clive_morrisau . . . Leeton, home sweet home!!!'s photostream  

Down Memory Lane again. This is taken from a slide of many moons ago and I am thrilled with my slides and how they have preserved themselves of aeons or what appears to be aeons of time!! And the innocence of children is an amazing journey, that is for sure!!!!!

I used to ride my bike to and from Hobart, firstly from Kingston, 15 klms away and in the middle was a 400ft hill that I enjoyed climbing and the joy of hill climbing on a bike is there is usually a down side too and I could rip my way down without too much trouble. On this track was a wonderful convict-built "Shot Tower" and there are around 150 steps that climb up the circular inside of the tower. Lead was melted at the top and then poured into a lade with holes in it and as the lead fell the "pellets" becamse round and would eventually land in the water, be instantly cooled, and then they could be used as pellets in shot guns. The tower was built by Thomas Moir and here is further reading . . .

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taroona,_Tasmania

Sometimes I get sidetracked but that is not my intention. So we return to the focus of this picture of this little lad looking intently at his mother who is happily reading the paper while propped up against the wall. I think this is also some of his discarded clothing here too. I can see by the colour of his trousers he has had a fun time with water, maybe he ventured too close to the water's edge and got swamped. Whatever happened, I love his expression on his face here, almost daring his mother to stop reading and pay attention to what he is doing. I also like the attendant sea gulls, hopefully hanging around for a tasty morsel!!!

Another interesting aspect of taking a picture, and in this case so long ago, that these gulls are probably long extinct, that the mother may be now a grandmother, and the young lad is now a grown man with a family of his own. Possibilities always abound when I recall pictures taken over 30 years ago!!! I also marvel at what has happened in the lives of these people, do they still live here, are they happy or sad, and of course I will never ever know the answer to this ponderous question, yet my mind still decides it will take this journey!!!

It is a beautiful part of Hobart and if you are ever in this area then hopefully you will call in and visit this beautiful beach. It has changed a bit since this picture was taken, there is a bigger and stronger reinforcing wall there now, after a huge swell rolled in and did considerable damage to this wall. Nature can be a very powerful asset or a fearsome foe!!!!

Thanks for your visit and your warm comments on my photostream and also your faves and may God continue to bless you in every way possible. Rosey is hard at work in our house (manse) doing a lot of gardening - she is the gardener and I am the waterer - she is doing a wonderful job and I am so very proud of her and what she is achieving!!! May your week continue to be a blessing to you and your weekend a wonderful time for you. Life is a journey, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but at the end of the day hopefully you are all cruising!!! Clive and Rosey xxxxxx

This picture was taken by Rosey - "At Last" I hear some of you say . . .

Rosey and I enjoyed a magical trip to Tasmania in November/December of last year. And what a journey it was.

I had shown Rosey Tasmania back in 2006 when we were married and this was a run down the middle of Tasmania and back up the middle again to Devonport - we came across by my bus (motorhome) I had at the time and I also showed Rosey the East Coast of Australia from Gympie down and then came back up the Newell Highway, 300-400 klms to the west.

This time we were returning to Hobart, where my dear mother had passed away the year before, 6 weeks short of her 101st birthday. This was to be a remembrance of the beautiful lady she was.

And so it was we flew this time to Launceston from Melbourne and hired a car (that is our little pocket rocket in the background - Getz - and what a great little car this turned out to be) for 17 days, and did the East Coast of Tasmania and I will save the West Coast for the next visit!!

We stayed with friends in St Helens and Coles Bay, both idyllic places on the East Coast of Tasmania. Both are great holiday/retirement towns, probably St Helens winning out as it has hospital facilities there whereas Coles Bay does not.

On the way we stopped at Swansea, a beautiful little seaside town 80 kilometres from Hobart and while I was otherwise occupied (not sure what I was doing) Rosey got the camera and took this action picture of these wannabe "Jonathans"!!! We had chips at the time and as you all know, seagulls and chips go extremely well together. I love the different "action" depictions here, all in various stages of flight, all wanting to be first to the tasty morsel!!!

We had a wonderful time in Tasmania. We stayed with my brother in Claremont, Tasmania, only a stone's throw from Cadbury's Chocolate Factory and the smell of choccies from the factory was almost overpowering!! Over the road from where my brother lives, new owners are now occupying our family home. They are a lovely family and are pouring the love into their new-found paradise - a repeat of what happened when we first moved into our paradise in 1950!!!! Mum lived in this house for nearly 62 years and loved every minute of it!!

A funny memory: When we first moved there, although this house was only 8 miles (in those days, now 15 kilometres or thereabouts in now-a-day measurements), from Hobart, the capital city of Tasmania and it was considered to be "in the bush" and "miles from nowhere". It did have a passenger train service in those days (another nostalgic memory as they are no more, except for freight). Nowadays, it has been swallowed up in the outer sprawl that Greater Hobart has become and is no longer "in the bush" but now in "suburbia"!!!

Thanks for your visits and your warm comments and your faves. May God continue to bless you in all you do. Much love always from Clive and Rosey xxxxxxx

This is the magnificent and beautiful Jet we minded for friends for a month while they went overseas. What joy it was to have him around. His unconditional loving energy was incredible, and he would obey any command we gave him. In the morning when we released him from his rope he would lie patiently on his bed, although his tail was beating a frenetic tattoo on the bed saying "lovely to see you, can't wait to get out and about"!!! and the same would happen at night when it came time to chain him up again, he would obediently go to his bed and wait while we put the rope on him so he would not wander during the night.

During the day he liked nothing more than to come inside in the cool, as we would often have the air-con going and he took full advantage of this, as we did too. We found out when the owners came back he was not supposed to go on the rug - we did not know that and he spent most of his day on the rug when inside rather than in the corner. No wonder he was on "cloud 9"!!!

It was sad for us when we said goodbye and the owners were so thankful he had been slimmed down a bit, thanks to Rosey, who diligently took him on walks most mornings, or myself for shorter walks!! Our friend has her own hair salon in the front of their house and her assistant could not believe how joyful Jet was to walk. When we got out his new yellow lead he would become like a young puppy and so enthusiastic and happy and off we would go. If he saw a cat that was a different matter. He became extremely active and would want to take after that cat no matter what. So restraining him was sometimes a difficult matter but once the cat had vanished then Jet would again settle down and all would be normal in his world (and ours)!!

Thanks Jet for your unconditional love the whole time we were there. What an honour and a pleasure to be able to care for you in the short time we had you.

Thanks for your visit, your warm comments and faves and may God continue to bless you on your journey through this life, albeit brief, or so it seems sometimes, and I say this as I am coming up to my 70th birthday, and the thought suddenly came to me the other day, "how did I get to nearly 70?" It sought of crept up on me and gave me food for thought for quite some time LOL!!!! I also thank God for guiding me along life's highways and byways, and for Rosey being in my life - what a journey we are enjoying!!

PLEASE VIEW ON BLACK

This is another in my "Down Memory Lane" series.

This too is taken from a scanned slide taken in the 60s or 70s - I am not quite sure, but it quite some time ago now!!!

The "house" to the right would have been the proud possession of owners at one stage. Not sure if this was the main house on the property or one for the workers. It is now full of hay. I love the rustic weatherboards, the rusty corrugated iron roof so synonymous in Australia on farms of yesteryear, the chimney on the outside of the house/hut, the house or barn that is behind this one. It looks like a very dry and arid place with nut much grass but this was around these buildings - maybe the rest of the farm was a lot more greener looking than this.

I am not sure where this was taken, I think in Tasmania. It certainly was scanned from a slide. One of the advantages of slides is they seemed to keep their quality. Mine were kept away from light in slide boxes and this served my purpose really well.

Back then the camera I was using was probably the Pentax s1a, which had a focal plane shutter (I loved this sort of shutter) and it actually had a "B" setting which means that as long as the shutter button was held down the shutter would stay open until the button was released and then the 2nd blind would come across completing the exposure. I took a few time exposures in this time and with the trusty tripod and cable I could lock the cable and take my finger off the button and count of the seconds/minutes/hours for the time exposure!! I also used a Weston Mark V light meter for my exposures (none of the modern technical advantages of today's digital cameras or film cameras for that matter.

One of the disadvantages of this was when I exposed each slide I would not know the result until I had exposed all the slide film and then set them off to the lab to be processed and mounted and when my slides returned I would eagerly look to see which pics were successful and which went into the bin, and I was happy baCK then to have considerable success and did not have to throw many away!!

Thanks for your warm comments and faves on my photostream. I do appreciate very much. May God continue to bless your journey. Love and blessings, Clive and Rosey xxxxx

PS: It is so sad that the great Kodak Corporation of which I used many films over the years, has now applied for receivership . . .

VIEW ON BLACK

It is a journey back in time we are now taking. I have not been down this track for a while, so thought it about time I ventured into my archives and found a suitable contribution for Flickr.

This is a cave somewhere in Tasmania, I am not sure where. This particular picture is taken off a slide. Somehow I have got a double exposure in here - not sure how, and as you can see, there is a cave that has had several flashes fired off and then, somehow, this other figure appeared.

Caving (or if you live in America and other parts of the world it is called "spelunking") it was a great sport for me. I was what is called an "active caver" in the 70s, then I became what is known as an "armchair caver" and quite happy with that state of affairs thank you very much!!!

Caving has its good points as all sports do and its bad points too. The scenery as it is called underground can be awesome, mesmerising, tantalising, visually incredible. These are some of the good points. The bad points are getting wet feet (and in Tasmania the water temperature is around the 10 deg C mark), crawling through creeks or mud, getting soaking wet and cold. The benefits of this, though, are bragging rights at the end of the day, superb pictures of an amazing grotto full of stalagtites or stalagmites (they go up from the cave floor) and an easy way to remember which is which is "when the mites go up the tites come down" LOL!!!

Caving has been extremely kind to me over the years, I made many wonderful friends, photographed many beautiful caves, and now I have the memories. I hope you enjoy this one. It is tainted quite blue and I think this is a slide problem. These slides have lasted since the middle 70s and some even before this, middle 50s, so I am very impressed with slide film, always have and always will; however, I am now even more impressed with the digital age and love my digital camera. What a ripper.

Thanks dear friends for your visit and kind and warm comments and faves. I hope your weekend is great for you and will be visiting your streams as time permits. Rosey and I have moved into our house at last and it is great to be here. Love and blessings always, us xxxxxx