Four in one blow

Covered walkway comes down, Penrith Public School library. 24 February 2010.


Wollemi pine in Glenbrook, Blue Mountains. 25 February 2010.


Robby the Robot clock with Internet backdrop. 26 February 2010.



Jack on the "pussy cats cushion". 27 February 2010.

Three in a row

A busy weekend, dodging raindrops!


Coming home rather late after a day of heavy rainfall. 13 February 2010.


A lone portulaca has sprouted and flourished on the edge of the gutter
in the front yard. They've been self-seeding in the back yard
for several years but none emerged this year. Somehow this tiny,
lone seed made it into the front. 14 February 2010.


It seems appropriate that a prehistoric Wollemi pine's pot
should harbour a very prehistoric-looking toadstool! 15 February 2010.

Photo roundup!

On the way to the Capitol Theatre, in Sydney's CBD, to see "Wicked". This jacaranda tree, in full bloom, created the most bizarre optical illusion against the azure blue sky, but the flowers have photographed much darker than I'd hoped. Still pretty, though. 24 October 2009.


Kitchen light. 25 October 2009.


My Wollemi Pine is shooting new growth! 26 October 2009.


"Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed!" Toy Batmobile painting by Nick Stathopoulos at the opening of his exhibition "Toy Porn", at NG Art Gallery, Chippendale. The exhibition was opened by David Stratton, of TV's "The Movie Show". 27 October 2009.


Realisation! It's almost midnight again. 28 October 2009.


I swear I had nothing to with this. A class of Year 1 kids were making a life-size chalk drawing of a dinosaur on the playground today - and were asked to show what he'd eaten. Amongst the pterodactyls and smaller dinosaurs was this... Andorian. 29 October 2009.


I have to restock this spinning rack of animal books every day. 30 October 2009.

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.

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!