Braised Wombat will not do . . .

I returned to the Old Courthouse Museum today to see, as promised, if I could discover why an antique piano had been left on the verandah, more or less exposed to the elements. The instrument appears doomed. A member of the management told me it had been donated as a pianola, an item the museum was keen to have, but the cabinet was then found not to contain the expected mechanicals. By the time this was discovered, the wicked donor had fled the district, and the unwanted piano was cast out. Now and then visitors to the museum apparently try to get a tune out of it - the innards still work, in a honky-tonk kind of way - but it is there for the taking, should you be passing by.

I had never been inside the museum, and I spent an hour happily mooching through its several rooms, enjoying the exhibits and absorbing the social history of Batemans Bay and nearby towns (and anti-social history - we had our murderous bushrangers). A few small rooms were set up as they might have been in times past. The early settlers were not all convicts, and the squattocracy often affected a genteel lifestyle. The "dining room" in the picture is meant to give an idea of that. And that's a nice touch, the placing on the table of the book "Advice to a Young Lady in the Colonies - being a letter sent from Mrs E. of England to Maria Macarthur in the Colony of N.S.Wales in 1812". I'm obliged to the Jane Austen Society of Australia for a taste of its contents. The vacuum cleaners skulking in the far corner were no doubt a contribution to the period by Dr Who.