Sunday, February 19 .....

I can’t believe the fuss that everyone is making about the video of Kevin Rudd showing frustration, and expressing this in a perfectly normal way. Have we become so precious that we can’t accept that some people deal with stress by mouthing-off. Swearing is a traditional part of Australian culture. I don’t necessarily agree with it but I’ve heard worse in a primary school playground. I wish the journalists could find another bandwagon and give us a break from the interminable ‘Will he, or won’t he make a bid for the leadership?’ Tony Abbott must be thanking his lucky stars that this distraction is keeping journalists from asking the hard questions about his lack of positive policies.

After my good walk yesterday, I had a quiet day at home. I had taken my GPS with me yesterday and realised that I had come very close to a number of geocaches so I took out the folder where I keep the data on the caches and sorted out half a dozen that I will pick up on my next trip to the Gorge.

It seems I have a busy week coming up: a Giant Steps Board Meeting tomorrow night, Rotary meeting on Tuesday and Craft Fair committee meeting on Wednesday. On Tuesday, we’re meeting at the Rotary Pavilion for a barbecue. We have a couple of containers there where we store Craft Fair equipment and we’ve decided that we’ll drag it all out and do a stock-take. As you can imagine, after the Fair all we want to do is get everything out of the way and out of the weather. We always have good intentions of repacking all the gear but only get around to it every third year or so. This is to be one of those years. I have been told that one container hasn’t been opened for at least three years so it will be quite exciting to see what is stored there.

As I have said before, I don’t read the local paper very often but I happened to pick up a copy yesterday when I stopped for coffee. There was an appalling article about road-kill. Tasmania has an unenviable reputation for the amount of road kill you can find anywhere you go. I’m sure there are various reasons why it is so prevalent here but it’s not a good look for a state which sells itself as a ‘back-to-nature’ destination.

Lloyd Whish-Wilson (what a great name!) has a farm at Hillwood just up the road from us. He said in his article that he was driven to write the article after finding a fully-grown echidna squashed on the road outside his gate. What hurt him was that it was run over on the centre line so the driver must have swerved to hit it. It wasn’t an accident. Andrew has been keeping records of the animals he finds along his road frontage. In the past two years he has identified a sea eagle, two Boobook Owls, a Little Owl, Swamp Hawks, two Quolls, several bandicoots and wombats, and innumerable possums and wallabies. I didn’t keep the list so I’ve relying on memory but the rarer animals and birds stuck in my mind. Andrew believes that a fair number of the victims were run down deliberately and, if that is the case, what sort of sick individuals are we allowing to drive cars. How on earth could you hit an eagle by accident?