Goodbye Old House

Northcote House

Today is the last day I will spend in the current residence as we are moving house tomorrow to the house in Ivanhoe.

After almost 31 years I am sad to be leaving, as I’ve always regarded the area as one of the best spots in Melbourne’s inner north suburbs.

It has certainly changed over the 30 or so years we’ve been resident.

Back in the 1980s it was a predominantly working class suburb with every second house owned by people of Greek, Italian, Macedonian, or Croatian heritage.

These days it’s very much professional couples who have taken over. There are doctors, lawyers and such occupying half the houses in the street. There are remnants of the old residents still here, the Crone across the road for instance.  We’ve never actually known her name, but she has provided us heaps of inadvertent amusement over the years with her busy bodying and nosiness and crazy obsessions with leaves and gutters. She’s always out in the street peering over fences and into parked cars.  On the original Google Earth map, there she was standing outside her house.

When we first moved in, back in October 1986 we had two cats and a dog. I can’t show photos of them as the old snaps are packed away, but the said animals were a black male cat called The Bear, a long haired black and white female cat called Maggie and my elderly Springer Spaniel dog, Arabel.

Arabel died in 1987 after swallowing a bone. We rushed her to Animal Urgent but they were unable to save her. She had been my constant companion for 14 years.

The Bear was very attached to Arabel having known her since he was a kitten, so missed her when she was gone. He died in January 1991 of kidney failure at the age of 10. Maggie survived for another five years before disappearing one night, never to be seen again. We’d found her as a kitten in a pub, to whence she had followed some patrons. We adopted her on the spot and she was a delightful cat who got on with other cats and dogs.

We replaced The Bear with Oscar, a beautiful Siamese cross who looked Burmese.  He was very sick as a kitten, suffering from Cat Flu from the day we acquired him. We nursed him back to health and he survived for 13 years before dying of a cancerous growth in his throat. He was a great cat, always a gentleman and very affectionate. 

Lizzie the Abyssinian took the place of Maggie and she and Oscar were great friends, curling up together and eating off the same plate.  She died of old age in 2012 at the grand cat age of 16 and I still feel sad when I come across a photo of her.

Oscar’s replacement was Willy whose recent death we still mourn.

And now of course we have Bingo and Talya, the last in a long line of cats who have cohabited this place over  30 + years.

So there are a lot animal memories we’re leaving behind as well as personal history.

With Spring imminent there are several things I shall miss when we move, such as the blooming of the lilac, the bush grown from a suckling from a lilac tree that grew in the backyard of a previous address. It took twenty years to produce flowers.

The sweet smell of the honeysuckle vine that grows in a fragrant ball on the pergola over the back decking. It’s a survivor as well – has always been there.

The purple irises which have been blooming every spring since we moved in…

…and the elegant Dutch irises – more recently planted.

Finally the Bella Donna lilies, which have bloomed every summer since we’ve lived here, always a surprise when they snake up from the ground and produce a gaudy display of lipstick pink lilies.

I’ll also miss the local birds – the game little blackbirds, the raucus wattle birds, lorikeets  and magpies, the tribe of local ravens, the tiny silver eyes and sundry other avian visitors.

No doubt there will be similar species out in Ivanhoe. In fact I spotted  a raven when were out there on Monday checking out the place in a final inspection.

The house in Ivanhoe hasn’t much of a garden just a vast expanse of lawn in the back. At least it may be possum free; native animals I will not miss at all no matter how cute they are. They are responsible for tree murder at the current address and are busy trying to kill more.

Hopefully the cats will settle in easily. They’re apprehensive at all the packing activity and no doubt will be alarmed when the moving van turns up. Talya should be OK, but we intend to lock Bingo out of harms way while its happening. And we’ll keep them both confined indoors for several days at the new place.

A year with the Russian Princess

Talya asleep at the foot of the bed – I love the blend of colours which complement her grey fur.

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of our adoption of Talya, the Russian Blue princess, and I must say it has been mostly a pleasure having her as part of the family. She’s a lovely looking cat with a sweet nature as far as humans are concerned, but is a bitch to other cats.

It’s a pity that her relationship to Willy still needs the kinks ironed out, but at least the occasional hostility between the two of them has not resulted in any collateral damage.  Fur is intact, attitudes remain suspicious.

Last night, whilst we were reading in bed, Willy was leaning against my legs, when Talya jumped on the bed and indicated that she wanted to curl up there too. When she was choosing a spot her tail every so often brushed against Willy - eek, she’s touching me! –  to his horror. Talya eventually settled down, curled a few centimetres away from Willy leaning against B’s knee and all was peaceful as both cats went  to sleep.

Snapped with my iPad, so picture is not perfect.

Talya has recently taken to sleeping on my pillow at night, which is a dangerous practice, as Willy uses the route across my pillow to climb under the blankets. We were woken in the early hours of the morning recently by a terrific shriek followed by a scuffle, as the inevitable occurred.  It makes me nervous. I certainly don’t want a cat fight on my head in the middle of the night, so I’ve been discouraging Talya from sleeping there. She has a perfectly comfortable bed in the computer room on top of the dresser…

…but with the usual contrariety of cats, she won’t sleep there if she doesn’t want to.

The cats coped well with the extreme heat last week, Talya mostly staying indoors where the evaporative cooling system provided relief from the 44°C outside. Willy chills out under the house in hot weather, as he appears to be disturbed by the fan blowing cool air.

However, the local possums were zonked. I was out in the backyard the other afternoon crumbing old bread crusts for the birds, when I heard a rustling in the trees by the fence, and a small brush tailed possum staggered onto the fence, looking very distressed. It  crawled under the water tank, and we don’t know if it survived or not.  No doubt we’ll find out soon enough, if and when a corpse makes an assault on our olfactory senses.

Thank goodness it’s cooled down this week, a relief after a week of 40°+ temperatures, though one expects it in Melbourne during summer.

I’m hanging out for the start of the autumn racing season. So far this year the racing scene has been pretty dull, though I have been assessing the young contenders for the Blue Diamond Stakes and Golden Slipper as they prepare for the big races. A few have attracted my interest – Unencumbered for one, who took out the Magic Millions Two Year Old Classic. He shows great promise. Another is Nostradamus who had his first start last Saturday and won it easily after missing the start.

I was disappointed to read that my favourites Super Cool, Fiveandahalfstar and Puissance de Lune will not be racing this autumn, for one reason or another. It’s A Dundeel however will be back, but only in Sydney. Hopefully Fiorente will come to Melbourne to contest the Australian Cup, but I fear that in Melbourne we’ll miss seeing several equine stars, with most of them being kept in Sydney to contest for the bumped up riches of its carnival.

It’s early days yet, so I’ll wait and see if it will be worth attending the track in a few weeks time.  Who knows what new stars of the turf will emerge this autumn.

Wildlife in the “Burbs”

The above photo is of a blue tongued lizard, sunning itself in our front garden. There appears to be a family of them living under the house – mum, dad and babies. Willy the cat fortunately ignores them, the large ones anyway, but the local wattle birds persistently attack the lizards on sight. 

Willy eyeing off a blue tongued lizard.

We also noticed the other day two delightful little spotted pardelotes stripping bark from the honeysuckle vine for nesting material.

Spotted Pardelotes

They are a rare sight in the suburban back garden, the bulk of the avian population being blackbirds, Indian mynahs, wattle birds and pigeons, with the occasional flock of rainbow lorikeets dropping by.

Lorikeet Chick

 
Adult Lorikeet in plum tree

As you can see from the photo above, the plum tree is looking ragged and chewed. This is due to depredations of possums, both of the brush tailed and ring tailed varieties, who inhabit the garden at night. In the past, the two blood plum trees were laden with fruit during summer. For the past two years, as the possum population has grown, the trees have yielded less than a handful of plums.  The possums eat the blossoms and then get stuck into the new leaf growth, effectively eating themselves out of any future bounty. In other words, they are pests, but protected by law, so you can’t dispose of them.

The brush tail possums are amazingly bold and friendly. They saunter up to you and would even try climbing your leg, if you let them.

Willy the cat won’t tackle them, fortunately – he’d come off worse in a tussle with a brush tailed possum. He’s even running scared of the mynahs and wattle birds who are extraordinarily aggressive birds.

We have new next door neighbours, so Pinto the feisty kitten has gone to live in Castlemaine with her owners and no longer troubles our backyard . However, the new neighbours, who recently emigrated from the UK, have two cats who are due to come out of quarantine tomorrow. They are bengal/burmese cross cats, a male and a female,  so I’m really interested in seeing  them, but Willy is in for a shock.  Hopefully they’ll co-exist in harmony with the local felines.

Mourning Ravens

Yesterday I noticed some interesting behaviour on the part of the local tribe of ravens.

Overnight one of their number had apparently been killed after sitting on the power box that controls a conjunction of power lines over the laneway near our house. There it was, a tatter of glossy black feathers on the ground at the foot of the power pole – one defunct raven.

Later in the morning I heard a commotion of ravens in the street. There were a number of them sitting in the plane trees close to the scene of the tragedy calling to each other, back and forth.

Raven in plane tree

I wondered, as I observed their behaviour, if they were discussing the death of their companion. It certainly looked and sounded as if they were.

Currawong and Cat

I witnessed the most extraordinary thing this evening involving a Currawong and a cat. The cat was Pinto aka Piccolo, (her owners address her by both) an adolescent tortoiseshell cat who lives next door.

She was in our back garden, prowling around as is her wont, when all of sudden I noticed her having a go at a Currawong as it swooped over her head.  The bird landed in the fig tree and sat there a while before launching itself once more, swooping on the cat then soaring up onto the fence opposite. Pinto being a feisty young thing, chased it and leapt for it in vain.

Then the bird did it all again as if it was a game. This continued for some time, the cat running after the bird, with the bird swooping deliberately low over the cat, from fence to fence, from fence to tree, until the cat lost concentration, whereon the Currawong flew off.

 
Pied Currawong

For those who don’t know what a Currawong is, they are a largish black and white native bird with a jolly, melodious call. There is also a grey type and a solid black type. You don’t see them much in the city, but they’re quite prevalent in rural areas and put on a deafening morning chorus of chortles and trills.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a camera handy when all this was going on. Besides, I couldn’t tear myself away from this amazing scene, watching the behaviour of these two creatures. It reminded me of that video that was making news some months ago of the owl and cat playing together.

Lucky Update

You may remember, back in October last year, I wrote about the rescue of Lucky the baby ringtail possum.

Here she is now…

… making her way out into the wide world. (photo by Pat)

As you can see she has thrived under the care of Pat, who over the months, has grown very fond of her.

Pat only recently allowed the small colony of ringtail possums, of whom Lucky is part, out of their cage at night. Apparently they all bounded off into the bush with alacrity, but return each morning to their nesting box.

So it’s really heart warming to think of Lucky wild and free with her own “family” of possums to hang out with.

As I now work on the same floor as Pat, I get to see and handle all the wonderful creatures she has in her care. The little ones who need 24 hour attention, Pat brings into work. She has had tawny frogmouth chicks, sugar gliders and recently an exquisite little marsupial called a dunnart.

The dunnart is a desert dwelling carnivorous marsupial related to the Tasmanian Devil, though minuscule in size. The one Pat had in her care was a baby fat tailed dunnart, half a finger’s length long, a perfectly formed, immensely appealing little beast. It will grow to about the size of a mouse on reaching maturity.

I must admit I’d never heard of a dunnart before, so it is fascinating to come across these unusual and relatively unknown native animals at my workplace no less.

Here’s a photo of an adult fat tailed dunnart.

Aren’t they simply the cutest beasties ever!

Close Encounter with a Tawny Frogmouth

The above bird, which I have identified as a Tawny Frogmouth a variety of Australian bird often regarded as a type of owl, is sitting on a low branch in a fig tree in the backyard. It has been there for hours. The cats are locked inside and very displeased that they can’t go out and torment it.

It is quite rare to see an owl anytime in the metropolitan area, let alone in the daytime, but I believe this particular frogmouth regards our place and next door as part of its territory. Our neighbour has observed an owl at night watching his compost for rats and mice. It could very well be this one.

These birds are supposed to rest during the daytime in a camouflaged position.This bird, though its colour does match the branches of the fig tree, is very conspicuous.

The Mellow Blues of Eric Bibb once again at Basement Discs.

Basement Discs today hosted Eric Bibb at an early lunchtime show in store. Eric is currently touring Australia in support of his latest CD Get Onboard.

Looking very dapper in grey pants, yellow silk shirt and white boater, he gave the large audience packed into the intimate environment of Basement Discs a taste of sweet and mellow blues, singing mostly songs off the new album, though he stated that he likes performing more to make a connection with people than to flog his merchandise.

He comes across as a warm and humorous person and after his short set was cheerily signing CDs with a beer standing handy.

It’s music festival time in Melbourne and elsewhere, with the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival the main attraction over Easter. It has a stellar line up this year, and I am very much looking forward to seeing Lucinda Williams performing a side show live in Melbourne next Wednesday at Hamer Hall. I have excellent seats so hope to get some good photos.

Next week Hot Club of Cowtown will be doing an in store at Basement Discs – another band well worth seeing – Texas Swing for a change.

Wending my way back to work after the in store, walking through the lovely Block Arcade, I came upon a Giant Bilby attended by a woman handing out chocolate egg bits. I turned down the chocolate in favour of snapping the Bilby who very obligingly posed for a shot. The Bilby is the Australian version of the Easter Bunny. In real life, Bilbies are endangered, desert-dwelling marsupial omnivores – very appealing little animals.