Colac - a lake, a church, and Botanical Gardens

from w
Recently we were in Colac, an hour's drive from Geelong, and it appears to be a thriving town, set on a huge lake with waves that ripple as if it is the ocean. We discovered a magnificent Botanical Gardens there near the lake (designed I think by the same man who set up the Geelong Botanical Gardens).

We also attended a funeral in one of the most beautiful modern churches I have seen, St Mary's, built in 1980 with a ceiling like a huge sunburst using beams radiating from the centre. My camera battery conked out so I couldn't take photos of inside the church as I wished - not that it's really polite to wave a camera around during the funeral of an elderly lady! But I found two photos on the internet. The outside shows a plain kind of building but inside it is full of space, light, and colour and some low-set windows with small stained glass inserts allow us to see the grass, trees and nearby lake. Way to go, different from the overdecorated neo-Gothic style where you kind-of hide from the real world.

To acknowledge the beauty of Australian landscape is important and on Monday I was delighted to meet an Australian gem of a writer, Bruce Prewer, at a meeting I was making cups of tea for. Bruce inspires us with his rewrites of psalms, his poems, his prayers to see religious faith using Australian metaphors and symbols.