Melbourne: The City

It is Photo Friday. And the theme is The City. The photos below are of my city: Melbourne, Australia. They are slightly different from a lot of south-facing views of Melbourne. These are taken from the First Floor corridor in the offices of Flinders Street Station. The photos look across the tracks and platforms of FSS. The first one looks south-east towards the tower of the Arts Centre. The second looks south-west.

Extracting magic dust!

To-day is Show and Tell Friday.

This is hosted by the gracious Kelli over at There's No Place Like Home.

If you pop over there, you will see the guidelines for this little weekly fiesta.

Now you can see this item from both sides - above and below.

Do you know what it is?

This is the only one that I have ever seen.

If you have one or have seen one, I would like to know.
It has a polished wood side for gripping.

The business side is corrugated or ridgy.

Down

Down

Down

HERE IS THE ANSWER

IT IS THE MAGIC DUST EXTRACTOR

I have photographed all four sides of the box.

Click on the photographs to enlarge so that you can read the print.

The photo above has the price on it - 29/6 (AUD equivalent $2.95 cents)

Decimal currency came to Australia on 14 February 1966 - 41 years ago.

This may be even older

When my aunt, Molly, died I cleared out her apartment.

This item was in it.

Don't you just love this statement -

UNCONDITIONALLY GUARANTEED TO LAST A LIFETIME

It has outlasted Molly. Will it outlast me?
~~~~~~

POSTSCRIPT

Decided to do a Google search and came back with one entry - over at Ebay Australia.

A picnic-ing we went

Left to Right: Miss Eagle, Lindsay, Gina, Val

On Tuesday, some bloggers had their picnic. Not down in the woods but at Westerfold Park, Templestowe in the north-east of Melbourne. We were five. Gina of Patra's Other Place, Val of Val Has Her Say, and Lindsay of Lindsay's Lobes and his good wife, Anne and moi, Miss Eagle.

It was a bright, sunshine-y day but, oh, the wind, THE WIND!

Did it play havoc!!!

But did we have fun. Great conversation, great laughs, great sharing. Should be more of it! Can you please note the demographic. All of the above are retired! That's our demographic - like it or lump it! We are not Generation X or Y. We are not the yummy mummies. Nor are we students - we are graduates of the school of life! And we are literate, opinionated and we do stuff.

Out came the picnic basket. We each contributed to the lunch with food and so many bottles of the good stuff you would have thought we were digging in for the winter! Needless to say, our optimism was not equalled by our capacity.
My menu contributions were 4P Rolls. These are rolls in which the main ingredients are Puff Pastry, Potato, Peas and Pesto. You will have to pop over to Oz Tucker for the recipe.
For afters, there were fruit and cheese skewers. I am sure, dear Reader, you can figure these for yourself - but, just in case, a fuller description will be over at Oz Tucker.

Dear Reader, you will note another person in this photograph.

That's Anne, Lindsay's spouse, on the left in the sunglasses.

Please note how everyone is huddled and cuddled because of THE WIND!

Controversial crafts and feminist foibles

Miss Eagle has the glisten of a tear or two on her cheek. You see, I have just been reading Jane Brocket's latest post over at yarnstorm.

If there was only one blog I was allowed to read out of the whole blogosphere, it would be yarnstorm. Apologies to friends and fellow bloggers but that is how it is. I admire Jane's layout, her beautiful photographs, her interests, and her writing. Over the last twelve months, Jane's readers have lived with her the writing of her first book, The Gentle Art of Domesticity. The book has only recently been released and Jane has had to embark on the usual media round to talk about herself and the book. You can listen to Jane being interviewed on October 9, 2007, on BBC4 here.

Jane's post, linked above, brings a tear because there has been so much comment that has been questionable and invasive to the extent that Jane has had to go beyond her usual privacy boundaries to clarify a few things. For those of us who admire Jane, this was wonderful to enhance and round out our view of her. But those of us who admire Jane have also felt her pain - and we think why the h#ll should she feel compelled to do this if she does not want to.

Clearly, fulfilling one's creative instincts by knitting, quilting and making rock buns is controversial stuff.

• It clearly is not enough to have come from limited financial circumstances and earned a first class education by using one's intellectual capacity to win scholarships and grants.
• It is clearly not enough to have become a Master of Wine.
• It is not enough to be able to capably review both wine and fine English lit.
• It is not enough to have the tenacity to have won through difficult personal circumstances to build a secure and enjoyable family life - and to use your income to invest in the materials of your creativity.
• It is not enough to have one of the most popular blogs of its genre on the net and to have spun it into a published book.

Miss Eagle has earned long ago her stripes as a feminist but some of the thought processes of those who claim feminist instincts and leanings is stunning.

Some of us remember when girls were advised not to learn to type in high school. The 'wisdom' was that if you could type you would only ever be treated as a secretary and never make your way to management.

Well, didn't they get that wrong.

We now have droves of women in their middle years who wish they had first rate keyboard skills for the computer age - like being able to touch type.

Fortunately, Miss E's mother, Phyll, who spent years in the workforce as a secretary believed that office skills are something a woman could always fall back on - so not only can Miss E touch type at pretty phenomenal speeds she can also do Pitman's Shorthand at such a level that she can do verbatim minutes of meetings. Miss Eagle left school at 15 with these skills. Later came the degree. Later came management experience.

These days I see women like Jane and Di over at Clementine's Shoes and Suse over at Pea Soup - who are professional and academically qualified women - taking the traditional domestic crafts to new and imaginative levels. They combine careeers and professional demands with family life and personal creativity.

Duh! What is wrong with that! What sort of female oppression is that!

None of these women are forcing others into their mold - but plenty of women are queuing up to join in their conversation!

And isn't that what we feminists are about first and foremost - choice: choice in our personal lives, choice in our working lives, choice in our family lives; choice in the public sphere, choice in the private sphere.

Drop in on The Dandenongs

Hat Tip to Winza for the photographs This post is blatant promotion. Miss Eagle lives in Upper Ferntree Gully in the foothills of beautiful Blue Dandenongs. The Dandenongs comprise large tracts of temperate rainforest - tall, ever so tall Mountain Ash and valleys of tree ferns.
For more than 100 years, The Dandenongs has been a leisure and pleasure getaway for Melburnians - particularly in a hot, dry summer. Sometimes they come from day trips. The wealthy had/have week-enders in The Hills. These days it is B & B territory with wonderful restaurants.
At the moment, there is a competition on and you could win a wonderful week-end experience in my neck of the woods. So, I didn't want you to miss out on an opportunity. So please go here and enter. And when you win, please email me so that we can do coffee up at Sassafras or Olinda.

Art outs visitors all of a sudden

Estevão Silva da Conceição at work

OK, please let me in on the secret. Back on April 20, 2007, I posted on the documentary, Gaudi in the Favela. It told of Estevão Silva da Conceição's home in a favela (shanty town) in the centre of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Today, I have wall to wall visitors to The Trad Pad after doing Google searches. So, I assume his work and his name are in the media somewhere - because the visitors are from around the world - including my neck of the woods in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. So, dear Reader, please tell me what has started this? Is Gaudi in the Favela showing or in the news?

Postscript: 8.10pm

Please note the comment from tavella.

The reason for the visits is due to a BBC news item.

I hope everyone gets to see Estevao's work in Gaudi in the Favela.

Beauty can be created anywhere if we have the eye and the spirit for it.

As Estevao shows - these are more important than the materials, which can be quite basic.