travelling north..

Photo-Sandy Scheltema
Pelican1 resting near Lizard Island.

I will not be posting for a while (not that I am such a regular poster) as I am heading up North to take part in the last week of a Pelican Expeditions project. This is our third project with the Hope Vale Aboriginal Community in Cape York. Pelican will be working for two weeks and we will have up to 200 Community members involved. I may do a more in depth post about it later but if you are interested you can go to

Pelican Expeditions

to follow the on line blog about it all. I will be taking my daughter, Aurora and camping at Cape Flattery.


Photo-Sandy Scheltema
The photo above is from the top of Lizard Island which is central to the Hope Vale project. This photo was taken during the Coral Bleaching project of the young Indigenous trainees involved.

I've been tagged..

Trinity College Library-Dublin Photograph by Candida Hofer

I've been tagged to do this book meme by anne-marie at verbena-19.blogspot.com.

So, here it goes:

A book that changed my life:
That is a toughie as books are my life, so to say which changed it does not in anyway represent my entwined relationship with the world of books. I suppose one of the moments when I felt a book enter me and begin to rearrange my DNA code was long ago.....in adolescence. I would take my copy of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte during long, eventless Summer holidays and sit in a quarry and be transported into a totally different world by the power of words.

A book I've read more than once: The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot by Dosoyevsky. When I had time to reread books in my twenties I was always coming back to good old Dostoyevsky. I think it had something to do with the conviction in the writing which I completely trusted. I hope to reread him again one of these days.
I remember the first time I reread something was TS Eliot's poem Four Quartets. It was in my grandmother's library and I was about 13 and I didn't understand it much at first reading. So I reread and reread and I still remember the miraculous feeling as understanding of the text's meaning started dawning on my confused brain.

A book I'd want on a desert island: A good book about the fish in the area and how to best catch it and when I settled down to a nice bit of fish cooked in the hot sand I would read a longish biography of Anna Akmatova (a Russian Poet) that I have been meaning to read for ages.

A book that made me laugh: A recent book by an American writer, Rodney Rothman about early retirement called Early Bird. The writer was I think in his early 40s and decided to drop out of the rat race for a while and see how he would fare with the octegenarians in a Florida retirement home. Some parts were truely, beautifully funny.

A book that made me cry: Many many, the last one was a book by Mariane Pearlman about her husband's death called 'A Mighty Heart"

A book I wish had been written: My own that made sense of everything!

A book I wish had never been written: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.

Books I'm currently reading: Poems and Prose of Basho, The Fabric of the Cosmos- Brian Greene, Holding Yawulyu-White Culture and Black Women's Law by Zohl de Ishtar, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk, A Berlin Childhood around 1900 by Walter Benjamin.

Books I've been meaning to read: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

What turned me on to fiction:My grandmother and my mother.

Tag 5 others for this meme: I don't really know 5 others but when I do I'll tag them!!

Wood for the trees

I am a little too tired to write the appropriate text tonight so I will put the pictures up and fill in the words tomorrow!

So, tomorrow never came.

The eucalyptus in the top picture was taken in a Messmate-peppermint-gum forest next to the Wombat State forest near Trentham, Victoria. This area of about 500 hectares was due to be logged but because a very rare owl was found by an intrepid naturalist the forest was saved. The campaign took many years and involved a lot of hands on protest, lawyers and much bureaucratic wrangling. But in the end the home of a breeding pair of Powerful owls was saved. My daughter and I went to stay at a friend's house who had a lot to do with the campaign. She, after many evenings stumbling about in the dark, found the owls home and began the prolonged campaign to save them.
We were hoping to spot the owl ourselves and went for a walk in the forest in the early evening. Just as it was getting dark we saw the owl, sillouetted against a Blackwood tree. The Powerful owl is the biggest owl in Australia and this lovely large bird kept a firm eye on us as we walked beneath him.