SPOT THE MOTH

It's Darwinian I suppose.

I wish I had taken a photo from further away to emphasise what wonderful camoflauge is at play here but I was so preoccupied with its intrinsic beauty at the time it was impossible to pull back. To give an idea of its size, this beautiful thing, the body length was the same as my iPhone.

UPGRADE

My ancient laptop which was literally grinding to a halt has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st C. You only need (to know) someone who knows.

I can upload photos in a minute, if not seconds. Like Madam on her birthday. She of the painted nails.

FEB 14

                                                                    (click to enlarge)


Not one to pay attention to special days (days is days), the window of our local butcher did however catch my eye. How couldn't it?

JANUARY 26

                                    (Banksia serrata in the hall for 'Australia Day')

January 26 1788. Very likely hot and humid. The First Fleet has moved into Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) with the French not far behind and replacing it in Botany Bay. The Union Jack is planted ashore. Possession is declared and established by whatever it takes. It begins.

I'd recommend Thomas Keneally's The Commonwealth of Thieves to anyone interested in this extraordinary establishment of a far off colony (equivalent to putting a colony on the moon these days some have said). Keneally recreates the first four years of settlement, the Philip years. Here's Kate Grenville's review, and she'd know a thing or two, she who wrote the marvellous The Secret River.

So, we are stuck with what was once Foundation Day now being Australia Day and my sentiments are exactly these. If we must have a national day, then one day may it be Republic Day.

Down here, I've doused the house in Banksias (such exotica that would take his name Sir Joseph wouldn't have found on the moon) and have decked one table with bark from the Scribbly Gums.

Scribbly Gums are things of wonder. They are Eucalypts. There's several varieties and particularly common are E haemastoma and E sclerophylla. I've planted heaps (I'm told by recent guests from NL that using this word collectively like this is an Australian pecularity, so on this day etc) of E sclerophylla.

The scribbles are the wiggly lines remaining in the creamy white trunk when the bark peals off and these beautifully etched tracks are the paths taken by the larvae of the scribbly gum moth burrowing away under the bark wandering back and forth getting wider and wider from laid egg till pupation.

My Scribblies would be five or six years old now and just this last month have been shedding heaps of bark. I'd thought it might be the weather - hot with some heavy rains - but I suspect it is an age thing. An adolescence.

The markings are on both the bark and the trunk, and when you find a piece of marked bark, it is such a lovely thing that you think you might get it framed, or at least post it twice.

WAITING ALL NIGHT

There was a yellow breasted robin flitting about the roof beams in the shed when I was feeding the dog yesterday at last light. I think the flitting started when we arrived but nonetheless it seemed in no mood to be shooed out either.

They tend to fly into the darkening space as the day wanes and have sometimes built nests, wonderful little clay cups with bits if sticks in them, in the rafters. They're tiny. But I have to discourage them for there might be days, and more days, when I'm away and they'd be locked in and unable to feed.

Perched high and happy and, as I said, with a look of this will do very nicely if only you'd go, he (I can't sex robins, sorry) watched as we left and closed up. And when I opened the door first thing this morning sure enough there he was sitting on the edge of a red bucket on the long bench facing a window. Looking out.

After a quick look around it flew straight out the door onto the roof rack of the ute parked just outside. Within seconds, and I mean seconds, from nowhere a second appeared and they sat side by side, centimeters apart, before the outsider made a quick dart towards the night resident - a c'mon lets go kind of dart - and off they winged, together.

I felt all warm and fuzzy inside.

MIDWEEK

There were three laughing their heads off when K arrived midweek for a few days. He never comes down midweek. Now, that's hardly ever.

The one on the/our left looks like a baby. And there's lots of baby black cockatoos around by the sound of the open throated pleading calls coming in the evenings from the giant gum poking up from the gully. 

I wasn't certain what that call was, and even thought it might be mating. Then a few weeks ago I found myself walking in Centennial Park with a bird-feeder of a certain eccentricity. She shamelessly carried a bag of raw mince meat which she dispensed to Magpie families with mutual familiarity. 'This one's got two' she would say as a Magpie would hop over to her and take a big lump of mince in its beak and toddle back to two open throated young making that call. 'This one's got one' got a lesser ration.

So, here we are midweek, babies and all. The rain has cleared and the skies are brilliant. I can't find the comet that's meant to below Orion.

While I cooked we listened to a 1947 recording of Tennesse Williams camping it up with Pancho and then ate watching La Dolce Vita. The phenomenal Anita Ekberg has just died. There's the legendary Trevi Fountain scene of course :

I wish I could find the surreal hospital sequence which edges dangerously close to a boundary as the still clothed overdosed fiancée lies unconscious splayed on a stainless steel trolley, legs slightly askew, in a vast and otherwise empty sterile emergency room. Or is it a mortuary.

Lighter in tone is the deliciously subversive ascent to the top of St Peter's :

There's a wonderful seance as the rich and beautiful slip beyond amused indulgence into the realms of vulnerability and higher powers. The sequence where the blond bombshell ends up sensuously collapsed on the table, breasts up of course, is nowhere to be found in youtube land. Sadly.

But there is this brilliant spoof from Toto, Peppino e ... la dolce vita :

Come the morning.

There's jobs to be done. A hundred eucalypts planted. A hundred grasses to go. Tomorrow. Is this what retirement might look like. Tomorrow.

TRIFFIDS AND THINGS

I've been down in the bush for a few days now and there's been lovely steady rain and some big downpours. Everything is soaked through. Everything is happy. 

As usual the ants were ready.

With humidity high, there's a light mist lingering day and night. A scrim.

The dog pulled a fat leach off her foot as she preened and dried herself on the doona, leaving a trail of blood, and washing. I got the bugger outside still sucking itself tight onto a bit of paper.

Weird fungi have emerged from the surface litter.

Large swathes of bark are flailed about like seaweed.

And last night there was a frog on a window like an embryo desperate to be somewhere else. It was all but transparent. Not yet alive almost and so vulnerable and fragile.