From the Coral Coast, Western Australia, and growing in sand, it’s for Cee’s flower of the day. There are so many wildflowers (more than 12000 species) during the season and very hard to find all the names. This year is set to be a bumper year, with above average rainfall, so if you’re heading to the west, make sure to visit one of the wildflower trails.
Safe travels. Take water and a hat, and your camera.
Botanical name Ptilotus, this mulla mulla carpet of wildflowers we found in the Coral Bay area of Western Australia, unexpected on the red dirt.
Mulla mulla is a regular inhabitant of the Pilbara region in Western Australia and found across the mainland.
See more flowers in Cee’s flower of the day.
My entry in Cee’s Flower of the Day is this unexpected find, in mid-west Western Australia. In the middle of a pond, surrounded by an amazing array of colourful birds, was this single waterlily.
If you are in Kalbarri, visit Rainbow Jungle. It is a visual delight.
Take a hat and water. Safe travels.
Dorothea Mackeller, 1885 – 1968, described Australia as “…a sunburnt country…” in her poem, My Country. The weekly photo challenge this week involves choosing your favourite sunrise or sunset photos, and there are plenty of opportunities, here. I noticed that most of my sunrises are over land and my sunsets over water. I’ll be interested to see if that’s common for most photographers in the challenge.
I wake early, so I see many sunrises from my backyard and from farther afield.
In Australia, the redder the sunset, the hotter the next day will be. Although I’m not a night owl, I also see lots of sunsets.
My father used to say,
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a girl healthy, wealthy and wise.”
I achieved the first and in my definition of what is valuable, I am rich beyond my dreams. There’s still time for the wisdom.
Safe travels, whatever you do between sunrise and sunset, this week. Take your camera!
On the jagged north west coast of Western Australia, between Coral Bay and Monkey Mia, lies the town of Carnarvan. We touched on its history and gardens, but only learnt of its links with space long after we’d passed the sugar scoop and parabolic disks.
Residing alongside the jetty is the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage. It has been maintained and contains original artifacts, furniture, clothing and documents. We loved the view from the front door, when the back door is open, of the ocean beyond the back yard and we were fortunate to meet one of the family who had lived there. Just checking on things and collecting the gold coin donations, she told us how, as children, when the huge ships came in loaded with goods, she and her siblings would run barefoot down the jetty to watch them unload. They would spend all day at this, as the livestock and goods were loaded on to the tram, which went straight to town.
The jetty itself was 1 mile long (1.6 km) and although it has been repaired and still has tram runs occasionally, it is shorter. There is a small fee for walking the jetty, which goes towards its maintenance.
We left the jetty and made for the River Gums Cafe, seeing good reviews on the internet and in brochures. It was an interesting drive and the winding dirt road entrance was picturesque. The attached caravan made it through the dips, no worries. We had freshly squeezed juice and an iced coffee, which were both very tasty, but the gardens we observed while we sat at our wrought iron setting, were superb. I have tried to locate the names of the plants I photographed, but I apologise, they were too many. If you know the names of any of them, please let me know.
Carnarvan is sprawled but the centre of town is like any big country town in Australia – wide centre median strip and two lanes on each side. As we moved easily out of town on the good highway, we saw the disks, or parabolas on the hill. My husband recalled something about space tracking.
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.DjHqg4rBt_zpJ25wErmK1gHaE8%26pid%3D15.1&f=1
from Carnarvan Museum.org.auWell, the radar disks were involved in the Apollo 11 flight, tracking its progress and sending information across the world. Now almost inoperative, the disks are housed at the Carnarvan Space and Technology Museum and it is written about very highly. We should have done our research and given this town more time, as the waterways, views and museum, that we have since learnt about, would have been enjoyed.
We’ll just have to go back!
Safe travels! Take a hat, water and tourist information.
For this week’s photo challenge – silence, I picked one of a small number of places where the silence stilled me completely; Lake Argyle, Western Australia.
In actual fact, shortly after this the wind picked up and we were in for high seas and, while the silence remained, it was charged with emotion.
Safe travels. Take water, a hat and it helps if you can swim.
I had not heard of the Rabbit Proof Fence until the movie of the same name was released in 2002. This, in turn, was based on the book, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence, by Doris Pilkington, published in 1996. But the fence and the media are quite different stories.
As I took the ‘Rabbit Proof Fence’ turnoff between Merredin and Coolgardie, it was with mixed emotions. What did it represent to me and to Australia?
A wide rest area enables you to read about the history of the fence, constructed between 1901 and 1907. The construction took place in several sections and this part, finished in 1903, is the place where it started and is named No.1 Rabbit Proof Fence, as a consequence.
The claim that is the longest fence in the world is not true, as when it commenced in 1901 the longest fence already existed, in Queensland. It is, however, the second.
When Australia was settled in the early 1800s, many Englishmen/women missed things from home and arranged to introduce them. Few of these were good for the country, although some, like sheep and wheat, were good for the development of a new nation. Well, rabbits were on the ‘bad idea’ list of imports, their purpose being to provide something to hunt for a Victorian grazier. They thrived in the place and spread quickly to the other eastern and southern states. What did they do? – not much. The following cartoon, appearing in 1880 in a NSW edition of Punch tells the story.
Within a few decades they made their way across the Nullarbor and were at the Western Australian border. Hence, the fence was built.
There are gates every 34 km for access and huts every 48 km, so that the Acting Chief Inspector of Rabbits and his team of 25 boundary riders could inspect and maintain the fence on bicycle, dray, horseback or camel. In terms of pest protection, it was successful until the early 1930s when drought brought as many as 100 000 emus to the fence line. The rabbits had declined due to droughts and the introduction of targeted disease, so the fence was realigned to protect agriculture from the emus and became known as the State Barrier Fence.
The longest fence in the world?
As an Australian, we have the vast distances to complete such a fence. We also have the second longest road in the world. The Dingo Fence, extending from South Australia to Queensland over 5600 km, was built to keep out the dingoes and wild dogs. In that, it has been fairly successful, but is not maintained as well as the Rabbit Proof Fence.
A shameful part of Australian history is the Stolen Generation. They are the Indigenous people who were taken from their parents and families over a 70 year period, by government officials. Doris Polkington’s mother escaped from such a settlement with her sisters. The account was recorded in her novel, Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence. In order to get home, they followed the Rabbit Proof Fence for 1600 km, through desert, avoiding officials. The movie faced strong criticism and was confronting for many Australians, but it helped to reach the point where, in 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appologised to the Aboriginal People of Australia for stealing their children and all that resulted. Rabbit Proof Fence is an extraordinary movie but I haven’t read the book.
An unbelievable story from the fence, is the one I read in Wikipedia, copied here verbatim:
In 1929, Arthur Upfield, an Australian writer who had previously worked on the construction of No. 1 Fence, began writing a fictional story which involved a way of disposing of a body in the desert. Before the book was published, stockman Snowy Rowles, an acquaintance of the writer’s, carried out at least two murders and disposed of the bodies using the method described in the book. The trial which followed in 1932 was one of the most sensational in the history of Western Australia. A book was published about the incident called Murder on the Rabbit Proof Fence: The Strange Case of Arthur Upfield and Snowy Rowles.[12] The incident is now referred to as the Murchison Murders.
A pause for critical thinking…
Safe travels, wherever you are going and whatever your goal. Take water and a hat. Every day we make history.
