Mentone and nearby

 In my last post I mentioned getting my binoculars back from the zoo. I subsequently found that they had a problem focussing, such that they needed to visit binocular hospital.  For Swarovski, in Melbourne, that means Mentone Optical so we headed off there down the Nepean Highway.  Frances had found an Historic Walk around Mentone so we planned to do that once the patient had been ministered to.  The material for the walk included:

"Parking is located at Mentone Railway Station and at the rear of Mentone Shopping Centre behind Mentone Parade "

What the note didn't say was that nearly all the parking at the station and nearby would be taken, presumably by commuters and people going to the school!  We found a spot in a side street about 400m from the opticians (see X in map below).  Our approximate route is the yellow line.

At the small station we noticed a memorial horse trough telling a sad story.  The trough was relocated here in 1990: one of the horses was, at the time famous, Garryowen.  The story told in the link has some interesting social commentary with Mrs Murrell referred to as "man"  - although whether that is a comment on 1930s culture or horsey culture 90 years later is debateable.  Nothing is said about the horse's career.

Kilbreda College was originally a guest house and coffee shop but sold to the Brigidine Sisters who opened a school, with 3 pupils.  It now has over 1,000.

Two of the historical buildings dating from the early 20th Century.

This was the old State Bank building now a real estate operation.

An interesting memorial gate (point 15 on the map) close to the centre of the town.  I was interested to note the war finishing in 1919 - when the Diggers got home - rather than 1918 when the Armistice was signed.  Also the relatively few names on the list: many tiny country towns would have twice that number.

This is one of the entrances to the RSL (19).  I have no idea who painted the image of artillery at work.

The RSL clubrooms were originally a private dwelling, one of 5 'tower houses' in Mentone.

This is the view from Mentone parade.  The horizontal wall is engraved with the names of veterans form several conflicts.  I thought they had a few more than the memorial gates (above) for WW1; about 2x as many for WW2; and 1 each for the Indonesian insurgency and Vietnam.

A row of ladybirds at Mentone Girls Grammar.

I thought the mural attractive.  There were at least 3 large private schools in this area (plus Kilbreda at the start).

The Mentone Hotel, at the junction of Mentone Parade and Beach Rd.  Operating since 1888, the hotel was the first licensed venue in the area and provided significant competition to the Coffee Palace (which is now Kilbreda School.

A view of the beach, looking South.

Frogmore House was originally a manse and then sold to Mentone Boys Grammar School.

The Davies Memorial Uniting Church was built in memory of Mrs Mary Davies.  Her family by marriage were prominent in the development of Mentone but appear to have had misfortune from the boom-bust economy in the last part of the 9th Century.

I used Google Lens - with some difficulty due to unfamiliarity and got the following: "The plant in the image is an Angel's Trumpet, specifically a species of Brugmansia, likely Brugmansia sanguinea (red angel's trumpet) given the prominent red and yellow coloration of the flower. "

On getting back to the car we headed off to Ricketts Point to see if there were any interesting birds there.  Here is the Point.

As often the case it was the locale for a school field trip.  (We encountered some of the kids and they seemed pretty good, but their presence on the reef caused whatever birds were there to rapidly become somewhere else.)

There were good numbers of Pelicans (my count of 55 got me a query from eBird), Pied Cormorant (37) and Australasian Gannet (guess at 10). 

Here is my overall list.  As we were leaving, we encountered this group who seemed about to launch a wreath/floral tribute into the waters!

Here is our route.