Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Come late afternoon on 17 March 2025, we were comfortably ensconced in an upstairs room.
Ever-growing numbers of wallabies were emerging from the wooded, lower slopes of the “roof” of Flinders Island, in order to graze the immediate surrounds of Mountain Seas Lodge.
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Strzelecki National Park’s signature features are its glorious, unspoilt beaches and the hills that tower above them.
Generally, the hills have well-wooded lower slopes, which eventually yield to quasi-naked granite.
The above photo was taken just a few minutes after I and the previous post’s star had been mutually-surprised, but unalarmed…just a few wallaby-hops distant from this post’s vantage point.
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20 minutes after the wedgetail “fly-by” (see #5 in this series), I enjoyed a much more intimate, ground-level, animal encounter.
Pictured is Notamacropus rufogriseus – a species which is particularly abundant in Tasmania, but is also common through much of eastern Australia’s coastal scrub and sclerophyll forests.
In Tasmania it is generally known as “Bennett’s wallaby”; in mainland Australia the more common name is “red-necked wallaby”; some humans regard the Tasmanians and the mainlanders as two distinct subspecies.
Doubtless, some would say the same of the two relevant human populations!
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Just a few minutes after I’d photographed the Strzelecki peaks’ seaward-facing side, I noticed a large raptor, gliding above the nearby beach.
It was soon obvious that s/he was a wedge-tailed eagle – Australia’s largest raptor, and one of the world’s bigger eagles.
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The headline above is the key sentence in an essay published on 04 May 2025.
That essay’s headline: Are the Liberals in danger of becoming the Kodak of Australian politics?
Yesterday’s Pelican Yoga post included its most telling paragraph.
It is a direct quotation from a speech delivered in 1946 by a young, multiply-wounded ex-RAAF pilot; in 1949 he became a Liberal senator.
In 1968 he – John Gorton – became Prime Minister.
As the essay’s author observes:
His vision was generous, compassionate and cosmopolitan: of an Australia and a wider world “in which meanness and poverty, tyranny and hate, have no existence.”
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An hour earlier, I had been standing in brilliant sunshine, as my eyes and camera gazed across intensely blue water, a rocky shoreline, coastal scrub, and colourful, granite-loving lichens.
By 2.45 pm, however, our little group was walking under a light grey sky, and heading just a little inland.
It was no longer pointless to point a camera lens at the “roof” of Flinders Island.
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I took this post’s photo an hour or so after we had landed on Flinders Island.
Luggage collected, our little group proceeded to the picnic shelter which is adjacent to Trousers Point Beach.
I am keenly aware that “good” light can disappear or shift, quickly.
So, whilst everyone else started to eat, I ducked down to the shoreline, where I took the featured image, at 1.49 pm on 17 March 2025,
The island’s most celebrated beach was just behind my left shoulder, with Flinders’ most spectacular peaks rising above it.
The sun, however, was in exactly the “wrong” place – there was no point in pointing a camera lens at Trousers Point Beach and the mountains.
As you can see, the “lesser view” – looking the other way, working with the available light – was still splendid.
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All photos in this post were taken from Walkers Lookout.
(actually, from just slightly below it, which is the better choice, if you are looking south)
Near to the centre of Flinders Island, Walkers Lookout offers sweeping vistas in every direction, as you can see, here.
The best views look south, across the Darling Range and then to the much higher Strzelecki Peaks which dominate Flinders Island’s southwestern “corner”…and define the featured image’s horizon.
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It is Bass Strait’s largest island.
Among Tasmania’s more than 1,000 islands, only the “Apple Isle” is bigger.
However, Flinders Island’s nearly 1,400 square kilometres are home to fewer than 1,000 humans.
Any observant tourist will encounter many more wallabies than people; the same is true of wombats, cattle and Cape Barren geese.
Finding a splendidly wild and uncrowded beach is phenomenally easy; Flinders Island has more than 120 of them!
And if you are partial to granite and lichens….
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