Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
You are looking at what the strength/weakness, relative abundance/scarcity, or presence/absence of various substances/qualities has delivered.
Likely-major players in the pictured instance: long-extinct volcanoes, erosion, chemical reactions, gravity, wind, rain, salt (windblown, from the nearby sea) and fire, sunlight, shade, shelter, temperature variation, “exhausted” soils, sheep.
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Australia is remarkably rich in exposed rock, including some of “our” planet’s loveliest and longest-exposed rock.
Even by Australian standards, Flinders Island is particularly well-endowed.
Its “rock stars” are often gloriously “decorated” by the wondrous-strange organisms that live on them.
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This post’s photos were taken about half an hour after the previous post’s, and circa one kilometre further north.
The featured image involved a telephoto lens; its 400mm focal made Flinders’ highest peaks look very much closer than they actually were.
It also emphasised the ruffled water and the rocks, immediately off the shore on which I stood.
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This post’s three images were taken within the space of twenty minutes, as we walked in a northerly direction, along part of Flinders Island’s west coast.
All three look south toward Strzelecki National Park; its peaks are the island’s highest, and they dominate its southern end.
The featured image offers a wide-angle view. (34mm focal length)
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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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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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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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It is very safe to assume that on 26 March 2025 the pictured grassy “runway” experienced more landings, take-offs and taxiings than did Flinders Island’s airport.
At the airport each such action was a “one at a time” affair; in the paddock, invariably, each such event simultaneously involved a pair of partners-for-life.
The featured photo and the one below were taken within a few seconds of each other, and they show the same couple.
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Cape Barren geese are monogamous, and a “breeding pair” usually forms a life-long bond.
During the breeding season the pair focus almost exclusively on each other, their nest and their eggs/chicks.
After breeding season (generally, in tussocky wild places on offshore islands) Cape Barren geese usually fly to grassy places.
These are often on south-coastal, mainland-Australian farmland, or paddocks on the larger offshore islands.
In “grazing mode”, the geese are more generally-sociable.
However, as you can see in the immediately-preceding chapter’s photo, even within grazing “flocks” the pair-bonds are conspicuously evident.
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The world’s rarest goose lives only in Hawai’i; click here to discover more about the Nene, aka “The Hawaiian Goose”.
The second rarest goose species – pictured above – lives only in certain southern Australian coastal places.
Like the Nene, the Cape Barren Goose (Cereopsis novaehollandiae) very nearly became extinct; by 1950, both species appeared to be “doomed”.
However, conservation efforts in the 20th century’s second half proved successful.
Neither species is now on the IUCN’s list of “threatened” species.
Certain key physical and behavioural features of Cape Barren geese are evident in the photo.
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