March 4 - The Transit of Venus and banksias!

The rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena has fascinated polymaths like Ptolemy, Horrocks, and Kepler. And you say, ....? It is what brought Joseph Banks to Australia.  If Linnæus, Swedish naturalist and father of modern taxonomy, had his way Australia would have been called Banksia in honour of the man who collected and described a vast collection of plants from this new country - 1770 exotic flora! 

Joseph Banks noted in his diary: 

“The countrey this morn rose in gentle sloping hills which had the appearance of the highest fertility, every hill seemd to be cloth’d with trees of no mean size.” 

Of course he was talking about the east coast of what was to become NSW, but the southeast coast of Gippsland is a veritable jungle of dense trees named banksias for this prodigious botanist. I have no idea of their particular species, but when we stopped for lunch in Cape Conran National Park we were surrounded by them and I spent a wee while poking around checking them out. 

A banksia fruit returning to the earth, seed pod mouths agape

A poor gnarled specimen

Bark like cankerous elephant skin

A wee May Gibbs Banksia man

The Banksia flower is an astonishing thing

Quite fascinating- and the ants thought so too!

Not the prettiest of trees but ancient and dependent on fire for their survival

Intersting new growth

This wee creature had me spell bound watching his gymnastics on a blade of grass