Cooktown Trip (Group 29) - Featuring the Branches on the Dead Paperbark Trees (Melaleucas) - Environmental Destruction/Catastrophe

I am posting 10 images in this upload which will be boring for some, but I like them. The reason I like these, is the artistic points I see in them. I like free flowing lines and shapes and I think these look nice, even though they represent destruction. The way the dead branches reach upwards in a crisscross disarray often set against the late afternoon cloud, appeals to me. This area is close to Finch Bay a few kilometres out of Cooktown.

 

It was in 2001/2002 in very poor rainfall seasons, that the whole extensive swamp area dried out allowing the salt water to rise towards the surface into the root zone of these splendid, large paperbark trees (swamp melaleucas) - "tea trees" to some. After that the whole area was taken over by many invasive weed species and rubbish trees. The Cook Shire is trying to repair the damage but gets no help from the State Government, but some from the Federal Govt environmental schemes.

 

I must add this poem that nearly all older Australians will know. One of the top patriotic poems of Australia:- (NOTE THE FIRST 2 LINES OF THE 3td STANZA) (For the non-Australians, the first stanza speaks about England, BUT then Dorothea in Stanza 2, takes her land Australia!

 

 

My Country

 

by Dorothea Mackellar (1885 - 1968) (Written 1907)

 

 

 

The love of field and coppice,

Of green and shaded lanes.

Of ordered woods and gardens

Is running in your veins,

Strong love of grey-blue distance

Brown streams and soft dim skies

I know but cannot share it,

My love is otherwise.

 

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains.

I love her far horizons,

I love her jewel-sea,

Her beauty and her terror -

The wide brown land for me!

 

A stark white ring-barked forest

All tragic to the moon,

The sapphire-misted mountains,

The hot gold hush of noon.

Green tangle of the brushes,

Where lithe lianas coil,

And orchids deck the tree-tops

And ferns the warm dark soil.

 

Core of my heart, my country!

Her pitiless blue sky,

When sick at heart, around us,

We see the cattle die-

But then the grey clouds gather,

And we can bless again

The drumming of an army,

The steady, soaking rain.

 

Core of my heart, my country!

Land of the Rainbow Gold,

For flood and fire and famine,

She pays us back threefold-

Over the thirsty paddocks,

Watch, after many days,

The filmy veil of greenness

That thickens as we gaze.

 

An opal-hearted country,

A wilful, lavish land-

All you who have not loved her,

You will not understand-

Though earth holds many splendours,

Wherever I may die,

I know to what brown country

My homing thoughts will fly.

 

Dorothea Mackellar

 

 

 

Done