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Category: Western Australia

Fuller version of “Big Spit: full Monty”

If the featured image’s swan had nested at this location a couple of decades earlier,  he/she (black swans share nesting/parenting duties) would have almost been “living next door to Alan”.

Alan Bond – criminal/America’s Cup “hero” – is no more, but “his” Victoria Avenue mansion recently sold for multiple millions, and is part of the featured image’s “millionaire’s row”.

This post is best read after first seeing the immediately preceding one.

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Revelatory covers (15th in series): “Oblivion”, twice

 

Oblivion is a 1982 composition by Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), Nuevo tango’s pre-eminent composer and bandoneon virtuoso.

Perhaps his most uncanny piece, it has survived/endured countless covers.

Some of its finest interpreters are not Argentinian, and although one of this post’s two very different versions does feature a “squeezebox”, it is not a bandoneon.

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Word power: hey, big (Oz Fed Govt) spender!

This post alerts you to two provocative essays about Australian governments’ approach to “public spending”.

One looks at general home truths, facts, fictions and illusions, with particular reference to our “post-pandemic” economic & social well-being.

The other addresses Australia’s response to “the threat from China”.

According to Richard Dennis, we Australians are reluctant to look into the simple truth hidden in plain sight:

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Augusta in winter: southwesternmost Australia

 

Four kilometres south of the little town of Augusta is Cape Leeuwin, atop which sits the Australian mainland’s tallest lighthouse.

The much-promoted notion that this is where two oceans meet is highly debatable; arguably, the Indian Ocean laps both sides of Cape Leeuwin.

Regardless, it is our continent’s bottom left hand “corner”, and the Augusta/Leeuwin  “corner” is a wonderful place.

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Karri forest: macrofungi in winter

 

Southwestern Western Australia is rightly renowned for the extraordinary diversity of its flowering plants.

Its fungi are even more diverse.

Fungi species comprehensively outnumber the combined total of plant and animal species.

Macrofungi are the ones with fruiting bodies big enough to be visible to an observant, naked human eye, in the wild.

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Favourite forest – Warren National Park

 

This post’s featured colour photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken just four minutes before – and from almost the same vantage point – as the immediately preceding post’s monochrome image.

I have been lucky enough to walk in many different kinds of forest, on six continents and various islands.

All are beautiful, in many different ways, but if I had to choose a favourite, it would be so-called “virgin Karri forest”.

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