I was having a little bit of banter with an Australian work colleague of mine the other day.

Having found another Redback spider in the back garden a couple of weeks ago I’ve found myself becoming a little laid back with the frequency of these near-death encounters

Poking the red back with a stick, I found the thing quite unaggressive, a life saving move for this little Arthropod as I decided to move it out of harms way instead of introducing the thing to a couple of litres of Spider spray!

“You should have just squashed it” quaffed my Aussie work colleague “Redbacks have been known to eat snakes and other stuff you know?  You’d best watch out for the cat!

Two days later she sends me an email titled  “The Red Back spider of Australia” with the below text and attachments: Continue Reading

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I thought I would save the last entry in the recent series of Blog entries following our Western Australia Road trip to Shell Beach.

Shell beach, just a few Kilometres south of Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort is an amazing place.

From a distance the beach looks like any other ‘amazingly beautiful’ tropical beach with clean white sands and the glimmer of the warm turquoise green Indian Ocean on the horizon.   A sight pretty typical to the area.

The thing that makes Shell beach different is the fact that it’s not sand that makes the beach so white but shells!

Shell beach gets its name from the Billions of tiny white ‘Coquina Bivalve‘ sea shells also known as Cardiid Cockles which form a snow white stretch of beach approximately 110km long.

An amazing and very unusual occurrence and apparently one of only two such beaches in the world.

The shells are mined under special license nowadays for production of calcium for poultry feed and exotic mulch for gardens and planters (there’s plenty going spare) In the early years of Denham, blocks of the solidified shell deposits were also mined and used as materials in building constructions. Continue Reading

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Once we had decided to embark on our Road trip around western Australia, we had two options.

Option one: head down south towards the wine regions of Margaret River where we would spend the week touring the local wineries amongst beautiful landscapes, getting slowly drunker by the day OR

Option two: travel north to see some dolphins.

Despite the draw of a plentiful supply of cheap Western Australian wine, we had two extra people to consider. The Kids,   so option one it was and what a good decision it was to.

Monkey Mia is located midway up the West Australian Coastline, approx 850 kilometres from Perth. It   sits in the middle of Shark Bay which is a World Heritage Area.

We stayed at the Monkey Mia Dolphin Resort for two days which was a welcome relief to. After the previous days of intensive driving we were all pretty ready for a couple of days off.

Monkey Mia is one of the more unusual place names I’ve come across. Apparently Mia is the Aboriginal term for home or shelter, while the Monkey part of the name is allegedly derived from a pearling boat called Monkey that anchored at the now Monkey Mia in the late 19th century, during the days when pearling was an industry in the region.

It’s also been suggested that the origin of the name Monkey Mia could also be the pet monkeys owned by early Malay pearlers who camped at the location. All I know is that it’s a truly beautiful place. Continue Reading

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Since arriving down under I’ve already written about the wonders of the bird life here in Western Australia.

Coming from Northern England, the most exotic birds we saw were the pigeons we’d often see waddling around. The poor things normally had a toe missing or stumpy foot due to a close call with a piece of rubbish thrown away by one of the local yobs to!

I was pretty surprised to see this little collection of Birds sat in a couple of trees near one of the petrol stations we pulled into during our road trip.

If you were a pet store owner with a large net I’m sure you could have a field day. There were literally hundreds of Budgerigars and Zebra Finches.   Birds I’d only ever seen before in a Pet store back home.

The Budgies here in their natural-habitats of Australia are noticeably smaller than those in captivity. Whether that’s down to diet, breeding or what I’m not to sure but they all seemed pretty happy chilling out in the shade of this tree. Continue Reading

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As I mentioned yesterday, we travelled quite some distance during our road trip, 4449 kilometres to be exact and I have to say, I have never been so awe struck by the vastness of the place that we now call home.

The reality of the sheer size of Australia first struck home when I had to fly from Sydney to Perth on Business a year or so ago. The flight takes you from one side of the country to the other and (dependent on which way the wind is blowing) takes in the region of five hours

Yes, five hours people! Five hours flying in a plane over the same vast landscape. Absolutely amazing!

Driving through Western Australia was an altogether different and frankly, more amazing experience. I’d read stories about the remoteness of Australia’s roads but never fully appreciated how vast and remote some of these roads would actually be, some of them appeared to go on forever.

During our journeys, it wasn’t unusual to not see another single car or vehicle for 10 – 15 minutes at a time. There was just nothing else but mile after mile of endless tarmac. Continue Reading

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Well this is our third Christmas since we arrived down under and the family and I are really looking forward to a nice relaxing Christmas day.

The Turkey has been taken out of the freezer and the next 24 hours should hopefully provide sufficient time for the thing to be defrosted.We’ve also got some huge Tiger prawns which will be getting introduced to the barbecue in the next day or so

Junior number one is ultra excited that Santa will be visiting (probably via the air conditioning vents again due to the lack of a Chimney) and Junior number two will likely be trying her hardest to have a nice brown smelly present for Mummy and Daddy first thing tomorrow morning.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is Sunny and a balmy 31 degrees Celsius which is a stark contrast to the delights of the weather we used to enjoy back in the UK.

Speaking of weather. The cloudy sky picture to the left is a picture I took from my front garden this morning. I don’t know if it’s down to a sheer lack of ozone in Australia but the sky’s here are the most amazing vivid blues.

By Aussie Standards (or certainly Western Australian standards) this is a pretty cloudy day but the cloud formations looked pretty cool and I decided to get all Arty and take a picture.

The picture now acts as my desktop wallpaper. I know that many visitors to our site come from less sunny Climates (such as the UK so feel free to do the same.

To set the picture as your desktop, simply click the thumbnail for the full sized version and (in most browsers) right click with your mouse button and select ‘select as desktop’ or similar.

I hope you all have a happy and peaceful Christmas and on the basis that I don’t get food poising from poorly defrosted turkey you’ll be hearing more from us very soon

Cheers

Mark

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Now, for those of you who visit GDU regularly, you’ll remember the sense of wonder and awe that I managed to capture in my Australia day fireworks photo’s.

OK, perhaps blurry, out of focus snaps might be a better description but you still got the idea.

This morning, an email hit my inbox with the picture attached and I’ve gotta say, the guy who took this photograph did a slightly better job of capturing an Australia Day scene then I did.

As I’ve mentioned before in a previous post; apart from the main Skyworks display on the Perth foreshore that I took snaps of, there were also a number of smaller displays at Freemantle, Hillarys boat harbour and Mindarie.

If you click on the thumbnail to have a look at a larger version of the image (opens in new window), what you’ll see is a picture taken during the fireworks display at Hillarys boat harbour.

The panoramic picture shows people just to the North of Hillarys boat harbour enjoying the display from the beach. You’ll also see the fireworks themselves to the right of the photo, the Mcnaught comet floating through the sky in the centre and just to the right the lightening storm that hit Perth on that very warm and muggy night.

The photograph was taken by a 17 year old Finnish guy by the name of Antti Kemppainen. Many punters have been claiming that the photo is a fake, suggesting that multiple images were taken and then sliced together to create the picture you see here today.

There’s also the view that the photo turned out so well just by sheer luck!

Apparently if your technically savvy enough with your camera, you can lock the shutter on your camera open and then uncover the lens when you want to capture a particular scene.

This can give a long exposure for the comet when the lightning and fireworks were not visible and a shorter exposure to capture the lightning and fireworks and people sitting on the beach.

Sounds a little like to much hard work to me and I’d imagine your reactions would need to be pretty sharp to get such a short exposure using manual means.

With all that said though, I don’t really care. Even if the photo is multiple photos taken at different times and sliced into one big picture, it’s still pretty bloody impressive.

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