Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
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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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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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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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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Photo (copyright Doug Spencer) taken just a few days before today’s winter solstice, in one of my favourite southwest Australian places.
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Sequentially, the featured image is the fourth of this post’s photos, all taken within the contest’s brief timespan: a little less than four minutes.
Formally, the “snake bird” is an Oriental darter, Anhinga melenogaster – the same species who looked so very different when in repose, in #66 in Pelican Yoga’s “a shining moment” series.
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It is a great pleasure to encounter a non-gloating, happy person – one who appears comfortable in their own skin, who requires “no particular reason” to be happy, who radiates contentment, is fully alive, and not “on guard”.
Such encounters do not require a common language, nor any words to be spoken.
Typically, no commercial transaction is involved, no contest, no “big event”…
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A perfectly peaceful, spacious scene?
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Leading by example: an Australian pelican, in South Australia’s Coorong National Park.
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Pikas are the Tibetan Plateau’s most numerous mammals.
The pictured individual was still alive, just…
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