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.

a Claytons post

Forty degrees is only funny for the first week. Now I want it to stop.

I got the potato crop in. More than this amount, with no care whatsoever, and all from a few Past Their UseBy leftovers that I flung against the back fence. Lots of potato recipes on the food boards at Pinterest where I have taken up residence trading with JahTeh - see link in sidebar.

This is my Kooka friend who has a baby, or Early Kooka, up in the high trees waiting for mince deliveries. Why do I feed them mince? I want to distract them from eating the tiny lizards of course.
Going away now to Google "heat stroke"
x x

woo hoo

Masked OWL, well-spotted by this bird sook, while walking across the bridge yesterday at 5pm. He thought he was hidden, in trees on the Campaspe.

This species is on the 'threatened' list.

(Both these images are virtually copyrighted Annie ODyne )

Click on the images for larger.

leafing through my past

Image copyright Ann O'Dyne June 2011

This is the entry area of the university of Ballarat. The only thing about the place that this ex-student can recommend is the autumn landscaping. There is only one road from the centre of Ballarat for the 10 kilometres out to the site. It has two lanes and there are seven schools on it. Buses buses buses, 40 kms limit = Total Gridlock, and that is before the city of Ballarat allowed a huge State Revenue Office to be built next to it, joining the huge premises of IBM. Total gridlock at 8am when they schedule lectures at 8:30am. One road.

That link at 'Buses' leads to a Coalition policy to fix it and I have no faith in it since their plandescribes a right turn that cannot be made by 95% of the traffic problem.
In their laughable School Of Business, they have lecturers in marketing who have never heard of Calvin Klein, or Tiffany stores, or Homer and the rest of The Simpsons. I know you don't believe me but it is true.
John Guyas said he got the job via the internet and wanted to work here because he liked the TV soap Neighbours. Never heard of The Simpsons.

When I expressed astonishment at this failing of a Marketing Lecturer, since TIME magazine voted it the TV show of the century, a third-year Business Degree student said to me "nobody watches that anymore anyhow".
I observed while there that the 'university' is merely a front for their truly profitable business - photocopying and the retailing of crisps and fizzy drinks.

On the road

Leaving ...

I will miss the chickens.

I will miss the kangaroos.

I will not miss the creeps who logged away the kangaroo dormitory, and hope they go bankrupt for gouging the earth and spewing diesel fumes 12 hours every day.

I will miss these calves

that I meet every morning at the mailbox.

(poor things live 12 freezing weeks before slaughter so some dolt can get bowel cancer having a 'Parma & Pot $12' at the pub).

I will really miss seeing the sun the very moment the horizon meets it in the morning - it is magically different every time:

... and now I am in Ballarat the city built on gold, leaving slag heaps everywhere

 

Yeo woe woah.

This is where I am. See on the right, the piles of bulldozed trees?

Now see them at 9:30PM tonight, on fire, with winds gusting at 44 kph, with the white light on the left being the verandah light of the house where I will not be taking off my boots and jeans to sleep tonight.

I mean, could you sleep soundly next to this? -

I will be watching Le Tour de France all night thanks to SBS, and through the window I will keep an eye on all those floating embers. Geez.

our planet

8am Friday 9th July - the paddock next door, Yeo 3249.

A year ago, this was a forest of pines,

all of them silently, constantly, converting carbon-dioxide to oxygen while kangaroos slept on spongy dry layers of forest-floor pine-needles ...
and now it's not.
I took this next photo at a later time-of-day,
from the exact same spot, facing the opposite direction-

Eucalypt, Yeo, 7am.

In a foggy Autumn dawn, from the front door of my present haven, this gum tree soars over the old dairy shed.

The realisations provoked by this sight, put me back in my tiny place in Time and on planet Earth, as it revolves, for the moment, in dark space, relying on a flaming sun for each new day.

Later, a pair of Gang-Gang cockatoos landed in it, getting my attention with their very funny call, which sounds just like a big old creaking door - 'waaarrrk!'.

(Of course I didn't get a photo ... I found this one thanks to www.pixdaus.com.)