The White Hat Melbourne Newsletter

Archived Newsletter No.211 - 29 March 2007

Contents

Festivals
Major Events
Medieval Festival
Finishing soon
Melbourne’s Hidden Gems
Comedy Festival
Music
Looflirpa Hall
Castlemaine Festival
Coming events
The White Hat Quiz

Festivals

The festivals continue to come thick and fast. This weekend is the Pascoe Vale Community Festival and the Kew Festival concludes. In country Victoria is the Lake Bolac Eel Festival (if you want to know how to catch eels just read The Tin Drum), the Lunarfest Vintage Festival at Red Hill, the Man from Snowy River Festival in the High Country, the Anderson’s Mill Food Wine & Jazz Festival, and the Ballan Autumn Festival. Details at Festivals in Melbourne & Victoria.

Major events

The International Flower Show continues at the Exhibition Building as does the International Food & Wine Festival throughout the city. The FINA swimming continues. Details in all the mainstream media.

Medieval Festival

This weekend in Brighton there is a Medieval Festival which includes brass rubbings for the kiddies. They can get some practice in advance by doing rubbings on the logos of household appliances. Details at Heritage Festivals in Melbourne.

Finishing soon

Shakespeare in the Gardens finishes up its season this weekend and the John Wren exhibition at the Racing Museum finishes this Sunday.

Melbourne's Hidden Gems

The best places to see bats and possums in Melbourne

A favourite place for Melburnians to take visitors to experience Australian native wildlife is the Healesville Sanctuary. Alternatively, you can go and watch the penguins at Phillip Island. However, both of these trips take up the best part of a day. For those on a tight schedule, it is still possible to observe native wildlife in the city and inner suburbs.

Two animals have been around for countless centuries. They watched the arrival of the first Aborigines. Strange two-legged creatures. Nothing to worry about. Unless you’re a possum. Melbourne gets quite cold in winter, and the garment of choice for Victorian Aborigines became the possum cloak. You can see some fine examples in the Melbourne Museum. From their vantage point at the top of the trees the possums and the bats discussed this new creature. “Why don’t they grow fur of their own rather than wearing that of our friends and relatives?” asked the possums. “Why do they walk upside-down?” asked the bats.

The possums made offerings to the great possum spirit who in the end sent – white man. The white man built special possum habitats with mystical names like ‘Federation Home’, ‘Edwardian Residence’, ‘Californian Bungalow’ and “Renovator’s Dream’. The possums lived in the main section upstairs while the white man lived underneath. During the day the white man would tend the garden of new exotic fruits and vegetables brought in especially to feed the possums. At night the white man would provide heat and atmosphere for romantic breeding sessions and the occasional possum party where possums would invite the whole neighbourhood over. Sometimes a white man would become upset that his entire crop of tomatoes had disappeared overnight and would make threatening noises in the direction of the possums. The possums would simply appeal to the great possum spirit who would cause another white man to be sent around with an edict proclaiming “Don’t Harm the Possums”.

You can continue your role in the great scheme of things by feeding the possums in the parks of Melbourne. The most commonly seen are Brushtail Possums but if you venture further afield you may come across Ringtails. Here are the places we recommend as the best for feeding possums and watching bats.

Please note: This section of the newsletter has been removed as it forms part of a forthcoming publication or because it is forms part of our Questing activities. If you find yourself on a tour where the guide is White Hat Accredited they are likely to know the answer to many questions you may have in this area. All guides on White Hat Tours are White Hat Accredited.

If you turn up to the bat colony at dusk at dusk you can watch the bats waking up after a good day’s sleep, witness a few domestic squabbles before the night’s flight instructions are issued. They are the same as every night. Beat the possums to the fruit in the suburban back yards of Melbourne. Around nightfall, impressive, if slightly undisciplined, squadrons take flight in various directions. Flying foxes don’t soar and wheel – every second stroke of their heavy wings seems designed to auto-correct for the problems of the last one – but they still cover large distances with few disasters. The departure of the bats in from their major colony is well worth going out of your way to see.

Comedy Festival

The Melbourne Comedy Festival kicks off on Tuesday. It has developed a format that has proved particularly successful. There are several core venues each with a number of performing spaces within the venue or within walking distance. There is a mix of talent from international to untried local performers. Length of shows and prices vary. The smorgasbord approach seems particularly suited to today’s lifestyle. Just rock up when you can and decide when you get there. I think the ‘high arts’ in Melbourne could gain some new audiences using this approach. Details on the Comedy Festival can be found everywhere.

Music

The Brunswick Music Festival continues and then at Easter is the inaugural Point Nepean Music Festival. This weekend in classical music there are performances by Ensemble Gombert as well as the first Melbourne concert of the Grainger Quartet. Details at Music in Melbourne.

Looflirpa Hall

This Sunday, one of Melbourne’s most remarkable and mysterious houses will be open for inspection for a limited number of people, and we at White Hat are privileged to have been chosen to offer free admission to a limited number of our subscribers.

First, a little background to ‘Loose Slipper Hall’ as it is known by the locals. Along the banks of the Yarra in the inner suburbs you will find many hidden backwaters. For instance, few Melbournians would venture along View Street Alphington, but there you will find a hidden wetland and small amphitheatre. The locals don’t want it widely known so you won’t find it on tourist brochures or advertorial weekend television programs. Not far from here is the remarkable Loose Slipper House. Again the locals don’t trumpet its existence too widely.

Much of its history is still shrouded in mystery, but here are some of the things we do know. Some time after the gold rush a small family arrived in Melbourne and took up residence on the banks of the Yarra. They brought with them two billygoats, a cow, two young children, a numbers of seedlings and cuttings from their native land and age-old skills in woodworking and the medicinal use of herbs. The husband built a rambling and ever-growing house from wood using tools from their homeland and techniques which required neither nails nor screws while the wife tended the garden plot and the cooking produced aromas which their Anglo-Celtic neighbours had never smelled before. The couple were solitary but not unfriendly. The garden grew in size, so did the house and so did the small flock of goats they had bred from the initial two they had brought with them.

By the early years of the 20th century the external woodwork of the house had gained strange neo-Gothic decorations and the locals were somewhat wary of the aging couple with their thick accents. The old man combined a lisp with his thick accent and referred to his house as something like “ Looth Theerpa Hall” and so in the best Australian traditions the locals dubbed it ‘Loose Slipper Hall’ with the implication that there was more than one thing loose in the old man’s mind. Local children who ventured into the grounds were treated well and always offered a glass of milk. Once the local urchins discovered this milk was not ‘proper’ milk but came from goats they realised the old couple were probably trying to poison them and kept their distance.

The old couple died. Nobody knows when they died, but they must have. The son, a tall man with dark hair and sunken eyes who looked old before his time, became the head of the house. He had few social skills but his woodworking skills surpassed even those of his father and he continued to expand the house. Until then, access to the house had been by small laneway called Mern Alley (named after an obscure poet) but he had had that blocked off and incorporated into the property. If you have an old map of Melbourne you may still be able to find Mern Alley. From that time, access to the property was solely from the river. This was no easy process since the riverside cliff at this point rises to some 40 metres. What produce they couldn’t provide for themselves they purchased or bartered from the nuns down river at the Abbotsford Convent in exchange for some of their delicious goats’ cheese.

Loose Slipper Hall passed on to another generation who maintain the tradition of woodworking, now in a stunning contemporary style. The house has never had electricity connected and operated entirely by gaslight and beautifully preserved mechanical contrivances from the nineteenth century. Note particularly the beautifully carved water bowls at each doorway. The mercury floating on top of the water maintains a constant magnetic field inside the house. Locals tell us that bats from the nearby colony in regularly fly in after dark and hang under the eves.

This Sunday there is a rare opportunity from a limited number of White Hat subscribers to visit Looflirpa Hall (we now know that the name comes from the town Looflirpa in Estonia near the French border where the original couple came from). There will be an afternoon session where you can examine the property in daylight together with the remarkable carvings using wood from the Jarrah forests of East Gippsland plus an evening session where you can climb the twenty steps from the river to the top of the cliff. Those who are game can mix with the bats and the gaslight and listen to the stories behind this remarkable property.

The owners, who understandably do not wish to broadcast their location to busloads of tourists, have asked us to restrict announcement of the details of the starting point of this tour on our website to Sunday morning only. Thus, if you are interested in visiting Looflirpa Hall go to the following page this Sunday (as early as possible because places are limited) at LooflirpaHall.

Castlemaine Festival

This weekend the Castlemaine Arts Festival gets under way. It is one of Australia’s major regional arts festivals. It also has an associated fringe festival. Now, once you get up around Daylesford / Castlemaine way, what is considered ‘alternative’ in the Melbourne arts scene is regarded as mainstream to those people drinking the funny water that bubbles out of rocks up that way. Thus the Castlemaine Fringe Festival may well be totally weird. Why not find out for yourself? Details at Macedon & Spa Country.

Coming events

We are coming up to Easter which means a number of regular events are on the horizon. There is the Stawell Easter Gift, the Bendigo Easter Festival, the Mornington Buskers’ Festival, the Churchill Island Working Horse Festival, the Maldon Easter Fair and the JAWS Festival at Queenscliff.

The White Hat Quiz

Please note: This section of the newsletter has been removed as it forms part of a forthcoming publication or because it is forms part of our Questing activities. If you find yourself on a tour where the guide is White Hat Accredited they are likely to know the answer to many questions you may have in this area. All guides on White Hat Tours are White Hat Accredited.