Casterton's Annual Kelpie Muster

Well darling readers I was there this morning for the 20th annual shebang and this pic is the actual muster where skilled working dogs compete on the banks of the Glenelg River. Below are the other competitors mounted and waiting with their dogs.

Dogs dogs woof woof it was dog city from far and wide you wouldn't believe the range of number plates from distant places. The next pic is my friend Julie Honey and her famous clever dog FLASH a rare Miniature Kelpie - he's the one in the red bow tie winning the Kelpie Egg&Spoon Race in the main Street.

I mainly shopped the muster - the stubby holder, bumper sticker and food food food. Tomorrow is the great auction of talented dogs where they go for thou$and$.  I don't really need a pet but I may be a sucker for the concurrent auction of a special edition VicRoads rego plate with a Kelpie on it. Watch the freeways my friends. Woof Woof.

Annie gets a goat

My goat Millie. She now has an old water tank for a shelter and several layers of carpet to sleep on. She makes sweet little bleats and is supposed to eat all the blackberries. Which she surely will after finishing all the bread and lettuce I have given her.

Wildlife and wild life.

That yearling is not supposed to be in my yard, but safely behind the fence across the road. The owner does not live on the property so I had to go to the pub "G&T please" to find out he lives miles up the road, go there [.05] and back. Life in the country is different.
I have moved house since the trucks in the rain post 8 weeks ago on 4th June, not that it has stopped raining. Into my last house, my final address of so very many addresses, on 20th June.  I am experiencing involuntary spontaneous smiles.
No unpacking yet, just clearing.
My new challenge is snakes. They are everywhere. Each new encounter slightly less shocking so that by this morning when I lifted a sheet of wallboard in the shed, I just put it down again and hope the snake went back to hibernating.
This image is yesterday's baby snake with it's head, sadly, flattened by that sharpened spade on the left.

I am waiting on Acme Mail Order to bring me six VibraRandom repeller stakes - only one is needed apparently, but I take no prisoners when I act.

The 'snakes here' sign is to keep the imminent shed-clearing guys from forgetting that baby snakes bite too. The large parents, are of course somewhere on the property, yet to surprise anyone. The stakes emit vibrations through the earth that snakes can sense via their jaws as danger, and hopefully relocate. It is supposed to also repel rodents, ants and rabbits.
The team of three who are coming to clear out the shed estimated two days and multiple trips to the Transfer Station.  I have prepared a first-aid kit and written out the phone number of the nearby hospital as well as the police station between here and it, so I can alert the cop that should I streak through his town with a snakebitten shed-clearer I shall be doing 140 kph -

like that.

We all know that being completely prepared for an event, surely guarantees it won't happen.
Tourniquets are out, pressure bandage is the way. The snakes are, of course, lethal Tiger Snakes.
There are benign reptiles as well:
Raking up the debris after slashing and burning blackberries on the roadside, I uncovered a large Blue-Tongue Lizard curled-up and hibernating I assume. The fire rolled right over the top without affecting it.  Later while mowing rough grass I mowed over the top of it's twin and thankfully it was not harmed either although when picked up, the tongue shot out in a cobalt blaze designed to strike fear into my heart. They are not called blue-tongues for nothing, it is such an intense shade and obviously works as a deterrent because I really don't want to see it again.
Next week the local highlight is dogs and dags at SHEEPVENTION and I shall be there.

My Western District Day

... comprised driving for 3 hours and meeting this roadside welcoming committee of Merinos in MERINO Victoria 3310
which is a lovely place. The pub has a movie theatre, beat that Melbourne.
Then I drove another 3 hours at 100 kms p.h. and am so weary I am doing this FFS.

Laborious victorius

Going down the road to vote in Buninyong.

getting closer. Mount Buninyong is a magical place.

Random outcome of a good close car park under those green branches saved me no time in the massive queue. Buninyong Primary School was the place, in one of those 'Gillard Government School Halls'. I wish time travel could have brought The Rev. Thomas Hastie who established the Bunny bush school in 1847. That horse float was a highlight.

Rachel Carson - The Silent Spring

My friend the factory-farmer uses pesticides as most people do, and if you dear reader saw regional TV the advertising of agricultural chemicals would shock you. Paddocks full of mammals full of stuff to keep worms and fleas at bay, and that stuff is in your meaty dinner. The pasture is full of chemicals too because factory-farming, where stock breeding numbers are artificially inflated by artificial insemination, needs the grass to grow faster to fatten them.
All these chemicals are produced by big agri-pharma and they would do anything to eliminate the evidence of Saint Rachel Carson, who has today had the Google banner accolade.
Ms Carson was a pioneer of ecological awareness and is the patron saint of all those tree-huggers who understand the balance of the planet. Leaves make oxygen and that is so good, concrete production is a worse polluter than anything else.
My blog pal Kath at Goofing Off In Geneva really misses the oodle-ardle song of the Magpies since she had to leave Melbourne. Imagine if there were no birds at all.
Please follow this link to the Wiki of hero Ms Rachel Carson if you have never read
her 1963 book The Silent Spring.

text of kin

This is the Paris grave of the magnificent Tartar dancer Rudolf Nureyev, designed as one of the Tartar a.k.a Azerbaijani carpets he collected.  It is in the Russian cemetery, surrounded by the tsarist nobility who got out of  St. Petersburg and MOCKBA c.1917 as the philistine hordes were trashing their treasures. I am buried deep into revolutionary Russia lately, tracing the family of my dear and cultured friend Ariadna*Vladimirovna - and patronymics now have meaning for me. Her second name tells us her father was Vladimir. Actually pre-1917 he was Woldemar Hesse, but Russia loves change. When a Russian maiden married, her surname became her husband's but with 'a' added. Vladimir Davydov's wife would be Natalya Davydova, meaning she is one of them, Davydova also meaning the entire family.
Added to the shifting sea of people's names, post-noble Russia changed all the place names as well, ie: St. Petersburg became Leningrad., and the Bolshie hordes trashed all the noble graves as well. As one website wailed 'the miracle of Russian genealogy, is that it can be done at all'.
My obsession with genealogy (anybody's) may be the result of never really being a part of my own family. I was a satellite of their orbit right from the start.
Just looking for a link to explain the dissociative disorder I definitely have, I found the founder, and do please just shriek at what he considered to be 'a trauma':
"By the late 19th century there was a general acceptance that emotionally traumatic experiences could cause long-term disorders which might display a variety of symptoms. These conversion disorders were found to occur in even the most resilient individuals, but with profound effect in someone with emotional instability like Louis Vivé (b.1863) who suffered a traumatic experience as a 13-year-old when he encountered a viper." 
A viper? Amateur hour Louis, pull yourself together. My viper was a rattlesnake in long grass doing the full rattle. Brushed that off without a sweat. My traumas have all been as 'pure Sandoz' was to any old LSD.

The person to whom I am the next of kin, just loved the open road - well Eastlink and the tollways anyhow.  Aged 90 years and with four speed fines and a collision in the past 2 years, that I know about, his licence to drive has been taken from him, and with it, his will to continue.
Today while wading through the admin of it all (and that will be another post, get your notebooks ready) I discovered this appropriate vehicle for travel to farthest horizons:

My fellow mourners of the smelly, randy legend that was Nureyev would understand.

My next of kin is blissfully and intensively medicated, receiving those who care for him, and I pray he lasts until tomorrow at least, because today is the 7th anniversary of the brutal murder of my sweet Puppy, a six kilo Shih Tzu ripped apart in our own driveway by a bikie's 120 kg English Mastiff, escaped from guarding the meth lab across the road. I know what grief is, and so does everybody who lived in that street that day.
Until I decided to include Puppy, my first thought for this post title was Good grief Charlie Brown.
Here is the Pupster guarding Kitty when she was only months old

black spot Friday

The internet is for nothing if it's not for cats, and this is dear crabby Kitty sleeping as she does so well and often. Her black-spot paw seems cute to me. When I got her, aged about 6 weeks, from the hot grubby but well-intentioned hands of some children in my street who had failed to convince their mother that she needed this new pet found in a paddock*, I took her to work everyday in a box so I could dropper-feed her. Lucky to have such a nice work environment, I now find other workplaces do cat stuff too. Click this link for the Kitten Races Office. * Yes I did find and catch the wild mother cat and when I got them together they spat at each other. wishing you all a safe, holy and chocolatey Easter.

Flaky over food

Trying to be vegetarian when eating-out with friends, one is often drawn to order the fish plate, and very frequently that would be called 'flake' and occasionally some other names like Butterfish.
Trying not to be a hypocrite, this New Year I resolve to stop ordering it under any name.
Shark is over-fished apparently, and author Tim Winton, oddly for a surfer, is campaigning to save them. Did you know that the gummy shark, a.k.a. 'flake' is absolutely harmless, and poses no threat to humans?
The trade constrictions caused by World War 2 prevented Australian manufacturers getting cod-liver oil from Canada, so they began using sharks as their source. 'Give your growing child Shark-Liver Oil' was never shouted at the market though. 'Get some shark and chips' isn't either.
I have always loved the c.1960 fibreglass shark signs mounted over fish shops across Victoria. There is one in GlenHuntly Road, GlenHuntly I saw from a tram one time, and the one in my wonderful photo above is on a beach strip in East Gippsland.  I love that photo. A shark surrounded by 'fairy' lights.

UPDATE: thanks to Donkey Blog for alerting me to the wonderful 1939 Style Moderne Fish Creek Hotel, which has a huge fish sculpture laying across it's parapet. (click hotel link above for excellent images, then visit Donkey for a post on something I know so well it made me laugh to tears)

Tuxedo Cat, with rose arbor.

Twelve years ago I was working in my fence-free front garden when some children were passing with a tiny kitten. "We found it!" and they were so pleased.
"Was there a mother cat?" I asked.
"Dunno." and off they went.
I had to go la-la-la for a while, to get all the sad animal thought out of my head. However, me and St. Francis have a good thing going, and the next day they were back -
"Mum Says ... it's gunna die."
I took the kitten to work every day in a box and did the eye dropper thing relentlessly, and there she is today, on the bed in the window, waiting for a bird, any bird, to land on that power line.
We are finally re-united after she was at Boarding School (Friend's Farm Campus) during my six itinerant years. We haz a home.

a good clean show

A friend took this photo in WA. If you CNTL+ to embiggen you will see the poster has A GOOD CLEAN SHOW on it, not once, but twice. The good old days.

Newspaper Article
https://www.trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/49004386
DAWNETTE AND THE PERFORMING Wonder Dogs. M2211. Available floor shows and par ties.
At a Christmas Eve party,children living nearby will see
"Dawnette" give a show with her performing dogs. Lady
an Afghan hound, is to be the dogs' Father Christmas and will
wear a long beard and scarlet cloak.

just Ducky

At the end of my street there is a swamp the council calls 'a lake' and these 12 baby ducks were bobbing around on it today.

billabong birdie

Eastern Rosellas in this burkes backyard.Parent birds look horrified to have bred a Thorpedo child.Scientific name Platycercus-eximius may have confused bird into swimming like a platypus.I enjoyed it all without even leaving my chair inside. It's freezing in Ballarat right now, and bloody Summer Time starts tomorrow getting up an hour earlier than it 'feels like' - up with the birds as they say.

swanning about on the lake

Cob: "hey Beryl! - don't take the kids near the bloody traffic ... "

Cob: "Jeepers darling, it's dangerous on land."


Pen: "Sheesh."

This blogger has come in from the goat paddocks out west, and now has swans at the end of the street. SPRING.

lucky me

Today included passing Lake Wendouree in Ballarat and of course I had to say hello to these swan babies gliding around in the winter sun. Swans are monogamous, vegetarian, and very good parents. What's not to love?

(images copyright Annie O'Dyne)

revolution in the air

As I walked away from capturing this moment as they gathered in outrage, trams were unloading hundreds more.
I would have joined them if I hadn't another revolution to view a block away where the Bolsheviks would not have been amused at their story playing Her Majestys' Theatre.

(image by Ann O'Dyne)

It was wonderful (especially from the third row) - design, costume and performances. Recommended. Thank you to That's So Pants for making my day.