Some of the world’s oldest trees stand on a hillside in the National Arboretum in Canberra, overlooking mountains and the lake below.

These trees are called Wollemi pines, and a long time ago, they were all over Australia. Fossil evidence reveals that they go back 100 million to 200 million years. Dinosaur fossils have been found in Australia from around that same time, leading paleontologists to believe that some dinosaurs may have eaten Wollemi leaves. As the continent became dryer, the trees died out; they were thought to have gone extinct along with the dinosaurs.

But then in 1994, a national park worker discovered a small stand of Wollemi pine in a rain forest gorge in the Blue Mountains, not far from Sydney. A massive conservation effort began, with seedlings sent around the world. Some ended up in Canberra.

Despite the tiny population in the wild, the tree is hearty. It can grow on exposed rock slopes and withstand temperatures ranging from 23 degrees Fahrenheit to 113 degrees Fahrenheit. The seedlings have matured, producing viable seeds of their own. Some Wollemi pines produce female cones, while others produce male cones, and some trees produce both.

People across the world can order a prehistoric pine of their own, to help this ancient tree survive. 

We don’t normally have white winters where I live in Australia, although snow has been part of our forecast this year. Still, I searched the nearby wetlands in this last bit of winter to see what white I could find.

No snow on the landscape, but clouds and trees and a ghostly moon contributed some winter white.

Birds provided some fleeting white splashes.

​And humans have made their own additions.

​While my home in Australia may not have the snowy seasons of my childhood, I can still find lots of winter white if I look.

Australia is known for its parrots. Of the more than 300 different species of parrots around the world, Australia has 56 of them, not counting sub-species. Twenty minutes north of Canberra’s city center is a spot to get up close and personal to many of Australia’s parrots: the Canberra Walk-in Aviary

Planted with suitable habitat for birds, this privately-owned aviary stretches over 3300 square feet and up nearly 30 feet high. It houses around 500 birds from 55 species, including more than 20 types of parrots.

​The admission price includes a plate of apple slices and a bowl of live meal worms. The birds flock to visitors (and more importantly, to the food they’re carrying). It is not the place for people who are squeamish about birds perching on them. One determined bird landed on me repeatedly, running his beak through my hair, as if grooming me.  

I made the acquaintance of the lorikeets, particularly the rainbow type. These small parrots are cheeky, social, and persistent. Although they are often a pest in the wild, there is no denying their charm here.

These lorikeets figured early in Australia's history: a rainbow lorikeet was the first parrot to travel back to England with Captain Cook.

I thoroughly enjoyed my morning here and look forward to the next time. I’ll return with a better zoom—the camera loves these birds. 

My thumb is the opposite of green. I can kill any houseplant, failing to keep even ivy or kitchen herbs alive. Imagine my boundless admiration when I visited the National Bonsai and Penjing Collection of Australia and saw what a combination of artistry and patience can do.

Bonsai is the art of growing miniature trees in pots, and it started around sixth century AD in Japan. Penjing means “pot scenery” in Chinese and goes back to the first dynasty of imperial China (around 221 BC to 220 AD). While the oldest bonsai and penjing are more than 1200 years old, this impressive collection is not that ancient. The oldest tree here dates to 1880.

About 80 trees are usually on display, and all the Australian or exotic trees have been donated or loaned by artists and their families or friends. The trees have been lovingly sculpted over time to create natural landscapes that evoke calm and tranquility. 

​Volunteers knit scarves for some of the trees, to keep them warm in Canberra’s chilly winters.

This lovely collection is located at the National Arboretum Canberra, and the website includes a 3D tour. 

The Birds of Australia—a massive seven-volume work published between 1840 to 1848 and one of the most influential books about Australian birds—contains stunning illustrations by a woman named Elizabeth Gould … but you’d never know it. Her name doesn’t appear on the title page. The individual plates are credited only to “J & E Gould.” The “J” is John Gould, Elizabeth’s husband, a taxidermist and ornithologist. The book’s author, he took credit for each illustration, even though the work was his wife’s. She was reduced to an initial.

Born into a military family in England in 1804, Elizabeth was probably taught to draw and paint, skills that were expected of middle- and upper-class women of the time. At 22, she was working (unhappily) as a governess. Her brother, a taxidermist, introduced her to one of his colleagues, John Gould. They married in 1829 when they were both 24.

John wanted to write a book about birds from the Himalayas and informed a no-doubt-surprised Elizabeth that she would do all the drawings, paintings, and lithographs. She taught herself the new art of lithography while pregnant with their first child. Elizabeth designed and illustrated 80 lithographs of 100 bird species, all hand colored.

When the book was published, John listed only himself on the title page. In the preface, John noted her “well-known abilities” in “delineating these birds.” Although Elizabeth didn’t sign any of her artwork, each plate bears a small credit: “Drawn from nature on stone by E. Gould.” The book was a huge success, leading to another project on the birds of Europe.

Over the next five years, Elizabeth worked on the illustrations and created 448 plates for the book. She also gave birth to five more children, but only three survived.
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During this time, Charles Darwin brought back bird specimens from the Galapagos Islands, and Elizabeth created the illustrations to go with John’s text about the birds. One of these was of the famous Galapagos finches, referred to in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Elizabeth’s name didn’t appear on any of the illustrations. 

Again, when Birds of Europe was published, Elizabeth’s name was not on the title page. Worse, each illustration now had John’s initials along with Elizabeth’s. He often claimed that she contributed only the lithographs, while he was responsible for the original art. Both contemporary sources and documentary evidence of the original sketches confirms his assertion was untrue.

With another successful book, John now wanted to tackle Australian birds. Elizabeth’s brothers both had farms in New South Wales, so the Goulds could base themselves there for the new project.

Elizabeth didn’t want to travel to Australia. The Goulds had four surviving children, and the plan was to take their oldest son (age seven) with them, leaving the three youngest children with Elizabeth’s mother. The idea of leaving behind her youngest child Louisa (only six months old) was extremely distressing, and Elizabeth nearly didn’t go. However, John insisted, so they traveled to Australia in 1838.

In her letters to her mother and diaries, she didn’t talk about her art. She missed her children and mother and was frustrated by the separation. She stayed busy, working on hundreds of drawings and paintings and learning about native plants as well as the birds. She worried about how many bird specimens her husband was collecting, calling him “a great enemy of the feathered tribe,” and wrote to her mother: “I hope he leaves some of the birds in the skies.”
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As a zoological artist, Elizabeth faced real challenges in the days before photography. Bird specimens to draw from were collected, killed, and stuffed. The resulting illustration was often stilted and unnatural, a style referred to now as “birds on a stick.” Their time in Australia allowed Elizabeth to observe and draw birds in their native habitat. Her art had to be scientifically accurate, lifelike, and beautiful—she achieved all three. 

​Elizabeth spent a little more than two years in Australia, returning to England in 1840. A year later, she died of puerperal fever after giving birth for the eighth time. Another artist had to finish the lithography from her drawings and paintings.

While John Gould never put her name on the title page of any of their books, he did name an Australian bird to memorialize Elizabeth, calling it the Gouldian Finch. He noted that his late wife had “laboriously assisted me with her pencil, accompanied me to Australia, and cheerfully interested herself in all my pursuits.” Ironically, even though he named the bird in honor of Elizabeth, he used only his surname.

​Today, although her husband is still sometimes credited for her work, Elizabeth’s enormous contributions are becoming better known through Her Natural History campaign, related presentations, and a novel written about her. The enormous breadth of her work can be seen in various archives, including this one of her lithographs, thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. 

​On my very first day in Australia, I spotted these odd pink and gray birds. They strolled along in a side-to-side gait that wasn’t quite a waddle, often in twos, feeding from the ground. They were far from graceful—until they took to the air. These mystery birds turned out to be strong, swift flyers.
 
The birds were galahs, a type of cockatoo, and I’ve seen them nearly every day since. Galahs are one of Australia’s most common birds. The name “galah” comes from the indigenous Yuwaalaraay language of northern New South Wales. The word has also become Australian slang for a fool or idiot, perhaps because Australians have perceived the bird as a clown or not particularly smart.  
 
The indigenous peoples of Australia had different stories about how the galah got its distinctive appearance. One version said the bald spot beneath the bird’s crest was caused by a lizard’s carelessness. Another story attributed the galah’s pink breast to blood lost in a battle, while in another, the galah becomes pink and gray after trying to help a dove ease the pain of a festering foot.
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Here are some facts about galahs:

While galahs don’t have the raucous confidence of sulphur-crested cockatoos or the cheekiness of gang-gangs, they always strike me as dignified, with a fussy charm all their own. 

​Everyone in North America is familiar with opossums. The only marsupial in the United States and Canada, the opossum eats many harmful insects, including more than 5,000 ticks in a season. 

​The name came from the Algonquin word “aposoum,” meaning a white dog or white beast. The informal name for this animal is “possum.”

We have very different possums here. They live in New Guinea, Australia, and Indonesia. These possums received their name because English naturalist Sir Joseph Banks thought they looked like the North American opossum.  

Both Australian possums and North American possums are marsupials, nocturnal, omnivorous, and live in trees. Both play dead (playing possum) when they’re threatened.

Now for the differences. They belong to different orders: Didelphimorphia for opossum and Diprotodontia for the possum. While the opossum has coarse hair and a hairless tail (like a rat), possums have softer hair and long bushy tails. Possums come in more diverse colors, and they have a rank smell because of musk glands behind their ears.

Other facts about possums include:

While someone from North American would understand a reference to either an opossum or possum, an Australian would probably think I was talking funny if I added an “o” to one of their possums.

Although this strange animal looks like an alien hybrid of a porcupine and an anteater, it’s neither a rodent like the porcupine nor a typical mammal like the anteater. This is a short-beaked echidna, found in Australia and New Guinea. Echidnas, also called spiny anteaters, are monotremes, a mammal that lays eggs. The only other egg-laying mammal in the world is the platypus.

The mother lays an egg, and it’s incubated in a temporary pouch. Once the egg hatches, the baby echidna—called a puggle—stays in the pouch and laps up milk from special glands called milk patches. Unlike other mammals, echidnas do not have nipples. The puggle stays in the pouch for about two months, when it begins to grow spines. The mother then moves it from her pouch to a burrow and cares for it the next seven months. Echidnas nest in burrows that other animals have left behind or they can sleep in hollow logs, rock crevices, under bushes, or in piles of leaves.

Echidnas use their narrow snout, which functions as both a nose and mouth, to search out ants, termites, spiders, worms, and other larvae. They capture their food with a long, sticky tongue. They can forage up to 18 hours a day and are most active from dusk until dawn.

Their spines are a specialized kind of hair and are used for defense. When attacked, they will curl up like a hedgehog. They can also use their powerful claws to bury themselves in the ground to get away from an attacker.

Here are five more fascinating facts about echidnas:

1. Echidnas are named after a creature in Greek mythology, who was half woman, half snake, probably because they have both mammalian and reptilian characteristics.
2. Their sticky tongues can be almost seven inches long.
3. They are the most widespread of Australia’s native mammals and can live anywhere from snowy mountains to deserts.
4. In colder areas, they will hibernate, waking every 2 to 3 weeks.
5. While their lifespan in the wild is about 15 years, echidnas can live up to 50 years in captivity.

So while I very seldom see one of these alien-looking animals, I know they’re in the neighborhood not too far away, munching on ants and other insects every night. 

The power of water does weird and wonderful things to the southern coast of Tasmania. Strong winds from the southwest create pounding waves that attack the rockface and erode the coastline. In addition to the Tesselated Pavement, three other sites on the Tasman Peninsula illustrate the remarkable power of water: The Blowhole, Tasman Arch, and Devils Kitchen.

Before looking at The Blowhole, here’s a primer on how water forms caves. Imagine the sea as it crashes against the base of cliffs. The waves carry sand and rock debris, which act like a big horizontal piece of sandpaper, cutting a notch into the vertical rockface until a crack or joint is reached. Compressed water and air wedge in the crack, forcing the rock apart. Continued erosion makes a cave longer and wider.

The Blowhole was a sea cave and tunnel until the roof at the back of the tunnel collapsed. The result was a broad arch with a blowhole behind it.

Eventually, the water will cause the rest of the arch to collapse as well so that it looks more like the next formation.

Devils Kitchen was likely a sea cave and then a tunnel. The waves over many thousands of years have eroded the rock, causing the roof to completely collapse. The water follows its inexorable path, cracking joints to create new caves in the rockface.