wilddogvalley view

Looking towards the Wilddog valley.

mirror world

Somewhere between the old year and the new year, I try to get in a final post for the passing year.

I have been so caught up in the day to day affairs of getting projects up and running a family that a lovely line of thought or even an interesting picture, which enables me to commune diaristically in cyberspace, has been noticably absent.

Australia is in the grip of a 10 year drought, affecting some regions more than others. Suddenly climate change and water are high on the political agenda.

From mid December, 2007, the state of Victoria was on fire, with nearly a million hectares burnt. Fire behaviour was extreme and frenzied, furies created by the complete lack of moisture in the soil. The only reason the fire fighters, volunteers, parks personel and other concerned agencies had Christmas with their families was because the prayed for rain fell like an enormous Christmas present. The fires are still burning and even though in Melbourne, we experienced the coldest Christmas day on record, will be an everpresent threat this long Summer ahead.

People in the city were made aware of the fires due to the smoke reaching the streets and bringing burnt forest smells and haze to mingle with the urban fumes.
It is sometimes hard to remain hopeful.

My project work keeps me working passionately for change and seeking creative means to help myself and others face the challenge that seems to me to be the most pressing question of our particular period of history. The environment and its degradation, to the point of catastrophic climate change has to be one of the biggest threats around that I can see. Besides nuclear war , bird flu, and serious posts like this one that is!!
Crikey, it's enough to send me back to the old canvas board. Forget the whole thing and make paintings!!
Who knows, 2007 might bring some welcome time for that.

Happy New Year to All!!

The light goes on...

As our federal and state leaders (bar the example you can see if you follow the link in the title) start to react vocally to the threat of global warming, we get snow in November in Queensland!!

Some one is laughing somewhere...

It seems to me extraordinary that I could be involved with Government employees on a project only early this year, in which we were specifically told that none of the scientists could mention global warming. We could, because we are the dingbat public, but not the official scientists! And now, even the great leader, John Howard is talking about it. He is even in Vietnam talking about that which was not allowed to be named yesterday. The damned hypocrisy is made worse by the fact that everyone just seems to sleepily go along with the titanic change of course.

It all started when Al Gore came to town... Mind you Mr Howard, who only saw it the other day, said that it sounded a bit like the mutterings of a peeved politician. Ooohh, that got him!
Al Gore replied to the dagger in the back with a very diplomatic well at least he is starting to listen, let's see how he acts.

Hope Vale

Plateau shadowing Daarba lands.

I reckon it is about posting time again. Aurora and I have just got back and trying to get used to life without a campfire.
I've got a link to a Melbourne newspaper that has run a story about the project that I am involved in so if you are interested you can follow the Hope Vale link with the title. My experiences up North are a little hard to transcribe tonight but I will attempt some stories over the next little while. So I will put up a picture of Daarba Aboriginal lands that I had the privilege of staying in. And another picture of a gaggle of Pelicans who represent our gang coming together for the first time up in Cape York. And finally a picture of Aurora getting to know some of the Dingaal mob at Cape Flattery.


Link to Hope Vale blog on Pelican Expeditions.

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.