I woke at 6.30 on the Sunday morning of our weekend at Hidden Valley and took my camera for a walk down to the river nearby (I would have taken people, too, but they were still asleep). It was barely light enough for photography so my first shots were a bit dark but the little river was so pretty I couldn’t resist.
My side of the river had been cleared some years ago so I was walking through long grass and scattered small trees, although trees on the other side were much denser and bigger. As I made my way upstream I came to a broad shallow pool:
Western rivers are famously transient and this one counts as a Western river since it runs down the Western slopes of the Great Dividing Range (its water must end up in the Burdekin). A few weeks ago it would have been carrying three or more times as much water, as fallen trees and scoured banks attest, but the pool was absolutely still when I saw it. I didn’t see a platypus but I can believe they live here.
It was so early that many insects were still sleeping, some of them prettily dew-draped. Photos of sleeping bees, a mud dauber wasp, shield bugs (not asleep) and a nondescript small triangular moth are all on my Flickr photostream – just click the links to see them. The most beautiful of all was a dragonfly: