Our streets look glorious at the moment, all covered in brown and gold leaves. They make such a wonderful crunching noise as you walk through them that you can’t help feeling happy, even if it means that the real Aussie winter is fast approaching….

Yes we’re lucky, June is a lovely time of year in Melbourne. Autumn, officially 1st March to 31st May is now over, but it’s not too bad… It’s cold in the morning but not chilly-cold like in Europe. Today it was plus 10 degrees Celsius… by lunchtime it will get up to a top of 16 degrees. Oh and the sun will be out (we are on the same latitude as Athens) the sky is blue – are you jealous yet?!

We had rain this weekend. The first winter storm came through. We had 48.6 mm of rain on Friday night, the most rain for a June day since records began. Here are the waves left in the mown fields at the football fields…

Last week we even had fog! Which is so rare that no one ever asks for fog lamps here when buying a car… Rain and fog, now that does seem more like Europe than Australia…

Melbourne weather never stays the same for too long. So today Mutt and I decided to head off into our local park to catch the last of the leaf peeping! Leaf Peeping is a term coined to describe people travelling around New England in the United States to watch the autumn foliage. In Victoria people travel out of Melbourne to a town called Bright which has spectacular autumn foliage. We don’t have time for anything more exotic than to head to the local Park…

It looks like we were just in time! The council were out in force sweeping up the last of the autumn leaves. We came across a leaf sweeper… now that’s a job for life in these leafy suburbs….

He was having such brilliant fun, blowing leaves around like confetti. It almost inspired me to search around in the shed for our leaf blower…

Just look what a lovely job he did on these paths… And this is as far as he got before it was time for a tea break…

Then on the way back we could see that the whole neighbourhood had been busy getting into the act of sweeping up leaves… big bags of leaves were littering the side of our footpaths.

Now the leaves have gone, we’re getting ready for the start of the ski season next weekend. It’s all go here!

Little Wandering Wren