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.

Why Superb “Blue” Wrens?

I have had a terrible time working out what to post about tonight.

First I thought I’d talk about my holiday. Which was fantastic and from which I returned with far too many piccies to post here.

Then I thought I’d talk about work and the trials and tribulations of working in an inner city homeless program. As well as the usual dramas that occur when working with extremely marginalised people, I am currently plagued by the end of quarter reporting that we have to complete.
But I don’t want people to think I’m just a whining Aussie so I probably won’t come back to this.

Then I thought I’d talk about my WIP and some problems I am having with working out how much to include about the rape of one of my female characters.
This problem was something I have run into before, but my solution has been to ignore it and write another section of the book. However, I can’t avoid it forever and a couple of recent posts on Michele Emrath’s blog Southern City Mysteries has brought the issue back to mind.
But while I do want to post about this problematic theme at some point, I don’t think tonight is the night.

Instead of sorting out what to post about, I did my usual weekend trick of going for a drive. So the afternoon has well and truly vanished and I am once again posting later than is comfortable (at least for someone who is as much of a morning person as I am).
And to add to my posting problems I have come home with another 100 piccies to sort through…

So rather than talking about any of the above I have elected to post some piccies of a cute little bird.

The other day I posted a pic of a pair of Superb Blue Fairy Wrens.
Except they weren’t very blue.

As I said, that piccie was taken about four weeks ago. Well this is what the males look like now (I snapped these while I was on holiday).
What do you think Superb?
And blue?The difference is he is now in his breeding plumage which he will wear until next summer.


So to end this rather odd post I am going to include two piccies I took on my holiday.

First the Uniting Church at Terang. This church was bathed in such stunning light when we drove past it on the way to Warrnambool I just had to stop and capture it.

Also a guessing game. I am afraid I don’t have any prize to offer other than the glory of guessing right.
Can any of you guess what this odd looking object is?
Two clues: my hand which is holding it gives the scale; and it is something we took away on holiday with us.

Please forgive the poor quality of the pic, its about what you get when you hold a camera in one hand and take a photo of something in the other hand (without looking through the viewfinder).

Wildlife and Warrnambool

Well we pulled in to Warrnambool a couple of hours before sunset. The first thing we did was head up to Logan’s Beach to see what sort of show the whales were putting on.
That sounds casual doesn’t it? In our limited experience it really is that easy to see whales at Warrnambool. What is special here is that while Southern Right Whales come to many places all along the South Western Coast of Victoria to calve, there is a group of females who consistently return to Warrnambool every year.

On this afternoon there were a number of whales fairly close inshore. One calf in particular was especially frisky and put on a good show.He/she was breaching half way out of the water and splashing back down on his/her back.
From Logan’s Beach we went into town and checked into our hotel. Then as the sun began to set I went for a stroll to see what the evening light would reveal. The war memorial gardens in Warrnambool are high and look out over the lagoon, foreshore and harbour. I thought this photo was worth posting because it captures the evening light beautifully.
Then I spotted this little fellow.
A New Holland Honeyeater.

Named for the old Dutch name for Australia, they have the odd distinction of being the first Australian bird to be scientifically described. They are quite common, but are a bit hard to photograph because they are very active.
He was flitting all over the place, but with a little patience I got this rather nice shot.
I am not sure what the flower is, a Hebe maybe?

The following morning we headed back east along the Great Ocean Road, turning off to look at Childers Cove which we did not see last time we came this way.
The country here is covered with depressions, I suspect caused by small sinkholes in the underlying limestone.
Many of them fill with rainwater run-off to make little ponds. On this one a black swan was nesting. They collect vegetation to build a platform in the water, where they lay their eggs.

Initially not being very photogenic it popped its head up for a look after I made a bit of noise.

We came down to Childers Cove, which like so much of this coast, is worth a photo or two.
In this second photo there are a couple of Australian Shelducks.
I’ve blown them up for you here.Shelducks are quite large, about halfway between most other duck species and geese in size. Unusually for ducks these guys usually nest in holes in banks and cliffs.

Next: I get nearly as boring as Uncle Harry

Call Us Boring

Call us boring, but Deb and I seem to have developed a minor obsession with the Western Districts of Victoria, particularly with the Great Ocean Road.

Our excuse this time was that we liked it so much we should show our girls. So with two of our three sprogs in tow (number two daughter was away with her boyfriend), we set off after I finished the breakfast shift at work on Saturday.

The first hour of the outbound trip is quite boring, the free-way from Melbourne to Geelong, the only interesting thing on this stretch is the Westgate Bridge over the Yarra River. The Yarra isn’t a huge river but it is flat country here and the bridge has to be high to allow ships to get through into the Docklands.

Past the end of the freeway we turn off the main roads and are soon driving along typical Aussie country roads.Not at all typical of Oz are the dry-stone walls that line many of the roads in this region.Land in most areas in the early days was not valuable enough to justify the labour involved in clearing stone from the paddocks and building stone walls. I suspect a few things were at play here to make the effort worthwhile: this area has very rich volcanic soils that would give a return; Victoria grew very quickly with the 1850s gold rushes which meant labour became available; and a lot of the workforce coming off the goldfields probably came from rural areas in Europe and had the skills to build walls like these.

We took a slightly different route this time stopping for lunch in Camperdown instead of bypassing it. In the middle of the main street is an amazing clock-tower totally out of place in the Aussie Bush. Camperdown is a small place of about 3500 people, this clock tower looks like it has been ripped out of some English town and plonked down as an after thought.I find this piece of architecture a little disturbing. In its own little way this monument seems as grandiose as Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria.

Much more to my taste is the bluestone post office.
Driving west from Camperdown, and just out of town I happened to glance to the left and said “That’s got to be a crater-lake!”
I had mentioned vaguely to Deb a few days before that I knew there were some crater-lakes somewhere in Western Victoria, and we should try to find out where they were to visit them sometime. And there one was staring back at me.

I had seen the northern most of two massive craters just outside Camperdown.
The first is Lake Gnotuk.
The second is Lake Bullen-Merri
This image taken from Google Maps shows the sheer scale of the lakes.The surprising thing to me is there were no tourist oriented signs trumpeting the lakes existence that we saw in Camperdown. Surely a marketing oversight?

From the lakes we pushed on west, pausing briefly to take a shot to demonstrate how green the western district is at the moment. This colour is very alien to most of Australia most of the time.
Next: Wildlife at Warrnambool