The word antipodes comes to us from Greek. It literally means “against the feet” or “with feet opposite our feet.” That is, it was the folks who were on the opposite side of the world from where you were standing.
For the British, that meant Australia and New Zealand, and Australia and New Zealand are still [...]
Entries from January 2009
January 30, 2009
The Antipodes
January 26, 2009
Sunshine City
Though Queensland is called the Sunshine State, Perth apparently holds the record as sunniest capital city in Australia. Despite a mild rainy season, Perth manages to score an average of 8 hours of sunshine per day for the whole year. Certainly, there are a few rainy days, but there are few that offer only rain, [...]
January 22, 2009
On to Perth
We ended the wildflower tour in a frenzy of collecting, photographing, labeling, and, as evening approached, saying farewell. We rolled into Perth at 6:15, and I grabbed a taxi to my hotel. When I awoke the next morning, it was time to discover Perth.
Perth is a great town for walkers, with a number of pedestrian [...]
January 17, 2009
Featherflowers and Grevilleas
Though I have photos of hundreds of flowers from the botany tour, I’m going to spare you from having to see them all. (Though I do hope you get to see them all in person someday.) But I thought I’d show you a couple more before moving on, out of the splendid wildflower fields of [...]
January 14, 2009
The Stirling Range
On the move again, we headed northeast from Albany, bound for the Stirling Range. These low, rolling mountains are the location of flowers that are astonishing even for this astonishing corner of Australia. Here, there are flowers that grow nowhere else—some of which, in fact, won’t grow anywhere else. One species, the Darwinias, or Stirling [...]
January 7, 2009
Albany Coast, Torndirrup Peninsula
In many places, the face that this corner of Western Australia presents to the sea is a hard one—great walls of ancient granite and even older gneisses.
The oldest rocks, the gneisses, pre-date almost all life on Earth. Scientists estimate that these rocks were formed between 1300 and 1600 million years ago, shaped by incredibly [...]
January 3, 2009
Happy 2009
Well, it has been a busy couple of months. I spent a couple of weeks in Japan over Thanksgiving and into December. Then I headed off to mom’s for Christmas for a week. But now I’m home, so I can get back to serious blogging, and posts will be more regular again.
The wildflower tour had [...]
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