image courtesy of Get Up Australia.

Today is a special day. Right now hundreds of people including Aboriginal Elders have gathered from across that beautiful big island in the southern hemisphere and are listening to the Australian Prime Minister saying sorry. What for? Read about it all here.

But before I continue on my post to celebrate this day, I have a song I would like you to listen to while reading this post. If I could be so bold as to ask you to click here to listen to The Stiff Gins ‘In Paradise’ while you read this post (don’t forget to come back here to read!)…

Photo by Gerald Jenkins for The Dreaming.

So where was I… Oh yes, I love Aboriginal Australia: original Australia. My favourite books in Primary School were the dreamtime ones, filled with Aboriginal paintings and drawings of serpents, watering holes and naked black figures with boomerangs. I loved when an Aboriginal Dance group would come to perform at our school, my heart was filled with inspiration and anytime I heard the didgeridoo I would feel ‘home’.

Photograph by Rotten Cotton. Purchase awesome didges online here.

As you can imagine there is so much I could share with you about Aboriginal Culture but in this post I have picked just a few of my favourites in celebration of this momentus day. Let’s start with these two chicks you are listening to now…

The first time I heard these girls sing was a decade ago. I was in a friend’s exhibition opening, sipping champagne and enjoying the wild and wacky work of my fellow students. While the room was filled with loud chattering all of a sudden these harmonic voices broke the chattering. It was that of these girls, Aboriginal singers The Stiff Gins. They had no instrument but their voices, and they stopped my mind’s chattering dead, my skin was covered in goosebumps and my heart was pumping loud and became a hidden beat to their song. There latest album called Kingia Australis is breathtaking.

All three stills from Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence.

Then there is this brilliant movie that depicts today’s reason for saying sorry. An incredible cast. Also in my DVD collection is Noyce’s remarkable Ten Canoes…

Still courtesy of Ten Canoes.

It goes a little something like this: “It is longtime ago. It is our time, before you other mob came from cross the ocean…longtime before then. The rains been good and ten of the men go on the swamp, to hunt the eggs of gumang, the magpie goose. One of the men, the young fella, has a wrong love, so the old man tell him a story…a story of the ancient ones, them wild and crazy ancestors who come after the spirit time, after the flood that covered the whole land…” Check out the website, it is beautiful.

And last but not least there is the incredible Bangarra Dance Theatre, one of Australia’s most innovative dance companies that blend traditional Aboriginal culture with contemporary dance. I have loved every single performance I have seen, each performance is stunning. They are heading overseas for their North American tour later this year…

Image courtesy of the Bangarra Dance Theatre.

And so my heart is inspired today – inspired with hope that today’s apology is representative of a new kind of people in this world. A people that finally recognise that the colour of one’s skin does not determine one’s value in society. A people that have spiritually evolved and know full well that their spirit comes from their ancestry and indigenous neighbours. And today’s post is to tell you that I am one of those people.

To celebrate love this week, I will be posting a random submission for My Heart Wanders per day. First up is this beautiful one from reader Roberta Taylor. Thank you Roberta…

Photograph and text by reader Roberta Taylor.

It’s the week of love. And I’m not one for celebrating a day of something, I like to make the good things last so I extend such celebrations for a week. My birthday last month being the big 3-0, was designed to last for 3 weeks (although that in the end did get a bit too much of a good thing!). So here in the (blog)house this week, we are celebrating love, and to do so I will be picking out some of the my heart wanders early-bird submissions at random and showcasing one each day with a little ditty. But to kick start the celebrations I’d like to begin with one of my loves: food. I’ve come up with a special menu for you which will stay in the kitchen this month. And although I’ve designed it for two, it is easily a menu that can accommodate 12. In fact we dined on an abbreviated version of this menu for my birthday dinner.

So here goes my lovelies, I hope you enjoy. I photographed and styled this story of images in Paris on a warm summer’s eve…

For hors d’oeuvre, start with a perfectly steamed artichoke. Pluck a leaf from the flower and dip it gently in a mustardy vinaigrette and softly bite into the meaty flesh at the base of the petal. Whisper sweet nothings tu m’aimes, tu ne m’aimes pas until you have both made your way to the core. Remove the tiny prickles to reveal the heart and cut little pieces, dip it in the vinaigrette and feed it to your love. The bowl of tossed artichoke leaves will leave you with a beautiful living still life to gaze upon…

Plat Principal: Raclette

Melt slices of fine raclette cheese over individual plates of cold meats, a simple boiled potato and serve with petits cornichons, cherry tomatoes and pickled baby onions while you sip on Savoie.

Indulge in a little pre-dessert to tantalise your tastebuds and follow with les fruits et le fromage: fresh figs with crumbled goats cheese and drizzled with rose-infused honey…

Before it gets too hot in here, lets cool down with a glass of champagne with wild hibiscus flowers. Santé a l’amour. Capture the moment and scribble each other a little message of love…

Then, between stealing kisses, serve le paroxysme. That is, la mousse au chocolat…

Et voilà.

bisous

It’s Monday again, and to counteract the effects of monday-itis it’s becoming a habit for me to go for a little wander around the blogosphere. I always come back to the (blog)house with a handful of goodies and a heart refueled with inspiration, ready to start my week. Today I must share with you the photography of Ms. Klea McKenna…

I love image series as you may have guessed, and Klea (what a beautiful name) has some stunning series that incorporate my creative philosophy of being real, raw and refined. These three photographs are from her series called ‘Long Story, Short’ where she endeavors to retell and remember women in her mother’s family by using herself as a model, attempting to take on each woman’s character by depicting a moment from the story of her life.

This is such a beautiful idea and Klea has got me thinking about such a project for my own family history – don’t you think this is a neat way of remembering your ancestry, of capturing memories? This is also a great thought to keep in mind for My Heart Wanders .

Next up on my inspirational finds for Monday-itis is this fabulous shot from Ali…

simple. elegant. sexy. Go and peruse Ali’s flickr and blog for some serious inspiration! I am so hoping she enters something for My Heart Wanders.

And this photograph from my guest in the guest quarters, is one of my absolute favourites from his collection. It reminds me that this Wednesday will be one of Australia’s most poignant and positive events as our new Prime Minister will be making an apology to the Stolen Generation – our Indigenous Australians. It has been a loooooooong wait for this moment, with our former Prime Minister stamping his foot and opposing the idea (he was part of the government way back when they took aboriginal children from their families and put them with white families to ‘breed the black out of them’). I have heard that there are still 36% of Australians who do not agree with saying sorry. This fact astounds me and makes me want to vomit. I can’t imagine that any of my readers are in this 36% but if you are I’d like to hear from you so please leave a comment to tell me why you are not with the rest of Australians in this matter, even if you want to be anonymous – I honestly can’t imagine who would oppose this and I wouldn’t mind some proof. For those who are not aware of the importance of this event, please rent out the movie Rabbit Proof Fence to give you an understanding of why it is so important we say sorry. I personally will be apologising this Wednesday and will be putting together a very special post for the event by celebrating the incredible creative talent of our Indigenous Australians. I would love you to join in with me on your own blogs and since Indigenous Australians are the oldest recorded surviving culture in the world (over 25 000 years and counting), this is not just an event for Australians, it is global.

Next: although I am sad to have to bid farewell to the absolutely delightful Momo who has been cooking up a storm with her cookies in the kitchen, I am pleased to be sharing a very romantic menu with you, and who knows how to romance the pants off us? The French of course!

Often (okay, sometimes) I use the freedom of my Sunday to bake… bake cookies that is. Because I love cookies. And cookies love me.

But I have been flat out these past few weeks and have not had a chance to try Momo’s recipes that have been in the kitchen this last month. But today was the day and I can’t wait to show and tell…

Starting with this one, Momo’s choc and banana slice. Now I think I have explained before, habit of my occupation I cannot help but detour off the beginning recipe – Momo did call this a pudding but as you can see mine turned out more like a slice. And WHAT A SLICE it is! I asked French Boy who is un palais (translation ‘to be a palate’, or to have a fine sense of taste) to taste test the result with me. Deliceux was the answer. Et je suis d’accord. As I’ve now discovered with Momo’s recipes, she allows the sweetness to speak through the fruit she uses and in this one, the banana and raisins add the sweetness necessary to bite through the cocoa. This is a perfect naughty afternoon treat that actually is not naughty at all, just take a look at the recipe .

Next up is this treasure I’ve been wanting to try ever since I saw Momo’s batch come out of the oven and onto her blog. This is how mine turned out…

Yes they are so very different to hers! I didn’t actually follow the exact instructions and just went with the flow, creating a log with the fruity filling.

When I scrolled through the quantities in Momo’s recipes I thought they seemed tiny – I’m so used to seeing recipes with cups of flour and cups of sugar, and I was intrigued. When I made the dough for this it seemed so little but it is just absolutely perfect. Note there is no baking powder and hardly any sugar. Again, the fruit reveals all. I would suggest baking two ‘logs’ as these little pillow cookies will be eaten up quickly.

I love that at the end of Momo’s recipes she wrote this:

This is a gentle vegan baking.
Gentle to animals.
Gentle to the earth and gentle to us too.

And gentle is exactly how I would describe the process of cooking and enjoying these recipes. It was such a pleasure to cook these recipes too. I am not a vegan or vegetarian but absolutely adore the real and simple flavours within Momo’s ingredient choices. Thank you so very very much for being my very first guest in the (blog)house kitchen, it was such a beautiful birthday gift.

In light of celebrating love, a new menu will be in the kitchen this week. So please make a copy of Momo’s recipes if you haven’t already. If you would like to submit a menu of your own for the (blog)house kitchen, please send me the recipes and some photos if possible, and also a story about what this menu means to you. Or if you just have one recipe then send that and I will endeavor to make a menu collaged from the submissions. And for those who haven’t yet tried my chocolate and cranberry cookies, the recipe is over at A World In A Pan.

Happy Sunday mes chers amis, see you tomorrow!