Photo Gallery

The new window dining area with our branding on the drinks fridge.  We are pleased with how it looks.

A glimpse of the booths from the front window.

Putting the colour-reversable booths back in place.  They are designed so that sitting in an orange booth you look at a green booth.

The Booths are Back in Town!

Welcome to the Blue Bird Cafe, Lockhart, open again in 2013.

After some restoration work the new retro floor looks good and there is an ice cream lounge ready to serve traditional scoops again.

Like old fashioned milkshakes, spiders, sundaes and banana splits with home made sauces and toppings.

The original milk bar was decommissioned around 2002 and suffered chemical damage.  It has been a project to restore it to working condition so that we can serve icy cold Orange Crush from the new refrigerated tubs.

The soda fountains are another major project.  We want these to be working again serving soda to mix with traditional cordials like the old days of Hume Cordials.

We've added a bit of a retro lounge where customers can relax over coffee or while choosing a book from our bookshop.  There is also a wall of old photographs and a growing collection of milk bar collectibles.

We are turning back the clock to the days when the syrups were home made and scooped out of the containers in the bar.  Icy cold Orange Crush is our nod to the famous Veneris Orange Ale which was stored in the freezer barrels.

 Here I am scooping ice cream out of the milk bar for the first time in maybe 20 years with the newly restored milk bar up and running in time for the Spirit of the Land Festival 2013.

The milk bar in action serving ice creams at one end and coffees at the other.  We still use the old Haros machine because it looks retro and adds to the ambiance and because it does its job well....which is steaming milk.  It means that the espresso machine gets to concentrate on making the coffee.

The cafe used to make sodas using Hume Cordials, the local ice and cordial manufacturers.  We found a number of old bottle caps under the milk bar during the excavation that happened before the restoration.  We decided to find out more about Hume and as a result now have a growing collection of bottle caps, old bottles and labels.

The Blue Bird is a great spot for classic and vintage car clubs to stop for a break.  Lockhart is also a popular destination for motorcycle tourists and caravan nomads.

Serving refreshments at the Spirit of the Land Festival in October 2012.  We had moved to Lockhart two days before the festival.  We got stuck into the restoration project straight away.