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Pete's Churchill Odyssey 2005

19th Nov 2005
To Canberra ...

Saturday, 19th November, 2005
We had most of the morning free in Brisbane; just one mission to a bookshop to complete and we set off at the back of nine to wander across the river and rummage the town centre. A breakfast location wasn’t immediately obvious and so it wasn’t until nearly eleven that we settled for a smoothie and a pastry on the South Bank, at a patio covered in tables and ibises amid a throng of family shoppers.
We collected the car from the motel at about midday and navigated across the river and towards the airport, which was relatively straight forward. Dumped the car with an extra 381 Km on the clock from our travels, executed an express check in of the bags and then had an hour or so the gather thoughts before boarding the Canberra flight.
The flight down was uneventful, I read and slept …. Awoke for the in-flight sandwich and then read and slept again, awakening as the wheels hit the tarmac with a crook in my neck.
We disembarked and cleared arrivals with remarkable ease and met Stuart and Duncan out in the concourse by baggage reclaim.
Scooped the bags, got our car with only a certain amount of hassle; extra tax to pay on the deal and general inflexibility. We then followed Stuart around the city arterial roads and towards their house. We stopped at the lake opposite Government house as an introduction to the city, to the flies and to the pollen. It was at this point that I started my second batch of hay fever for the year !! that really is pushing it; once in the UK is quite sufficient.
Canberra’s a strange city, there’s nothing above about 10 storeys high and the city is designed with leafy suburbs and farmland corridors threading between the settlement areas. The effect is that when you drive along the roads around and through the city … or along the small suburban roads, you don’t get the impression of houses and buildings and manicured gardens but of houses fitted into the surrounding bush.
We arrived back at Stuart and Di’s and Anne and Di settled down to catch up over a couple of gins; Stuart and I swigged a beer and then went for a twilight wander up on the nearby Pinnacle Nature Reserve. From the gum tree at the top, there’s a spectacular view around. A view across rolling green fields with scattered gums and beyond areas of fresh green burnt clear by the bush fires of 2003. In another direction here are gum forests, which the fires didn’t reach.
From here it is possible to get some ideas of the area burnt; with at least 135 degrees of vision around affected, extending to over one million acres
We had various birdy encounters on the way, nearly all of them new to me. The search for the friarbird and its attendant leaden flycatcher ended up with the evening’s most significant find a tawny frogmouth which Stuart had been searching for, for some time. As we were standing on each others shoulders trying to get a view into the friarbird's nest, the frogmouth started its rhythmic call from nearby. It’s a ventriloquial much softer and quieter, bittern boom.
We both legged it in the general direction of the noise thinking it to be about 25 yards away and stopped to listen to get another reference point. The next time it called it was behind us; we’d actually run right underneath, it was much nearer than we had thought. Sitting on the branch two adults and three frogmouth chicks all sat very still and branch-like as I took some shots.
We walked back in darkness seeing a kookaburra silhouette against the last glow in the western skies. Di had prepared a superb roast of lamb, pumpkin and tatties, which we were all ready for.

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Diary Photos

A lone cricket lover

A look back at Brisbane

Canberra

Gum forest at Pinnacle Park

Tawny Frogmouths
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