Nature's Place

There’s an out of the way fishing spot on a bend of a tidal creek not far from where I live. Often there is nobody there at the times I go.

It’s nice to walk by the water and around the few short tracks in this small area, the place is literally surrounded by mangrove forest at the edge of the bay, Moreton Bay – protected from the wilder ocean by a series of islands.

The main reason I’ve been going there so much in recent weeks is the growing bird activity at this particular bend in the creek/river, and the fact they are very shy of people, so it’s necessary to introduce oneself, to optimise the chance of a picture or two.

As luck would have it, one or two have been sitting within range the last week or so. Range enough … Rainbow Bee Eaters, I believe, nesting in the creek bank wall on the sunny side.

The best direction to be shooting at the time of day, to catch them in the light.

Picking the best shots from ones blurred by dried grass – since trimmed for future work – blowing in the wind between lens and bird.

Elegant little beauty … Sun is high, from the shadow of the beak.

Same perch from the other side, slightly different time of day too.

A more distant perch out over the water. A cleaner background but lower resolution. But good enough …

And a lucky shot, just as she was about to take to the wing. At the limits of the gear.

…

Sometimes I come across a couple of older guys carrying bags and I see them fetching a dingy from the undergrowth to get to a bigger boat anchored mid-stream. We wave …

That boat takes them to a (almost) hidden hut on a dry rise on the creek bank a few hundred meters away, almost invisible to the eye nowadays.

A small dingy does the job for this day. The tide goes up to the floor – at the front. Location couldn’t be more private. They seem to do ok.

Reminds me of the kids stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, except this may be home to one or both of them in these ‘housing as an investment’ days.

It’s somewhere to live undisturbed for a while, until there’s a cyclone or king tide. But I haven’t been there and there may be higher and dryer space behind them.

People live on the water around here, it’s warm enough year round as long as the weather and health allows.

Living quarters don’t come much tighter than a small yacht. Outside piled up. Not a lot of space inside, as I remember it from long gone days.

A houseboat is a different prospect. Still on unstable and poorly serviced foundation, but an option for some.

There’s a rainbow of characters out there that we rarely see, down by the water.

© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look …
*
*

… just MIA for a while. Or is that MIInaction. I do intend to get back to this blog when circumstances are more aligned, we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, I post some stuff weekly or so on FB social media – not sure why, because I sure am not social, but for now. Here – Garden Safari Pictures

I remember now, it was to promote my framed and unframed pictures for sale at weekend outdoor markets, and online. Only ever sold a few online, and after the first year nobody was buying at the markets and the cost of doing it was eating into a small pension. So I’m looking at how to do that differently, a reboot sort of. Gotta be practical, if it’s that.

Outdoor market selling was supposed to be adjunct to online selling but when I looked into that I was intuitively repulsed by the in-house manipulation of marketing that was obviously not to my advantage, in fact it was designed to fully occupy me and attach me to the platform by costly fees and promotions if I was to sell anything at all. It also required a lot of non-essential but time-consuming considerations and activities. Labyrinthine is a good word for it.

Today I read an article that gives one good explanation why I was repulsed by some online selling platforms – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/05/way-past-its-prime-how-did-amazon-get-so-rubbish – in a word, enshitification, and it’s widespread. Worth reading … if you care to.

Ebay is still as simple as it ever was, for me anyway, though it has gotten more expensive on sale fees and is not really suited to my current product – close-up photo prints of our local nature. I only have 3 listed there but any of what I have can be purchased if someone asks – https://www.ebay.com.au/usr/macromeds

There’s another description of enshitification, malice intent, or just plain greed as a philosophy. The calculated intent to rob us of the value of our lives, to spend them in thrall to multiple minor excitations of the psyche, in service to a self-defeating process of identification with nothing of value. It’s nothing new, but the intensification, and with the turbo-charging of the process with AI that’s now well underway, the net capture of ones value, ones attention or intelligence, will be comprehensive and pervasive.

That’s progress, the way a virus is a progression of events. And in its way it serves the evolution of intelligence, by eventually forcing a separation from what doesn’t serve, identification of intelligence with what passes. And the dis-identification with such is pain, is change. Change is pain.

We’ll see how the reboot goes anyway, I might buff up my eBay presence and pare all else down to weekend outdoor markets, but I really only want it to pay for itself – properly, not just the days expenses – fuel and stall rent, but the hidden incidentals too – even if that doesn’t include something for my time, 8 – 12 hours a market day. I have no hope or design though, just an idea, for now.

Or it might just be an idea that has run its course. We’ll see … nothing can be set in stone if a reboot is to have a chance. Likewise, nothing can be left out. Regardless of orthodoxy.

Something different is a possibility, though the terrain may be fraught and the effort vain. We’ll see …

Kookaburra in the back garden, where I live.

Pelican preening at the local jetty, perched on a tall power pole.

Duck, regular visitors to the back door these days.

And the Stone Curlew, it’s chick season again. Keeping her eye on things.

© Mark Berkery … Click on those pictures for a closer look …
*
*