The Flickr Welltaken Image Generatr

Gardening would seem to be a kind of investment in the future, yet here is my dear wife, hazily glimpsed through a window, busy at it as she always has been, but alas, with little future allotted to her. As she fades and her petals drop, so does my heart.

O Rose thou art sick,
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

WIlliam Blake

(As for most images taken with a lens wider than traditional 'standard', this needs to be viewed at large scale to have a sense of reality and impact.)

My wife was standing in the same spot, facing the other way, twelve years earlier when I took this shot A Last Grasp with an extension lens on an early iPhone 4.

Anthurium andraeanum, or painter's palette, according to my phone's plant ID, is listed in the NASA Clean Air Study as a plant that is effective at removing toxins from the air. Not much pollution on Maui anyway, in the garden at Napili Kai Beach Resort.

With the photography equipment at hand, the sulphur-crested cockatoo was not close enough to make it the essential subject of a picture, but I thought it was within range to become a contributory compositional element within a wider idyllic bush scene.

In Warrandyte State Park on the fringe of Melbourne, where ca 1870 a tunnel was blasted to divert the flow of the meandering Yarra River. This was to isolate an 'embryonic billabong' in order to mine alluvial gold. The adjacent picnic area is popular with both birds and people. This cocky has a good vantage point from which to survey the potential pickings.

Although I have made obvious reference to a famous French painting, the image also makes me think of more than one Australian painting, as well as the following verse...

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

― Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald trans)

As for previous. Inspired by La Vuelta, having raced past the spots where I threw my late-afternoon near equinoctial shadow, I only just made myself stop and go back to photograph them. This was obviously after the trail swings north, whereas I was facing due east for the other one.

(By contrast, my image 'The Solitary Cyclist' shows a silhouette of my former self, but this one is actually a shadow of my current self.)

On the Main Yarra Trail in Eaglemont, a suburb of Melbourne.

'Ordinary' = 'Penny-farthing' = 'High-wheeler' = old bicycle.

Inspired by La Vuelta, having raced past the spots where I threw my late-afternoon near equinoctial shadow, I only just made myself stop and go back to photograph them. Came out a bit grainy...

The light is realistic. Facing the other way to return back to this spot for the photo, I was nearly blinded by the sun's brilliance.

Near the tree shadow on the far side of the track, as the trail swings around to the left ahead, my own shadow changed shape and relative position. This is shown in the next shot.

On the Main Yarra Trail in Eaglemont, a suburb of Melbourne.

This variety (Corymbia maculata) is among my favourites of the subset of eucalypts known to me. They have dimpled surfaces with beautiful variable coloured smooth bark that sheds in summer.

The larger you can view this image, the better you can see the colours in the foremost tree and recreate the feel of being in this beautiful little copse. (The name given as the map location is incorrect. It should be the Melbourne suburb of Kew.)

Spotted gums are widely planted for urban landscaping in Melbourne. Although their natural habitat is mainly along much of the east coast of Australia, with wonderful stands in southern NSW in particular, they have also grown in an isolated pocket of my own state of Victoria. However, that was ravaged by bushfire in recent decades. The one report I have seen says that in 2020 the entire living remnant of the natural Victorian population of these trees was under one meter high, meaning that if herbivores or bushfires get to it before seeding can occur, it will be gone forever. And if it does survive, it will be decades before the forest is reestablished…

PS In other photos of eucalypts I've mentioned how well the species can grow in parts of the US. I came across a video of the fantastic American classical pianist Jeremy Dent playing Bach on a street piano, clearly showing one of these trees. Cultural and botanical appropriation! 😉 See inserted comment below...

One of a collection of Sculptures named "Lodstar" This is a bit of a first for me as I don't recall posting a Sculpture before and I certainly have never posted picture from a phone .I think I might throw my R5 away .Perhaps not!!.

Napoleon's prison island of St Helena was transferred from East India Company governance to British crown rule in 1834, a year before Europeans founded the settlement that was to become Melbourne, in the Port Phillip district of then New South Wales.

One Major Anthony Beale, who had been born on the island in 1790, retired from his EIC paymaster job and he and his family went first to England, surviving on a pension. However, in 1839 Anthony and his wife Katherine Rose took most of their very large brood to live and ultimately farm in the Port Phillip district (losing their eldest son to a drowning in Van Diemen's Land just before the last leg of the journey). They built a cottage and called it St Helena. By all accounts their life was content until Katherine died in 1856, after which Anthony built "Rose Chapel" in her honour. He spent more and more hours brooding in it and left behind a written record of depression. After his death in 1865, a son-in-law oversaw the conversion of the chapel into an Anglican parish church, St Katherine's.

The building strikes me as having elegant simplicity, within its conventions, and pleasing proportions. It was destroyed in a bush fire in 1957, but was reconstructed from surviving architectural drawings. Photographs show that the original exterior walls were of more traditional bricks, which had been hand made on site. The church and cemetery are still in use today, in St Helena, originally farming hinterland, but now engulfed as a sort of "sub suburb" of Melbourne.

NB I’m not a historian. The above is my paraphrase of what I have read since visiting the site. Throughout the entire imprisonment, and therefore also at the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, Anthony Beale would himself still have been living on the island of St Helena...

'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze;
He turned away the good old horse that served him many days;
He dressed himself in cycling clothes, resplendent to be seen;
He hurried off to town and bought a shining new machine;...

(Start of MULGA BILL'S BICYCLE by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson. High-wheelers are often used in illustrated versions of this classic Australian comic ballad, but they had been replaced by 'safety' bicycles by the time the poem was published. Still, this is a shining new machine and in town...)

These early bicycles seem counter to the appealing notion that the best solutions to problems flow from maximal simplicity and elegance. The latter is an aesthetic judgement, but simplicity is hardly contestable compared to chain-driven diamond-framed bicycles.

This immaculate bike is chained up on the footpath in front of a pharmacy shop in one of the most famous streets in Melbourne's CBD. In a font that is stylish but modest in size, the gold lettering on the front fork proclaims the commercial relationship. Apart from the machine's own novelty (to me), what caught my eye was the anachronistic contrast between it and the parked motorbikes visible through the spokes. I took several shots, waiting for the pedestrians to be favourably arranged, but the bike coming up the road in this one was serendipitous. In their heyday, penny farthings would certainly have been ridden up the hill past this very spot.

Zooming in reveals that behind the lamppost behind the penny farthing front fork, a modern push bike cyclist was also on the road. It would have been nice to get that properly in view as well.

This bike has 64 tangential spokes on the front wheel, but most of the illustrations of high-wheelers in my cycling books show the earlier radial layout. I am not sure, but it seems likely that the stronger tangential lacing was introduced some time after the start but before the end of the brief reign of these bikes.

Back to aesthetics — is a circle a beautiful shape, and if so, can one be more beautiful than another? The large wheel strikes me as very elegant…

Courtship dance. A pen and cob in love. Dance of the Big Swans. Synchronised swimming.

Minutes before this photo was taken, the pen was tenderly tending to a clutch of four eggs in the grassy verge of the pond, a little closer than the right hand corner here. After some minutes, she entrusted her eggs to the balmy sunshine, and waddled clumsily into the water where the cob had been idling all the while. When she reached him, the two immediately fell into a smooching greeting of clear affection. This turned into a formal amorous dance. They entwined their necks, alternately bobbing one head below the other's beak and nuzzling the top of its head under the other's neck, then briefly scooping the water with their heads just under the water. Occasionally, they mimicked each other's posture, but I failed to capture a moment where they made a heart shape like so _❤️_. This was the nearest I got. (Hence the alternative title.*) The sunshine caught in the circular ripples around them made me think of a spotlight on stage dancers. Reflections of the cob's beak and perhaps its tail are just visible in the disturbed water. They went on for so long that we had to leave them to it...

These black swans are native to Australia. They mate for life, they can breed at any time of the year (autumn on this occasion), and they share nest duties. They are more slender than white swans and are certainly not "mute". Apparently, they make a range of sounds, but the one I am familiar with is a lovely soft clarinet-like note, which is perhaps not surprising, given the length and thickness of their necks.

Some will have picked up a few of the things that appeal to me about this lady, but they cannot know most of what matters most to me. Hinted at here is one such, her capacity to be thoughtfully interested -- in everything under and behind the sun.

At morning coffee she was looking through a book she had given me for Christmas, a new collection of early Melbourne photographs (the splendid work of an enterprising young man while ‘doing time’ in COVID lockdown). Admittedly I'd been reading on my iPad, but her capacity for absorption was such that she had no idea I had been using its camera to take a shot for just about every page as she leafed through the book. That left me with a daunting selection task...

With days shortening and cooling, southern hemisphere Easter time has a different feel from that in the north, where it was invented. In this image other things might seem odd to those who live some way north of the equator -- orientation of the moon and its northerly location when high in the sky (as revealed by the weather vane, not the church itself, which appears to have its 'liturgical east' facing north west!).

Taken in fading equinoctial light on a stroll back to our motel after a pub meal in the town centre of the old gold mining town of Beechworth in Victoria, Australia. The Old Beechworth Gaol is on the other side of the road, behind the camera. Saints on one side, sinners on the other. An alternative is to continue up the road, the original route to Sydney, where there’s no difference…. 😉

Wear a Helmet......? To keep bats out of your hair maybe?

Corridor of 'The Stick Shed' in Murtoa, Victoria, Australia. (For details of the intriguing building, see image 'Timber and Corrugated Iron Cathedral', taken on the same day .)

Tourists doing the Kata Tjuta part of the Uluru -- Kata Tjuta National Park on a morning in winter-time in central Australia.

(A few moments on from an earlier posting If You Can't Go Over It...)

Canon Digital IXUS 860 15.