Tag Archives: Wildlife

Watson for today, then?

3 Replies

Friday 20 September 2024 – Acting on a suggestion from the friends we met last night, we decided that Watsons Bay would be a good destination for an excursion, particularly since the weather outlook was so good – sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s.

So we headed for the ferry and queued up

to get on to F9 on the B side of Wharf 2. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the public transport available around Sydney is organised. There’s no need to buy tickets; one can simply “tap on” and “tap off” using a credit card or, in my case, my phone. The trains are double-decker, the ferries seem to be very competently operated and the services have suited us very well on our short stay here. The ferry ride out of Circular Quay offers, unsurprisingly, some great views of the Sydney skyline

North Sydney

and, of course, its iconic structures.

Jane noticed that there were people climbing the bridge,

something that she and I did when we were here last, in 2001. Nice to see it’s still going; and they’ve added the aboriginal flag at the top of the bridge since our last visit, unless I’m mistaken.
Many ships leaving Circular Quay will pass a Martello Tower built on a small island:

Fort Denison, a former military site which is the most complete Martello Tower in the world and has been a museum, tourist attraction, restaurant, and popular location for wedding receptions and corporate events. It’s now closed for conservation work, apparently.
Watsons Bay is an attractive place

with a great view back of the Sydney skyline.

One of Sydney’s great attractions is a restaurant, Doyles, known for its seafood generally and its fish’n’chips specifically. The Watsons Bay location

is the original one, dating from 1885. Another attraction is the heritage trail which starts at Camp Cove (a place, not an over-theatrical chap) and leads up to South Head, the southern jaw of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. It’s a walk. So we went for it. Obviously. It takes you past some of the nice houses there,

and behind a cannon, which is pointing, for some reason, back at Sydney.

The furthest point of the trail, about a kilometre from the start, is Hornby Lighthouse

with the old lighthouse keeper’s cottages beside it.

One can also see how narrow the gap is that leads into Sydney Harbour. North Head – the upper jaw – is really quite close.

The lighthouse is a good, photogenic location. It’s therefore catnip for today’s generations of phone camera wielders (mainly, today, from the far east),

who seem to find it intolerable should a photo not include themselves. In many cases, quite an inordinate amount of time is spent organising poses (e.g. staring (nautically? pretentiously?) into the distance or pointing at the top of the lighthouse as if surprised to see that it has one). This specific posing seems to be a cultural thing among oriental tourists, and I wonder what will become of all of these images. Instagram, I suppose; the idea is that other people should see the photos. I doubt that, once posted online, the images will ever be seen again by their originators.

Grumpy? Me? Bloody right.

We had wanted to continue our walk down the other side of South Head rather than just completing the heritage trail loop. Trouble is, there’s a fucking great military establishment in the way, HMAS Watson,

and they clearly take a dim view of people wandering past their buildings. So, back towards Camp Cove it was,

which at least gave us the chance to take a coffee stop. From there, we cut across to the other side of the head. There’s clearly a military link here, since (as well as the naval base there) the road passed an armoury, an “Officers Quarters” building

and what we think were once gun emplacements.

There was some wildlife action along the way: Jane spotted a kookaburra

which really was sitting in an old gum tree; a couple of remarkable ants nests;

an engaging pair of blue wrens (male and female)

and a bunch of sulphur-crested cockatoos,

who were pretending to be sea birds perching on the cliffs and

inspecting tourists for food value.

We also spotted this dove

which, coincidentally, is a Spotted Dove.

The wrens and the cockatoos were at Gap Bluff, which has a small National Park area and also provides a couple of great cliff views.

There’s a historical memorial there, too;

the anchor belonged to a ship, the Dunbar which was wrecked on nearby rocks

in August 1857. Only one of the 122 aboard survived and the anchor was recovered some 50 years later and placed as a memorial to the others. The wreck was the catalyst for the creation of the Hornby Lighthouse and its survivor, one John James, went on to become the lighthouse keeper there.

Further along from Gap Bluff is the Watsons Bay Signal Station,

first established in1790; a permanent guard would watch out for arriving ships, raising a flag both to give them a sign of the new location of the settlement, and to notify the colony of the imminent arrival of the long awaited ships. Amazingly, the station has remained in permanent use from that date and has thus maintained its role for over two centuries, and from the same building for most of that time.

Near it is a lighthouse, the South Head Upper Light, also called the Macquarie Lighthouse.

Its site is the longest serving lighthouse site in Australia, with some kind of navigational aid in place since 1791 (sadly not sufficiently effective to save the Dunbar, though). The lighthouse shown above was completed in 1883 and is still fully operational. Next to it is the lighthouse keeper’s cottage

and in front of it, complementing the formal informational plaque on the lawns, is a much more informal tribute.

One could have carried on walking the cliff path, but we turned back to the bay to catch the ferry

back to Circular Quay, whence we walked towards the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden. On Circular Quay there are some plaques in the ground celebrating well-known Australians; we recognised a couple

and I suppose this one

must be the one originally dedicated to Rolf Harris.

The Botanic Garden is a large, pleasant park

with some remarkable trees

The tallest palm tree I’ve ever seen

and a few quirky sculptures.

My main objective was to get Mrs. Macquarie point and something called Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This Macquarie name keeps cropping up. Major General Lachlan Macquarie (born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century, hence the ubiquity of the Macquarie name.

He was married, as we can infer from the naming of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,

an exposed sandstone rock cut (by convicts in 1810) into the shape of a bench. Folklore has it that Elizabeth Macquarie used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built, on the instruction of Governor Macquarie, between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.

By this stage we were getting a trifle foot- and back-sore, so decided to return to the hotel. We diverted for a quick look into The Calyx,

to see if it would sell us some beer. Sadly, the café is just a café, and coffee wasn’t going to cut it for us, so I took a couple of valedictory photos

and we headed back to the hotel, past the Conservatorium of Music, which has the least music-related architecture I think I’ve ever seen.

Thus ended a very pleasant day’s outing; ample justification for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. Before we retired for the night, for amusement, I set a timelapse going to cover the comings and goings of the ferries at Circular Quay, which we can see from our hotel room. I hope you find it as engaging as I do.

Tomorrow we leave the city proper to spend a few days with friends who live to the north of Sydney. I have no idea what this means in terms of photos and verbiage on these pages; you’ll just have to keep an eye out to see for yourself, won’t you?

Freixenet Freycinet

2 Replies

Monday 16 September 2024 – After our two engaging, informative and photogenic days with Bushie, it was time to leave Jetsonville yesterday and head towards our final destination on this unique island (apart from the departure lounge at Hobart airport, that is) – the Freycinet Peninsula, which dangles off the east coast of Tasmania and is a National Park. In theory, the drive should have taken us just over three hours, but we somehow or other spent nearly five hours covering the 220km. Rather than take the swiftest route, we elected to take the coast road, our old friend the A3 along which we’ve covered so many kilometres, as this took us past a couple of places which promised some photographic action. First, though, we passed the hop fields we saw yesterday, and Jane took a photo showing how much more extensive they are than was shown in my photo;

and we passed through Derby, and took a photo of what we think is the bit of scenery which collapsed when the dam broke and ended the town’s tin mining period.

As ever, the scenery on our drive was lovely, made more so by sunshine,

and we soon reached Pyengana, a village which is noted for its cheese production.  We could have stopped for a cheese tasting, but somehow the idea didn’t appeal; instead we took an 11km diversion to see a waterfall, the St. Columba Falls.  Jane wasn’t too sure that this would be a worthwhile detour, an impression which might possibly have been emphasised when we got there and took a look at the track leading to the falls.

Someone had clearly seen the netting across the entry to the track and thought “bugger it, let’s take a look anyway”. We decided that if that person was prepared to take that risk, then so would we, dammit. (Also, we talked to people coming the other way, who said it would be OK; we like to live dangerously, but only when it’s safe to do so). There was a problem on the path

but it was relatively easy to clamber over it and carry on, past some riparian scenes

and some pretty amazing tree ferns

through which we could just about catch sight of the falls

so it looked like it might be worth all that danger after all. The falls are really  quite impressive (yes, an Icelander would concede that they are actually waterfalls), but photographically really quite difficult to capture, partly because of the viewpoint offered and partly because of the position of the sun. The best I could do is via video.

After the falls, we stopped for a coffee at St. Helens, an attractive coastal town,

before moving on towards our next diversion.  En route, we passed a landscape that was difficult to decode.

We think that the foreground planting is grape vines, but can’t explain the background – dead trees among live shrubbery; very strange.

Our next diversion didn’t take us far off our chosen route. We reached Bicheno, another coastal town

and went to look at the beach. Or, rather, the rocks,

which look very fine with their covering of lichen.  Beyond them, you can see froth and foam, which gives a further clue to why we stopped here.

(So does the title of the video, I guess.)

After Bicheno, it was but a short drive to the Freixenet Freycinet peninsula,

National Park and Lodge, which is where we were due to spend a couple of nights.

Freycinet National Park occupies a large part of the peninsula, (named after French navigator Louis de Freycinet), and Schouten Island (which on the map looks like a drip falling off the witch’s nose that is the Freycinet peninsula). Founded in 1916, the park shares the distinction of being Tasmania’s oldest park with Mount Field National Park, which is in the Uncharted Quarter – the southwest of the island.

Freycinet Lodge is quite an impressive operation. By the reception are the bar and restaurant areas

and our cabin, or rather our “coastal pavilion”, which is some 300m away, nestled among the woods

is very swish

and has obviously had a very cool and with-it designer, which made the interior exceedingly chichi and almost totally unusable for practical purposes. I should have realised this when in order to get in to the place we had to open the door by pulling it.  Also, it’s great having nice low mood lighting throughout, but there are times when actually I would appreciate being able to light the place such that I can see what the fuck is going on; but it’s not an option – gloom is, apparently, trendy. The light switch system is so complex and mysterious that it needs the  instruction manual which you can eventually find on the in-room TV, and it’s got a great supply of all the things you need for a comfortable stay – fridge, kettle, that kind of thing – but all hidden behind panels that merge in seamlessly with the walls, so you have to go round experimentally tugging or pushing at bits of the wall to see if they move in some way to reveal what’s behind. Very, very chichi, but very, very frustrating in the dark after a couple of large gins. [ On the plus side, comfortable bed, good shower, and a bath outside on the deck for star-gazing – Ed ]

Generally, the environment around the lodge is very pleasant, again helped by the sunshine we’ve had of late. There are nice views available

but the Australian ravens

sound very derisive.

We had the day to ourselves today, with no formal programme, but a strong recommendation for a walk to a lookout point over Wineglass Bay. One can walk all the way from the lodge to the lookout point; on the other hand, one can drive 3km to the car park whence the actual walk starts. We’re on holiday travelling, so we took the lazier option, but I should make it clear that it’s not like we put in no effort at all.

We had sunshine, which was good, and slightly unexpected, but the wind was a cold one, which made Getting On With It a good idea. It’s a well-marked path

with some steeper bits

past some amazing boulders.

We did stop to take some pictures of the views on the way up. You can see the nearest town, Coles Bay, quite clearly.

The final push to the top is up some more steps,

around 326 of them, and at the top there’s a circuit of viewpoints to navigate,

with more impressive boulders on the hillside

and (of course) a great view of Wineglass Bay.

Had there not been a good view, I would have been a bit tetchy, and not without justification, I think. The way down is slightly different from the way up, if you follow the signposts (like almost everybody did),

and continues to give good boulder.

There’s one mysterious rock quite near the bottom;

we can’t fathom how those dimples came about. Reaching the car park, we passed a rather cute structure shaped like a whale,

which I assume is a bicycle rack.

The road from and back to the lodge passes Honeymoon Bay, so we thought we’d pop down for a quick look;

our visit was short and sweet, much, I suppose, like your average honeymoon (eh, Starmer?) and we were soon back at the lodge and taking it easy for the rest of the day.

Tomorrow, we have, with some regret, to depart these shores and return to the Australian mainland. We’ll therefore be heading north which means that it should at least be warmer. Whether it’s more interesting or not will be revealed in these pages in due course.

 

Bushie, tailed again

6 Replies

Saturday 14 September – Bushie called for us at around 9.45 and we tailed along again for another day of mystery, excitement and information overload. The only thing Bushie told us was that we were headed for the far north-east of the island. And the first thing he did was to stop at the pond just down the road where yesterday he said there were platypuses. At first I was dubious about the wisdom of this, given our failure yesterday to see anything at this very place. I should have known better, and trusted Bushie’s knowledge and judgement, because

there were three platypuses in the pond, and we saw them all.  I even caught one having a scratch

and got some video snippets, too.

so I was very happy that we’d spent the time there.  Bushie was confident that we’d see them because he knew that they came out here at around 10am, hence his collecting us at 9.45. He was slightly disdainful of the people that walk by the pond, saying that they might walk by every day, but they’d never actually seen a platypus; all you needed to know was the time(s) that they came out to feed.  He was also somewhat more disdainful of the experts who opined that platypuses were crepuscular, and rightly so; here was our evidence that they come out during the day, too.

Between this pond and the next (which also had at least one platypus in it), there was a bank, and one could see the tracks that showed where platypuses move from one pond to the other.

Yesterday, as he’d driven us round, Bushie had casually pointed out various ponds and told us the number of platypuses in them. Today, he proved that he knew whereof he spoke. It seemed that there were more ponds with platypus inhabitants than without; they may be elusive, but in this corner of Tasmania they’re not rare.

A nice little nugget from Bushie: platypus young are called puggles, a term also applied to baby echidnas. There you are; a trivium you can deploy when you’re down the boozer, or trying to solve a crossword puggle clue.

Our next port of call was the town of Legerwood (emphasis on the middle syllable, according to Wikipedia). Its USP is a series of memorial carvings, which have a great story; but first, let me show you the carvings, as they are very impressive.

Private John McDougallPrivate Alan Andrews

On 15 October 1918, twenty-five Turkish pine trees were planted in memory of the village’s fallen soldiers following the end of the Great War. In 1999 the trees were deemed unsafe from blight and the local council recommended they be cut down. Determined to retain the memorial, in 2004 the Legerwood Hall and Reserves Committee commissioned chainsaw sculptor Eddie Freeman to carve a series of sculptures on the dying trunks based on the lives of the people they represented in remembrance. The photos above are just some of the 25.

We pressed on, through some lovely scenery,

(note the incipient distant rain in the last photo) and past some hop fields.

Hop fields were everywhere in this area at one time, but have declined markedly, which Bushie blamed on the Great American Hop Glut of the 1940s; the end of prohibition in the USA led to a vast expansion in their hop production, leading to a major surplus, with knock-on effects globally.

We stopped for coffee in the town of Derby, which is a major, even global, mountain biking centre, because of the excellent trails in the surrounding hills.

They have even staged world championship competitions here several times in recent years and there is a Derby Derby – which only sounds good as a phrase because they pronounce the name of the town as der-by not dar-by. Derby was, in earlier days, also a centre for tin mining; our coffee bar had a picture showing what the town looked like then – pretty ghastly, as is the case for anywhere near a mining operation.  Derby suffered particularly when overuse of water cannon to shift the soil led to a collapse in a river dam and the inundation of much of the town. So the mountain biking craze has brought life back into what had become a very quiet place.

More delightful scenery was on offer at The Little Blue Lake, which is a lake that is

not very big and, erm, not very blue, either. Bushie told us that the colour was due to reflection of a blue sky, but I’m not so sure.  I’ve seen that colour before in glacial lakes (e.g. Lake Louise) but this was possibly mineral in derivation. Anyway, pretty. And inundated with frogs:

We then headed for the Mount William National Park, which sounds a whole lot more impressive than the reality; Mount William is just 150m high. Musselroe Bay is part of this national park and we saw some bird life there.

Pelican
Kelp gulls
Australian pied cormorant
Bushie said this was a Mollymawk, but I reckon it’s a juvenile kelp gull

Just by the beach at Musselroe Bay was an old aboriginal midden.

These show where aboriginal folk had simply discarded things, such as shells. The layers are like a journal, showing that they’d left the area and then come back as the seasons dictated.

There was not much more to see in the Mount William National Park. A pair of kangaroos (mother and grown-up joey)

and, as the weather was really closing in by this stage, a camper grimly determined to have fun no matter what.

We high-tailed it out of the park, with Bushie making rude remarks about the National Parks authority investing its money in white elephants such as the Dove Lake Visitors Centre at Cradle Mountain (which, admittedly, is a major over-achievement) rather than maintaining areas like Mount William, which has fallen into neglect, allowing kunzea shrubs to take over what was once grassland and rich grazing for Forrester Kangaroos.

The dramatically-changing weather gave us some great landscapes as we headed for a village called Gladstone,

which is where I saw my first-ever emu,

with a very haughty-looking demeanour. It’s not strictly a wild bird, having been raised from a chick at a farm, but it’s lived an unpampered life, so I claim the tick box that says “emu” for this trip.

Bushie seemed to be rushing us back to Jetsonville, when he suddenly turned off the road on to a rough track

and we realised that we might be in for another Bushie Evening Special.  Indeed we were. The track led to a pond

(which, of course, had a platypus in it) by a cabin

where Bushie’s wife, Janine, awaited us. We were offered another of Bushie’s excellent snack platters, but had to turn it down, as we knew we had a dinner date with Madeline and Guy back at the farm, and we needed to preserve our appetite for that. But beer was also on offer, and that went down well.  Although the rain (and occasional hail) had stopped by this point it was, however, damn’ cold, so Bushie prepared an outdoor fire in a marvellous contraption

made up of various cogs, wheels and the inside of a washing machine. It was a great chance to meet Janine and talk about their life and business as the sun went down.  Eventually she left us and we repaired inside the cabin, which was delightfully warm

and which had lighting and a window through which we could watch developments on the sward outside. About four pademelons came out and fossicked about until something scared them off.  Eventually, another shape came shuffling out of the undergrowth;

a brush-tailed possum, perhaps with joey(s) in her pouch, which was lovely to see.

Janine and Bushie had agreed to take over stewardship of the cabin from the local council, as it was being used for all sorts of youthful skullduggery, involving drink and guns, and they wanted to avoid the tragedy that was otherwise pretty much inevitable. Their plan is to gradually build back the confidence of the local wildlife to provide even more of a viewing spectacle for their guests – we were only the second set of people to be taken here, so felt very privileged.

We had to leave in order to get back to the farm, and we had a delightful evening talking to Madeline and Guy about their lives and livelihoods.  Two Jetson brothers came over from Leicestershire in the early 19th Century and started farms, which is how the area came to be called Jetsonville; Madeline and Guy are the only Jetsons now farming, raising a mixture of beef cattle and crops. To our mutual delight we discovered that Madeline’s middle name is Jane – while Jane’s middle name is Madeleine – which is wonderfully symmetrical.

We have to move on tomorrow, as we near completion of the circuit of the northern part of Tasmania. Our time in the north east has been excellent, filled with new wildlife and glorious scenery. I wonder what excitement our final destination on Tasmania will bring?