"On belay freefall!"

So, having spent a week moving house, what does one do for relaxation? To unwind?

Naturally, one’s 15yo daughter needs to notch up some abseiling (at least 12 descents using at least 5 different devices) as a key part of earning some credentials which are really important to her, so one drives one’s battered and worn body — along with seven others considerably less battered and worn — for forty minutes down to Statham Quarry in Gooseberry Hill, and spends the day running up hills, carrying stuff, staring into the sky and tugging on ropes as a belayer, and taking photos of people, rocks and wildlife.

Some of the stuff I photographed is quite interesting. This smokebush-like flower has bright yellow stamens, a stark contrast to the grey petals (if petals they are). It’s smokebush-like only at first glance, the structure and detail are quite different. Smokebush is a plant which occurs here and there all over Western Australia, and the light-grey leaves look a little like smoke rising. Some varieties of it (not all) have been used by the Aboriginals for successfully treating cancer. These are flowers, not leaves — the leaves on this one are a dark green.

This here wee frog is about the size of a small blowfly (those ripples are fingerprints on Yani’s palm and folds of skin there, the folds are much smaller than individual fingers) and it’s pretty much identical to the dirt underneath it. The frog is danged hard to spot from a foot away even when you know roughly where it is.