Brisbane is lovely, as cities go. It has some lovely parks and green spaces.
Just look at this amazing Bottle Tree (Brachychiton rupestris) in Anzac Square.
The Cities main feature though is the Brisbane River. Its meandering is not as smooth as the Thames or some other major cities, in fact it’s tortuous and much of the city is perched on its cliff edges which makes it spectacular.
I took a ferry from Ellen’s into the city for a day while she was working (She’s a busy person, working, mum to two teenagers and she’s a student trying to complete her thesis).
I decided a day of culture was called for and visited the Queensland Museum and two art galleries on the South Bank. I also visited the botanical gardens.
I enjoyed it all especially an exhibit of fossilised dinosaur footprints at the museum. There there was a small sample (still quite big) of a slab of sandstone lifted in order to protect the footprints from weather damage. What was phenomenal was there were so many varieties of dinosaur prints caught in a stampede. It begs the question what made them stampede as some footprints where huge!
My foray into the botanical garden also revealed a dinosaur, living, breathing and very startling!
This is an Eastern Water Dragon and about 18 inches long. Not what I expected to appear out of the greenery as I sat on the grass with my coffee.
In the gardens were several species of what here is called a pine. Araucaria is a tall impressive conifer. It’s South American cousin is what we call the monkey puzzle tree. All of them are living fossils (back as far as 250 million years ago), their relatives fed dinosaurs. Weirdly although they are now an exclusively Southern Hemisphere tree, most of the fossil remains are found in the Northern Hemisphere.
Well I came to a very modern city and spent the best part of the day in the far distant past before man existed! Happy Days!
The Travelling Bee 