Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
Residents of the Australian Perth – a prodigiously sunny city – tend to be very sooky about rain, clouds and cool weather.
Many of them believe that Western Australia’s southernmost coastal region is a “bleak” place, one that only mad persons would voluntarily visit at any time other than summer.
In fact, globally speaking, WA’s Deep South enjoys a warm temperate climate, and even in winter it would not be at all odd to see Mandalay Beach looking as it does in this post.
Comments closedI took the photo on a glorious autumn morning almost exactly one year ago – 10.26 am, 29 October 2019, Labahe, Sichuan, China.
In Scotland, more than half a century earlier, Robin Williamson wrote my favourite autumn song.
Allegedly, October Song was the first song he ever wrote, as a teenager.
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This is a sequel to the immediately preceding post.
It involves the same vantage point, on the same morning, but this post’s image (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken 13 minutes later, at 7.03 am, with a longer lens. (400mm, effectively)
Again, its musical complement is the work of a troubled genius who died young.
One CommentIts tautological title notwithstanding, the song is one of the loveliest “jazz standards”.
As is true of many “jazz standards”, it was not written as a jazz song.
This post’s photo (copyright Doug Spencer) was taken recently on a beautiful Spring morning in my favourite “Deep South”.
Australians do not need a passport to access it, but internal border closures currently render it “off limits” to most Australians.
Comments closedMost – around 80% – of southwestern Australia’s flower species are endemic.
Many naturally only occur in very particular, small portions of WA’s southwest.
Almost all are extraordinary.
Some are very obviously beautiful and/or highly unusual.
Others – this one, for instance – only reveal their singularity if you stop walking, get your head down to where the flower is, and look closely.
Comments closedIn 37 years of visits to Albany (on Western Australia’s south coast) we had failed to achieve a key ambition: to experience a major storm there.
A few days ago, nature finally obliged; the image shows Lowlands Beach at 3. 54 pm on Sunday 20 September 2020.
Joseph Tawadros provided this post’s suitably tempestuous music.
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The featured image shows Caladenia latifolia – the Pink Fairy.
If you are in southern Australia (Tasmania included), within one hundred kilometres of the Indian or Southern Oceans, and have access to somewhere bushy and sandy, chances are excellent that you can see this species in flower, right now…or very soon.
Comments closedAnthropomorphic captions almost always lie about the animals they purport to describe!
This juvenile Australian Wood Duck was simply preening, as birds do.
This behaviour has precisely nothing to do with egregious self-regard.
However, the “water as mirror” circumstance does lead me to one of my favourite pianists, delivering a sublime rendition – coughers, notwithstanding – of Claude Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau.
Comments closedIf 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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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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