As we sat surrounded by smoke last Friday, the little town of Dunalley battled the odds.
It’s a sweet town, situated round the Dunalley Canal which enables pleasure and fishing boats to shortcut into the Derwent Estuary from the Tasman Sea rather than chancing the exposed southern tip of Tassie and the Southern Ocean.
My mother is our family matriarch. She is 87. Over the last three weeks, she has had three changes of mind about where we should have Christmas. Should it be up the coast by the sea or should it be in town?
I’ve always loved flowers and things floral.
So loving Liberty was a given.
Dresses for my daughter thirty years ago.
Making Liberty dolls for the South Yarra Liberty shop when the children were small…also thirty years ago.
House – my fave place in the world, and the sky is blue.
Porch’s warm and the perfect place for a dry white before dins.
The garden survived the torrential ‘Tornado’ rains of Friday…
Snowball Tree.
I’ve known Jane Nicholas for a number of years since I met her when I enrolled in a ‘how to’ class for stumpwork at our local embroidery shop, A Stitch In Time. In the course of conversation, she found out that I was a book and paper-artist and our friendship developed on a number of levels because we have similar backgrounds and we both deal in forms of communication and creative expression. I felt the ringing of those kindred spirit bells, – a sure sign there is a good friendship in the offing.
I’ve known today’s Big Red Chair guest since I was seventeen. She has always seemed grounded in the face of adversity, and being less grounded, it fascinated me how she found such surety. Faced twenty- five years ago with the birth of a disabled child, this woman didn’t once allow difficulty to strike her down. Rather, she became stronger, and a staunch advocate for those less fortunate than ourselves. She has wisdom and profound thoughts,
I’d had a good morning. Dressed in my city jeans, city shirt and city shoes (favourite camel JP Tods bought from the USA), city perfume, city makeup, jewelry, clean hair … you know, the sort of thing you do when you are going shopping. Not dressed up to the nines but a damn sight better than the last five months of aged shorts or farm jeans.
Last year was somewhat of a milestone birthday and as it passed, I made a mini-Bucket List (sort of child’s beach-bucket size) of all the things I want to do between now and whenever.
It involved things like a helicopter ride to my favourite place. A light aircraft ride to a world recognized wilderness area. Visits to all the parts of this absolutely beautiful state that I have never seen because I’ve been too busy visiting overseas places, or too busy looking after family, or too busy living in cities away from Tasmania, or too busy ‘being’ on the coast. Scuba-diving lessons. (Not sure about this one as I am claustrophobic, which come to think of it may affect the helicopter and the light aircraft, but on the plus side I love swimming underwater.) Climb to the top of Mount Maria and so on…
Light can mean so many things.
In this tiny cottage, we are lit by the full face of the sun in summer and winter. The original owner was English and he and his wife had lived in Sweden and had an intrinsic understanding of the value of light in life. Thus this little house has masses of windows facing north… and just in case there was the slightest chance the sun thought it could escape lighting the house at any point, there are windows facing the morning east and the dusk west. 
