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Photos du Jour: Misty Walk, Back Beach Port Chalmers.

6/5/2021

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​The weather moved me yesterday.  It was misty in that patchy, anomalous way that means you can't see shit one moment while it's clear as a bell 10 m down the road.  Always look behind you into the sun during mist.  These are a wee bit noisy but the camera was ancient and tiny, so whatever.  I didn't throw on any FX filters, just black and whited them.  This is pretty much how it looked.

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The sun was pushing through the watery suspension and lensing into the void over the bay in the form of a cold white rainbow- the opposite of darkness yet somehow vacant of all the properties you expect of light.
​ I had never seen this before.

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Photo du Jour: Fir

1/3/2021

 
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The white dust ring around his nose is a product of his insistence on digging up the stones under our café table chairs so he can lie in the cooler shade.  

It always amazes me how different two dogs of the same breed and strain can be.  Fir is a lot more easy going than Felix, who didn't care for unfamiliar dogs; he loves everyone and takes nothing personally, assuming any aggression or rebuff is just some sort of misunderstanding that you will reconsider as he trots away, unshaken.  Many crises have been averted by his breezy diplomacy, for which we are incredibly grateful given the burgeoning ranks of poorly-socialised dogs and clueless owners.  He is extremely affectionate and trusting, welcomes any and all attention and sits patiently through baths, haircuts and flea-pickings, another tremendous relief (although Felix was similarly tolerant).  

He's got a few annoying quirks, though.  Obsessively coveting my hair bands, for one, stealing and eating them whenever they are in reach, necessitating public extraction of the poopy elastic from his bum hole while out walking.  The kleptomania is apparently congenital, his grandmother being an accomplished thief of dog treats from concealed tupperware according to his breeder so there's not much to be done about it.  Socks are another illicit passion.  He snores while lying on one particular side due to a slightly sloppy palate.  And my god, his ability to find and devour anything disgusting or hazardous while out walking is a continuous nightmare.  Our battle to stay between Fir and the street caviar he finds so compelling has so far kept him out of dog hospital, but it would be great if filthy arseholes stopped throwing their fishing gear and chicken bones on the fucking ground.

So, how's your week going?

Photos du Jour : Port Chalmers Represent

2/2/2021

 
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How's it going?  

I'm posting new things.  Doing it.  Doing it.  
Feels good.

The blank black sign looks shopped but it was real, wired onto the fence outside the Port facility. Then it was sadly withdrawn, presumably by the very same hand that affixed it, sucked back into the silent wormhole of entropy from whence it came.  All I know for sure is that someone billed us for it.

There's been some quite good tagging on the trains lately, but we hardly ever have a camera when we see it.
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Photo du Jour: Fir

26/6/2020

 
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Nightwalking in Port Chalmers, Pt 4

2/6/2020

 
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The Dunedin City Council, in its infinite, unquestionable wisdom, ripped the roof from this historic industrial shed in a bullshit asbestos panic and presumably hopes it will disintegrate before they have to make a decision about preserving it.  Which fucking sucks, since this is one of, if not the last remaining vintage industrial building in the area, and definitely the last one of any aesthetic merit.  Get your shit together, DCC, or at least be honest about lumbering onward with your middle-finger agenda in regard to our much-abused little town. 
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Port Otago's nasty wizard eyes.  
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​Careys Bay lies around the corner from Port Chalmers, behind a veil of old volcanic stone.  It is a pretty little gully that once would have chimed with a legion of native birds, but now mostly buzzes to the sound of incessant powertools, the barking of bored dogs and the industrial declamations of Port Otago.  The giant container ships have been muffled for now, but something worse will come along.

Careys Bay at night is more palatable, because the power tools are tucked up in bed and you can overlook the oily little teacup bay and serpentine Victoriana from a quiet cemetery fringed with smoke-scented blue gums.  Possums shriek and fuss in the trees alongside roosting Rosellas, both rowdy imports from Australia.  An Arbutus
, heavily laden with both polychrome fruit and pearly blossoms, shelters the graves.  It is a peaceful isolate.

Down by the water, the Black Backs croak lullabies to each other post-breeding season, and shit on the bow of the pilot boat.  

Someone went to the trouble of installing this pursy effigy; fixed expression, hi-viz, low inputs, strange posture, alarming moisture content.  The 
vérité is terrifante.
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A new fishing wharf lies beyond this ziggurat of containers, a somehow depressing sop to the community that had to submit to still more noise and disruption as the Port expands its activities.   Depressing in that it is been covered in furtive slash obsessive groups of people jerking largely undersized fish from the bay every time we've visited, in a metastatic expression of the everything wrong with the facility lurking behind it.  It smells of death, already. 
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I'm not a Star Wars person but that is some Evil Empire shit.
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There is something deeply surreal about the high tide overrunning the concrete of the boat ramp around Back Beach under these lurid lights; a blurring of material realities in which the water, supremely unconcerned with infrastructure, subsumes terrestrial limitations, in a small taste of what is to come.  I have stood on the northeastern tip of Arnhem Land and watched distant  cyclones steer their fluted, lightning-flecked flanks over the blood-warm waters of the Arafura Sea; the feeling is the same, somehow.  Ominous, for sure, but not entirely unpleasant.

On some nights, the gulls sit in tight ranks on the jetty rails, scurling loudly.  It sounds like they're arguing about something we don't understand.  They'll shut up if you shine the torch toward them.  

It seems like we might have escaped the horrors of Covid community transmission here in NZ, for now.  I am grateful; it feels safe, no thanks to the legion of arseholes and micropeen'd edgelords who flocked out here specifically to break Level 4 lockdown.  They're all gone now that small-scale travel is permitted; back to their land of never walking anywhere, complaining about environmentalists and public health measures.  Another week of political dithering would have seen these turds blow the curve for us all, so don't believe the accounts of New Zealand's utopian exceptionalism.  We just got lucky.  Lucky especially that there was a sentient woman in charge of making collective/domestic shit happen, but lucky none the less.  

​We hope you find ways to fend this clusterfuck off if you're less fortunate geographically; stay home if you can, because that shit does work.
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Nightwalking, Port Chalmers Pt 3

16/4/2020

 
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This pandemic is the socialised cost of exploitative globalisation.  I thought about that, wandering around beside the Pacific Ocean under a full moon.  Like all shitty concepts, unfettered capitalism needs to hide its stinky, dysfunctional arse, to privatise its profits and kick the cost of everything else off the books in order to look like something that actually works.  I hope a lot more people are understanding that, feeling the true shape of it.  What we are doing now only works as long as the teetering garbage mountain of karmic and practical consequence doesn't shift and crush us.  This disease is just a little bit that broke away and flattened the garage.

I've followed epidemiology for years now, and you might not want to hear this, but Covid 19 is actually a bullet dodged, relatively speaking- wrap your head around those implications.  We have a great opportunity to change our heading, but... that's not going to happen, is it?  A man threatened to assault us today for questioning his lockdown-busting public fuckery.  He had his elderly father in the car with him.  

We are so fucked.

If you're groping for epidemiological context and why Covid 19 was not made in a fucking lab (it is a basic bitch zoonosis; they happen every day and don't need help), you could do a lot worse than read The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett (1994, Penguin).  Prescient, chilling, awesome.   

I'm pretty discouraged about moving from Level 4 lockdown (everyone stays home, nothing's open except supermarkets and essential business, no gatherings or school etc) to Level 3 in a week, here in New Zealand.  We have seen so many selfish, clueless breaches of L4 that if the virus had been 5% more virulent or dangerous, half of us would have it by now.  There's nowhere near enough random/sentinel testing to draw definitive conclusions about the true extent of community transmission; with estimates of up to 40% asymptomatic cases (worst scenario, but not out of the question) and suggestions of an associated array of organ damage, my morbidity is starting to feel like a big fat fucking comorbidity.  As you may have observed in your own country, a lot of people don't give a shit about observing responsible procedures.  They do not and cannot be made to understand the dangerous roulette of exposure and exponential transmission, and they will cite the very success of any public health measure as proof there was no epidemic and it was all a false alarm by libtards and the kind of weird science people who made them feel stupid at school.

Fucking A, I'm ranting.  I didn't live this long to die at the hands of retards.
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Unless you want to haul serious gear around or spend hours fine-tuning your settings, you have to let go of technical quality at night.  I'm a primitivist anyway, and prefer images that recall the shortcomings of the human eye in darkness.  The greasy murk of Back Beach still holds sway under a supermoon; potholes in the dusty road are always trying to twist your ankles after sunset.   
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Export logs are usually piled high between these steel stays on the wharf at Port Otago, but the timber boats have cleaned them out for now, leaving an eerily henge-like installation.  

​I love this image.
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The rusting primary hues of industry are a sort of dirty visual candy at night.  Strobes, bleeps, colour blocking, percussive impact, robot motion.  It looks like christmas, and there's no Mariah Carey or emotional blackmail.
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Always consider that you might be standing in the very thing you're looking for.  I walked right into this puddle groping for the angle and saw nothing, until R pointed out the reflection from the other side.  I love the satiny black ponding and bossy, lurid markings in the darkness.
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It's so good, it goes further.  This is actually true.
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I know I was downplaying technicalities, but fuck I love this picture ^ and am determined to improve the quality so I can get a decent print out of it.  
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Part Four ensues.  Lucky you.

Nightwalking in Lockdown, Port Chalmers Pt 2

9/4/2020

 
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Depending on just how fat/unfit/sizzling and muscular I'm feeling, the climb up to the Scott memorial on the hill overlooking Port is either an arsebusting ordeal or an act of semi-senescent affirmation.  The route is a compressed passage through various miniature clines; town, outskirts, rural then bush within about one click of the main street.  

The shitty old tarmac gets slimy under the macrocarpas in winter.  It skirts the Port then opens out into the cemetery overlooking Careys Bay, although the view is getting overgrown.  

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Kereru come down to drink the water pooling on the oldest graves, waddling across the turf on their stumpy cherry legs.  
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We take pictures from the top but they're never really satisfying; there's something about the layout of the town and harbour that defeats meaningful capture or at least relegates it to chocolate box inanity.  It's a shitty little camera.  A poor work person always blames their tools.  

​The walk down is extremely satisfying.
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The church looks like some sort of gigantic petrified goblin, peering over its shoulder or glaring monocularly down on the houses it will one day mash underfoot once the (largely) unsuspected curse is lifted.  No groups of dark-garbed heretics should ever pour out a forty whilst doing anal in a circle around a modest burning effigy within sight of this malefic clocktower.  

​Just saying. 
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Closed closed fucking closed.  Chinese wet (they mean wildlife trafficking/torture) markets slapped the hot chocolate right out of my hand and may yet fill my lungs with pus and kill my partner; I'm not alright with that.  I'm not alright with bat delicacies and bullshit medicinal claims.  But it could just have easily been pig concentration camps in the American South or some crap chicken farm in Auckland.

Quackery and cruelty got us here.  Let's remember that.
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See?  Baleful.
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Well I've always thought that but no one ever listens to me.
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No I haven't finished; more to come.

Night Walking in Port Chalmers During Covid Lockdown, Pt 1

2/4/2020

 
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In the absence of cars, the voice of a place returns to a volume clearly apparent to casual consciousness.

I really noticed that walking around two weeks into NZ's extensive lockdown period.  We hate cars and their pernicious influence on almost everything, from the black smut on our windows to the cheap superficiality of interaction they facilitate.  

Never having owned one has steered us into benefits and exemptions that are difficult to explain to the vehicular-bound, except perhaps in times like this, when everyone is forced to evaluate exactly what the fuck they've been doing with their adult lives.  

We've been walking, as we always do, except it's been so much nicer.  Safer, quieter, cleaner, more intimate.  Here are some pictures.
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At the moment, Port Otago is virtually the sole source of significant noise and is never more of an obscene intrusion than on a clear autumn night.  While society in its current form is predicated on its activity, the industrial port is a singularly articulate expression of all that ravenous consumption; the blind grinding roar and peevish metallic shrieks of greed.

But you know, I bought a Joy Division shirt from England last month and it's hanging on my washing line as I write this.  So I am the Beast of Revelations too.
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Few anthropogenic phenomena are more beautiful than sodium street lighting.  Dunedin is phasing it out over the next few years, and while the energy savings will be welcome, the loss of this lurid marmalade influence is a devastating prospect.  

​We fucking love orange.  I had no idea just how intensely until I took a personal inventory; our house is orange, my hair is orange, orange features heavily in my wardrobe and living space.  I concur with the Theravada- orange is a hugely potent expression, not of positivity, but of the general size and power of the unseen forces that suffuse everything.  It is light and darkness.  

​You see orange when you close your eyes, just as much as darkness.
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Chick's Hotel, that ancient edifice, squatting like a fat armoured reptile on the foot of the hill.  Christchurch's Victorian stalwarts were felled by earthquakes, so now places like this are the last bastions and touchstones of Gen X's treasured historical grungience, emblematic of all the shit warehouses, gross parties, dirty sex and nascent addictions of a lost youth.  You remember them all when you smell the damp masonry and stand again in those deeply recessed doorways.

It's so weird, not to be young any more, per se.  Without children, or any serious physical afflictions, your age is just something other people see when they look at you.  It is much less relevant internally.  There is a calmness that rises out of perspective, but that's about it.
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I will continue this in a little bit.

A Young Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena)

27/1/2020

 
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A family group of swallows has taken to nesting around the boat sheds at Back Beach and we have been watching the babies fledge and get their insect-grabbing wings over the last couple of months.  Unfortunately one of them had been downed by unseasonal southerly gales and sat huddled on the road, dazed, possibly with strained wings and definitely  just moments from being run over.  Luckily R saw it and carried it home, from where it was delivered to the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital.  A big shout out to the DOC weekend operator who went the extra mile and picked it up for us.  Fingers crossed that it just needed a couple of days to rehydrate and recover.

Good luck, little bird.
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Photos du Jour: Random December Views, Port Chalmers

18/12/2019

 
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Fir / Spoon / Back Beach  / New Oak / Spray-seeding the Scraped Hill / Doll / Tulips
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Late Spring '19: General Garden Business

6/12/2019

 
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We can't afford to smash a bottle of champagne against the prow of our new porch to declare it officially open, so just imagine video hos twerking in a semicircle to celebrate the occasion.

Unlike those other bloggy people who pretend they love working together as part of their particular romantic coupley brand, R and I usually end up at each others' throats in the course of practical projects, due to our shall we say conflicting modi.  I am proud to report that nobody died during this one, but I feel it was more of a fluke than personal progress.  I'm sure plenty of people still got to hear me losing my shit at crucial moments as they walked their dogs past the site.

This structure was necessary due to a month of downpours and high winds robbing us of our treasured purple bird plum, which provided shelter to this spot before keeling over toward the house one morning during a gale, almost taking the aviary with it.  It was gut-wrenching to have to cut it down and we will miss the yearly blossom spectacle horribly.  
Neither I nor our textile collection can stand much UV beaming directly into the house so this newly naked northern aspect needed something to replace the plum's generous shade.  As a bonus, I now have a place to house the cacti and aloe oveflow from elsewhere as everything gets bigger.  

​You don't really think about that as you're amassing a collection of tiny little baby plants; the Aloe alooides in the centre of the above image used to fit in the palm of my hand.  Now it could scoop the brains from ten craniums at once with its monstrous extremities, if it were so inclined.  If you want to save yourself some hard choices, be wiser than me- take a rational moment in the midst of your compulsive acquisition to wonder about ultimate sizes and where all that arrant vegetation is going to live, long-term.  

Half an acre and a knack for building awkward polycarbonate structures mean I can flip moderation the bird for a few more years.  Here are some of the fruits of those happenings.
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Various Rebutias, Lobivias and Sulcorebutias.  I cannot be arsed trying to keep up with their highly mutable taxonomic nomenclature so they remain 'that purple/orange/yellow one' to me.  Most are easy to both both acquire and cultivate, so if you're looking to get into cacti, you might as well start with these guys.  The flowers are gorgeous and reliable, often repeating throughout the summer months.  The pale crustiness you see on a few is supposedly spider mite damage, but it doesn't seem to affect them too much and we are anti-spray, except in the case of losing a valuable plant I couldn't replace (it hasn't happened yet).  Mealy bugs are their worst enemies.  I squish the bigger ones with tiny twigs and blast them off with a hose or camera-blower thingy.
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The incredibly luscious, neon-emerald velveteen of Tibouchina 'Moonstruck's foliage.  I planted the darker purple variety out last year but it shit itself over winter, so I'll keep this guy potted.  Tibouchinas are super-draggy in flower but I don't accept that there's such a thing as bad-taste plants.
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Below: the lovely silver and indigo stylings of Salvia discolor.  It's a brittle, slightly awkward plant but the near-perpetual flowering and scent of blackcurrant cordial pleases me greatly.
With the newish potted garden out the front of the house, I've been getting into Salvia in a big fucking way.  These are a selection of the earliest flowering wee jamensis  and microphylla hybrids; there are red and yellow varieties just coming on.  I have other larger species, including the obscenely green involcruta below left, but they're generally more of a midsummer-autumn thing. 
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Ambridge Rose: one of the pretty bloody wimpy DA roses I've rescued from very moderate competition in the general garden.  Its revival from a single cane is more tribute to the quality of the graft than the plant itself.  I persist with this variety because the colour is lovely and the scent is a truely delicious hardcore myrrh.  Wish I knew how to quit you.
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Metrosideros 'Springfire', a nice little hybrid (?) Pohutukawa from somewhere in the general Pacific; I can't be more specific because every single fucking nursery claims it is something different, ranging from a true dwarf species to a hybrid larger tree.  I'm not even sure this is Springfire since it seems to have lost most of its leafular waviness, but I'm enjoying the dangerous volume of that orange and the prospect of extended summer flowering.  Bellbirds skulk around it furtively, defying my presence to get at the early nectar.  We sincerely hope Myrtle Rust doesn't make it this far south and wipe out all our fantastic Myrtaceae specimens, as it has done in Australia.

Notice the ye olde wrought iron fence panel in the background- that's new too.  We bought some online a while back that looked like they were probably yoinked out of some Victorian grave somewhere and painted them up to put up along the front garden.  Hot tip: paint your rusty iron panels before you attach them to a fence over a 15 foot drop.
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The very gratifying Urospermum dalechampii, the Golden Fleece Daisy.  The foliage is dandylionsque and the leaves you see at right belong to an unrelated nearby sage.  It's supposedly a pest in some places but guess how many shits I give.

Below: much excite-, the slow unfurling of Arisaema speciosa, the Beautiful Arisaema.  After getting a bit too fucking optimistic and planting out the Aroids I had amassed, then losing the poor little buggers to our wet winters, I decided to try again and stick to pot culture.  This guy is the first one up.  I will post more pics when the other species do something interesting.
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Roses  *   Succulents   *   General Pics


Photos du Jour: Late Winter Walk over the top of Port Chalmers

11/10/2019

 
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The waterlogged Sea Scouts barge was finally chainsawed into nothingness a month or so ago.  RIP its rotten old timbers.  We will miss its picturesque obsolescence.
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​Port's domestic structure is a whacky Victorian labyrinth of narrow little streets draped over the bulbous topography like a lace doily.  Some are no more than lanes to this day, with mossy banks encroaching on their shitty tarmac and insufficient room for two cars to pass abreast.  Frost can mean you slide backwards on the steep dips in the shade of the blobby ridge that runs lengthwise along the centre of the peninsula.  It's about 60m above sea level according to topographic maps, but it feels much higher than this, as you can probably see.  This represents yet another annoying discrepancy between my expectations and physical reality, so I just add another 200m or so in my mind in order to approach the preferred 300 m +/- range.  

People have won presidential office with this kind of stuff, so I'm just waiting on the whole salary and acclaim package.
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Bellbirds and Tuis rattle the dead branches of the blue gums as they clamber around them, looking for insects and shouting at each other; their language consists of fluting, bill clapping, cackling, sneezing, warbling, chiming and diving flights full of intimidating wing sounds like taffeta swooshed hard past your ear.

People dump their green waste in historically-designated slash unofficial middens on the side of the road, where it merges down into the tangled scrub below.
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From Island Terrace, the view becomes quite bougie, almost Riviera.  Well, it does if the fucking ugly Port Otago warehouse carbuncle is factored out.  At the present time, these are mostly grotty yachts, which is not as pejorative as it sounds.  They are the kind of hobby and old-school craft middle-aged people might remember their parents and grandparents owning, sitting quiescent for most of the year and puttering out into the greater harbour for a bit of fishing on summer weekends.  A few people live on them semi-permanently but there's not really a huge culture of that here, probably because housing was cheap until recently.  They are hauled up onto the tiny local winch dock for loving maintenance before being returned to their relatively affordable moorings.

It occurred to me the other day that the gentrification quickly gathering pace around Dunedin will sweep rich boaty twats and their launches into these scenes in a few short years.  They're turning up now on the weekends, so it's just a matter of time until Port becomes bland and middling enough for them to dimly recognise its advantages.  I know I always say doomy shit like this, but it's inevitable, isn't it?  They will demand upgrades and memberships and wharf extensions and all this will become another marina for property speculators in black 4WDs.  All those peculiarly unhappy tight-faced white men with disregarded golden retrievers and boats on trailers parked up on their double drives under spotless canvas covers, emblazoned with names like Blade, Samurai, Sea Eagle and Moonraker II.  And Vixxen.   With two x's, which is probably more apposite than they realise.

It's never Goodbye Remaining Equity, Bought This Fukken Thing To Impress My Side Piece or Half A Metre Smaller Than My Brother In Law's Boat, is it?  Lol.
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A fine stand of Cabbage Trees.  Not Cabbage Palms, confused northern hemisphere people.  They are in fact Lomandroideae or Agavoideae​, depending who you talk to.  Once again the chilled goods warehouse shits all over a formerly nice view; I cut it out below.

A lot of people destroy their Cabbage Trees or refuse to plant them because they drop their leaves.  Why not shoot the dog for breathing while you're at it?  
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I can't remember who built this hull-shaped rock sculpture on the southern end of Back Beach; think it was a local artist?  There's not much reference to it online and I don't think many people actually notice it for what it is.  Which is okay; sometimes art should sneak up on you.  As someone ruthlessly opposed to whimsical expression, I took a hard line at first and disliked it, but we've come to appreciate its moody ironies and also the kind of workpersonship that has seen it last in good shape for quite a while now.  It is appurtenant without being overly literal and seems perfectly content in its own mystery.  It thrives in the wild, coming and going with the tide.  It's not plastered with credits and sponsors.  It's the best piece of public art in the area.
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Port Chalmers, New Zealand   *   Our Photography   *   Selected Ravings


Photos du Jour: Midwinter

26/8/2019

 
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Photos du Nuit: Full Moon with Halo

19/7/2019

 
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The moon was a jewel at god knows what in the morning a few days ago, so I took some pics.
 
After all this time, I still don't know shit about cameras or exposure or aperture priority etc. and you can probably tell.  I was quite proud of myself for finding the ISO button in the dark and knowing to dial in one direction instead of the other.  Normally I would be embarrassed, having to admit such abject ignorance, but when it comes to photography I just don't care.  It's such a fucking vainglorious and utterly bullshit conceit, all that framing and recording, as though you were somehow responsible for the beauty or intrigue of the result.  Unless you create objects to photograph, calm your auteur hauteur and realise that your genius eye is a commonplace thing, and that you might as well be taking brass rubbings for all that you actually contribute.  Photographers can only ever convey what they once looked at; BFD.  We should be grateful we've had the opportunity and just leave it at that.

With that in mind, I have a lot of (exemptionalist and nepotistic) respect for my partner's images and his impressive technical knowledge.  He pursues photography as a craft and a science, striving to better represent the natural world that he values so much.  It's not a vanity project.

Anyway, I prefer the one below lol.
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Photos du Jour: On the Second Shortest Day

7/7/2019

 
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We live in a beautiful place.  It enjoyed some 20C the other day, which was a record for the month.
June is supposed to be winter, with temps between 5 and 10 C.
I personally feel as though this super-ugly climate clusterfuck stuff is going to kick off much sooner than most people realise; it is already underway in more marginal parts of the world.  We don't have kids, have never owned a car, don't fly and live very modestly, but we'll still be eating shit along with everyone who couldn't be bothered to do one fucking thing to be less of an environmental catastrophe.  Cheers, arseholes.  Cheers.

Photos du Jour: Pieces of Trains

21/6/2019

 
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Some people want to complain about trains but I like them, even when they're bouncing me out of a great sex dream at 3.47am with brake screech and hard rumbles.  Every time a train goes past, 34785 trucks don't.  Think of it that way.

Will some arsehole please reinstate the formerly awesome Dunedin to Christchurch passenger service, because that route is dope and NZ busses are spectacularly ghettto.  Only here would an incredibly scenic and already extant line like that, between two major centres godammit, sit idle for years.

Looking at Clouds and Trees in Autumn, Port Chalmers

2/6/2019

 
It's only a little camera so there are some technical challenges but I like how it blows out, just like an eye.
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The harbour is an unusually three-dimensional place, strictly contained by rims of hill and either expanded or compressed by cloud.  On a bright cirrus day the blues are infinite, stained yellow by the slanted sunlight and pulled from azure into turquoise.  Then the northeast cloud rolls in from the ocean, pouring through the gates at Taiaroa and over the Hare hill to set a leaden lid on everything, lying so low you feel as though your hands could brush its undercarriage.  One is a palatial ballroom, the other a mist-dripping cellar.  I like both.

This isn't drone footage.  We climbed up to the lookout hill on foot to get these pics and that series of abrupt inclines sucks with lunch on board, let me tell you.  I had to stop once on the last leg to reoxygenate and felt like an aged fatarse, but had my chagrin assuaged by the pall of cigarette smoke from some lazy random who had driven the whole way to the top.  I gave up smoking twenty years ago and have never owned a car.  

​Superiority intensifies.  
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A towering complex of feral Tasmanian Blue Gums, Monterey Pines and Cyprus sp. flourish in the uninhabited belts of hillside encircling Port.  Passionfruit and Muehlenbeckia vines entangle their lower storeys and tend to safeguard them from dipshits with chainsaws; birds sing all day from this ribbon of humanless green, fantails and warblers swooshing down over your head as you walk the Back Beach road that runs parallel.  

Unfortunately, this miniature forest also seethes with feral possums, who demolish the regenerating native vegetation.  We trap them for The Halo Project, a predator-reduction initiative linked to the local Orokonui Sanctuary, and they have just begun an intensive push to get their numbers down toward elimination.
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There is often a curiously gaudy, oversaturated effect to the autumn light that falls on the paddocks in Sawyers Bay; I think it's the heavy volumes of water carried by the fresh grass that glows and amplifies the yellow tones.  This scene illustrates that effect at about half-strength.  When it's fully lit, the quilted, undulant farmland looks almost candied through the smudgy pines, but it usually passes before you can get a lens on it.  Annoying.
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The South Island is not much more than a brief affront to the vast volumes and momentums of the Southern Ocean, a montane blip to winds and oceans that scream virtually unimpeded around the tail end of the planet.  So we get a lot of visible atmospheric stratification, with clouds headed this way and that on their various business.  High horsetails usually mean trouble is a few days out, so you'd better get shit done in the garden before that cold southerly slams into and bows the big front windows and covers the road with pine needles and huge ribbons of gum bark.  Bubbly cumulus lazily mass and disperse just a hundred meters or so over the harbour; the same shape will be born, over and over, in the lee of an island and the space of half an hour.  

Everything worth knowing is annotated in this rhythm, all meaning, all process, all denouement.  

The Blackthorn Garden: Autumnal Potplant Action

30/4/2019

 
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You know your raver days are two fucking decades behind you when you start getting just as excited about incoming blooms as you once did about BPM, random sex and synthetic stimulants.  My stimulants are organic nowdays.  Autumn used to be a bit of a dud around here since we don't get great deciduous colour, being windy and maritime; all the summer flowers are fucked out and the aloes have yet to get their shit together.  

So I decided to establish a bit of a crazy pot farm in the front yard.  It covers the scabby concrete and tarmac patches, feeds the bees and pleases the eye with an array of exotic salvias and all the half-hardy beauties that might lose their roots in the clay.  It's getting more and more crowded as I get into all those mesoamerican sages and South African bird polinated thingies that do so well here.  Above: Aloe hoffmanii, first flowers I think tee hee!
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The first flowering on this exceptionally emerald green Aloe glauca clone.  I almost lost it a couple of years back to root rot after letting too many old leaves get manky around the base.  Don't do that.  
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Salvia splendens 'Giant Form' apparently tops 6 feet and the hot red variant certainly curb stomps the colour gamut in late afternoon sunlight.  Bought both the merlot and the scarlet versions; it was the right decision.
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Salvia involucrata  
​This head is only half-out but is already gratifying us with this intense candy blue-pink. I have several largely unnamed forms of this group and I love them unconditionally.  They become enormous here with our decent rain and pissweak-to-absent frosts.  The foliage is huge and plush.  You can hear the clickety clack of bumblebees sawing into the base of the flower to get at the nectar (they are bird pollinated in native situ I think).  Plant some today.
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Salvia fulgens 'Red Dragon', a tall, open bush with attractive corrugated leaves and nonstop fuzzy scarlet floral business.  Something, I suspect a Bellbird, comes along and snaps off half the damn heads trying to get at the nectar.
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Fuzzy.  Silky.
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If I had a dollar for every euphorbia I had going on, I'd have about $12.50.  The lazy gardener's main ho.  Can't remember the name of this cultivar, but it's from Marshwood Gardens in Invercargill.  Their online shop is like a tinny house for plant tragics.  Sheeeeeeiiiiit.  Peruse at your peril.
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Salvia sagittata supposedly but it looks like it might be a hybrid with something else.  The flowers and parts of the stem are an incredibly dense Afghan lapis blue, which is as much as you can ask of any given organism really.  Not quite out yet, but you get the picture.

Below: good old Salvia leucantha, which I only discovered a couple of years ago after encountering its luxurious, almost extraterrestrial plushness in the flesh at a garden centre.  

​​Always touch plants.  The tactile dimension is a whole nother thing.
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I always try to have some Dagga (Leonotis leonurus) going, even though this plant seems to labour under a curse in our garden, attracting all kinds of misfortune and mysterious fatalities.  I have a slightly disappointing creme version too, which unfortunately looks like used bogroll a lot of the time due to the unsightly off-whiteness of the bloomage so I might pass it on.  Dagga is supposed to be psychoactive but it looks  like it tastes like something you would do in your late teens because you couldn't get any real drugs.  So I haven't been tempted.  Give it a few more years.  I may well regress to vomiting sludgy decoctions in someone's backyard.  Lol.

The honey-seeking birds tend to give it a fucking hammering, which is why some things are better closer to the house where the avian contingent is a bit more circumspect about humping the shit out of popular plants.
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We got ninety nine problems but a bush aint one: the Garden   *    More visual shit


Places and Things Review: We're on a Boat- the Port to Port Ferry ride

22/4/2019

 
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If you've learned anything about us from perusing the blog, it's probably that you wonder why you bother with this shit, because we never really go anywhere or do anything.  Everyone's doing it for the Gram, except us.  We don't drive, are loath to fly and sort of hate travelling with other people.  

​What are tragic homebodies to do at the end of a summer in a port town filled with other, more itinerant arseholes all coming and going from some sort of watercraft?  We got on a boat.  For about half an hour.

Groundbreaking.  Courageous.  Inexpensive.
You might roll your eyes and murmur bloody sponcon, but nothing could be further from the truth.  We don't tell people we're reviewing them, don't solicit or accept free shit, and just say whatever we like about whatever we're doing/purchasing/visiting.  We went on this particular boat just because it was there.  It's not sinister.
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The Port to Port ferry was a long time coming, even though the 15 minute route across the harbour from Port Chalmers to Otago Peninsula obviates an horrendous hour-long, vomit-conjuring drive around the entire bloody inner coastline.  They had to have their shallow-draft boat custom built; there are one or two vintage ferries that used to make the trip still lying about the place in various states of disrepair, but the romance of an historical vessel is one thing and the economic reality is another.  I grew up in remote Northern Australia and still have a soft spot for tinnies anyway.  

​The boat is neat, stable and boarding from the low jetty in Port shouldn't pose any challenges if you have half-decent bipedal motility.  You don't have to wear lifejackets but they have all the requisite safety shit on board; I checked.
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The return trip cost $50 for two adults and one poodle slash child.  Even ridiculous penny pinchers such as we thought this was perfectly reasonable.  I effed up the online booking but the Port to Port people were very helpful via email and various tour/trip options are available.  We liked the service, so we'll probably do some in future.  I think they rejig their pricing and timetables over winter so check that out if you're keen to go.
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This was Fir's first time on a boat.  Though he was not initially convinced it was something a dog should be doing, he relaxed about halfway across.
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It really is strange to see a place you've swarmed over for 25 years from such a different perspective.  

Doing touristy things in your own region forces you to reconsider your lazy-arse complacency about stuff that is, in fact, an astonishing privilege to experience on a daily basis.  Otago Harbour's ancient podocarp forests may be largely denuded (you're seeing second growth and plantation pine here) but it is still such a generous landscape and is - for the moment- free of the very worst human cruftage.  There's no millionaire marinas or canal mansion wank or salmon cages.  No militia flotillas or visible body parts.  Yet.  

​There's talk of some ratchet architectural jizzings (Acres of glass! Plagarised parabolic silhouettes!  Looks like someone got their dick caught in a giant bivalve!) being installed around the Dunedin waterfront in a near and more terrible future, but we won't be able to see it from our house, so whatever.

​At least it's not steampunk.
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The central islands are larger than they appear from the Port side of things, looking exactly like the stubborn, crusty survivors from right up the arse of the ancient, once-massive shield volcano that they are.  Boutique land chunks.  Bijoux continents.
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A Victorian quarantine dormitory remains on the largest, along with the graves of those unfortunate enough to have survived the half-year sea voyage from the northern hemisphere, only to drown coming ashore or succumb to disease just as their new home was sighted.  

Quarantine Island-Kamau Taurua is open to the public and you can stay there short-term, helping the bush recover with weed control programmes etc.  This would normally be right up our alley, but I am sort of secretly disinclined to step onto the place in case the remnant juju is... inclement.  

I have reservations when I view this isle at night sometimes.  It seems to focus and absorb the great, indifferent black energy of the ocean in a way its smaller neighbour does not.  Sometimes that dark flow is sticky.  It could just be me.
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 Looking out at Taiaroa Head with its lighthouse and albatross colony.  Below- Mt Cargill and the inner harbour, toward the Dunedin city end of things.
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The Otago Peninsula forms the long south-eastern arm of the Harbour, lying about 8 kms distant across from Port Chalmers.  We considered settling there upon arriving in Dunedin, we really did.  That dream lasted about as long as it took to settle in to one of its little bays and feel the thud of our tits slapping into our eyebrows, courtesy of a wind that never, ever stops.  I mean, Port gets it from the south and the north, but it is episodic, rather than the spirit-crushing, mono-directional air-hounding that afflicted our Peninsula domicile.  The bus ride into town and back sucks arse too.  (Life advice: always find a way to test drive an area before buying or signing a lease.  Always.)  

Portobello is a picturesque wee settlement and probably the tourist hub for the area, but we didn't bother getting off the boat for the brief time it was moored there to pick up some wildlife tour punters.  We find Portobello sort of... desultory, and have had one too many shitty experiences in its various cafés. 
Things may have changed since we were last there, and it's not like it's a hellhole or anything; our best advice is to pick up some fish and chips and park your arse down on the waterfront on a nice day.
Otago University has a marine study facility > on an adjacent headland.  You used to be able to visit the aquarium but it's only open to educational-type groups these days ie. children, goddamit.  

​I was told off there back in the day by some emotionally unregulated juvenile for touching a starfish, even though a sign encouraged visitors to do so.  The starfish didn't give a shit and it's not like I was visibly getting some sort of sick gratification from distressing an echinoderm.  
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Personally I would prefer to punt most children into the actual sea before allowing them to monopolise marine research facilities, but that's probably a niche thing.
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Heading back toward Port.  It was a really pleasant trip and we definitely intend to do it again on one of those nice flat-water days over winter.  There was a half-decent nor'east swell on the day and the boat handled nicely; R gets motion sickness sitting in a driveway contemplating movement, and he was fine, as was Fir.

 Our one small gripe was the lack of commentary volume once we picked up speed in the rear half of the vessel.  But you know, there was plenty of room in the cabin if we'd really needed to know more, and a low key approach to audio is one thousand times better than being fucked in the ears by some rote-droning halfwit, as any bus tour veteran will probably know.  The experience was pleasant, affordable, low-key and irritant-free, so the Port to Port Ferry goes on our used+recommended list of local attractions.
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Photoessays   *   Port Chalmers, New Zealand 


Photoessay: Late Summer, Port Chalmers

17/3/2019

 
Climate-wise, it's been a pretty typical summer so there's not much to report in that respect.  Lifestyle-wise, we've had the culture shock of entering the hospitality trade via our little wiener guesthouse, which has taken our usual summer routines, strangled them and dumped them on the compost heap.  Oh well.  At least we can afford groceries now.

So anyway, we haven't been out much; you'll just have to make do with these quotidian scenes.
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Newly minted geese.  At least the local sports clubs aren't shooting them at the moment.
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Juicy water.  This had a sparkle rating of about 8/10 on the Blackthorn Scale.  You can't really see where it picked up that sort of score in these images due to the limitations of the small camera we were carrying but it was a good effort.  It had almost everything: sexy contrast, interesting distribution, lively coruscation.  Points deducted for slightly disappointing sequin definition, suboptimal continuity and water colour could have been better, strictly speaking.

A number of krill events have seen legions of birds and fish of all sizes roiling through the harbour and sucking up that oceanic bounty.  I dote upon these cyclic manifestations; they provide some evidence of business as usual in the face of all those hellish predictions. 
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This is Frost, some sort of collie/huntaway amalgam and he is a good boy.  He runs ahead to all the swimming spots and waits, with his stick, for his lady and her poodles, who must remain on their leashes for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with the breed and I say that as a poodle parent.
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Supermoon rising.  Unfortunately we were not carrying a superlens, but you get the idea. 
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Above: Careys Bay Pub, just round the corner.  Below: seasonal civil greetings.
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As part of its postindustrial budget charm, Port possesses a puzzling superfluity of hazard signage, both contemporary and superannuated; in time I will document it all, before gentrification sweeps it all away.
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This was just your usual shitty, no frills boatshed round Back Beach until the tin was stripped away.
​I had no idea.
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Fir insisted on obscuring this footpath dick; that is actually what you're looking at, in case you were wondering.
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Careys Bay.  The football field.
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Photoessays   *   More Photos du Jour   *   Port Chalmers, New Zealand


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