I’m old enough to remember when the supermarkets did away with big brown paper bags and replaced them with plastic bags. The reason? To save the trees. Looking back it sounds crazy. These days everybody is wringing their hands over plastic and how it pollutes everything. Paper is basically organic matter, and will break down…
The Big Event of the week was, of course, the Super Blue Blood Eclipse moon. Forgive my jaundiced lack of excitement. The so-called super moon is just a shade closer to the Earth than a common-or-garden-every-28-days full moon. Nobody makes a song and dance when the Moon is at apogee (furthest away from Earth), but…
It’s the 26th January, 2018. Today is the 230th anniversary of when Captain Arthur Phillip planted the British flag at the site of what became Sydney in the state of New South Wales. The place is New, it’s in the South, and it’s a bit weird, like Wales. Get it? The Dutch were even less…
While my friends in the Northern hemisphere complain about the short grey days and the long cold nights, we in the South are either enjoying long summer days, or complaining about soaring temperatures. Many of us are also enjoying the summer holidays. For us, Christmas signals the beginning of the big break before work resumes…
I’ve been persuaded to write one more Norfolk article, on account of having forgotten a few things I’m told I should have mentioned <sigh>. I mentioned the little trip in the horse-drawn cart, but said no more since I didn’t go. I love horses, but they have a very nasty effect on me which has…
Norfolk Island is a stunningly beautiful place but it doesn’t take long before you realise what an enormous impact humans have made on its ecology. It’s a lesson to us all, I suppose. These days, importation of any animal or vegetable material to Norfolk is strictly controlled. We watched the cute little beagle sniffing everyone’s…
The third wave of immigrants to Norfolk Island were the people from Pitcairn Island, and they form the basis of most of the permanent population. The mutiny on the Bounty is part of their family history. It’s how their ancestors came to Pitcairn Island, a remote 2 square miles in the South Pacific. I suppose…
Norfolk Island’s early European history is entwined with the British penal system and the colonisation of Australia, so part of any visit to the island has to include the convict ruins, and the graveyard. There’s not much to show for the island’s first settlement in 1788. Here’s a short piece about those first colonists. When…
We just spent a week on Norfolk Island, a tiny speck of an island (~35 square kilometres) in the South Pacific a little over 1,600km North East of Sydney. What a fascinating place. The island is one of Australia’s territories, but even so, it had a high level of autonomy until July 2016, when it…
Isn’t it interesting how things go wrong at the most inconvenient time? When I wrote the blogs for our latest trip to Europe I entitled it ‘A series of unfortunate events‘, because so many things went wrong. Well, it seems the trip demons hadn’t finished with me. Not all that long before we left on…