Melville Sculpture Walk

Today we went further afield for our walk. We went to Piney Lakes Reserve in the suburb of Winthrop to visit the 2007 Melville Sculpture Walk. Today was the last day.

There is a permanent sculpture walk which goes through the bush behind the Piney Lakes Environmental Education Centre. The Walk we visited today is a temporary exhibition held every year and was set up on a part of the Reserve I have never visited before. It is very attractive. There is a small lake, obviously fed by a bore, with a fountain and a gazebo and the sculptures were scattered about.

There were two sculptures actually in the lake, including this one of turtles. Turtles are indigenous to the chain of wetlands that this lake was originally part of. North Lake and Bibra Lake are their main habitats now.

While most of the sculptors used traditional materials: wood, metal and stone, there were some that used fibre.

Trudi Pollard and her daughter Helena had wrapped tree trunks in silk dyed with natural dyes and netting stitched from strips of the silk that resembled the marks that insects make in bark. The loose wrappings moved in the breeze like leaves. At the base of each tree were a couple of baskets made from natural materials and filled with leaves and nuts that suggested the baskets used by aboriginal women for collecting food. Piney Lakes was once an important gathering and ritual place for tribal women.

I did enjoy looking at the sculptures. We also walked a lot - 5000 steps on my pedometer.