Australia – Page 41

Cabbages …

The subdued early light shows off the plumage of this heron to perfection.

Today we wake in the Lake Tyers Forest Park. Tonight we will be in Merimbula. The population density in the intervening country could easily be the lowest in coastal south east Australia. We will be passing some of my favorite places, the Croajingalong and Ben Boyd National Parks. These are denied to us today because we have the dog.

One spot than we can visit is the Cabbage Tree Flora Reserve. Baron Ferdinand Jakob Heinrich von Muller is credited with discovering this isolated pocket of palms in 1854. It is said to be the only patch in Victoria and it is the most southerly occurrence of any Australian native palm.

They grow quite tall, 20+ metres, along the creek surrounded by the wet forest .

As well as being scenically splendid this place is usually a birding hot spot. Not this day, the only creatures flying around were the mosquitoes.

The next port of call was Eden, watch out for the snakes, the first place of note in New South Wales. There is an old joke about spending a week in Adelaide one Sunday, you can do it in a Saturday afternoon in Eden. It does, though, have a very fine harbour.

We arrived in Merimbula just in time to catch the sunset.

A Jaunt to the East …

Living in western Victoria there is some splendid countryside in easy reach but it’s nice occasionally to have a little variety. My home is just on the inland side of the Great Dividing Range. Great it is, but in length rather than height. It sweeps off to the east and then heads north. Its highest point is in southeastern New South Wales at Mount Kosciuszko which stands 2,228 metres (7,310 ft) tall. From there it continues north to the tip of Cape York in Queensland. It’s total length exceeds 3,500 kilometres (2,175 miles).

Whereas my part of the world is pretty dry, the Great Dividing Range catches a lot of rain. East of Melbourne, especially, it supports a lot of forest and that means a very different suite of birds.

I took the wife, the dog and my trusty camper trailer and spent a few days making a circuit of South East Australia.

We spent a couple of days in Melbourne at each end of the trip, in between we covered about 1400km in five days.

On day one we stopped for lunch in Sale. At a picnic spot by the lake the local avifauna consisted of an unruly mob of mostly rejected pets. They were quite happy to provide a close encounter so I sat down with a little bread and tried for a wide-angle close-up. It was hard getting them to pose nicely, their manners were appalling …

Whilst this guy was peering down at me I noticed that there were some much better behaved ducks on the water. Just a few feet away there were half a dozen Freckled Duck , not at least interested in the feeding frenzy nor all that bothered by my presence. They are Australia’s rarest waterfowl. A photo opportunity not to be missed …

Our camp site that night would be in the Lake Tyers Forest Park. A beautiful spot where the dog is legal and so is a campfire.

There are several designated camp sites reached by Tyers House Road just east of Nowa Nowa.It was a crisp and starry night.

Beaumaris …

No kangaroos this morning, I’m in the big city.

Yesterday I took the dog for a walk along the Beaumaris cliff top from the Motor Yacht Squadron to Table Rock. For the uninitiated this is a Melbourne suburb south east of the city on the edge of Port Phillip Bay.

The cliff is a deep red and way below our feet is …

Australia’s single richest marine animal fossil site, spanning the last 5 million to 10 million years of Earth’s history …

… The fossils paint a vivid picture of life below a sea that once covered parts of Melbourne. They comprise remains of ancient whales, seals, dolphins, sharks, fishes and sea birds, crabs, shells, corals and sea urchins.

An added distinction of Beaumaris is that it is one of the only sites known in Australia where we find evidence of our ancient land mammals in rocks formed in the shallows of an ancient bay.

As land animals died, their carcasses were washed out to sea by what was an ancestral Yarra River. This co-occurrence of land and marine animals is world famous, enabling precise dating of the evolution of Australia’s unique marsupial fauna.

The Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron has already covered a part of this site, public land of inestimable value, with a carpark and would like to develop a commercial marina. Enriching for them, impoverishing for a landscape that inspired a couple of generations of Australian painters. Let’s hope the council has the wit to deny them that opportunity.

On the journey we pass a sign …

‘At this site in the summer of 1886 the artists Tom Roberts and

Frederick McCubbin first met Arthur Streeton. Together with Charles Conder these men were the founders of the Heidelberg School.’

Fine art has been made at virtually every lookout on the way, not only by Roberts, McCubbin, Streeton and Condor but also by John Perceval, Alfred Coleman, Clarice Beckett and many less famous artists. You can find more detail <HERE>.

It’s a place that has managed to retain a bit of bush and a little wildness despite the proximity of a busy road. For me it offers a chance to enjoy some of the local birds. I shot all of these within 45 minutes with the dog waiting patiently at my side …

Kangaroo …

I woke up this morning to find a bunch of Eastern Grey Kangaroos at the back door. They were gone in a flash but I found this one again a little later and she was a little slower to flee …

Joey is getting a bit big for riding around in the pouch, the style is typically untidy. It is probably sharing the accommodation with a much smaller sibling fastened on a teat and there may be another sibling in utero in a state known as embryonic diapause.

Despite the heavy load, when it’s time to go it’s time to go …

By the light …

The moon slipped over the horizon at 5.17 this morning but before it went …

Pigeon pie …

The capture was reported to quarantine services and the bird was removed by Department of Agriculture officials.

The bird in question was a Nicobar Pigeon, The Australian reports …

If the extinct dodo was dumb, its closest relative the Nicobar pigeon may be considered adventurous, after one of the birds native to South East Asia and the South Pacific was found in Western Australia’s north.

The indigenous Bardi Jawi rangers first spotted the colourful, near endangered bird last month at Chile Creek on the Dampier Peninsula in the Kimberley region – far from its usual habitat between India and the Solomon Islands.

Senior ranger Kevin George said there were many sightings of the bright bird before it was captured at a One Arm Point front yard earlier this week.

This is a species that is mostly found on islands but does visit adjacent mainland coasts. It is found in Timor and New Guinea. The article gives the impression that it has made a huge journey to get here – it ain’t necessarily so. Timor is about 600 km north of the Dampier Peninsula and the crossing is made easier by the Islands of Ashmore Reef , directly on route.

Australia is a part time home to dozens of migratory species that cross the sea to our north. If the Department of Agriculture is going to collect them all they’re going to be very busy.

So why “collect” this one.

The Nicobar Pigeon is classified as Near Threatened by the IUCN.

Waterfalls on the Wannon …

I’ve been having a bit of a run around western Victoria and one of the highlights has been a visit to a couple of waterfalls on the Wannon River. They’re about 9km apart 16 km west of Hamilton and they’re well signposted off the Hamilton to Mt Gambier Road (B160). You can camp in the Wannon Falls Scenic Reserve.

The Wannon arises in the Grampians beneath Mt Abrupt and flows into the Glenelg River which reaches the sea in the far west of Victoria.

The geology of the falls is quite different. The Wannon Falls tumble over a hard lava bed between 1 and 2 million years old lying on top of softer rock. It’s a single drop of 30 metres into a plunge pool.

The Nigretta Falls tumble from shelf to shelf on much older rock (~400 million years) that is hard from top to bottom making it rather more spectacular to watch.

Silo Art Trail update …

Way out west in the Wimmera the latest instalment in the silo art trail is taking shape.

This is a work in progress in the heart of Rupanyup – you know how to pronounce that, don’t you? If not you can find instructions <HERE>.

Summer slips over the horizon …

As I’ve been driving home of an evening in recent weeks I have been aware that the sun has been setting a little further north on the western horizon each day. One day, in the not too distant future, it would set right at the end of a local road framed at the end of an avenue of trees. Imagine it right in here …

I pulled up The Photographer’s Ephemeris and wound on the clock until April 5 at 6:15 pm. I use this photographer’s aid with some trepidation. Just as certainly as the sun and moon will rise and set at a certain place and time so it is certain that clouds will obscure the event. At least it seems that way. None the less I was there. The sky was partly cloudy. I had chosen my camera position in advance but a couple of hundred metres east of that I saw that the sun was spotlighting a bridge quite beautifully and thought that, even if I got nothing else, this would be a photo. Just to put the icing on the cake a car drove past at a very convenient moment …

Having captured that it was time to see if my plan would come to fruition …

The Silo Art Trail …

Happy New Year everyone, may it be a good one.

In January last year I stumbled on the recently painted silo in Brim, a small town in north-western Victoria. I wrote about it in a post entitled A Tale of Two Cities.

It proved a remarkable success and a major disruption to traffic for a while. By June it had spawned the idea of an art trail to attract tourists to a part of the state that is in need of a little love.

Poor old Patchewollock with its boarded up general store was the next town to receive an artistic baptism …

… by October Fintan Magee was hard at work painting a portrait of local man Nick Hulland.

If you’re tempted to take up silo painting have a look at Fintan in action in a series of slides from the Wimmera Mail-Times.

Sheep Hills doesn’t have a boarded up general store or even a working store but it does have a silo which is now beautifully painted by Melbourne street artist Adnate. The portraits are of local indigenous people.

And here’s the original at Brim …

Still my favorite.

There are some great photos of the silos at Leanne Cole’s Site.

Three more silos are on the drawing board at Rupanyup (starting in March), Lascelles and Rosebery.

The proper pronunciation of Rupanyup is not obvious. Start with the last syllable, forget the u and say Yip. Now for the middle syllable, forget the a and say pun. Put those together Punyip with the emphasis on the pun. Precede that with the Re from republic and you will be able to ask directions to … Re-punyip. It’s about 300km from Melbourne. No good asking directions until you get closer.

Sheep Hills is a little off the main road.

The only large(ish) town on the route is Warracknabeal. There is a road house on the highway, shops and accommodation can be found in town.