Crikey, did I really do that ?

Do you look back at your life sometimes and almost surprise yourself at how far you have come ? I owe thanks in one significant respect to my hubby who nearly called the wedding off, all those years ago, when I took him to a restaurant which served (ampelopoulia) migratory song birds, a big delicacy in Cyprus. Mercifully catching them, lime -ing them is now illegal, they are a protected species. In my defence I didn't know better but I should have.There was scant care for the environment and frankly no one was bothering with protecting birds - they were mainly hunted and eaten. 

Living in India as I did, and now in Australia I have become a willing twitcher and it is a daily joy to see the birds coming to eat some sunflower seeds or the magpies singing to me from the branches of the Hoop Pine. My favourites are the grey butcher birds which visit me daily. I am happy to share this latest announcement from Wildlife Queensland. 

The BAN IS IN THE BAG 

After two years of leading the campaign for a plastic bag free Queensland, Wildlife Queensland is delighted by the Queensland Government’s announcement on 25 November regarding the introduction of a ban on single-use, lightweight plastic bags in our state.

Farewell dear friend.

Wrote to a friend to find out how she was - a cancer had returned and her much awaited visit to Australia had to be postponed to allow her to have treatment. I did not hear back which was not like her. So I wrote to a mutual friend to find out news. She answered almost immediately to tell me she had passed away on Monday after complications from surgery. Mary Anne was with her till the end.
I put my hand to my mouth and drew my breath in hard. You see she had always been one of these indestructible, incredibly sensible, totally organised, completely alert and very go- getting women with whom I had shared many a walk in the Swiss Alps, many a Committee meeting, and many a lunch and dinner. We had kept up a good exchange wherever I was in the world and had been so delighted that Brisbane was finally in her travel plans. Talking of which there very few places in the world she had not been to, together with her friend and for the years we lived closer, we would look forward to their return from their world wide adventures so we could pick their brains on the Emperor Penguin's life or the joys of the Trans Siberian Express.She delighted us with her tales and her photo albums always meticulously prepared and annotated of where they had been and what they had seen. She lived her life more dynamically, more eloquently and more appreciatively then anyone I know so I should not feel sad, and yet I feel a sense of loss and grief, remembering her kind face and smiling eyes, as once and perhaps only once, while climbing a steep and snowy side, she asked for my hand to steady her passage.

The wonderful and unforgettable Doreen Barrack 1935- 2016. 

To her life long friend and support Mary Anne my heartfelt hugs.

Hi

Mind if i just jump in ? Can't wait for you guys to casually finish your dinner so I will just hop down walk across the deck, have a good sniff and then take the short cut back to where my dinner is waiting. 

Pollsters - PAH

Allow me this little rant - I don't often do it but seeing how many times the Polls have mislead the public in the last few years makes me want to put out a purge on Pollsters, calling for their extinction and elimination from the western world. They conduct polls where no one dares tell them the truth, they produce spurious results that people rely on, they offer  no insight into what is happening, no wisdom about why anything might be happening and ultimately are hugely wrong in their predictions. 

Does it really need Brexit, Colombia, The US election and I don't know what else to reveal to us that these people with their useless questions, assumptions and mathematical models have nothing to offer and the information they provide is not worth the valuable paper it is written on or the screens it is disseminated from ? 

Why do we keep going back to them ? Isn't time we put them all out to grass, or better still doing community service which might involve some real work with real people to do penance for all the wasted time we have spent listening to them, being misled by them,  and not gaining an ounce of wisdom from them. Think about how much money could be saved for starters let alone the freedom to strategise what you and not they think is important. 

Rant over - back to butterflies and birds and all the things that make the world a better place and my friend Faith had just the poem to express this : 

"THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS" BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Trumped

So we have been Trumped and my Braggadacious Predictions are hollow for Hillary and she will fade into her Foundation. I ascribe some of her loss of votes to the many disenfranchised white men who see their ever diminishing role in the world but are unable to even think about giving a woman the top job, even though the only man around is such a poor specimen. But how about the women who voted for him or the ethnic minorities, how on earth can we explain or justify their actions ? Is their desperation so complete that they are left with no choice ? So we have to ask ourselves how we have let them down to this extent, how the gap between rich and poor is yawning wider and what on earth can be done about it. 

We hang our heads and ponder at the madness in the world and the difficulties faced by ordinary and good people when they are given hope by such empty and dangerous rhetoric. He is sowing the seeds of bigotry and injustice, racism and sexism and sadly the persons that will be let down, will be his  gullible supporters who will realise that his words are as empty as his plans. Lets hope so, as some of his threatened actions may border on the positively dangerous. 

America you will need all the help you can get after eight glorious years of Obama and Michelle and their wonderful family. What a disappointment for them as they watch their work getting undone and their efforts thrown away. And for what ? All that money spent for the campaign would have pulled a  fair few Americans out of their property trap, given a livelihood to refugees, those that are allowed to come in, and probably bolstered many enterprises. Instead it has all been gobbled up by big business, TV channels and bloody awful pollsters who should offer to govern in his place, as a penance for getting it wrong. Well, wrong in my eyes at least, but I fear even those with him, wont stick around for very long. The reality and the disenchantment are not too far down the line.

America will struggle to be great again, it has now receded so far into the dark days, that it can no longer even be considered a contender anymore. 

Flutters in the City

Today I took a long walk back home from an arts and crafts market. The day is bright and sunny and the city is ordered and clean. But something phenomenal is happening around me. Everywhere, and I mean everywhere, there are butterflies fluttering by, soaring to catch the sun, chasing each other, meeting as pairs, swooping, looping and letting the wind carry them upward or sideward. They are mostly black tipped, small yellows, little blues, too many, too fleeting to allow me to identify them all. So I wondered if others had noticed and found this in the ABC news in an article by Jessica Hinchcliffe: 

"Thousands of caper white butterflies from western Queensland have migrated to the south-east in search of food.

Residents in suburbs throughout Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast including Mansfield, North Lakes, Manly, Redcliffe and the Glass House Mountains have reported sightings of the butterflies in "plague-like proportions".

The caper white butterfly is most commonly found in the west of Queensland and in New South Wales, on the other side of the Great Dividing Range."

I wonder how many citizens stopped to have a look around them and noticed them ? They will be gone in a flitter, flutter moment. 

Back to Nature

This is the time of the year when we like to escape to the mountains and there is no better place to go then O'Reilly's in Lamington National Park.

This is a place steeped in history and one worth getting to know about.The O'Reillys go back three generations and what started as a dairy farm has now become a mountain resort. More importantly they have always understood and appreciated the need for forest conservation and for preservation of the environment which has meant that the vast tracks of cleared land now have secondary forests forming with a plethora of birds like this curious and wonderfully coloured Crimson Rosella.

We walked through forests and met rocks delicately balanced, luminous or luminescent bracken, waterfalls more than we could count and enjoy, beautiful ferns and crows nests shining in the sunlight, tree ferns which were a dentelle of detail, a snake slithering out to greet us by the path and trees, including Atlantic Beeches and Brush Box that extend far above the forest as high as our eyes will take us.