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Category: miscellaneous

“Old city”, Lahore (#22 in series: different drum, with musical bonus)

 

 

In the “western” world most drums are made from metal, wood and “skin” (although that “skin” is now usually synthetic) and they are usually played with sticks, mallets, or brushes.

In Asia and Africa, however, many drummers hold no stick or mallet, and their instrument is a clay pot or a vegetable gourd.

Doubtless, some “westerners” imagine that music played by a hand drummer on a clay pot is necessarily simple, crude, “unrefined”.

That assumption is dead wrong…as is strikingly illustrated by this post’s “musical bonus”.

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“Old city”, Lahore (#3 in series: let there be drums + musical bonus)

 

 

(The musical bonus features a man who was very possibly the greatest tabla player in recorded history. It is hard to imagine that there has ever been a more prodigiously gifted player of any drum.  I am around 99% certain that you have never heard of him, let alone heard him. For the final 49 of his 66 years he lived in Lahore)

Immediately after our more “formal” welcome, we were made even more welcome, more personally, in a courtyard adjacent to Delhi Gate.

Drums and garlands were involved.

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Flinders Island, March ‘25 (#29 in series: living on the edge + musical bonus)

 

 

As highlighted in this series, Flnders Island’s shorelines are both beautiful and very demanding – especially for plants.

I imagine that not a few visitors perceive a place such as the one pictured above as “unspoilt”, “wild”, “pristine”.

The above adjectives are “wildly” inaccurate!

(I took the photo on the southern half of Flinders Island’s west coast at 10.08 am on March 2025. I love such places, where things “hard” and “soft”, “massive” and “petite”, “inanimate” and “living” all coexist, near terra firma’s edge)

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Flinders Island, March ‘25 (#24 in series: Mount Chappell Island “3” + musical bonus)

 

 

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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Flinders Island, March ‘25 (#23 in series: Mount Chappell Island “2” + musical bonus)

 

 

This post’s photo was taken just a few minutes further into our morning walk on 18 March 2025.

When clouds move along in a dappled sky, they can swiftly and dramatically change a landscape’s/seascape’s appearance.

A few minutes earlier – as pictured in this series’ preceding chapter – the “darkly forbidding”, low-lying island in front of Hummocky/Mt Chappell Island was an “inviting” isle, bathed in golden light.

Matthew Flinders named Mount Chappell in 1798, after the maiden name of the woman he would marry in 1801.

Flinders Island, is named after him, as are more than 100 other Australian places; Flinders was the first person to map the entire Australian continent’s shoreline – mostly, with astonishing precision.

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Flinders Island, March ‘25 (#22 in series: Mount Chappell Island “1” + musical bonus)

 

 

I took this post’s photo at 9.49 am on 18 March 2025, as we were walking along part of the southern portion of the western shore of Flinders Island.

Flinders is much the largest in the Furneaux Group, which sits at the eastern edge of Bass Strait, off the northeast tip of Tasmania’s “mainland”.

The Furneaux Group has circa 100 members; whatever shorelines you walk on Flinders Island, other islands are always visible.

The pictured “island in the sun” (whilst our vantage point was still cloud-shaded) is variously known as “Mount Chappell Island” or as “Hummocky”.

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Word Power: “ Above all, the Liberals would do well to lose the sneer” + pertinent musical bonus.

 

 

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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Deep South WA, Feb ‘25 (#42 in series: wave, with musical bonus)

 

Western Australia’s south coast is mostly unspoilt, uncrowded, wonderfully wild.

However, in February 2025 sunshine, strong winds and big waves were generally “AWOL”, and the usually-brilliant, clear light was mostly flat, hazy and/or smoke-tainted.

This trip yielded an unprecedentedly low number of worthwhile opportunities for landscape/seascape photography!

Nonetheless, even on a “flat, grey day”…

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Deep South WA, Feb ‘25 (#33 in series: threatened giants “1”)

 

 

 

You are looking at new growth on a very old, very large tree.

The Red Tingle – Eucalyptus Jacksonii – is a survivor, just, from a much wetter time.

Its “suitable habitat” has shrunk to a tiny portion of Western Australia’s south coast; almost all of it within Walpole-Nornalup National Park, which contains the wettest part of southern Western Australia.

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Deep South WA, Feb ‘25 (#22 in series: Porongurup “5”, with musical bonus)

 

 

This post’s forest floor “natural abstract” was photographed a couple of minutes later than was the “5” Porongurup image.

Their locations were only a few footsteps distant from each other.

One of the world’s greater guitarists has (unwitttingly) provided a sublime musical accompaniment..

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