Some Local Fauna

Got to spend the weekend with my friend Rodney who I know from Toowoomba, where I taught during a break from grad school. He has a sheep property near Longreach in outback Queensland. More about there when I go visit sometime.

We went to Eden 5 hours south of Sydney, which was far enough to be clear of the school holidays crowd (past Wollongong, Gerrigong, Ulladulla, Numbugga, Yatte Yattah, Jerrawangalla....) The big tourist attraction there is a museum that has the skeleton of Old Tom, the leader of a pod of killer whales that helped the whalers in Eden in the early 1900's by herding other whales into the bay and then coming to shore to tell the people to rush out to hunt.

Mostly though we wanted to see live whales, and that we did. Never while the camera was poised of course, but we saw humpback whales breaching just a few hundred meters from the beach just below the cliff in the first picture. From our hotel even we could see a lot of slapping of flippers and tails. Really fantastic. We also saw dolphins and no shortage of beautiful birds (lots of the wild birds here are parrots). The animals that stayed more still got their pictures taken. Mr. Goanna is about 2 feet long, maybe 3 with all that tail, and Mr. Hoppy is a common grey kangaroo, but still, cool.