Christmas and New Year 2017

The weather here in Melbourne has been quite variable over the Christmas and New Year period. The temperature has changed considerably and to use an old expression, it’s been up and down like a ‘whore’s drawers’. Christmas Day was hot at 36C and then it cooled down to about 20C for other days. This is not new but is noticeable. I can remember many ‘century days’ at Christmas when I was young. (The days when the temperature reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit – before we instituted metric measurement in 1966).

On Boxing Day, my family all got together at my brother’s place in the country. On that day, the temperature was in the mid 20’s and it rained gently during the afternoon. It was still warm enough for the kids to enjoy some time in the pool. A few days later, we had an enormous dump of rain when a thunderstorm produced 50mm of rain (2 inches in the old scale) in our suburb in just over an hour. I still have water somewhere in the electrical circuit that supplies my workshop and outdoor lighting. The safety cut-out keeps tripping when I turn that circuit on again at the meter box. I’ll wait for a couple more days and see if it dries out naturally before calling an electrician.

Jill and I are not very big on New Year’s activities and didn’t we do anything special on New Year’s eve. However, the images on TV of fireworks in Melbourne and Sydney (as well as many other places around the world) looked stunning.

One of the joys of retirement is that most days are the same as others, however yesterday was a public holiday ( a day in lieu of New Year’s Day because the real day fell on a Sunday). We decided to have a day out. Just before Christmas, I was lucky to be an early recipient of a new and upgraded version of my camera and I was anxious to try it out.

It was a cloudy day and ideal for photography in the forest. There would be an even light with no harsh shadows and over-bright sun glare. We were unsure of a good location but Jill suggested that we head towards the Strzelecki Ranges in South Gippsland. We might have bitten off more than we could chew as we left home a little late and didn’t get back home until early evening. Getting the towns of Yarram and Yarragon confused meant that we ended up much further way from home than I thought.

These mountains are about 200 kms south-east of us and one of the most beautiful areas is the Tarra Bulga National Park. The sections of this park lie in deep gullies where Myrtle Beech trees and broad tree ferns proliferate. it’s a beautiful temperate rain forest area. The surrounding area is still logged and there must have been a lot of small settlements dotted throughout the mountains in the old days. As we drove, we occasionally came across a sign that denoted that a particular spot was once the site of a township or a school. I doubt that these places ever thrived, let alone bustled but they would have been active with a sawmill and a small surrounding community.

I walked along a couple of tracks that followed pretty little streams and took photos as I went. This is what I saw.