Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
My feet were planted on the same strand, and this post’s photo was taken only moments later than was the final image in this series’ chapter #6.
Common to both: foam…foam with which one can be “relaxed and comfortable”.
Its presence on Yeagarup Beach was entirely benign.
No alga was “blooming”.
The Warren River’s and the relevant section of the Southern Ocean’s waters were not polluted.
Q: so what was going on?
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A river’s mouth and the beach it breaches – or only sometimes manages to breach – can be very dynamic places.
From one visit to another, they may display utterly different “faces” to an occasional visitor.
Anyone familiar with the mouth of the not-so-mighty Murray, adjacent to the Coorong, knows that even a river mouth’s “precise” location can be a highly-movable feast…or famine.
This is also true of many much more “modest” rivers, such as the Warren.
On the winter morning of 16 August, this particular meeting of river and ocean underwent many changes in mood, even within a single half-hour.
Comments closedThis post’s and the previous chapter’s photos were taken within the space of one minute, from almost the very same spot on Yeagarup Beach.…
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Untarnished, but sometimes “stained”…benignly.
I took the photo at 11.19 pm on 16 August, when a handful of humans stood on Yeagarup Beach.
This is where the Warren River meets the Southern Ocean.
In global terms, the Warren is “modest”, in both length and average flow rate.
However, its lower reaches are glorious. Beautiful, globally unique, very tall, never-logged forests segue to dunes, an estuary and a truly wild ocean shore.
As evident in the featured image, when a “properly” wet winter feeds it, the Warren carries enough tannin-rich water to darken the Southern Ocean’s edge.
(and – as a future chapter will show – the river’s mouth then moves “up the beach”, which it reshapes)
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Urban-resident Australian humans who were born after 1970 may find it very hard to believe, but this post’s headline is accurate.
Relatively speaking, Threskiornis molucca – the Australian white ibis – is a newcomer to urban life.
However, the so-called “bin chicken” was already resident on the Australian continent long before Homo sapiens arrived – let alone post-1788 humans and rubbish bins.
It is absolutely not a “feral” bird.
Contrary to what many Australians believe, it and the so-called “Sacred” or “Egyptian” ibis are entirely different species; the latter has never called Australia home.
Still, the roof of a “Federation Era” house in any Australian city – such as the Subiaco one, above – almost certainly never felt the pitter-patter of Threskiornis molucca‘s not-so-tiny feet until the final quarter of the 20th century, or the first quarter of the 21st.
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Well-known fact about Perth: it is handsomely the sunniest of Australia’s capital cities.
Perth averages 3,200 hours per year – circa 8.8 hours per day.
Little-known, counter-intuitive fact about Perth: its average annual rainfall is considerably higher than Melbourne’s…and London’s.
(Melbourne has twice as many rainy days, and many more hours of drizzle. Perth’s rain – is typically much more “squally”)
Perth’s winter light is often glorious; it can flatter everything it touches – even very “generic” CBD architecture.
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At least according to European-styled calendars, spring has just begun in Australia’s southwestern corner.
Seasonal realities are in fact highly “fluid”; they do not obey calendar dates.
Whilst seasonal patterns have become progressively more “fluid”, the skies over WA’s south west have provided progressively smaller annual deliveries of actual fluid.
For the past four decades almost every annual and winter rainfall figure has been well below the long term average
in June-July-August 2025 most parts of WA’s south west experienced their first “properly” wet 21st century winter.
Perth’s 2025 winter was the wettest of our 42 years here; only those who have lived in Perth for 68 years have experienced any (barely) wetter one.
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The featured image (above) was taken at 2.51 pm on 18 August 2025, near Beedelup Falls, in southwestern Western Australia’s “Karri country”.
Although not a very fine photo, it does show some very unusual behaviour.
”Flaunting it” is something to which any male member of the genus Malurus – the eleven Australian species generally known as “fairywrens” – devotes a deal of his life.
Generally, however, these “show-offs” are very wary; as soon as a flaunting fairywren senses a human’s presence, he “disappears”.
Q: So why was the pictured individual right out in the open, on a sealed roadway’s surface, and utterly unalarmed by my very obvious, very close presence?
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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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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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