Some Layouts

I haven't shared any of my layouts for months. I did this one of Leah at the Florewen Scrapbook Retreat. Leah on Lorne beach when Dad was visiting last month.

I taught this layout at the retreat. Kady and Dylan at Bells Beach last October.

Another I finished at the retreat. Leah doing cartwheels down Lorne pier with my Dad encouraging her.

This would have to be my favourite childhood pic ever. My Dad kissing me. My Nan looking in from behind. My Uncle Mick scanned this photo and sent it too me after my Nan passed away earlier this year. It was out of one of her albums. The journaling is about my memory of Dad's psychedelic shirts when I was little. I used to get the hand me downs for art smocks at school lol. My Dad was a pretty trendy guy.

Kady and some friends. Leah took this photo of the three of them when they were visiting a friends and I was working. A scrappers daughter lol Lots of yummy Heidi Grace papers and Cloud 9 rubons.

A layout about all the clothing labels Kady loves at thirteen.

We visited this playground in January. I still have to journal. It was the BEST playground we have ever been too.

The following layouts are for my local history album. Not the best pics of the layouts. My camera was dying, so the colours are really off.

Journaling reads

The “half church” was dedicated in August 1877 in its present shape to allow for possible future expansion. The “half church” is an Anglican church.

A note in an early diary says, “went to church, preacher was Mr Scott”. Mr Scott was a lay reader with the Church of England at Bacchus Marsh but became more well known as “Captain Moonlite”, one of Victoria’s most notorious bushrangers.

He was active in the district in the 1870s and was finally arrested in New South Wales. La Cote Homestead, which was located in La Cote Road, was owned by Mr Shuter, a stipendiary magistrate, before whom Captain Moonlite appeared. Scott was eventually hanged in 1879.

As the goldfields lost their importance, residents abandoned the area and the Greendale Church, which was to have accommodated 200 worshippers, was never completed. Photo taken May 2007

Journaling reads

White settlers, as they moved into the Ballan area in 1838, encountered timbered country with little scrub. There was a great variety of native flora and fauna including large “boomer” kangaroos and kangaroo rats, which disappeared in the 1850s.

Bandicoots and two species of native cat were also plentiful up to the 1870s when they too vanished with the pressure of human habitation, disease and hunting. Dingoes were originally so common in the area that T. H. Pyke, an early Ballan settler who gave his name to Pykes Creek, hunted them far and wide with a pack of foxhounds he kept for that purpose. Birds such as the curlew, the wild pigeon and many parrot species have also gone.

An early pioneer described the country as “ … a very pretty part of Victoria”, with plentiful stands of wattle and wild cherry. “Wild flowers … were in great abundance and variety and they made the surface of the country resemble a gaudy carpet. They were of every imaginable variety of colour …”. This was in the time when stock was scarce and people scarcer still.

The first aboriginal tribes encountered by the Ballan settlers were the Kutung, the Wathourung, the Wurunjeri, the Jaara and the Ngurelban. These people were fairly numerous and there were inevitable clashes between them and the white arrivals. There were many eyewitness accounts of corroborees and tribal fights in the area during the early settlement. As more whites came to the district, stories of clashes between the two races became more commonplace.

The first white person to settle in Ballan, Robert von Steiglitz, typified the settler philosophy in his journal: “… it may be questioned by some feather-bed philanthropist whether we had the right to take the country from the blacks but I believe the general rule is that if people cultivate or graze the land they have a claim to it. These creatures did neither …”.

Many names in the area are derived from the Aboriginal place names: Bunjeeltap, Myrniong and Berembroke are examples. Cutumnimnip was the Aboriginal name for the creek which flowed through the centre of what was to become the property taken up in 1839 by Sir John Lewes Pedder, formerly the Chief Justice of Van Deimen’s Land. Pedder owned it until 1855 when it was sold to Mr Thomas Hamilton who named it “Glen Pedder”. The land on which Greendale now stands was originally part of this run.

Greendale’s early settlement history was closely bound up with that of Ballan and Blackwood. The area was considered a handy halfway place between the two townships and was surveyed by Nixon shortly after the discovery of gold at Blackwood in the 1850s. He named it Greendale as it was “ … a beautiful hollow bounded by green hills with Dales Creek in the centre”. Dales Creek had earlier been named after Mr H. F. Dale, a manager of Glen Pedder.

The first to settle in Greendale was John Drury, who built and ran a coffee shop at the foot of Long Gully. A government Gazette of 1859 announced the sale of land at Greendale with town lots at £8.0.0 per acre and suburban lots at £3.0.0 per acre. During the gold rush days the settlements of Greendale and Blackwood almost met. Greendale was proclaimed a township in 1861 and supported a post office and at least two hotels, one of which, the Medway, survives today as the Greendale Hotel. The Greendale School was opened in 1869, and in 1870 had 61 children enrolled, although the average attendance was only 22 pupils.

As the goldfields lost their importance, residents abandoned the area. . The 1888 Municipal Directory of Ballan Shire shows that Greendale consisted of 87 people, one hotel, one school and one place of worship. For most of the twentieth century Greendale was a quiet rural area, with farming as the mainstay of the local economy. The school was closed in 1954, after which it became a state school camp.

Since the early 1970s residential subdivisions have opened up at Wombat Forest, Dales Creek, Long Gully and Hastings Road. The population has grown and diversified as people once more build homes around the beautiful green hollow of the Dales Creek.

This photo was taken after some much needed rain. For a long time the hills surrounding Greendale where dry and brown. After the rain the lush green grass returned. Such a pretty sight. On the right of the picture there is a road in the shape of a love heart. Locals know it as Love heart Lane. Leah’s friend ###### lives at the house on the top of the hill. The hill in the background is Mt Blackwood. The houses in the back of the photo are part of the Hastings Road subdivision.

Information on the history of Greendale taken from the Greendale Community Website.Photo taken May 2007

Journaling reads

During the mid 1800’s the area surrounding and including the present township of Blackwood was then known as Mt Blackwood.

Mount Blackwood is a prominent mountain about 9 miles south south east of Blackwood and was the highest volcano in the area with a summit elevation of 736 metres. Mount Blackwood is a prominent scoria dome built on lava flows extending 8 km to the south. The flows are narrow and elongated and followed an upland valley thus covering stream gravels. Korkuperrimal Creek and Myrniong Creek have excavated lateral valleys leaving the lava flows as an elevated ridge.

John Batman, originally named Mount Blackwood, Mount Solomon in 1835, after a friend of his who shared in the partition of the land bought by him from the natives. By 1838 it was changed to Clark’s Big Hill, after Mr Kenneth Clark, who was the first settler in the Bacchus Marsh valley in 1836. It was later named Mount Blackwood, after a Captain Blackwood, Commander of the ‘Fly” from 1843 to 1845.

Today Mount Blackwood is privately owned bare grazing land, which has a communications tower on the summit. Photo taken May 2007

Dylans first bed. I used the Fiskars Bling Squeeze punch

Ok that's all for now. Good on you if you read this far.