Usually cats and moderately-sized bodies of water are mortal enemies, however in this case, there is a connection.

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

The delightful Bernie and his wife Lyn came in to the centre a couple of weekends ago with quite a curly one: Bernie used to drive trams across the Princes Bridge during the 70s and remembered an unusual wind-powered fountain that used to stand at the southern end of the bridge that is no longer there. Bernie just wanted to know what it was called. Bernie had done a fair bit of research himself and for the life of him couldn't find out the name of this fountain or any information at all about what had happened to it. It was like it had never existed. Could we? My curiosity was piqued. You can't just completely wipe a fountain from the pages of history. I started to look into it. I found frustratingly little. Then Jo's curiosity was piqued. There must be some mention of it somewhere. She started to look into it. Well...

For at least the next half hour, between the two of us, there was frantic Googling, there was Encyclopedia-of-Melbourne reading, there was phoning of the Arts Centre and getting their people on to it, there was negotiations with the State Library and getting their people on to it, there was investigations into the City of Melbourne about a certain Snowden Gardens in which said fountain may or may not have stood (turned out to be a red herring of sorts), there was essentially a collaborative research project across the main bodies of Arts Victoria, and then finally we (yep, us) stumbled across a history of the construction of the Arts Centre that mentioned the demolition of one 'Southgate Fountain' to make way for the spire.

When the picture finally came up on the screen and we said to Bernie "Is this is?", there was shock, there was disbelief, there was awe, and there was a "Yes". Research win.

Bernie and Lyn waited while I phoned Margaret at the Arts Centre back to let her know too, as promised.

And the cat? Unrelated to the fountain (fortunately for the cat), but did appear on the front of the very nice thank you card we received from Bernie and Lyn for our persistence.

 Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria

Photo: Meg Lomax  Source: Museum Victoria