'Surviving Australia' is the name of one of the galleries at Sydney's Australian Museum. It's packed with scary venomous spiders and snakes, things like sharks and crocodiles that eat you, stingers, biters and buzzy things, all the things the tourists love. And so do we!
It's been 20 years or so since I'd last explored the place, and it's come on quite nicely. There's still the classic galleries with the the fine collections of stuffed birds, insects, marsupials etc. There are skeletons galore, and of course dinosaurs. Menacing, noisy dinosaurs. Australian ones too these days. There are rocks, gemstones and meteorites.
A lot of work has gone into making things very accessible and exciting for kids and for tourists.
There's also a classy gallery on indigenous Australia, and intelligent displays on environmental degradation and extinctions.
I think an Australian Museum visit is a must for visitors with a few hours to spare and a wish to gain a good quick introduction to the country, and it should probably be on the agenda for all of us locals too now and again.
I say Cicada. Both pronunciations are in Macquarie's, of course. What the cicada is saying is "Let's get friendly", or similar. And in cicada language, that's an ear-piercing screeching drumming noise, and it's being said a lot around Sydney this summer.
Here's one I came across in the bush the other day. It had just moulted, and had emerged from its pupa state. It's an Orange Drummer cicada (Thopha colorata). Another abandoned cicada shell appeared on the wall at home the other day too. And a few years ago I came across a veritable army of shells marching up a tree trunk. (Actually I have to admit I remember rearranging them a bit for effect.)
In January 1991 there was a short, violent storm that swept through the suburb of Hornsby and wreaked havoc. Someone described that event on the radio this morning as a tornado, and given what happened there yesterday, he suggested there was a 'Tornado Alley' operating there.
When I searched the internet for the 1991 event, I found only the violent
storm, no mention of the word 'tornado', except that there was in fact a
tornado around then in Hornsby, Tennessee, and also one in Hornsby
Bend, Texas.
Anyway, let's go with this 'Tornado Alley'
idea. Our news media need to compete with the bigger and better
tornadoes that just killed several people in the US, and indeed the
massive typhoon last week in the Philippines, which killed thousands and
made millions homeless, and which is still the real natural disaster
story of the moment.
The
local media certainly made hay with our little tornado today. Hornsby
was crawling with camera crews this morning as I inspected the damage and the
clean-up operations. The reporter/camera operator from the ABC
distinguished himself by being particularly territorial towards me I
thought. Clearly jealous of the fine work being done by Sydney
Sapiential photographing the damaged cars in the station car park, he
rather rudely plonked his camera right in front of mine, and pretended I
wasn't there. (ABC, lift your game, you're dealing with the big boys
now!)
I'd just passed through Hornsby yesterday, and was on
my way down the Pacific Highway to Pymble when a bit before 3pm a there
was one of the fiercest downpours I've experienced. Visibility was
shocking, and the traffic slowed to a crawl, but there was no hint of any wind. When I first heard the news
of the collapsed roof at the Westfield shopping centre movie complex, I
assumed it was just due to a drain blockage and water build up. But
news trickled in about a swathe of damage - trees down, roofs wrecked,
cars upturned or squashed under other cars, and a demountable cabin at
the station, turned on its side with six people inside it.
It
turns out there was a 50m wide path of destruction, 2km long,
passing through central Hornsby via the shopping centre, the library,
the Hornsby Inn, the train station, and the TAFE campus. And it's been
officially declared by the Meteorology Bureau to have been a tornado,
rather than the 'possible mini-tornado' we were hearing about yesterday.
October and November bring not only jacaranda flowers. There's also Sculptures by the Sea. Regular as clockwork these days, and just as scenic.
You have to make your way to Bondi Beach and walk the kilometre or two along the clifftop walkway to Tamarama, via Marks Park. You encounter over a hundred fabulous sculptures, all with a message to tell.
Not that you'll always figure out what the message is. The poster of the iceberg, "coming to a beach near you" is presumably a comment on global warming. Lots of washed up things, transparent boats, and tents on rafts, all implying to me a comment on asylum seekers and their plight. There's a collection of beehives, with miniature human dwelling units inside. There's a skeleton cycling up a narrow beam with a boulder strapped to his back, likely to fall off the end when he completes his mission. There's a pretty blue whirly thing on Tamarama Beach, entitled 'Look at Me'.
There's a big circular collection of red or yellow 'swim between the flags' flags. But the central zone is all red flags for danger.
All self-explanatory, I thought. But lots of the other works would have benefitted from me purchasing the catalogue, I guess. Next year I'll do that, and I'll find the time to spend a whole
day there, or at least time it so I avoid the enormous crowds, schoolkids especially. It's been quite a success story, the Sculptures by the Sea. Check it out.
It's Jacaranda time in Sydney
again. Perhaps the most scenic time of the year. Mind you, it seems to
be coming a little earlier each year. I used to associate jacarandas
with November, maybe starting in late October. But this year the season
was underway right from the beginning of October. Winter was unusually
hot, and dry too. We've had very little rain for over three months.
You used to see a lot of
Illawarra flame trees planted alongside jacarandas. They made quite a
spectacular colour combination. The flame trees have a bit of a bad name
these days, what with invasive roots and irritating seeds, and I'm not
seeing so many. There again, maybe the jacarandas have got ahead of
themselves, and the flame trees will flower after they've gone.
This week my 'Famous Five' Thursday adventure bushwalking group took it on itself to explore some of the historic relics near Mt Victoria in the Blue Mountains. In particular, the 'Chert Incline', which had a short and inglorious career in the 1920s, bringing up chert from deep down below the cliffs, near the Fairy Bower Creek.
What's chert? Macquarie's says: A compact rock consisting essentially of cryptocrystalline quartz. Flintstone, incidentally, is a particular form of chert. The Mt Victoria chert was used as road metal. The company went bankrupt very quickly, maybe because it was such a big and ambitious engineering venture, as we were able to ascertain as we retraced the route of the cable railway.
Several local historians and other bushwalkers have taken an interest in rediscovering these relics recently, opening up ancient tracks through the steep, scrubby bushland, and identifying and marking bits and pieces of old iron, railway sleepers, steam engines and winding gear. We were doing our bit to further explore it all. And gee, it's a fabulous way to spend a day!
We continued on down into the Kanimbla Valley, and with a fair bit of our trademark trial and error, bushbashing and bravado, we put together a round-trip walk, that took us back up along the Reinits Pass track and up onto Pulpit Rock. Then a short walk through the streets to Mount Victoria.
It had been a hot and windy day. Fire danger had been high, and a fire had been burning for days near Lithgow. But that was a fair distance away. We'd kept an eye out for smoke, and had had our plan for dealing with any bushfire we encountered. (Our plan was to "Get down low and go, go, go"!) But we really weren't expecting anything along those lines to happen.
As we approached Mount Victoria station, however, where my car was parked, what did we see but big clouds of black smoke, and an advancing fire, only a few hundred metres away! We'd been blissfully unaware that since lunchtime the Blue Mountains fires had been raging away, dominating the national news, causing massive destruction and traffic chaos, and blackening skies all over the Sydney basin.. The Mount Victoria fire was one of the bad ones.
I literally ran to retrieve my car, and we got out of there quickly. Passing through Springwood we had a chance to see the plumes of smoke from what used to be Winmalee and Yellow Rock. Over 100 homes have been destroyed in this fire alone so far. And tomorrow the weather turns hot again.
Anything could happen in the next few days, both here and in the rest of New South Wales. The Lithgow fire (thought by some to have been started by an army live bombing practice exercise) has spread over a huge area, and may well destroy many of the Famous Five's very favourite bushwalking adventure grounds.
Sydney Morning Herald piece on the fires: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/more-than-100-homes-destroyed-conditions-set-to-worsen-20131018-2vshk.html
I reviewed the fleet the other day. Along with a few others, admittedly, I took my place on the walkway on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and on cue, in the warships steamed, single file, projecting their full might and power in a wonderful early twentieth century way. The Opera House and Fort Denison quaked in their boots and instantly surrendered.
It was the Fleet Review, and it celebrated the 100th anniversary of the arrival in Sydney Harbour of the original Royal Australian Navy's seven ships, all state-of-the-then-art vessels made in England.
I pronounced our navy fit and well and reasonably adequate to fight World War One again. I think that's what navies are for after all. Its ships tend to be made here these days, and cost far more than they should, and often don't work. But there are a lot more than seven of them these days, so some of them are always working.
In fact, seeing as they had also invited ships from China, Indonesia, the United States, Japan, and about a dozen other countries, to join in the fun and to party on with pageantry, fireworks, and fun galore, they could have even used the opportunity to fight World War Three while they were here.
The media coverage was all about the fabulousness of the spectacle and the super-eligibility of the redhead bachelor prince who was visiting, but there were comments from the less enamoured in the newspaper letters columns. About, for example, the irony of the extravagant expenditure at a time when the new Federal Government is banging on about 'budget black holes'. About the obscenity of said expenditure when the very navy we're celebrating is actually going to be tasked now mainly with just carrying out the dirty work of said new government, in repelling a small number of desperate refugees they make out we can't possibly support in our rich, comfortable country. Refugees mainly from wars we've been involved with, wars created to keep in business the poor old military-industrial complex that needs to keep building ships (and planes, bombs, and tanks and things) to keep the tired old system ticking over.
It would be nice if the world could work this all out for itself eventually, but it probably won't. So see you again in 100 years time!
About 20 years ago I happened on a very scenic little pool at the bottom of a small waterfall on a creek in Tasmania. I had just done a 'Taking Better Pictures' sort of photography course, and recognised the potential in the colours, shapes, and textures. I liked the resulting picture, and more importantly, the lady who ran the photo printing booth in the local K-Mart was over the moon about it.
In those days you viewed photos on pieces of paper, called prints. Your camera used rolls of
film, and you had to take said rolls to K-Mart or elsewhere to get the
pictures developed and printed. The people there made more money if they
could persuade people to get enlargements made, and my lady used
examples of customers' work, enlarged to various degress, stuck on the
wall behind her, to illustrate what you could get and what it would
cost. I was flattered and delighted when she asked whether my shot could
be her new demonstration image. It was there for several years.
The other day, walking in the
Budawangs, I came across another Pool of Photography, one to rival that
earlier Tasmanian one. So I got to work again. Here are the results.
It's been 20 years or so since I'd last explored the place, and it's come on quite nicely. There's still the classic galleries with the the fine collections of stuffed birds, insects, marsupials etc. There are skeletons galore, and of course dinosaurs. Menacing, noisy dinosaurs. Australian ones too these days. There are rocks, gemstones and meteorites.
A lot of work has gone into making things very accessible and exciting for kids and for tourists. 
There's also a classy gallery on indigenous Australia, and intelligent displays on environmental degradation and extinctions.
I think an Australian Museum visit is a must for visitors with a few hours to spare and a wish to gain a good quick introduction to the country, and it should probably be on the agenda for all of us locals too now and again.
