Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
As regular readers would already know, the Coorong is one of our favourite places.
This series is the fruit of our most recent visit, on 13 March 2024.
In the wake of the 2022-23 floods – which produced the Murray-Darling river system’s biggest flows in many years – the Coorong was enjoying better overall “”health” than had been the case over the preceding several decades.
Most tourist visitors enter the Coorong via the Goolwa Barrage, where this series begins.
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Venerable and majestic as it is, the pictured river red gum is neither the tallest, nor most massive, nor oldest example of the Australian mainland’s most widely distributed and most widely-loved eucalypt species.
The pictured tree, however was “the hero” in the most famous photograph ever taken of Eucalyptus camaldulensis.
87 years ago one of the most influential Australian photographers saw this tree, standing on a sparsely vegetated plateau, with Wilpena Pound’s flanks behind it.
The tree has stood there for at least several centuries; “the Pound” is circa 800 million years older.
Harold Cazneaux (aka “H.P. Cazneaux”) captioned his 1937 tree portrait, The Spirit of Endurance.
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At 3. 50 pm we climbed back into the warmth of the 4WDs and began the drive back down from the Stokes Hill lookout.
At 3. 51 pm we suddenly had very good reason to stop the vehicles, to brave the wintry gusts, and take careful aim with all available binoculars and cameras.
Elevated places are always the best vantage points for humans who like to observe raptors in flight.
The wedge-tailed eagle is Australia’s most massive raptor, and the most widespread.
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This post’s photo is this series’ final “from Stokes Hill” landscape image, albeit its penultimate “from Stokes Hill…” shot.
All the landscape shots were taken within the space of 12 minutes.
This one looks west-ish, toward some of the mightiest of Wilpena Pound’s ramparts.
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This chapter’s featured image was taken six minutes after the #15 one in this series.
I invite you to revisit the #15 image, and follow its sunbathed ridgeline, along to the right hand side of the photo.
There – as “minor details” – you can see some of the very same “grass trees”, and the same more distant range and ridgelines that are the “heroes”,here.
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This chapter’s photo was taken less than a minute after #19’s in this series.
For #19 I used a “short” lens (46mm); for this one, I wheeled around, circa 100 degrees to my right, and deployed a much longer (400mm) lens.
The photo looks a little south of due east, towards vast, increasingly flatter, drier expanses.
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Shortly after I photographed #18’s “bush tomato”, I forsook the long lens, in favour of a shorter, wider one, which I pointed north.
Undulating, “arid zone”, outback Australian places really “sing” when they “bathe” in dappled winter light.
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Whilst rotating through the full 360 degrees, and admiring/photographing splendid vistas in every direction, one should also pay attention to whatever is immediately in front of one’s feet…
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Less than sixty seconds after I had taken the two previous “from Stokes Hill” images, my feet had not moved very far.
I shouldered the other camera (and a much longer lens – 400mm, effectively) and scanned the fast-shifting play of light and shade across an “ancient”, “unspoilt”, “semi-arid” landscape.
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This post’s photo was taken just a few seconds after the previous chapter’s, and from the same vantage point.
Here, however, I turned circa 70 degrees, to look a little south of due west, toward Wilpena Pound’s highest ramparts.
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