Inside the House of Bottles

You may recall I posted about the House of Bottles recently - here is one wall. As you can see the bottles are all cemented in. The stained glass window shows three Australian birds - the one at the top is the Fairy-wren or Blue Wren, they are found in South Eastern Australia in areas where rainfall exceeds 400 mm per annum. They are found in areas that combine a dense cover of low shrubs, tussocks and bracken interspersed with bare or open grassy ground in forests, heaths and scrub along the coast and inland watercourses.

The middle bird is the Kookaburra which has a very distinctive laugh and is more properly known as the Laughing Kookaburra.
This is what they sound like

Kookaburras grow to about 40 - 45 cm long and are regular visitors and sit on top of our fences or clothes hoists to investigate the garden. Other than their loud, long chuckling call, they thrash live food against tree branches until it is pulverised enough to swallow whole, and are also family oriented and older unmated birds will help feed their younger brothers and sisters.

The bird at the bottom is the Crimson Rosella and is found in NSW, Victoria and South Australia in open forest areas. The have a melodic piping call.

Shoe Collection

Amethyst

Shells and Marine Creatures

House of Bottles

Ten Green Bottles?
Actually 13,569 of them went into the building of this bottle house. It was built in 1969 by Joseph Eykenbaum and was carefully planned in order to bring out the contrasting colours of the bottles, and inside is - you guessed it - a bottle collection with a vast range of bottle types dating back to the early 19th century from all over the world. Muriel Gray who with her husband Les, owns the property estimated the collection of bottles inside to be around 10,000.

There are also fossils, dinosaur droppings and dinosaur eggs, minerals, rocks, memorabilia and an unusual collection of 5500 ornamental shoes made of everything from leather to glass, metal to pottery.