For the gonad-challenged male

JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank

This thing is for sale at Amazon. I've always wanted to sell something like this so I've even put it on my own Amazon account. You must buy one -- I get 5% commission which I will spend on promoting peace, I promise.

"The JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank is an open-ended custom-made, Star-Wars-oid personal tank that carries up to five people at 40mph over sand. It comes with a giant 400w stereo and a camera for recording the reactions of the people you drive past. Only 20 grand!"

I found it at techno\culture

Irish Blogmanac team member Nora thinks it would be great for Sandy Beach visitors who salivate at the thought of running over crabs. The ones in the Caravanserai of Corpulence about which I wrote on January 9 in Sandy Beach Almanac (Crabstock: I came upon a crab of God). If you're interested in SUV -- the 4WD -- and the environment, particularly the beach, scroll down and click the waving crab. :)

I shaved today, unlike my friend

This fella isn't the Eastern bearded dragon (Pogona barbata) I chatted with this morning, but possibly his dad. (The picture was taken a week or two ago by my friend Baz le Tuff. Click to enlarge.)

When they feel you're getting a bit close, they puff up their bodies and make their spiky beard stick out, as this photo shows.

I see the big one in the picture most mornings depending on the direction I take, and less often a smaller one, both in among the scrub beteeen me and the sand. The big fella likes to sun himself on one of the fence rails. Today's Pogona was about half of the big fella's approx. 50 centimetres, much darker in colour, and much readier to stare me down with his, or her (I must find out how to tell) beard sticking out and bright orange mouth wide open. On close inspection I realised that I could see almost all the way to England in there.

I'm learning all the time, but I don't know enough about the creatures who I share this earth with to call myself a lizard sexer. Twelve months or so ago when I was living about 50km south of here at Repton near the mouth of the Bellinger River, I had a 60cm Eastern water dragon living at my back door, whose name was Leonard until he got fat, disappeared for a few days, then came back as Leonora, with three dragonettes. I was very fond of Leonard, who came to expect a morsel from me at least once a day -- often right up the steep wooden stairs and to my door.

The swell was big today, drowning out even the cicadas, and bright and early there were plenty of surfers up the south end. As my landlord says, if it's big at Sandy, it's enormous everywhere else, and today's sad news confims it. Five people drowned in the state this weekend and the size of the waves must have been a big causal factor. Having almost drowned on two occasions, I have a pretty deep respect for the power of the pacific, and I hope people will take extra care when a swell like this is up. With temperatures of about 30 degrees and a mild SW breeze, it has been real beach weather and it's easy to let excitement get in the way of caution.

I'm no surfer, but I think surfing is superb. It's one of the few pastimes developed in this country that is predicated neither on beating another human being, or the environment. And it's beautiful to watch. Which is just what I did atop the headland as the big breakers rolled in from the blue South Pacific. I just have to get a camera and take a panoramic series of photos and see if I can blend them together in Photoshop. On a blazing, blue day like today, with those waves, it's like looking down on all creation. It was just me and a crowd of terns (Lesser crested tern, Sterna bengalensis, I think) lazing on the grassy heights.

The warm weather means having the window open in the Ponderosa, just in front of Esmeralda the Computer, where a very large spider has spun a web (but ran away when I stuck the webcam close to get a shot). Having the window open has its perils, because this week the tree ferns that I wrote about on January 4 are spawning to beat the band. Like most rugged backwoodsmen of the Grizzly Adams/William Buckley/Alexander Selkirk school, I suffer from allergies that welcome such tiny entities as the spores of Dicksonia antarctica which lightly dust my desk as I write. They put me in bed for some of thursday, though it might also have been the mould as we've had a lot of rain and humidity's high.

As my mate Luke the Chef told me a few days ago, it's the sort of weather that makes a lot of people in his industry go down at this time of year with 'Chef's Crack'. He reckons it's worse than allergy, but I didn't look into it. Looking deep into a bearded dragon's gaping mouth is quite enough for this he-man's week.

Sea squirts Kilpatrick, anyone?

I went for a wade on this beautiful warm day, and saw what I thought was the gaping head of a flathead fish washing up in the surf, no doubt discarded by an angler. A closer examination showed that it was a large old oyster shell, remarkably well-hinged for what seemed to be the time it must have been washing around the shore.

I'm very fond of oysters, and although few will believe me, and I don't blame them, I've seen shells at Lake Conjola on the South Coast at least the size of saucers. I do have a witness, with whom I ate dozens of smaller, but still enormous, NSW rock oysters that day.

I suppose because oysters are one of my favourite delicacies, much scarcer around here than where I was living 12 months ago near the mouth of the Bellinger, I was thinking about them as I rounded what I call Cormorant Rock at the north end of Sandy, when I was surprisedto hear the "peep, peep" of three Sooty oyster-catchers (Haematopus fuliginosus). I thought someone was calling me!

"Peep, peep", not to be confused with the pipi (strange name) molluscs that are well known to Aussies, but rapidly becoming scarcer. I saw one of those on my flaneur today, too, a fine specimen half hanging out of its shell and drinking in the Pacific, as I was metaphorically.

Sooty oyster-catchers are usually found singly, or in pairs, so it was a delight to watch these three, even if the possibility that they might be a ménage à trois does seem a little ... permissive, even to someone as broadminded as I. I've known what nosy neighbours can be like so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. Quite likely one of them is a cousin up from the city. Whatever, they might be respectable, but their red bills are longer than is seemly (especially those of the females), and they look a little silly as they sort of waddle through the shallows on the sand around the rocks.

Funny name for them, though. They don't even like oysters, which is a concept I don't understand. Their idea of a good chew is limpets, chitons, Cunjevoi (sea squirts) and mussels. Mussels are OK, especially those big green New Zealand guys, but give me a big doz of oysters any day. Make it three doz, raw and off the rocks. As for cunji, you can keep it. I wouldn't eat it with your mouth.

Nice picture

Stormy weather: reprise

It's been pouring all day. I've been flat out like a lizard drinking all day. I could write about it, or I could put my feet up. I think I'll ----

Know what I mean?

I'm really wondering whether I should renew my membership in the Hermits' Society this year. They cancelled the annual convention ... again.

St Andrew's cross. Little wonder.

I've been enjoying watching Argiope keyserlingii, better known as the St Andrew's Cross spider, seven paces from my computer. She hangs upside down like St Peter crucified, but the stunning design on her web is what gives her the other saint's name.

Her zigzag bands of silk woven in the X-shaped cross strengthen her web and also reflect ultraviolet light, thus attracting more little critters, like grasshoppers and other flying insects. Today she's been munching on what looks like a fly.

How do I know she's a she? Because my little mate has beautiful yellow stripes, and her hubby, wherever he is (probably down the pub), is a dull reddish brown.

According to tradition, the Apostle St Andrew (feast day November 30) was crucified at Patmos, in Achaia, on an X-shaped cross, the form of which became known as St Andrew's Cross, which is still on the Scottish and British flags. His cross is the same as the cross of Wotan which Norse invaders of Scotland carried. In Scotland it became the national symbol, as Andrew the national patron saint. My online friend, the very knowledgeable Waverly Fitzgerald at School of the Seasons points out, "The cross saltire, is also a sun symbol, which looks similar to a Catherine wheel or the rune of Gefjon, the Giver, which is associated with Freya, the great Scandinavian goddess who is much honored at wintertide."

According to Nigel Pennick (The Pagan Book of Days, 1992, 131), Andrew is a version of the divinity Andros, the Man, personification of virility, seen as an aspect of Dionysus.

St Andrew made another contribution to my own culture by his ordeal. People used to sign with an X if they couldn't sign their name. Then they would kiss the X and promise by St Andrew (whose cross the X resembles) to abide by their oath or contract. Over the years, ‘X’ on a letter came to mean a kiss.

bfn xxx

Latitude, with gratitude

I got a friendly email from a local man, Fritz Brzon, whom I haven't met, who kindly informed me of the correct Sandy co-ordinates for latitude and longitude, which I have now corrected in the header. He also pointed me in the direction of this site which has the software with which he made me a map (click thumbnail). I would guess that I'm actually a second or two of latitude to the east (beachward) of where my correspondent has drawn the co-ordinates. Many thanks, Fritz.

You say "papaya", I say "pawpaw"

The pawpaw I ate today was delicious.

(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

'Pawpaw', that's what it's called in Australia, but in most countries Carica papaya is called 'papaya', and outside of this country 'pawpaw' refers to Asimina triloba, a similar-looking relative of the custard apple and native of North America. Interestingly, in some islands of the West Indies they also get the name right. The yellow fruit I tucked into is known as 'pawpaw' there too, mon.

The Aussies think the Yanks have got it wrong, and the Yanks think we're nuts. So how did the confusion arise? That's not a rhetorical question; I'd really like to know.

The yummy pawpaw I ate today came from the garden; the ones in the picture came from United States Department of Agriculture. A little-known and very pleasing fact is that, unless otherwise made clear, images from USA government websites are in the public domain. Since I only have a webcam with which to take a (grainy) digital picture, the US pawpaw (sorry, papaya) will have to do. I also admit that the ones outside my door aren't quite as perfect as the ones here displayed. But they sure taste good!

Perhaps I should bow to the North American nomenclature, because the ancestors of whatever it was I ate today are believed to have originated there. In southern Mexico to be precise, which is still North America regardless of how many times one hears Mexico referred to as a Central American country, something that drives Mexicans loco.

From their Aztec home, seeds of this wonderful fruit spread around the world to other places were the climate is warm -- there are records of them being taken to Panama and then the Dominican Republic before 1525, and seeds were sent from India to Naples in 1626.

Our plant has folk medicine applications in many countries; as one website says: "In tropical folk medicine, the fresh latex is smeared on boils, warts and freckles and given as a vermifuge. In India, it is applied on the uterus as an irritant to cause abortion. The unripe fruit is sometimes hazardously ingested to achieve abortion. Seeds, too, may bring on abortion. They are often taken as an emmenagogue and given as a vermifuge. The root is ground to a paste with salt, diluted with water and given as an enema to induce abortion. A root decoction is claimed to expel roundworms. Roots are also used to make salt."

It's fitting that the plant that is so associated with tropical climates all around the world (and which almost but not quite thrives in sub-tropical ones like at Sandy Beach), has lent its name to an online interest group, The Green Papaya, which is all about South-East Asian culture.

The moon's full, the sky is like cut crystal after days of clouds and rain, and today a stiff wind blew straight from the east onto Sandy, bringing with it quite a few bluebottles that washed up on the sand; a 30-cm pink-tongue wandered up close to the Ponderosa this afternoon.

And about bluebottles, pink-tongues and all sorts of colourful things, we'll have more to report, someday, sometime, somewhen in Sandy Beach Almanac.

Late tonight I went to pay homage to Selene the Moon. I stepped onto windswept Sandy amid darkness as one of the few big billowy black clouds raced before her face. The moon shot white rays from behind the cloud; I looked up to the south end where only the sandhill was glowing eerily at a distance. Then, suddenly, bright white light illuminated all the sand and ocean, the trees and the headland, as though someone turned on the lights. I love this place, and my life, more with every passing day and every passing cloud.

Time for bed. Bright blessings to all.

Daily Planet News: One-stop newsagency

Hundreds of headline links constantly updating

I've taken a rain-check today. See the list of newsfeeds all on one page at Daily Planet News. Enjoy. Read about it here.

Those friendly Sandy Beach waves!

Remember I said the other day (here) that there are ways apart from digging large sand traps to show four-wheel drivers how much we welcome them on beaches?

We'll be showing some cool methods over coming weeks and light years. Today's tip: the waves of Sandy Beach are an excellent way. Don't know what I'm talking about? Easy! Click the waving guy for a how-to. :)

When one Sandy Beacher does it, they think maybe someone else is being waved to. When two or three people do it, they realise they've been noticed in their shiny big cars (and remember, they thrive on attention!).

When lots of people do it -- and this works for other beaches, folks -- they see it's a movement. Their very own welcoming committee, and they feel so proud they'll be back soon for sure. Let's give a big Waving Welcome to our 4-WD mates!

Stop Press
If we can get a sponsor or sponsors for a prize or prizes, we will run a competition for photos of people waving to cars on the beach. If you have a lazy fifty, or something else to offer, and would like to be a sponsor, send me an email at pipwilson [AT] acay.com.au and help spread the "waves" from Sandy Beach all around Australia (and the world).

Free air conditioning and lightshow

At 9.30 pm, the huge sky was cloudless as I sat on the beach on this hot night, except for a big bank of dark nimbus clouds over the sparkling South Pacific and Woolgoolga headland to the north-west. Above the distant storm, the half moon illuminating the top edge.

Chango, son of Yemaya and Orungan, was hurling his lightning bolts with incredible energy and beauty, and a mild 10-knot breeze from the SSW not only cooled me down, but ensured that Chango wouldn't be visiting this neck of the woods tonight.

I'd been to Bellingen today, where they know about hot. By the time I got home, the very best I could do was nap for an hour, then do a little Almanac work and cool myself down on the beach. Bellingen Community Radio (2BBB-FM) is kindly broadcasting the Almanac each morning, and I pre-record these 4-minute spots in big slabs. Since my last session, in December, BBB has gained an air conditioner, something I would have liked when I got home to the Ponderosa. But I got it for free, watching Chango tonight 'neath the waxing moon. Best movie I've seen since Being John Malkovich. The big frog somewhere outside my door is still applauding.

Phew!

The storm blew out to sea, after causing a lot of mess throughout the state.

I've awoken to a bright, blue, beautiful Sandy Beach day.

Stormy weather

A storm's on the way. Its 120-kph winds and hailstones have already caused a lot of damage further south in New South Wales, and unless it blows out to sea (which the satellite map in our sidebar, at time of writing, promises), it will probably whoosh over Sandy.

Even though it's south (and looking south I can see a build-up of dark clouds now at dusk), the high-pressure air from our north is rushing towards the storm's low-pressure system. How naively I had expected the wind to be from the south when I heard several hours ago about the fury of the storm, though I expect it will swing around later.

The loose, dry sand blowing over the hard-packed runway of Sandy reminds me of something out of a movie like Dune or Lawrence of Arabia. It's mesmerising to watch the light on dark, the fast-racing clouds of granules swirling up the beach faster than I could run. And the smell of Neptune and Salacia, that rich, oceanic aroma ... mmm ... I've never smelt it stronger at this beach. Breathe in the sea, deep, deep into the lungs, stimulating the lining of your nasal caverns. Aaahhhhh!! Beautiful!

Climbing from the sea, half a moon. Half a moon is better than no moon, I guess. But I shouldn't speak too soon.

Joggers, kiddies: need an artery slashed?

In the park by Sandy Beach is a low post-and-rail fence on which the rails are affixed by hundreds of straps of galvanised iron. A great many of these straps are rusted, sharp and/or hanging off the posts and rails and constitute a very serious danger to anyone using the park. Click the thumb to enlarge.

I worked for three years in Sydney Children's Hospital, and I've seen in the wards what nasties like this can do. I asked Coffs Council 6 months ago to do something about it and feel that my concern was ignored.

If you think veins and arteries are worth protecting, why not join me in telling:

The General Manager,

Coffs Harbour City Council

Locked Bag 155

Coffs Harbour NSW 2450



Website    Contact

And my friend Baz 'Protect Small Fluffy Animals and Children' le Tuff, the photographer, will I'm sure be happy if you use his picture.

Collection of collectives

We say a congregacyon of people, a hoost of men, a felyshyppynge of jomen, and a bevy of ladyes; we must speak of a herde of dere, swannys, cranys, or wrenys, a sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pecockes, a watche of nyghtyngales, a fllyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a pryde of lyons, a slewthe of beeres, a gagle of geys, a skulke of foxes, a sculle of frerys; a pontificalitye of prestys, and a superfluyte of nonnes.

So wrote Dame Juliana Berners (Barnes; Bernes; b. 1388?), the English writer on hawking and hunting, in the Boke of St Albans, in 1486.

Dame Juliana thus kindly provided us with a colourful collection of collective nouns, my favourite being "a superfluity of nuns". She didn't, however, have everything covered, so I humbly propose several that came to me in the last few minutes, after the rain:

A galaxy of frangipanni flowers outside my door.
A Cappadocia of ant nests in the park.
A Central Station of ants on my sink.
A groundhog of kids with body boards.
A Von Daniken of crab patterns on Sandy Beach.

Pee wee, pee wee

Pee wee, pee wee,

feathers black and white.

Black like nightsky,

white like moonlight.

Memory, or at least my memory, is such an uneven and irregular thing. The word itself seems smooth and curved, like one of those 3D representations of a wormhole in space, but the thing itself is bumpy, fractured, and fractious.

I can remember my blue woollen overcoat, but not the face or name of the young man I lent it to on a cold night in 1972. Was it 1972 or 1971 or 1973? That I can't recall either, but I can still feel the texture not only of the fibres of the coat which, like the man, I never saw again, but also of the herringbone pattern. I remember the room of the flat where I offered it to him, and the name of the street, but almost nothing else that occurred in that apartment, my home for ... how long? I've forgotten.

I have no trouble at all remembering what I had for breakfast this morning, but I have no memory of the tune that was playing as I ate. Ask me what was the first thing I thought when I awoke today, and even yesterday, and there's a good chance I'll know. But what was the last thought I had last night, or the one I had when I made a cuppa tea an hour ago, and I'm stuck.

Yesterday I had to deliver a written message to a shopkeeper, Tom, for a friend of mine who is ill. I did so, but he mentioned that his name is not Tom, but George. So now my friend has permanently ruined George's actual name for me. I would have been OK, but whenever I see George, as I will, I'll be plagued by a dilemma of nomenclature: "Think, Pip! Is he George or Tom? Tom or George?"

Worse, if worse is possible (did Gerard Manley Hopkins write "no worse -- or worst -- there is none"? I can't remember, and Google is no help as both versions abound), is that Tom ... I mean George .... will always remember me as the Tom bloke. There's no way he will be able to get that out of his head. I have to go to that shop a bit (he's very friendly, is Tom, so it's no problem), and both minds will repeat the Tom-George loop until kingdom come.

Triggers for memory exhibit a somewhat more ordered and regular nature than bumpy and prickly memory itself. Whenever I see an after-dinner mint, I'm reminded of one particular evening in one particular place, a long time ago. The word 'rake' sets off hilarity in me and my mate Baz le Tuff because of an ancient incident, and don't say "coeliac disease", "Easybeats", "Tamworth" or "dill pickles" if you don't want me to regale you with the same anecdotes everyone who knows me has heard ad infinitum, indeed, ad nauseam. I'm getting worse, not better.

A few minutes ago I saw a pee wee, a common enough black and white native bird about 20 cm in length (its ten dollar name is Grallina cyanoleuca and the books often call it 'Magpie lark', but I have never heard it called that in my life), and whenever I do so my mind recites the poem I quoted above. I have written poems in recent years that I thought were OK at the time, but I will never remember them again, possibly even when I find them on the back of a table serviette filed in a box of old junk on top of a wardrobe. But the pee wee verse is stuck there like the opening riff of George Harrison's 'What is Life?" which has played on one of my head tapes a zillion times since I was a teenager.

Back to the pee wee, so I can get that bloody riff out of my head again. It was when I was a teenager, about 35 years ago, and I was the gardener for a very nice family in Cheltenham, Sydney. The mum was a lecturer in English and dad was an Aussie NASA physicist who had photos on the wall of him with some of his students: people like Neil Armstrong. He designed a wind/dust measuring device of some kind that he was very upset about at the time because it famously had to be jettisoned from Apollo 13 to save the lives of the crew in that ailing spaceship.

I wrote quite a lot of children's poetry in those days and I wrote one for Caroline, their seven-year-old daughter. The pee wee one. It's served me well many times since with other people's children, and my own three children and four grandies.

Originally it said "white like starlight". I liked the imagery. However, Caroline, the daughter of two university lecturers, one of them a NASA man, corrected it immediately. "The colour of stars is not white," she said. "Stars have many colours according to the gases they're made of." I already knew that, but it was good to have it pointed out as I hadn't renewed my poet's licence at the time.

In point of actual fact, the pee wee poem is a joint composition, because it was she who suggested that I replace 'star' with 'moon', because "the moon, being solid and not gaseous, reflects a whiter light". The astute reader will immediately see that I could have got her on a fine point of physics there, and don't think it didn't cross my mind.

Hard to believe, but Caroline O'Brien, whom I have not seen for more than 33 years, must be no little girl any more. She's much bigger than seven now and even has all her second teeth -- although I find that my memory is far stronger than my rationality in this regard -- and maybe has grandchildren of her own, like your very fortunate almanackist.

Blue suns galore

Yesterday at low tide, a long wavy, blue-studded tide mark ran the length of the beach, about halfway between low- and high-tide limits.

For each step I took along this mid-tide mark, there were about five or ten deceased Blue suns (aka Blue buttons; Porpita porpita), a little bright-blue 'jellyfish' in various sizes about as big as a small coin. There were many thousands of them, washed up during a Nor-easter, I would guess.

Check out these beautiful photos of P porpita, which will depict their beauty far more than your almanackist could ever do with words.

Unlike their relative, the well-known Bluebottle, also common after Nor-easters on NSW beaches, these ones won't sting you unless you're smaller than them. As there are quite a few people on Sandy today (because it's so hot, already about 30 degrees), that'll be a blessing to the swimmers. Like the Bluebottle, each Blue sun is a float above a colony of little critters. The whitish float has the ability to eat, but so do the tiny blue creatures in the colony. All in all, a complicated and mystifying arrangement.

I'm going for a flaneur a bit later, when the sand isn't too hot for my tootsies. See you soon.

McKoel

If you lean closer, I'll whisper where this koel (either Eudynamys cyanocephala or E orientalis; click thumbnail to enlarge in new window) is nesting, not in Sandy but in Coffs.

Shhhh!! You know the McDonald's at Park Beach Plaza? She's in a lilli pilli tree (Acmena smithii) near the drive-thru.

She would have come down in about McSeptember from Papua-New Guinea, or maybe Timor or the Maluku Islands (aka Moluccas, Indonesia), and will head back there in early Autumn (McMarch). Being a cuckoo (Cuculidae), she lays her eggs in the nests of other birds (such as larger Honeyeaters like Friar-birds), but at Macca's she has a nest. Whether she built it or just moved in, I can't say.

Nor do I know if her husband is anywhere around Coffs. He will be black, not the tawny colour of the female with her beautiful long kookaburra-like, chevron-marked tail feathers.

She's not nesting there for the McFood, she's there for slow food like the lilli pilli berries, and she will also eat other berries, natives like the lilli pilli, or exotics, like mulberry, and figs and insects. McDonald's has diversified, but not that much.

This koel is not tame but you can get up quite close; if you're from the McCoffs area and thinking of seeing her, please don't get too close.

The turtle bloke ... again!

Those readers who live up here in the beautiful North Coast boondocks will know what I mean when I say that communications around here can be a bit tricky -- like for me over the past 20 hours during which my ISP was down. Bless their hearts, Acay.com.au, which is based in Sydney, has some rented cow bales somewhere outside Nana Glen via Coffs Harbour in which they keep a box the size of a milk crate which they refer to as their 'Coffs server'. In fact, I believe they use a milk crate. One of the old wooden ones, and they've rigged up two IXL jam tins and a length of string.

And locals will know what I mean when I say that radio services could do with some improvement in this part of the scrub. Here at Sandy Beach it would be nice to be able to pick up 2BBB-FM (Bellingen) and I could listen to that Wilson's Almanac bloke each morning, but I haven't heard him yet. My choice is pretty much Radio National or Radio National. Fortunately, RN is very good in many ways. I could listen to any Phillip Adams broadcast three or four times a week. As a matter of fact, that's at least how often any RN show is repeated.

Are you a rural ABC listener with few other options? If so, the following might strike a chord with you. If not, count your blessings:

The turtle bloke. For the 14th time?

He was on again, on Saturday. Thomas King, Massey Lecture Number 5, ABC Radio National, 6:00 PM Saturday, January 15. And he was on the day before that. The "turtles all the way down" lecture, I call it, because it begins with a joke that has those words for a punchline. And Mr King has become 'the turtle bloke' of my nightmares.

Around Christmas I pointed out to ABC Radio National that I had heard the same lecture five or six times on RN in recent weeks. The ABC, which can patronise you not just with its programming but (like all corporations) also with its replies, wrote back on December 30: "We have found that, in general, listeners are very pleased to have the opportunity to listen to repeat airings of programs". Even since then, the ABC has replayed it, and replayed it, and replayed it.

Saturday's repeat brings the number to around 12-14 recent broadcasts of the same long lecture. Media Watch (also on the ABC) has not responded to my email or phone message.

Overheard at ABC RN: "Running a radio station would be so much easier if it wasn't for all these bloody listeners."

Turtles all the way down to one and all.

The birth of Aussie surfing

Down the coast from here, a long way down (about 600 clicks), is Sydney's Manly Beach, said to be "Seven miles from Sydney and a thousand miles from care". That was before miles were replaced with 'clicks'.

Like everywhere in Oz and in a lot of the world, the guys and gals like to surf at Manly, and Sandy, and they owe it to the Big Kahuna.

On this day, January 15, 1915, the world-famous Big Kahuna (Duke Kahanamoku; 1890 - 1968), from Hawaii performed surfboard riding for the first time in Australia, at Freshwater Beach near Manly. And on the same day, 16-year-old Isabel Letham became Australia's first female board rider.

Legendary surfer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku was an Hawaiian Olympic swimming champion, in Australia for a competition swim at the Domain Baths. He toured Sydney's northern beaches and chose Freshwater Beach, near Manly, to show Sydneysiders the finer points of surfboard riding, a hitherto unknown sport in Australia.

The Duke made a board out of a piece of sugar pine provided by a surf club member. After some graceful acrobatics, he called for a volunteer from the crowd that had assembled on the sand, to join him in a display of tandem riding. Young Isabel rode with the Duke for three hours becoming the Australia's first female surfer, on the day the sport was first demonstrated in Australia.

Isabel Letham left Australia for the US in 1918 to become a stunt woman in the movies, later teaching swimming and water ballet. She died on March 11, 1995.

(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

You Know You're From Sydney When ...

You Know You're From Sydney When ...
(Author unknown)

You make over $100,000 AU and still can't afford a house.

You never bother looking at the train timetable because you know the drivers have never seen it.

You order organic fruit and vegies online, but eat out every night anyway.

You spent more money on your coffee machine than on your washing machine.

You spend $200+ for your room in an apartment with stunning harbour/beachviews and European appliances; and then spend a total of 40 hours each week there (37 of which you are sleeping).

You contemplate calling a taxi from your home to where you managed to park the car the night before.

You spend 30 minutes in a traffic jam next to a car with more power to its speakers than its wheels.

You know everyone's e-mail and mobile number but not their last name or home address.

You can roll sushi, make pasta and keep your red curry paste recipe under lock and key...but couldn't roast a chicken to save your life.

Your taxi driver was a micro-surgeon before he moved to Australia.

Your co-worker tells you he/she has 8 body piercings but none are visible.

You can't remember....is dope illegal?

You've been to more than one baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.

You have a very strong opinion where your coffee beans are grown and can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.

A really great parking space can move you to tears.

You are thinking of taking an adult class but you can't decide between yoga, aromatherapy, conversational Italian, French or building your own website.

A man in full leather regalia and crotchless chaps gets on the bus. You don't notice.

A woman with live poultry gets onto the bus. You don't notice.

You are genuinely surprised when you meet someone who was actually born in Sydney (but then, they are Swiss/Thai/Brazilian).

Your hairdresser is straight, your plumber is gay, the woman who delivers your mail is straight.... and your Avon Lady is a drag queen

You take a bus and are shocked at 2 people carrying on a conversation in English.

You assume every company offers domestic partner benefits.

Your boss runs in "The City to Surf"... it's the first time you have seen him/her nude.

You think any guy with a George Clooney haircut must be visiting from the North Shore.

You know that any woman with a George Clooney haircut is not a tourist.

You couldn't figure out how to drive to Sydney Tower if your life depended on it.

You meet friends for coffee at 1am at your local Netcafe / Laundramat /Bookstore / Bar / Alternative healing centre and go for drinks and pool at nine in the morning.

You go out each Saturday for breakfast and the paper...at 3pm.

Your shiatsu therapist is headhunted by an Internet Startup and your accountant becomes an actor.

You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Sydney.

Phenologists?

That cute lil guy last night (I refer to the Rhinoceros beetle, not my landlord) is Xylotrupes ulysses australicus and while Ulysses is a fine name, Hercules or even Atlas might be better, because he can carry up to 850 times his own weight on his back. This is probably so he and she can push through heavy leaf litter on the forest floor. Trouble is, the name Hercules was already taken by his Kentucky cousin.

The name Xylotrupes tells us that this rhino is, like his cuz, a scarab, and thus related to the sacred beetle of ancient Egypt and other assorted dung-rollers.

Rhinos are more common further north and people from Brisbane will have seen them in large numbers on poinsiana trees, if not lying upside down beneath lights in service stations. An ignominious end for such an impressive creature.

In case you thought Australia now had a Rhinoceros Man, rest assured I'm not given to the brave, if embarrassing, stunts of the TV crikey guy with the foreign accent. The beetle on my hand last night was quite harmless, although a bit scratchy and quite loud. The strange squeaky hiss they make is pretty scary.

More on the Rhino beetle, at Scribblygum, a site named for a beautiful Aussie tree, and a must-bookmark for all Australian amateur phenologists like your almanackist.

Wouldn't you know it? Stuart is also a phenology phreak.

Beetle without a fan

Look who just walked in on a warm night. A rhinoceros beetle! My landlord, consultant and friend, Peter, brought him in, actually. I don't know 100th of what Peter knows about Sandy, and not many do. When I don't know, which is all the time, Peter advises. Sometimes he gives me bugs to hold, like this fella.

(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

She walks in beauty, like the night

So dark the night sky. Did you get outside tonight to see the thin crescent moon? I hope so. How beautiful she is.

   She walks in beauty, like the night

     Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

   And all that's best of dark and bright

     Meet in her aspect and her eyes ...

   Lord Byron

I used to share a house with an elderly Afghan woman who would always throw a sprinkle of water over her shoulder when seeing the first of the New Moon. I still feel the essence of water whenever I see it myself, thanks to Bibi.

In the sidebar on this page is the current lunar phase. Locals will notice that it is in reverse to what we can actually see tonight; this is because it is a live link from the US Naval Observatory in that other hemisphere.

Also in tonight's sky, dark because of the slight light of the moon, is the radiant Southern Cross, hanging upside down as I write, and as it begins its passage through the magic tapestry.

These and other celestial wonders are still quite bright at Sandy by night, but we do have a problem with unnecessary lighting from nearby Woolgoolga. Although Woopi's only a small town, it emits a lot of light. Some of the people in charge of some businesses, clubs and sports grounds, well-meaning though I'm sure they are, are a bit behind the times and a friendly, polite mention next time you meet them would help bring them up to date. Business people can be particularly sensitive to community attitudes.

They probably haven't thought about it much, if at all. Consider: only two or three decades ago probably the majority of people thought it perfectly normal to throw litter on the ground and dump garbage in the bush. Those obsolescent practices eventually required porcine "Oink! Oink!" advertising campaigns, but I feel the gentle reminder will work as well.

Light pollution robs us of much human spirituality (and most would agree we need more, not less of that), as our species evolved with clear skies and a close connection with the natural lights. They inform our myths, our poetry, our religions and our very souls, even today. Sadly and surprisingly, I've met and had correspondence from people in the Northern Hemisphere who have told me that they have never seen the Milky Way. To the rest of us, that sounds like saying they've never seen a bird or a mammal.

Don't Californicate Australia! The International Dark-Sky Association has info and ideas that will help us keep our Milky Way above Sandy Beach, just as we would keep the very sand itself.

See There Once Was a Sky Full of Stars (children's book).

Mylestom sunset

I had to go to town today for a few things, and I picked up some prints off a roll of pix I took last Summer and Autumn on the coast about 40km south of here, a favourite fishing spot of mine.

Click for a late-Summer sunset from the Mylestom tidal swimming pool near the mouth of the Bellinger River. I was living down there last Summer and was lucky enough to be able to wet a line there most sunsets for an hour or two. That's 'my' bench in the foreground.The image that will open (in a new window) is 253kb.

The spot isn't serious fishing for serious anglers, but serious enough for me. I don't know of too many more beautiful places to fish, although there aren't a lot of fish to bring home. Let's put it another way. It's not too hard to catch something, especially bream, but they are still mostly small, or they were a year ago, and I didn't get a feed each night. Until some months before I was living there, the river had been commercially fished for a long time, depleting the stocks, but then the government declared the Bellinger a recreational fishing zone. This means the fish stocks were improving but when I was there, mostly only littlies were in the drink. I expect that by now an evening's fishing will be producing something more akin to a good feed.

Two towers you see have been built on the other side of the river since I first fell in love with the Bellinger River more than 30 years ago. Some well-paid members of our bureaucracy realised the scenic value of Mylestom and found a way to improve it for your benefit and mine. They did an excellent job, don't you agree? And they did it with the help of all of us who said "Go right ahead, you must know best. Plus there are 50 of you and only 20 million of us, and we know when we're outnumbered."

Cuttlebirds and muttonfish

Today rambled over the south headland, which I don't do as often as I'd like. There are hundreds and hundreds of cuttlefish shells, the internal shells of soft-bodied marine cephalopods. These shoehorns of shell are best known as beak-sharpeners and a source of dietary calcium for a famous Aussie, the budgerigah (budgie), and for other birds.

There are 119 species of cuttlefish, which look something like squid but, unlike squid, can be domesticated and around the world many people keep them as pets. Some say they are the "cat of the sea". You know those old sepia photographs you see in museums? Sepia was made from the ink of this fascinating creature before being replaced by modern chemicals.

The difference between the tides this week is very great, so great, in fact, that lifesaving authorities have issued a public warning for people to take extra care swimming in North Coast estuaries. The estuaries, lakes and lagoons fill at high tide, and as the tide recedes it can come with a "whoosh!!" that might take you on a one-way trip to Peru via New Zealand, so take care.

On the other side of the headland, on the high-tide mark, were more dead muttonbirds than I'm happy to report, one every few paces on the south end. They're in a fairly advanced stage of decomposition and have become meals for bacteria, bugs and crabs. Most of the ex-birds had a large crab hole in the sand beside them, and quite a few seemed to be peering down a crab hole, making me wonder if the heads had been dragged down by the crustaceans.

Muttonbirds, as they're known around here, or Wedge-tailed shearwaters (Puffinus pacificus), make a round-trip of thousands of kilometres each year to Japan, SE Asia, the Korean peninsula, even Siberia, ending up at places like Muttonbird Island at Coffs Harbour. People can walk out to the island via a seawall, where the birds' breeding burrows dot the landscape. Unfortunately, it's common for exhaustion or storms to defeat many birds before they make it home and they can often be found in large numbers on their sandy necropolises. Necropoli. Cemeteries.

If you have Flash, there's a great online documentary I'd recommend, A Year on the Wing, about another Australian/Siberian migratory bird, the Eastern curlew. Follow the bird through its amazing annual cycle. That site also provides a very cool link to a place for lots of free posters of this and other topics, Department of the Environment and Heritage. I'll be browsing it further, for sure.

Take a stroll down Rosemary Lane

Blogs don't come any better than Rosemary Lane, and Sandy Beach Almanac is now proudly twinned with Stuart Buchanan's loving creation.

Stuart and I met on the Internet only in December when SBA was planned for a January 1 launch. I was delighted to find that on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England near Southampton, he was doing a similar gig.*

Stuart's love of place and Nature shine through every word of Rosemary Lane, and his knowledge of the folklore of the calendar warms the heart of your almanackist. We have something else in common: we both have bananas growing outside our doors. I look forward to every new post on RL and know that in coming months and years I will learn a huge amount, as I do from RL's archives. If I had a stove, I might even try some of Mr B's scrumptious-sounding recipes. Naah, that's a pipe-dream. I'm over cooking for a while. But checkem out.

Definitely a blog to bookmark, but you'll always find our twinning link in SBA's sidebar. Thanks, Stuart, for the honour of a special twinned-blog relationship!

[*'Gig' is right, I guess; after all, the Isle of Wight was the scene of one of rock's most famous concerts (Isle of Wight Festival, 1970), which The Guinness Book of Records listed at the time as the largest recorded gathering of human beings (600,000 -- much bigger than Woodstock, almost as big as Crabstock!), and you'll recall The Beatles singing "Every summer we could rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight" in 'When I'm Sixty-Four' on Sgt Pepper's. I'm sure a lot of the locals would prefer not to be reminded.]

Antique maps and prints of the Isle of Wight

"It'll never fly, Lawrence"

I'm not used to the vast throngs of humans on our precious 1,285 metres. I counted nearly 20 today.

But you won't hear me object. In fact, the sight of people enjoying the last hurrahs of the Summer holidays at Sandy is exhilarating to me, just as the eleven months of relative desertion have their own delights.

A sand castle on the beach today affirmed that there's hope for the future of the planet, for as long as there are children making sand castles on sandy beaches, and as long as clean tides wash them flat when the kids are tucked up in bed, all will be well.

And dads and kids with kites. The blue and red delta-shaped kite fluttering and swooping like the swallows that nest outside my cabin, on the beach today was a beauty. In a 22-km/h breeze it was remarkable what perpendicularity the guy on the controls could achieve. If the boy has as much fun being a man as the man has being a kid, we have yet another reason for hope.

The kite brought to my mind the great flyer of kites, Lawrence Hargrave (1850 - 1915), engineer, explorer, astronomer, aeronautical pioneer and inventor of the box kite. At another beach south of Sandy on this Pacific coast (Stanwell Park), on November 12, 1894, he was able to fly in one of the home-made box kites that obsessed him and helped improve the lives of us all. "It'll never fly, Lawrence," I can almost hear his friends and families say. "Get a job."

Hargrave, seen above with his friend, fellow inventor Alexander ("It'll never ring, Alex") Graham Bell, believed that a "patentee is nothing but a legal robber", preferring his inventions to be used for the betterment of mankind. Apart from the kites that helped the birth of aviation, he contributed to the early study of the curved aerofil and the rotary engine, which was to power many early aircraft up until about 1920.

Hargrave had papers published in the journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Australia), that were published abroad. In the USA, Octave Chanute, another pioneer of aeronautics and aviation, became aware of Hargrave's experiments and reported on them in the October, 1893 issue of the American Engineer and Railroad Journal, spreading the Australian inventor's discoveries even further afield.

He was in correspondence with the Wright Brothers before their December 17, 1903 flight at Kittyhawk, although they denied that his studies had influenced them. This is entirely possible, despite Hargrave's international influence, because all this stuff was "in the air" at the time.

Hargrave was nearly lost to science and aviation. On February 26, 1872 the brig Maria ran aground on a Queensland, Australia, reef, with the loss of 21 by drowning and 14 killed by natives. Among the passengers was 22-year-old Hargrave.

When I see the occasional aircraft flying over the blue South Pacific, I'm kinda glad Larry lived to become one of the greats in a long line of Australian beach bums.

Hang glider injured

"A man was seriously injured on Friday afternoon at Emerald Beach on the state's north coast, when his hang glider crashed shortly after taking off from Look At Me Now headland."
Source: ABC News

Look At Me Now headland is a couple of headlands south of Sandy. I understand the injured man will be OK; I only posted this here because of my reference to hang gliders a few days ago.

A journalist and photographer from one of the local papers, the Coffs Coast Advocate, came round today, for a proposed piece about this almanac. My appreciation of the promotional value of an article in the local paper exceeded my dislike of being photographed, even though it was drizzling at the time.

I wouldn't even know if Moby Dick beached himself on Sandy today. Sometimes the grocery shopping and other boring things just have to be done, and that's what I've been doing. But it's New Moon tonight, and that makes as good a night to explore as the Full, if the rain holds off. See you tomorrow on the beach.

Crabstock: I came upon a crab of God

Crabstock. That's what it's like today at low tide. Hundreds of thousands of Soldier crabs (Mictyris longicarpus). As soon as you're within about eight paces of them, they hide into their holes and do whatever they do down there. Make love, not war, I guess. I hope they use protection or they could catch humans and other STDs.

If you're more than pint-sized, looking down upon them is like being in a plane and looking down on Woodtsock. Then, when you've passed, they emerge eight metres behind you, so just by flaneuring along the strand at low tide you set up a kind of rhythmic or wave-like motion of the blue marbles-with-yellow-legs. They will do that for eternity, or until the seas are too polluted, whichever comes first.

You can almost outsmart them by turning around suddenly and stepping back a few paces, but it makes you look like Harpo Marx and people will talk, especially in a small village.

The beach at low tide is about 100 metres wide, and at any time it is a very flat landscape -- my guess is that across those 100 metres is a fall of only about a metre and a half. Over millennia the elements have pressed and blown into a flat runway the part of the sand that is not above the tidal limit. So when the tide's out, there's a big stretch of hard sand that a few people with far less consciousness than a Mictyris longicarpus confuse with a road. We refer, of course, to 4X4 carloads of dangerously obese tourists.

Today there were tyre tracks across the crabby patterns which, like constellations of the night sky, blaze gloriously along Sandy Beach, made by millions of tiny rolled balls of sand. And here's the rub: not only do the four-wheel-drive vehicle drivers (who, especially in summer holiday time, too frequently take a wrong turn onto a beach) make an ugly imprint on one of Nature's works of art. They also disrupt Nature's creatures. Scientific research indicates that the compression caused by the lost cars and their heavy, grinning occupants, damages the crabs' ecological niche. It's not really so hard to work that out, is it?

There are ways to reduce significantly the numbers of 'recreational' vehicles, and the florid-faced families that grin from them, that don't actually require the excavation of very large sandtraps, though these are perfectly acceptable. We'll be returning to this topic some time in the future, with some fun methods of SUVicide. Ooooh yes indeedy we will!

Today I think I heard the crabbies singing, half a million strong:

"We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon ..."

Please review this blog

Will you please write a few words of review of Sandy Beach Almanac at Blogarama? We're in the Travel/Places section. As we're new, you might have to surf through a few pages in that section to find us. We're on the 5th page of Places listings today, and moving up each time a reader clicks the Blogarama button in our sidebar. Thanks a lot, in anticipation of your support. :)

Beach closed

Well, I'm sure Sandy wasn't closed, but I was. Or, rather, I was away from home for much of the day, actually at a beach further south, at Coffs Harbour.

Towards nightfall I took a short stroll on the harbour beach and was quickly alerted by the call of "Ark! Ark!" I saw a couple of fishing boats, but no ark, then realised that (as I walked through the trees edging the sand) above my head was a very agitated member of the genus Corvus. It was an Australian crow (Corvus orru) the larger of the two indigenous crows, the smaller being the Little crow (durr), whose $10 name is Corvus bennetti.

Crows and ravens, both of which interest me from a world folklore perspective (I'm collecting black bird lore at the moment and will assemble a page sometime), are both Corvidae represented by local species. I thought for a moment that this big one was worried about my presence, which struck me as odd because crows generally don't scream when I'm around, unlike some birds I've met. (Groan. Well, I did reel in the "bird" pun on Thursday when talking about drunk and stoned lorikeets, and that was a perfect comic feed, plus it's late and I'm tired, so cut me some latitude, willya?)

But no, Old Crow was 'flipping the bird' (as the British say, or 'giving the finger' as we say here) at a pair of Calyptorhynchus funereus, or Yellow-tailed black cockatoos, who probably should have known better than to step over the crows' invisible territorial boundary. Crows are so touchy.

That's the black cocky in the sidebar at left, from an old engraving after the painting by the English ornithologist John Gould (1804 - 1881), whose name is a by-word in this country for exquisite 19th-century bird illustration. In the late 1830s and the 1840s, his work on Australian birds was monumental. Click the sidebar image for more about this cocky, from a South Australian perspective. In that state, they are struggling for their very existence as we humans seem intent on wiping them out.

As big, or bigger, than the caged white cockies you might have seen in your country, which are their cousins and also from this continent, the Yellow-tailed black cocky, like the Red-tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus banksii), is one of the most spectacular birds of the bush. As they are an endearing and, one hopes, enduring part of the Sandy Beach environment, I'll have more to say about them anon. But after a long day I've been to a barbecue and eaten far too much even to sit much longer.

Local folklore has it that black cockies appear before rain. I have no evidence of this belief being true, and am by nature a wicked sceptic. I should report, though, that it was three hours ago that I saw them, and it wasn't raining then. But it's raining now.

Another feature of Coffs Harbour wildlife is the ferocious Mississippi mudcake (Chocolatus indigestibilis), an encounter with which this evening has changed me from one who was famished to one who is vanquished. And this was after pitting my strength against an enormous bird of the genus Gallus.

It's good to get home, and I bid my friends "Make a great day". Ark!

My desk smells like a fish market

And that's one of my favourite smells in the whole world. When life from the sea is fresh, nothing can beat the fragrance, to my mind.

The seaweed in this picture is fresh from the water's edge, still wet. The white one is a beautiful, feathery creation, like an expensive, ferny lace. See that one I'm holding? Little glistening beads like a rose quartz necklace. That's it in the picture below, too.

The wind has shifted (see the weather report in the sidebar, although of courseit will have changed by the time you do). As I write, it's about 28kph and from the SSE -- the South-south-east -- and that means it's blowing briskly, but as it's 26 degrees in temp, my stroll was gorgeous.

The SSE breeze, or anything with an 'E' in it, means it's coming off the South Pacific, or, more precisely, the Tasman Sea, which is the south-western segment of the South Pacific Ocean that laps on Sandy Beach. And when the wind comes offshore from the east, especially after a period of onshore breezes such as we've been having, it brings with it all sorts of fascinating things that wash up on the sand and rocks. Lots of seaweed today. Most obviously, kelp, which grows amidst the plate coral beds and other marine environments in this area, attracting all sorts of creatures, such as the protected marine turtles.

The beach has a touch of that nice fish market aroma today, but in a couple of days it might not be so fresh, especially if you get close to the kelp. It's not so much the seaweed that's responsible, however. That tends to dry out in the sun and sand, much like a beachcomber's skin. The real reason for the rich pong of two-day-old kelp is the little barnacles and other creatures rotting. And on that pleasant note, I'll sign off for today.

(Yes, I'll take the seaweed outside. The fresh seafood fragrance is already starting to go off like a bucket of prawns in the hot sun -- it doesn't take long in this climate. Just visit any primary school classroom in summer and you'll get the idea.)

Beautiful noise

Web duties have kept me indoors much of the time today, but any possibility of Dame Nature being completely ignored was broken by a flock of Rainbow lorikeets screeching outside, obviously happy with something -- perhaps the few drops of rain that had fallen. They flew past with their customary Boeing speed and planeload-of-whingeing-pommy-immigrants cacophony.

(Now, before English readers jump on me, I am not anti-pom! You guys are great, and the fact that you drink warm, sudsy beer is scarcely an issue with me and I never mention it. In fact, today I proudly twinned Sandy Beach Almanac with Rosemary Lane on the Isle of Wight. This is a special service to our bi-littoral readers -- not that there's anything wrong with it.)

The Rainbow lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus, entirely unrelated to the Rainbow trout, by the way) is as squawky as it is beautiful. It's a medium-sized parrot of the genus Trichoglossus, meaning 'hairy tongue', because of its adaptation for sucking nectar from flowers, and playing the bagpipes.

My mate Baz le Tuff has asked me to point out that lorikeets get drunk on nectar and behave badly. "They should be Australia's national symbol not the dozey, evolutionarily doomed koala", writes le Tuff, failing to explain why a dozey, evolutionarily doomed creature isn't highly appropriate for that distinction. It's true that the birds have been observed flying over the limit. One explanation is that they have imbibed fermented nectar; another is that some flowers (such as those of the Coral tree, Erythrina), contain intoxicating alkaloids, or so I have heard but don't quote me. Anyway, they shouldn't drink fly, not that it's easy to get a designated flyer in summertime.

Rainbows often pair for life and flock in groups of between two and 50 by day, to several hundred when night falls and it's time to roost. They can live for twenty years or so, remarkable considering being paired for life.

There's no doubt about it, they might sound like the bastard offspring of a donkey and a rusty gate, but their beauty is unsurpassed. So beautiful are they that we Australians, in our customary embarrassing way, like to claim them as our own, and Rainbow lorikeets do in fact range widely across eastern and northern Australia, in the coastal regions where there's plenty to drink -- a well-known national characteristic. But these pretty guys are much more cosmopolitan than just being Aussies, and they don't just speak with Australian accents, however it may sound to the undiscerning ear.

As a matter of fact, Rainbow lorikeets have featured on the stamps of some of the other nations they inhabit, such as Indonesia, Solomon Islands, Papua-New Guinea, ... et Nouvelle Caledonie et Vanuatu aussi, monsieur et madame!. Some caged ones apparently got free (yay!!!!) in New Zealand, where their numbers have increased to such an extent that they're an ecological and agricultural pest (boo!!!!), like Aussie possums on that side of the ditch. Our Kiwi cousins have declared the poor little blokes an 'Unwanted Organism', making lorikeets seem more like Legionnaires' Disease than polychromatic jewels of the sky. New Zealanders, huh? And the Bible reckons that Palestinians are philistines.

Like many people of my acquaintance -- and this is a universal observation, not a slight on New Zealanders, whose charmingly quaint and endemic paranoia will now be fully engaged -- lorikeets have two basic threads of conversation. When they fly, they often screech, and when they feed, they chatter. When I lived on Palm Beach down south, it was in a similar but larger cabin beneath a hugely towering Silky oak (Grevillea robusta, known for its floral abundance) and that's when millions of the multicoloured birds first brought to mind the donkey/gate analogy. C'est vrai, mes amis, sometimes I could have strangled the whole tribe, were they not so damned hard to catch.

However, they can squawk as much as they like, as long as they look as good as they do. I know, I know, we blokes are so shallow. But we're good at moving fridges and getting things off high shelves.

Lay lady lay day

Good to see that visitors are taking out free subscriptions to this blog, in the box in the sidebar. I hope you're enjoying it.

I takes quite a lot of time and energy to create a website, and the construction of Sandy Beach Almanac has been no exception. So I decided to take a lay day from writing on this hot and humid day, and attend to some other pressing things.

But the day wasn't too hot, nor the business too pressing, for me to take a brisk walk along the sand, past the ancient Aboriginal midden, and to the next beach and back, and there will be plenty of time later to discuss these wonders.

I leave you today with a list of wildlife (and, unfortunately, unwanted critters such as the fox) found here at Sandy, or more precisely, in the Moonee Beach Nature Reserve which is our beach's backyard. (You can even build your own wildlife map of the area: choose three species.) And, gods willing, I'll see you tomorrow.

One, two, tree ferns

No matter what's going on in the world, and no matter what the politicians without vision do to our lives and our blue planet, the wheel of the year turns and the plants grow.

And doing very well on the other side of the two-metre-wide window across my desk, among a number of other plants in the shade of the big mango tree that over-arches my place, are two tree ferns.

They are of the Australian native species of tree fern (or treefern), Dicksonia antarctica, found in tropical and subtropical areas, including cool to temperate rainforest, and even down in sub-Antarctic islands, hence its name. One of their favourite habitats is cool mountain forests, but they seem well acclimatised here at sea level.

Dicksonia's large, green fronds were once popular in Australia as Christmas decorations (midsummer is not a great time for holly berries), as seen in the black and white illustration ('Christmas is Coming') by Sydney artist Julian Ashton of a flower girl selling fronds, published in the Illustrated Sydney News on December 20, 1879.

As with everything (without exeption, as far as I know), there is a political aspect to the tree fern:

"British gardeners may be contributing to the destruction of a popular Australian tree fern. Dicksonia antarctica is being "salvaged" from ancient forests that are being clear-cut for paper and packaging. Between 1994 and 1998, 44,660 tree ferns were exported from the state of Victoria, mostly to the UK. The profits from the fern-trade make Australia's woodchipping industry economically viable. Says Tim Cadman of Australia's Native Forest Network, 'Every time a British consumer buys an Australian tree fern, he or she is supporting the destruction of our old-growth forests and rainforests.'" Source: Earth Island Journal

The little one outside my window is less than two metres tall, and the big daddy is about three, but they can grow to four metres. Although these two have been planted by human hand, as have all the specimens in pots and gardens in Britain, America and elsewhere, Dicksonia is very common in the Australian bush if the conditions are right (they are happy in most moist climates but don't look their best where there are really high temperatures). In some places they almost form forests, where you might see a lyrebird and hear its mimickry of other birds, vehicles and even human tunes.

There are no lyrebirds in my garden, but there are a few others. More of those from me on another day at Sandy Beach, somewhere on the Australian coast.

One thousand, two hundred and eighty-five

I paced it out. One thousand, two hundred and eighty-five. That's how many paces it is from the rocks at the south end to those of the north end, among which northern cluster is one boulder about three or four metres high (Cormorant Rock, I call the guano-capped mini-monolith).

As I strode and ambled, I thought of Neal Cassady and his (attributed) last words: "64,928". The literary lore has it that the greatest writer who never wrote perished alongside a railway track while counting rail sleepers on the cold, inebriated night of February 4, 1968.

As I discovered, and you'd think I'd have known before, one of my paces is almost precisely four of my hand spans. As Nature would have it, my hand span is near as dammit to 25 centimetres, providing a handy metric rule. So my step is one metre and Sandy Beach I reckon to be 1.285 kilometres in length, at least around the arc of the delicious waterline that lapped around my ankles. As I live in roughly the centre of the beachfront, my aim of writing about the area one kilometre from my home allows me the whole beach, the headland (on the southern end), 1km of hinterland, and more to share with you.

Of course, I might have lost count and messed up the calculation. There were at least four moments along my surveying route that interrupted my concentration.

First of these was a remarkably proportioned, young, bikini-clad woman leading two small black dogs on a leash at some distance from me. I won't pretend it was the dogs that distracted me, although I don't like to see dogs on the beach, and it is against council regulations. I did find her easier to forgive than some others I've seen. I might have lost count then and as I pondered the grim reality that if she were 19, as I guessed, she was closer in age to my granddaughter than my daughter, and that God is quite uncaring in the apportionment of libido and age.

A second thing that might have interfered with my important measurement of Sandy would have been my stooping to pick up a lime-green tennis ball that had washed in on today's low surf. When I got home, my landlord's dog caught it on second bounce and I think Millie has a new chewable toy, if a salty one.

Thirdly, I passed and saluted a man of about my own age, clad in cozzie like myself, apparently another Sandy Beach flaneur who I see quite often on the road or the beach. As I needed the fingers on both hands to count my steps, the salute might have thrown my calculations.

I don't generally salute, I usually *#)~. (I don't believe there is a word for a *#)~, the Australian bush greeting, a kind of twist of the chin and neck, often accompanied by a kind of click of the tongue on one side of the mid-palate, emitted through a crooked smile and accompanied by half a wink on the same side as the *#)~. Aurally, it's a bit like a quick budgie.) But yesterday we'd *#)~d so I thought today he was worth a *#)~ and a slightly inhibited, Henry Lawsonesque, salute. His smile and 1/2*#)~ said he thought it was a pretty beaut idea.

It's with some embarrassment that I admit that the fourth distraction was yet another young woman, a little closer in age to my daughter you'll be relieved to hear, and perhaps you'll be understanding of me when I say that she was topless and bloody good at it.

The weather is warm, but not as warm as yesterday, with a mild and steady breeze bringing the cooler air from down south. And a somewhat overcast sky has dulled the ocean's blues. The number of tourists has declined accordingly, and I suppose that down the Pacific Highway the Coffs Harbour video stores, mall, pubs and clubs are doing a bit better business.

But as at most times, I don't have Coffs on my mind, I'm recalling a cheeky little Willie wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys), the first bird I saw when I stepped outside today, a bird from my childhood in the bush outside Sydney. He was there on the railing at the edge of the stretch of grass that separates Sandy from my home, 520 paces north of the southern rocks, the place marked by the coconut palm (the one that gives only the tiniest fruit because I live too far south of the tropics). I think there's also a residual flicker of the young woman with the small black dogs, and the one with the big white puppies, but this, too, shall pass.

See ya tomorrow *#)~.

Yellow Mondays, blazing blue Sunday

It's like Coney Island at Sandy today. I counted about 40 people on the beach, and, the day being 29 degrees, it's no surprise.

The cicadas make themselves known on these hot days, as well, and they're quite loud from the casuarina trees immediately behind the sand. Australia has about 220 of the 2,000-plus species of the world's large Cicadidae family.

Over generations, Australian children have bestowed names on some of the species. The most common and thus best known is the Green Grocer (Cyclochila australasiae). The Floury Baker (Abricta curvicosta) and the Black Prince (Psaltoda plaga) are less common – the latter especially so and their scarcity might help explain the dubious folklore of children that you can sell them to pharmacists for a tidy sum, and their wings will be ground up and used in important medicines. It might be that during the Gold Rush days of the 1850s, Chinese herbalists really did grind up Black Prince wings for their elixirs.

Another famous Aussie cicada is the Double Drummer (Thopha saccata), and I suppose just about everyone here knows the Yellow Monday, which is also Cyclochila australasiae like its Green Grocer sibling (Green Grocer and Yellow Monday are simply two different colour forms of the same species). No one really knows when the colourful names were first given, but the terms 'Yellow Monday' and 'Green Grocer' were in popular use as early as 1896.

Green Grocers, Yellow Mondays and Double Drummers can crank up a noise intensity of more than 120dB at close range, approaching the pain threshold of the human ear, and I've lived in places where Summer drumming can, frankly, be a damned ordeal. As evidenced at Sandy on this beautiful hot Sunday beneath a lightly cirrus sky, their insistent chorus is certainly louder than the surf. I wonder why I like them so much?

The day after the night before

It doesn't get any busier at Sandy Beach than on a very warm New Year's Day round about 3:30 PM. It's about 26 degrees Celsius, with a very comfortable northerly stroking my body, and the sky wispy with cirrus clouds. There must be up to 30 people on the full length of the beach which is about ... well, I haven't paced it but I suppose about a kilometre.

I saw only one plastic party popper stranded on the sand after last night, but then, most of the fireworks were in people's backyards. Not really much litter of any kind, considering. Up the south end there's a group of maybe a dozen what look like teenagers from my spot in the middle, and scattered teen surfers are having a go along Sandy, a few boys and a couple of girls -- a crowd for this beach. What might they be thinking on this first day after a year of so much bad news? Not news, that's for sure. Who is going with whom, what a great rave last night, who woke up with whom. By this time of the day they will be pretty much over their hangovers, because they're young. An old fella (not much older than me, I suppose) with a hat and white T-shirt, ambles along on his own. A large, lone lady in black cozzie is reading something -- maybe a Christmas prezzie.

Up above the southern headland flies a hang glider, also uncommon for round here. There are few birds. It's the holidays, and things are buzzing with human activity, in a usually deserted sort of way. This is the only week they ever do around here, but 25 km south of here at Coffs Harbour, the beaches will be almost packed.

Welcome to Sandy Beach Almanac

And happy New Year to all!