Days that make days: the new Balloon Day

Back in the good old innocent days of blogging, I would document a wonderful perk of living in Canberra: hot air balloons (or, as my Western Australian father calls them, “baahllooowens”). They would appear in Autumn, when the air was cool and crisp and the sky usually clear. Either we’d get up early in the morning for the Balloon Festival by the lake, or I’d just see a balloon while I was out and about, and it never failed to lift my spirits, and if I was already feeling happy, I’d just get dreamy happy.

The hero image here is a shard of a screenprint I made at a Megalo workshop. Balloon days are actually the reason I became Ampersand Duck — Below is a snippet of a letterpress print that I made as a student in the mid-1990s, and the combination of a comma and ampersand was perfect: literate yet completely silly, my favourite way of living life.

So, I chose this small town not only because I have roots here and it’s affordable, but also because it’s 20mins from the beach (but dear reader, I am a winter beach walker , and I don’t go in the water) and there’s no salt air here, which would be completely detrimental for my letterpress equipment. At the end of my street is a lagoon in a paddock and occasionally it attracts pelicans. And now pelicans have become my balloons.

I know, it’s a crap photo, but I was out this morning pulling up weeds and it took a moment to get my gardening gloves off and grab my phone out of my pocket and then find my moving target. For pelicans, in case you don’t know, can fly in a straight line if they want to, but more often they will flap for a while and then find a curling bit of wind and spiral with it. And then flap a bit more until they find the right spot again, then spiral – and this repeats, sometimes winding up, sometimes winding down. And that is magic to watch.

Today I stood and watched it spiral across the sky until it went out of sight. Last year sometime I sat on my front porch with my lovely mother and we watched a trio of pelicans spiral right across the sky in front of us. We were absolutely enchanted together, which is something we do well.

Another reason why I think pelicans are adorable is because they remind me of my maternal grandfather. It’s the shape of the head and the somber yet humorous gleam in the eye. They can be slightly scary in packs. One strong memory is watching my wee son walking around Melbourne Zoo in his Dorothy the Dinosaur hat, accompanied by a group of pelicans. He was delighted but also sensibly wary. He is a big hairy man now, but I think he’d still treat a group pelican encounter the same way.

The main problem with pelicans, unlike hot-air balloons, is that you can’t hear them coming. You don’t get that loud gas-burn blast that always made me run outside and/or look up as the balloons passed. Pelicans are more of a serendipitous find, which maybe makes them even more magical. Mind you, I look up a lot, especially when walking. In this town, there’s a moment at dusk when you can’t tell if the thing flying overhead is a bird or a bat. I really love that moment. It’s more common than the pelicans, because there’s a bat colony that lives in the wetlands around the lagoon.

In other news, I have finished my last academic commitment for the year (a paper for the next UK Artist Book Yearbook), and there’s no more trips away, so I can finally start spending sustained time in my letterpress studio. I have a long list of things to print that have been patiently waiting for ages, but there’s also still a lot of the unsexy sorting, cleaning and arranging to do… not so magical. But, it’s summer: there’s days and days and days.

 

[This was originally published on Substack on 2 November 2025]