December 13, 2010

I drive past Lake George quite often – any time you drive north from Canberra you really can’t help it. Recently someone’s filled it up with water. It started looking marshy and then there was definitely a silver sliver of water on the horizon and now you can’t help but feel like it actually might be a real lake after all. It hasn’t been this way for at least 15 years, which seems like a long time to me but I suppose when you’re more than a million years old it’s not really so much of a big deal.

I know only random factoids about Lake George. They are the kind of thing that you tell to your weary passengers in the car every single time you drive past. Eg, it’s really old. It’s dangerous when full because the water is shallow and the wind kicks up waves. Until recently it wasn’t full for bloody ages. And I once heard on a callback radio programme that the hills near Lake George are a common place to see mysterious ball lightning – a name which has unfortunately only just struck me as being amusing – and I always think of that as I drive past.

Last weekend I stopped to take these couple of photos of the gorgeous wind farm and the fading sunlight on the lake-bed, and a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos flew past. They were right over the middle of the lake so from where we were standing it was only possible to tell they were cockatoos (and not, for example, marauding crows looking for doom of which to be the harbingers) because of their lovely slow wing-beats. Zooming in on the photo later confirmed it.