Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Warren National Park’s Karri-dominated forest is – by Australian standards – a moist, cool environment, albeit definitely not rainforest.
Most visitors mostly look up; for many tourists, the Warren’s big trees are the tallest living things they have ever seen.
It is also a good idea to look down, to pay attention to non-huge things, and to remember that “dead” wood is never lifeless.
Comments closed
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)
Comments closed
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.
Comments closed
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.
Comments closed
I took this post’s photo an hour or so after we had landed on Flinders Island.
Luggage collected, our little group proceeded to the picnic shelter which is adjacent to Trousers Point Beach.
I am keenly aware that “good” light can disappear or shift, quickly.
So, whilst everyone else started to eat, I ducked down to the shoreline, where I took the featured image, at 1.49 pm on 17 March 2025,
The island’s most celebrated beach was just behind my left shoulder, with Flinders’ most spectacular peaks rising above it.
The sun, however, was in exactly the “wrong” place – there was no point in pointing a camera lens at Trousers Point Beach and the mountains.
As you can see, the “lesser view” – looking the other way, working with the available light – was still splendid.
Comments closed
From 9.44 am through 10 am on 14 November 2022, the pictured rock and yours truly were sharing the very same hilltop.
Whilst the rock itself was an inanimate object, living beings very successfully occupied a deal of its exposed surfaces.
These beings are neither plants nor animals; as you can see, more than one species are obviously-present on this particular rock.
A lichen is a composite organism that emerges from algae or cyanobacteria living among the filaments (hyphae) of the fungi in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.
Comments closed
