Afternoon tea review: Gooromon Park, Hall

Surprisingly nearby to Canberra there are many delightful rural areas full of rolling hill vistas, boutique wineries, and gourmet food providores and cafes. Each time I venture into the countryside, which is not very often, I vow to see more of the local region, to try all of the local wines, to eat all of the wonderful seasonal produce. Did you know that the Canberra region is one of the main truffle producing areas in Australia? That it is famous for its cold climate ones, notably Riesling and pinot noir? It's so easy not to appreciate how much there is so close to where one lives. But, then again, there are only so many hours in a weekend (48), and it can be hard to find the time to enjoy the local countryside by the time one tends to one's own gardening and household chores, reading of the weekend newspapers, grocery shopping and cooking up the forthcoming week's supply of soups and casseroles, occasional socialising and family duties (this weekend was my father's 60th birthday party; my sister and her husband, who live in Goulburn, hosted a really lovely surprise birthday for him).

Also this weekend, however, Tom and I found time in our hectic schedules to take the 20 minute drive out to Hall, which is a very pretty area of rolling hills so close to Canberra you can (unfortunately) see the western suburbs from some spots. I had wanted to take afternoon tea at the Homestead Cafe at Gooromon Park for some time now, and fixed that now was the time for us to wile away an afternoon on the veranda of a country cottage and enjoy some homemade delights.

Well, we did not book early enough for the veranda, and the popular parlour was booked for a (what else?) hen's night afternoon tea, so we just had a seat in the regular cafe. The house is an old weatherboard, relocated from Canberra. The whole place has a quite nice rustic, but not twee, feel about it.

The food was really good, especially the sandwiches which were delicious (so often overlooked) and the savoury snacks. The sweets were all very nice too of course, as was the complimentary glass of champagne. The tea selection could have, in my opinion, been a little better, but I'm not really complaining about it - it's just that they could offer a little more choice of nicer teas for not really much more money; say, a selection from T2 or The Tea Centre in Canberra. In many settings, I would not have found the floral china to be charming, but in this setting it was. It was a very relaxing afternoon in the country, with good food. I therefore happily recommend high tea at the Homestead Cafe.

On the Scott Scale, it gets a solid 7.5 out of 10, which would be an 8 with better tea. That puts them on equal footing with the Ritz-Carlton in Singapore.

Redwoods in Canberra?

I was pretty fascinated to read in a recent Tim the Yowie Man article in the Canberra Times that there was an experimental grove of redwood trees planted in Canberra, just near the airport (which is actually where I work). I have driven past these trees many times and never really noticed them, thinking they were an abandoned pine forest. Apaprently, they are the remnants of a failed attempt to create a redwood forrest that was planted on the instructions of none other than Walter Burley Griffin.

When we were in San Francisco a few years back we did a day trip to the Muir Woods and I found these trees so powerful - the way the light tentatively dappled through their high branches, and their towering, silent presence. Instinct suggests that the Canberra climate would be far too dry for these beautiful, ancient giants. Canberra may be cool in summer but it is nothing like the wet Pacific north west of the US and Canada where these trees are from.

Turns out, instinct is correct. The trees have made a valiant effort but they are slowly dying from lack of water and heat stress. Apparently much of the original forest has been destroyed for airport expansion.

Still, walking through what remains is a peaceful experience. Although they are adjacent to the airport and a busy road, something about these trees wraps you up in a cocoon of quiet reflection. The light does dabble through the branches. It is such a shame they could not be saved, but one does get the feeling their days are probably numbered.

This picture comes from the Redwood Grove Park. I highly recommend a visit if you're driving past some time - it is a very peaceful place.

Springtime in Canberra

Spring has certainly sprung in the national capital and the weather is glorious.

This weekend Tom and I went over to Lake Burley Griffin where we walked along the promenade and were delighted by this couple of black swans with their cygnets. We then went to see a very interesting exhibition contrasting east and west German architecture post-WWII at the Gallery of Australian Design. It was full of fascinating photos, plans and models and highlighted the similar approaches taken in both of the then nations to housing as well as commercial, leisure, cultural, civic and other public architecture and town planning.

We then walked over to have a look at the much anticipated, much delayed and now just newly opened National Gallery 'front door' and Indigenous art galleries. I must say I'm not quite sure how sympathetic the additions to the building are from the outside (you can judge for yourself from the pictures - don't you think all that glass somehow cheapens the uncompromising concrete brutality of the original?), but there is no question that the interior improvements are fantastic - several, huge new Indigenous art galleries, a much better shop, a more lobby-like entrance space. Overall, I think it is a big improvement - from the inside. I do however loathe their hideous 'new' retro '80s NGA logo - it's cheap and vile.

After a browse in the Portrait Gallery bookshop across the road (absurdly small and poky - was it an afterthought?), and some tut-tutting about the disgraceful state of disrepair of the outdoor spaces around the shamefully neglected High Court, we drove over to Yarralumla Nursery to buy some plants for the garden.

Aubergine restaurant

Last night Tom and I celebrated our twelfth anniversary with a dinner at Aubergine restaurant in the Canberra suburb of Griffith. I had only been there once before, some years ago when it had a previous owner and chef but I remembered it fondly and I am happy to say that it is still a great restaurant.

We had a window seat which was very nice (not that the window actually faces onto anything interesting! It would be nice of there was a little garden there or something. Still, it is nice to sit in the window). The restaurant was full but it is one of those places that has been designed well to absorb the noise with fabrics and the like so it was not noisy and overbearing as modern restaurants often can be. The outdoor terrace was full of people too and that looked very pleasant.

Service was friendly and generally efficient (the only small hiccup is that one of my glasses of wine did not appear until after I had finished eating the matching course, but this oversight was duly apologised for). The menu is very good for someone like me in that I do not like to make a lot of choices. There is a 5 course degustation menu which looked great but which I did not wish to have alone (Tom does not drink you see). So instead we ordered from the dinner menu and I ordered a wine flight where they bring you wines to match each of your courses and you don't have to bother choosing them. That kind of thing really appeals to me as I do not like to make too many decisions when I go out to dinner.

I had a generous entree platter of ocean trout, oysters, pickled cucumber and a quail egg, followed by veal and polenta and a delicious crepe Suzette for dessert. Tom had quail, followed by John Dory fillets and gnocchi and quince panna cotta for dessert.

It was a very enjoyable and relaxed evening.

No fun police on patrol in Canberra

This article about a "crackdown" on retailers in Civic (Canberra's "city" heart) who dare to display their wares on footpaths without a permit - even though there is no such permit they could apply for - is the sort of thing that really irritates me.

Canberra is famously neat. Not quite Swiss, but rivalling Singapore. There is no outdoor advertising permitted, and land uses are strictly zoned and segregated. There is very little mixed use in Canberra.

Decades ago, the now deceased but still famous Gus Petersilka battled the bureaucrats by putting tables from his cafe on the footpath, single-handedly bringing al fresco dining to Canberra. His long-fought and hard-won battle is now the stuff of Canberra legend, celebrated even in official government plagues around the place. He brought cosmopolitanism to the capital, and not before time. The area around his cafe, which still operates under his name, is now a lively strip filled with popular cafes and year-round outdoor diners and coffee drinkers.

So why oh why are today's bureaucrats hassling the independent music retailers and bookshops that are displaying their goods on the footpath, not very far from Gus's cafe? They add much needed life and colour to Civic, an area now dominated by a grotesquely over sized indoor shopping mall. These activities ought to be encouraged, not persecuted.

If it weren't all so counter-productive it would be pathetic; as it is, I just find it all very sad. The ACT government does little to help Canberra shrug of its "boring and lifeless" labels with this sort of overly vigilant bureaucratic behaviour.

Vanity Fair Portraits

The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra is showing an exhibition of celebrity portraits from Vanity Fair magazine spanning the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s to the present. These portraits of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr and his then wife Joan Crawford (top), Louise Brooks (middle) and Liza Minnelli (bottom) come from the exhibition. I saw the exhbition this week and it was quite a bit more interesting than the celebrity vanity piece I was expecting.

In reviewing this exhibition, Andrew Stephens of The Age suggests that Vanity Fair's appeal has lain in its promise to get "behind" the manufactured celebrity smiles to the "real" person underneath, which in this age of so-called "celebrity culture" where there is neither privacy nor mystery about any vaguely public figure is really no mean feat. I don't entirely agree that there is any real depth to these photos in terms of insight to the "real" celebrity: you are looking at highly posed, highly structured, highly controlled, generally contrived images of professionals whose job is to project an image taken by professionals whose job it is to capture glossy images of image professionals. In other words, there is no escaping the artifice of the subject or the situation. The photos do not give you any insights to who the "real person" may be beneath the air-brushed, posed image. And nor should they really - celebrities have a right to a public and a private persona, and why should we the masses have any right to see or even glimpse their private selves?

What the Vanity Fair "style" does seem to offer, however, more so than your standard celebrity mug shots, is a suggestion of intimacy and a highly polished presentation that makes the images at once engaging and interesting. All the famous images from the post-1983 incarnation of Vanity Fair are here: the iconic, celebrity-friendly images of Mario Testino, Herb Ritts, Annie Liebowitz, Bruce Weber and David Lachapelle. We have the dancing Nancy and Ronald Reagan, the smiling black and white grainy Princess Diana, Raquel Welch and the naked swimming team, Joan and Jackie Collins in sunglasses in the back of a limo, pregnant Demi Moore, all those "Hollywood" group tableaux.

Most interesting in my opinion were the photos from the earlier version of the magazine: the 1920s and '30s photos of not only movie stars but also writers (many of whom, like DH Lawrence, I had never even seen a photo of before), painters, dancers and other artists, suggesting the far broader palette of popular creative artists that existed in the earlier part of the last century compared to the movie star-obsessed focus of the early years of this century.