Tag: places

Braidwood: Where all is well

Braidwood really is one of those ideal little towns where you can feel like you are living in the pages of Country Style magazine, or other romanticised vision of country living. Full of boutique shops and cafes, Canberra’s well-to-do & hipsty crowd can feel quite at home here. It reminds me a lot of Bellingen up in Northern, NSW and it might be headed in that direction. Like Bellingen it has resisted instating many of the chain stores and this adds to its charm and ‘authenticity’ (though when a Mill goes from being a Mill to a guest house – well, the only thing authentic about it is its architecture).

Being a Canberran, I love Braidwood with all its quaint stone buildings and expensive stores, not that I can afford much of it these days, but it’s nice to window shop, my husband, coming from Country NSW does find it a bit trite and inauthentic as a country town, but there can be no denying its picturesqueness and beauty as a place to stay for a few days.

And so stay we did, my family and I, we managed to get all bar two (which is a good effort when there are a total 19 heads to round up) into the Braidwood Mill, which ended up being a great base for our venue and it worked out well this time around, but is realistically just a tad too small for our large family.

Braidwood proved the perfect wind down post Christmas, where we could spend time eating good food, walking off our Christmas indulgences, patronising our favourite Braidwood bakery, and carousing over a late night game of Articulate – which is just the funniest game to play with my family.

We made new discoveries like an exercise park which was as good for the adults as for the kids, a new swimming hole where we found (but did not take) large, freshwater mussels and spend a good couple of hours and I roamed the back streets of Braidwood discovering pokey old cottages at 5.30 in the morning.

I have a deep love for my family and investing in times like this is just so good. Of course my sister-in-law and her new little one were missed, but as we all grow and stretch out into our own paths coming back together now and again cements our place and who we are.

I keep coming back to the photo of me and my siblings, it amazes me how who we are is so different to who we were, we have all chosen such varying paths, in the mix we have a Horticulturalist, Photographer, Artist/Apprentice Chef, Accountant, Textile Artist/Children’s author/designer and Soldier. Some are frisbie mad, others into the family way, most of us are mad about traveling and if we haven’t yet traveled far we at least want to. Lovers of language, history and philosophy, books, art and music, good food, wine, beer, cider and every single type of cheese you can throw at us, board games, nature, good architecture. When we come together we know we can indulge in the things we love.

January 10, 2014
Yarralumla Brickworks

I wish I had more photos for you. The day before these were taken I took myself along a little dirt road which ran lengthways along the Brickworks building (I found out later this was ‘not allowed’). All along the road I was just awestruck at the size of this industrial infrastructure. Nothing computerised, everything just massive and manual. Chutes coming from and leading to nowhere in particular. I could not comprehend how men would have worked here, the machinery seemed immense to my very inexperienced eyes. And how the building stood up was another matter, everything appeared to be made out of corrugated iron, rather dilapidated and very exposed. There were tunnels many feet above the ground, just hanging there.

Granted the building is 100 years old, built in 1913. It was apparently one of Canberras first buildings and many of the older buildings (which are slowly being demolished, although my Nonna still lives in an original specimen) are made of the stuff. The iconic red bricks this Brickworks produced can be recycled and are sold for $1/brick, and they are rather beautiful to my mind.

The tall chimney, which can be seen from around Canberra proved difficult to get to, the whole site being closed off excepting the workers of Thors Hammer. You can get in to buy wood from these guys. For now they are the caretakers and I am glad such a worthwhile business has their hand in it.

The building stopped functioning as a brickworks in 1976 and has had a few attempts at a new life since then. When I looked at it I saw a potential vibrant community of craftspeople entrenched in history. It is a perfect venue for a craftspersons marketplace, a music venue, gallery, even perhaps a recording studio and artists space. The kind of things that should happen here ought to reflect the building itself and in a way hearken back to the days when most things were done by hand and by people with real skill. Bootmakers, woodturners, painters, glassmakers, weavers, spinners, food producers and makers, musicians. I would love to see something like this installed in this beautiful old building and if, one day, I had the money I would invest it heavily into this place, it is worth restoring for the preservation of Canberras history and ought to belong to all and be freely accessible, and not as it is now, locked behind fences with security signs strung up.

Here’s a photo from wikipedia. I don’t often include these pictures, but the Brickworks is a very sentimental building to me. My childhood was spent very much under its gaze in the surrounding suburb of Yarralumla and its beautiful pine & oak forests. The chimney is worth showing off.

This is the back of the Brickworks, I kept my walk to the other side where there are piles of discarded bricks embedded into the side of the hill and the old quarry where the red clay was mined can be clearly seen.

This is the entrance to the brickworks, I remember going under the front part of this building while it was still neglected and there were no fences to keep anyone out. We saw the smaller kilns and invented spooky stories for the vast, darkened interiors. There used to be market days here, held in the outer area.

The road leading to the Brickworks passes Yarralumlas beautiful pine forests and antique houses, the Brickworks are hidden at the back of this suburb.

June 1, 2013