Liffey...

 Amazing how life can return for a little game of haunting...
I used to live for about 2 years in Liffey, Tasmania with my husband at the time...
The 40 Gulf Road property was 50 acres...including natural forest...
and included a lake with a special resident, Merlin the platypus...
The property had a weird old 2 storey house, a tea room and a 3 storey gallery
with extensive gardens, dry walling and an amazing collection of rhododendrons...
(Our Liffey gardener, Chris Spencer, is now in Victoria...
He manages a music programme on Tuesday mornings...
11:00am - 98.3FM based in Colac + 88.7FM Along the Coast (Ocean Road)...
The show is folk and blues based...
He knows my music teacher friend Ree Liddell (found her name on his friend list)...
plays her group's music on the radio... (small world)...
Chris lives at Kawarren in Victoria...)
The views of Dry's Bluff in the Western Tiers were amazing... (above photo)...
At times, it would change colour, just like Uluru...spectacular to see...
The property was sadly lost through tragic circumstances...
Today, I was wandering real estate spaces and searched for Tasmanian properties...
(As I do from time to time, as I miss Tasmania)
and there it was... My old property...Granted a new lease on life...


Recent owners built this house by the lake...


This used to be a gallery when we bought it,
(notice the beautiful gardens in the first photo, still as I remember them in the late 1990's)
but the real estate advertisement claims it was originally a conference centre...
'Amongst this botanical setting are three unique buildings,
one was formerly used as a tea room (now an art studio),
another three storey building was originally set up for a convention centre
(now a workshop) and another homestead (now a garage and workshop).'



One of 4 Liffey cabins (we called them chalets) high up in the forest area...
In my time here, we built these cabins...
The road established to them was a costly exercise...
It involved navigating a surprise underground spring...
These cabins are ideal for the artist within to find some sanctuary...


These were once tea rooms...We named this public area Liffey Tea Gardens...
(Shari, our beautiful collie, loved to guide guests from the nearby carpark to the tea rooms...
and our peacocks, Lancelot and Zanzibar, loved lining up outside the tea rooms for left over scones)...
Senator Bob Brown visited here and a regular visitor was Alison Cox of Spring Banks, Longford...
(On Wednesday 13th December, 1911,
'The Mercury' published an interesting list of large properties in Tasmania...
Spring Banks, 1,400 acres, Longford, W. G. Keane, u.v., £8,860; c.v, £13,400
u.v= unimproved value + c.v. = capital value)
Alison was a beautiful identity
who claimed a heritage connection with the Coxes of Clarendon, Evandale...
(She believed that my Cox ancestry on my mother's side could be connected with hers...
Alison even bought one of the scarves I knitted to sell in the tea rooms...
I displayed the scarves on an old tree branch by one of the tall windows...
I also sold Rafael Saldana's paintings on postcards...
Rafael and Maria lived on a neighbouring property in Gulf Road)...
Alison loved the Liffey area...

The Liffey 
 When the world is too much with me,
Daily work a dreary load,
Then I have the perfect answer,
Then I take the Liffey Road.

 Soon the mountain looms beside me,
Soon the river’s running clear,
Small farms dot the bright green pasture,
Placid stock are grazing near.

 Birds are singing so much sweeter,
Trees have scents both sweet and rare,
Only birdsong breaks the silence,
In that heavenly mountain air.

 Further on the foxgloves flourish,
Green light filters through tall trees,
Spongey moss and long-dead tree trunks,
Form a path one climbs with ease.

 Woodchip lorries, keep your distance,
Crashing, smashing, far and wide,
Take your noise and fumes and plunder,
Not this lovely mountainside.
 - Alison Cox.

Alison is now forever in The Liffey, sleeping close by Bob Brown's old home...