Random raves

And while it's really nice to have the nurturing sound of rain (there were some fab thunderings and lightnings earlier as well), what's particularly groovy right now is the frogs, who have started up their peeping near the creek (or stormwater channel, I suppose). It's amazing how they can get themselves out of their aestivation (or whatever you call what the frogs do when it's dry) state so quickly and start greeting each other with such optimism within an hour or so.

In short, too cute for words.

... with wonderful gold and crimson lights against the dark fluffy clouds, and the temperature has dropped to 18 degrees.

Both of these things are very pleasing.

This is where I lived in one area of Auckland (out of the many). Our house was to the right and behind the grey roof in the right foreground. All that area beyond there is bush, which I'd disappear into for hours. The dip in the hills to the rear is where the beach is.
( piccie )

This is the wee estuary just before the beach. There are mangroves, cabbage trees, and what I used to call toetoe (pronounced toi-toi), although it's actually non-native pampas grass, alas (toetoe is very similar, but has droopier fronds - the pampas grass is pushing it out of its niche). I would have had some piccies of that, but bloody hands again. The greens in the shot are unaltered, by the way. My camera is crap at washing out highlights when it's dark, but those greens really are lurid. There was a tui (bellbird) hanging around having a chat while I was walking to the beach - I tried to record him chirpling away, and I'll have to see what I ended up with.

( another one )

And here's one of my favourite parts in the bush - a stand of young kauri trees. That bushland was all logged off in the late 19th Century (for house building, furniture-making and ship spars), and what is there now has been regenerated from that. The kauri trees there are just 70 or 80 year old tiddlers, not much wider than my own body. Mature trees can live for several hundred years (over a thousand is not unknown), and achieve diameters of up to 4-5 metres. These ones have a little way to go. Again, the quality of the photo is not good - the greens of the bush have been washed out due to the lighting "correction", and it should all look much darker.

( trees )

Oh, and this is all right in the middle of suburban Auckland. It's a 15 minute drive to the central city (not during rush hour). As a kid, I was lucky to be able to spend time in such a place.

It's no secret that I have my issues with Canberra, not least the fact that I don't consider it to be a real city, more a conglomeration of four shopping malls connected by suburbs and roundabouts. (Actually, I like roundabouts. Whee!). While it's well-served by museums and galleries, it's by virtue of the fact it's the national capital, not that there is a particularly lively arts scene here. But my biggest issue is the fact that the people are so homogonised. It's been a bit of an adjustment living in such a white-bread city.

Anyway, enough of the gripes. Canberra is, however, spectacular in the autumn. The city is fairly flat, but has substantial greenbelt (mainly eucalyptus and scrubby shrubs - it's too arid for ferns or podocarps) areas and conical tree-covered "mountains" which pop up from the landscape at semi-regular intervals. Canberra is an artificial city, kind of like Australia's version of Milton Keynes, but, it must be said, a lot more attractive.

In the 1910s, the city was designed (complete with circles and roundabouts), and the Molongolo River was finally dammed in the 1960s to form Lake Burley Griffin. The actual building of the city started shortly after its design, with brickworks being built in Yarralumla, as well as the Yarralumla Nursery also being founded at that time. Now, the nursery is crucial, since they grew all the trees which are currently showing beautiful colours, especially in the inner (lakeside) suburbs and around the lake itself.

There are gorgeous reds and purples and yellows and golds, with the leaves in huge drifts in the parks. There are still enough trees with bright green leaves to provide contrast, and there is always the dusky purple/green/grey of the eucalypts as the underlying note. The weather is cool enough that you can actually walk around for more than 10 minutes without expiring and engage in other vigorous physical activity, ditto. I went for a nice walk by the lake on Sunday morning, and happily quacked to the ducks who were fossicking around on the shore. (The two joggers who went past gave me googly-eyed looks, but if they don't want to quack at contented ducks, that's their problem). The sky was dark with imminent rain, but there were shafts of sunlight through the clouds which highlighted the leaves against the dark backdrop. Quite spectacular, really.

The other useful thing is that the Yarralumla Nursery cultivated the "Canberra Gem" Grevillea, which I am going to plant for my girlfriend as a hedge this weekend. The bushes grow 2m high by 3 wide (which is sufficiently hedgelike), are drought-resistant, love full hot sun, prefer low-nutrient acidic soils, and happily resist frosts down to -10 deg, as well as attracting nectar-feeding birds. I got out there with the soil-testing kit a few weekends back and ascertained that the soil pH is between 5 and 6, so we're good to go. I did think of camellias, but they tend to be more disease-prone, want more water, and aren't native or so bird-friendly. Also, grevilleas are just cool. Anything to avoid the dreaded conifer-hedge blight. If you live in sub-Arctic regions, great, or if you're surrounded by native varieties, also great. Otherwise, I hate the buggers. Anyways, with a 30m long frontage, I'll need to get 20 plants. I think they'll fit in my car boot (if I lie them down).

Eee! I like digging things. And pruning. And it's apparently the perfect time of year to plant the grevilleas. Yet another reason to love autumn.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my country? Heh. And, I totally love my friends, they're marvie. What a soul-restoring few days I had.

It rained almost the entire time, except Sunday, the day I was leaving. It'd apparently been totally gorgeous for the two weeks preceding. Of course, I get back to Canberra, and it's still raining.

Even so, here's a nice piccie of the Hokianga Heads, the top of the harbour I spent most of my time driving around "up North" (of Auckland). ( Hokianga Heads )

The whole northwestern coast of the North Island is festooned with sand dunes. South of Auckland, you get the black iron sands at Port Waikato. The currents bring the black sand to the west coast beaches of Auckland, and I have tons of memories of not being able to stand on the beach due to the heat generated by the iron deposits. Literally foot-frying. Also, there can't be too many places in the world where kids take magnets to the beach for fun (who knows if they do now, but we certainly did then). The black sand beaches aren't so black these days, since they finally found a process to extract the iron for smelting in the late 70s - as you can imagine, getting iron out of the silica it's bound up with in the sand isn't a trivial process.

Anyways, this post is just for starters. I'm happy with my new phone/camera, although since the shutter speed isn't too fast, I have problems holding it steady enough with my wobbly hands. Since I totally overdosed on the yummy coffee to be had at home, they were even less steady than usual. Never mind.

This is a kauri tree:



(That one is Tane Mahuta, by the way, the largest tree in NZ. Kauris are second-only to redwoods in terms of height, but have more wood volume than any tree.)

There were lots of them around where I grew up as a kid. I'd go off into the bush for hours, with my flask of mushroom soup, sit under them, read, hug them, and make up stories about the gods of the forest, before going on an expedition up a creek (the days I remembered to wear my gum boots).

I haven't seen one of these trees in nearly 7 years. I spent 5 years in London (nearly), and just over a year back in NZ, in Wellington, which is too far south to grow these trees. And here I am in Australia... I just want to touch the bark and break off a small piece of gum, so that I can rub it and have the smell of the bush wherever I go.