The last couple of days I have spent in a beach house in Tootgarook, about 1.5hrs down the coast from Melbourne. A friend of mine was having a birthday celebration and about 20 people all went away to help her celebrate. I hope that she had a fantastic time, I know I certainly did!

On Saturday morning we went for a walk along the beach at Rosebud and then up towards Arthur’s Seat. Arthur’s Seat is a sort of large hill or small mountain that comes down all the way to the sea; it was popular for it’s chair lift and mountain top restaurant, but I think the chair lift has been decommissioned.

On the walk I took some photos, unfortunately many of them didn’t come out the way I wanted them to so I only have a few to demonstrate. The weather was gloriously sunny for most of the walk but windy and quite cold.

These are some gorgeous examples of the beach side changing boxes that are typical of the area. They have a special place in the local history and I believe there have been campaigns to save the beach boxes when developers etc have attempted to remove them. They are almost all brightly painted, as these ones are, and many have murals on the back walls. The beach in this part of Victoria has a fairly thin strip of sand and then another fairly thin strip of foreshore that leads straight onto the main road. These boxes line the beach between the sand and the foreshore for kilometres!

This is part of a retaining wall designed to stop the sand from washing away down the beach; there are hundreds of these little walls all the way around the bay. This one looks like it may have been burned by drunken teenagers and has a forlorn, washed out look. I really liked how the post gapes at the top and frames the sand behind it.

I think this photo shows the great colours that were around on the walk; it also shows how far the beach stretches off – as far as you can see in both directions curving around slightly to form Port Phillip Bay.

This one I would probably called ‘The Coming Storm’ if I was going to give it a title. I liked the was the tree is bare against the darkening sky, it feels really ominous; which I guess it was it rained a lot that weekend although the weather was very kind to allow us to finish our walk before bucketing down.

If I have some time I will try to play with some of the other photos where the colours didn’t come out and I will put them up in a follow-up post.

The weekend was exhausting and exhilarating, I can’t wait to see everyone again and at the same time I never want to speak to another person again. I seem to be full of such a weird and wonderful collection of feelings.