Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Kookaburra - feathered laugher

I've always liked Kookaburras. What Australian doesn't?

I think I remember reading about them in David Fleay's book on Australian animals when I was a child and definitely loved reading research about their communal nature and things like why they trapeze fly.

It's not surprising that one of the stories in my storytelling repertoire is one I created with prep students about a kookaburra and a rather 'muddle headed' but heroic wombat.

We used to have kookaburras visit us at home. They would sit on the clothes line under the mango tree and laugh and look for worms and bugs in the compost. There are too many construction sites around us now and although we still hear the occaisional one in the distance they don't come visiting like the butcher birds, magpies and rainbow lokikeets.

Still they always sound like home.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.


And here's the poem that inspired that video on bubbl.us - you can move it around and zoom to see it.










Sunday, April 04, 2010

A Question of Balance

Caught the bus over to the Royal Brisbane Hospital to visit my mum today. She was gardening and took a step back rather then forward, tripped on a rock and landed with a hip crunching force on the concrete drive.

Watching and listening to the parallel dramas of the public hospital ward has really brought this question of balance up in my conciousness this week. Things like - use this painkiller and you will be able to handle the essential physio treatment but it might cause some nausea. Well something has certainly caused a fair bit of nausea for my Mum.

Still, despite the superbug in the ward and the shortage of moniters etc, she is getting really good treatment by the staff and I've learnt a very neat way of taking off the disposable apron and folding it into each of the disposable gloves before consigning them all to the bin, thanks to watching a wardsman.

I got off the bus at the Roma Street busway on the way home and walked across the Kurilpa Bridge and took in the Asia Pacific Triennial again. Watched a video that Suse Wolf recommended. She said it really made her glad that we lived in such a wonderful country as Australia so I was curious. I had to agree really. It was a commentary on the ugliness of the rapid industrial development in the three dams area balanced with the beauty and colour of the pots of flowers the two men were carrying. I hope our Lord Mayor got to see it.