Highlights From Our 90th Anniversary Celebration...

Like with all big events, we here at the Mentone Public Library needed some time to digest the festivities before we shared the highlights with you all. 

That's my excuse for taking so long to bring you the goss from our birthday party. :-)

Mordialloc Ukulele Group warming up the crowd.
 
 
 
There was a sense of excitement amongst the volunteers who had worked tirelessly to bring the day together. 
 
 

 
 
We had local officials, writers, poets, historians, long-time library patrons and a street performer who made awesome balloon art (you should have seen the motorbike) and who went above and beyond by  preventing our marquee from taking off in the strong wind several times during proceedings.
 
 
Lesley and our Marquee saving Street Performer Shannon.
 
 
It was a wonderful celebration not only of the Mentone Public Library but of our local community as well. Listening to the Blue Chair Poets recount what living in Mentone means to them gave a somewhat formal affair a lovely feeling of intimacy.
 
 
The (sometimes cheeky and always fabulous) Blue Chair Poets

 
And what birthday party would be complete without cake -
 
 
 
A big thank you to Julia, Tony, the other volunteers, and the local community members who gave their time and energy to make the event a succsess.  Here's to another 90!!
 
Local Historian Veronica presenting our Julia with a thank you gift.

Happy Reading,
 
 
Mentone Public Library




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Judy's Open Mic reflection, 24 June 2023

Judy's Open Mic reflection, 24 June 2023 Last Saturday (24 June 2023) we had a great ‘Open Mic’ session. Stimulating writings by several members revealed their literary talents either through ‘in depth’ revelations of lives or humorous accounts of every day observations.  Pip, Jan and Elsie opened up about their inner thoughts giving us a deeper understanding of even our own lives. Bruce was in poetic and artistic form, and Graeme took a light-hearted look at Russian politics. Word choice and poetic pattern were exemplary in both cases. Terri, Tony and Judy attempted another radio play script, unrehearsed, which sadly needed better secretarial management (my bad!). Mind you Terri did a superb ‘boy voice’ for her character struggling up Balcombe Rd with a horse and dray in 1899 going to the races at Mentone Race Course; and Tony was equally in charge of his masculine character. Ron also had stories about a Jack Russell named Jill,   (There is a Jack and Jill Russell joke there somew
Read more

Lover, Husband, Father, Monster and the art of coercive control - Author talk with Graeme and Elsie Johnstone

Image
Lover, Husband, Father, Monster and the art of coercive control What a pleasure it was to have Elsie and Graeme present with us on the difficult topic of coercive control on Saturday, 15 July, using their trilogy of books as a springboard for conversations. Graeme and Elsie Johnstone wrote three inter-connecting novels on this topic under the banner of ‘Lover, Husband, Father, Monster’, entitled ‘Her Story’, ‘His Story’ and ‘The Aftermath’. The works are best read in the order of 1 The woman’s perspective 2 The man’s perspective and 3 The views of those who it affected.  When they were working on these books, Elsie and Graeme decided to write every time it rained and being Ireland, they wrote a ‘bloody lot’. Their task was to find out ‘What drives two men on either side of the planet to commit such awful acts, both in Australia and Ireland, and how have their marriages come to this?’   The novel is set in Dublin, and it focuses on the marriage of Jennifer, a legal graduate, and Stewart
Read more

Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder Author talk review and Writer Meets Reader promotion

Image
Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder and Kerryn Mayne coming again for Writer meets reader Kerryn Mayne.  What a breath of fresh air! Some people are born to speak in public and Kerryn is one of those lucky ones. We could have listened to her all day and not been bored. A full house at our Mentone Public Library was entertained and enthralled as we listened to Kerryn traverse many subjects – life as seen by a police officer, the busy and sometimes hectic life of a mother of four children under five, two of them nine-month-old twins, living with a young family in Aspendale Gardens, the goodness in almost everybody, even hardened criminals (there but for the grace of God, etc).  And those were just the side topics! What Kerryn was there for was to speak to us about the journey she took through pregnancy and COVID to produce a magnificently entertaining novel, ‘Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder’, a sort of crime fiction / psychological study / philosophical / human story, set in Belgrave abo
Read more