9 best travel deals of the week: grab a round-the-world air ticket for $2275
Returning for the third time, the Birrarung Riverfest will take place at a range of locations along the length of Victoria's Yarra River - Birrarung to the Wurundjeri people - with events ranging from platypus-spotting and sunset paddles to art-led sensory walks.
WHEN: September 6-28; riverfest.org.au
COMING UP
Regional NSW's largest annual outdoor sculpture exhibition, Sculptures in the Garden, will return for its 15th year, taking place at Rosby Wines in Mudgee. The theme for this year's artworks is Musical Statues, so expect pieces that offer tribute to great songs - or make musical sounds themselves.
WHEN: October 11-26; sculpturesinthegarden.com.au
NEXT YEAR
The 2026 Commonwealth Games - to be held in mid-2026 in Glasgow - is a great excuse to start planning your trip to the Scottish city, best known for design, architecture, music and nightlife.
WHEN: July 23 to August 2, 2026; glasgow2026.com
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Canberra Times
19 hours ago
- Canberra Times
9 best travel deals of the week: grab a round-the-world air ticket for $2275
SOON Returning for the third time, the Birrarung Riverfest will take place at a range of locations along the length of Victoria's Yarra River - Birrarung to the Wurundjeri people - with events ranging from platypus-spotting and sunset paddles to art-led sensory walks. WHEN: September 6-28; COMING UP Regional NSW's largest annual outdoor sculpture exhibition, Sculptures in the Garden, will return for its 15th year, taking place at Rosby Wines in Mudgee. The theme for this year's artworks is Musical Statues, so expect pieces that offer tribute to great songs - or make musical sounds themselves. WHEN: October 11-26; NEXT YEAR The 2026 Commonwealth Games - to be held in mid-2026 in Glasgow - is a great excuse to start planning your trip to the Scottish city, best known for design, architecture, music and nightlife. WHEN: July 23 to August 2, 2026;
West Australian
2 days ago
- West Australian
Visiting Daresbury, the birthplace of author Lewis Carroll in Cheshire
Travel stories about Lewis Carroll often take readers to Oxford, where the writer lived, studied, taught, and penned Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. It was in that esteemed university city where Carroll took a 10-year-old Alice Liddell — the daughter of his friend, the dean of Oxford's Christ Church College — for a much-mythologised boat ride on the River Isis. As he rowed, he entertained her with tales of fantastical characters and whimsical encounters he would later braid into his legendary 1865 novel. But it was a few decades earlier, in another bucolic, waterway-sliced part of England, where Carroll's imagination and creativity flourished. I am in Daresbury, a tiny, sleepy village in the county of Cheshire in the north-west of England. Carroll was born here, as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in 1832, and lived here until the age of 11. He was one of 11 children of mother Frances and father the Reverend Charles Dodgson, the Scottish-born, Oxford-educated vicar of the village's All Saints' Church. Today, walking through the tree-shaded graveyard, I step into the church, which was largely rebuilt in the 1870s, after the Dodgsons' departure from Daresbury. The interior is cool and handsome, all neat sandstone and carved wood. The sun is streaking through the stained-glass windows, which include a special memorial one honouring Carroll. By the entrance, you can buy jars of Cheshire honey and various gifts — books, tea towels, fridge magnets — illustrated with Wonderland's protagonist and anthropomorphic creatures. Attached to the church is a small modern annex that houses the admission-free Lewis Carroll Centre. Information panels and archive pictures detail the writer's Cheshire upbringing and how it sowed the seeds for his future endeavours. Fond of playing in the Daresbury countryside, where he would invent games and stories involving toads, earthworms and snails, young Charles was initially expected to follow in his father's footsteps and devote himself to the Anglican Church. He was, in 1861, ordained a deacon, but never became a priest and instead followed his passions for mathematics and literature. Besides writing stories, he was a prolific correspondent, penning more than 50,000 letters in his lifetime. His pseudonym was a play on the Latin versions of Charles (Carolus, spawning Carroll) and Lutwidge (Ludovicus, resulting in Lewis). He was also keen on those new-fangled cameras that were coming into fashion, and is thought to have snapped more than 3000 developed photographs over his lifetime. Some have become contentious with age, especially the ones he took of children. His collection ranged from shots of young Alice Liddell in different costumes — including one of her dressed up as a beggar maid — to portraits of Victorian-era celebrities like the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Though he gave up his hobby in 1880, remarking that 'it had become a very tiring amusement', Carroll also took photographs of people and places in Daresbury when he returned as an adult. It was a time of great change for the area, with the Industrial Revolution bringing railways, mills and factories to a county that had long been dominated by farming. Carroll's birthplace, the Daresbury village parsonage, burned down in a fire in 1883. Its former location is on one of the local walking trails, and is now under the care of the National Trust, with the site marked with floor outlines and wrought-iron sculptures. Carroll died a bachelor in 1898, aged 65. Daresbury has obviously changed since his day — there's a near-constant faint hum of motorised traffic, with the busy A56 road bringing cars and trucks right by the village — yet it still retains its rural essence. There's a tinge of manure in the breeze as I wander beyond the church and watch sheep, lambs and ponies grazing in the verdant fields. In the other direction, by the village hall, there's Daresbury's sole pub, the Ring O' Bells, which has a rustic-cosy interior behind its mock-Tudor facade and provides tempting options for food and drink. You won't find much else in the immediate vicinity, although you're not too far from larger settlements: Warrington (15 minutes up the road), Chester (half-hour south) or Liverpool (45 minutes to the west). Walking up Daresbury's gently rising main street, I see quaint stone cottages and new housing estates with red-brick houses built to look older than they are. About 250 people live in the village now and it remains desirable, particularly for young families. I pass Daresbury's primary school and can hear children playing loudly on their lunch break. Glancing up at the building's roof, I see the village's famously quirky weathervane. It was donated by the local blacksmith upon his retirement in 1968 but had fallen into a sorry state before fund-raising by the school and the wider community restored it to its former glory. Looking at the weathervane, I see its painted figures of Alice, the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter. And I find myself grinning, a bit like the Cheshire Cat. + The Lewis Carroll Centre is open daily from 10am, apart from Sunday when, it's 2pm. It closes at 6pm in the northern summer, with earlier closing times in the darker months. For more information, see + For more information on visiting Cheshire, see + To help plan a trip to Britain, see
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
