K is for...........

Kookaburra, Koala, Kangaroo...iconic Australian fauna. I love the uniqueness of our native animals. It's a shame that some are so common that we take them for granted and even undervalue their place in the environment. For example, the kangaroo is often considered a pest in areas where it breeds prolifically and competes for pasture land with domestic food animals. It ends up on the wrong end of a culler's gun and becomes fertilizer, ugh boots or dog food. Does any other country do this to an animal that has pride of place on their coat of arms? I've heard all the arguments about controlled culling. I have read that a species that is hunted under strict regulations will ultimately benefit.....there are probably statistics to prove this, but I can't get my heart (or head) around this.

J is for.....

 JELLYBEANS - juicy joy in a jar! Giver of comfort to small owners of hurt knees and sore fingers, consolation administered by doctors after painful shots. Not to mention their use for the purposes of bribery, as in, eat all your yummy sprouts and you can have a jellybean to take away the disgusting taste.
I love jellybeans but am not usually supposed to eat them, unless I am having a hypo and need to get my blood sugars up fast.
It's almost worth the discomfort of a hypo when I first pop one of those forbidden little beans into my mouth and savour the delicious flavour and chewiness.
Darn, I really have a craving for one right now!





JOY!

JUMP FOR JOY....look mum I can fly.

I is for...

IBIS, a nuisance to some a beautiful creature to others. We have a local park whose ponds have been taken over by Australian White Ibis. Great controversy raged for a while about their origins and claims to residence. Some people wanted to shoot them, poison them, drive them away. (Where have we heard all this before).
Thankfully common sense and understanding prevailed. A program of egg culling reduced numbers to more sustainable levels and the ibis can still be found arguing and fussing in communal nests in the park ponds.
The sight of ibis grazing in a soggy paddock after rain always makes me think of Egypt,  pharoahs and pyramids. They are elegant and graceful, but unfortunately have learned that the presence of man means food in the form of litter and rubbish and they more often than not frequent rubbish tips, their beautiful white plumage becoming soiled by the muck around them.

H is for..

HERMAPHRODITE...particularly the kind that eats my vegetables, chomps my seedlings and leaves silver trails all over the back doormat.
How do they find my stuff? Lettuce planted in a container on the top shelf of my greenhouse were  midnight snacks. Seedlings, surrounded by piles of allegedly deadly snail killing pellets, were chomped down to the roots.
AND this myth about the "slow snail" is totally misleading. While no one is watching I reckon these molluscs are fast! How else could they climb shelves and walls and get around my entire garden in one night?
And another question. Why don't the slimy  little sods eat weeds?
I can't bring myself to stomping on them either, they have such cute little heads. Obviously I am not relocating them far enough away.

Tiny, tiny snailshell in my birdbath, 

caught the early morning light

and turned into gold.

G is for ...

GREENDANCER....I called him this because as I took pictures he swayed and bobbed to music only he could hear.

GORILLA - I am in Melbourne for a week. (Melbourne is in Victoria and is about 860 km from my home in Sydney) I always visit Melbourne Zoo when I can and they have a wonderful primate display.
This handsome fellow was definitely deep in thought....who knows, locked in that intelligent head there might be solutions to all the "big questions" that have puzzled mankind for centuries.

F is for.....

FROGS, glorious frogs! I built it and they came! (Sorry Kevin)
Wanted birds, planted trees, yearned for amphibians, put in ponds. Now I can't put down a glass of water for five minutes without a bug eyed resident depositing hundreds of eggs in it.
And don't talk to me about tadpoles! Scooping one's hand into anything with water in it will gather a squillion little black squirmers. And the cacophany when the come- bonk- with me serenade starts! The common as muck brown striped swamp frog sounds like dozens of tennis balls being pounded down the court, while Peron's Tree Frog is most aptly commonly called the "maniacal cackling frog". I shall leave it to your imagination but he wouldn't be out of place in Luna Park's House of Horror.
Strange as I may seem, I love them all.

 Romancing the frog.. a lot of this goes on in my garden

they don't call him common for nothing.

 Peron's Tree Frog , above and below..shy, elusive 

with a voice to shred your eardrums.

My garden - there really are ponds underneath all that shrubbery. 

E is for.....

EXQUISITE - the things my macro lens can see and I can't.

 Floating in the mist of a day lily.

 Heart of a grevillia

anonymous beauty!

D is for DRAGONFLY...............

Helicoptering around my garden, a flash of red in amongst the green.

C is for......

CORELLA ..Oscar by name, parrot by nature. A mixture of sweetheart, clown and homicidal maniac. Tara eat your heart out, this bird is the champion of avian multiple personality syndrome. That long beak can nibble your ears ever so gently while whispering sweet nothings or make mince-meat of your fingers in the blink of an eye. He can make you laugh with his acrobatic antics or bring murderous thoughts to your mind when he emits eardrum shattering screeches nonstop for minutes on end.

And you never know when.....!!!

 He was a rescued bird and I blame his dark, unknown  past for his personality disorders!
There are no two ways with Oscar. People either love him or hate him!

B is for...

BALMY... not in the weather sense but as in eccentric. Which is what my neighbours probably think of me as I wander around the jungle that is my garden,camera ready to invade the privacy of any creature that catches my eye.

BEE MIMICS - this cross-dressing insect is a hoverfly, who, for reasons only known to entomologists, masquerades as a bee.

BUGS- yet another sap-sucking enemy of my lemon tree...grrr

BOTTLE BRUSH - looking stunning after the rain.

A is for............

...APHIDS! Greedy little suckers sapping the life out of my lemon tree. Totally in cahoots with the other "A" scourge of my garden..ANTS!  I am sure they have an important part to play in the environment but what can I say. Not in my backyard guys.

Been a while.....
Decided to start blogging again and try the A-Z April Challenge.
Will be posting lots of photos with a few words thrown in!
Still spending obscene amounts of money on photography equipment. The truth is if you have a true photographer's heart and eye you can take photos that elicit emotions and tell wonderful stories. And you can do this just as well with an old Box Brownie.
PS This is a Box Brownie for those too young to know. The first models made in 1900 were made of cardboard. Of course there are older cameras than these , but Box Brownies (not the 1900 models) are as far as I go back..ahem..some may dispute this. Ignore them.
The camera underneath is my Nikon D7000. With all its whistles and bells I love it as a piece of clever technology but it hasn't made me any better a photographer!

The local cats!

Hello old blogspot! Have been unfaithfully cavorting with another cyberspace program, namely flickr. Fot those who haven't run across flickr it's a photo sharing site that allows you to publish your photos and get feedback from all those millions of other mad shutterbugs out there.
Let me say this. If you have an addictive nature do not try flickr. It gets you on the first hit. "Hit" being the first positive comment you get on one of your photos. It goes quickly from a passing flirtation to a full on passionate affair, madly joining different interest groups and waiting impatiently for the feedback and feeling spurned when no one notices a particluarly fine shot. (in your opinion at least)
Now the upside to this is that you are motivated to continually widen your horizons and improve your photographic techniques. The downside is there are so many hundreds of superb photographers out there that looking at their photo streams can send you into a deep depression and tempt you to hock that super duper "semi pro" digital slr and buy a paint- by-numbers kit.
It's worse when they own the SAME camera as you and get results that make yours look like a "look what happened when we gave this to a chimp" experiment.
Like any addiction it is all consuming and my house is chaotic (hey at LAST something to blame besides innate laziness) my dog is unwashed and there are two websites and a number of posters waiting to be finished.
I will get to them. Just have to check my Flickr site to see if anyone liked my last batch and maybe sort through some old photos that might be worth posting.....
For anyone who would like take a look at what all my fuss is about:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/unrealdigital/

and, ahem, feel free to leave a comment on anything that takes your eye!

Melbourne Again
Just returned from another trip to Melbourne. Saw a bit more of the city this time. Visited Old Melbourne Jail in the centre of the city. A sombre building with three tiers of miserable little cells which I can only imagine must have stunk to high heaven given the lack of sanitation in the place. We get to see the restored and sanitised version of this building but the misery, violence and abuse of basic human rights must have created an atmosphere that was palpable and nauseating.
The death masks of the convicts that were hung are gruesome reminders of a less forgiving era in our society and one that certainly did not seem to be swayed by present day ideas of political correctness. Although corporal punishment certainly had its opponents then.
The death mask of Ned Kelly has a prominent position in the building and his countenance gave me the impression of strength and resolution..quite a handsome, broad face.
The biographies displayed with the death masks told of lives ravaged by tragedy and criminal acts often prompted by desperation rather than depravity.
I found Emma Williams' story unbelievably sad as did many people of the day. There were many public petitions against the death penalty before her execution but they were unsuccessful. Arriving in Melbourne in 1893, the pregnant Emma lost her husband to typhoid. After many unsuccessful attempts to place her son in an orphanage or with a baby-farmer she resorted to prostitution to survive. The baby was nuisance in the house as it was always crying after Emma and in 1895 the body of a small boy was found in the Port Melbourne lagoon with a stone tied around his neck. Emma was arrested and subsequently convicted of his murder.

A Bad case of Verbal Diarroeah!
Going through a bout of insomnia I simultaneously "worked" on my computer (read "surfed the net") and half listened to and watched an American morning show. Good god how those people can talk. It's almost as if they are frightened that if they stop talking something terrible will happen to them. Sort of like the characters in the movie where the bus has to keep going at a certain speed or the bomb strapped underneath it will explode. The frenetic yapping and the way the various guests and hosts talk over and around each other may be motivated by fear that they will fade from the screen if the words stop flowing-or maybe their heads will explode. Mine certainly felt like it after ten minutes. Perhaps if they had something substantial or midly interesting to say it would be less irritating, but these guys rabbited on about the most banal topics. Take for example, the segment on "rugs". Not the interesting and always potentially humorous rugs that some hair challenged males wear, but floor rugs. The interviewer, a big- haired, whippet thin woman in outrageously high stillettos, asked the rug expert questions and reiterated the answers before the interviewee had finished speaking. Actually when you think of it it takes some sort of skill to talk non stop for ten minutes on ways to lay a rug on a floor. And I don't recall seeing either host or guest stopping to take a breath. Tag talking?

Psychic or not..?
Have just had a friend describe a session with a "psychic" which she described as "amazing". This person seemed to know all about my friend. Even I got a mention. Now, here's the thing. Everything the psychic said was exactly what my friend had been espousing to me for the last few years...her beliefs about the people in her life and the things that were happening or had happened to her. Now, did this reader (as I believe they are commonly called) psychically connect with my friend and "read" her mind, thereby feeding back to her all the information she could see stored there? Or, more incredibly does she have the ability to see the multiple strands of a person's life by some intuitive "sixth sense". Can she then follow those strands, knotted and tangled by circumstance and chance and predict where they are going to lead to in the future?

If, my friend had returned with a few correct "hits" from this psychic and some startling unexpected revelation I might have left the subject well alone. What got me was the fact that the information imparted was such a strong affirmation of my friend's beliefs....she had been told or believed she had been told, what she wanted to believe. So I went surfing for information on psychics and discovered "cold reading" and "hot reading" techniques. They make a good read (forgive the pun). To put it briefly, they are techniques to get a person to reveal facts, their opinions and their feelings and to then feed this information back to them as if the reader had "sensed" them. Some people get very good at this, so good in fact, many begin to believe that they actually have psychic powers. It's worth a few minutes to look up these techniques which involve careful observational and listening skills and "fishing" ( general questions that can lead down specific paths depending on the response). The success of these techniques is also due to the human brain's ability to associate facts, words, ideas, and numbers and for people's willingness to apply these associations to their circumstances. A good example of this is the daily horoscope sections of newspapers. Read any star sign prediction regardless of your birth date and you will invariably find something with which to relate. Most of the sceptics websites use similar arguments against the existence of psychic powers. A common question is, if these people can predict future events, why not go for something big, like warning all those poor devils before they perish in earthquakes and tsunamis. Another site about psychic mediums makes the point that people who are too busy to talk to the living suddenly want to talk to their dead relatives...who never seem to say much of any consequence anyway and totally fail to answer some of the BIG questions like is there a god and have they met him (or her). Another interesting slant on this is in the book "Plague Species - Is it in our genes?' by Reg Morrison. Simply put, he argues that genetically we are programmed to have a "penchant for the mystical" and that "believing the unbelievable" excites us and frequently overrides logic.

Now, this is where my "mystic gene" kicks in. I would really love to believe that some people do in fact have some super intuitive powers that enable them to, if not predict the future, at least connect with other humans on a mind to mind level. (A sort of "mind meld" for all the Trekkies out there. )

Mellbourne: what can I say...it's a city. People, cars, trams and buses elbow each other for room and modern buildings loom over older and more graceful structures. All around is movement, colour, smells and commerce on a grand scale. From Victoria Markets to the tiniest curiosity shop there are goods that tempt you to spend and spend and .......
I was a pushover!

Every now and then there is an oasis. The park that hides behind the aging houses of Coburg and the carbon monoxide haze of Sydney Road is literally a breath of fresh air and space. You can walk along a pleasantly overgrown riverbank for a kilometre or two and emerge onto a vast green lawn with curving paths, large trees and a lake full of free loading waterbirds forever on the hustle for a free feed.

I loved the architectural vastness of Southern Cross Railway Station with its wonderful roof full of light and shadows. The place ebbs and flows with the energy of the commuters and the personalities of the trains. ( I love trains and tend to anthropomorphise when I see them)
(Had to look that spelling up!)

Small things...you don't have to be big to be beautiful. Seduced by the sunny morning and needing any excuse not to have to look at a house that needs cleaning, dusting or blow torching, I spent an hour or so with my camera in my backyard and my neighbour's yard.
My neighbour grows beautiful flowers and I grow beautiful weeds. (The dandelions are mine.)

We live in a world of contradictions.
At any moment on the earth there are different people putting equal effort into saving or taking life. Millions of dollars are spent on research, drugs and medical techniques aimed at prolonging and improving life. Simultaneously someone , somewhere puts the finishing touch to a "weapon of mass destruction".
Environmentally the same thing happens. One group fights to save the kilometre square habitat of a tiny frog, while half a world away huge forests are clear felled to make toothpicks and chop sticks.
Consider for instance the creek near my home which adjoins an area which is being carefully re-generated after over 30 years of use as a garbage tip. What had once been a natural wetland full of waterfowl and fish had been turned into great mound of garbage. The enormous task of reclaiming this area has involved barriers to prevent domestic litter being washed into the creek and the river it flows into, and massive replantings of local plants and trees. The area is still polluted and far from pristine but the birds are gradually returning.
We continue to be obsessed with human history. We reinact it, read about it and archaeologists are forever trying to dig it up. Why don't we ever seem to really learn anything from it. Thirty years ago it was probably a local council who saw a "swamp", deemed it worthless and began to dump on it. Now we are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to re-establish this little piece of natural environment so casually destroyed.
Why do we continue to make the same mistake over and over again to varying degrees all over the planet, when history gives us so many past scenarios to learn from.