Nature

Even though it meant getting up at 6am on a Saturday, I leapt at the chance to drive out to York over the weekend. I've been in the city for too long. I was beginning to fall into that comfortable illusion that everything important in the world lies within a ten kilometre radius of a large metropolitan centre. This sort of thinking can only lead to all kinds of delusion and foolishness, such as paying $800 for a pair of shoes, criticising the bakery for not stocking the right variety of ciabatta, and voting for the Greens.


We had a barbecued breakfast of bacon and eggs, cooked on an old iron plate over an erratic fire, and went tooling about in a forty year old Land Rover across the paddocks of my friend's family property. In between I went off by myself for a while, just tramping through the bush reconnecting with the Australian environment. The background was dominated by the distant emerald green of the young wheatfields and the heavy grey of the sky, but all around me were the ochres, silver-greys and olive greens of the bush, punctuated by the YELLOW and BLUE of wildflowers, so vivid that a flower the size of a coin could be seen from the opposite side of a gully.





The Donkey Orchid, so named because, from certain angles, it looks sort of like an elephant. On a pogo stick.





Lechenaultia Lieschenaultia Letchenaultia Small Blue Flowers. Named after the famed French botanist Jean Baptiste Small Blue Flower de la Tour.





Prickly Moses. Well you try spending your infant years in a waterproof basket and see how easy you are to get along with.





They look like delicate little snowdrops, but they are in fact carniverous. Never trust a plant that eats flies by choice.

I also saw a Western Red Kangaroo. "Hi, roo," I said. It gave me a wearied look as if to say, "Bloody tourists", before languidly hopping away.