Arriving by ferry from Circular Quay, Sydney.
Tag: photography
Golden Windows
WPC: Yellow
Some sunny colour spotted ‘Downunder’
Thank you WPC for giving me an excuse to post more photos from Australia, this time with a yellow theme 🙂
(please click on an image to scroll through and enlarge)
Kayak
Plover
Gum Tree
Stained Glass – Canberra Library
Noisy Miner Bird
Paper Daisy
Floating above Manly Wharf
Dressing up in the Chinese Friendship Garden, Sydney
Grevillea
All You Need is LOVE
David Jones department store is famous for its animated Christmas window displays. And rightly so. I’m only sorry I didn’t get out in the evening to capture these all lit up, but trust me, they are superb and every child in Sydney ought to be taken to look at them.
Ursula Dubosarsky the award-winning Sydney children’s author was thrilled when asked to write an original story with an Australian flavour for the windows this year.
“I was thinking kangaroos, wallabies and koalas,” Dubosarsky says, but she quickly came around to the idea of using a reindeer. “It suggested a nice story of the Australian experience, which is very often an immigrant experience. Apart from indigenous people, we all appeared here from other cultures.”
Dubosarsky took home the toy reindeer to use for inspiration, as she often does. “You get a bit more personality from a toy. You know how it is, you think your teddy bear is talking to you,” she says. “I still use that technique, so I sat there with the reindeer.”
Cat
Cat
Cat
Dog
Dog
Reindeer
Reindeer
Reindeer
Happy Ending
The End
The tale he told her, Reindeer’s Christmas Surprise, was about visiting all his animal friends with presents, before getting a lovely surprise himself at the end of the story.
Happy Christmas Everybody…!
New Zealand Wrap-up #2
Sailing
Auckland is the largest city in New Zealand with a population of 1.4 million and the greatest concentration of Polynesians in the Pacific. It is known as the ‘City of Sails’ and it is thought that 1 in 3 people own some form of watercraft.
“Latin skies upon Chinese lagoons
tousled, sunny-mouthed, sandy-legged coast”
~ Poet Allen Curnow
Ultimate Holiday
Ruapuke Beach is reached via a winding dirt-road that snakes its way through native New Zealand bush and lush green rolling hills beneath the foothills of Mount Karioi, an extinct volcano that watches over the town of Raglan.
The black volcanic sand is so hot that when the waves come in steam rises! Surfers ride the waves. the only ones we have seen along the coast today. Rock pools are a rich source of photographic inspiration; tiny crabs scurrying one way then another in the shallow pools, a red crab hiding under a rock, green and shiny mussels, black barnacles, starfish waiting for the tide to turn, shiny seaweed drying on the rocks. Black sand.
In the Country
Unusual mailbox
Daisies
Waikato is dairy country. The green rolling hills are home to cattle and wild flowers. And views.
Arts and Crafts
Raglan is home to many artists who produce original art, carvings, jewellery and other handicrafts. Shopping here can be an expensive pastime!
Te Parapara Garden
In pre-European times there were many gardens on the banks of the Waikato River. Te Parapara takes its name from a pa that was located on the site of Hamilton Gardens. This garden illustrates Maori horticultural traditions and technologies.
Maori horticulture is closely connected to spiritual beliefs. Gardens and gardening practices have ritual aspects. The carved figures on the palisades (pouwhakarae) represent specific ancestral figures.
This brings me to the end of my New Zealand adventures. I have only seen a tiny portion of these amazing islands, but what I have seen has impressed me. A lot. I will be back…
TRAVEL WORDS 