Windsor has certainly seen an upturn in eateries since January … The Grill at 72 George Street across the street from Macquarie Arms Hotel opened recently and perhaps more recently, WonderSushi opened its doors in the Lachlan Arcade shops. Sushi must be quite popular in the Hawkesbury as there is rarely an empty seat. Michelle’s Tearoom, also in Lachlan Arcade is now under new management and their hours are Wednesday – Sunday. It is a lovely room and on Mother’s Day weekend you couldn’t get in the door. Book early for weekends, particularly Sunday(s).

Some really great news: The Wedding Centre is now a one-stop shop for weddings! In addition to imported dresses (from around the world), Natalie has a lovely selection for the mother-of-the-bride. Having experienced the stress of a daughter’s wedding, we understand how stress-free it is to find men’s wedding attire, the bride’s dress and Mum’s as well. No need to drive to Sydney!

We’ll round off this post with a reference to an earlier posting in June 2011. We wrote about a Lost News Story — a feel good story on an U.S. island — Roanoke. where we grew up. The island has much in common with Windsor historically and this week, an interesting press release arrived in our Inbox. On our Villages of Hawkesbury webblog, we bring the story uptodate. While Windsor’s history is not 425 years old, it  is the homeplace of Australia’s early history — along with Sydney and Parramatta. Here is the link to the news about early colonial America: http://www.villagesofhawkesbury.com/blog/

Be back in a fortnight!

Pre-Easter brought many shoppers out to Windsor Riverview Shopping Centre. . . parking spots in the underground car park were at a premium. Moderate temperatures in the Hawkesbury must have been the motivator to shop.

Along The Mall, we chatted with many shop proprietors — they are still revelling in the success of the International Sand Sculpting Championship back in January (2012). “So many new faces in Windsor” seems to be the mantra when speaking about the ISSC.

Historic Post Office

Visitors and locals were taking advantage of the gorgeous day and at every cafe, the outdoor seating filled quickly. To our surprise, a new addition to The Mall is Wondersush, a sushi bar. Obviously, the locals have welcomed it as only a few seats were available when we entered. The ambiance is modern and spotless.

Early Morning on Windsor Mall

The Hawkesbury Regional Museum was the final stop on our trip around Windsor. The exhibition space is small, but  it offers much that is unusual for children and adults.  During the school holidays this is a great way to entertain the kids — call 4560 4655 for holiday classes.

Exhibition 19th century dress: 

Hawkesbury Regional Museum Exhibition

In our last post, we spoke of the International Sand Sculpting Competition coming to Windsor in January 2012. Along with the ISSC came days and days of rain, yet large numbers of hardy attendees flocked to Windsor. It was a success and all are thankful that the rising Hawkesbury river waited until February for its “show”.

For us, January was a sad month. . . we made a final journey to San Francisco to bid the last  farewell to a close family friend. Often we don’t verbalise the deep ties to our friends until they are no longer with us. We are unaware of the loss we will experience  — the loss of their kindness, their respect and their friendship. The connectedness is torn and grief hangs on for weeks, months.

Which leads us to quote from an essay by Hugh MacKay (“The Marketing of Brand Me,” SMH Weekend Edition, March 3-4, 2012).  ”The desire to be taken seriously is perhaps the deepest and therefore the most easily frustrated of the many desires that drive us. We all need to be recognised, acknowledged, valued,” writes MacKay.

Our most connected friends understand this universal need as do we. Mutual respect, acknowledgment and value are irreplaceable. We mourn our loss.

So, we turn to other connected friends to help us heal. Laughter, sharing stories and reconnecting ease the grief — we are such social creatures and these few moments of happiness are wonderful.

We are back and Windsor was a delight on Friday — a slight drizzle occurred off and on, but visitors didn’t seem to mind. Much was the same — the Macquarie Arms Hotel is still under construction, or so it seems. The didgeridoo artist still performed beautifully — quite hauntingly in the gray overcast. Foliage on The Mall is quite lush — well, it has rained for 30 days and 30 nights hasn’t it? And earlier in the month, we thought a call to Noah would soon be necessary! The river was so high.

But, this didn’t harm visitation. . . The Windsor Ice Creamery was packed on Saturday. . . as the proprietor pointed out, “we humans are drawn to a natural disaster.” Ice cream is yummy at all disasters.

The Hawkesbury Regional Gallery opens  a new exhibition on Friday, March 23, “The Versatile Clints” and on Saturday 28March two local artists, Taryn Malzard and Adrienne Richards offer a watercolour technique workshop. Sounds terrific 10:30am – 2:30pm. Phone: 4560 4441 for details.

The Hawkesbury Regional Museum will have events for families during the school holidays.

We have returned — after a long hiatus!

We are working with Sandstorm Events Ltd out of Melbourne area who own the Frankston Sand Sculpting Exhibition. Since 2002, this event has entertained thousands of visitors. . . last year alone, attendance was above 255,000.

Now, we don’t anticipate that many in our first year of three weeks, but by 2014, perhaps close to 200,000? This year 2012, we are planning for 100,000 with fingers crossed. We have had a terrific assist from Urban City Consulting (Windsor firm) who have submitted all the necessary plans and documents for the event to Hawkesbury City Council. Troy Myers heads up the firm.

Richmond Club, that impressive and well loved club (some 20,000 members strong) is a major financial supporter. Elf Farm Supplies is another major supporter, along with many many businesses in the Hawkesbury. So many have come together financially to make this event possible, we can’t say “thank you” enough!

Yesterday, Sandstorm executives flew up from Melbourne for day-long meetings. First they “inspected” the sand at Matt Collins & Sons Quarry. Hawkesbury sand is perfect and is being donated by four quarry owners. (Thank you, Thank you!) They will deliver 400 tonnes — yes, 400 hundred tonnes — to the competition site (Howe Park, Windsor) along the river on Jan 8th, 2012.

Then, once in Windsor, we walked the site and Sandstorm Events operation manager, chose the appropriate sites for the 14 sculptures. They were blown away by the location: the shady ambience and the beauty of Howe Park and the river. We will be blown away in January when each of the sculptors begin to carve “magical creatures” out of 20 tonnes of sand. Each has 20 tonnes to work with for the competition.

Greg Hall of Urban City stepped Sandstorm Events team through many of the traffic management details, emergency exits, safe cross walks, etc. It’s amazing all the details one must plan for in a public event and Hawkesbury City Council is helpfully advising and mentoring as we plan and implement.

Good AZ Gold Coaches will provide “hop on – hop off” service for the three weeks duration. Many thanks to owner, Ryan Thompson. You can see now with all our “name-dropping”, that the Hawkesbury community has rallied together to support this ambitious event.

A recent newsletter from the Hawkesbury Regional Museum arrived and we will take the liberty of passing on to you a bit of history as gathered by the Museum Staff. A new exhibition “The Misses Stewart” is on display — based upon the seamstress skills of  two Hawkesbury sisters, Myra and Ivy Stewart.

Today, we would call Myra and Ivy fashion designers, for in the early 20th century these two earned their living designing and sewing garments of all kinds for department stores like David Jones and Farmers.

The Museum display includes clothing from underwear (the 1900 style) and night clothes to day wear and mourning wear along with accessories.   Kids’ classes based on the exhibition are offered on Friday 30/9 and Friday 7/10. The September class will focus on making a beautiful friendship bracelet. The October class, kids will make a handy marble bag or coin purse — they will personalise it with their initials. Staff and volunteers will assist and guide boys and girls of all ages. Kids and parents or carers are invited to drop in between 11am and 2pm.

Myra and Ivy spent their childhood on the family property at Mountain Lagoon. Their father and grandfather were pioneers in the fruit growing industry up in Bilpin. Imagine growing up with the wonderful fruit of Bilpin at your doorstep.

The girls were assigned household duties to help their mum and perhaps these tasks were the beginnings of their clothes-making careers. Being a capable seamstress would have been highly desirable as stores were rare and travel was by horse and cart. Roads were potholed and often muddy challenges.

When their father died, Myra, Ivy and their mother, Blanche moved to a cottage in Richmond. Now their skill became a necessity in order to earn a living. From the Museum Newsletter: “Working by the light of a kerosene lamp, they knitted, sewed and crocheted everything from ties, belts and gentlemen’s waistcoats to baby clothes and delicate lace trimmings. Once a month they travelled to ‘town’ (Sydney) to deliver their wares.”

While neither sister married, they had a long career and their beautiful handmade articles remained a Sydney mainstay for many years. Ivy died in 1976 and Myra in 1978.

Within eighteen months of the British arrival in Sydney Bay, writes author Jack Brook, two-thirds of the local Indigenous population, the people who spoke Dharug language, had died from smallpox. Their immune systems could not cope against this foreign disease. Respiratory ailments such as influenza attacked those still remaining, so that by 1795 the Indigenous population was all but annihilated.

What followed was ‘culture shock, harassment, injustice and disillusionment for the remnants of the Dharug’. Loss of their tribal lands eroded the traditional and spiritual
ceremonies and initiations, not to mention food and shelter. As most stories of
the Indigenous people were never recorded, the mental anguish – perhaps similar
to post-traumatic syndrome – suffered by Indigenous communities is lost to
us.

Clearly each group was competing for the same rich soil. For thousands of years, yams
were the staple vegetable of the clans and they held a cultural view and habit
of gathering any available food within their traditional grounds.

Much of the local wild game, possums, bird and kangaroos were scarce as their
habitat had been destroyed by settlers clearing the land for farming. By 1795,
the few remaining yam beds along the riverbanks were on land owned by settlers
– the concept of land grants and ownership was clearly not understood or
perhaps not respected by the Indigenous people. When the Dharug tried to
harvest the yam crops, settlers drove them away.
The conflict was compounded when farmers failed to pay Aboriginals who had helped
them gather their corn and maize crops. Driven by hunger and desperation,
Aboriginals plundered farmers’ maize (corn) crops. The farmers retaliated,
shooting several men they caught in the cornfields. Atrocities had escalated in
1794 when settlers captured, viciously tortured and killed a young Aboriginal
boy. In retaliation, the local clan killed a settler and a convict. Stories and
rumours inflamed an already agitated population and a detachment of fifty New
South Wales Corps were sent out to kill natives of the band which lived on the
Hawkesbury River near Richmond.

An order issued by Governor Hunter 1799 gave tacit permission to the settlers to rely upon one another to defend themselves and their land against Aboriginals. Settlers should not expect troopassistance. All-out warfare then ensued. Deaths were frequent and vicious and
Hunter later acknowledged the military’s role in fanning the hostility.

By 1805 the corn or maize crops yielded little – flooding had destroyed much of them. The Sydney Gazette added fuel to the fears by predicting that ‘natives would be troublesome: until the entire crop had been wholly gathered’ (Murray & White, p.122). Though the Governor warned settlers that the Aboriginals living between Prospect and Parramatta were under his protection, Andrew Thompson led a raid against the group living on the Hawkesbury River from Wilberforce and Wiseman’s Ferry. A year later, Hunter and Aboriginal leaders came to an
agreement, although hardly satisfactory for the clans, and his truce lasted for
eight years with very few skirmishes.

NEXT WEEK, WE’LL FINISH OUR STORY AS IT MOVES INTO THE GOVERNOR MACQUARIE PERIOD. MACQUARIE HAD UNTIL 1815 HELD A  BENEVOLENT AND FRIENDLY , THOUGH PATRIACHAL ATTITUDE TOWARD THE INDIGENOUS.

We are a person who studies artefacts (an iPhone) and images (a coca cola advertisement) and people (technology geeks) – where they intersect (sometimes collide) and why we give meaning to them. We are not an historian. Yet, people of our ilk do have a “classification,” a rather strange name — semioticians. Try that one on for size.

Semi-o-ticians try to make sense of the everyday things that our world gives meaning to. Remember the iPhone. It isn’t just a tool that makes life easier for us! It is a jazzy phone that makes us feel cool and connected!

So history is not our educational background. We try to be accurate in our facts, but really — it is confession time — we are searching for the meaning behind those facts. More confession: we are easily bored by dates.

Searching for meaning is an addiction and we love the “ah ha” moment when the picture we’ve studied changes ever so slightly. We then see the picture and the world differently. Why constantly look for context — or relevant circumstances? To see things differently.

Too often when trying to understand and solve an issue, humans overlook the context in which the issue is wrapped.  We’re an odd sort!

We want life to be concrete, without blurry lines or problems.  We want easy answers. But life is not like that — life is full of ambiguities. Well, perhaps life is like that for a few — the few who cannot allow the grey issues to creep into the picture. After all, ambiguity is enough to cause a panic attack in so many!

In our next post, we will discover the arrival of the First Fleet changed the lives forever for convict and Aboriginal. What appears to be the same set of facts, the meaning (context) for each group was so misunderstood. The results were sadly, dramatically and disastrously different for each group.

Stay tuned!

So, we’d like to share some of the facts we discovered in looking back at our history of more than 200 years. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post short segments and we’d love to have comments or other historical facts you would care to share.

We’ll begin with the background today and later go onto some longer segments periodically. Okay, fact #1:

Survival was on everyone’s mind in 1788 in the new penal colony — convicts called the colony at Sydney Cove, ‘Botany Bay’ and punishment of those convicts was the primary purpose for the first few governors.

For everyone, convict or official, food and medicine was constantly on their minds. There just was not enough food.

Back in England the attitude toward ‘transportation’ was quite mixed — was it a wide-open gaol or was the experiment just a another name for slavery?

Within a few months of the First Fleet arrival, disease had all but annihalated the indigenous population around Sydney Cove. We won’t go into the frightening description, but the spread of smallpox, followed by influenza(s) was a horror the indigenous had never experienced. The descriptions read much like the horrors of the London plague of 1665.

The loss of ancestral tribal lands to white settlers compounded the psychological wounds they were suffering from the loss of family and friends and of land which included tribal grave sites.

Exact records are not available, but estimates place the indigenous population across the continent at close to a quarter of a million people at the time of the First Fleet. Within 18 months that number would fall dramatically. Those who survived suffered culture shock – probably what we now describe as post traumatic syndrome.

Later this week, we will describe the violent culture clashes of 1810, many in the Hawkesbury region.

While the setting is not as sophisticated as some, the ambience is warm and welcoming. These new owners have a vision  and we are confident they will gain a loyal clientele and be very successful.  The menu reigns (as it should); the setting can follow.

The menu definitely is sophisticated. Fortunately, we faced  a modest number of menu choices — not overwhelmed by endless lists of tired offerings which seems to be a pattern of many restaurants. My dining companion ordered the Seafood Sampler and we choose the Mushroom Tart from the entree listings. (We were saving room for desserts!) While we waited for our choices, olives in a light oil and a dense Tuscan bread — a perfect match — were served to help us stave off hunger.

Our companion gave an A+ rating to the Seafood Sampler and its artistic presentation; the Tart, a delicate crust filled with savoury diced mushrooms, was beautifully presented with a stem of summer zucchini (the flower filled with a smooth light cheese). This was definitely Sydney dining. While dessert choices included several chocolate delicacies, we both chose the Citrus Sampler. What a wonderful combination of consistencies — light and dense –  of lemon delicacies. Even for you chocolate lovers, this is a sampler to try!

The young chef, Jarryd Faint is bold and he changes the menu with frequency — a sign of an upmarket restaurant.  With this knowledge in hand, we will return again — and again.

The same afternoon, we stopped by Pet Lovers’ Gifts — a recent shop in the Old Post Office Arcade in Windsor. Owner Debbie Woolcott, hardworking and optimistic, has a family of helpers. Daughter and mother help Debbie in the shop. Items are charming and priced for us who are budget-minded — we love the computer-mouse-pads. Ah, we digress from our story.

As we were browsing in the shop, we overheard Debbie’s mom on the phone with Debbie. Perhaps as we came from stoic and non-affectionate German-English stock, we were moved to hear mom’s encouragement and endearments to her daughter, Debbie. Clearly,  we were evesdropping  upon the natural dialogue of a close-knit and openly affectionate mother and daughter. Beautiful. . .

When the nights are long and the wind blows fiercely, these are the moments we like to remember.  Now for anyone who thinks we are being a little syrup-y in this post, we’ll leave you with a Miss Piggy (of Muppets’ fame) quote:  ”Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from  time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”

Next post, we’ll tell you about a terrific new foodie spot in Windsor!