Fred Baker 
These two Laughing Kookaburras decided to share my occasional bird feeder.
Not that they were interested in birdseed, but it made a good vantage point for wormwatching.
They weren’t into team diving, however, and they wouldn’t have shared the worm.
Probably siblings from one of the large kookaburra family tribes on my place, they’d be used to helping feed younger brothers or sisters, so maybe they were hunting to take back to the nest.
No, that’s not fly dirt on the picture — it’s the pair of wedge-tailed eagles who lord it over the upper skies here, and have done for the 30 years I’ve been here. They usually have a third in tow, their young one.
They cruise so high up it’s amazing they can spot anything down here on the ground. Their eyesight is equal to ours when using binoculars with 20 times magnification powers.
No other bird can make it up there, although the magpies will chase eagles a long way above the treeline.
I zoom in to check, but oh yes, it’s the wedgies.
Not being very technologically savvy, occasionally I ruin a CD, the non-rewritable sort, by accidentally copying the wrong thing.
Rather than waste the disk, I collect them, in twos.
I tie each pair together, back-to back with cotton.Then I hang them from the verandah rafters, theoretically for the amusement of my grandchildren. They spin and catch the light beautifully.
But the other day one caught a rainbow. It was late afternoon, the day had been damp and misty, but the clouds were lifting at last.
First the disk itself trapped the colours as it spun. I was entranced.
But, minutes later, it was reflecting a round rainbow on to the scribbly gum furrows of the verandah post. It looked like a projected colour film of hieroglyphics.
Talk about the light fantastic!
Walking through my forest, I often come across small groups of Eastern Red-necked Wallabies. On this occasion there were three, who propped and watched me.
Sometimes they take flight, but mostly not, because this being a wildlife refuge, they are used to not needing to fear me or what I allow to happen here. No guns or dogs or roads for careless cars.
I was especially taken with the innocence of this joey, who didn’t move at all, just watched, big eyed, its little black paws relaxed against its pale furry tummy. We looked at each other for some time. It didn’t mind the camera. It’s been born here and will grow up here, as protected as I can manage.
It is somehow worse to see an echidna roadkill than a wallaby. Not only because I see them less often, but because they are so unmistakably not dreaming but dead.
I see wallabies dozing in all sorts of odd poses, but I have never seen a live echidna on its back. The spines are there to protect it from predators; it rolls into a tight spiky ball when threatened.
Yet here it is, the soft underside helplessly exposed, the strong-clawed paws that would have dug it to safety outflung, stiff and useless.
Neither its spikes nor its claws were any defence against the uncaring, unstopping driver of the vehicle that bowled it for six – and out. Echidna-, not manslaughter, hit and run, and yet no one will be punished for this.
Back from my week in Melbourne, struck anew by how much colder the more southern latitude makes it, by how culturally alive that city is, and how terrific their metro transport system – even I worked it out eventually.
I wore long johns under my jeans every day, fell in love with the Victoria Markets and the State Library, and was interviewed by terrific women on commmunity radio: Bridget Bosun on JOYFM, the gay & lesbian station; Gab Reade on 3CR, the left-wing social justice and environmental one that felt like home, and 3MDR, where my friend Ann Creber interviews really interesting people in extraordinarily diverse fields. All of them had read my book, and that’s more unusual than you’d think.
No camera, so no pics for you, but can report that the Eltham New Voices Festival went well, in wonderful venues like the faux-ancient Montsalvat and a mudbrick church hall, as did the Belgrave library talk, with lots of keen environmental interest and questions.
Now I am going into retreat to finish the text and illustrations of my next book, Mountain Tails, before the deadline of the end of August. Nearly there.
Like the children of Rozelle Public School in Sydney, I’m backing this initiative: will you? Be part of creating a national visual petition to Kevin Rudd.
Gather around you whomever you know with a care for the future — whether from your family, play group, work mates, tennis club, or… ?
It doesn’t matter how few or how many. Ask for immediate and real action on climate change from our leaders.
Let Prime Minister Rudd hear the collective voices from our communities — loud and clear — with pictures.
Turn The Tide is aiming for over 1,000 images from communities all over Australia before the end of September.
Visit the Turn the Tide blogspot to see how others are doing it, and to find out how you can do your bit.
Let’s get everybody doing it!
Very early one morning I happened to catch this connection between nature and man.
The heavy cloud was just cruising, waiting for the sun to warm it up, when a cheeky jet plane shot right through the middle of it and up into the real daylight.
There it shone, a silver streak that made my cloud look like it was wired for sound and sporting a long antenna.
Or else being towed by the jet – a cloud on a string.
The Wood Ducks, or Maned Wood Ducks as they are often called, mostly hang out at the big dam, as the magpies shoo them off the small dam below the house.
But the other day the maggie sentinels must have been on a break, for I spotted the handsome couple pecking about in the grass on the bank.
By the time I got there with the camera, they’d taken flight. I waited as they wheeled about and headed down to land on the water.
I snapped this shot of the female as she hit the water, her mane feathers fluffed and her wings not yet folded back down.
Because her mane is brown like her head it’s usually not as noticeable as her partner’s black one.
Overall, she has the soft patterning while he gets the smart tuxedo look.
Mist rises from the mountains opposite as morning light grows stronger. It reveals light snow has fallen overnight up there at 5000 feet.
That’s in the wilderness area, so only the wallabies will be marking the snowfall with their prints.
But the sun is rising too, and the mist begins to glow, tinged with rose as the long low rays penetrate it.
The snow will melt during the day; the brief glimpses I get are rewards for the cold morning, and a reminder that I’m not in Sydney!
The cleared slope was a fairly uniformly well-grazed green. Except for a spot of orange today.
I walked over to see what it was and found a small cluster of coral fungi blooming fleshily all by itself in the middle of nowhere.
A species of Ramaria, it would seem, or else paprika cauliflower cheese made from a rather spindly cauli.
Back home another incongruous splash of orange drew me to the orchard, to the sawn-off base of a self-sown avocado tree who’d had 10 years to prove it could fruit, and didn’t, meanwhile shading my vegie patch.
It was ringed with tough orange frilly fans, while others were elegantly striped, in less garish cream and grey and brown. I think it’s Trametes versicolor.
On top of the stump was a cluster of funny little greenish-grey nubs, like lost teeth. What they are I cannot imagine!
Thanks to Margie Jenkin for her review of The Woman on the Mountain in the latest edition of Island, Tasmania’s justly famous magazine of arts and literature.
A good review is always gratifying, but this is the best of the lot by a long way and it makes the hard work of writing worthwhile.
Margie Jenkin is another mountain woman: she lives on Mount Wellington, the huge, brooding dolerite massif that dominates the landscape around Hobart. And she works as a ranger on the Maria Island National Park off the south-east coast of Tasmania.
There couldn’t have been a better choice of reviewer: her studies at the University of Tasmania’s School of Geography and Environmental Studies included an Honours thesis exploring sense of place through the stories of Tasmanian lighthouse-keepers and their families — so she was very much in tune with my own feelings about the the importance of place in our physical and emotional lives.
I can’t resist a couple of quotes from her sensitive and beautifully written review:
“Munro’s writing emanates strength and courage, and thoughtfulness for tomorrow. Reading her words, you are urged to reconnect with home to nurture a sense of care…”
“A complete treat, this book is daring and heroic. Munro’s narrative provides the habitat to re-visit your own ideologies and unfulfilled dreams. She reminds you that it is never too late, but warns that you must plant your seedlings soon to see them grow in your lifetime.”
You can read the full review in Island No. 113, out now, and I urge you to subscribe if you can — our literary magazines deserve everyone’s support, so visit the Island website now.
Or you can download the review as a PDF here,
My thanks to Margie once again and to Island’s editor Gina Mercer for permission to re-publish the review.