Please come and visit us during the Strawberries & Cherries Weekend – it is a great festival.  The Cottage and Forge will be open until 4.00pm each day.

We are joining with the Bacchus Marsh Flower and Garden Show and opening our Cottage garden on Sunday, 29th October 2017 between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm.  Please join us in our little garden.  Inside the Cottage, embroidered floral pieces will be on display, while in the Bookbarn (the Forge next door) you will see a printed history of the Bacchus Marsh Horticultural and Agricultural Show dating from 1867.  Plenty of news articles to create the...

We hope you won’t mind but we have decided to cancel our scheduled Open Day in the Cottage on Sunday, 13 August 2017.  Over the winter months, we have been working to present the Cottage to you in a more organised way – quite a bit of work is underway, more than we had anticipated.  Please pencil in your calendar “Sunday, 17th September 2017, 12 noon to 4.00 pm” – our next Open Day.  We’ll be looking forward...

  Late last month, on Sunday, 21 May 2017, we celebrated 25 years of our volunteers keeping the memory of the Blacksmith alive at our site in Bacchus Marsh.  A very enjoyable afternoon tea followed our special guest, Barbara Manly, a direct descendant of Thomas Manly, one of the blacksmiths who, in 1850, continued the business set up by Vere Quaile.  Members of the original Committee of Management were on hand to plant a tree to commemorate the...

  Once again, we are part of the Australian Heritage Festival.  Come and visit the Blacksmith’s Cottage and Forge – step back into the past when the ‘smithy was a going concern and the ‘smithy’s family lived in the adjoining Cottage.  In 2009 our Committee undertook an Oral History project, recording the voices of some of the district’s farming pioneers of the early 20th century, when the horse was the main...