Home sweet home

Our new home and neighbourhood is a far cry from our previous place in Portland. There we had 5 acres of orchard, lavender grove, paddocks, huge garden beds, a gazebo, sheds galore and no close neighbours...... and now we have a paved driveway, a pebble 'front garden',  a paved courtyard at the rear,  a handkerchief-sized lawn and neighbours on both sides of us in very close proximity. But how lovely it is not to see gum leaves scattered everywhere and have large swathes of peeling bark littering the driveway and lawn.  It is pure bliss to walk three steps to hang out the washing and two steps to pick my parsley. However, our new surrounds and those of the neighbouring street are indeed very, very neat.   Roses abound in all their glory and natives are pretty and well looked after - nothing straggly here. I will definitely have to lift my horticultural game. Here are three views of the neighbourhood.

 

There is a lovely lakeside development nearby that people kayak and swim in. Houses that front onto this lake have their own private pontoon. However, there is access to the lake for everyone with lots of landscaped grassed areas with seats at intervals around the lake.




Best of all is the Wetlands Walk, a minute from our front door. It's around 20 minutes a circuit so sometimes I turn around and do it again the other way.

Opposite our house is an old cemetery. It is fenced off with a lovely brushwood fence and native landscaping. It was once the site of the Tabernacle Church erected in 1846 by early settler the Rev Ridgeway Newland for his Congregational flock. Today half a dozen old tombstones remain; an elaborate wrought iron gate guards the entrance. It is lovely to look out of the bedroom window and see the trees, though they are home to marauding magpies and screeching cockatoos.

Discoveries

I have been reading an intriguing book called Ill-starred Captains: Flinders and Baudin by Anthony Brown. It tells the story of the two navigators and explorers as they charted the previously unknown southern coast of Australia between 1800 and 1803. It is an extremely detailed tale drawn from their daily journals, diaries of the sailors, and other contemporary accounts, linked together by the author's retelling of the voyages. What intrigued me was the similarity between the Englishman and the Frenchman: both were excellent navigators who put their scientific discoveries ahead of the current tensions between their countries; they died in their forties, forgotten men who were abandoned by their mentors and their governments as war between the nations became more important than discoveries on the other side of the world.

I loved following their routes, atlas close by, and identifying the landmarks the navigators named (many remain today the ones these men gave). Baudin's ships' names were assigned to Geographe Bay and Cape Naturaliste in Western Australia.  In territory close to our new home, I learned the origin of a number of names. The Fleurieu Peninsula was named by Baudin in honour of the man who gave him the instructions for his voyage: Charles-Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, who was at the time the Director-General of Ports and Arsenals. Kangaroo Island was named by Flinders  for the abundance of kangaroos found there (though the straightforward account in his journal  that the animals 'were tame and were shot in the head with small shot and in some cases knocked on the head with sticks') was particularly sad.

But the best part was finding out that Flinders actually sighted Baudin's ship on 9 April 1802 near the mouth of the Murray River at the end of a large bay, and after hauling up flags to signal who he was, went on board where they greeted each other,  talked about their discoveries and exchanged charts.  That evening, Flinders journal records that 'in consequence of our meeting here, I distinguish it by the name Encounter Bay'.  

Along the coast

Today we walked part of the Heritage Trail along the coast near Victor Harbor. The sun was shining, the sky a vivid blue, and on our left the sea was a mix of aquamarine, bluey-green and deep indigo, with splashes of frothy white as the waves dashed against the rocky coastline.  Thankfully a cooling sea breeze wafted in as the temperature was climbing rapidly as we walked.  The gorgeous wildflowers made for a postcard-pretty picture.

 

To our right was farmland, a vast expanse of golden fields with masses of recently formed hay stooks.
I liked the way they looked.

We walked for an hour or so then turned back.