Sunshine

What a difference! We woke to sunshine this morning, bitterly cold (for us, anyway), and it stayed clear all day. A superb Adelaide winter's day, made you glad to be alive.

Alongside the Belair National Park close to where we live there runs the main railway line between Adelaide and Melbourne. And right by the Belair Railway station is a group of old railway cottages. Built and lived in by workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I love what the owners of this particular cottage have done. They have installed a seat, (with an attendant dog bowl full of water), and painted the seat, the stobie pole, and a wall of their house in bright colours.

OK, so what's a stobie pole I hear you say. These incredibly ugly poles were invented by one James Stobie in order to carry power lines. Basically, a Stobie pole is a power line pole made of two steel joists held apart by a slab of concrete in the middle. It was invented by Adelaide Electricity Supply Company design engineer James Cyril Stobie (1895–1953). Stobie used materials easily at hand due to the shortage of suitably long, strong, straight and termite-resistant timber in South Australia.

At one time, it was the done thing to decorate your stobie pole if you had one outside your house, and some enterprising councils even ran stobie pole painting competitions. Very often you'll see pelargoniums being trained up them - even wisteria, but that's a tad too vigorous. You wouldn't want your climbing plant going up to the top amongst the power lines.