The power of a song

This morning I went to my usual exercise class. We are a group of ladies with a teacher leading, who do a variety of stretches and exercises in a(vain) hope of keeping fit and even losing weight!

The exercises are to music supplied by the teacher, some of her music is more modern but occasionally she adds some very old time songs. Today she played this song, an oldtime tune released during the first world war I think.

As I listened I was absolutely carried back to when I was a young child. My father had been a soldier in the second world war, serving in the middle east and mediterranean, and had a huge repertoire of songs from that era. Some had been altered to include their own army version.

He would rise in the mornings at around 5am, make himself a cup of tea and toast, and then head off down to the milking shed to milk the herd of cows. My bedroom was right next to the kitchen and I would wake to his singing as he waited for the water to boil and then get ready to begin his days work. He had a beautiful singing voice and, as I mentioned, sometimes a slightly different version of the song.

I stood there in the hall with all the ladies around me, trying to hold back the tears. Nobody noticed, they were all too busy trying to keep up with our teacher.

My dad died nearly 40 years ago at a relatively young age. I would walk over hot coals to be able to hear his voice singing again.

Nearly Spring

And another one!

Wonder what lives in here?

We don't have snakes in New Zealand, or a variety of poisonous spiders. So consequently I tend to be very wary when stepping off the beaten track in Australia. No, I am more than wary - make that paranoid!



So I was a careful to steer clear of these little holes we spotted in the sand on the track. I was tempted to poke around with a stick to see if anything came out, but decided to leave well alone.

Australian flowers

These are some of the wildflowers we saw north of Perth. We were not in the wildflower season so there was not the variety one would expect to see in the spring.The top photo is (I think) a type of bottlebrush, the middle one is a small shrub growing by the sea south of Kalbarri, and the last picture is a beautiful banksia tree.

An Ad we would never see now!

An explanation

The photos below:

The top one is a typical side road in the Kalbarri national park, about 700 kilometers north of Perth. This one had been recently graded flat, but ungraded for a few days and they become corrugated.

The second photo is a grass tree. These seem to be all around Western Australia and fascinated me with their stark beauty.

Third - a view through an rock monument at a beach near Margaret River, south of Perth along the rugged coastline.

Last: The Pinnacles. An area of several acres of these unusual rock formations just poking up out of the ground. I was taken by the aboriginal explanation they would give to their young people - they are dead mans fingers - people who have been buried and are trying to rise again!

Random Aussie pics

An Australian Experience

We have just arrived back from several weeks holiday in Australia. We had a great holiday, visiting all the sights and marveling how like New Zealanders Aussies are. And how many of their shops are the same as ours - Bunnings, Subways, MacDonalds, etc etc.

But we (unfortunately) had one unique Aussie experience. We went on a car trip for a few days 'way' up north. Well it seemed like a long way to us but on a map its about 1/4 of an inch. Australia is such a big country. It was 7.30am and we had made an early start, facing a drive of over 600 kilometers back to the city, and were cruising in the car through a national park.

An isolated road, just low scrub on either side, when two kangaroos leaped out of the bushes and ran across in front of us. There was no way we could miss them. The leader made it across, but we just clipped the second one. Unfortunate for Skippy and for us too.

He/she flipped across into the bushes and we were left with a dilemma. Do we stop and go tramping through the bushes (probably snake infested - we were in Australia after all and had heard all about tiger snakes)looking for a wounded animal? If we managed to find it then what would we do with it? Or what would it do to us?

Apparently if you hit a kangaroo you are supposed to check to see if it has a joey. Which one of us would put their hand into the pouch to see if there was one? And if there was, what on earth would we do with it? We were miles and miles from civilization.

So we drove on, feeling rather sick. The car sustained some damage to the bumper/fender and the front panel. The panel beater later told us we were lucky, sometimes the 'roo can come through the windscreen.

The kangaroo however was not so lucky. If he/she survived he will have severe bruising at the least.

Most of the local people there have big 'roo bars on the front of their vehicles. There were several dead kangaroos through out the park, lying on the side of the roads. Obviously they are a hazard. And the cars are too - after all we were in their territory.

Kiwifruit Harvest time again.

The crop is in for the year, its a good one, and all's well. Pics wont load, will try again later.