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Granite Trail in Autumn

2/4/2015

 
Greetings fellow Foxies,
                                      Today I visited the Granite Trail with Jess, a colleague and an economist with a heart. I wanted to show her the visual delight of colour and form of a wandoo draped over a large granite rock that is shown at 2 times in the day below. Jess admitted that it is a nice rock (but not suitable for a quarry I guess!).
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Dawn
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Mid-morning
I had more success in activating the economic aorta when we moved to the flowering Dodonaea humifusa  (a hopbush) groundcover plants that drape over rocks in red clay soil.
This hardy and delightful species has male and female plants like the she-oaks. Male plant flowers appear normal at first glance, but are basically petals and anthers that released a cloud of pollen when Jess touched them. She loved that. The female plant flowers are just the ovary with a red style (tube).
​If you know any economists who need an emotional kickstart, take them to the Granite Trail in late summer-autumn.

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Female plant on left,male on right
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Carpets of evergreen plants
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Glistening red styles on female plants
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Males seem to have normal flowers
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Female flower left male right

Claypit walk lookout tree

9/8/2014

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Greetings fellow Foxies,
Ex-neighbour Robbie Harrold and I looked for his favoured childhood haunts and discovered his lookout tree near the geocache site on the claypit walk. It's a large wandoo with spikes driven into the trunk for steps and remains of a metal bedframe cubby. It is most impressive and I am amazed that I walked past it for years without noticing.

Of course Robbie had to climb the tree for old times’ sake.

The structure is old and probably dates back to my childhood when kids were real kids rather than namby pamby bottled water drinking, gluten-free products of a nanny state. Oops old fart alert! Replace previous invective with ‘careful and caring socially interconnected modern children’.

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Rifle range

3/2/2014

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The following is an extract from Maurie White’s account of the history of Foxes lair.
“At the commencement of World War1 the need to stimulate military awareness and get men familiar with weapons led the Defence Department to construct Narrogin’s second rifle range along a flat area of Foxes Lair.  This range with its high stone “butts” was created between late 1914 and early 1915 and officially opened on 31 January 1916.  In later years the range was extended eastwards over what is now Range Road by the Narrogin Rifle Club, with a wooden tower (now long dismantled) being erected instead of a 700 yard mound in the late 1920’s.” I think that the range was in use until the 1970’s. The road that runs east to the car park was once the shooting range. If you look carefully as you go down it, you can see the low earth shooting mounds.
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The Granite walk passes by the old target area and earth bank. The sign in the image below advises children to look for  bullets that become exposed in the gullies.
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In 1998, the Sawkins family had another use for this bank. Aileen could never understand how the kids came back with torn clothes after I took them to Foxes Lair! She does now.
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    Doug Sawkins is a friend of Foxes Lair 

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