Approaching the huge water tank from the trail side, it’s a nondescript green.

​Called the Narrabundah reservoir, it holds 18 million liters and supplies water to southern neighborhoods like mine. It’s important. But utterly unremarkable … unless you see the opposite side, from the highway. 

​The mural explodes with color. I can pick out native flowers like banksia, grevillea, and wax flower. A goanna climbs a tree above a kangaroo family.

​And the birds! Many fly across the mural or populate the ground and trees, including a pelican, yellow-tailed black cockatoo, a gang-gang couple, and a purple swamp hen.

Something that I have always appreciated about Canberra is the effort to make the mundane quirky, colorful, and even beautiful. Local artist Geoff Filmer has played a big role. He’s known as Canberra’s “mural man.” The water tank mural is one of many projects he’s tackled.  

This artist is now one of my personal heroes; I was delighted to discover that he was the one who transformed a pump station into the famous TARDIS on Red Hill.

I admire Canberra too, for supporting local artists in their quest to make the everyday into something extraordinary.

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. 

​I grew up outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and whenever I feel a little homesick, I just go to my local Australian grocery store. The rows of Heinz products soon remind me of my hometown.

How did the H.J. Heinz company get all the way from Pittsburgh to Australia?

In 1869, using his mother’s recipe, H.J. Heinz started selling bottled horseradish from a pushcart on the streets of Pittsburgh. Other products soon followed, including sauerkraut, vinegar and pickles. Most famously, bottled ketchup and baked beans came a little later.

Those baked beans were Heinz’s entrée to the rest of the world. London’s famous store, Fortnum and Mason, became the first overseas sellers of Heinz products. The Heinz company introduced baked beans to England and marketed them heavily, eventually succeeding in making baked beans a staple of the British diet.

Heinz products came to Australia via American miners working in the goldfields in the 1880s. They shared Heinz foods with their Australian counterparts. Heinz representatives also held in-store demonstrations to introduce unfamiliar products like baked beans or India relish (a sweet mixture of pickles, celery, and spices).

​In 1935, Heinz’ Victoria factory began producing bottled horseradish, followed by baked beans and canned spaghetti.

​Heinz quickly learned to adapt to local tastes and change their products accordingly. The famous ketchup formula has different variations across the world. 

Heinz also purchased Wattie’s, a venerable New Zealand company, in 1992. 

​Today, Heinz products are sold in more than 50 countries, including Australia. Traveling around the world can still remind me of my hometown.

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. 

While many towns may consider street art to be a public nuisance or at best a civic experiment, street art actually saved the town of Sheffield, Tasmania. Sheffield is located about fourteen miles inland of Tasmania’s northwest coast.

Sheffield was a thriving little town while several hydroelectric plants were being built in northwest Tasmania. By the mid-1980s though, the construction had finished, and the town shared in the area’s general decline. The town’s leaders looked for inspiration to the other side of the world, in Canada, in a small town on Vancouver Island called Chemainus.

Also facing an economic decline, Chemainus had begun painting murals on its buildings, which drew visitors and revenue. The citizens of Chemainus credited the murals with saving the town.

Sheffield decided to give murals a try too. In 1986, John Lendis painted the first mural, and Sheffield rebranded itself as the Town of Murals. 

​Sheffield encouraged artists, commissioning and creating murals for the town's buildings.  Many of the murals depict the area’s history and life in the town’s early days. The emphasis on having an enormous outdoor art gallery of more than 100 murals worked, and now Sheffield is a tourist destination.

The town now hosts a yearly International Mural Fest, where nine artists paint works based on one theme. The winning murals are then displayed in Mural Park for the next twelve months, ensuring that returning visitors can see new artwork.

Sheffield offers more information about each mural on a website, and the Visitor Information Center has both a map and a self-guided audio tour.

What a wonderful way to spend a morning—looking at the paintings that saved a town. 

​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.

The longest night of the year is coming soon for the southern hemisphere. On 21 June, the South Pole has its maximum tilt away from the sun, resulting in a winter solstice. How do Canberrans celebrate? Some may go to parties. Others, however, brave the cold for charity.

The annual Winter Solstice Nude Charity Swim raises money for the charities Love Your Sister and Lifeline. Participants plunge naked into the icy Lake Burley Griffin at daybreak. Last year, a bagpiper played before the intrepid swimmers launched. Although the event started with only four people three years ago, it is growing. Last year, sixty people participated, and this year, an estimated 31 teams and 122 people are signed up so far, with two days to go. The chilly dunk is scheduled for sunrise at 7:12 am, and the morning forecast is for partly sunny skies with the temperature a little below freezing.

The other charity event is the tenth annual CEO Sleepout sponsored by the St. Vincent de Paul Society in Australia. On 20 June, one of the longest nights of the year, leaders across Australia in business, government, and communities will sleep without shelter to raise money to battle homelessness and poverty. In Canberra this year, the CEO Sleepout will be held at the airport, in Hangar 47 on the Fairbairn RAAF base. Airport representatives say that temperatures regularly fall to below freezing and “aircraft noise will be a constant reminder of the harsh realities of sleeping rough.” The hope in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is to raise at least $700,000 AUD for services to help the homeless.

While I don’t think I’ll be shivering in Lake Burley Griffin or sleeping rough in a hangar on this winter solstice, I’ll be supporting the people who do and celebrating the arrival of the longer days to come.