naomi loves: melbourne

melbourne

Public transport scenes

Yesterday while walking to the tram stop during peak hour I saw traffic banked up four or five cars deep around a roundabout, at every entry point. Nobody was going anywhere, but nobody was honking their horns, either. When I came closer, I could see that a mother duck and her nine ducklings were waddling across…

Please add two more items to my list of Things My Parents Did That I Thought Were Really Boring But Now I Like Doing Too: 1. Looking at other people’s houses, and 2. Going to garage sales. I remember traipsing around Berowra Heights with my mother while she delivered pamphlets for a part-time job in…

The darkest night has passed. The winter solstice, the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Our ancestors lit bonfires on the winter solstice, the bright light and heat of the flames symbolising the turning of the sun back towards their homes, warming and brightening and lengthening the days. When they lit the…

Yesterday was all about gardens and grandparents at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. We peered through the windows of cubby houses bigger than most apartments I’ve lived in, and up at bird houses not much smaller. We explored water gardens, cottage gardens, Australian gardens, edible gardens, gardens for birds, gardens for bees, gardens…

I want to tell you a story about Milly the community cat. When we first moved into our neighbourhood, we were on a walk one day when we saw a sign on some people’s front fence, advising passers-by of the health of their cat, Milly, which had apparently been attacked by a dog. It was sad…

Did you know that you could email any individual tree in the City of Melbourne, and the tree would write back? The helpful folks at Council have individually mapped every tree in the city and assigned it a unique number, then created a website by which you can identify and contact each tree. The website was…

According to my two-and-a-half year old daughter, everything tastes better when it is little. So when we were choosing a food truck at the International Street Food Festival* on the weekend, Sliders on Tyres seemed the obvious choice. For $14, you get a tray of two sliders plus hand-cut chips. I chose the Fisherman (spiced…

Stop the Press. The Travelling Samovar tea house is having a tea auction! Have you ever heard of such a thing? They will be auctioning off beautiful hand-crafted and vintage tea-cups, tea-bowls, tea-pots, trays, an honest-to-goodness vintage samovar and a host of rare and unusual teas, all collected personally by the owners during their global…

Sometimes do you go along to something that has so much potential but it just falls short? And you’re left with a bit of an empty feeling and you think, “This could have been SO GOOD, why didn’t the organisers take it there?” Yeah me too. I spent the afternoon on Saturday imagining how I…

Do you have a local market? A growers’ market has just started up around the corner from us, though I haven’t had a chance to visit it yet. We love markets large and small at our place: the hustle and bustle – and fresh produce – of the Victoria Markets; the amazing ring of food…

A couple of weeks ago we headed over to the new Batman Market at Coburg and let me tell you one thing for free: it was street food heaven. We were there quite early, at about 9.30am, but already a string of food trucks had formed a wonky kind of circle at one end of…

“Would you like to hear a story?” a woman beckons, from the doorway of a caravan. And just like that a small group materialises as if from nowhere and sits at her feet, prepared to be enthralled. I am reminded powerfully of my children’s daycare centre, when a teacher pulls out a copy of The…