It's YOU! Hello! Nice to see you! Here you will find stuff about living a creative life in country Australia. I create with watercolour, pen, collage, mixed media and photos. I teach, hosts workshops, collect, dream. I love cheese, travel, my garden, faffing, colour and whimsy. I am crap at time management, and do way too many things, but it is all good. Oh yes, all pictures and photos on here by me too, just saying.

Wednesday 28 May 2014

A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS



A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS....

Brown paper packages 
tied up with string...
and here are 
 are a few more of my favourite things!
There seems to be a few things and a few themes that repeat...bet you spot them!
And you?
Your favourite things? 

cameras
photography(all photos by me)
painting 
lovehearts
watercolours
spirals

books
Kiwiana... and New Zealand
little souvenirs from around the world
recycled wood
blue shoes
green grass
 foot selfies

home
sofa
colour
glass
west german pottery
foraged twigs
cushions
IKEA
my ruby red Marcel Wanders stool
collecting
retro
vintage
opshopping
kitchenalia
coffee
eating
 silliness
laughter
craziness
fun
being a mum
black jeans
 A book that was my Grandmother's
 living in the country
gold fields
blue skies
being a passenger in the car and dreaming
shadows
 a good cemetry
angels 
black and white photos
 flowers from my garden
thrifted vases and furniture
yellow
light
 my new puppy Olive
my daughter's love for Olive
 playing with colour
colour
watercolour
time to paint
time to paint and play with colour
 diana camera
turquoise


red things
stationary things
paper things
bits and pieces
collections of things

 chocolate 
my daughters eyes
licking spoons
 flanelette pyjamas
stripes
colour
warm sox
 foraging
feathers
leaves
 mushrooms
acid yellow
felt
handmade
 collecting
glass
retro
vintage
home

 succulents
cuttings

 Doc Martens boots
patent leather
 my daughters hair

blue skies
clouds
cloudwatching
daydreaming
 making
colour
collage
cutting

the number 8
striped stockings
vintage industrial furniture for a song ($2)
lovehearts
love
colour
watercolour 
lead pencils
pattern
yellow
found and foraged
photography
memories of Thailand
drawing
sketching
where I live
things I find
stripes
 red hearts
brooches
LOVE !


Sunday 25 May 2014

BROKEN HILL AND BROKEN HEARTS



Me , myself and I...my shadow on the slag heap

BROKEN HILL AND BROKEN HEARTS

This post is a little different to my usual, with a bit more substance to it..not just pretty pictures and eye candy.Please indulge me, as I give a little peek into another side of Broken Hill, quite different in nature to the post a little while back I did about Bell's Milk Bar.This is about another icon of 'the Hill', but not perhaps quite so charming.

For those not familiar with its location... many, many, many hours drive away from where I live,in Country NSW, already over 4 hours from Sydney and the coast
(indeed, far enough away that if I replaced NSW with a map of Europe we would have driven across several countries to get there)is a place called Broken Hill. You may well know it by name , even if you have not been there. Yes, it is in Outback NSW, not far from the South Australian border.Yes, it has featured in many movies.Yes,It is a bustling place, this city in the middle of a desert.

 It has amazingly cool street names, like Talc St. Galena St., Bromide St.,all names of elements and minerals. And the city itself is hunkered down under the gaze of surely what is one of the most bizarre and ugly things-a huge, massive gargantuan slag heap. A flat topped hill made from all the useless and unwanted stuff dug from deep in the bowels of the earth, in man's search for the things we desire.A waste heap of rock and dirt, brown, grey, red,  and totally treeless and not a blade of grass anywhere. It is indeed a Broken Hill.

And on top of this giant man made monstrosity, looming above the city, is a stark, powerful, brute of a memorial (and a modern cafe..now abandoned.)  

The memorial is for the fallen, lost men whose lives were claimed by mining accidents. Horrendously killed, by falls, crushings, explosions, infections, mishap and faulty equipment.. just to name a few of the grim means that they may have met their end.

Each man and boy who has died has their name, how they were killed, where they were killed and their age recorded on a wall of memory, complete  with a sad and faded plastic rose. Heartbreaking, and so much grief in what has always been a tight - knit town full of strong characters and strong hearts.

It truly is remarkable and deeply moving place, made even more powerful by its location, because from up high and its vantage point, the isolation and the enormous span of the horizon is intense.You look out and see space, vast open space, desert, and sky. You can even see some of the curvature of the earth, it is so damn incredibly vast.

I was so desperate to get back to Broken Hill, to feel the enormity and scale of our country, and bask in its isolation.I had been there as a teenager, and it had felt powerfully intense.I drew orange and blue, flat landscapes afterwards for many months. And now I felt the same emotions stirring, again, up here on the slag heap. 

Standing there felt akin to standing on some bizarre planet, like something or somewhere BBC might have filmed Dr. Who episodes, or some other slightly dodgy sci-fi show.

Truly and definitely strange. 

Definitely an experience.

Definitely glad I am not a miner.Definitely amazed by those who go deep into the underground for their livelihood.Definitely aware of how HUGE our nation is. And definitely glad to be back there to experience it all again.
Just as raw and powerful as I remembered it. 

 Roses on the memorial wall


Miss 7, looking out from the memorial
Memorial shapes, brutal and harsh against a blue outback sky
now abandoned cafe on the slag heap
The Miner's Memorial in profile
Looking back from the desert, the slag heap, with the and cafe and memorial...and Broken Hill nestled beneath them.