Home & Kitchen · 4 days ago · By Jodie Maclean

“My Hands Won’t Let Me Paint the Stripes Anymore.” Why a 73-year-old grandmother from the Murray is selling her last hand-painted watermelon bowls at a special price

For 46 summers, Merrilyn Haddow’s husband grew watermelons on the Murray outside Robinvale, Victoria. After he was gone, she made a bowl that looked like one of his melons, and her six grandkids started emptying it before tea. Now the arthritis in her hands has made the decision for her: on 30 November she closes her pottery shed for good. Fewer than 200 bowls are left.

The packing shed still smells a little like melons. For forty-six summers, this is where Lindsay Haddow sorted, stacked and loaded the watermelons from forty hectares of sandy river country on the Murray, and where every grandkid in the family learned to knock on a melon and listen for the hollow sound.

Lindsay has been gone since February 2024. The old melon bins are shelves now. And on them, in neat rows, sit small ceramic bowls painted like watermelon halves, each with a zigzag rim and six little coloured balls perched on the points.

Merrilyn Haddow picks one up and pulls the blue ball. A thin steel fork slides out of the rim. She spears a grape with it and hands it over.

“That’s Harrison’s,” she says. “Don’t tell him I let you use it.”

Forty-six summers of melons

Merrilyn is 73. She married Lindsay in 1972, the year she turned nineteen, and in 1978 they put in their first melons on the block his father had run sheep on. Robinvale sits on a bend of the Murray where the sandy soil and the long hot summers suit melons, and the Haddows did their share: truckloads of red melons for the markets in Melbourne and Adelaide every January, and every year one long row of yellow-fleshed melons that never went on a truck at all.

“That row was for the grandkids,” Merrilyn says. “He called it the secret row. They’d sit on the back of the ute with the salt shaker and eat yellow watermelon until their shirts were ruined.”

Merrilyn has been throwing pots for more than twenty years, first at a night class at the neighbourhood house, then on a second-hand wheel Lindsay bought her for their thirtieth anniversary. Mugs, pie dishes, the odd lamp base for the school fete. Nothing she ever sold for more than petrol money.

When Lindsay got sick, the block was leased out. After the funeral, she moved her wheel and her little kiln into the empty packing shed. “I couldn’t stand the quiet in the house,” she says. “Out here I could hear the trucks on the highway and pretend.”

That first summer without him, the grandkids still came on Sundays. There are six of them, from Brooke, who is 24, down to Harrison, who was six. Merrilyn did what she had always done: she cut up fruit, put it in a plastic container and stuck it in the fridge.

“And there it sat,” she says. “They’d open the fridge, look straight past it and grab a packet of chips. By Wednesday I was chucking out mushy rockmelon. Every single week.”

It isn’t only her grandkids. Fewer than half of Australian adults eat the recommended two serves of fruit a day. Most of it, Merrilyn reckons, isn’t being refused. It’s being forgotten behind the pickles.

A bowl that looked like Pop’s melons

The idea came that December, while she was trimming pie dishes for Christmas. “I thought, those kids never walked past one of Lindsay’s melons in their lives. Not once. What if the bowl looked like one?”

She threw a small, round bowl about the size of half a rockmelon and, while the clay was still soft, cut the rim into a zigzag with the same paring knife Lindsay used to cut melons at the kitchen sink. She painted the outside lime green with dark green stripes, a thin white band along the edge for the rind, and the inside red with little black seeds.

Then she sorted out the other problem. “Nobody ever had a fork,” she says. “They’d eat with their fingers and drip on the couch, or go digging in the drawer and get distracted.” So before the first firing she pushed a narrow hole down into each of the six points. After the glaze firing, a little stainless steel fruit pick with a coloured ball on top slides into each one. Six points, six picks, six grandkids. Each one got a colour.

Christmas Day, 2024

It was 38 degrees on Christmas morning. She set the bowl on the kitchen bench, filled it with cherries, mango and the first watermelon of the season, and didn’t say a word.

Harrison found it first. He pulled the blue ball, saw the fork come out and yelled, “This one’s MINE.” Within a minute every grandkid had claimed a colour. Brooke took pink. The bowl was empty before the prawns were on the table, and Merrilyn refilled it twice.

“Twenty years I begged them to eat fruit,” she says. “And a bowl did it in one afternoon. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be insulted.”

By autumn, the bowl lived on the bench for good. Brooke’s mum asked for one for her own kitchen. So did the minister’s wife. Then a neighbour wanted one with a yellow inside, “like the secret row,” and Merrilyn made that, too.

What makes Merrilyn’s bowl work

There is no trick to it, and Merrilyn won’t pretend there is. “It’s a bowl,” she says. “It’s not going to make anybody eat broccoli.”

What it does is three simple things. It gets the fruit out of the fridge and onto the bench or the table, where people actually see it. It looks like something you want to reach into. And it brings its own forks, kept right in the rim, so nobody has to go looking for one and nobody eats with sticky fingers.

Grown-ups like it for the same reason. At a barbecue or a card afternoon, everyone pulls a pick and keeps it, so there are no fingers in the grapes and no toothpicks all over the table. Merrilyn’s CWA branch now uses two of them for cheese cubes and olives.

She is honest about the size, too. The bowl is about 17.5 centimetres across and 9.5 centimetres tall. “It’s a snack bowl, not a salad bowl,” she says. “A good bunch of grapes, or a mango and a handful of cherries cut up. Enough for the kids before tea. Then you fill it again.”

She is just as fussy about the picks. She uses stainless steel ones with small two-pronged tips, because cheap plastic picks snap and wooden ones go furry. “They’re little forks with a point,” she adds. “Fine for big kids and grown-ups. I wouldn’t give one to a toddler.”

A queue at the local show

In March 2025, Merrilyn took forty bowls to a trestle table at the local show, mostly because Brooke dared her to. They were gone before lunch.

This March she brought a hundred and sixty, and a woman from Bendigo bought nine at once for her grandkids. “She said, ‘I am not having them fight over colours at my place,’” Merrilyn laughs. “I told her, love, that’s half the fun.”

Visitors took the bowls home to Melbourne, Adelaide and Mildura and wrote asking for more. For a while Merrilyn posted parcels from the Robinvale post office every Tuesday. There was no website. There was a spiral notebook and a lot of stamps. This spring Brooke, who now looks after the orders, finally put the bowls online.

The bowls come in two versions, both with the same green-striped rind and the same six picks: Crimson Red, painted like the red melons Lindsay trucked to Melbourne every January, and Golden Yellow, for the secret row.

“The yellow ones always go first,” Merrilyn says. “People reckon I made them up. I tell them, you just never got invited to the right farm.”

Why these are the last ones

Every bowl takes Merrilyn the best part of a week from start to finish: thrown on the wheel, trimmed, cut, pierced, dried, fired, painted stripe by stripe, glazed and fired again. Then each pick is fitted to its point by hand so it slides in snug and doesn’t rattle.

At 73, her hands have made the decision for her. Arthritis has been creeping into her knuckles for years, and this summer it reached her right hand, the one that holds the brush. “The long stripes are the problem,” she says. “By the third bowl my fingers swell up so badly I can’t close them around the brush. I sit there with ice on my hand and look at the bowls I haven’t painted yet.” And by December that tin shed is an oven anyway.

Her doctor told her what she already knew: rest the hand or lose it. So this spring’s firing is her last. On 30 November she is closing the shed, and Brooke will keep posting what’s left of the final batch until it runs out. Right now that is 187 bowls.

For the last batch she has set one price: A$69 a bowl with all six picks, instead of the A$129 she charged at the show. “I didn’t make these to get rich,” she says. “I made them so kids would eat a grape. I want them on kitchen benches and on the table for Christmas lunch. Half the people at the show bought them for their grandkids anyway.”

The shed closes on 30 November. After that, what’s left of the last batch is posted until it’s gone, and there won’t be another one.

What families are saying

Where to get one of Merrilyn’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Merrilyn’s own little shop, which Brooke runs from her kitchen table in Mildura. No shop stocks them, and there won’t be another batch like this one.

“After the thirtieth, I’m done,” Merrilyn says. “If there are a few left at Christmas, Brooke will keep posting them. But I’m not making any more.”

Payment and shipping: The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand with its six picks in place and dispatched within 1 to 2 business days. Every order comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

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