Welcome to Forest Leaves

An early wall phone, with its essential elements - the ear-piece, mouth-piece, crank, bells and magneto and battery boxes - as once...

The Boarding House, and former Teacher’s Barracks at Pemberton (photo courtesy of Joanna Drake) A young man starting out on a life in...

The cover of the new (2007) edition of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky I have been...

Photo courtesy of Joe Caruso This is a story about a road through the forest, beginning with its origin as a logging railway, its...

Freshwater Bay Painting by Elizbeth Durack Provided you have lived long enough, most of us have done something heroic at some time or...

Renaissance man: Father Antonio Ravalli I have been reading a wonderful little book called “Ponderosa - people, fire and the West's most...

Portrait of Paul Hasluck on the cover of his biography by Geoffrey Bolton I have been reading Geoffrey Bolton's biography of Paul...

Wild Buffalo in Assam In the 1901 edition of Countries of the World (Volume 1: Abyssinia to Bengal), the entire set of which my mother...

Bushfire at night Photograph by Joyn Evans The first bushfire I attended was in December,1958. I remember it vividly, to this day. I was...

Silver wattle in a garden setting (photo from Wikipedia) There was a halcyon time in my long-ago forestry career when I spent a few years...

I bring to your attention two wonderful new inventions from the USA: the ‘Transparent Toaster’ and the ‘Hot Water System That Requires No...

An Easter picnic in the bush Every so often as we continue our journey through this vale of tears, there occurs an event that marks a...

The Fremantle Traffic Bridge, photographed in 2022 I was on my bike yesterday, cycling down to Fremantle, and stopped for a breather...

An abandoned crofter’s cottage on the Island of Rum I was mulling over a paper on the temperature record at Darwin in the Northern...

Bushfire in the karri forest (photo by John McKenzie) In 1972 I was the Divisional Forest Officer (or in today’s jargon, ‘District...

An offering to relish: home-baked bread and curried egg, the ultimate sandwich I attend a weekly gym session for geriatrics, cheerfully...

Like the great Horace Rumpole, I have reached the age where I prefer mostly to read books I have read before. Thus, I have recently been...

Ancient olive trees in a garden in Italy (photo from Wikipedia) An old friend rang me up one day a few years ago to ask my advice about a...

Notre Dame Cathedral burning (photo from Wikipedia) Is there any more tragic sight than the destruction of a thing of beauty by fire?...

Left: My Aunt Dorrie and Uncle John, perfectly attired for tennis in the 1930s At my first meeting as a newly elected committee member of...