Oil and Water

Well the two people who got closest to guessing the What is it piccie for this week

were: Kristen M with her guess of “a dark liquid”;
and Linda G came close by accident with her guess of an ‘oil spill’

Well let’s just hold that answer for the moment.
This morning was a hard frost down here. Which was good, because the way our weather works it means we more than likely have a sunny day afterwards.
And today was a glorious sunny winter day! It was so nice to see the sun after weeks of dreary wet weather.
As usual Deb and I were out and about. I took up my oft time habit of waterfall hunting.
And I found a doozy!

The Wombelano Falls are up in the mountains near Kinglake, less than an hour’s drive from here.
I guess now is about as good as they get with all the rain we have been having.
On the way home I paused to get this piccie of the evening mist creeping into the valleys below.

Finally I couldn’t resist the sunset!

Now back to the mystery piccie.

It was part of my lunch last Sunday!
On our way home from Cape Paterson Deb and I paused in a little town and tried a local restaurant.
One of the items on the menu was a “tasting plate” featuring a mix of local produce. I couldn’t help but choose it.
I don’t know if it was deliberate irony, but my plate (in the foreground)
 
featured not only fried quail, but emu sausages. As well there was a selection of Gippsland cheeses and some bread to dip in a local olive oil with balsamic reduction.  So Kristen was right with “dark liquid” and Linda was right on with oil, although it wasn’t spilled and it certainly wasn’t a petrochemical!

Swan Watch XI: Unseasonable Weather

I have barely posted recently and I have spent even less time visiting other people’s blogs. First I was away at my Mum’s and since then work and life have just been sucking up so much time. Hopefully you’ll see me around the blogosphere a bit more in the near future.

You'll have to forgive me for being so negligent in responding to your comments. I hope things might be getting more back to normal soon, but we will see.

Io did the swan patrol for me this week because Deb and I headed in the opposite direction. More about that in the moment.

First to the swans. Unfortunately, we have no more news about the injured cygnet. We’ll just have to hope that no news is good news.

On a cheerier note mother swan and the remaining baby are doing well. Io has captured some beautiful piccies to prove it.

The swans are very used to Io and Damian now, when they come down to the ponds edge the swans usually cruise over to check them out.Today they were back in their original pond, I liked this piccie of them coming closer through the reeds.The remaining baby continues to grow at an almost unbelievable rate. It’s hard to believe this strapping youth is the cute fuzzball of only a few weeks ago. I can’t help think of Hans Christian Andersen’s ugly duckling now.

But of course the sinuous curves of baby’s neck reminds us that he/she will be a beauty like mum before too long.Now to Deb and my weekend. Most of the good folk who read my blog live in the Northern Hemisphere and are half way through Autumn. We down here in Oz are halfway through spring and the weather should be warming up.

It isn’t! This is the scene at Kinglake yesterday. It hasn’t snowed where we are (it almost never does in Melbourne and near the coast). But it has been so cold that it has snowed in the hills around here. We can see Kinglake from our street.

I have never heard of snowfalls in the country near Melbourne in October. But there it is.
Higher up at Mount Donna Buang it was still thick.

This is the road to the summit.Being a kid at heart I couldn’t help but walk up to the summit.

Past this gate.To the top where it started to snow again.On the walk back down.
This wattle peeping through the snow further down the mountain is a reminder that it is supposed to be spring.

A Few Thoughts

Deb and I stayed closer to home last weekend. We went out to Warburton a mere hour away.

I took a few photos down the main street.

Now these are not great photos, it was rotten weather, I was not thinking about composition and I quite simply snapped away.

They are nothing like the sort of picture Uncle Harry would want to show on one of his infamous slide nights.

“Wadda ya mean infamous?”

Oh go back to sleep!

The photos are nothing special

But then I had a closer look.

Warburton is in the upper Yarra Valley, with high mountains all around.

The mountain in the background is called Mount Little Joe, and it is as close to the town as it looks. Mount Donna Buang lies just to the north.

In short Warburton is surrounded by bush.

If you look closely at the second photo - I’ve enlarged a section for you here.You can see protruding from the forest canopy, up on the ridge line, the skeletons of many dead trees.

These are the remains of Mountain Ash trees that were killed by the heat of bushfires in the “Ash Wednesday Fires” in 1983 as the flames raced up Mount Little Joe.

By good fortune and a favourable wind Warburton was spared.

This past summer the fires of “Black Saturday” came to within five miles before the wind eased. Over the next few weeks fires approached Warburton from three sides to within a few miles.

Fortunately the weather conditions of “Black Saturday” did not return and fire crews were able to contain the fires using fire breaks and by conducting back-burning until they burnt out.

This sunset photo was taken during this period near Warburton.

What appears to be cloud is actually smoke from burning bushland.

Tuesday was the first day of spring and Victoria has been experiencing drought conditions for eleven years. In spite of a little rain during winter, the bush is tinder dry.

I look at charming little places like Warburton, and remember Marysville and Kinglake where dozens died last summer, and quite frankly I am anxious about what the warmer weather will bring.

“Stop whinging you useless bastard. We’re Aussies we’ll deal with it. Now I’m going to shoot through, probably head down the pub. You comin’?”

That’s my Uncle Harry, a bit rough, but not a bad old bugger.

And now, as Monty Python were so fond of saying, for something completely different.

Above are both sides of a promotional card I picked up while in Warburton on the weekend.

Apparently Tuesday was also “Equal Pay Day” designed to highlight pay disparity between men and women.

Oz is a great place, but it seems even after decades of supposed equality, there are very basic things we still just can’t get right.

“Fair crack of the whip, there you go again. Wadda ya want, that they make you an honorary feminist or something? You’re probably just pissed that your missus earns more than you do. ”

Uncle Harry? I thought you’d gone to the pub.

“Nah, heading down there now.”

(Just a little note on Australian English. Terms like Bastard and Bugger may be either terms of endearment or abusive. What is important is the context of their use and more critically the tone with which they are delivered. So you might call someone a "bit of a bastard" and have them either hug you or hit you depending on delivery.)

A Tragedy in the Healing

On Sunday the other half and I drove into across the Yarra Valley and up into the Goulburn Valley. In stark contrast to most of the weather recently, it was a bright sunny day. Not warm because of a cold wind, but it lifts the spirits to see the sun.

We took a slight detour to get a few photos of the Yarra valley up past Yarra Glen. We have had quite a bit of damp weather lately so it is very green at the moment, you would never guess we are in the midst of years of drought.

We then drove up into the Goulburn Valley, like the Yarra it is very green at the moment.

This photo shows some typical "bush" mailboxes with a nice backdrop.

On the way home we went via a little place called Kinglake. Kinglake has been very much in the news since February, unfortunately for unhappy reasons. In the Black Saturday Bushfires on the 7th of this February past 96% of the homes in Kinglake were destroyed. Of the State’s 173 fatalities on that day, 42 were in Kinglake, a lot of people gone from a town that had a population of less than 1500.

We have been to Kinglake before but this was the first time since the fire that destroyed it. It is distressing to drive through a place you know to find it all but destroyed. We were both deeply touched by the experience.

In spite of it all, many of the people of Kinglake are still there, beginning to rebuild their homes and their lives. The Aussie flag was displayed in many places throughout the ruins. Here in Oz we do not often display the flag as individuals, I think in Kinglake it is being used as a sign of community, of mateship and of pride. I think the Kinglake community are using it as a symbol of their determination to not be beaten by the worst.

I did not take any photographs in the town, that would have felt like intrusion, even desecration. We did stop a few kilometres away on the Whittlesea road to take a few photos of the devastation left by the fire. Here are just a couple.