Australian Garden

We visited the Australian Garden in Cranbourne, about 40 km east of Melbourne, on a cool, cloudy afternoon. The Australian Garden is the indigenous part of Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, and includes bushwalks, cycling tracks and walking tracks. It's an impressive experience.

The Australian Garden is organised around a central Sand Garden, with stylised sand, rock and plant features that reference Aboriginal art. Central Australia is called the 'red centre' -- the sand in the deserts and arid areas is this rich, ochre red. The plants in the third photo below are called kangaroo paws, as the little flowers look like ... well, kangaroo paws.

There are art installations throughout the gardens, such as these 'rain sculptures'. You spin the disk and there is the sound of falling rain.

References to Aboriginal symbology are worked beautifully into the gardens. Here is the rainbow serpent in the form of a path that wends its way through a bed.

These grass trees (left) are hundreds of years old. The flowering spikes were used as spears by Aboriginal people. On the right, and below, are some of the many banksias. I think the pink fluffy flowers are a pink acacia.

The water features are imaginative and fun.

We walked about 500 m outside the garden, through the bush, to a lookout point. This is from the lookout, looking back to the garden -- you can see the red centre ...

... and we were pleased to see fauna of the hopping variety (a wallaby) and not of the slithering variety.

Well, an outing is not complete without a visit to the garden cafe. And what should we find there but two ring-tail possums, curled up in their peculiarly situated nest between window and louvre shutters? They're nocturnal (pests), so while they look jolly uncomfortable, clearly this pair has adapted to this odd home.

Christmas 1992

I thought it was a good time to reflect on Christmas, twenty years ago. Mom and Dad spent every Christmas with us in Cape Town from around 1986 to 2000. For many years, we would spend Christmas Eve at the Strandloper Restaurant in Langebaan, about 120 km north-north-west of Cape Town. The west coast of the Cape has very cold water, but some brave souls do swim without a wetsuit. In these photos, Lee is four years old and Luke almost, almost seven.

The Strandloper (translated from Afrikaans: Beachwalker) is an open-air seafood restaurant with a set menu, all cooked over an open fire. I remember we started with mussels and fresh fish, then worked our way up to kreef (lobsters). Dessert was mosbrood (home-baked bread with a yeast made from the must of grapes) and grape jam, and coffee boiled on the fire.

On Christmas Day, Smuts's parents would join us for an early morning church service in the 300-year-old church where the boys were baptised, followed by a day in our garden next to our river. We'd start off with Christmas cake and mince pies and coffee, and open our presents. Then we'd move on to a leg of lamb from Karien's farm in the Karoo, cooked on the Weber over coals -- accompanied by plenty of good wine!

Christmas Eve

We have an annual Christmas Eve party. The rules are simple: you have to wear some Christmas bling, you have to bring a Kris Kringle gift for less than $5 for distribution, and you have to eat and drink merrily. We've been doing this for ten years and the families that come every year know what's expected! I don't think there's much more to be said, because the photos tell the story. (The camera is for general use so I can never tell what photos I'll have at the end of the night. It depends on who picks the camera up and uses it.)

Some things to look out for: Joe's fabulous fiery halo, Tim's Santa hat that danced and sang (pity you can't see it moving in these pics), Luke wearing the Master of Ceremonies hat to conduct the gift-opening part of the night, Anne and Robert's brilliant little reindeer desserts. Enjoy.