A BACK YARD TRAGEDY. Walking around our dam, our son Peter noticed an inlet pipe was not allowing water into the dam. He disconnected it, and found caught in it the dead body of a bandicoot. A few days later … Continue reading →

IN THE GARDEN. Over the years I have written dozens of columns on the Home and Garden. http://www.gordonmoyes.com/category/publications/home-and-garden/page/3/ They include articles on aspects of our own large garden developed by my wife with support of our horticulturalist son, Peter. At … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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

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. Continue reading →

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.” Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →