Statues

You can find all sorts of small statues. These examples vary from about 2 to 3 feet tall or so. Some are women and some are men. Many are decorated with feathers, hair, natural fibers, or shell. You have to be careful with these - they won't let you bring them back into Australia if there are any signs of insects or endangered species...

Story Board

Story boards are a relatively new craft in PNG created for trade and are nice. Originally they were done on bark for display in the men's lodge. Later they were turned into carvings. You can hang them on walls or one guy told me he mounted his under a glass top to make a coffee table.

Typically they tell a story - this one has hunting scenes in it and what look like some village life of some sort.

Pots

Pots are among the craft items that are available. There is one style that looks like a fish with a wide mouth I like. I liked these with the faces. The coloring is not glazed - it is dry and powdery like a colored clay that is painted on. I bought one for David and the color is water soluble so it definitely isn't dishwater safe.

The School down the Street

This is the school at the bottom of the hill from where we live. I stopped and took the picture in early morning light with my little camera on the way to work. Unfortunately there are a lot of light poles and wires in the way of this church so I cheated and took them out with digital editing software. Click on the photo to blow it up and look at the pole - no wires.

I try to take pictures so I don't have to edit them. It takes time and I am lazy so mostly I just crop and align them and let it go at that. At times I will adjust perspective on pictures with straight lines at strange angles. I had to do this on the Crazy Clark photograph below.

Take a careful look at the picture with the lady and the dog below. Look at their shadows and then the people in the background. Did you notice the shadows were missing when I first posted the picture? I thought they were distracting on the original picture and took them out. It is fairly easy to do this on something like grass.

I always reduce the size of everything I post so they load faster on the blog. If you really like one of the pictures and want to print it just let me know and I'll send you the full size file...

Salt and Pepper

I noticed these salt and pepper shakers on the table when we were eating out the other day. They were sitting in front of a candle and my camera was pointed towards them. I pushed the button without even looking through the view finder and this is what came out...

Fossils

This fossil is embedded below the cliffs (they call them bluffs back in Arkansas) at Kangaroo Point. Click on the picture and you can see it isn't what it might first appear to be.

Brisbane is becoming more artsy than it was a few years back. Queensland was considered a backwater but now it is growing faster than any other place in Australia. I don't know if that is a good thing but it is a nice place and you can't hardly keep people away from nice places...

V = 8967

Australian Outback

This week I'm posting some photographs from the Australian Outback. Actually, it didn't seem that remote... It is more like a rural area, and is 240 km West and somewhat North of Brisbane. The location is Jimbour House where David had his Australian debut with the Brisbane Philharmonic Orchestra. Look behind Yebisu for a picture of Dave and opera singer Deborah Humble singing Carmen. The road heads out the back of Jimbour house. I was tempted to do a walkabout...

Outback Cactus Tree

You do see a lot of cactus out here. This one is very unusual. It is dry but there are more trees here in Southern Queensland than in West Texas. Australia is HUGE. In the Northern part of the state there is rain forest.

Outback Watering Hole

This is a man made stock pond just in back of the house. There is a small creek with a little standing water, but other than that, very dry...

Outback Tree

The trees, plants, and animals here have to be pretty resilient. I really liked the way the bark was scaling off this tree. It is winter and the leaves are scant, but I doubt this one is particularly leafy even in the best of times. The sky can have such beautiful deep colors at times and there always seems to be an intense sun.

Aussie Watering Hole

In Brisbane, there are lots of sidewalk cafe / bars - everybody likes to be outside. This one is in the middle of Queen Street (it is a pedestrian street now) and features television so that you can watch sports - another favorite Aussie activity.

They love coffee here but the closest thing to American coffee is espresso with heated milk - really a latte - but they call it a "flat white" since it doesn't have foam like a cappucino. There are lots of beers served - note that this one sports exotic Michelob as well as Cooper's Pale Ale.

There is something kind of neat about this picture that I didn't notice until I got home and downloaded it. Click on the picture and blow it up to full size then read the red poster at the bottom of the picture just to the right of the pastry counter. It is an advertisement for a soccer game to be played between Qatar and Japan that they will televise in this Australian bar. The world is a small place...

Crazy Clark's

This is Crazy Clark's Discount Variety Store in the basement of the Big W building on Queen's Street in Brisbane. Actually, I like Big W better. Big W is the discount section of Woolworths. It is a little higher quality than Crazy Clark's but doesn't suffer from the high prices you see at fancy name brand places like J C Penny or Sears. My kind of place...

Butterfly and Lantana

OK - I am back to taking some nature photographs again. This butterfly was checking out a lantana in bloom on Mt. Gravatt. Lt. George Gravatt was commandant of the penal colony here in 1839. Today there is a radio tower up on the summit and you have a view back towards Brisbane. There is also a nature park where I photographed this butterfly and the lorakeet below.

For those interested, the butterfly was about a meter away when I took the picture. Click on the picture so you can see it larger (but much lower resolution than the actual picture since I have reduced the size for faster internet transfer). I really like the texture in the leaves and note the way the veins in the butterfly wings match the color of the flower beneath. I took some other pictures of this same scene and each one shows a little different detail of the insect with it wings up or down, above or below the body. Neat...

Lorakeet

This lorakeet was in a tree about 30 meters away. I took the picture with my Nikon D200 with the tele zoomed out to 250 mm - equivalent to 400mm on a 35 mm camera. The picture has been cropped but that is all. I was pretty surprised it came out this sharp since the camera was hand held.

Lorakeets are parrot like birds that are sized in between parakeets and parrots. There were two of them in this tree sitting fairly close together but I couldn't get a good shot of both of them together.

Woman and Dog

This woman and her dog were enjoying the sunshine at the Scottish Festival on South Bank just down the river from the apartment. Scotties have a well deserved reputation for good temperament. I can't imagine too many other dogs happily wearing this outfit and a funny little furry hat. They weren't alone though...

Aussie Rules Football - Breaking Through

Here we are at an Australian Rules Football, start of the game, with the Brisbane Lions (Go Lions!) breaking through the banner. Australian Rules Football is not Rugby. It is played on cricket grounds and might be described as a cross between soccer, rugby, and maybe some American football mixed in. The ball is oblong and yellow. There is kicking (lots of it), running with the ball, a kind of punch pass, dribbling, and tackling. You have to kick the ball through posts to get points (outer posts are 1 point and inner posts are 6 points). The action never stops, and it has four 30 minute quarters.

Lions Fans

Fans like to get dressed up for the game and this gives you an idea of the stadium. It is round, and completely surrounded by the bleachers. It was a pretty cold evening and a bit windy. Here in Brisbane, we consider 50 degrees F a pretty cold evening :-)

By the way, this picture was taken at the bar which overlooks the grounds. You can order beer, wine, or a mixed drink, and there are plenty of delicious junk food offerings like fish and chips, sausage rolls, and such all around the stadium.

Lions Vs. Power

This gives you some kind of idea about the action in the game. Lots of running, passing, etc. Especially lots of running. It is more like a marathon than a sprint.

It was an exciting game. Brisbane started strong and fell behind by about 30 points at half time. They struggled until the 4th quarter where they made a tremendous effort and tied the game at 105 - 105 with only minutes to go. Unfortunately, the Power scored 7 points in the closing minutes to prevail 111 - 105. David ranks the game below basketball but above baseball. I think it is as enjoyable as either one of them. The players don't have to be large and endurance is at least as important as speed. Interesting game...

Possum Eye View

Here is a possum eye view, actually two possums, entering a garbage can in the park. I was walking home from work and heard them in the can. When I walked over, the one at the top popped his head up to look at me and then turned back to the business at hand. The fellow below him never looked up. I just stuck my camera out over them and snapped their picture...

Pelican Art!

Now this is real art. We also have the goofy modern style that nobody knows what it is. But this is cool! Click on the picture to enlarge it and you will see that the guy on the left has a propellor for a tail. Nice...

V = 8799

Mr. XXXX

Melbourne's got rain and Sydney's got yuppies,

Tassie got the chop and we got lucky,

Nobody does it like up here does it,

We love it up here,

We don't just like it, we love it!

We don't just like it, we love it!

We love it up here,

The people the places, the mates the faces,

The XXXX, yep, the beer up here, we love it up here!

XXXX jingle, early 1990s

I am tiring of taking artistic pictures of cities at night so I am switching to poetry. If the poem above doesn't make sense, try drinking a few beers. I twisted the beer cap in this picture off a bottle of XXXX and quaffed it just the other day. The same Mr. Fourex in his jaunty boater hat is visible on the brewery in Milton a pleasant walk from the apartment. He might have been modeled after a fellow named Paddy Fitzgerald (a lot of the convicts who came to Australia were Irish) or he might have been based on a well-known dwarf who sold newspapers in Fortitude Valley in the late 1920's based on my research. Nobody knows for sure...

Brisbane in the Rain

It was a wet and windy night...

Brisbane at Night

I like my new Nikon D200 camera. It does all sorts of tricks. Look behind Yebisu for cool pictures of David at the barbie and standing on the balcony. The trick here was a slow shutter, a bounce flash, and for this picture a wide angle lens.

I still take most of my pictures with my Canon point and shoot because the Nikon is so much bigger and heavier. I do like it though...

Brisbane on a Cloudy Day

Brisbane Central Busines District (CBD) projects out on a long lazy bend of the Brisbane River. From the balcony of the apartment it looks likes a city on an island.

Houston in the Rain

I like taking pictures of cities at night. This was taken right after the ballgame and there was a slight drizzle and a really gloomy look over downtown. I took my little Canon point and shoot, braced it on a chain link fence, and shot.

Ballgame

Here is a self portrait (I'm holding the camera out in my right hand pointed back towards us) of Cody and I at Minute Maid Ballfield watching the Astros whip up on Seattle.

Brisbane Fireworks

The other night there were fireworks again on the river. I don't know why. The River Cat that ferries people home from work is stopped in the river in the foreground waiting for things to let up. And there are fireworks being lit off of one of the buildings downtown in the right background also. Celebration is good...

Brisbane Sunset

This picture was taken upriver off of the apartment balcony in the same direction as the one above at sunset. It has been cloudier of late, and as such, there have been more colorful sunrises and sunsets. Natural fireworks... Having water outside your window seems to make things more interesting. It leads your eye to the horizon and people, the landscape, and the sky seem tied together. I like it...

Brisbane Possum

The first time I saw one of these little guys I thought he was a small racoon. Their color is a bit like a racoon and their rear legs are longer than the front so that they walk with their butt up in the air like a racoon. No mask though.

This fellow was in the park about to partake of his evening meal. He is sitting on a garbage can and climbed down in it just after I took his picture. They are marsupials and nocturnal just like North American possums. I think he is a little more handsome though...

XXXX Maroon

XXXX (4 eks) is the favorite beer in Queensland. Q: Why is it named XXXX? A: Because Queenslanders don't know how to spell beer.


And did you notice that the color of Queensland is maroon? This is deja vu all over again. The poor Texas Ags are grossly maligned and rally under the maroon flag too. The little guy wearing the straw hat is the XXXX mascot and XXXX is the local beer. Kind of like Shiner in Texas. Queenslanders are considered the hicks in Australia and they are fanatic about Rugby (thats what this banner is all about).

The Origins game between the "Maroons" and the "Blues" is at least as big as the turkey day game between Texas A&M and Texas. Obviously, as Queenslanders and Aggies, we are for the Maroons. Go Maroons! And don't forget to stop in at the local pub for a XXXX to get in the proper spirt :-)...