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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For so long, it seems, we have had dry mornings. Sometimes cold and sometimes not, but never dewy and certainly not shrouded in white wetness like my favourite wake-up sight: Cloudland. I’ve been missing them. As I returned from a walk up the hill to release the bush rat from my live trap (he’s destroying [...]
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There is always something grand about the skyscapes of Victoria’s wide open spaces. I can remember being struck by them on my first trip to the state, back in 1978. This dramatic beauty (above) was offered to me early on a very windy morning, on higher ground about 5km from Bacchus Marsh. And yet, back [...]
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With much on my mind re this coal book, the ongoing issues and the ensuing talks and tours, I am up early to start work. One recent benefit of this — apart from stopping my kaleidoscope brain from its pointless shuffling — was that I caught the moon on its way to bed, full and [...]
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I have been so involved in my coal book and the ongoing issues it deals with that I have hardly had time to leave the cabin — except to charge the laptop in the camper! And, by the way, my 18-year-old batteries are OK. It’s the inverter that’s given up. Unfortunately BP don’t make solar [...]
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When I wake up to a white world it’s not usually because it has snowed — although that has happened — but because a cloud has decided to descend and join me, poor earthbound being that I am. At such times the only bright colour is in close things, seen sans veil of finest white [...]
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I look up as often as down, on the alert for the surprises that my surroundings so frequently have to offer me. Thankfully the sky is ever changing; I agree with the Cloud Appreciation Society who ‘pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’, since ‘Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony [...]
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By day the weather has been wild and windy, making my escarpment edge trees roar like jet planes as they whip and whirl under the onslaught — and protecting my clearing. Early morning, it can be quiet, but ominous. ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning…’ And while there’s been no rain, the sky [...]
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Moisture, light and air — nothing substantial, and yet what they create when they combine can be magical and memorable. The wind-teased clouds in this sky made a grand if fuzzy-headed bird, tail feathers trailing, gliding like an eagle overhead, intently watching the earth below. A perfectly still, dewy early morning, when clouds hug the [...]
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I like a painting where there’s a focus for the eye but also depths and secrets, possibilities that keep you looking and musing, even if it’s hanging on your wall for years. My skyscape canvas is not as vast as out in plains country but the mountains create more varied layers of clouds. This is [...]
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You may have noticed that I am fascinated by what’s above me as much as by what’s down here on my lowly level. Early morning curry-combed clean bright clouds greeted me the other day; I dare to think I have identified them as the mid-level clouds, Altocumulus stratiformis undulatus — nearly parallel lines of cloudlets [...]
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A storm-bent early morning, when pewter clouds fill the western horizon and no scrap of blue to be seen. The sun climbs over my eastern treeline and switches on the spotlight, and the contrast between the suddenly vivid green moptops of the gum trees and that heavy background sky sends me running for the camera. [...]
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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.
