Back.

Home sweet home. In the three weeks we have been away every leaf has fallen off our trees - it's definitely winter in Hobart:

So I've had to dig out the winter woolies:

The brown leather jacket and knitted dress are from Gerard Darel which I bought, pregnant, eighteen months ago in Montpellier. I love them because they are French, (fickle, I know) yet at the same time they still carry the association of pregnancy, and, without beating about the bush, I was enormous with my 4th child. The jeans are Sass and Bide and the pashmina I bought for about $15 at the Crawford Market in downtown Mumbai. It is impossible to go to India and not buy a pashmina - they have all tourists picked as being desperate to own a pashmina and flog them at every possible opportunity. I am still regretting that I didn't buy a gorgeously embroidered 100 per cent cashmere pashmina, yet after two hours at the Crawford Market my husband was showing early onset signs of pashmina fatigue, from which he never fully recovered. I was lucky to get this one....and a pink one before the rot set in. While I was coveting pashminas he was coveting G & Ts at the Air Bar at the Four Seasons.

Don't be deluded into thinking that, due to my blogging silence, the last week of our family road trip was uneventful. Far from it. After Port Fairy we drove two hours inland to hang out with old friends from school at their farm. Isn't it nice catching up with friends who you don't see very often due to the tyranny of distance? We had gossiped, driven to the paddock by the river where the picnic was set up and were just embarking on our first wine.......when Felix almost severed his ear off on a protruding stick. A trip to hospital and eight stitches later...... I'm very happy to report that Felix has made a great recovery. And a monumentally big thank you to Orge, who, with her exceedingly good nursing skills saved the day.

Our last day was spent in Melbourne en route to the Spirit of Tasmania:

Melbourne at this time of year dragged me back to this same time four years ago, when my Dad was being treated for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia at the Alfred Hospital. It was a harrowing time yet the Leukaemia Foundation offered wonderful support to our family, if you feel like making a donation. Then it was Toby in the pram. During those bleak days we had no idea that one day we'd be pushing the pram around Melbourne with another little person. I miss my Dad yet at the same time I feel so incredibly blessed to have welcomed Camelia to our family. It's a strange combination of feelings.

We bought a ticket to see this:

The Napoleon exhibition at the NGV.  If you can, go. It was brilliant. Amongst all of the fabulous things on display, and there were lots - Napoleon's hat, Josephine's coronation ring, a lock of Louis XVI's hair and a miniature of Marie Antoinette's close friend the Princesse de Lamballe fittingly on display next to a revolutionary's pike (she met a gruesome end being decapitated and her head was then impaled on a pike and paraded under Marie Antoinette's window) - was this:

(photo from the NGV catalogue)

A Sevres 'Nipple Cup' or 'Breast Bowl' from a service made for Marie Antoinette's pleasure dairy at Rambouillet. Yes, a pleasure dairy. When you already have a cubby house on the scale of the Petit Trianon and it's accompanying hameau why not have a dairy to play milk maids in? It was from these cups, rumoured to have been modelled on Marie Antoinette's own breast, that visitor's to the dairy drank milk. I admit to being fascinated by this period of French history and it's utter decadence. Does anyone know where you can buy a reproduction of one of these....I would like one for my birthday.

R

PS If you would like a 'Nipple Cup', you can buy one here for US$925......unfortunately, all of my four children combined don't make that much pocket money!

Nice.

Look how nice it is here in Port Fairy:

This has been the view from our beach house for the last ten days:

It has been a shame about the weather. I had deluded myself into believing that Port Fairy existed in it's own unique Gulf Stream which meant that it would be warm and sunny. It doesn't. It has been cold and wet. I've reached the conclusion that sometimes the ocean is at it's most beautiful and dramatic when the clouds are dark grey and the wind shrieks.

Last night the babysitter came good so we went on a dinner date to the Merrijig Inn. If you ever find yourself in Port Fairy you MUST have dinner here. It was monumentally good. Their use of the heirloom vegetable and garden grown fruit was impressive. In the Spirit of the Famous Five we ate tongue - not in a sandwich but in a terrine:

This charcuterie platter also had fromage de tete (which loosely translates as head cheese.....it is all the bits of a pig's head cut up and set in aspic). I hesitated, yet in the quest to add another first to my already impressive list, I ate it.

Look at what we had for main course. Pork chop with crackling, anchovy butter, roasted root vegetables and cheesy polenta:

Kim had duck, three ways:

And then for desert, quince and gingerbread trifle:

And apple and quince crumble:

Today was market day in the village:

Look at Camelia's cute new hat, knitted from alpaca no less:

The very talented Granddad's from the Port Fairy Men's Shed had a stall all set up where they were helping children make toys out of wood offcuts. They weren't scared to share their drills and hammers and expertise:

What a fabulous idea. It was an incredibly touching and generous act of public spirit. Our boys were in seventh heaven.....and the old boys were really enjoying themselves too. Three cheers for the Port Fairy Men's Shed!

Needless to say we spent most of the afternoon floating boats in the river:

Tomorrow it's back in the car, no doubt to the accompaniment of The Very Best of Cold Chisel (thank's Meigs). We are struggling with what else to listen to on an Aussie road trip? All suggestions warmly welcome. Just so long as our children don't know all the words to Khe Sanh by the time we get all the way back to Hobart.

R

Port Fairy.

Finally, today the sun shines here in beautiful Port Fairy:

With the bad weather as an alibi I've been on a book a day.  When I finished all the reading material I packed, I set to work on $2 books at the op shop. Side by side with the trash were Madame Bovary and The Great Gatsby. I left them there for someone else to read.  Funnily enough it was walking down the main street which sent me a subtle prompt:

So I dug Fifty Shades of Grey, which had been downloaded by a friend onto my iPhone, out of my trash and succumbed to reading it - much to my husband's utter horror. Fifty Shades of Grey has been doing the rounds of the school gates in Hobart as 'Mummy Porn' yet the grey haired bloke in the bookshop at Port Fairy described it as 'Granny Porn'. I suppose it depends on where you are at. He also showed me this Amazon parody on YouTube. And there I was thinking Port Fairy was a sleepy, retirement town. I finished the book, yet can't say that I'll be rushing out for the next two instalments. Now, I've moved on to Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending. As I keep telling my husband, it 's serious literature as it was nominated for the Man Booker Prize last year. He's happy with that.

Since we have been in Port Fairy I've taken up coffee again. In my defence I have also taken up jogging, as the closest Bikram Yoga studio is in Geelong.......three hours away. Most days, in the quest for coffee and milkshakes, we all descend on Rebecca's cafe at least once if not twice:

Rebecca's is a charming cafe with a really lovely buzz. They do a delicious traditional Irish stew (there was a time when Port Fairy went by the name of Belfast) and very good eggs benedict.......not to mention the take away buckets of mini yoyo biscuits.

For some inexplicable reason, I am incapable of using the ceramic cooktop in the beach house - I have burnt everything I have attempted - lamb shanks, polenta and even toasted sandwiches. I seldom burn anything on the gas cooktop at home......oh, except for rhubarb fruit mince one Christmas. The catch cry in the beach house is.....'I can smell burning.....Mummy must be making lunch'.

So we have been forced to dine out. If you find yourself in Port Fairy make sure you have lunch in the Cafe at Basalt Wines, on the highway at Killarney:

It's an old weatherboard cottage quirkily decorated with an eclectic mix of taxidermy, art and strangely curious antiques. My favourite combination. The food was really interesting:

I was talked into the tripe and it was delicious. I still remember how fervently I tried to avoid tripe in France - my greatest fear was that I would accidentally order it - maybe I shouldn't have been so paranoid.

Probably the best thing about Port Fairy, and we are talking about a gorgeous, historical town (it boasts no less than fifty National Trust listed properties) with sweeping dramatic oceanscapes is the fact that it has it's own island complete with lighthouse. Griffith's Island is something straight out of Enid Blyton's The Famous Five. It is just how I imagine the fictitious Kirrin Island to be. Even better, it's an easy walk from town along the river and is attached by a walkway so you don't need a boat (or to swim) to get there:

You can circumnavigate Griffith's Island in an hour, even if you take a stroller. Camelia has been channelling Lady Jane Franklin's tour of the West Coast of Tasmania as her stroller has turned into a sedan chair, carried not by convicts but by her parents.

Anyway, there you have today's post - from  Fifty Shades of Grey to The Famous Five. And I bet you thought it couldn't be done!

R

Ocean.

This morning the first sight that greeted my eyes.........was the ocean at Port Fairy:

 It has been a long drive to get here:

You can really appreciate why when I show you the view in the back of our car:

Although mercifully, this was the same view later in the day:

For some bizarre reason we thought a family road trip might be an easy option for a holiday, especially as we now have four children and were forced by necessity to buy a seven seater car. We have tried various Bali resorts (is there anywhere better than the Ayana at Jimbaran Bay?), a P & O Cruise (still trying to forget the debauched behaviour on deck during the Australia Day festivities), various European jaunts around France and Italy and two weeks in the UK in a motor home (friends of ours recommended it.....they are now divorced). The fact is that there is no easy option for a holiday when you have four children. And cars and boats are not necessarily easier than planes.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I had no idea that when you cross Bass Strait on the Spirit of Tasmania a public address system wakes you on arrival at 5.45am so that you can be in your car and good to go at 6.30am. It's a tad early to be starting a day out and about in Melbourne, don't you think?Nor did I really register the hours involved sitting in your car waiting for the ship to board. Luckily though someone had given us the heads up about the food on the ship so we packed a delicious picnic and bottle of wine from the Hill Street Grocer before we left Hobart:

Look, David Jones in Melbourne has the same light that we bought from an antique shop years ago in deepest, darkest South Hobart:

Admittedly our's doesn't have her frock accentuated in gold. Tobes loves her regardless:

After a brief stint in Melbourne we drove along the glorious Great Ocean Road. Yesterday, there were myriad koalas in gum trees by the side of a narrow country road:

This photo makes it look like downtown Collins Street. And then we went to the 12 Apostles:

......there were helicopters and the track was like being on a busy city footpath. It was beautiful though in a way that only dramatic natural panoramas can be:

Our children were excited to be in the same place as on the front cover of our Lonely Planet guide:

Which of course we have been reading as we tend to rather slavishly depend on guide books when thrown into a new destination. Although we hadn't been in Port Fairy for an hour when amazingly I bumped into a girl I'd been to school with in Launceston. She was able to give us some insider tips re restaurants, pubs and the best place to buy treats to bribe your children with. 

I have also been reading this: 

Paris in Love by Eloisa James. I wasn't prepared to be so utterly beguiled by it as I have been, especially as it starts out after she has been diagnosed with cancer and that's what prompts her to move her family to Paris for a year, and then the discovery that the book is a series of Facebook posts which have morphed into a book. Regardless, this book is like a jewel box of tiny, individual stones which make up a priceless treasure chest. It is so real and honest and true and I really connected with it. On page 142 she writes,'.....I pack the children off to school and then think greedily about how many hours I have before they come home. I have come to the conclusion that silence and time are the most precious commodities'. I hear what she is saying.

I loved Paris in Love so much that I sought out another of Eloisa James' books not realising that when she says that she is a romance writer she really is a bodice ripping, no holes bared ROMANCE writer. I got my hands on this:

Yes, it's called Desperate Duchesses and no, I'm very sorry to say it is no match for Paris in Love. In fact, I'm struggling to reconcile that they were written by the same author.

Half of our family has gone fishing to attempt to catch our dinner:

I hope that they have some luck as I'm sick of having to buy it at the fish and chip shop:

Oh oh, the baby's awake so had better dash. Yet before I do thank you, thank you, thank you so much to the fabulous Faux Fuchsia who linked me to her phenomenally attractive blog in an attempt to boost traffic on mine. It worked! For twenty four hours I was so popular that I was positively giddy. And then I became consumed by our family.....in a car......in Victoria.  Thank you also to everybody who took the time to make a comment, it was like being in a parallel universe and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I wonder what will happen now?
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