sheep - Sounds like wish

Some months, rather than leave town, I go tripping around my local area and have just as good a time as if I’d taken a trip to the sea. This weekend, just by walking and riding my bike around the suburbs and by the lake, I’ve seen a few odd things that make me appreciate this beautiful unboring city. Yesterday, for example, I knocked on this door. Clearly the resident is not afraid of anyone:

Then I went to the lake to watch the weekend sailors. Let me give you a bit of the history of this central ornament of the nation’s capital, in honour of its 50th anniversary this week. Lake Burley Griffin is an artificial lake formed by damming the Molonglo River. The capital’s designer, the American architect Walter Burley Griffin, is immortalised in the name of the lake. He had included it in his original design in 1912, but the lake project didn’t begin until 1963, and finally the formal opening came in 1964. Residents and visitors have flocked to its shores ever since.

For me, it’s a body of water which is neat, if unnatural; it invites us to sit beside it but not to enter it. The water quality is frequently reported as unsuitable for swimming, and therein lies the disappointment. But I must remember that the Molonglo River is narrow and unspectacular, hardly a suitable river for a nation’s capital, unlike the Brisbane River in Brisbane or Sydney Harbour in Sydney. Here’s a photo taken earlier this year as I was walking beside the part of the Molonglo which still exists where the lake ends (begins?); you can see it opening up into the lake on the right:

Molonglo River opening into Lake Burley Griffin

Thanks to Walter Burley Griffin, instead of a stream that even I could swim across, we have a nice big lake. Yesterday I went to watch sailboats sail on it, an excellent antidote to the busyness of life. The weather was heavenly, an ideal spring day; blue sky, warm air, light breeze. If you were fishing, which I wasn’t, there was no need to hold on tight to the rod. No need to hold it at all, in fact:

Many of the national institutions are situated lakeside, including the Australian National University. One of the university’s sculptures by the water caught my eye with its aluminium birds roosting on the dead branches of this old gum tree. From a distance they give the impression of a flapping flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos, a familiar sight around here. But a closer look reveals the metal birds also resemble hands reaching up to the sky. The commissioned sculpture, called Witness, is by Indonesian artist, Dadang Christanto.

Witness, Dadang Christanto, 2004, ANU, Canberra

After seeing unreal birds in a dead tree, I turned round and saw real plants in a dead car. Another piece of ANU ‘art’.

Back in my suburb, I was riding my bike past a neighbouring house where a sheep is both pet and mower. She was very happy for me to take her photo but didn’t understand the concept of standing back from the lens.

And then she smelt my leather bag and began to nibble it…

Check out the reflection of me in her eye! Now that’s odd.

All in all, a good spring weekend tripping around my town.

Marianne sends out the challenge to take one trip EVERY month. If you’re reading this, Marianne, I say a big THANKS for the inspiration!

*****

Not far out of Canberra, a small village called Gundaroo beckons some of us to stop and stroll, and others to stop and live in the peace and quiet. This morning we drove there for a cuppa, parked in Cork Street outside the old police station, beside which there’s a tank on a tower, beneath which there was a sheep asleep.

We had morning tea at the Cork Street Café in the old stables behind the Gundaroo police station.

The chef suggested her freshly baked (in three minutes) foccacia with jam, and with our cappuccinos, it was all hot and delicious, outside in the sun, looking at the lockup.

Gundaroo lockup. Standard government design. Erected in about 1870.

Other side of the door, the side a prisoner would be glad to see.

Settlement in the Gundaroo area began in the 1820s after explorers discovered the well-watered land and fine black soil of the Yass River valley. From 1856 the village grew slowly with a general store, a Presbyterian Church and Royal Hotel going up. This small, small village needed a police station and lockup, sad but true, as well as a Court of Petty Sessions. Today the Court, built in 1874, is an Anglican Church. It’s fascinating to walk around it and work out how it’s been converted to a church, with the addition of three stained glass windows in an otherwise blank front wall, a bell in the yard to call people to worship, and a cross on the roof (only just visible in my photo).

A short skip down the street brought us to an old shop built in 1886, once called Sally Paskins’ Store, but which is now a kind of museum of old tools that can be purchased. Together with another shop beside it, the Gundaroo Store, it would sell all kinds of necessaries, from haberdashery to hardware items, and even explosives for miners, for gold had been discovered in the region. No one bothers with the gold these days, since Gundaroo has a pretty high average household income. In the header of this page you can see the outside of the store with its heritage-listed wooden plank walls and brick fireplace, quietly retiring beside an ancient tree.

Though it’s a shop, the building is laid out in the typical style of small 19th-century Australian houses, with a hallway extending like a tunnel from the front door to the back. I slipped out into the back yard while my husband was still inside looking at the blokey stuff.

A similar cottage across the street was put up as the Gundaroo Literary Institute and Library, which I once wrote about here. As we were heading down to the Village Common, run by the villagers as a common grazing ground, we saw the sheep that had been asleep, now standing close to the fence munching grass. We approached. She came towards us like a lonely dog looking for a pat. It’s been a long time since I’ve touched a sheep and I’d forgotten how thick the layer of wool is. I had to press down through several inches of it to make any contact with the actual head. As I stroked her, I found tiny horns curving over and hiding their tips down in the thickness of the wool. She seemed to like the attention even if she couldn’t feel me making much contact.

With her sweet ears that stuck out horizontally, two furry white triangles with pink inners, I couldn’t resist a few clicks. As we were walking away, she came to the gate and poked her nose through, like our dog does when we arrive home.

It was a good Gundaroo morning.

Thanks Marianne for inspiring me to take a trip EVERY month.

Tag: sheep

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