Nymphaea caerulea

Nymphaea caerulea, the Blue Lotus (or Blue Egyptian Lotus), is not actually a lotus, but instead, a water lily. But that's a minor detail for those fortunate enough to see the lilies and lotuses at the Blue Lotus Water Garden at Yarra Junction, just around the corner from the Yarra Valley vineyards we visited last week. These gardens of lilies, lotuses, and other flowers cover 14 acres; if Claude Monet's water lily garden at Giverny were this large and diversified, he would probably not have known where to start painting! Photographing beautiful flowers is almost too easy...point the camera in any direction and push the shutter release. Because of this less-than-challenging aspect, I usually don't take flower photos. But I was there, the flowers were there, and I couldn't help myself getting in several shots in our hour plus tour of the garden. I guess it was the Japanese-style bridges that added enough of a compositional element for me to take several photos. Since I was using two cameras, my "real" camera (Canon 5D, MkII), and my iPhone, I missed the Blue Lotus with my iPhone, which is what I use for the blog photos. So the Blue Lotus flower below is borrowed.

Blue Egyptian Lotus, Nymphaea caerulea

David and Yi at the Blue Lotus Water Garden in Yarra Junction

Wei and Yi find a shady spot in the gardens...temperatures reached about 95 degrees F (35 C)

There are dozens of lotus and water lily varieties in the water gardens, including a water lily from the Brazilian Amazon Basin. The ones at the water garden had lily pads measuring four feet across. When the flower blooms, it is white, but changes to pink on the second night. The flowers are pollinated by scarab beetles, at least in Brazil.

Victoria Amazonica lily pads can grow up to 10 feet in diameter

We've been getting around mostly by trains...it's a 45 minute train ride into the city, and once there, you can hop on trams to get closer to your destination. For our trip to Geelong yesterday, we took an early train to the Southern Cross station, and caught another train to Geelong. We had enough time to get a "flat white" coffee at a coffee shop in the train station. I just read that Starbucks just discovered the flat white, but they've been around Australia and New Zealand since about the 1970s or 1980s. Apparently, like many things New Zealand and Australian, there is a rivalry about just where the flat white was first popularized, so let's just say that it's an Antipodal invention.

Once in Geelong, a major industrial city about an hour and 10 minute train ride from Melbourne, we headed for the Wool Museum. There are about 100 million sheep in Australia; it's a big industry, accounting for about 25% of exports. The sheep farm/station lore and culture runs deep in Australia, which includes the creation of the lyrics for Waltzing Matilda, Australia's unofficial national anthem. Waltzing means to travel on foot, which the itinerant sheep laborers did, walking from sheep station to sheep station in shearing season. Matilda refers to the sack of belongings (swag) carried by these workers, or swagmen. The song recounts a sheep worker's run-in with the law during the Great Shearers Strike in 1891 in Queensland. The shearer, surrounded by policeman at the Combo Waterhole (billabong) shot himself rather than surrender. 

The museum tells the story about wool in Australia: how the shearing is done, the wool sorted and cleaned, and the processes to eventually turn the wool into thread and wool textiles. There's also a functioning Axminster carpet loom (first invented in Axminster, Devon, England) that is fired up for demonstrations every day. Quite a complicated machine that is amazing to see in operation. Australia makes less of the finished products than it once did...China imports a lot of wool for its massive textile industry. The last big carpet manufacturing plant in Australia closed about 10 years ago.

The Wool Museum, Geelong

The Axminster carpet loom using the Jacquard method of carpet making

After a fish and chips lunch on the waterfront in Geelong, we visited the city gardens, and then the Geelong Art Gallery, which has a collection of mainly Australian/European art, and some special exhibits of historic Geelong and the Geelong Mayor's contemporary art collection. Then we were off to the Geelong railway station for our train trip back to Melbourne & Mooroolbark.

Platform #1 of the Geelong railway station... built in 1856. It still has the original 19th century train shed, one of two remaining in Victoria.