Bus trip

Anyone who reads George's Journey will know that I was out all day yesterday. 

Friends of Belair National Park generally have a Spring Bus Trip, and this year we went on a really interesting tour led by an expert in Aboriginal Rock Paintings.  All of the sites were on private land, so rarely seen by the general public.  This image shows the group in the way to the first site.  We were allowed to take photos of the images, but were asked not to put them onto the internet; initially I thought "why not", but once to you see them there is a very real sense of spirituality, and you understand.

Oh my golly, was it ever windy.  I struggle with this kind of terrain at the best of times - quite steep slopes and very rocky; the wind gave it quite another dimension.  I went on two of the three hikes - this one and the last one.  The middle one was just too hard for me.  There were stone walls to climb and rocks to scramble over - my rock scrambling days are well behind me, I'm afraid.

This part of the Mt. Lofty ranges (the eastern slopes) is very different to where we live on the western side.  The whole area is in the rain shadow, very dry, and not very good farming land at all.  I think they run sheep, but by far the biggest "industry" is the farming of moss rocks for garden landscaping. 

From a purely commercial point of view I can understand, but from an ecological point of view it's a disaster.  The removal of the rocks is causing erosion on a massive scale, and habitat loss is enormous.  I believe that there have been court cases, but so far the landholder has not been stopped, even though he has faced enormous fines.