Category: Newcastle

Spoonville

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Have you ever seen or heard of something local and thought I’ve got to see that. What a clever idea! As you know most of New South Wales is currently in lockdown as we battle the latest Delta variant. So as a response to the frustrations of being in lockdown and the kids not having things to do someone came up with the concept of Spoonville.

Each Spoonville community is different. They develop a personality of their own dependent on the Spoony people that join the community. Local kids are invited to decorate wooden spoons at home and add them to the others as they get out of the house to exercise.

Spoonville rules are simple.

  • Place your Spoony person during your daily exercise
  • Make sure bits won’t blow off your Spoony person as we don’t want litter
  • Think about using natural materials in case they do fall off – maybe twigs for arms and legs
  • Make sure your Spoony person can take the rain – nail polish is good for our faces
  • Spoony people are not keen on dogs ( furry friends please stay back)
  • Come and see the Spoony people but don’t stay too long and no touching. Have fun.

I heard about our local community at Cooks Hill on the weekend and couldn’t wait until today to investigate. The only thing I knew was that they lived in Centennial Park. I was clueless as to where. Never fear I googled how to get to Centennial Park from my house and off I went. I had been there many times before but I always found it by accident and when coming home. The park is 2.2 hectares and was given to the city of Newcastle as a centenary gift in 1888. After about 15 minutes of following paths and generally exploring the area I saw them, Cooks Hill’s Spoonville. They were playing under a beautiful old Norfolk pine on the other side of the park.

As I spent time at Spoonville, I wished I had young children in my life. It would be so much fun helping them design and create their own Spoony person. I attempted to choose a favourite but each time I looked I would fine a new favourite so I gave up and decided it was all so much fun. I’ll be back to meet the new Spoony friends over the coming weeks.

Today’s post was inspired by Word Of The Day – Clueless.

What A Difference A Week Makes

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The photos above were taken last Sunday on my walk. The news had said that the southern swells and Spring high tides earlier in the week had caused major erosion of my local Merewether beach not seen in our area since a major storm in 1974. The 1974 storm was locally known as the Sygna storm after the Norwegian bulk carrier of the same name that ran aground on Stockton beach at the time. I was fascinated to see what everyone was talking about. Wow! I wasn’t expecting what I saw. It didn’t even occur to me that there were rocks under the sand. All the media reports about the erosion stated that history had proved that the sand would return by summer. The swells and the tides would put it all back again. No intervention needed.

While I had no evidence to go by I just trusted mother nature and didn’t think any more about it. Today on our lockdown walk as we had nothing else to do we thought we’d go back to Merewether and see what was happening. We were gob smacked. Merewether beach was back and beautiful. The photos below were taken this morning. They are from similar spots and of the same stretch of beach that was stripped bare last Sunday. We were also surprised to note that there seemed to be even more sand on the beach than before. It was also clean and yellow. Merewether beach had been Spring cleaned at no cost.

Thanks to Natalie for hosting #weekendcoffeeshare

Yarn Bombing

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Last week as I was walking around my local area I found this yarn bombing event. As I had never seen one before I was intrigued. Why? What was it all about?

For anyone like me who doesn’t know what yarn bombing is – it is a form of street art, like graffiti often connected to activism in some way. Another point of yarn bombing is to mitigate the severity of barren, cold public places.

This particular laneway I agree prior to the yarn bombing was boring, desolate and barren. I would walk down Devonshire Lane twice a week last year on my way to work and it had nothing going for it. The addition of the Deafblind Connect yarn bombing event has definitely brightened up the area. The colourful event has also brought attention to the Hunter’s Deafblind community. When I looked closely at the tree coverings I noticed many different textures especially designed for the blind to enjoy.

The event occurred during Deafblind Awareness week 21st -27th June as part of a global initiative in 22 countries across the world. What a fantastic idea to bring the community together.

Inspired by Word Of The Day Challenge – Mitigate

Newcastle’s Fairy Garden

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Today as we are still in lock down in New South Wales, I thought we’d share a takeaway coffee at a secret spot I only discovered last year. Newcastle’s Fairy Garden to my surprise is over 50 years old. I can’t believe I never heard of it as a kid even if then it was a private place.

Merv Moyle created the wonderland across the road from his house in the 1970’s for his children. Over the years he kept adding his new ideas to it until his death in his 90’s.

Imagine how special his children and grand children must felt to have their own fairy garden, complete with a fairy queen, animal friends, fairies and toadstools, not to mention the beautiful flowers and rainforest. As a child, I thought we were lucky as our dad had made us a cubby house. I am glad that it is now open for anyone to wander through and connect with your inner child at this magical place.

I hope you enjoyed our coffee and visit today. Thanks to Natalie The Explorer for hosting Weekend Coffee Share

Newcastle Window Wander

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This week again we will be having takeaway coffee as New South Wales remains in lockdown. As we cannot have visitors to our homes or most shops we will take a walk with purpose. Today we will be exploring the Newcastle Window Wander. A group of local businesses have gathered together to increase their shops profile while closed and at the same time give locals something to look at during their daily exercise. The idea is to follow the map, look at the specially created window displays, take a selfie, upload it the social media and then go in the draw to win a gift voucher.

Today was a beautiful day for walking with Spring just around the corner. It was interesting to go walking with the specific goal of looking in shop windows. What surprised me was that I don’t really notice what is in the windows when I walk. As I followed the map I found most of the window displays. On 3 occasions I was so impressed I will go back to the shops when they reopen. Unfortunately being window displays they were hard to photo graph without something being reflected in the glass.

I smiled at the first window I saw that used humour to catch our attention. They created a “shitty” birthday cake made out of toilet paper rolls.

The next shop a few doors down in Darby Street was a men’s wear store that I didn’t know existed and they keep my husband’s favourite John Lennon brand shirts. I loved the one in the window.

Some were a little bit clever.

The birds at the gallery were spectacular. They were amazing replicas of some of our iconic birds. Unfortunately, due to the doors breaking the line of vision my photos don’t do them justice.

The last stop on our journey was Pappa Sven. I have walked past this small shop many times but never looked inside or at the windows. It is a Swedish shop and looks amazing. They had created their window display to represent celebrating the joy of Swedish Midsummer.

Merewether Aquarium

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For many years, I have walked past the pedestrian underpass leading to Merewether Beach. As I had a walked past on the beach side, I had vaguely noticed that the outside was painted and was welcoming people to come inside. But I never did.

Last Sunday on my weekly local exploration walk however I found myself using the underpasss from the other side to get to the beach. It was then that I remembered it was called Merewether Aquarium. I couldn’t believe the difference.

The Merewether Aquarium was created by local artist, Mister Trevor Dickinson in 2014. An aquarium is a great description of the underpass as the artist has even painted a turtle and a shark on the roof of the underpass so it feels like you are in the viewing tunnel of a big aquarium.

The paintings on either side of the aquarium walls are fun and full of quirky details and hidden messages. Some of my favourites were:

  • The local Merewether bus
  • The artist himelf as a diver
  • Newcastle’s local 4 times World Champion Surfer – Mark Richards
  • Merewether Ocean Baths building
  • Merwether Surfhouse
  • The diving blocks from the ocean baths
  • The local hotel
  • Humpback whales that swim up and down the coast from May to November
  • Lifeguard vehicles

I also love the black lines painted regularly giving the impression you are looking through glass.

Photo of the Week Challenge: Changing Seasons

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In Australia, we will be going into our second month of autumn on Wednesday. On the last day of summer, my son and daughter-in-law had their Australian wedding. It was a beautiful day. Since then however, I haven’t spent anytime out in nature. So I thought I would go for mindful walk around the neighbourhood to see what had changed. As I headed down the driveway, my first surprise was the budding camellias.

Then around the next block I found flowering frangipani trees. I love frangipanis, especially the pink ones.

Halfway through my walk the skies opened and in true autumn in Australia fashion, it started raining. No warning, just rain. Then I saw the first changing leaves of the season. In our cities you don’t get the amazing amount of leaves that change colour and drop to the ground that you do in the country areas. When we lived in country NSW, we spent many days playing in and with the autumn leaves everywhere we went.

Another change I noticed was the growth of berries and nuts on the trees.

On returning home slightly damp, I ventured out into our backyard to find the citrus trees are full of fruit. All in varying shades of green through to yellow.

And lastly I discovered the trees my husband had severely trimmed in summer were full of new growth.