Our winter art exhibition is coming up in a couple of weeks. Artists … you can still join in. Register on our website. Local friends … pop past on opening night to help us celebrate 🎉 or over the weekend to check out the talent in our neighbourhood … and perhaps buy some art!

Keen to know what is coming up in Semester 2? Check out our new hot-off-the-press brochure here!

Bookings for our new short courses will open on Wednesday morning. So if you are interested in Women in the Shed, Cultural Cooking with Manu, Pattern Making with Loretta, AAA Art with Clare, Slow Stitching with Serene, Sewing Machine Maintenance or Overlocker Maintenance with Gordon or keen to update or renew your First Aid Certificate, Wednesday is the day to book in.

Just follow the links from the front page of our website to our booking page.

We’ve got our beans (perhaps a little late because of the tomatoes that had a second run …) and our leafy green pak choy and some marigolds grown from seed in the garden and they’re doing their thing slowly … and on Friday Theresa worked on potting up some cuttings from Clare’s garden … salvias and other flowers 🌺 to bring some pops of colour to our fenceline and garden.

And then after morning tea Corrado and Max kindly stuck around and we started up the (previously checked and safe) donated chainsaw (what a generous neighbourhood we live in) for a heavy duty (and hard work) pruning process - the fruit trees 🌳 on the eastern fence … (we all needed to head home for a nap afterwards!). They’ve now had part one of their two part planned haircut … we’ve tackled the width, next time we’ll lop off the top … to make sure we can reach the fruit 🍎 they produce. It’s just amazing how much they grow each year!

Also … did you see our compost on Instagram last week? It’s teeming with life. Thanks neighbours who contribute scraps … it really is looking amazing!

If you are interested in gardening and chatting to nice people and contributing to our neighbourhood come along from 10am on Fridays. We’re back after the school holidays!

Derek’s key hook project is complete! Just in time for the school holiday break … ACC will be closed for two weeks.

Our new program will be out Monday and we’ll be taking bookings from Wednesday for next term. We’ve got some great things coming up including Women in the Shed for term 3 and 4, Cultural Cooking with Manu, stitching sessions with Serene …and more.

We’ll be back on deck on Monday 11 July. See you then! Happy mid year holidays.

Sadly our Covid Roulette podcast series has come to an end. But … the last few episodes were super interesting.

Episode 15 - Alistair, was recorded at the safe injecting room in Richmond. Alistair who uses heroin talks about the challenges he faced during the pandemic, Peter who also uses the facility talks about his homeless friends and explains what happened to them, and Dr Nico Clark who runs the facility discusses how they managed … and the worries and impacts on staff and clients.

Then in Episode 16 - Katia and Sue - many of you may know them from our Peer Support Playgroup - talk about their family’s recent bout of Covid, their hospital experiences (they both went, and to different hospitals) … and the impacts of the pandemic on people with ‘underlying health conditions’.

Our final episode, Episode 17 - Pat, features a wrap up from two doctors at Austin Health - Pat Charles and Andrew Casamento. They talk about the effectiveness of the vaccines etc. and what they are experiencing in the health system now. It is super to get access to this information … and very helpful.

So … we hope you take a listen here or on your favourite podcast listening app - just search for Covid Roulette on Sporify, Google, Amazon or Apple etc.

Thanks once again Tony Wilson for your fabulous interviewing skills, David Bridie for your music, Lee Arkapaw for your graphic design and the Victorian Government for the funding.