Dingos and trees

A beautiful sunny day today so time for a walk into the centre of Canberra to do a bit of shopping.

Many of the guides I read about shopping in Canberra were a bit dismissive - all I can say is that these people have never been to Aberdeen. The shopping centre in Canberra is Enormous, with lots of lovely shops, as far as I could see. They even have a Jamie's Italian, to prove that there is no place left on earth where his cheeky chappy persona has yet to penetrate. I am not saying this is necessarily a good thing.

Outside the shopping centre, next to the second-hand record store (yes, Frederik, I went in and moved records around for a bit) are lots of statues of dingos:

It was hard to take a photo of them actually because of all the little children riding on them. No one apart from me seemed to think this strange - have these people not seen A Cry in The Dark?

I have been noting a real difference between imported and indigenous tree varieties on my walk. The imported trees - oaks, maples, etc - are all beautiful autumn colours, but the eucalypts don't seem to do this. I will monitor the situation further. What lots of the Eucalypts do do is kind of moult their bark. There are lots of different Eucalypt varieties, but the ones around here mostly seem to be of the stringybark type. Their bark comes off in great long strings and lies at the bottom of the tree in heaps. Apparently this is to encourage bushfires - these trees regenerate after bushfires when buds buried deep in the tree are stimulated. So these trees are basically amassing kindling around their trunks to start fires. 

The second photo below shows the foliage of a local Eucalypt in comparison to the oak tree outside my apartment.

So today we learned about suicidal trees and babies playing on dingos. We're not in Kansas anymore Toto.