Australian nature meets science and art. By Paula Peeters
Rain has emphatically returned to Beechmont in the last few days. Overnight we received 167 mm! I don’t like to complain about the lack of rain here, since we still tend to receive far more rain than many drought-ravaged places … Continued
I’m finding it a bit hard to be cheerful these days. Heat, smoke, prolonged drought and more fires. Frustration at the lack of action on climate change, while its effects are becoming more and more obvious. My beloved Lamington National Park is still closed, so I can’t go and lose myself in its leafy depths. But life continues, in all its beauty. When I take the time to look about, and look closely, I find many reasons to be cheerful.
Flame trees, jacarandas and silky oaks, are flowering wildly, against the smoke. Two months since we nearly lost our house in the Binna Burra bushfire, and fires continue to burn all around us. Our lives are saturated with smoke.
In this cartoon, spring has come to Beechmont, while Binna Burra has become like Shangri-la: mysterious and inaccessible.
A cartoon about last weekend’s unprecedented fire at Binna Burra. It’s wobbly because that’s how I feel right now. But all around our house the birds are singing and I heard a koala bellow just before I posted this. So life goes on, and I’m hopeful for the future.