Another hot week

 The weather continues to be stupidly hot, too hot to get any serious gardening done in the afternoons, which will mean a lot of weeding as soon as things cool down a bit.

The zucchini are refusing to produce anything other than flowers, and as for the tomatoes, I have a sad story.

The crop was developing quite well and I was thinking that I should net them as some were beginning to colour up. 

Unfortunately I left it a day too long, and when I went to net them, the damned possums had got there first and stripped the riper ones. Fortunately I'd planted two varieties, one slower ripening than the other, so hopefully they'll start to ripen in the next week or so.

It's not all gloom though, the chilis are doing well and the possums, after an experimental nibble give them a wide berth.

The hot weather of course meant another early start to get anything done at Lake View before it became too hot. Like last week I was up before the sun, and pulling into the car park just on eight while it was still cool.

Unfortunately, unlike last week the building had stayed hot and stuffy as we'd had a warm night, so it was not the most pleasant experience.

I've started work on the study, which is a bit of a shrine to Henry Handel Richardson, and full of memorabilia, despite her connection with Chiltern being tenuous - she only lived there for eighteen months as a child, although Chiltern served as an inspiration for her description of gold field settlements in Australia Felix, the first part of the Fortunes of Richard Mahoney trilogy.

Still, I had a minor triumph.

Among the memorabilia was a tarnished brass medallion. 

In the photograph, the 1990s handwritten description is quite legible, but that's because I played around with the image - the ink has faded quite badly in the original. 

I was fairly certain that the last line read [...]nior Pianoforte Scholarship, but I was not sure.

Henry Handel Richardson was sent as a boarder to the Presbyterian Ladies College, then as now the most prestigious girls' school in Melbourne, where her experiences formed the basis of her novel 'The Getting of Wisdom'.

Long story short, the Presbyterian Ladies College is a wealthy institution, and wealthy enough to maintain its own archives section, so I emailed them in the hope of them being able to confirm the scholarship details.

And they went above and beyond, not only confirming that the scholarship was for Senior Pianoforte, but including an account from the school magazine of 1896 describing a performance of her prize winning cantata based on Tennyson's Sea Fairies.

The concert was also reported in the Age and the Argus, so it was obviously a newsworthy event within the circle of the great and the good of Melbourne at the time.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, while I'm not really a collector, I am intrigued by the use nineteenth century people made of postcards, and have been slowly assembling a small collection of examples from colonial Australia.

My latest acquisition is this rather nice 1898 example from South Australia

addressed to an O.N. Rosenhain Esq in Balaclava, which is of course a suburb of Melbourne.

I thought I might make a start on transcribing it - transcribing old post cards lets me practice my skills in reading nineteenth century handwriting - useful for family history research and the rest, but when I flipped it over to scan the message side of the post card, I got a surprise

it was in German!

Well, in a sense that's not surprising - at the end of the nineteenth century perhaps ten per cent of of the population of South Australia were of German heritage, and there was a reasonably large population of German heritage in Melbourne.

While we now think of Balaclava as an area with a large Orthodox Jewish population, most of them arrived in the 1930s and 40s - before then Balaclava was not particularly anything, just another moderately well to do suburb of a growing city.

But I must admit that it reminded me that while we tend to think of late colonial Australia as an Anglo Irish monoculture, that in fact developed later with the racist 'White Australia' policy - at the end of the nineteenth century Australia was quite diverse, even if new immigration was beginning to be restricted to those of 'desirable' heritage ...