thank you Patricia Anne :)
I’m so glad this came to mind… it will be so fun to give this to dad on a greeting card one day :)

hey kj…yeah, dad always (and still does) had a ciggie hangin out his mouth….he still does his gardening, fishing or whatever …. but the ciggie will always be there…

..nearly all the chicks survived, they were revived by a fire to warm them, it took a few hours…

i’d only seen yellow chicks from the hens before that, and assumed the turkey chicks splodges and colourings were dirt….

I was just trying to ‘help’ lol

Hey Samantha..
The chicks had to be warmed and rubbed near a stoked fire…..most were revived….
my mum says i was tugging her skirt to tell her “I washed the birdies” but she and dad thought i wanted them to ‘watch the birdies’ and delayed coming to see…

Upon arrival at the scene, it was duly noted, I had ‘laid them all out in a row’....the poor little chicks….

I was only trying to ‘help’!!

thanks again Sam…i’ve ordered the book ‘My Family and Other Animals’ by Gerald Durrell through my local library…should have it soon….and i really will enjoy reading this!!

thank you so much Sam…sorry i forgot to thank you earlier :) glad you can see it all now :)

..hey thank you !!
I didn’t expect anyone to really respond… that’s very nice that you did. I was born in 1965 and being the firstborn, did have a lot of photos taken…. it’s such a shame not to have them, but as long as you have the memories… sometimes for me, the photos bring back, or help recapture fading memories..it’s lovely to have them…

now and then, i stop and just look at them and reminisce…it’s a lovely feeling to be able to do that…

i keep this photo in a dear little pebbled frame in my studio and when i look at it, it lifts my spirit and i feel connected, strengthened and encouraged to perservere :)

Hi tonilouise, thank you so much for looking and commenting….i am so happy you like my childhood memory captured in a snap…thank you again! Hugs xox

oh no Sam..i have not heard of this book…i’ll try and google it and see if i can find it tho….i did always love Dr Doolittle (still do) and his travels and chats with the animals :)

Hey Sam, i just located some text on the internet, it sounds wonderful…i will have a good old read of this later on :)
thank you so much!

Hi blossom…it certainly seems that way … thank you very much….(now you see why your images capture something special for me hey!!)

Hi Keith, yes, thank you so much! It does make one ponder about these things. The only thing i’m very good at with my children is taking them to the rockpools…i love to find things and explain what they are…i have a great fascination for things that are ‘dangerous’.........we had fun one day (as grown ups) with my children when my dad came to visit….he could just tell there was an ‘occy’ under the ledge of the rockpool…because of the little bubbles floating to the surface….he jammed his hand in their and reefed the poor thing out and we all (my children included ran screaming and jumping with excitement)....
I wish I’d done more with my kids, to show them nature…but a child has also to find wonder in nature…and not all children these days find this an easy task with computers etc…. and the norm being to ‘stay inside’....i would encourage them with ‘bug catchers’ out in the back yard, and to look at the beauty inside the flower, or the leaves…. now they come running to tell me when there’s a beautiful sky to be viewed, etc… so perhaps they do now begin to show a love for nature. My sisters children are very lucky because they live right near my father…(their grandfather) and he has instilled this love of nature in them.

Every afternoon, at a certain time, dad feeds all the birds …. hundreds of them flock to mum and dad’s verandah…at first there were just maggies (magpies) but now there are all sorts, and it’s magnificent to watch…not to mention that from their view on the hill they have a 180 degree view of the ocean and ‘whale watch’ the season from start to finish… i wish we didn’t live so far away (only an hour) but too far to be there for such occasions…...ie…quick, look, there’s a whale going by…. i often am on the phone, and mum will start gasping and i’m saying….what’s goin on Mum?? and she’ll say o shit…the fishtank just burst… or omigod your father just split his leg open doing some crazy thing…or stop everything, the whales are jumping!!!

so yes, what a wonderful life they gave me and what a wonderful life they still have, always surrounded by their love of nature :)

I’m sure you would have had a super impact on your children….i have always adored the TassieDevils….

lol…thank you Sylvia…i bet you would have touched it too, had you been encouraged and felt safe, as i must have here in the photo…...hhaa… if only i really was brave!! but thank you very much!!

Hey Jak…thanks, yes…i am lucky to have had the life I’ve had…..for many years, i wasn’t grateful for it….but when i speak to other people it helps me realise how fortunate i really have been…i’m sure your son will feel the same Jak….you make sacrifices and the kids know it later, when they’re all grown up :)
hugs xoxo

hehe…yes, funny that!!!
i could still use the same ‘catch cry’ today….as i still get myself into all sorts of trouble! thnx so much kaz xox

thank you so much tcups :)
yes, i treasure this photo, it’s framed in my studio and i look at it when i need encouraging :)

hehe….i’m sure you would have touched it too…you just have to feel very safe in the handlers skills…which i must have felt…i wasn’t brave!!! I think i was scared too :)

aw, thanks so much (you have to catch them tho!!) i am so glad you enjoyed this…you are so sweet, your comment spread a big happy smile over my face!! xox

thank you very much Sharon, i will check that out ….it’s very kind of you….. and you know how much i love your wildlife images!! :)

thanks again Sharon…i’ve ordered the book through my local library !

..now you’re talking!! yes….. that’s it!!

yes…that would be lovely to see Janis….!
thank you very much :)

lolz… yes, i do relate to Bindi a little… dad wasn’t so wild-eyed as the gorgeous Steve was tho :)

hi webbie, thank you so much for stopping in to have a little look!!
and for taking the time to comment also :)

thank you Shanina..yeah, the poor widdle fings…!
who knew turkey chicks weren’t yelllow…no one told me!!

Hello Mohsen,
and thank you so much!!
:D

Hi Keith,
and thank you :)

thank you Matt..i have just requested it from my local library here, they have it and i’ll pick it up soon…looking forward to reading it very much!
cheers!

Hi Natsky…sure, yes…this is definitely how i came to have the sense of wonderment….to just sit and stare at things, and watch them…...to gaze into rockpools…these things bring me back ‘into the present moment’ and who knew that the things i learnt in my childhood would be ‘therapy’ now in my grownup years. It takes sharing with others the journey, to realise that what i had was rather special and unique growing up….and only in the last few months has this become apparent to me. I wish dad and I were closer, but we share the greatest love of all….that of the world around us…and in that way, i am as close as ever to him always :)

oo yes, me too Sam!! thanx again, i’ll let you know!!

thank you genevieve…i think he’ll get a lovely surprise too :)
i just bought it :)

aw, you are so sweet Ujean… of course i don’t mind…gosh!! i am only extremely honoured that you would favour it … wow…thank you!!!
I agree…my dad is a handsome fella :)

thank you satsumagirl! Yes, i’m sure it must be….!!

i’m so glad you did Mel…thank you for that.
i’ve reserved the book through the library, and just waiting for a phone call from them to go collect it…can’t wait to read it, it sounds wonderful!

hi Fa…. yep…
did i tell you about the baby foxes that had razar sharp teeth too…they bit me on the ankles!

Re the occy and the lobby….dad would go fishing like at 3am in the morning or sometimes all night long on the trawlers and he would bring home an array of sea creatures in buckets….he would have them outside while sorting them all, and it was really fascinating and they were all still alive and you could sort of play with them, (before we ate them) he was also a big jewfish fisherman, and caught many large ‘jewy’s of the breakwall across the road, where the river meets the sea (called the ‘bar’) and boats go out to see through the channel…anyway…every night he wsn’t working, he’d be over there fishing…some times the jews could be 4-5 feet…and we’d have a huge bbq outside and invite ‘everyone’...... dad was a bit of a showmen also, he would do the old ‘blowing the fire out of his mouth’ trick for everyone on ‘Firecracker Night’ around the bonfire…very dangerous stunt, involving a mouth full of petrol and a naked flame….madness!! But oh!! the excitement!!

ps dad loved his fishing soooo much, that we had to have our bath, get in our pjs and walk across the road to kiss him g’nite…coz he wouldn’t come home when he was fishing!!!

thank you so much MT…
i am guessing my mum must have taken this photo with an old camera…
when little, i was given an old broken box brownie to play with, maybe that was the vehicle … who knows.. i doubt if the folks would remember anyway – and yes….truly happy feelings and tears both abound when i look at both these special images, and i feel so lucky and so loved

Hi there Michael,
I’ve been over to your site and see that you love reptiles too!!
or at least enjoy photographing them :)
I am sure you will leave a special imprint on your children too :)

thank you very much for that lovely comment Antanas,
very kind of you indeed :)

thank you traceyanne, i’m so glad you enjoyed this :)

yesh!!! isn’t that terrible!!!
glompz

thank you so much Linda…you are very empathic to notice…
i really appreciate your lovely comments :)

thank you Julia…yes, a very wonderful life indeed :)

thank you so much!!

thank you Richard…i am really happy to share :)
glad you liked it :)

Hello Nira, LOL..thank you :)
Matt did a great job hey!!
I’m very lucky :)
xox

hehe…that’s so funny….i can imagine your mum’s face and reaction!!
i wouldn’t be so brave now….!!
i do have this terrible tendency to chase chicks though…
and then i remember it’s best not to touch them, because
the mother duck or hen may reject them if you you interfere…
but they are so cute….and so are baby lizards !

thank you so much lily..
my mum says she made that little dress for me too :)
yes, we have to treasure every moment don’t we !!

thank you so much pinky…. i really appreciate that :)

lolz….. methinx you are right Cate!!
we had a lot of adventures – a lot of heartache along the way too….but that’s life isn’t it!! I’m so glad you enjoyed this Cate..i’ve so enjoyed everyone’s comments, and so did my Mum and my Dad…who actually came over here and read them all yesterday!!!! they were pretty amazed at the response from you guys :) xoxox

ah – you have a terrific memory Mui-Ling!!!!
thanx so much :)

....Mui-Ling … your new profile pic is beautiful!!

...amazing to hear that barnsis… so glad you enjoyed hearing little snippets from my childhood….. this group sounds great…..there is
another fellow called ‘ozcloggie’ who would be good also for your
group, as he does a lot of reminiscing and his stories are interesting
too. I would love to become a member of your group!!! Thank you
so much for the invite, and I feel really happy that you liked hearing
about my childhood so much!

Ozcloggie

lol…well, that’s interesting :)
glad you found him….. i must be a bit younger…born 1965
my hubby is a teacher tho !

aha! she must be 41…which makes you????

lol!

oh that’s a lovely happy story…see, it matters not what age we are….the older i get the more i realise that !

i’m so glad you enjoyed this Ana… aw, sorry it makes you miss your dad xox

hey,, so glad you enjoyed that wee little remiscence georgiegirl.
i remember the day i told dad i was all grown up and i wanted to see him chop the chooks head off….dad warned me, there’d be blood and it wouldn’t be nice….still, i insisted,....it was just shocking…. like you recall…the chook ran round and round and round the yard with it’s head chopped off, and blood spattering everywhere, it was bloody horrific…never could do that again….then i had to witness the plucking and the gutting…..and i never could look at chooks the same way….always knew when mum was cooking a chook that dad had killed, as he never plucked ‘em fully, and the feathers were still on half the time, o it was horrible…. I’m one of those maternal types, when i see the animals i love them, and i cannot bear the thought of killing them to eat…...

It sounds like you too had quite a menagerie of your own there Georgiegirl, and poor old Bip and Bop the goats eh!! I’ve friends who are fattening their calves/now cows and i don’t reckon they’ll have the heart to send them to the slaughter…..they were going to have them done about 2 years ago….and days and years go by, i think they are going to remain family pets somehow…lol…well, i certainly hope so anyways… :)

thanx Ellen, pleased you enjoyed this!

hey that’s cool cat….how about that eh…thx many, or should i say many thx :D

Hi Glenna… lol, sure was!!! eeek!! :)))
thank you!

that’s my pleasure Byron, i think this will be a great group…
would you like for me to journal about it so more people know?

Hi Byron, i think it would be really nice to invite her personally.. i think she would enjoy this :))

lol… thanx so much for reading this Sarah…i hope Miss Anna finds it amusing!! :) xx

thank you so much Sharon, I’m so glad you enjoyed reading this, I am very blessed, big hugs xxxxx

Rain-dogs, i just have to say thank you for sharing some of your childhood with me, i can’t believe how aligned and similar our early years seemed to be…. dad once took me out many many miles to wave to the captain on the tall ships..i never saw a whale out to sea, i always wish for it…but dad has.

I so love your story about the darling crabs… how adorable!!!!

We too, would drive slowly on every trip and watch the trees for snakes and lizards, and we’d pull up and reverse and get out of the car to look and observe, or to catch ‘em!! big googies (goannas) were his specialty and it was nothing for him to scale a tree while we sat in the car watching and waiting to continue the journey. He taught me to observe.

Once when we were out at Nine Mile Reef off Kingscliff on a greyish choppy day fishing, I noticed a fin..but thought nah, it’s just a choppy wave… it held my gaze though…and I continued to scan the surface of the water… I am not kidding when I say that a 17 foot (same size as our aluminium boat) white pointer shark approached alongside the boat and gave us the evil eye. I was pretty terrified, he submerged and then reappeared 6 feet away travelling directly towards the centre of our boat… his mouth open and water trailing through it…a sight i shall never forget….he gently glided under the water and I am guessing under the boat, and we didn’t see that fella again…

I have a few other stories about staying on an island in the Whitsundays called “Keswick Island” opposite St Bees Island, where the sharks exhibit some very odd behaviour such as crawling up onto the coral on their bellies to retrieve dead shark carcasses and the like… i can’t believe i went snorkelling in that water…the sharks were very determined to get their food lol

I also relate to opal mining or mining for gems, as my father had an interest in that too and made a couple of trips out to lightning ridge as a younger man, he brought home some pretty opals, and i think mum got a pair of earrings made. I have some aboriginal axes and artefacts he found out along the road i think at Tullamore, where there was known to be ancient aboriginal sites… he’s given these to me little notes as to where he found them….I am one of those people that loves museums…i love the glass specimen cabinets and reading and observing every little detail :)

I had done a bit of writing about out time away and the adventures we had at Keswick island, and just getting there was an adventure in itself. I’ve made them viewable again in case you ever have time on your hands and were interested, but no pressure of course :) I’m not a very good writer, they are just recounts i did the best i could.
Keswick Island Stories (8 chapters plus an intro) :)

when we were on keswick, my baby brother caught a little shark in his bare hands….. he wrestled and wrestled with it… it was most exciting, he was caught in the rockpools which went out as far as the eye could see ;)

It sounds like your dad was a great character rain-dogs, we are lucky indeed to have had this childhood and to continue to have such affinity with nature, I envy you somewhat lving out there right in nature’s heartbeat…but i look for signs everywhere i go, even in this urban area there are still treasures to be found and enjoyed every day :)

Of course, being such a girl, I wanted to go in…but Dad said nope!! we are here to fish, why would we go in now? lol… that’s what he was like.. if you went out with him be prepared for anything :)

Later that day as we drove the boat into the servo to fill her up…he mentions he’d had a night terror the evening before, in his dreams waking up in a cold cold sweat to a huge shark torpedoing from the oceans depths into the sky over the boat he was in…. like a premonition…

lol, wow…i hear the sharks are way fiercer down SA way! That was so brave of him, is/was he an abalone diver rain-dogs? I have images of dad’s snorkelling days, he would wear a long sleeved brown skivvy (in place of a wetsuit) to keep warm, and spear in hand…goggles and snorkel in place depart into the ocean….and on his return, usually he had something terrific, a big flathead for dinner or a lobby extracted from a secret cave or shelf he’d found…. he’d go in straight off the beach and seemed to know by intuition I guess, where the best spots would be. We kept track of our position out to sea by watching civilisation…you’d pick two points like buildings in the distance and maintain your position if drifting. The most amazing thing i remember out there was seeing sunfish…huge sunfish migrating, like large plates, thick in the water…and i love love love coming across a gentle turtle swimming along, just going about their turtley business… so slow and sure… my favourite fishies are the anglers with the little worms above their heads, the wee little box fish that are yellow and polka dotted with black spots and look like a pea…and the goby….because they are so quizzical and always look at you, and i loved your story about the blue tongue earlier in one of your comments :) I hope you enjoy the keswick stories :)

haha… that’s gorgeous…that he would actually video tape the tank… dad just sits there watching them too…it’s very relaxing isn’t it. We hope to get a small tank going again soon, as Ben my son (12) is interested. I was so amazed your dad wore jumpers and skivvy’s too… my dad gave up his boat and now goes out with someone else crabbing and fishing, without the responsibility. Dad used to catch aquarium fish for the tanks which were all salt water in an elaborate set up under the house, but nowadays, he just keeps pretty guppies and breeds them, that seems to give him great delight and less work than the salt water tanks.

Dad is quite eccentric too lol, but he doesn’t realise that. He makes teapot topiaries in the garden, and attaches fairy doors to tree trunks, he creates some fun sculptures out of all sorts of plastic things like silver tubing to create a chesire cat and the tinman and other things and finds pleasure in growing things in his garden…he’s always hurting himself one way or another….

geeez that was a scary story about your dad and the shark….and horrible to get a spear in your leg… i have only seen a shark once when snorkelling and i was very intrigued but afraid…dad was motioning to it, and when i looked i thought what can i do…i can’t get out or anything so i clung tight to him lol – it was only a little shark tho. I guess i have an immense fascination with shark behaviour, or animal behaviour in general… hmmmm, i can’t think why tho lol ;) .... oh and characters….what about all the characters i bet you’ve met in your lifetime, people that don’t follow the straight and narrow, people that hunt and fish their food, and live day to day in an unconventional way…. dad has friends i always love hearing about… they fascinate me as much as the animals with the funny situations they get into… and dad has always been big on playing practical jokes, was your dad like that too? Is your dad still around?

aw, I’m sorry to hear about your dad, I’ve enjoyed this too, very much, thanx rain-dogs….two worlds so far apart, but with such synchronicity it’s really really amazing. :) take care, waves!

thx so much for reading this Pip… i wish i had realised and appreciated it more! I wish i could remember more…i don’t remember the Tottenham days where this photo was taken, but have been told all these things, so for me they are the memories others have of me as a child…i would love to trigger those memories so i could relate to them and really see… I have one memory of Tottenham i think is real, and that’s playing in the sulky (horse and cart) i recall always reaching up asking for an adult to put me up in the sulky… and then pretending to be on top of the world!! and always wearing a red handknitted jumper with a little beret :) xx

hey thanx Rosie!! lol…yeah, my mate muscularteeth thought that was cool…...dad always (still) has a ciggie hanging out while he does the gardening or reading a book…fishing…etc…. one memory is he always has one while he’s rigging up the rods… and needs both hands to tie to hooks… one time he set fire to his hair at a restaurant…lol… had the ciggie in his hand resting his hand on his face…and someone could smell burning…he’s quite a character and always getting into scrapes and hysterically unbelievable circumstances…too many to mention…but i’m thinking of telling a few of his stories…maybe one day :) good for a chuckle :)

No jewelled dolphin fish in my stories….not yet anyway, i feel such a traitor for not setting him free that day….what a beautiful creature….i can’t find any pix on the ‘net to show off what they look like when they’re flashing their fiery colours…. as soon as he landed on the deck the colours faded away…. such a beautiful fish. :) xxx

Aw thank you Anna!!!! I wish I can be more like him and my mum, they are so kind to others and as a grown up I see their great qualities and wish to emulate them more…. Big hugs xxx and you’re very welcome to return to this when time permits !!