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 [...]
{ 0 comments }
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 [...]
{ 2 comments }
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 [...]
{ 0 comments }
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 [...]
{ 0 comments }
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 [...]
{ 0 comments }
Each summer these powerful plants re-shoot, sending up thick stems metres into the air in a race to the roof with the Glory Vine. I do have to tie them to the verandah railings before they become top heavy, as dozens of burgundy pods explode into these elegant blooms. Beautiful as they are in cream [...]
{ 0 comments }
The walk at Lees’ Pinch Lookout in the Goulburn River National Park is only an 800m round trip. At this time of year there were more native flowers blooming than I’d see in most gardens. Fantastic rocks and sinuous young, whitely unscribbled-on Scribbly Gums formed the settings. Yellow predominated, but apart from the simple open [...]
{ 2 comments }
It’s still as cold as winter of a morning, but the irises are heading skywards for summer. The most proudly regal flower I know, their fistfuls of blue-green broadspears of leaves were lately joined by tall spikes of tightly furled buds, and now the topmost of these are opening. They droop their lower lips and [...]
{ 0 comments }
Whilst I live in the middle of 165 acres of natural bushland, a huge ‘native garden’, I appreciate my small pocket of exotic botanica, introduced plants that don’t want to go walkabout. From my desk I am treated all day to the ethereal beauty of the white wisteria on the verandah, flowering for the second [...]
{ 2 comments }
My stone fruit trees agree with the snakes; they reckon it’s Spring. The apricot declared it first, prematurely, and lost most of the blossoms in a rainy spell. Of them all, my favourite is the Santa Rosa plum’s simple white blossoms, their stamens topped with gold, and set in softest green. The bees like them [...]
{ 0 comments }
The dreary grey-greens and browns of the Australian bush did not appeal to many early settlers, used to soft bright English and Irish greens. As with many of our flowers, you need to be up close — and unblinkered — to see just how varied and colourful our trees are. My indigenous rainforest trees have [...]
{ 2 comments }
The small details of the plant world often make me wish I’d become a botanist. In my day, if they were ‘going on’ after high school, girls did nursing or teaching — to tide them over until they got married. I have been unable to decide whether, had I been born later, I’d have studied botany [...]
{ 2 comments }
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.
