Australia, 2005

Wikipedia's really fascinating article

Wikipedia material on the delightful platypus

I thought the following information was really interesting.  It is the area of each country in square kilometers, rounded to the nearest 500,000.

Russia 17,000,000
Antarctica 14,000,000
Canada 10,000,000
United States 10,000,000
China 10,000,000
Brazil 8,500,000
Australia 7,500,000
India 3,000,000
Argentina 3,000,000
Kazakhstan 3,000,000
Algeria 2,500,000

Follow the first link above for an excellent documentary on evolution in Australia. My mother was a zoologist, a rather playful one at that, as among the very first words she taught me were "an Ornithorhynchus anatinus is a duck-bill platypus" and "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (largely discredited).  In its article on the platypus Wikipedia notes, "this egg-laying, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it".  Delightful! So when the opportunity arose to spend a month in Australia seeing all its creatures up close and  personal, I seized it with every appendage I could muster.  See the second link above.

My wife grew up in Melbourne so that's where we headed to start our month-long adventure.  It started off really, really badly.  Based on her previous experience with Qantas she told me it was a great airline.  However, in the time since she had last flown with them they had declined, notably in the area of succumbing to the sardine imperative.  The seat in front of me was so close that I had real problems holding my book up. That lasted some 15 hours.  Enough said.

We were picked up by my wife's sister and brother-in-law whose place served as our staging area. We had the use of one of their cars and I learned how to drive on the left with a right-hand drive car.

The Great Ocean Road

Adelaide	Bonnie Doon	The Emerys	Cleland Reserve
Eureka Stockade	Fairy Penguins	Glenrowan: Ned Kelly	The Grampians
Great Ocean Road	Hanging Rock	Koalas	Melbourne
Mount Gambier	Phillip Island	Power's Lookout	Sovereign Hill

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