Three Quick Updates.

First (and most important) Dave is much better. A night in hospital and a couple of nights in temporary accommodation have made the world of difference to his health.
Dave used to have a good ‘squat’ but he went away for a few weeks in June to try to find work. When he came back he found his place had been taken (which isn’t surprising). A few more weeks in more exposed places and he became unwell.

We haven’t managed to find anything more permanent for him. As a temporary solution, we will organise him a tent and a new swag. Some of our regulars have agreed to make space under ‘their’ bridge for him to pitch his tent. It’s not much, but at least he should be able to stay dry and relatively warm.

Now on a slightly worrying note: Io (my middle daughter) has come in this evening and said “There is no sign of the swans on the nest.”
I saw one was sitting on Thursday, but I didn’t go past yesterday. Io said she could see eggs apparently abandoned in the nest.

I am a bit worried. However, taking the optimistic line the cygnets may have hatched and the mother may have taken them elsewhere.
It is dark now so there is no point in going out tonight (black swans are awfully hard to see at night).
I was going down in the morning anyway to snap some photos for my Sunday Swan Watch, so I will have a good look around and see what I can see.

Finally, and finishing on a more positive note: back in July I announced Christine was the winner of my Piccie Give-Away.
Christine decided on her three piccies, which I had printed and duly sent off to the UK.
Christine has now received her piccies and has kindly agreed that I can share her choices.
She said it was a lengthy process choosing as she wanted to pick three from a single theme.

The theme she chose was a water/landscape one.
Christine’s choices were:
Bay of Martyrs, Victoria
Rocks and waves at Bermagui

and a restful waterfall The Toorongo Falls

Down and Out in Melbourne

I have to apologise, but the tone of this post isn’t exactly cheery.

Things have been rough lately for many of the guys who use the homeless services I run. The cold weather is having a real impact. A number of guys have ended up in hospital with conditions like fevers and pneumonia.

About the only saving grace in such situations is the major hospitals in Oz are public and essentially free.
Yet getting a hospital bed is not the end of the guys’ problems. Often their condition will only be stabilised and then there is pressure on them to be discharged.
Once they are discharged it means straight back onto the street, there simply are not enough emergency accommodation beds in the city.

So a good deal of our time over the past little while has been work around this kind of issue.

Yesterday for example, a regular of ours (I’ll call him Dave) showed up at our breakfast service clearly very unwell. Dave had a high fever and could barely move for pain. My offsider Greg and I spent an hour making sure he got to hospital. Then I was on the phone a number of times to try to get Dave’s needs followed up.

Dave was discharged today, he’d been on intravenous anti-biotics overnight and looked quite a bit better. But nothing like well enough to spend a night on the street or under a bridge.

So I spent a good chunk of the morning phoning around to get Dave some emergency accommodation. The best I could organise: two nights of motel accommodation paid for by an accommodation agency.

As you can guess a situation like this is extremely frustrating. We are working in a system that is in my opinion badly broken.

It would be easy to get very down about how little we can achieve. Yet, what I take from an experience like this is essentially uplifting. I have done what I can, I have tried my hardest. Dave has at least a couple of nights of safety. That means something.

And who knows what we might achieve tomorrow.

Now for a change of pace a Pacific Reef Heron I “caught” up on the NSW south coast as he hunted along a wave washed rock shelf.I haven’t seen one of these guys before although they are apparently quite common around our coast.

Sunday Swan Watch: II

It is freezing cold today (it's supposed to be snowing in the high country around here again).

I hope it is a case of no news is good news with our swan family to be. There is still no sign of hatchlings. The swan is still sitting on her platform nest .Perhaps because of the cold, the Swan was absolutely motionless.
In fact she was so still I got a bit worried that she was dead. It was a relief when I saw her move move her head after about ten minutes.
If you look closely at her eye in these two blown up images you'll see something I couldn't see on site.

She was blinking.
There were very few other waterfowl around today,
the main exception being some Maned Geese (also known as Australian Wood Ducks)
This guy thought I got a bit close...
taking off and revealing a flash of green on his flight feathers.
Before landing again a short distance away.
These guys are unusual in the duck family, in that they nest high in trees.

And speaking of trees, as I got ready to leave all hell broke loose high up in a big river gum nearby.

It seems the swans are not the only birds with breeding on their mind.No less than three pairs of Long-Billed Corellas ...
were squabbling ...
Over a nesting hollow in the end of this broken branch.
Like most parrots, Corellas nest in hollow branches in trees. As a large cockatoo they need a decent sized hollow which can be difficult to find. So these normally sociable birds become very argumentative about who will take possession of a suitable site.

Boy they were noisy!

Proof!

Yesterday afternoon saw this apparently unremarkable package arrive at the Russell Residence in one of the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
A short while later a certain individual (known to the followers of this blog as “Al”) could be seen happily perusing the contents of the package.
So what is it that I was so happily looking over?

I deigned to come out from behind the book, for book it was, and hold it up so Deb could snap me with it.Veiled in Shadows, Allan Russell, emblazoned across the cover.

It’s here, it’s finally here! A proof copy of my very own book!

To hold my work in my hands… what an amazing feeling!

It looks fantastic, exactly as I imagined it. The cover (my design) looks even better than I expected.
To say I am over the moon is an understatement. Publication is just around the corner. I just have to check this proof for errors in layout etc. Once I am happy, I give the go ahead to my printer Lightning Source. Then it will be somewhere between two and four weeks before Veiled in Shadows is available on Amazon, The Book Depository and to wholesalers.

Of course at that point the hard work of marketing my baby begins.

Wow, amazing. A bit scary too, but amazing!

Winter.

While I was away on holiday at Merimbula I was posting photos like this.

And this.

Then I was grumbling that despite the gloriously sunny weather I was cold.

People enjoying their Northern hemisphere summer looked at photos like this

and for some strange reason they didn’t take me very seriously.

Fair enough in tropical parts of Oz it never really gets cold.

However, it is winter down in the bottom half of the world and here in the southern end of Oz it gets wintery.

This Aussie for one thinks it is cold.

Now I have proof of the cold down this way.

On Saturday I took this

and this

See, I’m not just grumbling :-)

Sunday Swan Watch

Some time ago I posted about the artificial wetlands that have been created throughout the new subdivision where I live.

They have been created for a number of reasons, but mainly for controlling stormwater to prevent excessive erosion and scouring of natural waterways. A bonus is a good deal of green space through the urban area.

This small wetland is down behind our local supermarket.Many of the old River Gums (some hundreds of years old) have been left in placeThere is another tangible spin off: wild life has begin to call them home; or at least visit.

Birds like, Coots Black Duck And HeronsAre there most times I go past.

But just recently, down behind the reeds,A pair of swans has begun nesting.You can see in this piccie she has her eye on me, although she isn’t really worried as I was quite a distance away using a telephoto lens.

Australian black swans build a platform of sticks and vegetation out in the water to incubate their eggs. A typical clutch contains 4 to 8 greenish-white eggs that are incubated for about 35–40 days.

I am planning to check on there progress over the next few weeks.
Hopefully, I will be able to photograph the cygnets soon after they hatch.
If everything goes well I will post on the swans’ progress every Sunday until the babies are grown, or they leave the area.

And the Winner is…

I can’t believe it is a whole week since I last posted.
As usually seems to happen (all too often) the week has flown by.

I feel terribly negligent that I have barely been around the blogosphere this week, that I have failed to comment or respond to comments.

Most of all I have failed to announce a winner for my piccie giveaway!

I had intended to leave it till Tuesday our time anyway, because with international time zones the way they are I didn’t want anyone to miss out.

We are 18 hours ahead of the American West Coast and a full 20 ahead of Hawaii (For us Pearl Harbour and our war against Japan began on December 8, 1941).

But I am rambling, it is not Tuesday it is Friday. I have left this far too long as it is.

So with out further ado…

Drum roll please…

The winner is...

Christine of Inwardlydigesting!

Congratulations Christine!

Christine took advantage of the fact that I gave two extra entries in the draw to anyone who posted about my giveway and it seems to have paid off handsomely.

So according to the rules of the competition Christine can choose any three of my piccies from this blog. Once She has chosen I will organise 8” by 10” prints the piccies and despatch them by airmail.

Now comes the hard part for Christine, she has to trawl through my archives and choose.

I wonder which piccies you would choose?

Perhaps a piccie of odd little Soldier Crabs from one of my first posts?

A fiery sunset?
A rugged seascape?
The surreal mix of snow and a fire blackened landscape?
A mix of old and new?
Something grandiose?
The beautiful
The cute
Or perhaps restful?
Or just as likely three others picked from hundreds more...