Leafy visitor

July 28, 2010

I’d just cut back the woody stems of the verandah vines — the ornamental grape and the wisteria. A scattering of brown tendrils and dry curling leaves had landed on the verandah and I began to sweep them off. Only, one decided it didn’t want to be swept and began lurching away. It was so delicate [...]

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Drying out

July 24, 2010

It had rained for days, and when it wasn’t raining it was damp and grey and cold. Miserable, in fact. The hillsides were oozing and the track was a running stream. But just as dry firewood was becoming a concern, this day threw a final heavy shower at the mountain and then the sun came [...]

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Wallabies at home

July 21, 2010

The wallabies took very little time to adjust to my moving back in to their domain. There are lots of mothers carrying young in pouches. Some of the joeys are very small and pink, and some, like this one, are really too big. It is so cramped in that low-hanging pouch that you can see [...]

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Return to Wallaby World

July 17, 2010

Home on the mountain at last, I was greeted by a heavily pruned garden ruled by wallabies. Of course it was lovely to see the wallabies, but… they have been eating plants I had never expected to appeal to their taste buds. Strongly aromatic plants like rosemary and lavender have been stripped, and are regularly [...]

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Gippsland the varied — part 2

July 14, 2010

Travelling home after two months on the road, for once I chose to be kind to myself, to unwind slowly and not to let time pressures make me rush past all the interesting turnoffs — as usually happened. Gippsland’s Wilderness Coast is somewhere I definitely want to return to, in another winter, with weeks to [...]

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Magical Mallacoota

July 10, 2010

It was just on dusk when I reached Mallacoota, 23 km east of the highway. A stunningly beautiful spot, and quite a large village, but, as I discovered when I drove to the inlet foreshore, its population must explode in summer. What I thought was just a pleasantly green and tree-edged park proved to be [...]

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Gippsland the varied — part 1

July 7, 2010

I discovered that Victoria’s Gippsland region, while small by the standards of bigger states, is vastly varied.  I had stayed at Mirboo North, with the extremely generous and helpful Kate Jackson and Phil Piper, who had welcomed me, sight unseen. As I left on a frosty morning, with a chilled mist in the air, the rolling [...]

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Man-made murk

July 4, 2010

Once the fog had lifted from the Latrobe Valley, the old Hazelwood Power Station near Morwell showed the true colour of its emissions — brown. Of course the real toxic output of such an outmoded technology — CO2 — is colourless, and all the more insidious for being invisible and thus unacted upon. Hazelwood produces [...]

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Coal-powered clouds

June 30, 2010

Victoria’s Latrobe Valley is the state’s powerhouse, burning their abundant brown coal for 85% of that state’s electricity. I knew that, but until I went there and stayed to see it in different weather conditions and times of day, I didn’t know it made its own cloudscapes. The eight little dots creating this amazing, yearning [...]

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Macedon mists and cool crafts

June 27, 2010

I like the mystery of mist, of fog, of cloud that comes down to join the land. But as a rarity, not a norm. The Macedon area in Victoria is on a high plain, about 700 metres up, above which rise its ranges. ‘Naturally cool’ is the shire slogan. And it is, on many levels. [...]

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An old garden’s treasures

June 23, 2010

The quaint Rosebank cottage where I stayed ( courtesy of Mary Delahunty and the Victorian Writers’ Centre) was surrounded by introduced trees and garden plants – and did have a bank of roses. The king of the garden was this giant oak, whose bark was dappled blue with lichen and whose branches reached 15 metres [...]

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Victorian gold

June 19, 2010

At Devonport, waiting to board the night boat, Tasmania farewelled me with rain, as it had greeted me a fortnight before, then withdrew its forces to the now familiar lowering dark clouds over its mountains — and turned on a perfect double rainbow. Day or night, Tasmania, your wild skies have won me. In the [...]

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