Uncategorized
April is a very busy month here especially in wet years. The cultivation paddocks have to be prepared for sowing and livestock need to be moved back to the grazing paddocks so they don’t eat the emerging crop. Autumn lambs need marking, weeds need spraying, last year’s lambs need trucking, calves need weaning, roads need […]
Ive had lengthy conversations with a farmer living on Wuradjuri land around Orange in the central west of NSW. His father & grandfather were farmers in the conservationist mode as well. The 3 generations have acted as custodians of their land rather than conquerors. This farmer also has a passion for scarred trees but is […]
Raining here again so Im reading another interesting book and loading the new TinTs I found mustering in Avon recently. The book is called Sapiens a brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and its excellent reading if you are isolating with covid or something – ”70,000 years ago Homo sapiens was still an […]
Out on Avon yesterday sampling Santalum lanceolatum aka wild plum or ngamumbirra berries which I find the yummiest of all the local bush tucker. I remember Freddie Walford picking some for the kids while we waited for the school bus years ago. The kids were pretty tentative & spat them out with much grimacing & […]
Late december brought temps In the high 30s and a dry electrical storm. The lighting struck in Myall which is a cropping paddock and the wheat stubble/ stalks caught alight. Only a few acres burnt because the Walgett fire brigade, our neighbour and our fencing contractors with the water truck put it out. La Nina […]
Ive been thinking a lot about these cohabitating trees lately and how they have managed to avoid detection for so long. People want proof to accept anything this outrageous but because of the nature of TinTs, proof is impossible. The host trees are almost always eucalypts and hollow so there is no way to age […]
Im reading an intriguing novel by Richard Powers called “The Overstory” about remnant old growth forest in the US & the people involved in trying to save it. Im only halfway through but have come across some fascinating research into how trees communicate both above & below ground. Although the tree species are different over […]
Some trees will, some trees won’t. Some trees need a lot of water and some trees don’t ….
I had a very interesting email from my friend & rangeland ecologist, Jen Silcock last week. Jen found these black wattle TinTs on the Dunkeld Golf Course south of Mitchell on the Maranoa in southern Qld. She writes “Both guests were Acacia salicina, both really large (one about 30cm diameter, the other much bigger but […]
The Gomeroi altered trees here in ways that are hard to understand now. They seemed to like circles & curves but I don’t think that was just for the aesthetic/ ornamental appearance of the trees. We know Aboriginal people navigated by the stars at night but how did they find their way by day? Im […]
Just because Aborigines used stone tools & weapons does not make them ‘stone age’ people. Just as hunter gatherers aren’t ‘cavemen’. This ongoing debate about whether pre 1788 Australians were nomadic or settled misses the point. Some people may have lived in villages and ‘farmed’ eels or fish & some may have grown native grasses […]