Botticelli didn’t paint The Birth of Venus, not above the Palace Hotel’s foyer anyhow. That gal-in-the-clam was the brushwork of Mario Cellotto. The Broken Hill publican toiled for weeks with eyestrain and an itsy-bitsy postcard of the original canvas. But the vistas don’t stop there.
Gordon Wyen, a student of indigenous painter, Albert Namatjira, arrived at [...]
When the tide is low, you can clamber down from the prefab lighthouse on Moreton Point, in Ulladulla (NSW), to reach the large rock platform edging the sea. Those scattered cannonballs are made of cooled lava, spat from a prehistoric volcano. They fell back to earth so heavily they’ve glued themselves among the rockpools.
Nimmitabel (NSW) is an Aboriginal onomatopoeia for ‘dividing of the waters’. But seldom has a town undergone so many spelling phases, with this alpine village going by the names of Nimitybelle, Nimitybell, Nimithyball, Nimity-Bell and Nimoitebool in its 140-year history.
Bizarrely, the hamlet was once a front-runner to be the new Australian capital. But those 15 [...]
Dunbogan, a bush town on Camden Haven Inlet (NSW), may well pass for Scottish or Aboriginal in origin. It’s neither.
A sawmill set up shop in the early days call Donne & Bogan, not to be muddled with a transcendental poet accompanying a bourbon-swiller in black jeans. All the same, it’s rare to find a town [...]
Sam Sawnoff the Penguin has a pudding that never runs out. He shares his perpetual snack with Bunyip Bluegum the Koala, and a sailor called Bill Barnacle.
Add a parrot, a bandicoot and Henrietta the Hedgehog, and you have the recipe for The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay, a kids book as lasting as the pudding [...]
Gardeners hate ’em. Grocers hate ’em. Barbie-hugging girls hate ’em. And my Aunt Maggie can’t abide ‘em. But snails are making inroads into epicurean restaurants around the country, albeit slowly.
Snails Bon Appetite is Australia’s first and only snail farm, set up in 2000. This hothouse industry makes it home in Congewai, a short drive from [...]
In the deep dark canyon David saw
A living breathing dinosaur”¦.
Above is the opening couplet of a poem composed by kids at Canowindra Primary School, 330 kays west of Sydney.
Such high-quality verse-mongering saw the school snag a remarkable prize, a two-metre sapling no other school on Earth could boast.
Known as a living dinosaur, the Wollemi pine [...]
Pick the odd one out:
Pakistan
Turkmenistan
Kazakstan
Baldrockistan
Afghanistan
That’s right. All ’stans’ are legitimate children, except the curious bastard, Baldrockistan.
More concept than enclave, Baldrockistan is a state of mind conjured by Herman de Vries, a member of the shadowy cartel known as State of Sabotage.
Before you get alarmed, or alert, consider this: Bald Rock is the largest monolith in [...]
Tom Hartsuyker had a dream. The expat Dutchman longed to remake a little piece of Holland in Australia. His solution was a clog studio.
A stone’s throw from the Iconic Banana in Coffs Harbour, The Clog Barn is ankle-deep in shavings, and wall-to-wall in wooden slippers. Outside, in the yard, is a downsized Amsterdam, with canals, [...]
Still with Column 8 trivia – see Fluffy Follow-Up below – a writer to the Herald’s feature posed an interesting question.
Graham Hand, of Cremorne set readers the challenge of naming the longest walk possible in Sydney, while remaining under cover at all times. He wrote:
“You can walk from the Colonial Centre on Phillip Street, at [...]