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Category: photographs

McGowangrad, winter ‘22: #15 in series (Cottesloe Reef)

 

Pictured above: a snake bird, perched above Cottesloe Reef’s landward edge, with surfer-dude in background.

(more formally, the “snake bird” is an Australasian darter, Anhinga novaehollandiae)

Below them: there be dragons!

(photo is copyright Doug Spencer, taken at 3.33 pm on 03 July 2022)

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McGowangrad, winter’22: #14 in series (surfing the Rhodium Coast)

Where Postcode 6011 meets the Indian Ocean is not yet nicknamed “The Rhodium Coast”, but the “cap” would fit.

Pleasingly, however, this beachfront belies the extraordinary “effluence” (as Kim would say to Kath) of the folks who live closest to it.

Beachside, “the vibe” is much more egalitarian than is usually true of suburbs so “exclusive” that some of their billboards are placed by Sotheby’s real estate division.

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McGowangrad, winter ‘22: #12 in series (Matagarup Bridge)

 

It cost more than ninety million dollars to build.

Does that make it Australia’s most expensive pedestrian bridge?

It may or may not be our longest suspension bridge that carries no cars; certainly, it is more than twice as long as one eastern Australian pretender to the “longest pedestrian bridge” crown.

(I have long since ceased to be surprised that “perhaps we should check to see what has been built or achieved in places west of the Great Dividing Range” is a notion that never occurs to far too many Australians who live east of “The Divide”)

Statistics aside, Perth’s Matagarup Bridge is a singular structure; imagine a pair of swans, in flight…

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McGowangrad, winter ‘22: #10 in series (Karrakatta Cemetery)

 

 

Visitor numbers to Karrakatta Cemetery exceed one million per year.

Even if you have no funerals to attend, and none of your particular loved ones have been buried or cremated there, Western Australia’s largest cemetery is a richly rewarding destination.

This is most especially true on a non-gloomy winter’s day.

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McGowangrad, winter ‘22: #9 in series (third of three “strangers in Paradise”)

 

This kookaburra, perched on a grave cross, has something in common with most of the humans who have been buried in Perth’s largest cemetery over the past 123 years.

In 2022, most living WA humans do not know what it is; most of them, in fact, have a quite wrong view of kookaburras’ “place” in southwestern Australia.

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McGowangrad, winter ‘22: # 8 in series (second of three “strangers in paradise”)

 

 

 

Lion’s teeth, wind-riders, and a bad reputation….

I am referring to members of Taraxacum – a large genus of flowering plants. which most Australians regard as weeds and/or as highly invasive pests.

They are generally known as dandelions; Australian has some native species, but the ones so very familiar to most of us are indeed “alien invaders”.

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