Fairfield railway station is located on the Hurstbridge line in Victoria, Australia. It serves the north-eastern Melbourne suburb of Fairfield opening as Fairfield Park on 8 May 1888, being renamed Fairfield on 14 November 1943.
Fairfield was the junction station for the former Outer Circle railway line from 1891 to 1893 and the APM Siding from 1919 to the 1990s. Boom barriers replaced interlocked gates at the Station Street level crossing in 1969.
This post is part of the Weekly TopShot meme.
Federation Square, in Melbourne, is a mixed-use development covering an area of 3.2 hectares and centred around two major public spaces: open squares (St. Paul's Court and The Square) and one covered (The Atrium), built on top of a concrete deck above busy railway lines. It is located at intersection between Flinders Street and Swanston Street/St Kilda Road in Melbourne's Central Business District, adjacent to Melbourne's busiest railway station.
The interiors and exteriors can be described as being of a deconstructivist style, with modern minimalist shapes interspersed with geometry and angular slots. While there are slight variations, the main bulk of its buildings follow a similar theme with a complex geometrical design featuring a mix of zinc, perforated zinc, glass and sandstone tiles over a metal exoskeletal frame in a complex geometrical pattern composed entirely of scalene triangles.
The aperiodic tiling pattern is based on the pinwheel tiling developed by John Conway and Charles Radin. The triangle is formed with dimensions 1,2, √5. This "fractal facade" is contrasted with sections featuring use of metal like surfaces including randomly slotted metallic screens and transparent glass walls tinted with a slightly green tinge.
This post is part of the Geometric Friday meme.
Today was a perfect Spring day in Melbourne. Fine and sunny, warm, calm and the air full of fragrances from the Spring blossoms: Plum, almond, peach trees, wattles of all kinds, magnolias, jasmine, pittosporum...
These are flowering ornamental plums gracing the front yard of a house in Ivanhoe, a Melbourne suburb. The smell as we walked by was overwhelming and the bees certainly enjoyed the flowers too.
This post is part of the Floral Friday Fotos meme,
and also part of the Skywatch Friday meme.
Flinders Street railway station is a railway station on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets in Melbourne, Australia. It serves the entire metropolitan rail network. Backing onto the city reach of the Yarra River in the heart of the city, the complex covers two whole city blocks and extends from Swanston Street to Queen Street. Flinders Street is served by Metro's suburban services, and V/Line regional services to Gippsland. It is the busiest station on Melbourne's metropolitan network, with some 92.6 million passenger movements recorded in 2011/12.
It was the first railway station in an Australian city and the world's busiest passenger station in the late 1920s. The main station building, completed in 1909, is a cultural icon of Melbourne, with its prominent dome, arched entrance, tower and clocks one of the city's most recognisable landmarks. It is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register. The Melburnian idiom "I'll meet you under the clocks" refers to the row of clocks above the main entrance, which indicate the time-tabled time of departure for trains on each line; another idiom, "I'll meet you on the steps", refers to the wide staircase underneath these clocks. Flinders Street Station is responsible for two of Melbourne's busiest pedestrian crossings, both across Flinders Street, including one of Melbourne's few pedestrian scrambles.
This is a photo taken from high up on a building on the northern side of Flinders St and looks towards the southeast.
This post is part of the the Waterworld Wednesday meme,
and also part of the Outdoor Wednesday meme,
and also part of the Wordless Wednesday meme.
The Kingsbury Drive Community Market is held every Sunday between 9am and 1pm. Stallholders sell a large variety of crafts, bric-a-brac and plants.The market is managed by Diamond Valley Community Support (DVCS). Income from the market is used to fund the various community services provided by DVCS.
This post is part of the Blue Monday meme,
Clunes is a town in Victoria, Australia, 36 kilometres north of Ballarat, and 146 km from Melbourne, in the Shire of Hepburn. At the 2006 census it had a population of 1,026. The 2011 census recorded a population of 1,656 usual residents.
The town was home to Victoria's first registered gold discovery made by James Esmond. His discovery, first published in the Geelong Advertiser on 7 July 1851 triggered the first gold rush in Victoria. The township was established a few years later and subsequent gold mining, predominantly driven by the Port Phillip and Colonial Mining Company saw the town's population rising to well over 6,000 residents in the late 1880s. Clunes post office opened as early as 1 October 1857 and in 1874 Clunes was connected to the Victorian railway network. Clunes station was opened in the same year.
In 1873 mine employers attempted to introduce Saturday afternoon and Sunday shifts. The miners refused to sign the new terms outlined in their contract renewals and went on strike. Some days into the action the miners organised the Clunes Miners' Association and what were to become known as the Clunes Riots, successfully resisting the use of foreign labour as strikebreakers. The Clunes Miners' Association is one of the earliest antecedents of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.
From the 1850s through to 1893, when gold mining eventually came to an end, Clunes was an important gold production location in Victoria. During this period gold in excess of 1.2 million ounces was produced at Clunes. Surrounded by grassland, meadows and pastures, the town has preserved many of its elegant historic buildings until today and is recognised as one of the architecturally most intact gold towns in Victoria.
The idea of transforming Clunes into a European-style booktown was first conceived and developed by Councillor Tim Hayes, Linda Newitt, Graeme Johnston and Tess Brady. Clunes held its first 'Booktown for a Day' event on 20 May 2007. Over 50 booksellers from around Australia set up shop for the day in the town's heritage buildings. Renamed to 'Back to Booktown' a year later and to 'Clunes Booktown Festival' in 2012, the township now holds the event each year on the first weekend in May. With more than 60 booksellers, millions of books and 15,000 visitors, it has become the largest collection of books in any regional centre of Australia and the major Victorian regional book event.
This post is part of the Scenic Weekends meme,
and also part of the inSPIREd Sunday meme.
So close you can almost jump to it from that balustrade!
This post is part of the Skywatch Friday meme.
The Hairpin Banksia (Banksia spinulosa) is a species of woody shrub, of the genus Banksia in the Proteaceae family, native to eastern Australia. Widely distributed, it is found as an understorey plant in open dry forest or heathland from Victoria to northern Queensland, generally on sandstone though sometimes also clay soils. It generally grows as a small shrub to 2 metres in height, though can be a straggly tree to 6 metres. It has long narrow leaves with inflorescences which can vary considerably in coloration; while the spikes are gold or less commonly yellowish, the emergent styles may be a wide range of colours – from black, purple, red, orange or yellow.
Banksia spinulosa was named by James Edward Smith in England in 1793, after being collected by John White, most likely in 1792. He gave it the common name Prickly-leaved Banksia, though this has fallen out of use. With four currently recognised varieties, the species has had a complicated taxonomic history, with two varieties initially described as separate species in the early 19th century. A fourth, from the New England region, has only recently been described. However there has been disagreement whether one, var. cunninghamii, is distinct enough to once again have specific status.
The Hairpin Banksia is pollinated by and provides food for a wide array of vertebrate and invertebrate animals in the autumn and winter months. Its floral display and fine foliage have made it a popular garden plant with many horticultural selections available. With the recent trend towards smaller gardens, compact dwarf forms of Banksia spinulosa have become popular; the first available, Banksia 'Birthday Candles', has achieved a great deal of commercial success and wide recognition, and has been followed by several others.
This post is part of the Floral Friday Fotos meme.
Fitzroy is a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, 2 km north-east of Melbourne's Central Business District. At the 2011 Census, Fitzroy had a population of 9,430. Planned as Melbourne's first suburb, it was later also one of the city's first areas to gain municipal status. It occupies Melbourne's smallest and most densely populated suburban area, just 100 Ha, bordered by Alexandra Parade (north), Victoria Parade (south), Smith Street (east) and Nicholson Street.
It has a long associations with the working class and is currently inhabited by a wide variety of ethnicities and socio-economic groups and is known for a culture of bohemianism, being the main home of Melbourne's Fringe Festival. Its commercial heart is Brunswick Street, which is one of Melbourne's major retail, eating, and entertainment strips. It has undergone waves of both urban renewal and gentrification since the 1950s. In response to past planning practices, much of the suburb is now a historic preservation precinct, with many individual buildings and streetscapes covered by Heritage Overlays. Its built environment is diverse and features some of the finest examples of Victorian era architecture in Melbourne.
This post is part of the Outdoor Wednesday meme,
