Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Britain’s now severely-underfunded national broadcaster may well be looking – urgently – for “new means of generating revenue”.
The BBC Venus is not one of them.
Very obviously the youngest ship berthed at Port Adelaide on 07 March 2024, this bulk carrier was launched in 2023.
Under its current “flag of convenience”, the vessel’s ostensible “home” is Liberia.
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Mangroves thrive here.
Heavy industry is also here.
This river is also part of a substantial port, within a metropolis of circa 1.4 million humans; the heart of its CBD is just 14 kilometres inland from the featured photo’s vantage point.
Your eyes are probably telling you that the location is somewhere within the tropics.
But where, exactly?
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How do “the seasons” actually work in southwest Western Australia?
In 2023 one could reply, “they don’t, anymore!”
However, even back in the “good old days”, anyone who paid attention already knew that “seasons” in WA had precious little to do with any calendar’s dates, nor with European notions of “four seasons”.
This was already the case long before the coining of terms like “global warming”, “climate change” and “the Anthropocene”.
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Do you fondly imagine that Australia has overcome its “rabbit problem”?
This post’s 2023-vintage photo was taken recently in a “well-managed”, much-loved National Park.
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To my eye, Coober Pedy is an ugly town, albeit a singular one.
So, I was delighted to see something so lovely, growing not many footsteps away from a hideous shopping venue and car park.
I love the way such tall grasses look, especially when wind whiffles through them.
Alas, however, I was admiring a very “bad” plant.
Buffel grass – Cenchrus ciliaris L, pictured above – is “arguably the greatest invasive species threat to biodiversity across the Australian arid zone.”
Some beef producers, however, still view it fondly as “great cattle feed”.
The relevant legal requirement in South Australian Arid Lands:
Land owners in this region to take reasonable steps to kill plants and prevent their spread. Enforceable by the South Australian Arid Lands Landscape Board.
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Coonoor (in Tamil Nadu’s northwest) is the second largest town in the Nilgiri Hills, which are part of India’s Western Ghats.
At 1,850 metres – more than 6,000 feet – this attractive town sits at a higher altitude than does any Australian settlement, ski villages included.
Coonoor was the one Western Ghats location where we stayed “in town”, I took the photo from the road in front of our hotel at 6.59 am on 02 March 2023.
Can you notice anything “dead wrong”, environmentally speaking?
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A Wikipedia list of 182 counties, ranked by average annual precipitation, has Colombia allegedly wettest and Egypt driest – respectively, 3,240 mm and 18 mm.
155 nations are allegedly “wetter” than Namibia; its reported annual average of 285 mm is a little more than half of the figure given for nation #141 – Australia.
Yet Namibian-harvested hardwood is the basis for an industry which currently yields more than 70 million Australian dollars worth of annual export income…and that figure is set to soar.
It has nothing to do with construction timbers or wooden furniture.
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From a research article published this week in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology:
Our results suggest that the enrichment of natural soundscapes using underwater speakers may provide an efficient solution for boosting early recruitment and habitat building by oysters.
However, caution the researchers, restoration practitioners must consider the potential for negative impacts from speaker enrichment.
A question for you, dear reader:
before you read the quoted words, had you ever contemplated oysters’ “hearing”, much less their response to sounds played through underwater speakers?
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This kookaburra, perched on a grave cross, has something in common with most of the humans who have been buried in Perth’s largest cemetery over the past 123 years.
In 2022, most living WA humans do not know what it is; most of them, in fact, have a quite wrong view of kookaburras’ “place” in southwestern Australia.
Comments closedMany of Perth’s streets are lined by “inappropriate” trees.
Just which ones really are inappropriate – and why – are matters of much-divided opinion.
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