Sky

Post #150 Thursday 7 January 2021 – New Year

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Thursday 7 January 2021

Dear friends, Thanks so much for the lovely gifts and the good wishes over Christmas New Year.
It’s been beautiful here in the country with waves of different coloured wildflowers from one week to the next, following on from so much rain. I’ve never seen it so lovely.
A close relative died before Christmas and it’s been a very sad time. Even when you have known someone is dying for a long time there seems to be no accounting for the level of emotion when that time actually arrives. Also some family members are more evolved than others and each can be playing out their own unresolved drama so right at a time that sensitivity would be the right thing, there isn’t any. I have to say I’ve found it all very difficult and it’s taking me a while to recover.
My plan has been to visit for the short week after Australia day, which would be Wednesday 27 January to Sunday 31 January 2021. I’m very wary of the developments with the virus though. I cannot understand how the the crowds can be allowed to go to the cricket today. And I do not understand why the vaccines are not approved and issued now. So can we agree I’m planning to come but it might have to be postponed? Absolutely none of us wants to get the virus!

On a happier note, I had the loveliest visit to Wollongong in December. The storms have been so dramatic in recent times and that day was no exception. Here is a clip from the beach in the evening. This panning shot up into an intensely coloured sky really reminds me of the cinematography in an Australian film called My First Wife. I saw the film years ago late one night on SBS, maybe someone else will remember it too. The sky above the beach was very colour saturated and stormy and the fast scanning movement of the camera evoked the main character’s searching. It was beautifully done, with wheeling gulls (like this clip), and an intense choral music sound track (the main character was a music teacher). This clip is much more peaceful though, like my state of mind when I was down there with all the waves surging up onto the sand and round me :-).

xx MG


Post #139 Wednesday 6 May 2020 – Poplars

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Letters from America

Wednesday 6 May 2020

This photo is a bit out of focus and overexposed but your glamorous aunt is doing real yoga.  There are some lovely spots just off the highway to Canberra.  This is one of them, at a rest area commemorating one of the bravest second war VCs, Diver Derrick VC.

Looking up, arms reaching up

In the Iliad there are one or two passages that changed the way I looked at poplars. Everyone knows I love trees. I already loved poplars. But now I love them even more. I have included one of the passages from Homer, which is about the death of a Trojan named Simoeisios. It follows a standard formula: the fall of the warrior in the battle, his precise wound, the story of his humanity, the metaphor.

There Telamonian Ajax
struck down the son of
Anthemion
Simoeisios in his stripling’s
beauty, whom once his
mother
descending from Ida bore
beside the banks of
Simoeis
when she had followed her
father and mother to tend
the sheepflocks.
Therefore they called him
Simoeisios; but he could
not
render again the care of his
dear parents; he was
short-lived,
beaten down beneath the
spear of high-hearted
Ajax,
who struck him as he first
came forward beside the
nipple
of the right breast, and the
bronze spearhead drove
clean through the
shoulder.
He dropped then to the
ground in the dust, like
some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying
about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with
branches growing at the
uttermost tree-top:
one whom a man, a maker
of chariots, fells with the
shining
iron, to bend into a wheel
for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening
by the banks of a river.
Such was Anthemion’s son
Simoeisios, whom
illustrious
Ajax killed.

4.473 – 489

xx from MG


Post #117 Saturday 26 October 2019 – Whitsundays

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Letters from America

Saturday 26 October 2019

I am back from lovely holidays sailing with friends in the Whitsundays. I have an excellent tan to show for it. I actually didn’t want to come back. The South African guy at the charter yacht company was no help either, just suggested I read the book with the self explanatory title “Sell up and Sail”.

This was the outlook when anchored overnight in a place called Refuge Bay:

In the evening I could hear a slightly mournful bird call. At first it sounded like a dove but it was too insistent. It turned out to be a couple of pheasant coucals calling to one another. (Don’t ask me how I figured it out, it was intuition confirmed by internet searches.)

The call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lluJIiLuuFg

Here are some images of the bird itself which I borrowed from Google:

Flying … (this type of feet first flying, good for short distances only)

I put this second image in because it has the fence wire for size. I have actually seen these birds and I can warrant they are concurrently large birds and small dinosaurs.

The “sell up and sail” caper is something I like to enjoy vicariously these days by watching youtube channels. My favourite channel is one called Free Range Sailing. It’s a youtube vlog maintained by an Australian couple who are cruising in a very modest yacht, mostly in tropical waters. Apart from the sailing, they do quite a bit of free diving on the reefs, spearfishing and exploring on shore. Pascal is a very good and resourceful cook. She also seems to be the creative lead in making the vlog – which is high quality well edited video. Her partner Troy is an excellent hand at keeping their 30 foot 50 year old yacht on track and in shape. He seems to handle the inevitable breakdowns of gear in good form and has a droll sense of humour. They are of course, “free range” so it all appeals to my tree hugging temperament. You aren’t going to find them zapping around churning up the peace of the natural world on jet skis any time soon. Highly recommend! And here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbU2ulPD3rJ4OZCNH7-gjjQ

xx MG

Post #113 Sunday 23 June 2019 – Pretty Balmoral

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Letters from America

Sunday 23 June 2019

The lovely thing about Sydney, well there are many but this is also one of them, is that even when it is overcast it can be very pretty.  

I was at Mosman last week during the week, a bit of an event because I don’t go over the Bridge so much these days.  Afterward I dropped down from the steep ridge that Military Road follows, to the pretty harbour beach, Balmoral (surf beach for the under threes).  I had a nostalgic and quality fish and chips from the Bottom of the Harbour fish and chip shop, which I think has been there about 20 years, loyally taking cash only and reminding some of us of scandalous tax avoidance schemes from the days of when…

It was an overcast day.   A steady number of citizens walked their dogs along the foreshore.  I have always liked the somewhat art deco style of the concrete foreshore walkway, complemented by the little bridge across the isthmus which you can just see at the end of the beach here in one of my afternoon snaps.

Bottom of the Harbour – tax schemes from the past

MG xx
Both sides of the Bridge

Post #111 Sunday 9 June 2019 – Various excursions

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Letters from America

Saturday 9 June 2019

It has been a busy time in May with various excursions and some enforced leave. I have been in the country some of the time and it has been exceptionally pretty, though progress with development has been very s l o w.

Even though it has been very dry, I have been there just after rain a couple of times and managed to get some lovely images, when the earth is all shining and luminous.

xx MG country mouse

Post #55 Sunday 29 October 2017 – Rifle range dogs

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  Letters from America

Sunday 29 October 2017

Even my first post was about a part of the coast on the south side of the harbour bridge.  So here is another post in that same tradition, this time about a favourite surf beach at Maroubra, South Maroubra in particular.

Earlier in the year, about August, I visited this favourite beach and took some snaps of the surf and sky after a spectacular storm and swell.  Here are some of the photos, the first looking to North Maroubra showing the crashing surf on the cliffs there:

This second one is also looking to North Maroubra, but it includes a surfer for scale:

I am also including a photo of the well known rifle range on the headland at the South Maroubra, you can see the series of targets set up in the distance here:

In the scrub on the headland round the rifle range there used to be a tradition of abandoned dogs inhabiting the rough terrain.  They came to be known as the rifle range dogs and were a distinctive type of dog, long legged, low haunches, solid colours, howling as often as barking and making excellent guard dogs.  There was a time apparently when they were relatively common pets in the eastern suburbs.   I only ever got to know one of these rifle range dogs, and it was quite a while ago.  His was a large hound called Bernie and he belonged to a notary public who lived near Bondi Junction.  He had a very distinctive musical yowl which he used more than he did bark.  Once he had determined you were friendly and here to do business he just flung his enormous frame into his bed and relaxed.  So here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald 1957 addressing the phenomenon of the rifle range dogs, here called the wild dogs of Malabar (as Malabar meets the south headland of Maroubra).

And here are two final gratuitous images of the surf with surfers and the lovely sunset sky at South Maroubra in August.

In praise of all the great things on the local coastline,

MG xx

Post #24 and a half – Saturday 22 April 2017 – swimming in the evening

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  Letters from America

Saturday 22 April 2017

There was swimming later in the day but no real sleep beforehand (as I had hoped).
The water was warm the way the sea gets warm in the evening.  The white on the waves was luminous.
Must only swim in the evening.

 

Lovely sunset Northern Beaches view.

And after we had recovered from the waves my girlfriend and I had sangria and tapas outdoors at one of the busy little restaurants on the promenade.

Signing off for real this time,

MG xx

Post #21 Thursday 6 April 2017 Compelling shapes – the arch

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  Letters from America

Thursday 6 April 2017

I have been in the country for a couple of days.  Doing country work things and also rummaging around in the outdoors, probably the New Zealanders would call it tramping.

The night sky was especially beautiful on Tuesday night 4 April.  There was a half moon (a moon that looked as though it had been cut squarely down the middle).  In the early hours when it was  lowdown in the sky it became a luminous buttery gold.  And even with a bright moon the stars were beautiful.  We don’t see anything like it in the city thanks to city lights.  But in the free open country skies the stars are a wonderful presence.  The sky does not feel like a flat ceiling over the earth.  It feels like a soft dark presence cloaked over the earth with the stars screwed in at their various places – thousands of them!  And the stars shine back out from the dark softness.  So beautiful to see in the middle of the night when stumbling out to use the bush loo.

So here is a photo taken on a walk on Wednesday 5 April.  In the top left side of the image in the sky you can see dark flecks – birds.  This was a flock of Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos.   The cries of these birds are marvellous.  It all sounds like mischief to me. When I find a good recording I will include it.  [Ed:  http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/sites/www.birdsinbackyards.net/files/factsheets/audio/calyptorhynchus-funereus.mp3]

The image as a whole shows another one of my compelling shapes.  This one is the shape of the arch. The arch in this instance is formed by the trees growing over the country road.

 

Good night friends
MG xx