Away again

Strip of vineyard along the road, Bedford Park, SA.


Waiting for my flight to Brisbane

Not sure why I started this. I was in Adelaide for a geostatistics course given by Peter Diggle. The course was really good. But when you organise to go, you organise the least possible time because you don't know anyone and you don't know what to do.

I find getting from A to B extraordinarily stressful, so I tend to organise not to linger which is ultimately pretty silly. The course was at Flinders University which is some way south of the city, and I had hoped to stay at the university to avoid public transport. Perhaps for want of something important to stress over, I get myself ridiculously worked up about catching buses or whatever.

Adelaide was looking very beautiful. Its street trees were green and lush and growing well and from the University we could see the sea. And I am sort of sorry I didn't get to dip my toe in that lovely sea.

I took lots of photos of the most beautiful river red gums I have ever seen, but my photos were not particularly good. So the photos you get are of the strange little piece of vineyard 5m by 100m running along a suburban road, with its very old, well trellised and very healthy vines, and a view of the Adelaide Hills (?) from the airport

Digitisation Lab, Australian Museum

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallaba_ochropepla
Gallaba ochropepla. One of the Gallaba species in drawer 184.

I have been volunteering at the Australian Museum. They have trained perhaps 100 or so people to digitise the collections. (We are volunteers but the project is managed by a permanent officer.) First cab off the rank has been entomology, and today I teamed with Clare to photograph Drawer 184 which featured the Gallaba genus.

Rhiannon, one of the project leaders has now started a blog (Rhiannon's blog), and you can see what we have been doing here. It is an exceedingly fiddly task. Each specimen in a drawer has all its labels removed using tweezers. The labels are put onto a piece of plastic foam so that all the information is displayed, while the insect is placed beside. An extra label (our K label) is added, and when the insect and its associated information has been photographed, the labels are rethreaded on the pin and the specimen replaced in the drawer.

Many specimens are over a hundred years old and most are quite fragile. The aim of the exercise is to make the entomology collection (6 million specimens (?)) available and to obviate the need to pull out the actual physical specimens.

I was pleased with our work today. We took good photographs (but we did manage to damage 6 specimens..) I had hoped to find images of our moths on the internet, but only a single reference to just one of the three species we photographed in drawer 184 popped up on my Google search for "Gallaba". (Now found references but no photographs for G. dysthryma, and poor photographs for G.eugraphes). Utimately our work will show the animal, its species name, when, where, and by whom it was collected.
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The photograph is of my driveway using the effects menu ("sketch) on my new Nikon D5100. Fun software, but I hope that is not what I was paying for, but rather for the lens...


Driveway, Palm Beach.

morally ugly movie, lovely park.

Paperbark Tomato Lake, Belmont, WA


Gums on Tomato Lake, Belmont, WA

Poppy was at daycare so we took the other little girls to "The Zookeeper", marred by the gratuitous nastiness of the hero when wooing his girl. Which we followed by going to Tomato Lake. First time the experience of taking the girls to the park had something for the adults and something for the kids. We walked around the lake, looking at the waterbirds and just enjoying the park, which had lovely gums, banksias and paperbarks and an impressive swamp.


Egrets roosting


Jamie and Ellie on the spider

Clair's dolls

I went to Bayes on the Beach, and asked Clair if she would give me a lift from Brisbane, so after the workshop, we went to her place.

She has a whole room full of these lovely dolls made by her from scratch.

The workshop and the conference were terrific, but Surfers Paradise could well be the most vilely ugly and depressing place on earth.

Waratahs

Waratah flower arrangement, Qantas Club, Sydney.


Near the Wirrieanda Creek entrance to Kuringai Chase.


Great North Walk, Broken Bay NP.

It has been lovely seeing the waratahs this year. I had only seen them once before in the wild, walking with Ath, in Kuringai Chase, now some many years ago. I think I would not have seen so many this year, except for Ruth, who set me walking and photographing the Chase once more.

(And the lovely display at Qantas was a bonus, as I head off to WA, with Rachel & Don to see Nicole, Nick, Elizabeth, Jamie and Poppy at Rottnest.)

Camera

Flannel flowers,McKay Reserve, Palm Beach.

Finally bit the bullet and bought a new camera. It has magical focussing. But all the jiggling with lenses means that I'll want to pick my lens for the day, and if I choose the one which does flower closeups so well, then I can pretty well forget landscape and broad brush stuff...

But it looks like I might be able to photograph flowers at last.

Angophora hispida (Dwarf apple)

Walking the Waratah track, in Kuringai Chase, I was struck by the extensive low growth of Angophora hispida shown below. Part of what I love about Australian flora is their capacity to adjust to both harshness and opportunity in the successive seasons and years. We have had good rains lately, so there were only new leaves in the photo showing this species taking advantage of the weather and an available spot..


Vegetative regrowth

Here the root system has obviously been damaged by a grader (or something) working on the track, and the new trees are crowded densely on the old woody root system with current growth less than 30 cm high. The area shown was perhaps 30-40 square metres of Angophora hispida.

The two pictures below show regrowth immediately after the 2007 fires, and in both, you see the lovely colour of the new leaves, together with their hairiness which gives the species its name.





Below are the nuts. And here you see, too, the opposite leaves which are a feature which distinguishes this genus from the Eucalypts. In the second photo of the nuts, you see that hairiness is also a feature of the stalks which join the nuts, and the nuts themselves.







When this plant flowers, it is covered in blossom and buds, and is generally covered in ants which (I think) play a role in fertilisation.



Finally, on the spine of West Head, near the Basin track, you can see how this species, like so many of our trees, sheds its leaves and becomes skeletal in response to difficult times.

Return

Waratah, in the Broken Bay NP, just north across the Hawkesbury.


Tea tree, at the end of the street.


Acacia sophorae seedpods. Earlier in the year the leaves were fresh and full of light. Now they are battered, insect chewed and wind broken.

I am slowly returning to life here. But I am feeling more cheerful. I have work to do and once more have plans.

So many tea trees are out now and this one is from the bottom of the street as is the wattle whose pods I haven't seen before. The splendid waratah is from a walk I did with R. last Sunday who is planning on walking to Everest Base camp in December. So she needs to get fit for walking and I need to get fit. It was a splendid day, a beautiful walk, and the return late afternoon, down the mouth of the Hawkesbury by water taxi, made it pure perfection.

These photos are from my iphone. Still existing with the iphone camera!! I need to earn some money.

Studying

Boronia clad slope, Flint and Steel track, photo Ruth P.

I got the email the other day: my thesis has been accepted without emendation. So all I have to do is get it bound and a few other administrative details.

Kerrie has a student working on what it takes to complete a Ph.D. Strange and funny undertaking. But given all the self doubts, I reckon two or three things were critical. I told everyone what I was doing and having made the step, I couldn't withdraw without enormous loss of face. I had been given a scholarship and that was such a statement of faith in me, and also something that I had to honour by completing. And, finally, and perhaps most importantly, the assumption on the part of my supervisor that I could and would.

You go to work each day and work in your little cubicle, reading the "literature" and writing. You feel like a monk, shut away, studying, or like a Chinese, locked in a room doing his imperial examination to become a Mandarin.

And finally you come away knowing some things you didn't know before, (in my case, learning how to use the library...), but probably not the things you thought you might, when you started.

Jury duty

Diana (one of the figures in the Archibald fountain in Hyde Park)


Phoebus Apollo


Theseus killing the minotaur


The pool in front of the Shrine of Remembrance

Today, I was called up for jury duty. I went armed with a medical certificate. I find it pretty extraordinary that at the age of 68, I am apparently required to do a nearly 4 hour daily commute and 5 days a week work where I may not move, eat or shit, except at the behest of the court. I argued that it would exacerbate existing health conditions and that I should not be called up again for the remainder of my life.

My doctor thought I was not a very upstanding citizen, but then her commute to town is probably less than an hour, and neither is she currently unemployed... (I would prefer to spend the immediate future in finding a part-time job after completing my Ph.D., rather than ruining my health in the service of the state.)

The photographs are taken on my walk through Hyde Park after my dismissal.

Photos from WA

Tash's Jarrah floor


Unidentified pea in the Kensington Bushland


Painted crayfish at Cicerello's, Freemantle

So many people in Perth have these beautiful jarrah floors. Such a wonderful colour and so long lasting. Even Nicole's 1930's cottage has its original jarrah floors.

The fishtanks at Cicerello's in Freemantle a fish and chip shop dating from the 30's were extraordinary. The fish & chips somewhat less so. A great place nonetheless for plebeian dining. And finally, I still don't have an ID for this very spiny pea.

Visiting WA

Ikea beads fitted one by one on circular and square frames


Nicole blew these eggs, papier-mached them, and then she and the girls painted them with textas


Kensington bushland


Kensington Bushland

Nicole has enormous patience in creating things and so do the two girls. The beads require tweezers and both Jamie and Elizabeth (4 & 6) are expert in handling them and deciding what they want to do with the colours.

Nicole wants everyone in the family to contribute an egg and has a dozen blanks still to go. I have done one and will do a second, the first is so awful.

The Kensington Bushland is lovely. It's almost just across the road, and is remnant jarrah and banksia forest. The paths through it are fenced to deter animals and people from entering. I used to walk Harley here every day when I visited WA. But now he is dead, I see it less frequently.

Zoran's eggs

Zoran's eggs

I was trying to do white on white with highlights. Fiddled with the exposure. Failed miserably.

Zoran has acquired three chooks and a chook house in his backyard. He & Branca no longer buy eggs. And Zoran wraps his eggs in plastic wrap so they will not dry out in the fridge. (I photographed them wrapped but I did not manage a good photo.)

They made beautiful bacon and eggs, but I forgot to show how lovely they looked when cooked.

Iphone and fundamentalist Christianity

Vicki's begonias on the carport still surviving despite the sea wind.


Tangle below the verandah. First Iphone photo...


Rachel's flat. Table set for Saturday lunch.

I gave myself an iphone as a present for having submitted the thesis. So, I have been starting to play with it. I love its connectivity with my contacts. If there is an address then clicking on it takes me to a map showing just where they are and in another click I have the route mapped out from whereever I am. (Provided of course there is some public wireless point available.) Another click takes me to an image of that address. If I am hunting for a hairdresser on the net up pop the ones nearest to my phone plus maps the lot...

At the moment, I do not have any of the photographs of my contacts so that a glance at the phone tells me who is ringing. Collecting those photos will be a slow process, particularly since I rarely photograph people so I cannot download any photos from my computer..

Rachel's lunch was interesting. And I blotted my copybook. I have become somewhat obsessional about the increasing influence of Christianity on our politics. The sad thing is that the dominant English-speaking culture is American. I love it for its intellectual richness, but Oh God, as a society I think it stinks. That huge divide between the rich and the poor, between the educated and the completely ineducated. So the influence of fundamental Christians is being felt in this country and in particular, I believe, in the behaviour of the climate change deniers. It seems to me, that there is a significant and influential mob who, believing in God, cannot believe that his favourite species might be wiped back to the stone-age, if we are lucky, or become completely extinct.

The two guests, Catholics, immediately changed the subject. But then, unlike me, who has so recently attended University, they have not seen the Christians at the start of the year manning the entrances of UQ and handing out thousands and thousands of copies of Darwin's Origin of Species, of which the most important part was the introduction purporting to be scholarly and arguing for Intelligent Design. Their children will be subject to this anti-intellectual bullshit, I have no doubt, and we and our government and our intellectual elite, having destroyed our state schools, will be increasingly subject to such nonsense.

A final comment about the iphone, a large number of its books come from project Gutenberg, but sadly, most of these project Gutenberg books are full of typos.

The Basin Track

Lambertia formosa


Acacia suaveolens


Female casuarina against the sky


Scribbly gum, E. haemastoma


An unidentified flower


An unidentified flower

Despite the rain, or perhaps because of it, the colours seemed very true for these flowers. The mountain devils were a rare and striking red amidst their soft grey foliage. Coming up the path, the first flower I noticed was a Banksia spinulosa with its lovely black stigmas edging the bright orange of the flower and then the somewhat bedraggled Acacia suaveolens with the rhythm of its phyllodes against the soft white flower heads. Photographing it, you notice that the smooth edges of the phyllodes are translucent.

The red and grey spider flowers (Grevilleas) were flowering and the grey spider flower was striking with its flowers atop its stalks, and there was a hakea, common as dirt, no doubt, but flowering too with tiny flowers all along its stems and huge woody knobbly seed heads.

I put in the photo of the scribbly gum because of the beautiful red of its stalks. It too, was flowering. In the rain, its flowers always remind me of Little Ragged Blossom.

Not surprisingly, I saw two flowers I had never seen before. Never seen before, since in both cases the flower was little more than a simple continuation of the foliage, itself largely unremarkable. And I am assuming I had never seen the reddish one before, since I have probably walked on by thinking that the plant was entirely dead or burnt since the entire plant was orange. So easy to pass by and assume familiarity. And equally easy, in my ignorance, to assume that I have never seen it before as I did with a Boronia which had turned to seed.

Working

My desk in Anne's office. I look out to the rock-face and Cliff street is three storeys above, but we are at street level on the other side.


Rice-paper plant in flower at the top of the Whale Beach steps. I see this plant when I walk to the bus-stop to go to Anne's office in Milsons Point.

But the journey by bus takes forever, and the walk to the bus-stop is over a kilometre, and my pack is heavy. I am not sure how to do this, nor how sustainable it is. I need human company and I am struggling to work at home. Palm Beach currently seems incredibly difficult.

Tony Abbott

"America's Climate Choices" from National Academies Press.

I should be sending this to Tony Abbott. Perhaps he might get serious about climate change.

Blue

Colvillea racemosa. In the City Botanic Gardens, Brisbane.

Feeling blue. Need some work and more contact with people to drive me to do things.

Checking out some photos on Flickr, I came across this quote "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera" (Dorothea Lange). BrainyQuotes Which I think is spot on.