The House(s) of Fran_mart

 We often use Cowper St when travelling between EPIC and Civic.  Close to the Limestone Avenue end of that street is an attractive looking Church: All Saints Anglican .  Frances had wondered about walking there one morning, and we decided the time (and weather) was right on 5 March.  On the way out we used the route suggested by Google Maps in a string of blue dots.  Coming back we used the red arrow route (mainly to revisit Ainslie School which one of our grand daughters attended when living in Canberra. The main road North was Torrens St, through Braddon.    Looking at all the new apartment blocks in the street I commented to Frances that all thoughts of the heritage precinct had vanished, Then I came across the pictured paving stone which IMO counts as heritage. Simon and Garfunkel sung that in New York "the words of the Prophet are written on the subway wall." In Braddon they are in the sidewalk. Here is the church.  There were a lot of si...

As it was a day of English weather and there were some good exhibitions on in the city we took ourselves off there on Saturday afternoon.  Our first port of call was the National Museum of Australia. This image shows both the murky weather and a pretty close to full car park. Why is it that Museum Directors always feel the need to be building new things?  I strongly suspect its because a few of the administrative staff realise they could be let go if they don't keep coming up with things to keep themselves looking busy. I also think the phrase "an immersive sensory representation" should be a contender for post-modern chunder-phrase of the decade (or possibly century). Our target exhibition was one devoted to an exhibition about the voyage of Nicholas Baudin .   It was very good.  One of my bugbears about many exhibitions (especially in our National Gallery) is the limited information on the cards.  In this case they had much useful stuff, includi...

This is more pr less just to record some musings, but might be of interest to some readers. A weather group I follow recently became engaged in a debate about where to measure the elevation of a town.  This followed from an article in a newspaper, (? it was the Daily Mail) which described Lithgow as the coldest city in Australia.  This led to a response by one of the expert members of the group: Lithgow's old Birdwood Street station has the longest record (84 years) of Lithgow stations and is close to the city centre. Its whole-of-record mean annual temp is 12.3°while its 1971-2000 30-year mean is 12.55. Comparing apples with apples, Ballarat AP's 1971-2000 mean is 12.15 and Orange's is 11.75, though that is at the AP which is higher and slightly colder than the city itself. Orange Ag Stn, which is just in the city proper unfortunately began in 1976, but its 25 complete years in the 1971-2000 period gives an annual mean of 12.3. So by a whisker, both Ballarat and Oran...

My friend Ian Fraser has posted about the genus Xanthorrhea and noted that in South Australia they are called yaccas.  I commented that this caused me to recall orienteering through large patches of this stuff in South Australia.  Unfortunately I don't have any images of such patches (it was in the 1970s - well before digital cameras, and I didn't carry a Kodak when doing cunning running).  They are probably  Xanthorrhoea semiplana described in a very interesting document as common in the Adelaide Hills. I also referred in my comment to some plants of this genus (specifically Xanthorrhea australis ) in the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra, of which I do have an image. The birds are Red Wattlebirds, a member of the honeyeaters although I am not sure if they are dining on the nectar or the insects attracted to that source of carbohydrate. X. australis is found in localised patches in the Brindabella ranges behind Canberra.  These images we...

We lived in Ottawa in 1990 and 1991, and remember the time with great pleasure.  One of the highlights was realising how common beavers were in the area.  Some points: We had been there less than a week and went for a walk along a path below Parliament House.  There was a beaver swimming across the River! Go forward about 9 months and I took a bunch of visiting European Statisticians to the swamp adjacent to the Brittania Water Treatment Plant.  The guests were very excited to see a beaver: the Norwegian said something like "We have to go a long way from Oslo to see one of them!" When Orienteering in the forests it was important to aim for the dam on beaver ponds: that was a nice run across a swamp whereas crossing upstream involved wading a significant depth of water. They were also common in the suburbs and the City sent teams out with dynamite in Spring before the steams started flowing to blow up the dams which would otherwise flood houses.  This meant ...

30 members and guests assembled at the car park of the Belconnen Soccer Club for a walk around some of the damper parts of this area of Belconnen.  This snip from Google Earth shows the various spots, with 1 being the car park.  The other numbers appear as red  in the text below. Once all had signed on and announced themselves we first headed to a little known pond 2 in the Northern section of this open space.   The recent rains had restored some liquidity to this site.   Including the "car park list" we scored 16 species here - all pretty much as expected. Knowing that the main McKellar Pond 3 was the haunt of Australasian Bittern and Australian Little Bittern we took ourselves off  in that direction.    It was also pretty well supplied with water. Alas, neither of the aforementioned rarities were present.  Several more expected waterbirds were added together with Red-browed Finch and European Goldfinch.  As we moved towa...

As usual, the day started with a spectacular sunrise. On emerging to head off for a walk along the Inlet a White-headed Pigeon appeared and flew to a feeder across the road.  It was soon joined by a second bird. Our walk was enhanced by a meeting with a local who was heading off to photograph the spoonbills and gave various hints that will be useful for future trips. Back to the house packing up and other pre-departure tasks were undertaken.  This was briefly interrupted by me noticing swirls in the water below which resolved to a flipper being raised.  That is the first seal  I have seen in the Inlet.  Nice of it to wave goodbye. Then it was off towards home, with the objective of visiting Towamba and then the Eden smokehouse for aquatic products.  We didn't find the road we expected to Towamba (it isn't posted to that destination but is instead marked as "The Snake Rd" reflecting the way it weaves around the Towamba River - we noticed where it j...