After a few weeks away, I was keen for the rainy days to end so I could walk about and see what had changed since Autumn had become Winter. And at 8ºC on the verandah, Winter it sure was. A sunny day, the wallabies busily stripping my shrubs as usual, revealed that some of my [...]
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I am wallowing in the daily delights of my mountain, after too long away. Tassie is a permanent seductress for me, but so is home. Even the wet days have been a treat, as I am snug and warm in the cabin, with the slow combustion fire on and banked right down. The mud brick [...]
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Looking out of my eastern window, I was struck by how perfectly the colours of the fur of the Eastern Red-necked Wallaby match those of the local rocks, here laid as a tank base. They really belong. Not three metres away I spotted an echidna; not so camouflaged in my yard, but good to see [...]
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I’m loving being home for a spell, especially as the weather is so beautifully verging on Autumn. Here it’s green and fresh and clear and the wallabies and I are fully appreciating it! All the ‘garden’ trees, like the Chinese Tallow Tree, look happy. For some reason the Lemon Ti-Tree is only flowering on one of [...]
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I haven’t been down close to my small dam, my waterlily world, for months, mainly because I usually come across a red-bellied black snake there. I’d only looked from a distance, as when the White-necked Heron came. Today I took the camera and went there on purpose, to see how the lilies were growing and [...]
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Some mornings when we have been inside a cloud, as it rises it leaves us lightly damp and not yet sunlit, but the valleys below me are bright. I imagine the wallaby inhabitants down there looking up to see the cloud cap lifting off my mountain. I can also imagine that my tree-rimmed clearing is [...]
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After almost two weeks away, I am greatly relieved to be back here on my mountain. Woodford was a visual and auditory overload, so back home I am appreciating small details once again, like the vines that wind their way up any handy prop. It is the silence I most appreciate, just a wind whisper [...]
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In any given day here I can be offered small moments of splendour or surprise. One day last week I had three. It began with a shining morning, where the low early sun set the leaves on trees and shrubs and even the bracken ferns to sparkle and dazzle. A solitary wallaby sat amongst the [...]
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I have always loved seeing the Jacky Lizards here, but the other day, for the first time in over 30 years, I saw a different Dragon lizard on my place. It was bigger, with a different head and different colouring. It looked even more prehistoric than my Jacky, not really able to called ‘cute’ at [...]
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Having been away from the mountain for a few weeks with the latest book tour means that I was prepared for the worst, like bush fires, or trees blown down and across the track, when I returned. I wasn’t prepared for the best, which is what I found. The winter jonquils were finished, but Spring had [...]
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After almost a month away, I half-expected the critters to have taken over the last bit left to me, the cabin. They hadn’t, really — just the usual antechinus invasion, persistent but not escalated. The verandah wasn’t so lucky. The spiders had tied the cane chair to my dad’s coffee table, with a densely woven [...]
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A little over a week ago I was home on the mountain watching the morning sunlight stream through my damp green forest, marvelling and grateful as always. I am now in so foreign a landscape as to seem like another planet. On Thursday night, after speaking in Barcaldine, I followed my hosts’ dust cloud through [...]
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Here's the cover of my new book — Rich Land, Wasteland — How coal is killing Australia — which is now in bookshops.
A candid meander through my life up here on my remote mountain wildlife refuge, answering the oft-asked question 'Why do you live way out there?'
Stories about the wild things who allow me to share their living space — and a plea to look after them before it's too late.
