No matter how many times you look at Mount Tongariro, you feel the same awe when first seeing it emerge from the white. Its snow-swept sides, its changing colours throughout the day, its valleys carved from ancient glaciers and its twelve cones blasted through the earth’s crust over millennia, together paint a landscape of immense beauty.
Continue reading “Sleeping in the shadow of Mount Tongariro”
Seen from the heavens, Mount Taranaki is an inverse bomb crater. Instead of a smouldering hole at ground zero surrounded by a graduated ring of devastation, Mount Taranaki is a colossal peak covered in thick life, with mankind’s eradication of nature ring-fenced by a perfect circle surrounding the summit.
Continue reading “Walking the deep past of Mount Taranaki”
For more than one hundred million years, the colossal Myrtle Beech has stood tall against a changing world. Despite ice ages, continental drift and man, these giants have survived in the remote corners of Australia’s highlands, sustaining an ecological link to Earth’s ancient past.
Continue reading “Meeting the ents of Tarra Bulga National Park”
“We’ve been coming here for thirty years now”, some hikers tell me, “and we’ve never seen so few orchids.” Once abundant in this small patch of heritage forest, the Butterfly Orchids are today hard to spot among the Strzelecki scrub.
Continue reading “On the trail of the Butterfly Orchids of Morwell National Park”
Survivors of ecological cataclysms, links to Earth’s ancient past, the ancient forests of Gondwana are a wonder of the natural world, but they could be facing their final days.
Continue reading “Walking the last forests of Gondwana, at Barrington Tops”
“Do not say…” an Egyptian sage wrote, …“that I’m too young to be taken – you do not know your own death. Death, when it arrives, robs the child from the arms of the mother, just as it does to the elderly.”
Continue reading “The short life of the Hawara child, AD 40”
Heralded as the cradle of Spanish Christendom, for centuries the alpine sanctuary of Covadonga has been a site of miracles for the faithful, a haven for the pilgrim. But today, Covadonga’s spiritual significance becomes universal, as a sacred site for the biosphere during the age of the anthropocene.
Continue reading “The endangered sublime of Covadonga, Asturias”
Imagine if tomorrow humanity were to reverse the current calculation for valuing things; where now we prize the new and the fast, the large and the easy, tomorrow we treasure the slow and the old, the small and the hard-gained. What would fetch the highest price in this market of tomorrow? An amble through an old forest, the glimpse of a lyrebird feeding her chick, a night spent in silence on the high seas: how high would the auction go?
Continue reading “The flower that conquered sultans and speculators”
Underneath a skyscraper city, there is little time for patience, and few spaces for contemplation. But today in the shade of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney’s own bonsai master is giving a lesson in the quiet art of the bonsai.
Continue reading ““The bonsai responds to our heart” – meeting Sydney’s bonsai master, Megumi Bennett”
Lives and Times 