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April 6, 2023 WOOLBALES LOOP If you’re perfectly sane, what do you do on your day off after three days of farm fencing repairs and various other general chores? Why of course, you go on a 19km hike. And you don’t let yourself know you’re going to do that distance, because your journey is open-ended, …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2023 Volume 2”
February 16, 2023 MT CLARE / DEEP RIVER LOOP Do you ever wake up on a day off without having a clue that you’re about to have an unforgettable day in an ancient ecosystem? Yes, we had a day off, and yes, we often hike on a proper day off. But summer means scorching Antipodean …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2023 Volume 1”
November 3, 2022 PARRY BEACH / MAZZOLETTI BEACH I’m looking at Track Map 7 (Walpole region, d’Entrecasteaux National Park to Greens Pool/Elephant Rocks) to see how many more gaps there are in our hiking of the Bibbulmun Track. We do half-day and day hikes, as return walks from an entry point – and by that …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2022 Volume 6”
This week we got a sneak preview of the upcoming Cure album when the band gave two new songs an airing in their first gig back since the pandemic began. This is courtesy of phone footage posted on YouTube – not generally something I watch, but I will make an exception for this occasion (and …
Continue reading “Songs Of A Lost World – Two Grief Songs for End Times”
August 17, 2019 CD-2 I’ve really been looking forward to writing this next part – the last section of the previous instalment felt kind of like homework I had to get through – my listening has been ahead of my writing, and there’s some songs I’m falling in love with on CD-2! The opener, A …
I’ve long meant to properly curate the accidental prequel that started the whole Exploring the Back Catalogue thing for me.
I was on an alternative music forum when we acquired Join The Dots and was participating in a Currently Listening thread. Suddenly I was mostly currently listening to Join The Dots, which there is rather a lot of – and as usual when I’m listening to music that gets me thinking, I wanted to write about it and, eternal optimist that I am, perhaps even be able to engage in comparing notes with other listeners…
September 15, 2022 VALLEY OF THE GIANTS TO BOXHALL ROAD Today we did a 14.5km walk on the Bibbulmun trail, from Howe Road to Boxhall Road and back again, and from there to the Valley of the Giants and back again. As we’ve done so many coastal trails recently, we felt like going back in …
Continue reading “South Coast Wilderness Walks 2022 Volume 5”
I finally got around to listening to this album 40 years after its release. Just saying that gives me the bends. It was the year I arrived in Australia and within 12 months pre-teen me was hearing Boys Don’t Cry, and Let’s Go To Bed on 96fm in its 1980s relatively independent phase before it was sold to a mainstream entertainment company. Those were the days, say I in a mock creaky voice, because 96fm was a unique station staffed by music buffs who actively educated listeners on music history and kept their playlist both broad and deep, playing 60s, 70s and what was then contemporary 80s music, album cuts as well as singles, and regular live concerts – all of which was relevant in a pre-Internet world, where you were at the mercy of radio stations, your friends, and your own puny budget in what you would end up accessing.
We talked as we walked along, about how happy we always feel to walk in intact nature as it’s supposed to be, away from the scarring on the earth that has been imposed by broadacre agriculture, industry and urbanisation. The biological riches of these areas are mind-boggling and took millions of years to evolve. This is nature for millions of species, not nature stripped away to serve but one. When we walk along in places like this, the ratio of humans to landscape is about right and there is a pervasive sense of balance.
Welcome back to my open music journal. It’s about to get underway again after a hiatus, and here’s why it’s been a year since I wrote anything new.
Last year I took a break from it to move the material from a forum onto my own space. You’d think that the best place to write this stuff would be a public forum specifically for the audience of the band whose back catalogue I am exploring. After all, my husband has a thing for writing recreational essays on the Cyberman episodes of Dr Who audio dramas, and duly places them on Gallifrey Base…