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My wife saw on our large back lawn a pair of Australian wood-ducks. She was really pleased to see them walking around our back lawn, eating any sprouting seeds. They are “our” wood ducks. They have been coming to our dam and walking on our lawns for years. They stay together for years, make their [...]

I have been clipping our hedges. It is one of the most satisfying tasks you can do in your garden. We have several hedges, mostly small in height but delightful to the eye. They include box/buxus (naturally), murraya, mandenas, prostrate gardenias, lillypilly and a few photinia robusta. The front and side fence has a camellia sasanqua hedge with 120 plants grown from seeds now standing one and a half metres tall and beginning to flower with magnificent pink flowers.

Every day, most people have a cup of tea. There is more history in that than you suspect.

Over Easter, every one of us is confronted by chocolate bunnies. Rabbits are the most innocent of animals. The other night at 4am, the lights awakened me when they suddenly went on outside my study. I got up to see who or what had set off the movement sensor. Outside our plate glass door to the courtyard, I discovered, sitting on our doormat, a teenage rabbit.

A year ago, I wrote an editorial on apples. In it I said, “Our kitchen table always has a large fruit bowl full of fresh fruit, for most of the year, from our own fruit trees. We have a score or more different types of fruit. We have an orangery with many kind of oranges, limes and lemons and the slope they are on, the depth of the mulch and the constant drip irrigation means heavily laden cops for most of the year for the citrus trees.”

Perhaps mine is the last generation to have lived with the memory of the Great Depression. Not because we were born then, but because we grew up hearing the haunted stories of homes, businesses and farms lost, of bank repossessions, of one third of the manpower of the nation unemployed, of dreams abandoned, hopes dashed.

When I was a university student in 1959, I learned a number of poems by C. J. Dennis, especially from his series “The Sentimental Bloke” which I would recite on suitable occasions. One I liked was “The Play”. The Bloke (Bill) is trying to impress a new girl Doreen, by taking her to see Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare.

Grandma Wilhelmina Mary Gordon, my maternal grandmother, had a jam making season. Our first house was at 15 Vine Street, Moonee Ponds, just down the road from the famous Dame Edna Everage. It was grandmother’s home and she had lived there all of her life. It was a wooden workman’s cottage built in the very poor days at the end of the nineteenth century.

As a child I was never introduced to Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-duck, the Flopsy Bunnies and their friends. As an adult I saw their representations in fine bone china shops and was aghast at the prices. I was aware of the huge popularity of the children’s stories, but I had seen none of the TV and films of either the author or the characters.

Over the next few years “courses” became a way of life at the Cheltenham Church of Christ. I decided to run a series for people who had been married but were getting bored with it. I used the same principle – advertised in the local papers, produced a brochure and dropped it in letterboxes all [...]