Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
A bit less than 30 minutes after I took the previous post’s photo, we had walked a little further north, along Flinders’ western shoreline.
By 10.16 am the “face” of Hummocky/ Mount Chappell Island looked very different, albeit still unmistakably-itself.
Mount Chappell is remarkably imposing, given the peak’s modest (198 metres) altitude.
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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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On WA’s wonderfully wild south coast there are some calm days, and a few truly safe places to bathe or swim.
16 February 2025 was such a day, and the “secret beach” (just east of Anvil Beach) usually offers safe bathing in perfectly reef-sheltered waters.
As evident in the featured image, even on this exceptionally calm day, the ocean-facing side of the reef gave occasional hints of the ocean’s oomph.
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Every word in today’s subtitle applies to the Hoarusib River, shortly before it sometimes flows into the Atlantic.
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The Curdimurka rail siding – near Lake Eyre South in the SA outback – saw its first train in 1888.
The last one went through in 1980, nearly three decades after the pictured water tank and gigantic water softener lost their raison d’être, when diesel electrics replaced steam locomotives in 1951.
This “big softie” was erected in 1943-44, so its working life was very brief.
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Natalie and Walt have just unwittingly delayed the promised leopard post!
(it will be the next one, I promise)
The photo alludes to one of my favourite Walt Whitman poems, from Leaves of Grass.
Most printed interviews with musicians are time-wasting, publicist-driven piffle.
A notable exception is The New Yorker interview, published today – worth reading, whether or not you admire/know Natalie Merchant’s singing/songs.
There aren’t a lot of people writing love songs to Walt Whitman.
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All four images feature the same moon.
However, as is true of just about anything observed more than once, “our” moon offers an infinite number of different “faces”.
The featured image shows a “blood moon” over Perth’s Lake Monger at 9.31 pm on 31 January 2018.
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Gnu/wildebeest are bona fide antelopes.
However, as the Blue Wildebeest’s scientific name – Connochaetes taurinus – suggests, most human newcomers assume that wildebeest are bovine beasts.
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Terns are particularly lovely in flight… or when hovering, intently.
The pictured individual is a Caspian tern, I think; s/he was our post-lunch highlight at Cottesloe yesterday.
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Australians’ 2022 views on taxation – and on taxation “reform” – are “informed” by a confusing array of truths, lies, twaddle, insight, credulity, chicanery, chutzpah, self-interested opportunism (sometimes naked, sometimes disguised) , rank hypocrisy, timidity, virtue-signalling, obfuscation, indifference, compassion, cruelty, ignorance, knowledge, and honest uncertainty.
The featured image is (Jon) Kudlelka’s cartoon for the 08 October 2022 edition of The Saturday Paper
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