A Sandy Beach Almanac



You've landed at Sandy Beach, NSW, Australia: Lat. -30.15331, Long. 153.19960, UT +10:00 – local map & zoom Google map. I live in a cabin on this beach, 25 kilometres north of the traffic and shops of Coffs Harbour, 600 km north of Sydney. My intention is to post observations of Nature and life within 1 km (1,000 paces) of my South Pacific home.

 

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Thursday, June 30, 2005

My country

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ...

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

Dorothea Mackellar


I know I'm getting carried away ...
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Sandy Beach, then and now.
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Here's another.
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These folks will be keeping an eye on the creek.
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Wild weather



Your almanackist is chewing his fingernails this morning as the whole north coast enters its fifth or sixth day of rain, and there are flood and gale warnings in the whole region.

Apart from some minor leaks, the Ponderosa is holding up well and I don't anticipate flooding. The fingernail chewing is over the birth of my fifth grandchild, who is six days overdue and currently residing on the bush side of the Kalang River, which tends to flood in a heavy dew. I'm waiting for news.

One town in southern Queensland had 502mm of rain in 24 hours. That's almost 20 inches.

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

A Tale of Two Gooseberries

I've talked about the Barnacle goose, but not the gooseberry, which is no relation.

This photo from the garden is of a gooseberry, as you can tell by the lack of feathers. The gooseberries are usually placed in genus Ribes, along with their near cousins, the blackcurrants and redcurrants.

Before very recently, I had never eaten a gooseberry, or even seen one, as far as I know. I grew up with Chinese gooseberries, which are unrelated and of the genus Actinidiaceae. I love these tart berries, and regret how much I've missed out on over the many, many decades by eating Chinese. Odd really -- Chinese is my least favourite Asian food. Give me Thai, Vietnamese or Cambodian any day. (Factoid for the day: there are more Thai restaurants in Australia than pizzerias ... that will even surprise the Aussies.)

There are some interesting word associations with these two unrelated fruit, and I will mention just a couple. It might be that the word 'gooseberry' is derived from the Dutch Kruisbezie , the German Krausbeere, or of the earlier forms of the French groseille. Thus, as Barnacle geese have nothing to do with crustaceans, gooseberries have nothing to do with geese.

However, the Chinese gooseberry doees have something to do with Chinese, because it was those good people who first found the plant and cultivated it. Then, the good folk of New Zealand (and there are known to be quite a few), discovered that Chinese gooseberries grew very well in their climate. This, of course, was a great boon for the Shaky Isles, because of the nature of their climate.

Then, sometime after my youth, the familiar Chinese gooseberries that I knew so well, were renamed Kiwifruit by either an enterprising Kiwi farmer ('Kiwi' being the generic nickname of a citizen of New Zealand, a name taken from the national bird, the flightless kiwi), or else an advertising or marketing agency or some New Zealand agricultural marketing board. I suspect a combination of the latter two.

In time, many in Australia grew to accept this arbitrary marketing nomenclature, though I prefer to honour the original cultivators, the Chinese. Then, the fruit gained many consumers in the USA, people who apparently were not aware that a kiwi is either a person or a bird, so they innocently shortened the commercial name of the Chinese gooseberry from 'kiwifruit' to kiwi. And that name has stuck in that country.

But in this one, it's still a kiwifruit, something best served when sliced and served on a pavlova. As for the meaning of 'pavlova', if you don't know, you're not Australian, and can find out by googling the words 'pavlova' and 'dessert'. if you find a recipe and can cook, make one. It is a superb dish.

I have neither pavlova nor kiwifruit, and no stove, come to think of it, so I'll content myself with a handful of gooseberries knocked to the ground sometime in the deluge of the past four days at Sandy Beach.

Afterthought: About 25 years ago when I was living on an intentional community called Boggy Creek, a Department of Ag man came round and said that with our soil and climate we should be putting in Chinese gooseberries ... I think he might have said kiwifruit as it was about then the advertising and marketing guys were having an influence. A few of the people on the community took his advice and dug the post holes and carted the timber to make the enormous trellises required to grow these fruit.

It seems that the Ag man must have gone to every farm in northern New South Wales and made the same recommendation. Several seasons later there were signs at the end of every gravel road in the north, each one bearing the tell-tale words, "Kiwifruit, $2 a bucket". And that was before the glut.

Afterafterthought and a curly question: So what do the Chinese call a Chinese gooseberry? Macaque peach (míhóu táo) is the most common term.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

You say lilly pilly, I say ... OK, whatever

It's hard to know how to spell these pretties.

Alternative spellings are legion: Lilly pilly, Lillipilly, Lillipillies, Lilly-pilly, Lilly-pillies, Lily Pilly, Lily Pillies, Lilly Pillies, Lily-Pilly, Lily-Pillies. "Although the name today is the common name of Acmena smithii, other species of the genera Acmena, Syzygium and Waterhousia are loosely called lilly pillies and this term is often included in their common names," this site tells me, so now I know.

These pretty shrubs are rainforest plants endemic to Australia, but they grow in other places as well, such as half the gardens in Oz, and in the scrub behind Sandy Beach, where I took this photo this morning while on my flaneur. I was actually looking for two huge birds that I briefly saw in the big mango tree outside my window, as they flew off quickly and I thought they might have gone behind the beach. They were really big -- about the size of black cockatoos, and might have been, but I only caught a glimpse and now I guess I'll never know. I haven't heard any cockies today and it doesn't look like rain. In fact, it's a superb day, real T-shirt weather.

They're related to the gum trees (Eucalyptus), like almost everything else in this country, and even on Winter Solstice (today) the bush is cheered by their berries about the size of a small strawberry, which comes in all reddish shades (according to species) from almost white, through pink, even hot pink, to fire engine red.

When the first non-indigenous people arrived on these shores and were looking for food in those near-famine days of the late 1700s, they found the lilly pilly, which must have been good tucker for Aboriginal people for about 50,000 years before that.

One of the best lilli pillies for the garden, by the way, is the pale-fruited wilsonii. :)

Here are some recipes: Lilly pilly and pear cake; Lilly pilly whip and Lilly pilly jelly. Rainforest Foods sell Lilly pilly jam.

Want to cultivate a lilly pilly in the garden? Burke's Backyard has a page on how.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Surf report: 4 on the Carpark Scale

Rule of thumb for surf measurement

I don't need to look at the Pacific to know how big the surf is.

I have a theory that the height of the surf in metres, and the amount of slop, are directly proportional to the number of cars in the car park at the south end. My guess today was that the surf is more than one metre, but frothy.

I checked the carpark out, and then the surf, my guess was correct. The biggest surf I've seen here was a 22. Today's is rated 4 on the Carpark Scale. Not bad. My next post will show the synoptic chart.

Sunday, June 12, 2005

This is Winter?

You've gotta love this global warming. Here it is, June 12, and I'm singing that Billy Thorpe song 'It's Almost Summer'. In the 20s Celsius, high 70s for those with antique weights and measures. The shack's almost hot, but it will be chilly again tonight.

It's supposed to be Winter here. Not because Australians are sensible and mark Winter from the Winter Solstice (June 21 or thereabouts), but because officially, and culturally, the seasons are named from the first of June, September, December and March. I've heard some theory about why this is so, something to do with the dates on which Summer and Winter uniforms were issued to the soldiers in charge of the New South Wales gulag two centuries ago, or some other reason that is similarly too preposterous to remember.

I must be some sort of traitor, because I reckon Winter will start about 9 days from today when the day is the shortest and the night longest. And then, "as the days lengthen, the cold strengthens" as the cold land is still lagging behind the increasing hours of sunlight. But what do I know? Everone tells me it's already Winter.

They should look outside at people swimming and strolling in T-shirst and shorts, and then tell me that.

Take a look: the hibiscus at the letterbox doesn't seem to think it's Winter, otherwise she wouldn't be blazing like a flame the size of a dinner plate. But of course, she's not a fair dinkum Aussie. She's from Hawaii, making her a Yank, and the Yanks make a lot more sense on the notion of the seasons than Aussies do ... except for having them upside down and back to front, that is.

Saturday, June 11, 2005

Go for a walk? What a novel idea.

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler

I'm going like a train with my novel, if you can call a forehead dripping blood all over the keyboard "going like a train". I suppose there must be something happening outside this door -- I can even hear a lot of birds. I must go out and have a look some day. Meanwhile, back to the book. If I can squeeze 500 reasonably good words a day out of my bloody forehead, I feel the train's on schedule.

... there are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Monday, June 06, 2005

Not playing, working



We have already mentioned (on April 30) Banksia integrifolia, that beautiful coastal bottlebrush tree that we are lucky enough to have plenty of just behind the beach.

And we mentioned how Banksias are named for Sir Joseph Banks (1743 - 1820), the British naturalist and botanist on Captain James Cook's first great voyage (1768 - 1771).

And on January 6 we mentioned Rainbow lorikeets, the 'beautiful noise' that squawk around here most days. Now that I have a camera, I can put the two together, although on a dull day with zoom the effect is not as good as I'd hoped, and as I hope to bring some time in the future.

These guys look like they're playing, but it's an optical illusion caused by their circus-clown apparel. It's like dolphins and cockatoos -- they always look like they're smiling regardless of how miserable they might be. And lorikeets always looked like they're dressed for fun, but this is no game for them and finding food is just a job, I suppose.

But what's the other tree here? It's one of the Melaleuca family of trees, best known as ti-trees or tea-trees, which give that effective ti-tree oil which is so efficacious for tyreating lots of maladies.

Kids have been here. Good.



Yesterday's sandcastle

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Sunday, June 05, 2005

Don't call me a galah, you galah!

"Darling, who's that strange man with the camera?"

"He's nobody, sweetness. He's the Sandy Beach Almanac bloke, a real galah."

You should never take offence if an Australian calls you a galah. It just means you're a bloody idiot and it's not meant to be taken personally.

The galah is Cacatua roseicapilla to some scholars and Eolophus roseicapilla to others, I think because they're still trying to work out from DNA whether they are more closely related to the cockatiel, to Major Mitchell's Cockatoo or to a box of rocks.

I snapped these two fat galahs a few minutes ago, with a currawong in the background. They were the only things not making a racket behind the beach today, because the she-oaks (Casuarina), ti-trees (Melaleuca) and a few other things are in full flower and the circus has come to town. More of that tomorrow.

I've seen thousands of galahs at a time, out west, where the aim of the game for most is to avoid hitting as many as possible with your windscreen, and for some, to score as many as can be hit in a day. I know people who tell me they've seen galahs by the hundreds of thousands, near wheat silos mainly (galahs are grazers), and I believe them. I know others who have told me they've seen millions, and they're just plain liars.

Like their cousins the other cockatoos, these fellas will live long if they don't succeed in their Mission Statement of getting to Sydney attached as a mascot on someone's windscreen. You should never get a galah for a pet. Firstly, how would you like to live in a cage (apologies to office workers), and secondly, who will look after it when you're dead and gone?

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