It’s coming on to 18 years since we moved from Victoria to Hervey Bay. Peter was having some medical problems and a doctor told him to take a couple of weeks off, get away from winter in Melbourne and go and lie on a beach somewhere. We did that. The beach was Brampton Island off…
I went whale-watching for the second time this season last Monday. I’d been watching the weather forecasts, looking for the very bestest day when the bay would be calm and the wind a zephyr and when the planets were in alignment I’d booked my trip on my favourite boat, Freedom III, for the following week….
I love Winter in Hervey Bay. The nights are cool, the days are mild, the humidity’s down – and in late July the whales start to drop by on their annual migration. They swim up the east coast (and the west coast, but that’s another population) to find calm, warm water to birth their calves,…
I can’t help thinking that we’re living through 1939 all over again. Czar Putin has his troops massed on Ukraine’s border. All he needs is an excuse to invade. Back in 1939, Hitler had security service (SD – Sicherheitsdienst in German) agents dressed in Polish uniforms attack a radio station in Poland and broadcast anti-German…
It’s that time of year again when the annual whale migration occurs. By now, most of the whales have been as far north as they felt like going and are on their way home to Antarctica. On the way, quite a few will divert into Hervey Bay for a frolic and a play, or to…
The beach at Hervey Bay is a great place to walk but if it’s high tide or you’re looking for a new experience, there’s always the pier. It juts out into the Great Sandy Strait for about 850 metres to reach deep water. Finished in 1917, it was an important piece of infrastructure in times…
Although we tend to go to the beach for our not-often-enough walks, sometimes we go to other places. That might be because it’s high tide and what remains of the beach is hard to walk on, or it might just be too hot for comfort. Or we might just want a change. One alternative is…
For a change from walking on the beach Peter and I visited our local botanical garden for the first time in… about fourteen years. Like most such places, it consists of several hectares of native vegetation plus a few hectares of developed grounds – lawns, walking paths, water features and the like. After our recent…
We went for a walk on the beach on Friday morning. It hasn’t happened as often as it should, I guess – but then, we’ve been busy in the garden, moving a mountain of mulch, painting, repairing edging, pulling out plants and sometimes planting them. And that all happened as we cleaned up the home…
After a short period of smugness as we in Australia compared our covid-19 statistics with those of countries like Brazil, the USA, and the United Kingdom, the virus snuck up behind us and yelled “SURPRISE!” But we in Queensland could still afford a bit of hubris. After all, the mounting figures were in Victoria and,…