Unloading Captain Cook’s Cottage. 1934.

When I was doing the post about the Fairy Tree in the Fitzroy Gardens the other day I also mentioned Captain Cook’s Cottage, as it is in the same part of the gardens.

Naturally, I couldn’t help myself but to look for articles about the cottage and was pretty happy to find this one.

I think they are a bit ambitious in the caption, with the statement ‘Cook’s cottage being unloaded’. It is a two storey stone structure. This picture from 1934 looks like they are only unloading the kitchen table… I wonder why they bothered with their plans to bring the original ivy as well. We have plenty here that we are happy to get rid of!

Captain Cook’s Cottage is an adorable building. I am sure in its day it was an impressive home but now it is a cute tiny cottage. I love the design of it, the entry through a breezeway is brilliant and the sleeping area in the kitchen would be a great way to stay warm on a snowy English night.

It also has a kitchen garden out the back that I would love to have at my house. Of course the residents depended on it back in the day, I am just plain too lazy to do one myself!

Nambour Chronicle and North Coast Advertiser 27 Apr 1934 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article77398729

A funny thing happened while I was at work…..

What is the last thing a man wants when he is slacking off at work and trying to buy some unecessary items for the man cave?

To be busted by the missus.

I had a hilarious phone call at work today. My boss sells car parts as a sideline and when the phone rang in the afternoon I answered it as normal to hear a very familiar voice on the line.

‘Hi, I was just calling about the car parts you have advertised in the Trader’ says the voice.

‘Hi’ I returned. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be working?’

‘What?!’ says the Man of the House, totally confused.

He had called the number in the ad not knowing it was the office number.

So, so busted….. He didn’t get anything he wanted either 🙂

I can’t go to work, my ipod is sick.

My ipod has not been working properly for a little while so I have been going to work each day without it. This is a problem. You see, I do a job that involves very little thinking, lots of heavy lifting and being surrounded by noisy machinery. My ipod distracts me and means I don’t have to listen to the terrible commercial station the guys leave their radio on. When ipod first got sick I though I wouldn’t miss him too much but today was the first day he has been (mostly) fixed and boy, I certainly welcomed him back!

The days without ipod have dragged and I seemed to look at my watch every 10 seconds. When ipod returned I put on something with a good beat and just got on with it. The day flew by.

It prompted me to do some posts to share the music that kept me happy, my playlist leans heavily towards Australian music and often Aussie music finds it hard to get air time overseas. You non-Australians are missing out!

I am starting with the artist that made me smile the most today with the song ‘Rock and Roll Nerd’, the wild haired, guy-liner-wearing Tim Minchin, comedian, poet and musician. The song is about his struggles with his average upbringing and life not being rock and roll enough. Hilarious.

If you have never heard of Tim Minchin you are so missing out. His music is not mainstream but is actually intelligent and will make you laugh out loud. The first time I heard ‘Lullaby’ I was in tears of laughter, the tears only a parent with a non-sleeping child would understand.

This is the part where I should tell you my favourite song but I love pretty much all of them!

Ok, apart from the aforementioned, I always chuckle at ‘If you really loved me’ and ‘If I didn’t have you’, Tim writes a mean love song…..

‘White wine in the sun’ is a sentimental song about his love of christmas and you can almost hear the gasps of horror at the first half of ‘Cont’.

The songs of Tim Minchin are at times controversial as he sings about racism, atheism, refugees and other current issues. The best way to first listen to him is to watch a live performance. When he sits barefoot at his piano and starts singing you never know where he is going to lead you. Whenever I hear his music I see him singing that song in my mind’s eye and it makes the music all the funnier. He is a performer, not just a musician.

Click on this link timminchin – YouTube to get to the Tim Minchin you tube channel. As Molly would say, do yourself a favour!

And then the ground opened up, and men spilled forth. 1928.

Western Argus 14 Aug 1928 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article34434434

Imagine the scene. There you are in a peaceful graveyard, perhaps laying some flowers at the headstone of a loved one.

There is a noise, as if stone was scraping against stone.

Suddenly, one of the nearby pavers lifts up and men appear, blinking in the light.

I expect that you might well run screaming too!

This article is very Indiana Jones isn’t it?  Visiting the catacombs, being separated from the group then losing their way in the labyrinth of dark passages. They should have been pursued by Nazis or something.

Just as well the glow of the outside world could be seen just when they needed it. I wonder how many other unseen glimmers they had stumbled past before the tapers gave out?

I think it is unlikely that the poor woman they terrified while she was tending the grave at the Campo Verano cemetery would ever be able to find peace there again!

The Fairy Tree, Fitzroy Gardens. 1932.

After I did yesterdays post, and talked about the mortally wounded Gnome who has spent the last decade dying on my front steps, I remembered the Fairy Tree in Melbourne and thought I would search for an article about it.

This wonderful bit of Melbourne’s history remains in the Fitzroy Gardens today and is still adorned with the colorful carvings done by Ola Cohn in 1932. We visited there a few years ago but I can’t find any of my photos! Darn it…

If you look closely at the photo in this article you can see some of the creatures Miss Cohn was carving. My favourite is the dingo face looking out near the bottom.

It is in a good little historical corner of the Fitzroy gardens, as Captain Cook’s Cottage is just nearby. (In case your Aussie history is a little vague, Captain James Cook, in 1770, was the first white person to set foot in Australia)

This cottage was reported to have been the home of James Cook in his youth and was bought over from England and rebuilt in the gardens here in Melbourne in 1934.

The caption reads;

THE FAIRY TREE.

Birds, beasts, and sprites have been carved on the trunk of a giant redgum tree in the Fitzroy Gardens by Miss Ola Cohn, who is seen at work. She began her task last year. On several occasions the carvings have been damaged, and it has been suggested that measures should be taken to protect them.

The Argus 3 Nov 1932 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4506787

My thinking spot has bad feng shui.

On Sunday I had three options, I could either do the housework, the washing or work on my blog posts for the coming week. Both the washing and housework were sorely in need of attention and I could do with catching up on some blog drafts. Decisions, decisions…

I did one load of washing and hung it on the line, so it looked as though I had actually done something, then went out to my thinking spot on the front steps so no-one in the house would notice that I was really doing nothing at all.

While I was sitting there I thought I would take some pictures to share with you. Then I could convince myself I was working on a new post for Monday. Two things off my list and barely lifting a finger. Nice.

My thinking spot has a nice view of the mountains and is where I can look at the garden and the critters that live there, so first I took a photo of my little bird bath in the lavender hedge, it is very cute and always has a bird on it so it seems like quite a popular place to be.

The Steps of Death...

Next was the Gnome. He is not the ‘happy gardener’ type of gnome. Our Gnome has spent years on the verge of death, slumped in a corner of the steps with a rusty screwdriver plunged deep into his chest, blood trickling from the wound. This is how garden gnomes should be.

Also on the steps are some members of my carnivorous plant collection, pitcher plants and venus flytraps I have moved out there in order to fatten up, while thinning the wasp population. When I thought about this (killer plants and a nearly dead Gnome) I realized that ‘the steps of death’ is probably something that a feng shui expert would change immediately.

Hmmm… should I get some happy flowers in brightly coloured pots to correct this? Nah… I prefer the steps of death.

That started me thinking. Maybe I should start writing an anti-feng shui book. It could be laid out as a walk through my house, with the chapters entitled;

• The Steps of Death (subtitled ‘The only good gnome is a dead Gnome’)
• The Lounge of Gaming (artistic photos of gaming accessories scattered around)
• The Cluttered Kitchen (obviously I need more cupboards!)
• The Bedroom of Mutual Accumulation (the two boys share a room, ’nuff said)
• The Calamitous Fridge (deserving of its own chapter)
• The Mysterious Void (Laundry. Where socks go, half of which never return)
• The Miniscule Bathroom (self-explanatory)
• The Toilet of Contention (you know how it is, whenever you are in there someone is knocking on the door asking you to hurry up!)

and finally;

• The Pagoda of Wisdom (the man-cave, where he worships his tools and the one place we let him think he knows everything)

Bloody hell, I came out here to slack off and do nothing and I ended up writing a whole post. I am ‘doing something’ and failing in my original lazy intention of ‘doing nothing’. Curse you thinking spot! Next time maybe I should just go back to bed.