpson's donkey. John Simpson was a British stretcher-bearer serving in the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. At Gallipoli he acquired a donkey and carried wounded soldiers down to the beach for the three and a half weeks that he was there before he was fatally wounded.

Of course, the Gallipoli campaign was an umitigated disaster and is well known in Australian and New Zealand war history. Australian casualties numbered 8,700; New Zealand 2,700; India 1,400; France 10,000; Great Britain 21,000 and the Ottoman Empire an horrific 87,000. More than double that number were wounded. Any lives saved were miraculous.

Simpson and his donkey by Peter Corlett

The statue to commemorate the sailors

and the soldiers



The roll of honour





One of the gargoyles in the Australian War Memorial

The museum attached to the memorial is fantastic. There are artworks and dioramas depicting individual battles, and a massive hall full of planes, tanks and armoury illuminated in thoroughly impressive sound and light shows.

A diorama of the trenches in WWI



Bomber Command Memorial by Neil Dawson



The Animals in War Memorial

Busy Doing Nothing

It's all go round our place, as you can see.

Chester finds life exhausting

While we do puzzles - one of my favourite wastes of time!

Market and Mountain

At the Capital Region Farmers' Market in Canberra I was debating whith myself whether 10am was too early for a hot spiced cider, when they sold out - so obviously not, then!

After the morning walking around the markets, we walked up Black Mountain, dominated by the Tower. It was a beautiful winter's day and the birds were squawking in the trees beneath the deep blue sky.

The park is full of scribbly gum trees, and these marks on the bark are made by the larvae of the scribbly gum moth - they seem somewhat confused about their direction in life.

Sculptures by the Lake

We were riding around Lake Burley Griffin when we came across this sculpture of the Angel of the North by Antony Gormley. It is a life-size maquette from 1996 and number four of five. It was kind of comforting to see it down here. 


The Angel of the North (life-size maquette) by Antony Gormley

As above, with Him Outdoors

This work is called Witness by Dadang Christanto and was commissioned by the ANU in 2004. The artist has nailed sculptured sheets of aluminium to a dead tree in the grounds of the Australian National University. The shapes are meant to represent birds clustering on the branches,and in their abstract forms they resemble aboriginal depictions.

They shine and clatter in the breeze and the sun/showers of winter, paradoxically like a scarecrow, but I noticed a couple of magpies who weren't to be intimidated perching alongside their gleaming counterparts!



Witness by Dadang Christanto



Spot the imposters

Goorooyaroo

Goorooyaroo Nature Reserve is five minutes drive from our house. So we went for a walk and I continued to be captivated by the bouncing locals.



Crimson rosella

In-flight entertainment

Mother and child