Day 4 Monday 27/11/2023 Heathcote, sunny 11 – 24˚
A warm sunny morning is most appreciated. Another bunch of vans arrive, and there’s a kerfuffle of cars, vans, awnings, and ropes. Elle puts up her decorations and some extra guy ropes to hold her lighter awning. PT one of our many sailors, reckons her “knots are sh*t” and reworks them for her.
A wander along the creek path to town and roughly sketch the Anglican Church. Reading the historical plaques (any wonder Woody won’t walk with me) and as I go I learn that the old flour mill was once a glass studio where the stained glass ceiling* of the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria was made. This holds a special place in my memory as BF and I were waitresses at the Grand Opening Dinner of the National Gallery of Victoria which was held in the Great Hall back in 1968. I reckon I spent most of the night staring at the glass ceiling and its supporting columns while trying not to drop plates.
A rather stressed stray dog runs into the park poops on M’s mat and pees on Bernie’s plastic Xmas trees before it disappears. There’s never a dull moment around here.
We have over 20 people for Happy Hour under a large elm. Another 20 are due in tomorrow which will make it one of the largest musters we’ve had for a while.
The lighting competition is really hotting up and someone has a host of wooden reindeer towing their teardrop caravan.
Accom: $34.00
*Now known as NGV International the architect was Roy Grounds and the ceiling by Leonard French “is one of the world’s largest pieces of suspended stained glass” Wikipedia. The NGV is still one of my favourite chill-out places.
Photo Source: By a.canvas.of.light from Melbourne, Australia – Great Hall, Revisited, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90627269
itchingforhitching 
Wow I haven’t been to the NGV yet, but now I definitely want to. How beautiful…as are the van lights.
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Next time you get the chance it’s well worth it, they have wonderful international exhibitions every winter. The Australian art has been moved to the Ian Potter Gallery in Fed Square, and I’ll guarantee that you’ll know most of the works. So many Australian icons. The tour of Hamer Hall theatre (the round building by the Yarra) is excellent too. Back to the vans, we do have fun with our Aldi light shows.
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Notes added to my phone list of things to see in Melbourne still, it’s a long list but we are heading over in April again next year so I’ll see what happens. Thanks for the tips.
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A pleasure.
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That’s quite a ceiling. I’ve never seen anything else like it.
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It’s an unusual building. Modernistic, stark, a sawn Western Plains basalt box. The stuff that so much of Melbourne is made from. And surrounded by a moat it almost dares one to enter. What appears to be the door is a glass water wall and of course we all have to run our fingers through it. Kids play with it. And wet footprints stain the basalt floor of the entry gallery…it’s a work of art in itself.
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That sounds quite a place. You must have had fun with your sketch book.
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That’s on the list for the future.
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Chartres Windows
1925
COLOUR fulfils where Music has no power:
By each man’s light the unjudging glass betrays
All men’s surrender, each man’s holiest hour
And all the lit confusion of our days-
Purfled with iron, traced in dusk and fire,
Challenging ordered Time who, at the last,
Shall bring it, grozed and leaded and wedged fast,
To the cold stone that curbs or crowns desire.
Yet on the pavement that all feet have trod-
Even as the Spirit, in her deeps and heights,
Turns only, and that voiceless, to her God-
There falls no tincture from those anguished lights.
And Heaven’s one light, behind them, striking through
Blazons what each man dreamed no other knew.
Rudyard Kipling
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Beautiful, you’ve taken me back to my all too quick visit to Chartres.
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