For the benefit of those who have not visited the Stirling Range…
The featured image and the one below – wide-angle and telephoto, respectively – look east from Toolbrunup’s east-facing flank, across to Bluff Knoll.
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Category: nature and travel
At 1,159 square kilometres Stirling Range National Park is “large”, or “small”, depending on one’s perspective.
Four hours drive northwest, Perth – Western Australia’s sprawling metropolis – occupies more than five times as much ground.
The Stirlings’ “footprint” is less than one 209th of the United Kingdom’s 242, 495 square kilometres.
Botanically, however, the Stirling Range is much the “bigger”/“hotter” place!
It has more flowering plant species than does the entire UK; many of them grow only in or near the Stirling Range.
Two recent “catastrophic” fires seemingly “destroyed” much more than half of what had been growing there…
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…is surely one of “our” planet’s most wonderfully weird plants.
Kingia Australis is the only member of its genus, is not at all closely related to any of the other grass trees, and it grows (very, very slowly, over centuries) only in Australia’s southwestern corner.
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A big, rusting surprise was just one minute’s walk away from the house in which we recently spent sixteen nights – on a forested hill near Youngs Siding, in Western Australia’s Deep South.
This post’s musical complement: a singular treatment of an apropos Thelonious Monk number, plus the most tender song ever written about a car salesman….
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As Australia’s Right-“thinking” “pundits”/commentators/zealots “know”, if this “scaly, self-indulgent millennial” continues to bolt down avocados, it will never achieve home ownership!
They may, however, be pleased to know that no member of this species has ever sipped a latte…although some “pundits” surely will be disappointed to learn that its name does not salute a monarch/y.
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…in our street, at least, the pervasive “warm, buttered, milky spuds” aroma almost certainly has nothing to do with potatoes.
Melaleuca quinquenervia is the “culprit” – flowering, not mashing.
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Soil restoration can be expensive, and impractical across vast areas of land. Soil disturbance by echidnas offers a cost-effective restoration option, and this potential should be harnessed.
Very easily reached via sealed roads, but astonishing little-visited, Anvil Beach is deliciously wild.
It offers visual splendour, grave danger, and safety.
If you intend to swim there, you must very carefully select exactly where/when/if to do so, how to reach your chosen point of entry, and how/if you can safely return from it…most especially if the tide is soon to turn, or a weather change is imminent.
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The rodent pictured above – well-rounded, petite, and “out in the wild” – quite probably strikes you as “cute”, maybe even “adorable”.
But how about the longer-toothed, urban-invading ranks of Rattus norvegicus?
Allegedly, they are currently making themselves ever more “at home” inside our cities’ offices, shops and homes…
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On 22 October 2019, in the northeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai, China, I met an obviously-ambitious sheep-owner.
Clearly, he was “improving” his flock, probably with help from Australia.
Some of his sheep greatly surprised me – very evidently, some of their “bloodlines” were merino.
The prosperous grazier’s mask was entirely appropriate to his dusty task.
However, wearing it would have been expressly forbidden in some other places/contexts, even in the much more open/democratic land of Oz…
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