There is no one more upset when a bird is killed or injured than my partner Rob. He is known as Dr Bob, for his ministrations to all manner of feathered creatures in our Blackheath garden. He scrubs out the birdbaths far more often than me, and
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Recently, on the way home to Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, I had to change trains at Springwood. It had been a long, tiring day, but were there any seats on the platform? No, just a bloomin’ rail to prop myself against! It made me think about
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We ‘twitchers’ often see birds at dawn or late in the day, in silhouette against the sky. Here in the Blue Mountains of NSW they are balm to my soul. In a world that is increasingly full of stress and strife, chuckling kookaburras herald the new day
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There are many reasons to visit my birthplace, beautiful Tasmania, but perhaps the best one is to eat freshly caught scallops. Oh yes indeed. Even as far back as WWI locals complained that too many were shipped off to the mainland. However, it seems this was not
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Recently I told the story of our dear Mr Wonga, an Aussie native pigeon who fell in love with four delightful ‘ladies’. Unfortunately they were all reflected in the shiny hubcaps of our house painter Rebekah’s restored, VW van. It just became too terrible to watch, as
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We are building a new house at Blackheath, in the Blue Mountains. Our painter Rebbekah arrives every morning in her beautifully restored VW Kombi van. Unfortunately it has led to confusion and frustration for our resident Wonga pigeon. It’s those shiny hubcaps. Oh my word, what a
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At the end of May, what we thought was a solitary, juvenile King Parrot appeared in our Blue Mountains garden. I shared a photo of the bird we named Max, and a couple of people in a bird group suggested he wasn’t young, and that his oddly
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Writing in 1926, a journalist (The Daily News, Perth) reflected on the sport of wood chopping in the years before WWI. He appeared to have been pretty impressed by competitors from the island state. In Tasmania, in the underhand events, the axemen invariably were barefooted, and they
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Birthday parties of the 1950s; an intense, but simple joy for Tasmanian Baby Boomers. Just a single, very bad photo taken at one of my own parties survives. I wasn’t even looking at the camera, which was a Box Brownie of course. The kids standing on those
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The Blue Mountains village of Blackheath has a new attraction. Her name is Princess, and she spends much of her time at the newly extended Blackheath Interiors and Homewares, in Govetts Leap Road. She’s a border collie cross. I’m not sure what the cross bit is, but
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