June 2020
Morning walk in autumn
Snake
May 2020
From the same outing as the pretty autumn leaves, a suburban snake:
Snakes aren’t as common as the Australian mythos in which we fight a Sisyphean battle against them daily, armed only with our teeth and in some cases our Irish ancestry, but they’re also not as rare as some folks would like to be assured either. I’ve never run into one in a suburban backyard, but seeing them on farms or in the wilderness is not a surprise, and this is the second black snake I’ve seen in a botanic garden; evidently botanic gardens are just big and wild enough to sustain some non-curated predators.
This one in Auburn was definitely the most active snake I’ve ever personally seen though, it was absolutely gunning it across the path and up the hill on whatever hunting mission it was on. I wouldn’t have backed myself trying to outrun it. We paid a lot less attention to the canopy and more to the forest floor afterwards.
Auburn Botanic Gardens
May 2020
This album comes via a quick detour to update Wikipedia so that I understood how school reopenings worked in New South Wales in 2020, specifically:
From 11 May [2020], students returned to school one day a week with a plan for a phased return over several weeks. From 25 May, the phased return was replaced with full-time schooling.
Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales (2020)
I had decided in advance that when school went back — it was remote for seven weeks, and two weeks of Easter holidays — that my spouse and I would then immediately take a week off work. Thus, the week of 25 May, we went somewhere each day in Sydney to explore, of which the most photogenic was Auburn Botanic Gardens in late autumn colours.
Autumn near Orange
Japanese maple
May 2020
Prime example of why I can’t declare photo bankruptcy: autumn in my mother’s garden in May of 2020.
By May, there was very little COVID in most of Australia, which had closed its borders to non-residents in late March and would not re-open them for tourists until February 2022. The weekend of 16/17 May was the first significantly unrestricted weekend, and so we went to visit my family post-haste.
