These are some of the pictures we took during our visit to
Australia in September 2011. We spent the first week with our Aussie
friends Jane and Malcolm and our Japanese friends Michi and Mitsuko on a
tour of the Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide. During the second week we
visited friends in Canberra.
We've broken the pictures into groups.
We always enjoy flora, so
Bush Plants and Gardens contains pictures
of not only plants in the wild but also some in botanic gardens in Port
Augusta and Canberra, as well as some scenes from the Floriade festival in
Canberra. We also visited a wonderful botanic garden in Adelaide, but
haven't included pictures from there.
North Flinders contains shots from the
North Flinders Ranges, mostly around Arkaroola, including some from the
famous bone-shaking Ridge Top Track and a few from the air.
South Flinders contains pictures
from south of there in the general area of Brachina Gorge and Wilpena
Pound, including a picture of me next to the Ediacaran golden spike (small
disk to my right), which it was one of my goals to see.
Panoramas has a few mountain view panoramas.
Finally, there's a little snippet of movie of a
papa emu with chicks.
Overall, the Flinders Ranges country bears some strong resemblances to
parts of the Southwest United States. It's very dry and there are very
deep beds of sedimentary rock, uplifted and massively eroded. Flora and
fauna have evolved differently, but occupy similar ecological niches.
We hope that these pictures will convey some of the reasons we had such a
good time.
Charley and Leslie Navigation is fairly easy. Click on any small picture to
get it larger, then click on the forward and back arrows to go through the
lot. There's a sort of "home" icon next to the arrows
to get back to the thumbnails, and from there you
can click near the top to get back to this page.
If you have an interest in seeing pictures from our past adventures,
simply go up a directory
and scroll down to find links.