Pound Bend and a (Not) Drinking Lizard

More on the subject of lizards (drinking or otherwise) in a moment.

I’m not going to post any more of our Tassie trip today. Instead I’m going to yarn about a walk Deb and I did a couple of weeks ago.

A few weeks ago Deb and I had a Sunday to kill. We had a lazy lunch at a café we frequent called ‘Wild Wombat’. Then we drove to a Melbourne suburb called Warrandyte for a walk along a stretch of the Yarra River.You wouldn’t think you were in a suburb of Melbourne - here the river meanders through a number of bush reserves.
The lower Yarra is often very brown, but this stretch is usually clear. This muddy look is from all the rain we have had this summer.

We followed these rough stairs down to the river’s edge.There at the bottom about half of the river’s flow seems to be making its way towards the cliff face.I scrambled to the corner to show you why. Meet the “Pound Bend Tunnel”.The tunnel is an artefact of the gold rush period in the 1870s. Miners diverted the river so they could get access to the river bed to search for alluvial gold.
The faint circle in the middle of the piccie is from a stray beam of sunlight filtering down from above and catching my camera lens.

Then as I turned to look back up the river… I noticed a local was checking me out. Can you see?This guy is a Golden Water Skink (Eulamprus quoyii) I think he/she is very handsome. He/she is a medium sized member of this species probably about 20cm (8in) long.
They are one of around 400 species of skink lizards native to Oz (we have about 800 lizard species in all).
Now speaking of lizards.
Last Thursday I challenged you to guess what the slang term ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ meant.
The key to the phrase is simply in the first two words ‘flat out’. So for most Aussies ‘flat out like a lizard drinking’ means ‘very busy’. Fair dinkum!