A favourite most of the year, more so when it’s chilly. This version takes two hours or more to cook. There’s a fast recipe that takes less time and uses a pressure cooker.
Timings: prep – 10 min Cook – 2 hours (or more)
Feeds four. Total cost (Nov 2025): £6.00 (stew) 60 p (dumplings)
Timings: Prep: 30 min. Cooking: 40 min Eat: 10 min
Ingredients
Stew
400 – 500 g cubed beef
Half a diced onion
two cloves garlic
two carrots, diced
400 g potatoes, cut into 2 cm pieces
one turnip, dice to the same size as the potatoes
Dried herbs – oregano, thyme and a bay leaf
Fresh rosemary (from the garden)
chilli flakes
beef stock pot
Veggie gravy granules
can of cannellini beans
Dumplings
100g self raising flour
50g suet (beef or vegetable)
Salt and dried herbs (a teaspoon or so of oregano, some black pepper and anything else you fancy)
water
The beef is the main cost of this dish, you can economise a bit but with cheaper beef you get more hard fat, which is unpleasant.
You’ll need a frying pan and a casserole dish.
Your choice of veg to add to the stew is personal, of course. I add turnips because they add an earthy taste to the stew, which not everyone likes.
1923 Bamforth postcard celebrating the turnip. James Bamforth & Co were probably best known for their saucy seaside postcardsTurnip! Baldrick’s favourite vegetable, they add an earthy flavour to the stew. Swedes can also be used.
Preheat the oven to 160 C/ gas 5.
Brown the beef in a little oil and add to the casserole dish when done. Fry the onions, garlic, herbs and spices before adding them to the pan. Dice the potatoes and turnip and add these to the rest of the ingredients. Add the stock pot or stock cube.
Beef, potatoes and turnip in the pot. Onions, garlic and herbs are hidden. Need to add cannellini beans and stock.
Drain a can of cannellini beans, add these and enough water to cover the ingredients. Give the while thing a good stir and put in the oven for at least 2 hours.
Beans and stock added. Now to cook for at least two hours.
Make the dumplings: Add the flour, suet, herbs and salt to a bowl. Gradually add water and stir well to get a dough that you can form into balls. These don’t need to be perfect. If the dough is too wet, add flour to the mix until you’re happy with how the dough behaves.
Uncooked dumplings. You don’t need to be very rigorous getting spherical dumplings, rougher dumplings will fluff up just the same.
About 20 minutes before serving, add the dumplings to the stew and cook for a further 20 minutes.
Dumplings done, stew ready to serve.
I did this using the slow method because we had to split out mealtime. Younger daughter has tap lessons that run until nearly 9 o’clock, so I served the rest of us at seven, then reheated the stew and added fresh dumplings to cook while I went to get her.
Younger daughter made this for us, loosely based on a recipe from BBC Good Food but adapted somewhat. This is a spicy version, alter the amount of chilli as you wish.
Timings: Total = 2 hours. prep – 10 min Cook – 30 minutes. Total includes ‘leaving to absorb flavours’ time.
You’ll need a roasting dish, a large saucepan and a blender. We used a stick blender for this. A large plastic food box or a large zip-tie bag will also be needed.
Peel, deseed and dice the butternut squash.
The skin of the butternut squash is quite thick. Either use a good peeler or a knife to remove the skin. Scoop the seeds out with a tablespoon. You can dry them off and separate from the stringy bits then roast them for a snack.
Add the olive oil and paprika to a large plastic food box or a large bag. Add the diced squash, mix well and leave for an hour to absorb the flavours. You can use a bowl to do this if you don’t have a box or bag to hand.
Set the oven to 180 C/ gas 6. Fry the onions in butter over a low heat. After 5 minutes, add the garlic and chilli flakes and continue to fry.
While the onions are frying, put the squash and the oil into a roasting dish and roast for 30 minutes. Stir them at least once during the roasting.
After 30 minutes the squash will be soft (squashy!) and the onions slightly caramelised. Add the vegetable stock to the onions. Take the squash out of the oven and add this to the stock.
Diced squash, roasted. Add the roasted squash to the onions and stock. This will add some much-needed colour to the soup.
Using the stick blender (or other device), liquidise the soup until it’s smooth and lump-free.
The stick blender makes the mushing up of the squash easy. If you want a smoother soup, a liquidiser is a better bet.
Warm through and add the crème fraiche either to the completed soup or swirl into each serving as you dish up.
Finished soup. We got some crusty bread to go with it. A sprinkling of parmesan would also add to the flavour.
We got some nice bread to go with this, though regular Warburtons (or other sliced bread) is fine as well.
You’ll need a big saucepan, a large bowl and a baking dish. An electric mixer will also help.
Peel and slice the apples and heat gently in a saucepan. Add the caster sugar to taste2 and lemon juice to stop the apples going brown. Once they have started to fluff up turn off the heat and allow to cool. Take the butter out of the fridge.
When the apples are cooled, set the oven to 160 °C (fan), gas mark 5. Put the apples into a buttered oven-proof dish. If you’re adding dried fruit or mincemeat put this on top of the apples.
Apples in a dish with some dried fruit on top. This is the stuff that I use for fruit cake, it includes dried peel as well as raisins and sultanas.
Start making the sponge while the oven heats up.
Add caster sugar, butter and self-raising flour to a mixing bowl. I used a plastic bowl – ceramic bowls are supposed to be better for this type of thing since they keep the batter cool. Crack the eggs into the dry ingredients and beat for at least five minutes. An electric mixer is best for this, do it by hand if you’re feeling strong.
Finished sponge mix. You need to mix this for at least five minutes to get air in so the sponge will rise.
Put the sponge mix on top of the apples. Make sure it’s covering the apples, then pop it in the oven for 40 to 50 minutes.
When it’s done, the sponge should have risen and be a nice golden colour.
Eve’s pudding. Remembered while I was dishing up that I needed a photo for the blog.
Serve hot with custard (method below) or ice cream.
With custard!
Custard
Make the custard when you’re ready – this should be timed to make sure the Eve’s Pudding is still warm.
Put the cream and milk in a pan and warm through to just below boiling. If you have a thermometer, heat the milk to about 85 °C.
In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks, cornflour, sugar and vanilla. A hand whisk will be fine for this.
Cornflour, sugar, egg yolk and vanilla essence, mixed and ready to have warm mil added.
Gradually pour the hot milk onto the sugar mixture, whisking constantly. Two of us did this together (I had help from younger daughter, who made crème anglaise in Food Tech at school); she poured and I whisked.
Pour the mixture back into the saucepan. Heat gently with stirring until it thickens to your liking. Don’t heat for too long or it might curdle.
Custard warming through and thickening up.
These are the best cooking apples. If you can’t get these because they’re out of season or you live outside the UK, Granny Smiths or other cooking apples will do. ↩︎
Tastes vary. Bramley apples are famously tart, you may want a lot of sugar. Unless you’re like my grandad who used to eat Bramleys as eating apples. ↩︎
I’ve finally figured out rigging, which means I can animate the mech I made a few months ago. Yay me!
Completed mech with colouring and glowing guns. The green glow around the windscreen is a classy touch.
The mech I used had a bit of a different colour scheme, I have dubbed it ‘the fabulous mech’ due to the glittery guns and pink glow around the screen.
Rigging involves adding bones to the design, linking those bones to the model, and moving the bones instead of moving the mesh of the body. This is just like how Aardman animate their models for stop motion.
The grey shapes are the ‘bones’, they control parts of the Mech model. You can rotate the bones to make the head move and move the bones in the legs to make it walk.
Moving the bones around using keyframes to control the timing of the mech and stuff. First trial was to have the Mech look around, notice the camera and step towards the camera.
Mech stepping to the camera. Mean and pink.
Getting a walk cycle for the thing was a bit fiddly. Moving the legs in a bird-like manner is easy enough, but getting the feet right and stopping them slipping needed a bit of fiddling about. Took me a while, but the result is pretty good. I wrote an Excel spreadsheet to help me with the timings of bone movement and getting the whole thing to move without ‘foot slip’, where the stationary foot moved backwards during the walk cycle.
It’s a bit gloomy, but the fabulous mech is here to menace you!
I’ll do some more on this later. The walk is mechanical (well, it would be). The lighting need to be improved so you can see the thing. I will add a swing to the hips and also movement of the head so it looks like the operators are searching for something.
There are a few videos on YouTube (and elsewhere1) of piles cubes being dropped, weights being dropped on cubes and balls hitting piles of cubes. I’ve done one myself, and it’s quite satisfying. Destruction of things without actually wasting resources. I was asked if I was in need of some sort of catharsis. I don’t think so.
I decided to mix it up a bit and have a series of groups of cubes dropping as the camera tracked past. The varying weights video (above) had a static camera. I rendered the different videos separately and spliced them together before adding sound to give it a bit of realism. The final bit where a flying cube hits the camera was the only camera movement I did. The shaking as the blocks hit the ground was done using an add-on called ‘camera shakify’2.
Blocks of cubes
First you make the cubes and then add physics. The easiest way to make a bunch of the same things is using an Array modifier, where you repeat an object a set number of times. So to make an 8 x 8 x 8 cube of cubes, I did three arrays of 8 in the X, Y and Z direction. Then the 1096 block need to be separated and given physics.
‘Physics’ in this sense means that the objects react to gravity and to other objects with physics. The video below shows how objects interact with ‘active’ physics, ‘passive’ physics and no physics. So the green cubes react to gravity and are stopped by the red passive objects. Passive objects don’t react to gravity or other forces but get in the way of active objects. The blue ‘no physics’ cube gets ignored.
Initially I made four blocks of cubes: 2, 5, 8 and the 10-cubed blocks, and then set up the moving camera.
Camera settings
To get a camera to pan while it focuses on a moving spot you need two things. A line for the camera to follow and something for the camera to aim at. For this video, the line is a curve that runs mostly straight past the cubes and then curves around and up to finish with a view of all the fallen blocks. The camera is pointing at an ’empty’, which is an object that will not render in the final image. I animated the movement of the empty so that the camera would arrive just as the blocks started to fall.
The camera itself has several settings, not all of which I understand. The one I do understand is ‘motion blur’, which adds a little realism to the falling blocks. The video below shows the effect in a simple scene. In the final frame of the video below you can see there is blurring of the cubes on the left and the animation looks a bit more realistic.
Lights!
Lights above the cubes turn on as the camera arrives. These are circular area lights, intense and powerful. I also added a ‘fog cube’ so the light beam could be seen. More lights, smaller yellow ones, and a back wall add some shape to the studio that all this is happening in. Getting this timed correctly is relatively easy, keyframes for the light intensity can be edited as needed.
I noticed how high the blocks went for the 10 – cubed block and so I thought I’d see what happens with 12 cubed. And the cubes went everywhere. Drilling down into the narrative3, I thought that the set-up would have overlooked this and so the lights that come on as the camera tracks would be too low for the last pile and this light gets destroyed by the cubes.
I added a cube above the light, did a cell fracture4 (only 20 pieces) and timed it so that the erupting cubes hit the fractured cubes as the physics takes over and the pieces fly everywhere. It just so happened that the end point of the camera track was just to the right of where one of the pieces flew.
Video below is how the Blender screen looks as the final animation is playing. There are random colours added to each object so I can make them out. There is a small three-way axis that travels left to right – that’s the empty that the camera (the pyramid that travels along the black curve) is locked in on.
Sound!
Getting the sounds was difficult, it is usually the part I struggle with. I have various thumps, crashes and loud clicks saved, so they were easy to get. I wanted to have a director saying ‘action’ and then ‘CUT!” but could I find one? Could I bugger. So in the end I recorded myself as the director. The family don’t think it sounds like me, the microphone I used is a bit heavy on the treble.
Two weeks after publishing it on YouTube it’s had about 500 views. The simple destruction videos seem to do a lot better than ones with a narrative. So I guess it’s back to explosions.
Such as TikTok. I will post these videos there, see if I get any interest. ↩︎
It shakes the camera. But you probably guessed that. ↩︎
The narrative being that these demos are for real but the director is a bit hurried with his setting up and is under time and budget pressure to get the videos done. ↩︎
I’d done a cell fracture demo, showing how a wall breaks with different levels of cell fracture. It’s had over 20,000 views. I guess people like things being destroyed. ↩︎
Thinking about how Hallowe’en is coming up and the fact that pumpkin spice is available in coffee shops. I’d tried to think of a Hallowe’en themed design for the shop, but had no inspiration, despite getting an asset pack from Gamedev.org that is full of creepy stuff.
What to do? How about a fun animation? I previously did a morph animation where a banana changed into a monster truck and that got quite a few views on YouTube (2704 at the time of blogging). Not as many as the wall smash video (20,629!) but still more than some of the videos I’ve taken more time over, including the cubes and tracked camera (I’ll be blogging that one soon).
Morphing in Blender can be done in a few ways. For the banana video I got the two models to spin really quickly then had the render stop for the banana and start for the truck while they were spinning at high revs. It looked good. But it felt like cheating. What other option are there?
Other morphing methods
For this one I used shape keys. All shapes have vertices, the points where the edges meet. It’s the edges that make the faces and the faces that make the shapes. Most of the time you control where the vertices are by pulling them around or by moving the whole model, but with shape keys you do things a bit differently. You take the first shape and record where all the vertices are. You then add a second shape and record where its vertices are. These are the shape keys. To morph between the two shapes, Blender will move the vertices from shape one to where the vertices are on shape two. And then you control where the vertices are on the shapes
Changing the value of the shape key changes the shape of the object. You can animate this, so the shape can change when and how you want.
I did the same sort of thing with the pumpkin and the chili, assigning shape keys to the two extremes. Using the animation feature, the pumpkin is made to shrink in diameter and lengthen, change colour and emerge as a chili.
The emergence of the chili stalk looked odd (see below), the colour change wasn’t smooth so I fell back to adding a spin to the whole animation to hide the weirdness. Still a bit cheaty, but the growth of the chili is in the animation.
Text animation
I uploaded the video to Canva to add the text. For this sort of thing I am happier with Canva at the moment. Though I find the lack of keyframes fiddly, there are some things I can do with text that are a lot easier in Canva than in Blender1. For this, I wanted the words ‘Pumpkin’ to stay above the animation and then the word ‘Spice’ to be animated into the scene when the chili appeared. Once I was happy with that, I downloaded it and went into the Blender video editor again to add sounds.
Sounds make all the difference
The first go I had with the sounds didn’t go down well. Younger child gave me her “Eww” face when I played it with a squelchy sound.
So I changed it to a slightly less organic noise and rendered the whole thing.
When I went to upload it to YouTube, it was categorised as a normal video, rather than a short. So I re-uploaded it to Canva and created a new YouTube short. That sorted the problem. I even did a video demonstration on how to do it, in case I forget.
Video on how to use Canva to make a YouTube short out of a video that’s wrong in some way for that format. YouTube won’t tell you what’s wrong with the video, though.
Finished
The final video is a nice bit of fun – it makes my youngest laugh, as long as I don’t mention the slurping jelly noise.
There are pre-set animations that are very useful. With Blender the infinite variety can be a bit daunting especially if you have an animation in mind. . ↩︎
I’ve been working on this a bit at a time since early July. It’s another course by Grant Abbitt – his Character Creator course gave us Steve the Orc, whose stand-up career hasn’t really taken off.
I’d done a dungeon build earlier in the year, with Grant, as part of the course that resulted in the two-legged mech, the dinosaur and Bob the Demon. We built walls and a floor then populated the dungeon with barrels, crates and torches. This project is a super-charged version.
The wizard’s workshop is an introduction to making scenes in Blender. Working with a 3D modelling system there is no issue of getting perspective wrong, but there is a need to get the proportions right in a scene. Your shelves and furniture, books, candles and other oddments need to be the correct size otherwise the scene won’t work.
Finished workshop with comfy chair, lots of books, bubbling cauldron, mysterious liquids and a pet skull on the reading table.
I learned quite a few useful things during the course. Modelling glass and filling it with different coloured liquids, how to randomly assign colours to similar things (the books), and creating an atmosphere in a room using mist and moonlight.
Away from the bright colours of the final render there’s a lot of fiddly bits that will allow me to move stuff around if I get the urge. Each group of books is linked to a single ’empty’ so I can move and position several books at a time. It’s how I got the pile of books next to the cauldron. I could also animate flying books or potion bottles – it’s a wizard’s room, after all!
Random colours for each item help to see what items are where without the computer lag associated with full render. You can also see a lot of little arrows – those help move and align multiple items
So finally I did an animation where the camera goes round in a circle while focussing on one item. This helps you to see more of the items in the scene.
It’s now over seven years since I started my Duolingo steak. Today I hit 2600 days!
I’ve concentrated on German for the last few years, partly to help our youngest with her German and also as a good intellectual exercise. I’ve also done quite a bit of Danish (hvorfor har du ikke bukser på?) and tried Scots Gaelic, though I struggled a lot with that.
Am I fluent? No. Can I ask for things in German? Probably. I still struggle with grammar, especially declension, which is usually a guess. I mean, why do they need so many words for ‘the’? How does such a thing even come about? That’s a linguistics question and there’s no Duolingo for that.
Saturn’s sixth-largest moon may have the right conditions for life. But how to prove if there is life on Encaladus?
Background – Cassini-Huygens mission
The Cassini-Huygens mission was launched in 1997 with the mission objective to explore the saturnian system. It would take seven years to reach Saturn, and it would collect images, chemical analyses and magnetic field readings as it passed through the inner solar system, the asteroid belt and past Jupiter.
Image of Saturn eclipsing Cassini.
This would be the first mission to orbit Saturn and would carry the Huygens lander, which landed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Among the instruments on the Cassini probe there was a mass spectrometer, the Cosmic Dust Analyzer1, which was designed to collect and characterise cosmic dust.
The Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) that was mounted on the Cassini probe. The opening is about 40 cm, the hexagon in the middle is the multiplier, which sits above the ionisation grid. The detectors are at the bottom of the cylinder, hidden from view. The unit is mounted on a turntable which allowed it to collect dust from a wider angle than if it had been stationary.
Among the many amazing discoveries on the mission was the observation of gas plumes – cryovolcanoes – erupting from the southern polar region of Enceladus, the sixth-largest of Saturn’s 274 moons2 .
Further observation and analysis of the plumes showed that they were mostly water and these ice crystals also constituted much of Saturn’s E-ring, the fifth ring to be discovered, whose existence was not confirmed until 1980.
Astronomers reached this conclusion from the chemical analysis provided by the CDA in the early part of the mission. Collecting dust from the E-ring and from around Enceladus, it was seen that the chemical make-up of the ice crystals in the ring and in the plumes matched. However, looking again at the chemicals trapped inside it was concluded that the water coming out of Enceladus was salty and contained not only silicates, but ammonia and organic chemicals of varying complexity.
A recent publication in Nature Astronomy3 has summarised the analysis of data collected by the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) during the last part of the probe’s orbit of Saturn from 2004 to 2017. The organic chemistry observed in these analyses shed light on the make-up of the oceans of Enceladus and raised the possibility that the moon is capable of supporting life.
The first question that needs to be asked in the search for extra-terrestrial life is whether the conditions are suitable for life to exist. Liquid water at a reasonable temperature and pH is one such condition4. Also, six elements – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur – are regarded as necessary for biological systems to survive.
Enceladus
Enceladus was discovered by William Herschel in 1789. Not much was known about it before the Cassini mission. It was known that it was 500 km in diameter – one seventh the size of our moon – and was associated with Saturn’s E-ring, though how the two interacted was not known.
Enceladus, photographed by Cassini. The fissures cover most of the moon’s surface, except in the southern region. A small proportion of the ice from the plumes falls back to the moon and covers this region in smooth snow.
Analysis of the magnetic data that Cassini collected provided astronomers with a update on the structure of the moon. There is a rocky core and an icy upper crust – this much was known. But data strongly suggested that there is a liquid ocean between the rock and the ice. This is a salty, high pH (11 to 12) environment but crucially there is liquid water.
The article by Khawaja et al provides an analysis of some of the data the CDA collected in the last months of the mission. It has taken years to refine the data to the point where statistically significant conclusions can be drawn. A lot of the information from the Cassini fly-past was collected at relatively slow speeds. And ‘relatively’ means less than 12 km/s. Data from higher speed fly-bys at up to 18 km/s were also collected and form the basis of the new analysis.
The speed at which the crystals were collected matters. The way the CDA works is that the crystals would hit a screen at the front of the CDA. The crystals are tiny – at most 1 nanometre (one millionth of a micrometre) and some ten orders of magnitude smaller (10-19 m)5. In the time it takes the ionised particles to reach the detector (about 20 microseconds at lower speeds) the water will freeze and this can shield many of the analytes from the instrument. At higher impact speeds the ice did not have time to reform and so more of the trapped chemicals were visible to the detector.
With faster incoming particles, the detector had to work faster to be able to distinguish between each particle. Higher speed detection required the analyser to work at its maximum rate and in a mode for which it was not really designed. The data were noisy and in the years since a great deal of effort has been spent finding enough useful data to be able to make conclusions.
What was found was some volatile organics such as methane and ethane, plus a mix of volatile low-mass nitrogen and oxygen bearing organics, single-ring aromatics and some complex macromolecular species, up to the limit of detection of the CDA (about 200 Da).
This complex mix of chemicals can be seen as the building blocks for life and raises the question of what the source of these chemicals could be.
In all this, you have to bear in mind that the CDA was designed and built nearly 30 years ago. Computer speeds have increased massively since the mid 90s and a CDA designed now would be smaller and more efficient than the one on Cassini. But also a CDA built in 2055 would be more advanced again.
James Webb
The James Webb telescope, launched in 2021, has investigated Enceladus. Using near infrared – more sensitive to water than the instruments on Cassini – it detected water plumes extending 10 000 km from the moon. Enceladus itself is only 500 km in diameter.
Near-infra red image from the James Webb telescope. The blue colour is water, almost all of which originates from Enceladus. The plume extends up to 10 000 km from the moon.
New missions to Enceladus have been proposed, but are not likely to take place any time in the next ten years. The tantalising possibility that there is life on another body of the solar system has taken a step closer with these data.
The mix of chemicals determined to be in the plumes, and therefore in the oceans of Enceladus, are known to be those that support life. Until or unless we get a sample of an enceladan microbe under a microscope there won’t be proof of life there. The data reported by Khawaja doesn’t mean that there is definitely life on Enceladus. It does mean that it’s possible.
Full description in Srama et al (2004) Space Science Reviews 114: 465-518 ↩︎
At the time of writing, there were 274 named moons. More may well be found in the coming years. ↩︎
The limits of ‘reasonable’ has changed over the last few decades. Extremophile microbes capable of surviving and thriving at temperatures of 120 °C and pH up to 11 have been found. ↩︎
This is a huge dynamic range for the detector to be able to analyse. It’s like being able to analyse a grain of sand and something the size of the Earth’s orbit in the same instrument. ↩︎
Western Australia’s capital has a wealth of public art, both street art and sculptures commissioned by the city council. Here’s a taster.
Three weeks in Australia
Back in 2019, we booked a holiday to Australia. We planned to go back to Melbourne (where we lived from 2003 to 2005), then take a week to travel to Sydney (where my brother lives) seeing parts of Victoria and New South Wales we hadn’t had the chance to see. I was working and our first child was born while we were there, so we were rather busy. But we had saved and planned for this big trip and were looking forward to the adventure.
Then 2020 happened.
So in September 2024 we booked to go again and hoped there wouldn’t be another global pandemic to crimp our plans. This time, we had a wedding to go to and we were going to celebrate older child graduating, younger child finishing GCSEs, Mrs S getting her first accountancy qualification and me reaching 20 years with the same company.
One of those things didn’t happen – I fell about 6 months short of 20 years at my job. However, we had paid for the flights and accommodation, so we went anyway, with a mind to reducing the number of extravagances we might otherwise have been able to do. And we had a blast.
Sydney and Melbourne
The focus of the trip was my brother’s wedding in Sydney, then a few days to revisit Melbourne, where we lived for two and a half years. Finally, we decided to go to Perth for a long weekend at the end of the holiday, mostly because we hadn’t been there and so many Australians haven’t made the trip either.
Perth
We didn’t know what to expect in Perth. We knew it was remote (thousands of miles from the next place of comparable size) but not a lot else. One of the feelings we got was that it was quite self-sufficient. A lot of locally produced food and drink, which makes sense when Adelaide is two days train ride away.
Taking advice from Australians about what to do, one suggestion that came up was a visit to Rottnest Island. It seemed odd that we should travel so far (four hours by plane from Melbourne) only to spend a day away from the city. So we settled on looking around Perth and spending a chunk of one day in Fremantle, the suburb of Perth that is on the Indian Ocean at the mouth of the Swan River.
We arrived on Friday afternoon, got some food in and watched the footy that was taking place a few kilometres from our apartment1. A Ramen dinner, an early-ish night – we were two hours ahead of Perth time – and up and about on Saturday morning. So our first full day in Perth, what do we do? We go on an art trail, of course!
Perth Art Trail
This was a free, self-guided trail that we found online (link). The city of Perth has a public art strategy dating back to 2009 with over 100 works distributed around the CBD and suburbs around the centre of the city.
Our hotel was close to Elizabeth Quay, where the trail officially started, but we decided that we had better get some breakfast in us before starting. It took us a while to find a place that was serving food at 11 am, but we settled on having brunch in the bar of the Ibis hotel on Murray St. This was fortunate because we were able to kick off the trail on Wolf Lane.
Wolf Lane
There are other streets in Perth with a lot of art, but this is the one that was highlighted in the tour guide. Most of the buildings in this back street have some art on them, a lot from a 2012-2016 effort to brighten the inner city. The move to have fresh street art was revived in 2024 and we were lucky enough to see two new additions. Well, one addition and one revival.
This was painted in 2024 as part of an initiative to revive some of the forgotten places in Perth city centre. This is actually an update of an original wolf mural, with red cloak and a ladybird added by the original artist, done in about 2014. As a street artist, Buckles also goes by the tag ‘Hurben’ and you can see his circled H to the right of the picture.
The titular ‘wolf’ or Inside Your Head, There’s a Heart, was altered by the artist (Steve Buckles) in 2024 to a slightly brighter image, but in the same style. The original can be found on some websites, such as this Facebook post. There is also a blog that discusses the original commission of street art in 2014.2
An untitled piece caught Mrs S’s imagination. By Dan Bianco, it was only painted in January 2025. She loved the way the painting was incorporating and would be incorporated by the living plants that were being trained on the wire trellises. It would be nice to be able to keep abreast of the changes in this work.
Untitled (Dan Bianco). Installed in early 2025 on Wolf Lane. It’s not obvious in the photo, but there are trellises around the painting of the woman. Over time the plants will partially obscure but ultimately enhance the mural.
Two of my favourites were on the same building. Untitled by Spanish artist Hyuro (tumbling women) and Seahorse by Alexis Díaz .
Untitled (tumbling women) by Spanish artist Hyuro, I like the kinetic energy of the women and empty dresses tumbling across the side of the building.
The seahorse – which I thought was a dragon at first – was the work of Puerto Rican artist Alexis Díaz.
Seahorse by Puerto Rican artist Alexis Díaz. It’s a complex composition, a sort of collage of various sea-related items and what look like hands to make a seahorse.
I lost count of how many murals there were on Wolf Lane, but there’s a selection below. Also an old advert for Solyptol Soap – I do like old adverts, they don’t muck around.
Selection of murals from Wolf Lane.
Beyond Wolf Lane
From there we were directed to Telethon Gardens, where a striking collection of wrought iron figures seemed to stand guard on the lawn.
Koorden (Rob Garlett, Fred Chaney, Rochie Kuhaupt). Three local Noorgar artists collaborated on these sculptures.
The Noorgar are the traditional guardians of the land where Perth now stands. These figures represent the Noorgar leaders who represented Aboriginal communities at Perth’s commemoration of Federation in 1900. There is also an ecological significance to the work, the latticework representing the layers of social, environmental and cultural heritage of the area.
From there we walked towards Perth train station. This is where the Indian Pacific train terminates; this is a bucket list item for us, though we will wait until we can afford (a) to come over again, (b) to travel in a private cabin and (c) have done some other things on the bucket list3.
Anyway, back to the art trail.
Opposite the train station was Grow Your Own, an abstract by James Angus. Inspired by the growth of organic farming, this is sometimes referred to as ‘the cactus ‘ by locals.
“Grow Your Own” by James Angus. Inspired by the organic farming movement, this was installed in Forrest Place in 2011. It’s at the edge of the main shopping area, with Perth train station in the background. More importantly for us, we stumbled upon The White Dwarf bookshop, a shop specialising in SciFi and Fantasy books. The owner was great, chatted with us for a while about England and science fiction.
Right by this artwork was the White Dwarf bookshop. Feeling the need to have a rest we got some water from the shop next door and spent a pleasant half hour or more in the bookshop. The owner was friendly; he said he was familiar with Forbidden Planet in London and we recommended he go to the branch in Liverpool – he was surprised that there is more than one. We didn’t buy anything, mainly because we didn’t want to have to carry books with us on the rest of the walk, but we promised to come back.4
St George’s Cathedral
After walking through the shopping district we arrived at the precinct of St George’s Anglican Cathedral. Built using local jarrah wood, Rottnest limestone and bricks from local sources it was consecrated in 1888 and is one of the oldest buildings in Perth.
To the southwest of the cathedral was the most confusing piece we saw on the trail. Ascalon looked like a broken sail5, but it is intended to portray St George slaying the dragon and seeks “to evoke a sense of righteous power and victory over a force of darkness and oppression”6; Ascalon is the name of his lance (or sword), which I didn’t know.
Ascalon (Marcus Canning, Christian de Vietri). Named after the lance that St George used to slay the dragon, standing in the grounds of St George’s cathedral. This was easily the most confusing piece on the trail. We wondered why they were commemorating putting a hankie on a car aerial, until we read the description. It’s a representation of St George slaying the dragon, with the white billow representing St George’s cloak and steed and the black base representing the defeated dragon. I always say that the best art is art that needs a glossary.
Further down towards the river is the precinct by the Council House. This is a rather plain 60s building, enlivened by a collection of kangaroo sculptures called ‘The Mob’ and the Boonji Spaceman.
One of a number of kangaroo sculptures on this terrace outside the City Council offices. Boonji Spaceman ‘Lightning’ (Brendan Murphy). This is a temporary installation celebrating Perth’s identity as the City of Light. In 1962 when John Glenn orbited the Earth, Perth residents and businesses were encouraged to turn their lights on so Glenn could see the city from space. Glenn commented on the bright lights as he passed over, all the while in conversation with a technician from the local Muchea tracking station.
The Boonji Spaceman was installed in May 2025, on the site of a popular artwork dubbed ‘The Kebab’7 (removed in 2021) which was built in 1971 to celebrate Perth’s population reaching 1 million. The new installation was not without controversy.
The final work on the trail, but not the last piece we saw, was in the entrance of the Federal Court of Australia. A very 1970s piece, I have spent rather more time than I care to think about trying to find the name and artist of this piece. If you know, tell me.
This was the last item on the art trail, though we carried on to the ‘proper’ start before going back to our apartment. I have tried to find the name and sculptor, but can’t. If you know, tell me and I’ll update the blog and credit you.
The beginning and the end
After a walk along the prom by the Swan River we ended up at Elizabeth Quay, where the trail is supposed to start. There are two artworks here – First Contact and Spanda.
First Contact , the work of Noongar artist Laurel Nannup, stands on the banks of the Swan River. It’s 5 metres tall and cast in aluminium and represents the shared legacy of the Stolen Generation, of which group Nannup is a member. The piece lights up at night, as we discovered later that day when we had a very nice dinner at The Island on Elizabeth Quay. More information on the building of this piece is available here.
First Contact by Noongar artist Laurel Nannup, a five-metre cast aluminium sculpture that we later discovered lights from within. This is the first piece of the Perth Art trail, though we came to it last. It’s beside Elizabeth Quay and not far from where we stayed in Perth.
Spanda was the result of a competition to create a signature artwork for Elizabeth Quay, won by Christian de Vietri (who also co-created Ascalon).
Installed in 2016, this is something of a symbol for Western Australia, though we didn’t know it at the time. Six white arches are intended to trigger the viewers inner experience of their own resonance with the world (‘Spanda’ is Sanskrit for pulse or divine vibration).
The whole walk took us a couple of hours. There was a great deal to ponder, looking at all the different styles of art and the media used by artists to celebrate their culture, make a statement, commemorate an event, or just to amuse the viewer. As with any art collection, not everything speaks to everyone. There is also a lot of art we missed8, so a return trip may be necessary.
The Dockers were well beaten by reigning champions and 2025 finalists, Brisbane Lions. ↩︎
Including the line “leaving a cold wet 17 degrees in Melbourne”. That’s 17 Celcius. ↩︎
Which includes a Nile cruise, May blossom in Japan, Hawaii, and a longer return trip to Malta ↩︎
We did, on the Monday, and spent about $70 there. We needed books for the return flight. ↩︎
Including the Bon Scott memorial statue in Fremantle. We were about 100 metres from it at one point, but I didn’t know it existed until we got back to the UK. ↩︎
Grim up North Heath 