Ho Hum, More Piccies and Another Dead Volcano?

Well here I go again, inflicting more of my holiday piccies on you. Uncle Harry would be proud of me.
Well actually he probably wouldn’t. Nothing anyone does comes up to his standards.

Oh boy, now I am developing a persecution complex about a figment of my own imagination.

Anyway here we go...

After I explored the Tarragal Caves we headed back to our accommodation at Warrnambool.

On the way I ran the risk of driving Deb nuts by pausing to take some shots of this ruined farmhouse.Unfortunately, there are ruins like this scattered over large swathes of Oz countryside. Some of them are the natural consequence of farmers going bust. Many though are the result of a darker piece of Oz history called soldier settlement.

Enough about that for now.

I also paused to grab a piccie or two of this shed that was catching the setting sun.
I was up bright and early (before dawn) the next morning. I raced out to catch the dawn piccies I posted a week or two ago.

After I got the dawn shots I went a little further east to the Bay of Islands
which I knew would still be in shadow.
As it continued to get light I took a series of shots of the bay in the early light. Then as the sun got a little higher it began painting the cliffs of the sea stacks with the amazing gold of morning.

For those of you interested a post made last year shows the cliffs later in the day. (Uncle Harry was plaguing me back then too).

With the colours fading into a regular day and getting hungry I headed back to a leisurely breakfast with Deb (who isn’t silly enough to be up in the pre-dawn dark).

We decided to go for another drive. Our first port of call (literally although we were driving) was the Warrnambool foreshore. I took this shot of Middle Island (which happens to be a Fairy Penguin Colony). In an interesting application of lateral thinking Parks Victoria has a number of Marremmas who live on the island to protect the penguins from vermin like introduced foxes.

I also captured this image of the clouds dancing in a sunlit morning sky. As a total aside can you see the error in this piccie that would have many "real" photographers "tut tuting"?

Then we motored a short distance to Tower Hill.
Like Mt Leura Tower hill is a huge maar volcano. In this piccie the range of hills centre frame are secondary cones that formed in the crater. This second pic gives a better idea of the crater wall and the secondary cones in the middle. The level area is the floor of the caldera. In normal years the crater is a lake with islands in the middle but after 13 years of drought most of the lake is gone.
This piccie taken inside the caldera shows an eroding segment of the crater wall, you can see how the original volcano built up in layers, each one representing a series of eruptions.

Inside the crater I caught this fellow and his two half grown chicks.He is an Emu, an Oz native and the second largest bird in the world (after the African Ostrich). Incidentally I know he is a “he” because with Emus the dad takes full responsibility for incubation and raising the brood of several females. He would have had somewhere between 10 and 30 chicks hatch out. Unfortunately he probably lost most to foxes. Foxes aren’t native they were introduced in the Nineteenth Century for “Gentlemen” to hunt. They have decimated native wildlife (with the help of domestic cats that have gone feral). Fortunately, the chicks are probably large enough to avoid predation now, their biggest danger as they continue growing will be the risk of getting hit by cars.

My final two piccies of the day are from a bay near Port Fairy where we stopped for afternoon tea.

A Mystery Solved.

The riddle of the mystery object has been solved!

However, in true Uncle Harry style I am going to inflict yet more photos on you all before I reveal our detectives.

If you want me to stop you’ll have to cease telling me you like my piccies!

Well here we go again, following our brief stop at Port Fairy we pushed a further 80km (50 miles) along the coast to Portland.
Just beyond Portland (another 20km) lie Cape Nelson and Cape Bridgewater.

As this was a lightning trip we shot across to both.

At Cape Nelson we stopped for a late morning tea and I (strange as it sounds) took some piccies.

My piccies there focussed on the rather magnificent lighthouse.I liked the shapes and shadows of the doorway and the walls around it.This piccie gives an indication of how the lighthouse perches near the edge of a cliff.
Past Cape Nelson lies Cape Bridgewater.
There are some interesting features there called “The Petrified Forest”.They are in fact an oddity known as “Solution Tubes” which form in prehistoric, vegetation covered sand dunes. When the vegetation is removed the old dunes erode away leaving the tubes.

Behind the "Petrified Forest" you’ve probably spotted a man-made feature on Cape Bridgewater.A wind farm.
Many people hate these. I actually quite like them.
Yes they stand out, but I think they have a kind of majesty.
Also they are a symbol that we are finally beginning to look at alternatives to an economy based on finite fossil fuels, with all the problems they come with.
I also like the fact that one of our most ancient machines is being modified as part of a solution.

Finally we drove down to the Bridgewater Lakes and parked ourselves on a jetty overlooking this lake. For a late lunch.
This piccie shows our setup. Our folding chairs have done many thousands of kilometres with us. The large soft bag is a cooler bag, the small one my camera bag. The red bag is one of Deb’s knitting bags. Her knitting goes almost everywhere with us. Knitting is probably her favourite pastime and it is something for her to do when her loony husband is “Getting just one more photo of that…”Oh, and you might also notice my mystery object on the table.

Which brings me to an announcement

Rayna of Coffee Rings Everywhere nailed it with her guess: “Is that something you use to warm water? You could pack the chimney with hot embers or something?”

Cheers all round! Take a bow Rayna
Rayna you are exactly right, except for the type of fuel.
This item is called an “Ecobilly”
To use it you loosely fill the chimney part (underneath) with eucalyptus leaves. You turn it upright on a piece of bare ground and fill the top chamber with water.
Put on the lid and apply a match.Eucalyptus leaves have such a high oil content that they burn with an intense heat (as unfortunately attested by our bushfires). The heat coupled with the fire being contained in the cone means it will usually boil in 3 minutes.
All from a tiny fire that leaves a small pile of ash.
And here an unflattering pic of me tending said object.Jaydee deserves an honourable mention for her guess: “I was going to guess a coffee maker of some sort - but it's doubtful. It's probably more of a case of me needing another cup.”
You just boil plain water in the billy, but hey you certainly could make coffee with that water (although we usually make the bush staple - tea).

Next: Aboriginal rock shelters

The Amazing and the Mysterious

I feel as if my dreaded Uncle Harry is peering over my shoulder as I write this.
I’m going back a couple of weeks in time to share some of the things we saw while we were on our Holiday at Easter.

On the way to Warrnambool we stopped briefly at Camperdown. I have posted about Camperdown before.

As I said previously, it has an amazing (and totally out of place) clock tower.

Beside the town are two huge volcanic crater lakes,
Lake GnotukAnd Lake Bullen-MerriTo give you an idea of the size, there is a boat club in the far side (in the middle of the frame).

As you come into Camperdown from Melbourne you pass Mt Leura on the Eastern Outskirts.

In its own way, I find the mountain as fascinating as the lakes.

Like the lakes, Mt Leura was a large Maar volcano that blew itself apart about 30,000 years ago. Not content to leave it at that it began rebuilding itself in a series of eruptions which built multiple secondary cones inside the crater.
The above piccie was taken from the top of the highest cone (which is Mt Leura proper). Each of the humps in the piccie is a small secondary cone. The ridgeline in the middle distance is the rim of the original crater. As you can see if you look closely, the crater is so big there are a number of houses and farms contained within.
This second photo is of Mount Sugarloaf which is the second largest cone in the crater (again the ridgeline in the middle distance is the crater wall). The lines cut across the cone are a road that spirals up to the top of the volcano.

As Uncle Harry would say that is enough about Camperdown for one night.

From Camperdown we went on to Warrnambool where we stayed the night.
The next morning we went out on the first of a series of day trips along the coast to the west.

After an abortive attempt at photographing the dawn we drove to Port Fairy.

I’ve included this piccie because of the amazing colours. These black boulders are the remains of a basalt lava flow. The sky and the sea were almost equally vivid blue and the orange colour that “paints” the boulders is naturally occurring lichen that grows along a great deal of this coastline.

The Bay at Port Fairy. Despite the beautiful weather and the holidays the beach was almost deserted.The Port Fairy Lighthouse taken across the bay.Behind the sand dunes east of the town are a series of lagoons which waterfowl love.
The black dots on the other side are: Australian black swans.
Unfortunately none were cooperative enough for me to get a close up.

Now because no one has yet guessed what my mystery object is (and because I have sadistic tendencies), another photo: this time from the top.Maybe I am too much like Uncle Harry for your good!