Bellingen Global Carnival 2005

The weather is turning. Yesterday was cool at first, with typical winds from approximately the north-east. But by early evening the wind had turned around and was running in from the west, where all day the wide brown land had been basking in the sun.

As a consequence, it seemed warmer at night than it had in the day, and might well have been. Despite a cool Spring day yesterday, it was like a Summer night, with godzillions of flying insects filling the warm -- almost hot -- air. I wish I knew more about insects and I could say something about them. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I only noticed them in the headlights of my car, and that I have no idea what they were as I came straight from my car to the Ponderosa on an almost moonless night. My guess: flying ants or termites looking for love on the hot westerly zephyr.

Today has been quite warm again, but we'll see whether the night time has last night's eery Christmas feeling.

I'm tossing up whether to go to the Bellingen Global Carnival 2005. I've been once or twice before and had a ball (especially the rave in the bush at the close, and an incredible impromptu drumming circle that went for hours in the grassy carpark after the security people made everyone leave at only midnight), but it does cost a motza. Hmmmm ... I'm pretty motzaless as usual. We'll see. If I go I'll tell you about it.

Permit issued for sacred Papuan drums

Tagged: bellingen, global, world+music

News news

Yesterday increased Daily Planet News to 140+ newsfeeds on the one page.

Two ways to enjoy a warm Saturday on the beach

As I wrote the other day that I would do, I went to the Middle Head Protests (1980) reunion. Someone had an old postcard from the days of the "stop the sandmining" campaign, which I reproduce here. It's the pic we used on the cover of 'Maggie's Farm' magazine at the time and brings back a lot of memories. The sadness on the face of the two activists is genuine, as the bulldozing of the rare frontal dune forest had already begun.

This photo at left shows all that remains of the MHAG (Middle Head Action Group) camp. There for weeks (or was it months), hundreds of protesters did what they could to save a precious littoral ecosystem, which, not seen in this photo, has clearly been ravaged. These old stumps were from the communal kitchen; there was also a school, operations and media liaison centre, and so on.
One of the local Koori (Aboriginal) men, Neville Buchanan, spoke at the outdoor microphone about how his late father, Harry Buchanan, had been very involved with the campaign, and also how he had taught him some of the lore associated with Middle Head, which is a beach near Macksville on the mid-north coast of NSW, about an hour's drive south of Sandy Beach. (I recall being told in 1980 that the Kumbainggeri people traditionally believe Middle Head to be the place of creation.)

Neville mentioned that when he goes to the beach, sometimes the spirit of his father comes to him as an eagle. When Neville left the Mike, Ian Cohen, who was very active at Middle Head and now sits in State Parliament, addressed our small group and said that when he first arrived at the beach in 1980 he had been undecided whether to remain with the action, but each morning an old eagle came to him. That's Ian in the pic.

On a promise, I had to leave the reunion half way to attend a Spring Equinox circle on a beach between Middle Head and Sandy. That was as much fun and as moving and thought-provoking for me as the runion, and I leave you now with a picture from that beautiful and windswept event, which had an excellent ritual. I'll be back soon to talk about Sandy Beach again, but just thought I'd share what I did on that sunny and warm Saturday. As they mostly do here, the thumbnails open in a new window.



Tagged: beach, activism, australia, littoral, environment

Middle Head protest reunion, Sat Sept 24

Come to Middle Head! My friend Peter Geddes writes, concerning this coming Saturday's 25th anniversary reunion of the 1985 Save Middle Head Beach actions:

There is energy building around this commemoration of the historically important Middle Head protest. People who have not communicated with one another in over two decades are getting in touch saying they are coming. Some can't make it and there is a growing list of sisters and brothers who have died in the past 25 years. We can honour them when we gather on the beach at two PM on Saturday, September 24.

Like all our activities at Middle Head, Koori time will prevail, and you are advised to tell your friends to come early and be prepared to stay late. When evening falls the re-union will move nearby to the Scotts Head Bowling Club. At the club here will be a display of photos and press clippings coordinated by Terry Parkhouse formerly of the Yarrahapinni ecology study centre, and everyone is invited to add contributions. Terry says there's good bistro food and drink at the club, and facilities for showing slides and video. We have dusted off a 37-minute video copy of a Super 8 film made at Middle Head and on the Beachwalk. It includes scenes from the Terania Creek protest and Guboo Ted Thomas' Renewing of the Dreaming work. The video copy is rather old and tired, but the content still stirs and you might be thrilled to see how beautiful you were in dissent.

The word has gone out to the Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti mobs in Nambucca and Kempsey, and it is hoped the Koori-white bond established at the protest will be re-kindled at this re-union. For many, it was the combined efforts of Indigenous Australians and White Australians that made the protest memorable. There we had the opportunity to learn just how well we can work together and how important the land is to all of us. How there are times when we are prepared to put our bodies on the line to demonstrate this love.

(Click thumbnail to embiggen. The pic is from 'Maggie's Farm' mag, contemporary to the action. Thanks to the photographer, whom I've forgotten.)

Tagged: australia, environment, activism

Spotting the whales

Happy Spring Equinox! And just think, there are no depths of Winter anywhere in the world at this time. For just two relatively brief periods each year, northerners and southerners are on more or less equal climatic terms.

This Rainbow lorikeet out the front of the Ponderosa in the New Zealand Christmas bush (Metrosideros excelsus), or pohutukawa as it's known at home in Maoriland on the other side of the ditch, is enjoying the day as much as I.

It's warm, at least 21 degrees, and bright blue and sunny, but a committed sort of wind is hurtling down the beach as fast as yesterday's southerly, and the trees and taller shrubs around the Ponderosa are doing the Sandy Beach Wave -- not unusual, and that's why I often joke that this place should be called 'Windy Beach'. I see from the weather sticker in this page's sidebar that today's stiff breeze is "21 mph / 33 km/h from the NNE".

It's T-shirt weather but not perfectly comfortable on the beach for my flaneur, as I'm a hot weather lover, and not real fond of moving air. Speaking of wind, and flaneurs, I haven't been flaneuring much lately (season too cool, me busy as a one-armed paperhanger in a high wind) but I'm doing more of it as the days grow warmer. Thus more posts to come, I trust.

It's round about the season for Humpback whales to be returning from their annual holidays in the warmer waters up north, and if they haven't passed by Sandy yet, they should soon.

Unfortunately, the Ponderosa doesn't have a water view (too close to sea level and the cabin faces west) so unless I camp on the beach, my chances of seeing a Megaptera novaeangliae are not much better than if I lived in Moscow. I was lucky to spot one travelling north a few weeks ago, but of course by the time I ran back with a camera it was submerged and holding its breath just as I was catching mine.

If you are local and want to email me at pipwilson [AT] acay.com.au if you spot the whales, chances are I will be able to spring into action and share a photo here with our local and international readers. If you think your chances of seeing the whales are better than mine (maybe you are on a boat a lot of the time, or have an elevated view somewhere between Coffs and Woopi), and want my SMS text number so you can tell me and I can grab a shot and share the pix online, I think that would be great. Maybe someone would like to set up an SMS text message "tree" for alerting fellow Sandysiders. If so, I'll be happy to publicise that here. I think that'd be great from a human social point of view, too.

More in the Book of Days about Humpback migration.

Three new features in the Almanac project

I've added three new features to the Almanac project. We now have Google News (illustrated) in Daily Planet News, making 38 global newsfeeds on the one page. I think it's a pretty good one-stop news source -- I don't know another like it (tell me if you do, I'd love to see it).

Also, I'm trialling two other features:

Blogmanac lite: Bookmark this if you want the Blogmanac in two-column format and with a faster download (no sidebar with blogroll, etc).

Tagcloud: I've added that to the Almanac Scriptorium homepage. The purpose of this is for the casual or regular visitor to see the main themes of recent posts in the various Almanac blogs. If you want to know what the blogs are, see the menu bar at the top of this page (Sandysiders, have a surf!).

What is the Almanac project? At this stage, it's well over 3,000 pages to help with our aim "To give readers many reasons and many ways to 'carpe diem!' -- seize the day!" If you would like to see the project grow, or even stand still, please throw Puppy a coin. A couple of bucks every now and again will help pay our growing Internet and luxury bills. Many thanks.

Tagged: web, website, news, almanac, blogmanac

Spring is sprung: Brunfelsia from America

This Brunfelsia is outside my door. I like the common names better: 'Yesterday, today and tomorrow', and 'Kiss me quick'. The reason for the former name? "When they first open they are a violet colour, fading to lavender blue and then white, with the three colours present on the bush at the same time." (Burke's Backyard)

It needs a bit of a haircut, but this is on my to-do list for when it's finished flowering.

(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

Categories: coffs, harbour, australia, brunfelsia, shrubs, garden, gardening

After the picnic, enjoy a good swallow

I guess this can be called "Swallow, picknickers and Springtime at the Ponderosa".
(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

Categories: swallow, swallows, bird, birds, australia, australian, coffs, harbour

Groceries done for another week. Why cook when you can peel?
(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

I wonder where de boidies iz

Spring is sprung, de grass is riz,
I wonder where de boidies iz.
De boid iz on de wing.
But that’s absoid!
I tought de wing wuz on de boid!

(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

The swallows iz getting very active and I'm trying to learn something about them so I can share it here soon. This one really didn't want to keep flying around the laundry, but there was a big galoot with a camera standing in the doorway.

And if you can tell me where the 'Spring is sprung' poem comes from, I'd love to hear from you. Was it Bugs Bunny? Ogden Nash? The Three Stooges? Marx Brothers? Those would be my first guesses, but I have a hunch it is none of these. (Stumpers-L, the difficult library reference questions list, has more information, but no really conclusive answer. It's actually quite nice to have a mystery or two in life, no?)

Fairfax, my new black/white/grey canary and flatmate, also knows it's Springtime, and whistling to beat the band every day. John and Elizabeth Gould, the Gouldian finches, seem to be getting frisky too. I caught them snuggling up together the other night. I hope they're not thinking of funny business, because I run a clean establishment here and if they had ears, they'd be out on their ear quick smart if I hear even a rumour of any funny business.

Categories: spring, sandy, beach, almanac, bird, birds, swallow, swallows, poem, poetry, folklore, gouldian, finch, finches, canary, canaries

Hurricane Katrina relief

On this beautiful Spring day, not too hot, not cool at all, with the blue Pacific lapping our shores, it's easy for any Sandysider to forget about the suffering in many places.

Anyone wanting to contribute to Hurricane Katrina relief can find some good links on this page at the Blogmanac.

Categories: hurricane, katrina, relief, alternative, progressive, aid, neworleans, louisiana, donate, donations, help, resources, hurricanekatrina

Does this page look OK?

A reader tells me that the main column of this page doesn't commence until about level with the foot of the sidebar. This can happen if it is viewed in a text size larger than 'Smaller' (see How-To at the head of this blog).

Please, if the page looks wrong even in Smaller text size, I would love to hear from you. It looks OK on Esmeralda, but on your computer it might look horrible and I should get it checked out. Thanks a lot.

Check out my feedmap

It's there in the sidebar, and if you click "Bloggers nearby" you will find the location of the Ponderosa. Then you can zoom in or out. The guy who put it together is one clever guy. I got the map from feedmap and I got the coordinates from this map.

Categories: blog, blogmap, google, map, feedmap

Sexing the doodlebug

A rainy day today but there's still plenty of life at Sandy Beach. Evn on the walls of the Ponderosa.

Wikipedia tells me that "Antlions are a family of insects, classified as Myrmeleontidae, from the Greek myrmex, meaning 'ant', and leon, meaning 'lion'. Antlions are small, fully developed larvae being 1.5 cm, and adults being 4 cm. Antlions are omnivorous. The antlion larvae eat ants and other insects, while the adult antlion eats pollen and nectar.

"The antlion is most often called a 'doodlebug'. It gets this name due to the odd winding, spiralling trails it leaves in the sand while looking for a good location to build its trap. These trails look like someone has doodled in the sand and hence the name doodlebug."
Source

Well, there ya go! I don't think they are most often called 'doodlebugs' at all, because I (like most people) don't live in America, something that Wikipedians are prone to forget. In this country, we just call them antlions.

Still and all, they're an interesting creature. When I was a teenager I used to have a few antlions in my bedroom, in a shoebox. Even wrote a poem about antlions. But I was quite grown up -- ancient, in fact -- before I ever saw one flying. I knew the ones in the sand in the shoebox were larvae, but of what I was unaware. So this bloke has paid me a visit just to seal the deal. S/he's rather beautiful is s/he not? I have no idea how to tell the sexes apart and I didn't try very hard. I wouldn't want to bug it.

By the way, there's a whole website devoted to antlions. And that's where this this info about antlions in medieval bestiaries, and this riddle comes from:

Dudum compositis ego nomen gesto figuris:
Ut leo, sic formica vocor sermone Pelasgo
Tropica nominibus signans praesagia duplis,
Cum rostris avium nequeam resistere rostro.
Scrutetur sapiens, gemino cur nomine fingar!

[I long have borne the name of hybrid form:
Both ant and lion I am called in Greek
A double metaphor, foreboding doom;
My beak cannot ward off the beaks of birds.
Let wise men search out why my names are twain.]

which is apparently by St Aldhelm (find him in the Book of Days if you want to know more).

(Click thumbnail to enlarge)

Categories: insects, antlion, larvae, myrmeleontidae