Steer clear, steer clear! There seems to be some leg health related bad luck going down in our office. So after all my misery last week with sciatica, Kalimna contacted me on the weekend to say she fell over stepping up a gutter (I think, or something equally innocuous) and broke her knee cap. Ouch! It means she’s going to be in a cast for 6 weeks. And they are still determining if she needs an operation … poor sausage. Keep your fingers crossed for her.

Also … please be kind to us as we try to pick up and run seamlessly with all the things Kalimna usually does here at ACC. I am sure I am going to muck some things up - but hopefully we’ll get there in the end.

On to cheerier things, last week we had 2 birthdays to celebrate at Community Lunch - a belated celebration for Corina because I was away the week before, and then it was also Clare’s birthday. I made a stacked brownie cake (thanks Aldi packet mix brownies) with macarons on top, and Margaret from CWA made fabulous dark chocolate and orange cup cakes. Delightful. Between the two of these treats we had celebrations with both of Community Lunch friends and our AAA Arts friends.

Coming up … on the 14 June we have our Clothes Mending session. There are still some spots available if you are interested in joining in.

We also have 2 more sessions of Garden to Plate and Crunch for this term - if you are interested in joining us for lunch on a Monday (to help cook and then eat what we make) or Thursday (to eat and make some relaxing art together) - you can book in online and/or come along! Both of these activities are lovely and low key and they’ll run this week and next.

Also, we have a our last 2 sessions of AAA Bowls coming up on Wednesdays at 10am at Alphington Bowls Club. Jill and the volunteers from the club create an amazing experience for a variety of people who come along to the sessions. Everyone has a great time - and I am sure they will once again be looking forward to the BBQ in week 6. Please note that this program does not run in Term 3 (because of the weather) - but it will be back in Term 4.

A reminder that CWA will be meeting tonight at 7.30pm at the Gleeson Centre in the Darebin Parklands (at the end of Separation Street). If you are interested in hanging out and doing things with some lovely local women (some of whom are dynamos) you should think about going along and joining up! They not only craft and cook, but also support local social services through fundraising, run a book club and meet up for dinners - it’s a really great way to get involved and to make local connections.

It has been great to have some new faces at ACC on Fridays lately - having some additional hands and ideas generated in the Community Garden program on Fridays has been just super. We love it when new people come along and join in. If you are interested in gardening and spending some time outside pottering (it’s generally not too onerous) then join us from 10am-12pm Fridays. Last week they put a net up outside our main windows to catch the leaves from the gutters and keep the gardens a bit projected - we’ll see if this experiment is a success as autumn kicks into full swing (the leaves from the plane trees fall way faster than we can rake them up at this time of the year). The week before they fishished off setting up and planting out our new garden beds.

In the office we are currently in the midst of planning for next semester and finalising all things for the end of the financial year. We are thrilled that we have some new programs on the cards already:

• Introduction to weaving with Corrin (6 week course on a Wednesday) in the day and the evening

• Inner North Death Doula Hub - 4th Thursday of the month 1-3pm. This free program will facilitate discussions on life, loss, death and dying. The first one will be on Thursday 26 June.

• A new program for pre-schoolers - hopefully coming on Friday mornings for anyone who is interested in being active with their little ones!

If you are keen on any of these keep your eyes peeled - we’ll have the new brochure out in the next week or two so you can find out more!

And … if you have a great idea of something you could run, or something you’d like to see us run (and links to great facilitators etc.) we’d love to hear from you. Give us a call or pop in or send an email.

I hope you have an excellent week.

See you soon.

Leanne

We’ve had visits from both Darebin and Yarra over the last week with notices for the community.

So … you can pop in a pick up a copy of Darebin’s ‘Older and Active in Darebin’ directory.

Or … find out about Yarra’s Draft Domestic Animal Plan.

Or … provide input to Yarra’s Council Plan. All great things to contribute to if you are interested.

Our house is always pleased to be able to provide a very local place for Council to engage with residents on community decisions and be a resource for local information.

We love a birthday … or two! This week we got to celebrate Corina and Clare.

Happy birthday Corina.

Happy birthday Clare.

This week I am going to start with a brief diversion into my own life.

So … over the last couple of years I have been meeting up with my old uni mates to go see plays at the Melbourne Theatre Company. About 8 times a year we go into the city and see plays that explore the big things like feelings and power and thoughts - fabulous things (mostly)! I have been in awe of the sets and stories - the package - that is presented each time. Some people are so clever!

And this last Friday I was meant to see the “The Black Woman of Gippsland” by Andrea James, which I am sure in no coincidence, is now running through National Reconciliation Week. Unfortunately for me I came down with dreadful sciatica, and so whilst I was crying at home and pumping my body full of a cocktail of prescribed steroids, opioids and anti-inflammatories (hooray they worked and by Sunday I was once again able to stand up and walk) my husband, brother-in-law (with my ticket in hand) and mates got the chance to see this play … which they loved. It explores a colonial-era myth about a white woman supposedly shipwrecked in Gippsland and taken in by the Gunaikurnai people. Here is a review.

And this builds on another play I saw and loved last year (it was also on earlier this year, a repeat because it was so popular), "37" by Nathan Maynard which tells the story of a down-on-their-luck country football team whose prospects are boosted by the arrival of two Indigenous players and explores themes of racism, identity, and community within the context of Australian Rules football, drawing inspiration from the experiences of Indigenous players like Adam Goodes. Here is link to a review in The Guardian.

Every time I see things like this they make me stop and think, and reconsider my perspective and my understanding of things, and the complexity … and they really make me acknowledge how much I just don’t know.

Reconciliation is all of our business (as Clare pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago when we were working in the garden on a Friday and she was reminding me to write something in the newsletter for this week). And so this week (such a bummer that I missed the play) I am committing to learning something else new, and maybe you’d like to too. You could maybe read a book or watch a TV show, or go to the play (there’s still tickets available for the MTC show on until 31 May) or listen to a podcast or two …

If you are interested in our local history (like me) you might like to find out more about what happened here in Victoria - I am always blown away by the story of Coranderrk Station/Mission up near Healesville. And just how few of Melbourne’s Aboriginal community survived the colonisation of Victoria to end up there. And how successful it was. And why it was eventually shut down. To find out via TV you can watch series 1, episode 3 of First Australians (SBS) here. Or if you are into podcasts you might like to listen to this one from 2008 from Radio National, Last Refuge: Remembering Coranderrk Aboriginal Station (that’s what I am going to do).

Or of course you can ‘do your own research’ … and if this is your cup of tea maybe start by checking out deadlystory.com website here - an amazing resource with so many links to so many things. Worth a deep dive! Check out the history of Fitzroy and then the link to a walking tour app you can download, for example.

Anyway, good luck! … and back to normal programming …

This week at ACC we have all the usual things … and nothing out of the ordinary.

We (as always) look forward to seeing you!

Cheers Leanne

We’ll be recovering from last week I think!

Thursday night we had Alphington Arts … check out the post below to admire what we produced.

On Friday we worked on the new wicking beds - which will be fabulous. They are now in place and filled up with layers of pond liner, scoria, geotech (a fabric barrier) and vegetable soil mix. And they are level (we hope) - always the hardest part right? Yes. Lots of heavy shovelling to get to this point.

But also … then … we got our annual delivery of fogo compost from Yarra City Council - only 2 cubic meters at this stage (we might get some more in a few weeks) - but similarly requiring quite a lot of shovelling and wheelbarrowing etc.

I know that I slept like a baby after a day of such physical activity - and I suspect there were a few others who did too!

But then … we all bounced straight into our shared National Volunteer Week event on Saturday morning. See the post below for photos and more general thank yous etc.

OKay, enough looking backwards, onto this week … we have:

• Preserves Group - Tuesday 1pm-3pm (free all welcome). Also if you have small jars and/or excess fruit/vegies in your garden PLEASE feel free to donate them - we will lovingly turn them into pickles and jams etc. Or we can even use them for our lunches …

• Overlocker Maintenance - Saturday 10am-12pm. There are definitely still some places available, if you are keen just book in on our website. Booked in already? Don’t forget to bring your machine along on Saturday!

And then … there’s all the usual things, including Garden to Plate on Monday, Crunch on Thursday and Community Lunch on Friday. Book in and come along if you are keen. The more the merrier! Also this week we will have two Masters of Social Work students starting with us - which should be terrific. We’ll be looking forward to getting to know them and start thinking about some meaningful projects they can do whilst they are here. Make sure you introduce yourself if you come across them!

We hope to see you this week.

Cheers Leanne