Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Alright, not quite Yowies, but....

In my first year of college in Rockhampton, some mates and I went camping in a State Forest to the north-east of town. It was Easter weekend. We got out there in the afternoon, set-up camp, relaxed... This was one of the odd Easter's when the full moon was on the weekend.

By about 9pm we also realised there was a lunar eclipse that night. Cool The forest was very quiet, lovely weather for moon watching.

We all watched as the last sliver of the moon disappeared. Then, all around us, dingoes started howling.

This kept on until the moon reappeared.

We didn't hear the dingoes at any other time that weekend.

Yeah, some moonlight nights can be mystical experiences in themselves.

I remember sitting on Echo Point one moonlight night (south of O'Reilleys on Qld NSW border) and watching the moon.

Not much of a story, but you had to be there.

Far away in time...... eh SNAG

Yeah (faint sound of "Science Fiction" from "Rocky Horror Picture Show" in background).

Thing is...I was alone at the time

There was another time...on Curtis Island (off Gladstone/Rockhampton coast) when my beautiful wife and I and kids were with a group of researchers from the Heron Is research mob (Qld Uni) helping them tag and study turtle egg laying on a hot and beautiful full moon...walking up the beach...when this enormous meteorite came in low on the horizon, blue/green trail...the biggest I have ever seen, would have traversed 90 degrees of the horizon maybe. Everyone had their heads in a turtle hole going ooh and ahh as the turtle laid, and I was jumping up and down yelling "Look at this", which no-one did.

The world is full of amazing things, if only people would lift their heads up and look...

If the weather is ok tomorrow I'm going out to check my marine system, see if the growbeds are ok, check fish size etc

This is my tinny at the Bedrooms, North Stradbroke Island, Moreton Bay

I can see there's been a bit of slow drifting and trolling going on there SNAG...

What do you go for mostly? You into flicking soft plastics around the mangroves...

I looove soft plastics, just came back a few weeks ago from seeing my eldest son and his wife in Cairns...did a bit of trolling up the mangroves there...some big bities watching us...one about 18 feet or so. The Minn Kota electric is just so useful...can troll up to about 6 hours on it depending on speed and current. I hope to get out tomorrow for some lizards (flathead), they go crazy for squidgy fish with the hot pink tail giving away trade secrets there

No lizards yesterday, big crackly electrical storm instead so we had to skedaddle. Been caught out like that before and it ain't fun in a little tinny.

Finally found my copy of "Green Mountains" by Bernard O'Reilly...p.185..."the Stockyard Creek depot was at the head of the gorge before the climb; it was a lonely spot; there was an iron roof without walls and the great tristanias towered one hundred and fifty feet above it. The floor of the gorge was a bare fifty yards wide and on either side the ranges rose steeply to a great height. While working on the telephone I camped there alone for some weeks, and on scores of other occasions, nights of storm and wind, I have taken refuge there, but it was impossible for me to shake off an uncanny feeling which always seemed to manifest itself there. It was not loneliness, that sensation was well known; upwards of a thousand nights of my life have been spent alone under the stars, mostly in jungle. This was something different, a feeling that someone or something was behind you, a feeling which made you want to look over your shoulder, as you sat by the camp fire. Other members of the family had noticed it too, something vague and indefinite, but something evil..."

And again...p.142, 146..."Away across the gorge from the jungle which clothed Cainbable Range came the friendly call of a mpopke and now and then the howl of a dingo, a sound which might just as easily have emanated from a damned soul. there was another cry, too, late at night, from the jungle a mile away, a thin high wail, which none of us could identify, but which we have facetiously named the Stockyard Creek Baqnshee. Almost every time I have ridden the Stockyard Creek track at night the "Banshee" has wailed from the far side of the gorge...The trips were nearly always at night with two packhorses; the reins and leading ropes clutched in one hand and a hurricane lantern in the other. Going round the cliff track there always seemed to be just a tiny, self-contained world within the lantern-light, and the rest an immeasurable void of blackness. Bats would descend from their shelters, volcanic blowholes in the dark cliff, and circle the light, frightening the horses; great white moths would come from the darkness-flutter briefly and pass on to their limbo. Night creatures screeched or howled, or called softly according to their nature. It is strange that in the jungle, creatures which call by day are almost without exception musical or soothing; while the cries of the nocturnals, with the exception of two or three, could be described as horrible. The great rainforest glooms majestically, crushingly, at night, and the lone horseman with his dim lantern, seems such a tiny, insignificant part of things. After twenty-five years of solitary night packing, it is just as strong-that feeling of being crushed and subdued by the vastness of the black world about me. But the jungle had other moods; spring nights when the light of a great white moon cut sharply down through the trees and the warm air was heavy with the perfume of orchid and jasmine; those were nights when we lingered outside the humpy after the horses were let go, loth to break the spell. There were nights too, of storm and wind, when the great trees bent over like an archer's bow, and the wild scene was lit by flares of lightning. There was loneliness on those rides, and sometimes fear, but never monotony."

Quite a storyteller, was Bernard...

Turn the lights out, turn the stereo way, way up, be beawry, beawry quiet, and listen to these...

http://www.oregonbigfoot.com/sounds.php

PS...put the kids to bed first, they may not want to after...

Snag, have you got "Songs from the Hills"? the book of poetry?

Yup, somewhere...most of my thousands of books are in boxes waiting for my new study/library to be finished, sometime about xmas...just had a quick look...can't see "Songs..." but I found "Over the Hills", reading for tonight!

My mum illustrated "songs" I have her autographed/gifted copy here in front of me

Just found my pride and joy...an autographed copy of Arthur Groom's "I Saw a Strange Land"...will keep looking