A Day in Geelong - 5 March
VIEWING OPTIONS: To enlarge images, click on the featured image below. For full-screen images, view in slideshow mode by clicking on the arrow.
For the EXIF, click beneath each photo.
This is the replica of John Pascoe Fawkner's Schooner "Enterprize" - the ship that sailed from Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1835 with the first permanent white settlers that started what has become the City of Melbourne.
The National Wool Museum is an amazing journey that traces the first European settlers to our country right up to the current times. It is an incredible display depicting all facets of the Australian wool industry and its importance to our culture, economy and national identity.
Each thread strand is fed into the weaving loom under carefully set tension. Being a narrow carpet, this loom consisting of two decks is relatively small. One can only imagine the huge size of looms required for large carpets.
Enterprize is an all-timber, carvel planked, two masted, topsail schooner. She is single decked, square transomed, with crossing yards on her foremast. She has been traditionally constructed using Australian and New Zealand grown timbers. The original Enterprize was built in Hobart in 1830 by William Harvey and William Pender as part of the early coastal trading fleets of southern Australia. At that time most bulk cargo was transported by sea. Enterprize carried cargo such as coal and, on one occasion, over 180 sheep. In April 1835, Enterprize was purchased by John Pascoe Fawkner to search for a suitable place to found a new settlement in the Port Phillip District. Enterprize sailed from Launceston on 21st July 1835, but only travelled as far as George Town in northern Tasmania, where Fawkner was forced to remain by his creditors. Enterprize then departed George Town on 1st August 1835 under Captain Peter Hunter. Searching for a place to settle, the party looked first at Westernport and then at the eastern side of Port Phillip. They eventually found the Yarra River, and after warping (hauling on ropes attached to the river bank) the ship upstream, they moored the Enterprize alongside the river bank at the foot of the present day William Street. On Sunday the 30 August the settlers disembarked and at once began to put up their tents, build their store and clear some land for growing vegetables. Permanent settlement at Melbourne had begun.
The 1910-built Axminster Jacuqard carpet loom forms the centrepiece of the National Wool Museum in Geelong. Regular demonstrations are provided by skilled carpet weavers who produce the Museum's own Manor House Rug.
19th Century Shearer's Cottage
This room in the wool museum carefully duplicates the typical interior of a shearer's cottage. Geelong has dozens of example of these cottages throughout the city, but most have been modernised due to a process demographers call "gentrification".
Bollard Sculptures - two salty sea-dogs
Jan Motchell's fabulous bollard sculptures are synonymous with Geelong. Commissioned by the City of Geelong in 1995 to commemorate quirky and important figures and happenings from Geelong's colourful history, they are dotted across the city.
Colourful wool bobbins are place in a feeding device known as a creel.
The bulk of them line Geelong's revitalised waterfront. A 4km walk along the lovely waterfront walking paths from Rippleside Park (off Bell parade, North Geelong) through to the glamorous 1930's swimming enclosure at Eastern Beach, will let you take in almost 100 of the often humorous figures
For each colour in the carpet, multiple bobbins are loaded in the creel, one each for every place that colour occurs in the carpet.
Bollard site #23 depicts members of the Volunteer Rifle Band playing in Geelong's first band recital in 1861. The bollards, carved in reclaimed timber pier pylons, are the work of Melbourne born artist Jan Mitchell
This narrow carpet loom requires a two deck creel to handle all the colours and repeat colours making up the carpet pattern.