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Category: New Zealand

Intertidal: #8 in series (what is wrong with this landscape?)

 

 

So much of Australia is parched, low-lying, flat(-tish)

So much of New Zealand is well-watered, extravagantly green, and its horizons usually include substantial hills or mountains.

Understandably, many visitors to NZ – Australians, especially – are utterly beguiled, and swallow, whole, the assiduously marketed fiction that New Zealand is “green” and “pure”.

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Intertidal: #7 in series (looking back into bay)

 

 

#6 in this series looked out to sea, from a bay on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula – a popular “weekend escape” destination for many residents of Auckland.

This post’s featured image was taken from almost exactly the same spot, but looking into a bay whose waters were very much deeper two centuries ago.

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Intertidal: #6 in series (western side of Coromandel Peninsula)

The location pictured in this post’s featured image is not very many kilometres away from the one in #5 in this series.

It is not at all close to the North Queensland coast, where Cairns sits at 16.51 Degrees South – unsurprisingly, a location where mangroves thrive.

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Surface, shifting (#88 in “a shining moment” series)

“Our” planet’s water surfaces are all shifting, always.

This reality is not always readily apparent.

It is, however, strikingly evident when one looks across a substantial intertidal zone when the tide is “out”.

This post’s musical component is Surface Level III – a particularly beautiful piece from Appearance, Chris Abrahams’ 2020 solo piano album.

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Ocean beach on a benign day (#68 in “a shining moment” series)

 

Near the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island is the so-called Ninety Mile Beach”.

It is no less magnificent for its actual length –  “only” 88 kilometres.

Musically, today offers a sublime, spacious, shore-inspired instrumental solo, plus an also-spare song which depicts a lovely state of mind:

lost in a seagull’s flight

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Perspective (#56 in “a shining moment series)

 

Two of many definitions:

the appearance to the eye of objects in respect to their relative distance and positions

a way of thinking about something

Geographically, today’s and tomorrow’s posts involve the same location, on the same autumn 2019 day – just minutes apart, with camera pointing in much the same direction

Musically, they address the same song, as recorded in 1958 and 1956, respectively, for the same label.

Each, however, is remarkably unlike.

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