Exploring Victoria!

In the meantime - between then and now! we have spent time exploring the central, north and east. Just last week we ventured north close to the border between Victoria and NSW to meet our newest great-grandchild - Taylor Lee the most adorable pretty little button. That brings us to 3 great-grandchildren - all gorgeous, 2 boys and 1 girl. We are so lucky.
We were in the heart of  old Soldier Settlement territory where between 1918 and 1934 over 11,000 returned servicemen were allocated blocks under the Soldier Settlement Scheme - over 2 million acres encompassing over 8000 settlement farms. Numurkah became the headquarters of the Murray Valley Soldier Settlement Area - one of the largest soldier settlements in Australia. Sadly by 1939 60% of the settlers had left their blocks. Problems then and still with serious water issues. But I digress - again!
On our way back to the big smoke we detoured through the Goulburn Valley region - glorious. On the recommendation of a couple of people (thank you Carina and Miriam), we took a further detour - as we are want to do, and ended up driving through Murrindindi and in to the Toolangi State Forest (Murrindindi in the Woiwurrung language of central Victoria means living in the mountains). Just lovely, peaceful, a place to revisit - and camp!

Lindsay is back with the birds!

The delightful Murrindindi River burbling away over the rocks while the trees dip thirsty branches into the amber waters.

Fascinating - the underside of what I think is a dogwood tree. Look at those tiny hairs.

The dogwood.

Eremophila I think. I just love these flowers. Look at the welcome mat it has put out for curious insects.  Again look at the hairs - clever structures hairs. Plants from desert salt bush to mountain trees use them to great advantage.

Wee jam tarts! Who could resist? I love the tea tree flowers, they're so deceptively simple.

Bush-tucker 5 floors up!

Bush tucker on a balcony garden! As we've travelled Australia I have learned much about indiginous food plants and I was anxious to try some. We’ve been harvesting veggies from our wee eyrie garden - not market-garden proportions but enough to keep us smiling. While we’re on a role, we’ve just replanted with baby rocket, cucumber, rainbow silverbeet, sugar peas, leeks, some lupines to add nitrogen (and colour eventually) and some other eye-candy flowers.  But this time we have branched out and added some drought-tolerant bush tucker to our patch - 'Bower' spinach, appleberry and coastal saltbush from Bili Nursery, Port Melbourne. Oh and not to forget our new passionfruit plants - both black and panama red varieties (the latter to remind us of camping at Hann River crossing on Cape York Peninsula).
Our ‘front’ garden is the veggie patch, but our side garden contains our mini orchard. We have 8 different fruiting trees/bushes/vines - 2 varieties of plum, fig, lemon, lime, 2 appleberry and a rescued passionfruit vine. Plus the mandatory tomatoes and herbs of course.
My experiment this year is with native species and in the fruiting space, the Apple berry, also know as apple dumpling or snot berry - yuk!  Aboriginal names include Karrawang (in Victoria). It is a small shrub or creeping native plant of the Pittosporaceae family and occurs in most states and territories in Australia.
They have bell-shaped yellow-cream flowers with a tinge of purple - or so I believe. I’ll have to wait to see what ours produce! The plant forms oblong berries 2 cm long in summer (next summer for us no doubt!). The fruit may be eaten raw (when ripe!), roasted if still green or preserved as jam. I’ll let you know how they taste.
All we need now is some native bees to help the other insects that buzz around our sky-rise garden. I'm planning to install a B&B for insects; we saw them in Oslo in July this year. We’ll have to put out thinking caps on and do a bit of research - and importantly find a space!

The side garden orchard

All the birds line up to take a dip. The mynas have even learned to take their turn but we have seen them sharing the bath with the doves. Amazing!

Gustatory adventures!

There are all ways of traveling (through life) and we’re exploring them all - well perhaps just a sample!
You know me and food! Well last Saturday Lindsay and I enrolled in a Vietnamese cooking Master class with Otao Kitchen in Richmond. We had a great instructor Dylan who showed us how and then let us make chicken and prawn spring rolls, marinated beef in Betel leaves (fiddly but a wonderful morsell), fish sauce dressing, char-grilled pork skewers, fragrant pork patties with rice noodles and pickled vegetables. All washed down with champers and topped off with coconut tapioca pudding with fresh mango and passionfruit. It was lots of fun and of course you get to eat what you prepare. Absolutely scrumptious! What a way to spend the afternoon - and there was loads left over to bring home.
That’s the second class we’ve done with Otao Kitchen, Richmond - we love it.  What next ... hmmm? I rather fancy Japanese but we'll see.

This is Dylan our guide. Lots of fragrant herbs with everything. Just heavenly. 

Chicken and prawn spring rolls- yummo. 

Marinated beef wrapped in Betel leaves and charred in a hot pan. 

Back in the city but dreaming ....

Our Arctic and Nth America adventures were a hard act to follow once back in our City sky-rise hideaway in September. But we dragged ourselves back to reality by replanting our garden and starting the preparations for our expedition to Antarctica - we are rather driven by exploring the world these days. But then shock horror! all bets seemed to be off when Lindsay was whisked away into theatre for a triple bypass! Who would have guess that unbeknown to us both, I was poised on the brink of widowhood - sacre bleu!! He came through with flying colours but what followed was an anxious period waiting for the tick off for him to travel - and last week he got it and we can, hurray callooh callay!
Happily he’s back in the saddle and champing at the bit to get down to the icy south. Me thr3!!
We're also having fun planning another trip to the outback to track some of Australia's iconic roads - got to travel more before we get beyond attempting the challenging driving that some of those 'roads' can present. 

That’s a huge limestone ridge beside us - an old reef?

The Tuwakam Track for instance. A 20 km track through the bush of the Judbarra National Park,NT. We drove it in 2017 and it took us almost 3 hours (without the van!) bouncing and crashing over an ancient bedrock of giant fossilised stromatolites - what a country! It led us to the Buchanan Hwy and to Jasper Gorge.  We'd do it again and spend more time in Jasper Gorge - but of course! Lots of routes, most of them gazetted stock routes, we want to travel before they get sealed over and become 'super highways' teeming with people - Tanami Track, Great Central Road, Strzelecki track, Heather Hwy - I kid you not and would you believe it is in the Gibson Desert - I'm a Gibson. So of course we have to visit that! Oh, don't get me started, our travel list within Australia alone is veery long - and growing. Like for instance SA and all it's glorious places including a tantalising place I'd really like to visit is the Adelaide Museum of Economic Botany. It was officially opened in the Botanical Gardens in 1880. It has been described as ‘the last purpose built colonial museum in the world’.
In the meantime ......