Author Archives: matte

Oct20

At the races

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At the races

The Spring Racing Carnival is a pivotal point in the annual racing calendar around Australia. Not all events are big like the nation-stopping Melbourne Cup.

In regional centres like Toowoomba, Queensland there are a number of events like the Glennie School Race Day.

This season is notable for being one of the last to be run on Toowoomba’s artificial surface called “cushion track”, instead of grass.

Of course many don’t care, flutter on horses based on the jockeys silk colours or the appeal of the horses name and generally have a good time!

Oct11

Northern Main Range National Park

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Northern Main Range National Park

One hundred kilometres south-west of Brisbane, Queensalnd, Australia, the Main Range National Park is on the western part of the famous Scenic Rim—a spectacular arc of mountains that is largely made up of the eroded edge of a giant ancient volcano that first erupted over 24 million years ago

The area is cloaked by the even more ancient Gondwana rainforest. Walking tracks take us past living fossils, plants that hold clear links to those plants that existed 100 million years ago on the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.

Equaling the plant diversity is the diversity of birds, who’s calls echo through the forest.

Here is just a quick snapshot.


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Oct10

A walk to the hidden creek in Redwood Park

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A walk to the hidden creek in Redwood Park

Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia is perched atop the Great Dividing range at a height of just over 700 metres above sea level. The ‘escarpment’ is home to several bushland parks that cling to the steep inhospitable hillsides. All of these parks have walking trails that allow access to some of the inner secrets of this otherwise inaccessible terrain.

The walk takes in several landscapes, from the green desert of the privet forest where nothing else grows, through a patch of native woodland before emerging into the hidden fern gully. The gully is in the early stages of regrowth following the devastating floods of January 11, 2011 during which a huge volume of water cascaded down this gully, sweeping all before it. So during this visit the ferns were not so evident, but signs of the destruction were easy to see.

The walk that descends around 350 metres and the decline traverses many layers of basalt and tuft rock, before culminating in the creek bed that is like a journey back in time with sandstone that was deposited over 200 million years ago.

 



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