May 15th, 2006
15/5/06
I’ve moved house and am now living in Fremantle, the gateway to Western Australia if you happen to be a shipping container. This photo looks out from my bathroom window over the roof tops to the busy harbour.
Here I am in my upstairs study, sporting some Jamaican headware. Purely by chance in turns out that my dad rebuilt some of this house thirty years ago - Fremantle is pretty small!
This is my new front door. I’m living a stone’s throw from the centre of Fremantle in a house built in the 1850s from limestone. Outside my bedroom window New Holland Honey Eaters drink the nectar from the yellow cones of Banksia flowers. It seems like a nice compromise between the vapidity of the burbs and the grime of inner city life here above the harbour.
May 2nd, 2006
For a while I’ve had the idea that you had to make your way up to around Cairns in northern Queensland if you wanted to see some warm rainforest in Australia. I was wrong. A hundred or so kms south east of Brisbane you come upon Lamington National Park, the largest area of easily acessible subtropical rainforest in the world.
With around seven hudred varieties, Eucalyptus species of tree dominate Australia. Aesthetically I admit I found it a relief to be surrounded in the rainforest by a more chlorophyll enriched maze of life.
It is hard to imagine how the early white settlers could have dismissed this area of rainforest on the east coast of Australia as the big ’scrub’.
I raise my glass to John Seed, highly influential rainforest activist who was engaged in the conservation struggle in the seventies and eighties just south of Lamington in northern NSW. Seed said that he was simply party of the rainforest defending itself.
As you drop down 400 metres in altitude into a deep valley near Binna Burra the light turns a silvery grey.
