Home Safe

A quick one tonight.

I got home safe from Mum’s house late on Tuesday night.
I had a lovely time but all good things come to an end.

Mum lives 1300 km (800 miles) away so I don’t get to see her nearly as often as I would like. It was quite heart wrenching to come away. She is still fit and healthy but at 82 years of age I am painfully aware that she won’t be around forever.

Mind you having said that she comes from a long lived line on her mother’s side so I hope she will be around for a good while yet!

That’ll do me for tonight except I have as usual come home with a pile of piccies. I will share just two tonight.

A pair of fire-tail finches (Neochmia temporalis) also known as red-browed finches. These native finches are about the size of a sparrow. They form pair bonds and these two seemed very cozy so I guess they are mates.

A common or laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae) these guys are common across eastern Oz. They are a giant kingfisher (about 45 cm long) their main prey is reptiles such as lizards and snakes. They swoop down from their perch and carry their prey back into a tree. They dispatch a snake by battering its head repeatedly against a branch before swallowing them whole!

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.