When visiting the place I grew up in and checking it out like a tourist you find interesting places that did not exist when you lived there. Like this cool wall of graffiti of ‘tags’ just down the road from where we are staying in Margate. Soon we will be visiting Melbourne and there is much more of this art around the city to check out on the walls and the laneways – I can’t wait as they are the perfect photo opportunity.

As part of the Redcliffe ‘homecoming tour’ I wanted to see places I had never been to in my life so we went to the Redcliffe Museum to learn about the history of Redcliffe from its humble beginnings as a convict settlement. As we walked in we watched a 13 minute short film on the history of Redcliffe and how when back in the day it was promoted as a beachside suburb to come and visit for R&R – one of the film stills of their promos in the pic above. Things do travel full circle and the city folks flock to Redcliffe on the weekend for their R&R, fish and chips and a walk by the beach. The weekends are generally busy here with families coming for day trips and it is funny how when I grew up here all I wanted to do was to escape but having kids and enjoying relaxing by the water it is a beautiful and relaxing place to be.

At the museum the kids got to check out machines of the past like the typewriter – I used an electric typewriter to learn to type at school. These were fully manual and it was funny how when you have not touched a typewriter for years you can still remember how these machines work. The kids enjoyed playing with them and thought it would be way more fun than using a computer!

Learning about history on the icons of my childhood I found that this wreck of the gunboat the HMQS Gayundah was ran aground at Woody Point in 1958 to serve as a breakwater structure. All these years I had made up many stories of this boat in my mind as to how the boat got there – pirates, war and the like. We used to do photo shoots in the boat when we were younger and somehow we did  not read the signs about entering the structure – oh well, young and danger loving! This ship was launched in 1884 in the UK and traveled for 5 months to reach Australia. While we were at the Redcliffe Museum I found a model of the boat a model with the history and what a beauty she was.

When we visited the wreck the other day it was amazing to see how over time the rust of the ship had transformed. I loved to see how the bow of the ship had fallen recently creating a fish head with nature in the form of weeds taking her place inside the mouth of the fish. I loved the shape of the stern as how it looks like a mechanical whale tail splashing out of the water.

Always many trees to climb here by the beach – this shady Pandanus palm is the perfect climbing tree for both the kiddos. And who did I find when we were heading back to the car – a lovely pink hibiscus flower in bloom in winter. Aloha Reddo!