Once upon a time we owned a small workers cottage on stilts in Bowler St. with a big orange tree hanging over our tiny front yard.
An aboriginal family lived in an old shop on the corner of Bowler and Martha St., the street that runs vertically through this painting to the little house with the blue roof.
The bright and lively children of that family delighted in collecting the fallen oranges every summer, we were happy they saved us the task of raking up the fruit. Since I first drew this scene several years ago there have been numerous changes. Some colonial houses on the hill morphed into bigger more splendid versions of themselves, the lovely rust red shops on the corner of Martha and Charlotte are now steel grey, the young man and the dog have grown older. There are subtle quiet losses including the aboriginal family, who moved on.
Much has stayed the same and unchanged; the blue roofed battened down white cottage, a landmark end to Martha St.,and just around the corner into Charlotte St. the two rambling stone coloured wooden houses with their tin stove recesses that so reminded me of my childhood suburbs of Kalinga and Clayfield that I recently painted them too in “Under the House Paddington’.
Still there - so far.