Al Returns

Well I didn’t fall off the face of the Earth.

On Tuesday night my eldest brother Mike phoned me. He had heard from my Mother’s husband that Mum had been taken into hospital that day.

Despite being elderly Mum and her husband live on a farm in the sticks about 40 minutes from the nearest (small) town Dorrigo. Mum had woken to excruciating abdominal pain and after phoning their doctor called an ambulance. She was taken to Dorrigo hospital which has a small emergency department. I was told she would be transferred to the nearest base hospital in Coffs Harbour about 100km away on Wednesday morning.

Mike lives about 5 hours’ drive from Mum while I am about 15 hours’ away.

So I got on the first flight I could to Coffs the next day. From here in Melbourne it is an hour flight to Sydney, where I had to wait for another plane for the hour long flight to Coffs.

Fortunately, Mum responded to treatment and we were able to take her home on Friday. I got home late last night. She is well on the way to recovery.

Needing to relax after a harrowing week I went waterfall hunting this afternoon. The result: piccies of the Olinda Falls on the flanks of Mount Dandenong just outside Melbourne.

My Mum’s Place

Tonight I want to say a bit about my trip to my Mum’s place.

I flew from Melbourne to Coffs Harbour on the Mid-North Coast of NSW where Mum came to pick me up.

From there we drove inland up to Dorrigo which sits at about 3000 feet in the Great Dividing Range. The north east corner of NSW is one of the wettest parts of Australia. With the ending of many years of drought it is really wet there at the moment. In fact the area is the wettest I have seen it since the 1970s.

This first piccie is taken through the windscreen of the ute (= utility = pickup truck) that Mum used to collect me from the airport. We were stopped at this traffic light. I thought the light on the road in the early evening fog looked worth capturing.The light is there on the Dorrigo Mountain road because of the wet. Beyond the light half of the road has slipped down the mountain with the rain. The engineers have decided the remains of the road are safe enough to use, but there is only room for traffic to go one way at a time.

The next morning I was up bright and early and out with my camera. This second piccie is the little house that my Mum and her husband Stan live in. It was built in the early 20th century by Stan’s parents. Stan came back in the 1970s to look after his aging mother which is when he met my Mum.

We (my Mum, my brother and I) were living on another ‘bush block’ nearby which is how Mum and Stan first met. After a friendship of about 15 years they eventually married.

This piccie of one of the paddocks shows how lush and green things are there at the moment.
One tradition on an Aussie farm is a series of decaying vehicles. You never throw anything out because it just might be handy one day…
I have to admit that I helped contribute to the farm junk yard here. This decaying Toyota was my first ever car.

While this Ford was my eighth.
It was bright and shiny when I bought it, but the local road soon knocked it around so badly that it wasn’t worth repairing. So it sits where I parked it in about 1996.

I turned my attention to capturing some of the local wildlife.

A Superb Blue Wren.
Then I tried to get a decent shot of a Fire-Tailed Finch, but they were hiding.
A not great shot of a Willy Wagtail.
And the firetails were still not cooperating.

An Award (and a fantasy)

I said in my last post that I was hoping to be a bit more frequent with my posts. Ah well, so much for plans. This week has been as hectic as usual.

Tonight I am going to get to something that has been on the backburner for a while. Way back in June Denise at L’Aussie Writing passed on the Versatile Blogger Award to me.

Thank you Denise!

With this award comes a few duties. Those are:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award.

2. Share seven things about yourself.

3. Pass this award along to fifteen bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic for whatever reason!

4. Contact the bloggers you’ve picked and let them know about the award.

Now I have decided to “cheat a bit” and tell part of an episode of my life in seven paragraphs so here we go:

When our kids were small, we (that is Deb, the three girls and I) lived for a couple of years all crammed in a tiny mill cottage surrounded by rainforest. The cottage is on a farm on the Dorrigo Plateau in NSW. It is on the “back block” of a property owned by my mum and her husband. Deb and I had decided we both needed to do further studies, so we sold our house and car (we bought a cheap second hand car) and lived rent free for a while to be able to study full time.

The cottage had no mains power. We had a small solar panel with a truck battery that provided our lighting. We had a refrigerator that ran on gas. Heating, cooking and hot water were provided by a slow combustion stove. I used to cut firewood for the stove from regrowth timber on the farm.

Our house used spring water. Although we were on a ridge high on the western side of the Dorrigo Plateau (about 3600 feet) the spring that fed our house is still higher. The spring is on the other side of the valley and the water is fed by gravity down a long pipe all the way to the valley floor and then up to a holding tank behind the house.

We used to drive an old four wheel drive three miles down a muddy track every day to take the older girls to school. Luckily the local state primary school was literally at the bottom of “our driveway”. When we needed to go into town for supplies we drove four miles down a different track to “the front block” where we kept our road car at my mum’s house.

My favourite thing of all was to get up soon after dawn. The plateau to the east would still be covered with morning mist. It was like looking out over a still sea of white. Through the mist would come the noise of the dawn chorus of the birds. In particular there were lyrebirds which are incredible mimics. They mostly mimic other birds, but will mimic other sounds they hear. I have heard them mimicking things like chainsaws and camera motor-drives. I have never seen the dance they do as they sing (they are very shy) but their song is amazing anyway. You will get a tiny patch of forest with all these different bird calls coming out one after the other. Then at the end of the sequence the lyrebird sings his own song before beginning again.

The time living up there was amongst the happiest in my life. But alas the needs of growing girls and the need to go back to the workforce meant we had to leave our patch of paradise and go back to the ‘real world’.

Now our girls are all but grown up, and it doesn’t look like it will be too many years before they achieve independence, I am cultivating a fantasy. In that fantasy Deb and I move back to our mountain paradise. I dream we will build a writer’s retreat. There we will host other writers who need a break with peace and quiet only broken by birdsong and the wind. So with the income generated by the (very reasonable) fees we will charge I will be able to devote myself full time to writing.

Like I say it’s a fantasy.
But you never know.

Now for the fifteen bloggers I want to pass this award to:

1. Niki at Wool ‘N Nuts
2. Angelique at Vampires and Tofu
3. Jennifer at Ten Lives and Second Chances
4. Elspeth at It’s a Mystery
5. Lisa K. at Writing on Thin Ice
6. Shannon at Book Dreaming
7. B. at B miler Fiction
8. Carolyn at Checkerboard Squares
9. Rebecca at Sonshine Thoughts
10. Kyna at Crystal Coast Gardener
11. Charmaine at Wagging Tales
12. Sarah at Falen Formulates Fiction
13. Alexandra at The Publication Follies of Alexandra Shostak
14. Sharon at Random Thoughts (the rules said discovered recently and I figure tonight is as about as recent as it gets).
15. Amanda at a Library of My Own (I have been following Amanda for a while but she has changed blogs because she no longer lives in NYC )

Please forgive me if you have already been given this award. I just don’t have time to check tonight. I am sorry for displaying such a cavalier attitude, but you are just going to have to deal with the trauma as best you can :-)

Now finally a couple of piccies.
By The way on the subject of piccies My last post features a giveaway check it out!

So the piccies, I am a bit pressed for time tonight so just three piccies of two birds I snapped on my recent holiday.

The first two are of a Crimson Rosella, another of our gaudy parrots. Not quite as friendly as the Rainbow Lorikeets I posted a while ago, but I think just as beautiful.
Finally a small woodland bird, an Eastern Yellow Robin.
These guys are not really shy, but they are quite active so this is the first time I have managed to photograph one.