Finding joy in the everyday

Australia is as wide as the distance between London to Moscow. Australia is the world's largest island. The biggest property in Australia is bigger than Belgium. More than 85% of Australians live within 50km of the coast. In 1880, Melbourne was the richest city in the world. In 1892, a group of 200 Australians unhappy with the government tried to start an offshoot colony in Paraguay to be called ‘New Australia’. The first photos from the 1969 moon landing were beamed to the rest of the world from Honeysuckle Tracking Station, near Canberra. Australia was the second country in the world to allow women to vote (New Zealand was first). In 1856, stonemasons took action to ensure a standard of 8-hour working days, which then became recognised worldwide. Australia is very sparsely populated: The UK has 248.25 persons per square kilometre, while Australia has only 2.66 persons per square kilometre. Australia’s first police force was made ...

Dear Blogger friends and family, I have been away on an exciting adventure with two lovely ladies (cousins of mine) and two smallish children.  We went to the Western Plains Zoo (Dubbo) which is around 400kms north west of Sydney (248 miles). We spent 4 nights in Dubbo and two days at the the zoo. Over the next few weeks I will share some of the photos I took — todays photos are of the cutest and cuddliest creature of all — the Australian Koala and as you can see — these photos are of a mother and her baby.  For those who want to know more about the Koala (and no they are not a bear even if they look like one) check out this LINK . After a wonderful relaxing week, I am back to work on Monday — up with the birds at 5:45am, no more sleeping in (not that I did much of that whilst on holidays!). Like all good things, they come to an end and all that is left is beautiful memories and photos to share!!  I flew back home yesterday afternoon and quickly unpacke...

Kangaroos and wallabies being hand fed My brother and niece (who live in the US) and I visited a wildlife reserve a few weeks ago as my niece really wanted to meet some Australia wildlife. I thought I would share with you some of the furry friends we met. The nice thing about this park was being able to mingle with some of the animals face-to-face and as you can see from the photos above, able to feed them. These kangaroos and wallabies have all been hand reared, therefore very use to humans and in fact, we decided, very dog like as they kept following us. In case you were wondering how kangaroos and wallabies differ, whilst they belong to the same family (macropods and marsupials), Kangaroos are bigger at around 8 foot compared to the wallaby at 2 feet, kangaroos have longer legs between the knees and ankles and the wallaby has a brighter and more colourful coat whilst the kangaroo has more sober colours. Kangaroos eat grasses whilst the wallaby eats mostly leaves in more fo...