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.
Blue is not the only beauty a sky can offer.
But that’s in Nature’s own colour scheme. Let corporate Man at it, and brown enters the palette. Dirty brown, pollution brown, ‘don’t breathe-the-air’ brown, the cumulative emissions from too many open cut coal mines and coal-fired power stations. Accepted as hazardous to human health in the U.S., still unacknowledged here — that would mean they couldn’t approve any more.
Lucky we have different lungs from Americans.
Welcome to the mid-upper Hunter Valley, which I can remember once had clean country air, blue or grey skies, but no toxic stripes of brown.