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Category: photographs

Anvil Beach (#6 in “Deep South WA meets Southern Ocean” series)

Very easily reached via sealed roads, but astonishing little-visited, Anvil Beach is deliciously wild.

It offers visual splendour, grave danger, and safety.

If you intend to swim there, you must very carefully select exactly where/when/if to do so, how to reach your chosen point of entry, and how/if you can safely return from it…most especially if the tide is soon to turn, or a weather change is imminent.

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Word Power: Ratty, post-COVID-19

 

The rodent pictured above – well-rounded, petite, and “out in the wild”  – quite probably strikes you as “cute”, maybe even “adorable”.

But how about the longer-toothed, urban-invading ranks of Rattus norvegicus?

Allegedly, they are currently making themselves ever more “at home” inside our cities’ offices, shops and homes…

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Word power: previously banned, now compulsory

On 22 October 2019,  in the northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai, China, I met an obviously-ambitious sheep-owner.

Clearly, he was “improving” his flock, probably with help from Australia.

Some of his sheep greatly surprised me – very evidently, some of their “bloodlines” were merino.

The prosperous grazier’s mask was entirely appropriate to his dusty task.

However, wearing it would have been expressly forbidden in some other places/contexts, even in the much more open/democratic land of Oz…

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Aussie “icon”/ “outcast” achieves lift-off

Our hero lost his “sacred” status when his Australian-ness was recognised!

As is true of many birds, Threskiornis molucca – the Australian white ibis – is wonderfully elegant when high in the sky, but rather less so when on terra firma, or in the process of becoming airborne.

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Living on a high, dry “floor” (#4 in “Tibetan Plateau” series)

The featured bird is very tiny, very hardy.

“His” valley’s sparsely vegetated floor – the “low ground”, locally – all sits within 200 metres either side of 4000 metres above sea level.

If transplanted to the Tibetan Plateau, New Zealand’s highest peak would fail to reach this valley’s lowest point.

 

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Lights Beach to Waterfall Beach (#5 in “Deep South WA meets Southern Ocean” series)

 

Lights Beach is a deal less than half an hour’s easy drive west, from Denmark.

Lights Beach car park sits just outside the eastern boundary of William Bay National Park.

The featured image and the one below were both taken from just below the car park’s edge; the wider-angle view looks south, whilst the one above looks west, along the National Park’s shoreline.

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Vale Frank Kimbrough (1956-2020)

 

Many self-declared “jazz lovers” would not recognise his name, nor have ever heard him…wittingly, at least.

That said, I am far from alone – and am in some very good company – in having long regarded Frank Kimbrough as one of the select few improvising pianists who ought be described/remembered as “one of the greats”.

if I were only ever allowed another listen to just ten “piano trio tracks”, his sublimely beautiful Waiting in Santander would be one of them:

 

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Happy New Year (with myth-buster bonus)

 

According to what most people believe, this post’s flightless bird is a perfect symbol for “moving forward in 2021”.

After all, aren’t the emu and the kangaroo Australia’s heraldic beasts precisely because neither is capable of taking a backward step?

Self-styled “rational” adults delight in having long ago discovered the truth about Santa.

However, even many self-styled “scientists” still believe that emus cannot walk backwards.

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