It’s well over six months after my first exploration of the Townsville cemetery in Belgian Gardens. On this recent return visit I walked right around it. That gave me plenty of time to think about it as a wildlife habitat; a good walk, too, since the cemetery is about 1.5 km long.
Tag: Townsville
Colly Campbell – The Capricorn Sky
The Capricorn Sky
Colly Campbell (author page)
Stringybark, 2020
There’s a lot to like in The Capricorn Sky but unfortunately there’s more than a little to dislike, too. Let’s get the negatives out of the way first.
It’s Campbell’s first novel (nothing wrong with that) and it’s self-published. The book’s unpolished design (fonts, text spacing, etc) sends up the first warning signals, suggesting that it has missed out on the benefit of experienced editorial eyes and hands. Furthermore, Campbell has chosen to write in an invented future English in which hyphenated words are replaced by camelCase, “qu” by “qw” (qwite, qwiet, etc), and there are other neologisms and re-spellings. He probably intended that it would help place the action where it’s set, at the end of this century. It’s a tactic which can work well in the hands of an experienced writer (Burgess’s Clockwork Orange and Hoban’s Riddley Walker come to mind) but this reader, for one, found it unnecessarily distracting.
And that’s a pity, because Campbell has set a good story in a worryingly plausible future North Queensland.
Continue reading “Colly Campbell – The Capricorn Sky”
Townsvilleans or Townsvillians?
Green Path often needs to refer to residents of Townsville but I have always been ambivalent about both of the obvious terms, Townsvilleans or Townsvillians. The former preserves the silent “e” and is perfectly readable but the -eans ending looks vaguely wrong, while the latter is just that little bit harder to read, especially in a sans-serif font like Arial, because of the -illi- combination.
A little bit of not-too-serious research was in order, so I asked on facebook (my personal page, not the blog’s page). Names have been suppressed to protect my informants’ privacy.
Other candidates
People in Italy are Italians, people in Chile are Chileans, but in both cases the final vowel is sounded so they are not exact parallels. On the other hand, people of the Seychelles are Seychellois and Townsvillois is attractively exotic. Sadly, 99% of the Townsvillois who see the word will automatically rhyme it with boys, ruining it completely for the minority.
Townsville’s 2019 floods
The Townsville flood of January-February 2019 was, like cyclones Althea and Yasi, one of the extreme weather events which define people’s lives in the city. Two months later, “How did you go in the floods?” is still the first question we ask friends we haven’t seen for a while. There’s a lot for Green Path to say about it but whatever we publish now will be incomplete so we will update and extend it as appropriate, in separate posts if justified by the amount of extra material.
Let’s begin with an overview of the weather event and its immediate consequences.
The weather event
A low in the monsoon trough over the Gulf became a rain depression and drifted South and East until it settled over Townsville, where it stayed much longer than “normal” (we will have to return to that concept later) and dumped an inordinate amount of rain on us over about ten days – say 29-30 Jan to 7-8 Feb. Continue reading “Townsville’s 2019 floods”
Birding on the Town Common
On Saturday I was lucky enough to visit the Town Common with a small group which included two keen, knowledgeable birders. Thanks to them, we ended up with a list of more than 50 species from Red-backed Wrens and Spice Finches (10 cm) to Jabirus and Brolgas (130 cm). We were happy that we spotted so many in just a couple of hours but I should note, just for context, that about 280 have been recorded on the Common.
We drove in past the golf club, visiting Payet’s Tower and the two nominated viewing points on the way to Freshwater bird hide, with a few unscheduled stops as one or another of us spotted birds from the vehicle. There is still a fair bit of open water on the Common and we saw substantial numbers of Magpie Geese, including about 150 in a single flock near the Pandanus viewing point. We briefly visited the Pallarenda Conservation Park, too, adding the Orange-footed Scrub Fowl, Scrub Turkey and others to our list.
Here are some of my photographs from the morning.