On How Marrow Bones Can Kill You

And no, this is not about a reality cook-off show where the cravated judge eats a bone marrow risotto and then dies of a heart attack*

This is the story of a plant in Western Australia that contains a poisonous compound - well there are many - but a plant in the gastrolobium family is especially famous for creating havoc with the colonisers. The names Poison Point, Poison Hill and Poison Swamp are mapped by cattlemen when driving their stock out to the coast to feed in the summertime. They mapped the areas where the gastrolobiums grew and they deliberately kept sheep, cattle and goats away from the beautiful egg and bacon plants.

This plant was later developed by the government and made into a synthetic version of its essence: sodium fluoroacetate or 1080: a biochemical weapon now used to get rid of feral animals such as cats, dogs, pigs and foxes.These animals were driving native fauna into extinction So this pretty little heart-shaped plant became weaponised against the ferals. Most native animals who fed on this plant over millennia were totally immune to its killer effects. This is why it is such a perfect poison for interlopers.

Every few months, a plane flies laps over my place. It is the baiting plane, dropping poisonous baits into the national park that surrounds me. I'm constantly warned by letters that these dried sausage baits full of 1080 are highly attractive to dogs and cats.The last time my dog ate one from the beach below my house, it cost her a general anesthetic and probably several years of her life. Her stomach was pumped out with charcoal and I copped a two thousand dollar bill. It will kill her next time. That is the cost of living next to a national park and with a wandersome old dog who still thinks she is invincible.

Every time I hear the baiting plane droning overhead me, I hate it. I really hate that plane. I know they are doing the right thing but I still hate that plane.

I haven't got to the point about bone marrow and what it has to do with sp.gastrolobium, 1080 and dogs. So bear with me here.

In 1885, a Mr Web wrote to the Australian Advertiser (28/07/1885) about cooking up a bronze wing pigeon for breakfast and giving the dogs the wish bone. "I have just had a valuable dog poisoned by eating the breastbone of a Bronze wing pigeon." The dog had died a terrible death. "I have seen dogs die of arsenic or prussic acid but their sufferings seemed mild compared to that poisoning from the bones of the bronze wing pigeon." He then went onto the idea that the bronze wing pigeons, who feed primarily on the poison bush gastrilobium bilobum, excrete the the poison really quickly from their bodies but store it in their marrow bones. This was one of the original 1080 poisonings and it came from introduced dogs eating the marrow bones of bronze wings.

'A valuable dog' 

 

Winter Solstice Part Four

 

Jayden put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘Mum will really like these shrooms too,’ he said and then remembered that night out on the water poaching, when he felt scared and small and cold and his Mum was ranting about poetry or something and about the end of the world.

‘Parents, man,’ Jayden said, trying to sound understanding but he also knew what he was talking about and he tried to communicate this to Matt through his side hug.

Parents who didn’t think, who were so busy with their own dramas that they forgot to pick him and Matt up from footy training on that low, misty oval late at night. Parents who privileged their ancient vendettas against teachers over the yearly school camp. Parents who fought a landlord’s injustices in court and then ran some poor bastard down outside a BP service station. Fucking parents.

Jayden’s Mum had read him Beowulf, explained the Lady poem about rogue onions and the Narnia Chronicles and she knew what happened to the children of those men who’d abdicated responsibility and still she got arrested and locked up and left her kid alone to deal with the shit..

‘The swan roads,’ Jayden said, pointing to the lake. ‘That’s the swan roads, like in the poem..’

‘What, the lake?’ asked Matt.

The two of them stared at the pond and the birds. Jayden saw lights behind them but also lights gathering in the swans who squwarked and gossiped on the water.

 

Oil Light and the Bay of Pigs

I was on the phone to my sister when Brownie and Doogs arrived from the bush camp, their dingo-looking hound Flex in tow. 'So yes, I've found a $1500 shitbox with no windscreen wipers or muffler.' I said to my sister, waving for the men to take a seat, 'It drives great and looks like sin apparently ... and Queen Ben is probably bound for the wreckers. What a fucking day.'

'It's about to get even better,' said Brownie after I'd ended the call. 'Have you heard about the Bay of Pigs?' 

'Drives great, look like sin.' Doogs nodded. 'Sounds like me.'

The oil light in Queen Ben came on yesterday on my way home to the inlet and then flickered out. This morning, with my dog Selkie still not home from her pre-dawn date with Flex, I headed out for another tower day, and the oil light came on again. In the mistaken belief that the oil light works like a fuel light, giving me a few more kilometres, I continued for another two or three hundred metres. (Yes I know, shut up. I've been self flagellating all day okay?) A terrible knocking sound. I stopped. Under the bonnet and off with the oil cap. Smoke curled out of the sump.I poured in some oil and heard it sizzling against the heat.

Queen Ben turned twenty last year. The five years that I've had her have been about replacement and good husbandry. A new head, replacing the turbo, ironing out dented panels, gearbox issues, idler arms and wheel alignments. My philosophy is that a diesel four wheel drive can last forever if you treat her right. 

Yes, I'm a terrible husband.

I walked for a while until I came into range and texted my boss that I couldn't make it to the firetower today, with some brief details of my poor car's demise. Cicadas chanted in the forest and parrots flitted around me, colours of karri leaves and bottle-brush flowers. Then I turned and walked home, patting Queen Ben's bonnet as I passed. It was surreal, walking through the forest that I drive through every day. Walking is when you notice things.

Smoky red dust rose up on the gravel as a car approached and I found a welcome ride home. Selkie was back, soaking wet, smelling of the inlet and limping badly. 'So that was quite the excursion,' I said to her. She looked at me in that way dogs look when they've done some bad things. I turned on the wifi. 'Oh no! Are you okay, do you need a lift?' My boss had replied. I told him I was okay and then I rang my sister.

I managed to borrow a car for the day and make it to the firetower eventually. I'll leave out the bits about the missing firetower key, the long drive to retrieve it, the firetower nerd I met up there today who was really cool, and that snake. But I have to have a car and the Queen Ben is dead. So I got busy on my phone, bought a car ('drives fine, looks like sin'). I live 35 kilometres from the nearest town and the firetower is an 78 kilometre round trip. There's no public transport and getting on a bicycle is a bullshit option, dammit.

I made it home close to dark and asked a mate to help me tow Queen Ben home from her unhappy perch on the gravel shoulder.. My reasoning was that the RAC will be badly stretched over the next few days of New Year's Eve chaos in our little seaside holiday town. 

I was just having a self-congratulatory glass of wine on the back veranda and updating my sister on the phone about the new car I was buying, when Brownie and Doogs turned up. They growled at Flex as he dawdled innocently towards Selkie's food bowl. Selkie looked up and didn't even complain or harry Flex. She was still limping. She looked very, very sore. 'So, the Bay of Pigs,' said Brownie.

Flex and Selkie took off before dawn this morning. They often do this when Brownie and Flex are staying in the bush camp. Selkie and Flex go off for hours and I never know where they go. Sometimes they'll come back streaked with charcoal and I'll know they've been into the firegrounds. Sometimes, while looking for them, I've followed their tracks along the beach for miles. Selkie always comes home exhausted and she's sore for days. There are few roads and no fences around here. It's dog heaven but I always worry about them taking baits.

This morning, Doogs went down to the boat ramp and heard the two dogs barking. It was an early easterly and so he could hear them, their voices calling along the inlet shore. I was mourning the knocking piston death of Queen Ben and beginning my dejected walk home, by the time Brownie and Doogs walked east along the beaches and rocky outcrops to find Selkie and Flex bailing up a huge black boar. Apparently, the pig was standing in the water facing off the two dogs. He was in the inlet, water around his shoulders and nose to nose with Selkie and Flex. 

'This pig was huge, Sarah!' Doogs said. I put my head into my arms. Oh. My God.  'Much bigger than these two,' he motioned to Flex and Selkie. 'They were crying and barking like babies though.'

'What a fucking day.'

'We're calling that place Pig Bay,' Brownie nodded over his beer. 'It's something that's happened here and that place needs a name. Never seen that before. Never. A pig facing down some dogs in the water. Never seen it.'

So Pig Bay it is.

This stuff all happened here on New Year's Eve 2023. It's been another mad year yes? Happy New Year Bloggers xxx

 

Dealing with a dog who rolls in a fish kill

 About two weeks ago it was raining hard. We had about 60 ml in a week. The inlet swelled with river-brown water from the massive system fed by three rivers. I was running out of firewood. This time of year always presents me with a sense of lack: crouching over a fire that will not thrive, like an animal trying to stay warm. Not enough sun to power the internet and my single lamp for more than an hour per day. As a casual worker, I'm out of a job for most of June and July, so when the income runs out, gas bottle runs out, my gas fridge stops and so does the hot water.

It sounds grim but it's a reality of living off grid in a remote location. 'I should organise myself for this time of year,' I think every year. This year I lined up a few writing jobs which are tiding me over for the moment. Anyway, with the fresh water pouring into the inlet over the last few weeks, regular visitors have noticed an anomaly.

The sudden influx created a mass fish kill event. At least I'm better off than your average herring. Brownie and Co were filletting mullet on an ironing board down on the beach. They'd set nets the previous night and not caught a single herring. 'They're all dead,' Brownie said, pointing to the dead fish lining the beach.

I walked along the beach for a few hundred metres and found 30 or 40 more dead herring. Shit. Later, other boaters told me there were dead fish on every beach on the inlet, stinking up the reed beds and the sandbars. I could only find herring on the beach, large, almost bull herring. 

So I reported the fish kill to the authorities and warned Brownie to put his nets away. For the next 24 hours I stressed about Fisheries coming out to inspect our nets and hanging about the place. The main thing was that I thought it needed to be flagged. Water authorities got back to me to say it was a fresh water deoxygenation event.

So my issue now is my dog. 

On the first day, I washed her in warm soapy water after she'd rolled in rotting fish, rubbed her dry with an old towel. She immediately went down to the beach and had another roll. I washed her with warm soapy water again. 

Next time, she's getting the hose.

Evening again

 

Like the gloaming and the evening, there is also apparently the fuckening! A friend sent this to me this morning and I was utterly up for it. It's been a pretty strange full moon period, for me anyway - and I've gone nocturnal since the dog and cat in the night time incident. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that doesn't mean they're not out to get me!

Missed calls from a dead ex, a pair of socks that aren't mine beside the fruit bowl, Random Man moving into the shack, the dead cat ...it's hard to refrain from making false connections between odd events at the best of times and I don't even smoke weed.

The inlet has risen really fast as well. Struth's boat would have been on the sand a week ago, if he'd parked it where it is in the photo below. At first I thought the bar had broken from the outside from the huge swells we've had but now I think it's the water pouring in from the other end, the rivers swollen with messages from upstream.

Here's some photos of my house too. People sometimes think I live in a shed but the cottage really is quite respectable. This is my desk and writing area, close to the fire of course. The huge windows face south to the inlet, and the weather.

 And this is I guess what you'd call the sitting room (It's all open plan). Today it's covered in prep work for next week's uni classes. This semester I'm tutoring for Environmental History, Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing.

Evening

 I've only just realised how beautiful the word evening is. Maybe I'm new to this: that evening up between day and night, that hour between dog and wolf, is a time of even - ing. The hour when everything is harmoniously balanced with light and dark. To go back to some earlier thoughts about the fugue and the gloaming, the word 'evening' begins to hold more meaning for me.

It's been a pretty decent full moon. Random Man (yes that one) has been out at the inlet mouth the last few days in his kayak, fishing for salmon. He said it was so bright out there on the white sands of the beach, that he could walk through the bush like it was broad daylight.'There was that triple ring around the moon,' he told me. 'There were dolphins surfing and whales jumping out of the water.'

I stayed in my house and watched the moon rise over the forest canopy. At midnight, as I was falling asleep, all hell broke loose on the back veranda. I heard the hound race out. Furniture and milk crates flying, glass jars of smoking chips breaking and then lots of shouting (from me), crashing sounds. In the torchlight I watched my dog try to kill a feral cat. I had to finish off the poor critter with an axe. I do wonder what the AirBnB guests next door were thinking about the kerfuffle. Surely, anyone else who has had to kill an animal at midnight with an axe, dressed only in underpants and ugg boots, will understand my story.

This brings me back to the gloaming, the evening. It's the hour between dog and wolf.

 

October

So nice to see you, inlet.

I feel like I've been driving for months and suddenly it's the equinox again. It took my Mum to remind me last week, and now there's the quickening between day and night that always throws me this time of year. A woman walks down to the seashore at dusk, glass of wine, sunnies and beanie, just like in the month of May - low sun and cool dusk. The sun slips and the darkening is faster but the kids are still yelling from the chilly waters. Orchids are rising their sex from the earth. My dog goes for a wander and returns with the desiccated leg of a kangaroo, crouches on the concrete and growls at any blow flies that get too close. They are new to this season too.

In the winter, right before I left for the big smoke, my car blew its head and this is an expensive exercise for a diesel. Queen Ben (car) is limping through now, avoiding any other medical procedures until the previous bill is paid up. Billowing smoke on a cold morning? C'mon, lovely lady, you can do it, just get out of bed for me one more time. Ignore those cold weather glow plug pains, baby.

Yesterday I taught in the city and then today I drove a long way to do our pre season fire training for the other job I have. I tied up Selkie in the courtyard at work. She'd been in the car for hours but she's long been my Girl Selkie and waited patiently on her makeshift bed, beside her silver bowl of water, accepting pats and copious stroking from all those fire fighters who are away from home and miss their own.

Then home to the inlet. Fisherfolk, returning from setting their nets this evening, their outboards blurp blurped as they headed to shore. The crunch of hull on coarse sand.

So yes, it's nice to see you, inlet. It's good to be home.

 

Swing Saws and the Queen

So this post is about swing saws. Have any of you heard about them? Swing saws are pretty much the most dangerous pieces of farming equipment I ever come across. Forget about tractor fatalities or deaths/dismemberments/injuries caused by post hole drillers, let alone those ATV bike rollovers. Swing saws are part of an archive of 1920s new chums (immigrants) turning up to buy and clear land in a country that delights in the mythology of the hard-working land clearer, and part of the mythology when bits of wood or the saw itself turns on the operator in a kind of karmic deliverance.

I'll get back to swing saws in a moment. For now, here is a photo of my dog. 

Queen. She was early-morning sunning when I took this pic.

The inlet is about to bust its bar. I've never seen the water sitting so patiently on the banks and I've been here for a few years now ... but it's full and ready to split, ready to spill out into the sea. I'll post this photo and then when the bar breaks, I'll post another photo from the same spot. Stay tuned.

Back to the swing saw. They are pretty much a petrol engine driving a circular saw blade attached to a rotary hoe set up where you can turn the blade from vertical to horizontal. During the farm sale and the assorted paraphernalia that went with it, the swing saw sold to a local farmer who promised me he would never, ever work the thing. He bought it as an article of interest and it was to be hung in his shed for perpetuity. He promised me that.

Others had expressed interest in the swing saw because old WW2 motorcycle engines had been repurposed into these land-clearing, sleeper-making, personal decapitation machines. I'm not kidding you. Have a look at this puppy and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Self medication: mushrooms, crabs, sunshine, poetry.

Happy Winter Solstice folks! We didn't have a family bonfire this year, instead there was major flooding, lightning bringing down power lines, wind at 9 or 10 on the Beaufort scale uprooting whole trees and other extenuating circumstances that involved women without nipples...*

 During this time I've had the worst head cold in years, spent a fair bit of time at the inlet cold, sick and lonely (in isolation basically; no one wants me any where near them), surrounded in butter menthol wrappers and dirty dishes. Yes, and whingy whiny too. So a day or so before the Solstice, when the morning was still and warm with pre-storm languour, I popped a mushroom in my mouth and dragged my sorry carcass down to the beach to sit on a rock, to feel the sun ripple through my chilled spine.

I sat on the same rock where I snapped the crocodile a month or so ago and sipped some hot apple cider vinegar and honey. Over at the boat ramp sat a white ute with fish tubs on the back. Couldn't see the man's boat and then I could - a white rooster tail over the other side of the inlet. As he got closer, I could see that it was Steeleye, his red checked shirt and khaki waders his standard dress code. Dog sat to attention at my feet and whined.

We chatted about the cobbler while he packed the fish. 'Caught three last night', he said as he hefted some stingray wings into the icebox. This is really unusual here and worrying for me as I love wading. 

 

Pelicans began to crowd his boat, growling at each other like kelpies waiting for the scraps. Steeleye gave me a couple of blue manna crabs, rare as well in these parts but the inlet was open for so long last year that all sorts of strange things have been going on - cobbler, stingrays, blue mannas. I even found a marron once, trying to find the fresh and stranded in salt water.

The shroom began to kick in, doing its work on my molars first and spreading to my jaws, behind my eyes. I thanked Steeleye for the crabs and gathered them up by their claws. Walking up to the house, a lightening of my spine and the clicking of crabs at my side, I heard Steeleye's ute rattle along the track, boat trailer thumping behind. Wouldn't be back for a while, he'd said, too many yellow eye mullet and they're only 40 cents a kilo at the moment.

Back in the kitchen I boiled up the crabs to crimson and spread newspaper over the bench. Wasabi and some vinegar in a little bowl. I jointed the crabs' limbs and sucked out my first feast of the season, lifted the carapaces and vinegared away the yellow guts.

I was supposed to drive down south and stay with family that night before the Solstice but I couldn't handle the thought of swagging it on the floor, sick. So instead I fed on fresh crabs, feeling the heady rush of the shroom trip swimming into the fuggy ache of the head cold, listening to Marianne Faithful recite The Lady of Shalott.#

* Not really.

# 'She Walks in Beauty' by Marianne Faithful and Warren Ellis is a wonderful album if you are into either of these two AND the Romantic poets all in one place.

 

Boomer meets Selkie

 In the gloaming hours, those hours between dog and wolf, I was woken by my dog. She was barking, howling, at an ageing kangaroo kicked out by his mob and condemned to a life ending by the inlet. They both stared at each other, an old boy roo and my dog. After hours, indeed years, the boomer took off and chased the dog along the track.

Weird and wonderfuls of the wild

 

Day off

Even though it is a lovely day today, I was stood down from the fire tower as there has been rain all through the district over night. When I climbed up there last, the cloud was so low I could barely see a thing but the forest was breathing in the mist. As you can see below, the karris are moulting again ... as the swans are too, out on the water.

... and heading higher, into the granites, the moss and the marris, as the country changes suddenly ...
 

I'm feeling quite posh these days (more about posh later), as I no longer have to drive five bone-jarring kilometres along gravel to the in-range spot to ring my boss and ask if I'm working today. Getting a satellite dish and wifi means I can ring work from my home and then pack my back pack with supplies, driving off sure in the knowledge I'm heading up the mountain.

So today, after the early call, I took my work boots off and thought about prepping for my other job as a tutor at the uni. This semester, as well as working with the School of Indigenous Studies, I'm tutoring a couple of English courses and one is all about the Classics of English literature, the canon, so to speak. 

The canon has all sorts of definitions and can be applied to religious law, relations of power or an appeal to authority, among others. It's always interested me as an Australian, in particular a West Australian, whose people in 1933 entertained our own version of Brexit ...

... to read classic English literature, while simultaneously learning about the colonial and pre colonial history of this continent and the expansion of western empire. So much of our English language, although never in stasis, is bound up with European notions.

Did you know that the word posh comes from Port Outwards, Starboard Home? The word comes from the early days of Trans-Atlantic cruise liners. If you were rich enough, you could buy a cabin on the port side where the sun was always sunnier on the way out, and then on the starboard side on the way home. Poorer folks paid economy class and stayed in the shade all day long, for a trip that may last weeks. Now, if this were in the Antipodes, the first class would be called SOPH, starboard out, port home but no such word exits. So now us Aussies are stuck with the word posh.

It's a tricky business to appreciate classic English literature and its social/political activity, whilst also appreciating the attempts to dismantle the ongoing colonial activities in this country. We are not even Antipodeans anyway!

The antipode is basically the point on the opposite side of the earth's surface to you. It can be translated as 'the opposite pole'. We're only called Antipodeans in Australia because, based on European language, we are at the end of the earth, when in reality, we should be calling ... um ... well from where I am, the island of Bermuda the Antipodes. 

https://www.antipodesmap.com/

According to this map, if I burrow from my place to the Antipodes, I come out somewhere near Bermuda, off the coast of North Carolina. Hi Jennifer of Sparrow Tree Journal!

Fire and Lightning

On tower and I think it was Tuesday when we had a schedule 5, the highest fire danger rating. We were expecting rain, lightning even. As the afternoon wore on, I watched the rain radar on my phone and strange bugs came to visit me. Check out this critter. She's lime green, including the lacework of her wings.

 

An interesting distraction, this bug, as I heard the spotter pilots from other districts begin swapping details on the system bearing down on them at four in the afternoon. 'Yeah, there's a cell to the north west but haven't seen any lightning yet.' 

I was watching the cloud formation gather and work towards me. I rang the office and asked them to look up the 0 -2 hour strikes to the west of our area. I can't get it on my phone. By five, I was sitting at the top of a granite mountain, with a comms tower beside me and a huge motherfucking lightning cloud right overhead.

It must have looked like a funny Adams Family cartoon, if I wasn't so terrified. I rang the boss. 'I'd like to go home now please,' I said in a small voice and to his credit, he asked me to call him from the car park when I got back down the mountain.

That night, I sat up in bed and watched lightning charge around the inlet. Rain ... deep heavy drops of rain fell all night. Selkie is not a thunder-hider-under-the-bed-kinda-dog. She spent all night bolting out through the mosquito blinds to sort out this thunder and lightning thang. I didn't get much sleep (and was ambushed by mosquitos. So, thanks Selkie. 'No worries', says my dog. 'Just protecting you from that thunder monster.)

The next morning I got the message that it was schedule 0 because of rain. 'But I still want you up there,' said my boss and I knew it was because of the lightning. Below is a map of the lightning strikes that occurred that night. 

Here's one for where I live:

 

I climbed the mountain and the forest smelled amazing. It was the smell of a hot and dank forest under stress, quieted by a summer rain. Scents of rot and death and germination. Frogs and cicadas chanted and I could feel the relief of every critter there. Lightning rain holds the super power of nitrogen. No tiger snakes either, which is a fringe benefit, for me.

Still, it was a hard climb. I'm quite fit this far into the fire season but this day was hard on me because of the heat and humidity. By the time I got to the peak, I had to wipe my face and catch my breath before radioing in.

As I watched, the neighbouring districts chimed in. It seems they got the lightning but not the rain. By 1100 hours, I heard the spotters calling in smokes:  'Attention required, lightning strike ... attention required, lightning strike', over and over again.

Father and Son

 Recently my son and I got a bit drunk and finally we talked about the funeral.

"I hope I haven't fucked up those songs for you forever," I said to him .For some reason I ended up organising the funeral.  His Dad was so into the Doors and Cat Stevens that I thought we should play them at the funeral. At the time, texts to and fro normally finished with my son asking 'what do you need me to do mum?' He was so flat out dealing with cattle breaking fences, the funeral, the neighbours, his father dying.... his head simply couldn't take on a funeral play list.

So I had a song list by the Doors. Roadhouse Blues. 'Keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes upon the road.' Nup. Not so good for a car accident fatal. How about Jim Morrison's 'There's a killer on the road. His brain is squirming like a toad..?' Nope. The man comes around' by Johnny Cash?

 'And so the four horsemen came and they were followed by DEATH.' No. Just no.  It was pretty tricky. All the good songs were taken out via context. By then we'd got the prelim coroner's report, it was a few days around the funeral day, and we were getting emotionally smashed all over again.

In the end, my son agreed to this song at the funeral:

We even did a bit of Johnny Cash. My son said that night that he had a greater investment in these songs since his Dad died. He said I hadn't wrecked those songs for him. He just understands them a little bit better.

What an amazing young man he is.

#offgrid compared to #vanlife

After a ten day stint on fire tower and radio support in the office, I've just had a joyous few days off. I did my washing:

I did the dishes and just hung out at my place. Kyabla sent me a box of honey from our last hive rob at Kundip. My colleague on the tower recorded his lowest relative humidity and highest temp ever today.He's been doing this for decades so it's a precedent. No more bits of kangaroo turning up via Selkie from the beach, although there were two tusks and a hind leg on my doorstep this morning. I've been busy prepping my lunches for the next swing ... safely stashed in a gas fridge that is on the blink. 

#offgridliving is the very opposite of #vanlife. Perhaps I should link up my life to their Insta account.

Bin fire grass fire

Today on the fire tower was more anxiety than boredom. Once again it was a sched 5 and I was up there earlier than usual. Lots of tourists. High winds meant that small kids were freaking out when they got to the peak, scared of being blown off the mountain. The mesh fences to stop this occasioning didn't seem to make them feel any better. Parents talking 'face your fears' didn't help. The only thing that worked was someone taking their child's hand and talking them beyond how scared they were.

There's thunder tonight and no rain which means dry lightning across the southern forests region. Wheee!  Today I called in a smoke out Rocky Gully way. It was out of our district and there were all sorts of hectic happenings in our own but still, the spotter pilot radioed me for coordinates and passed it onto the neighbouring spotter. It turned out to be a few hectares of paddock going up. Grass fire. Must have been a decent one because I could see it from fifty kilometres away. Soon after I called it in, the radios went crazy.

On another note, Selkie was terribly happy when I returned home. She sleeps on my bed whenever I leave the house because she's a stinky, passive aggressive bitch. I returned to a house smelling of passive aggressive bitch. As soon as I turned up she headed down to the beach to retrieve the treasure she's been sniffing at all day. Turns out there's another kangaroo carcass down there.

 

I think what is in the photo is part of a spine and rib cage (including said dog). She's very pleased with herself. I'm really not sure what's going on at home any more.

I did find a bird's nest. Check this out:

 

I found it under a tree outside the local day care centre. When I brought it into work, the ranger said, 'That's the string and felt we use in the day care centre!' She has kids who go there. The nest is also threaded with parrot feathers and bits of serviettes from the cafe. This pretty much my best find all year.

Finally, these two ... just because they are pretty bloody funny:

 

 

If I don't get to post beforehand ... Happy New Year Bloggers. I just love you mob and think you are all awesome. Thanks for being around this year and ones past. I really appreciate it.

X Sarah