[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #DC943C;”] F [/dropcap]ormer ABC journalist and now successful author Nikki Gemmell can never be accused of being predictable.
It has been 16 years since Nikki made the leap from journalism into writing with her debut novel, Shiver, and she has since written another four novels, two works of non-fiction and published a collection of her newspaper columns.
Michaelie Clark, from Warrnambool Books, has chosen Nikki’s latest work as her book for the week and it marks another surprise turn for the author:
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #DC943C;”] ‘M [/dropcap]any people will have first become familiar with Nikki Gemmell’s work without knowing she had written what they were reading.
Her first, much-discussed best-seller was The Bride Stripped Bare, a work of literary erotica which takes a confronting look at the secret desire and anguish of a newly married woman. The novel was originally published anonymously, though she was soon outed as the author and her name later appeared on the cover.
Now the well-known journalist and provocative writer has taken a very different turn in her career – she’s just released her first book for children.
The Kensington Reptilarium is written under the name ‘N. J. Gemmell’ and is a fun, feel-good tale that is full of adventure. It follows the story of the Caddy kids, four young Aussies from the bush who find themselves in London in the care of Uncle Basti, a man who loves his house full of snakes – and isn’t a fan of kids.
This may be a new genre for Gemmell, but there’s no doubt she’s a talented writer with a knack for capturing attention and offering fresh perspectives – something that young readers are invariably attracted to.”
Nikki Gemmell’s latest work sees the author move into another genre. Image courtesy of www.nikkigemmell.com
[box] Keep up to date with new releases and treasured classics from Warrnambool Books on their Facebookpage.[/box]
[box] Bluestone Magazine recently brought you the story of the rejuvenation of 222 Timor St, Warrnambool. This week, we tell the story of one fascinating find during its restoration.[/box]
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A99E90;”] O [/dropcap]ld shoes, perhaps more than any other item of clothing, have the power to tell stories.
What is the story behind a single shoe discarded by the roadside? Did it land there by accident, through misfortune, or part of prank?
We throw old shoes over powerlines and tie them to wedding cars, and we refer to shoes in our folklore and our fairytales: “if the shoe fits, wear it”; Cinderella and the famous glass slipper.
Old shoes are personal. They hold an imprint – a literal footprint – of their owner that cannot be replicated and makes them so hard to throw away, especially when they were once worn by a loved one who has also gone.
Some shoes can outlive us, surviving for centuries beneath the dirt and rubble of demolished homes and ruined cities until they are at last unearthed by new activity.
How 222 Timor St, Warrnambool, used to look in 1968. (Image: J.T. Collins Collection, La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria.)
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A99E90;”] A [/dropcap] shoe that had been hidden for possibly more than 70 years was recently found at my grandmother’s former property at 222 Timor St, Warrnambool, opposite Swinton’s supermarket. It was the house in which my mother spent a large part of her childhood.
It is also one of the oldest commercial buildings in Warrnambool and is believed to have been built around 1850.
As we wrote about earlier this month, the building recently passed into new hands and its long-hidden secrets are being slowly uncovered: a hidden doorway down to the cellar, shoebox-size windows that had been boarded up and wallpapered over, and a child’s single leather boot that had been placed under the floorboards.
The boot is about 18cm long, with tacks around its sole and seven pairs of metal eyelets securing a cloth shoelace.
The old floorboards in 222 Timor have revealed their own secrets. Image courtesy Luke Taylor.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A99E90;”] I [/dropcap] thought it might have belonged to my now 89-year-old mother, but when I showed her the boot, she suggested it had most likely been hidden under the floorboards by a boot repairer – a Mr Long – who had rented part of the property from her father in the 1930s.
My mother told me she had read an article in the Reader’s Digest about shoe superstitions, including the placing of a shoe under floorboards for good luck. I couldn’t trace the Reader’s Digest article, but an online article by British shoe historian June Swann confirmed that in Britain, in particular, it was not uncommon for a shoe to be hidden somewhere in a house to bring stability and good luck to the household.
Hiding a child’s shoe – in either a wall, chimney or under the floorboards – was also believed to increase fertility.
Perhaps Mr Long, if he did hide the boot, hoped it would bring prosperity to his business. Or perhaps it wasn’t Mr Long at all, but a previous owner of 222 Timor St who stowed the boot away for good luck.
The full story is yet to be revealed and the boot, of course, is holding its tongue.
[box] A version of this story first appeared in the Warrnambool & District Historical Society newsletter, Warnimble, April 2013. The new owners of 222 Timor St, Luke and Nat Taylor, plan to hide one of their children’s shoes in the restored building…for good luck. [/box]
Colonial oven still makes a crust
Paul Sanders with the magnificent 135-year-old wood-fired oven that he returned to working order for his Dunkeld cafe.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] W [/dropcap]hen Paul Sanders and his wife Pauline Yule moved into an abandoned bakery in Dunkeld, they had no intention of doing anything with the clapped-out, 135-year-old oven that dominated one wall of their bedroom.
In fact when they first bought the Martin St property in 2001, the cast-iron wall oven and firebox were hidden behind workshop shelving. They removed the shelving and converted the whole space into a bedroom, before converting it again into a meditation space as part of their business operating a spiritual retreat: a curtain was draped across the oven to avoid distracting the meditators.
It was only in 2010 when they thought about selling the property that the pair learnt the wood-fired oven might be an under-appreciated gem.
“We had a guy come through from Melbourne who was interested in buying the place as a bakery…we called some wood-fired bakers and soon got a sense that maybe the oven was actually in good nick,” Paul said.
The Martin St building has become a favourite among travellers since opening as a cafe last year.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] T [/dropcap]he last bakery to operate from the building closed in 1976 when the major bread companies began to buy up country bakeries with the intention of closing them down. As part of the deal, the ovens were supposed to be destroyed.
“But the baker who had this place, Ian McKernan, said he just couldn’t do it, so the oven survived,” Paul said.
Paul and Pauline stayed on and turned the property into accommodation and a gallery, while, behind the scenes, they worked on bringing the oven back to life.
“We fired it up with a fire in it every day for six months and it began to drip tears – it started to cry – as all the moisture that had built up over the years started to come out,” Paul said.
The external thermometer, that also dated back to 1878, also needed a bit of tweaking.
“We worked out that 300 degrees was actually zero and went from there,” Paul said with a laugh.
After more than a century of taking the heat, the temperature gauge was a little out.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] B [/dropcap]y 2012, the pair had decided to expand the business into a cafe and freshly baked bread, of course, would be a house specialty.
“We tried with (dry) yeast bread at first and it got a bit hairy at a times with black, smelly smoke filling the cafe,” Paul recalls, chuckling.
After weeks of trial and error, the quirks and mysteries of the oven began to be solved, and Paul felt ready to expand into baking wood-fired sourdough bread – made from scratch – that would give the cafe a real point of difference.
There was only one catch: he didn’t know how to make it.
Paul Sanders and Pauline Yule ran several businesses from the old Dunkeld bakery before returning it to its roots.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] T [/dropcap]he first step was to import a quality leaven (‘starter’) from San Francisco and then enlist the help of a professional sourdough baker who spent a week in Dunkeld showing Paul the process. Paul also hired a baker, Gurwinder Singh, to take over the bread making.
Despite their best efforts, however, the first sourdoughs they made on their own kept falling flat.
“We couldn’t work out what we were doing wrong and kept calling up people for advice, but in the end it was our local yoga teacher here, Frank Jess, who turned out to be the best help,” Paul said.
Frank suggested adding more water to the mix – “we weren’t hydrating it enough” – and making sure the oven was super hot.
“We made our first perfect loaf in May last year and haven’t lost a loaf since,” Paul said with an element of pride.
The oven is capable of baking 300 loaves at a time, but Paul is happy to put through 250-300 loaves a week, most of which are sold at local farmers markets.
For a 135-year-old oven, it’s not a bad way to make a crust.
[box] The Old Bakery & Wild Plum Cafe, 97 Martin St, Dunkeld is open seven days, 9am -5pm. P: 5577 2663. The sourdough bread is available from farmers markets including Port Fairy, Ararat, Hamilton and Daylesford. Paul and Pauline have just listed their business for sale. [/box]
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] T [/dropcap]he end of the school year for Year 12 students has, unfortunately, become associated with some fairly high-level drinking and partying as part of the traditional “Schoolies” week, but a reader has told us about one Portland school that has turned this tradition on its head.
Bayview College, which overlooks the stunning Portland Bay, will this week run its Schoolies with a Cause program, where Year 12 students will celebrate the end of their secondary schooling not by heading to the closest beach, but by helping out at a secondary school in Vietnam.
Eighteen students have volunteered to spend 10 days in a disadvantaged community and will work on a number of projects including improving playground areas.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A5CECD;”] I [/dropcap]t is the third year Schoolies with a Cause has been held by Bayview College, and each year more students are signing up to be a part of a life-changing experience. The trip is subsidised by fundraising held during the year and enthusiastic Year 11 students have already started raising money for their trip in 2014.
There are always a lot of people behind such a successful program, but the two names that kept coming up when we investigated the project were Nicole Reefman, who works as the Public Relations officer at Bayview, and Portland financial adviser Rodney Stone, who has a deep connection with Vietnam through his volunteering stints in the country over the last five years.
We would like to acknowledge the hard work of Nicole and Rodney, in particular, and Bayview College, more broadly, for putting together such a great alternative to “Schoolies”: they are our very worthy Quiet Heroes for the week.
[box] Our Quiet Heroes will each receive a coffee and cake voucher from The Pickled Pelican, 137 Percy St, Portland. Thankyou so much for your support, Pickled Pelican.[/box]
Made by hand: Kate Bouman first explored art as a child, but has only recently returned to her love of making and creating things by hand.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #DC943C;”] K [/dropcap]ate Bouman has taken the long way round, but she has finally come back to creating the delicate art she first began to explore as a child.
Growing up in Pomonal, a speck of a town between Halls Gap and Ararat, Kate loved to draw realistic pictures of the people and things around her and, at the age of 12, displayed her paintings in the Pomonal art show.
There were no major prizes to be won, but the high praise she received for her work encouraged Kate to keep going and, after finishing secondary school, she applied to study art in Bendigo and Ballarat.
Unbelievably, an administrative mistake meant that Kate was assessed as a Year 11, rather than a Year 12 student, and was rejected by both universities, so she applied to study childcare at TAFE instead.
“Childcare wasn’t really for me, so I ended up getting into horticulture (her parents owned a nursery in Pomonal)…by this stage I had come to believe that to make it as an artist you had to be either completely mad or dead, so horticulture seemed like the best option,” she said with a laugh.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #DC943C;”] K [/dropcap]ate, 25, is now an orchid grower with Warrnambool Orchids, but this year she has also returned to her first love of creating beautiful things by hand and, in September, started a market stall as Pip & Lily Boutique crafts.
The care, patience and precision required for growing orchids is reflected in Kate’s creative work, which includes hand-drawn and painted cards, hand-painted jewellery, hand-made dolls, felt work and hand-drawn designs on clothing.
“I wanted my main point of difference to be the hand-made element, in that everything I do is hand drawn or designed,” she said.
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #DC943C;”] K [/dropcap]ate’s collection of hand-drawn cards, including a range designed for Christmas, pay homage to classic children’s books such as the Beatrix Potter collection, Noddy and Winnie the Pooh, and she is unashamed to admit that she owns more children’s books than adult books.
“I love the characters, the little animals, and the incredible illustrations,” she said.
A love of small animals also explains, in part, the choice of name: Pip & Lily.
“When I was a kid, I always wanted two zebra finches that I was going to call Pip & Lily, but then I came to realise that keeping birds in cages was not such a good thing, so I have kept the names, but I never got the birds,” Kate explained, laughing.
“And I also tried about 10 other names, but they were all taken, so Pip & Lily it is.”
[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #DC943C;”] A [/dropcap]lthough Kate has only been selling at local markets since September, she has been delighted with how well her work has been received.
“I make things for the love of it and as a creative outlet, rather than as a money making thing, but it has actually gone a lot better than I expected, which is wonderful.”
[box type=”bio”] Pip & Lily Boutique craftswill be at the Made by Me Market, Saturday November 30, 9am-4pm, Pavilion function room, Warrnambool breakwater. You can find also Pip & Lily on Facebook. [/box]
