Premier's Reading Challenge vs Premier's Leadership Challenge

This is the spectacular view from Government House, Sydney, venue of the annual Premier's Reading Challenge presentation - with an absent Premier, who was fighting a losing battle to save his own job.


















The next door neighbour is some weird, white, noisy building! ;)

Wonderful Wollemi!

Finally, after years of admiring them, and waiting for the prices to come down just a tad, I bought myself a Wollemi pine tree from the Royal Botanical Gardens in the Sydney CBD.

I heard that they were dinosaur-attracting plants, and it looks like they really are!

Roar like a dinosaur!

I've been reading a wonderful book, "The Wollemi pine: the incredible discovery of a living fossil from the age of the dinosaurs" by James Woodford (Text Publishing, new ed. 2005), which I picked up a few months ago from the Botanical Gardens in the city. The book reminds me of a political thriller or a whodunnit, only it's real and the blithely ignorant star of the book is a grove of trees which forgot to go extinct. Amazing stuff.

The trees were only discovered in 1994, in the almost-inaccessible wilderness of the Wollemi region of New South Wales, it was the botanical analog to the discovery of a living coelacanth (a primitive fish, previously only seen in fossils) in the waters off Cape Town, South Africa, in 1938.

I think the discovery of the Wollemi pines has even more indelible for me, in that the big press announcements were made on my birthday, 14th December, of 1994. Nothing like having one's birthday swept off the news radar by the discovery of a tree that had survived since the Cretaceous Period!

Ever since, there has been a concerted effort to propagate Wollemi pines and they've been on public sale for some time now. I'm determined to buy myself one of these amazing plants, onesdayrealsoonIhope - and how ironic if I don't care for it properly and it goes extinct on me? - but this vacation gave me a chance for us to pretend we were in a whole rainforest of Wollemi pines at Greengold Heritage Nursery in Yarralumla.




At Greengold Heritage Nursery, Yarralumla.

Catching up with Aunty Pat

Today's plan (for several weeks now) was a sketch group gathering in Sydney's Botanical Gardens. Even if there'd been a shortage of live human models (and there threatened to be), the Gardens are filled with plenty of life-size statues. It turned out to be a glorious day for it, but unfortunately coincided with the arrival of two huge ocean liners, Queen Victoria and the QE II, in Sydney Harbour - and the media encouraging everyone to go and check 'em out, again. Ick! So much for the usual tranquility of the Gardens on a Sunday.

Yesterday, my aunt suggested I meet her in Bondi Junction instead, so I piked out on sketching (only three others of about eighteen people had RSVPed anyway, much to my disappointment) and had a great day catching up on family gossip. I scored a late Christmas present, too; a great polo shirt with white sides that will have a wonderful optical illusion slimming effect!

Speaking of which:

Sunday's magic number: 90.9 - slightly up on last week, but one of the students' parents from school presented the staff with a record-breaking, huge Black Forest cake on Monday. So all my diet promises for last Monday lasted from 8.00 am till exactly 11.20am. Sigh.

However, it was about this time last year that I began a six-month stint of denial, ie. refusing to check the scales each week, resulting in me putting back on about eleven kilograms and ruining about a years work of dieting. So I'm sorta excited I'm holding steady.

Year of the Small, Nocturnal, Domestic Rodent

This weekend marked the commencement of the Chinese New Year. The Pig (2007) officially handed over to... the Rat (2008). Or, indeed, the Mouse - if you believe my local coin shop which is distributing special "Year of the Mouse" collectible coins for the Australian Mint. Maybe mice are more socially acceptable to coin collectors? (You dirty rats!)

I was in the city for a Star Trek Meetup in the Royal Botanical Gardens but, on the way through the CBD, I passed all the marchers and floats preparing to start their huge Chinese New Year Parade. Perfect timing, and I couldn't resist firing off a few digital snaps for my Flickr account. Or as a slideshow!

Photographing colourful, waiting, assembled marchers proved to be quite effective - with all the outfits pressed against each other instead of stretched apart during the parade proper - although the dragon and lion dancers came alive with a magic that only moving footage would have been able to preserve.

The most amazing group was wearing grey, faceless costumes of the Terracotta Warriors. Very impressive.

Enjoy!










Sunday's magic number: 92.1. Tempted by food - all around me! But resisting anew. I hope.

Botanical beauty, with bats

Yesterday, a friend from Wollongong was visiting Sydney and we had lots of time to kill, so I suggested a stroll in Sydney's beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens in the CBD.

With the threat of rain constantly looming overhead, we nevertheless had a great day: wandering aimlessly, for the most part, but also choosing to seek out the site of the old Garden Palace, the prehistoric Wollemi pine display, the cafe and souvenir shop, and the great Succulent Garden.

The entire day was chorused by the often-deafening background chittering and squabbling of hundreds of flying foxes, who've taken over many of the Gardens' trees by day, and are destroying their foliage by night. I really had no idea the creatures had become such a problem, of plague proportions.

To top off the day, there's been a similarly noisy chorus of screaming frogs, right here in my backyard, every night. Australian frogs don't say, "Ribit!" or "Croak!", you see. Some say, "Bok, bok!" - and the rest just scream like they've just met Roddy McDowall's withered old mother, armed with cutlery, in the shower!