100% Effort

Well I am frequently  guilty of using piccies that I have posted on the blog for my What is it Wednesday?

This week’s WIIW was no exception..

So let us wend our way to an answer.

Linda G guessed, ‘Definitely claws. I'm going to say duck-billed platypus.’

Yep, they are definitely claws, so you are half right 50%

Mel said  ‘A creature from "Where the Wild Things Are" trying to use chopsticks!’

That has to be one of the most creative answers in WIIW. So it is definitely worth some marks, not quite sure how many though.

Susan, being nearly as ham fisted as she accuses me of being :-) said ‘ "Claws!" I thought, all excited, thinking no one else would pick up on it. HA! Right. Okay, so what kind of claws, you probably want to know. Beats me. Big ones’
Okay, they are claws, and they are definitely big so I will say 60%.

Michelle ‘I'd say it looks like claws...but the straight brown stick in between? Don't know.’

I guess you have earned yourself 50% Michelle.

But the winner is Jennifer (AKA Old Kitty) with her answer ‘Ooooh they're claws!!! Koala claws?!’

They are claws and you are bang on the money. 100%

Koalas are really hard to spot in the bush. Usually if you are lucky enough to see one at all it will just be a slumbering figure high up a tree.

But this guy I ‘caught’ in the Otway Ranges put on a brilliant show.
Actively climbing around browsing on eucalyptus leaves.

Pink Fingers

This tiny native orchid (the whole flower is not much larger than my thumbnail) is widespread, but hard to spot in the bushland where it grows.

Pink Fingers Orchid (Caladenia carnea) 

 

Nga keeat Billimina

In the rugged Grampian ranges.Along rough bush trailsHidden in the high ground around the valleys
Often under shallow overhangs like thisLie special placesNga keeat Billimina
In the language of the people of the land “Welcome to Billimina shelter.”

Billimina is a special place, this shallow overhang which lies behind a cleared dance –floor has a rock face literally covered with thousands of markings.

In fact this is the single largest collection of symbols in one shelter in the whole of Victoria.

Most are like these simple vertical strokes.“Tally marks” early and unimaginative European explorers called them. The archaeologists who explored this site can tell us that it was in use for thousands of years

And that the paintings here were made across a period of at least hundreds of years.

Some are vivid as if painted days rather than decades or centuries agoOthers are faint and faded and slowly being covered by the dark blotches left by the natural weathering of the rock
Some are clearly human-like figures.Maybe representations of the people who were here, maybe of spirits.

The knowledge is lost, or perhaps the descendants of the people wish to keep their secrets.

But do not mistake secrets for hostility most of the people are welcoming.

In the words of a local community elder:
“We have always lived here.
Now you have come,
Respect our culture.
It is now part of your heritage"
And most do.
But I must finish with a sad side of these ancient places

Over 100 are known just in the Grampian Ranges. Only 5 are made public
The rest lie hidden

Because while most respect these places for what they are the few…

Mean that such sites must be protected.In a few days more rock art

Next: Waterfalls in the Grampians

Rain, Fire and a Fatty

We have been having rain, glorious rain for the past week. Thank goodness it held off while we were actually moving.
After ten years of drought it is desperately needed. Melbourne’s water storages are creeping up slowly. An added benefit is that rain now will delay the risk of fire this summer. Unfortunately, government sources are suggesting that the risks of the current fire season are as high as past summer.

Now you have to forgive me I am going to be a little morbid for a moment. Further north the fire season has started early. In NSW as I type there are 50 wildfires burning across the state. My brother is a Rural Fire Service Brigade Captain on the NSW Central Coast. His brigade was called out to 22 scrub fires in just the past month. And it is still only spring.

We drove across the back road through Marysville towards Warburton. This area around Marysville was some of the most badly burnt in the Black Saturday Fires on this 7th February past. I posted about the devastation through this way a while ago.

This time the weather was clear and we could look across the valleys to distant ridges. In some places your eye was drawn to the green patches in the valleys below (green thanks to the recent rain) and things did not seem too bad. But when you looked at the closer ridgelines you really realised how extreme the conditions were.
These few photos show a mountainside totally destroyed. All the trees seem to have perished in the heat. Something almost unheard of in the Aussie bush, our eucalyptus trees are tough as nails. Also many of the trees seem to have been felled as if in a wind generated by a raging fire-storm. These destroyed mountainsides remind me of the destruction caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens back in 1980. Like there I think the forest will be decades in regenerating.

All we can hope is we don’t see such conditions again this coming summer.

Enough of doom and gloom.

Not far from these scenes of destruction there is an untouched patch of bush along Badger’s Creek. In there I managed the rare treat of photographing this fat little fellow.He (and I know he is a he because of his colouration) is a Common Bronzewing, a native pigeon species. Although they are, as the name suggests, quite common they are also shy and will not often sit long enough to have their portrait taken.
They are quite gaudily coloured birds and the wing feathers are a metallic sheen that change colour depending on the angle the light strikes them. The first photo only kind of shows the variation because he is in the shade.
This second piccie is not such a good shot. He insisted on turning his back (I said they are shy!) but it does show just how brilliantly metallic those feathers are.

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.