FIERY SUNSET

Much of Victoria sweltered through extreme heat today, with a statewide total fire ban in place along with health alerts. Much of the northwest including Mildura and Horsham reached temperatures around 47˚C, while Melbourne's temperature soared to 44˚C.

Smoke from the New South Wales bushfires and the Gippsland fires – in Victoria's south-east has made its way towards our City, covering the sky and giving Melbourne a taste of the conditions that have been choking Sydney. Smoke extended over Victoria this morning and into the afternoon reducing visibility to about 1km in places.

The sunset was suitably fiery and the heat is persisting into the night, although a cool change was predicted, with a maximum around 22˚C tomorrow.

This post is part of the Skywatch Friday meme.

SERRURIA

Serruria florida is a species of flowering plant in the family Proteaceae, endemic to South Africa. It is known by the common names of blushing bride or pride of Franschhoek. This species grows to between 0.8 and 1.5 metres in height and 0.5 metres in width. The leaves are fine and dissected and the flowers are white to pink and appear from July to October in its native range. It occurs in the Hottentots Holland Nature Reserve in the Cape Province.

A well-drained position in full sun is preferred by this species, which tolerates dryness. Propagation is from cuttings or seed, although the latter can prove difficult. The species is cultivated for the cut flower trade and it is also grown as an ornamental plant.

This post is part of the Floral Friday Fotos meme.

XEROX ART

Xerox art (sometimes, more generically, called copy art, electrostatic art, or xerography) is an art form that began in the 1960s. Prints are created by putting objects on the glass, or platen, of a copying machine and by pressing "start" to produce an image. If the object is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, or the object is moved, the resulting image is distorted in some way. The curvature of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, and the distance of the cover from the glass, all affect the final image. Often, with proper manipulation, rather ghostly images can be made.

Basic techniques include: Direct Imaging, the copying of items placed on the platen (normal copy); Still Life Collage, a variation of direct imaging with items placed on the platen in a collage format focused on what is in the foreground/background; Overprinting, the technique of constructing layers of information, one over the previous, by printing onto the same sheet of paper more than once; Copy Overlay, a technique of working with or interfering in the colour separation mechanism of a colour copier; Colourising, vary colour density and hue by adjusting the exposure and colour balance controls; Degeneration is a copy of a copy degrading the image as successive copies are made; Copy Motion, the creation of effects by moving an item or image on the platen during the scanning process. Each machine also creates different effects.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,

and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme,

and also part of the My Corner of the World.

Rosie Eisor: Xerox Portrait 1

Left: Lesley Schiff – Flower in Hand, 1981, from the portfolio Seasons. Photocopy, 10 1/2 × 8 1/2 in. (26.7 × 21.6 cm) / Right: Lesley Schiff – Leopards, 1981, from the portfolio Seasons. Photocopy, 10 1/2 × 8 1/2 in. (26.7 × 21.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gifts of Judith Goldman

SWANSTON ST

Swanston Street is a major thoroughfare in the centre of Melbourne, Australia. It is one of the main streets of the Melbourne central business district and was laid out in 1837 as part of the original Hoddle Grid. The street vertically bisects Melbourne's city centre and is famous as the world's busiest tram corridor, for its heritage buildings and as a shopping strip.

Swanston Street runs roughly north-south in-between Russell Street to the east and Elizabeth Street to the west. To the south it becomes St Kilda Road after the intersection with Flinders Street, whilst the road's northern end is in the suburb of Carlton at Melbourne Cemetery. This northern section was originally named Madeline Street. The street is named after merchant, banker and politician Charles Swanston.

This post is part of the Our World Tuesday meme,

and also part of the Travel Tuesday meme,

and also part of the Wordless Wednesday meme.

PEACE, JOY, LOVE

Because that's what the Festive Season is all about.

This post is part of the Mosaic Monday meme,
and also part of the Blue Monday meme,
and also part of the Seasons meme.

BOURKE ST

At the top end of Bourke St, watching the trams go by. As it gets closer to Christmas, the City is becoming more congested and to see the road relatively free of cars and pedestrians is quite unusual this time of the year...

This post is part of the My Sunday Best meme.

KOALA

The koala (Phascolarctos cinereus or, inaccurately, koala bear) is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae, and its closest living relatives are the wombats. The koala is found in coastal areas of the mainland's eastern and southern regions, inhabiting Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. It is easily recognisable by its stout, tailless body; round, fluffy ears; and large, spoon-shaped nose. The koala has a body length of 60–85 cm and weighs 4–15 kg. Pelage colour ranges from silver grey to chocolate brown. Koalas from the northern populations are typically smaller and lighter in colour than their counterparts further south. It is possible that these populations are separate subspecies, but this is disputed.

Koalas typically inhabit open eucalypt woodlands, and the leaves of these trees make up most of their diet. Because this eucalypt diet has limited nutritional and caloric content, koalas are largely sedentary and sleep for up to 20 hours a day. They are asocial animals, and bonding exists only between mothers and dependent offspring. Adult males communicate with loud bellows that intimidate rivals and attract mates. Males mark their presence with secretions from scent glands located on their chests. Being marsupials, koalas give birth to underdeveloped young that crawl into their mothers' pouches, where they stay for the first six to seven months of their life. These young koalas are known as joeys, and are fully weaned at around a year. Koalas have few natural predators and parasites but are threatened by various pathogens, like Chlamydiaceae bacteria and the koala retrovirus, as well as by bushfires and droughts.

This post is part of the Saturday Critters meme.

EVENING FALLING

This post is part of the Skywatch Friday meme.

'JUST JOEY' ROSE

Rosa 'Just Joey' was bred by Cants of Colchester, United Kingdom, in 1972. It was named for the wife of the Managing Director of Cants of Colchester, Joey Pawsey. This Hybrid Tea rose performs well throughout Australia and there are many fine specimens in Melbourne gardens, beginning with ours, where we have no less than four bushes of this variety! It really is one of the most beautiful of our roses.

The plant is vigorous and grows well, achieving a height of 1.5 m and width of 1.2 m. Flowers are borne one per stem and can be of an impressive size (up to 20cm in Spring and Autumn, slightly smaller during Summer). The bush is disease and heat resistant and tends to survive well with a little care. The flower is an eye-catching ripe apricot colour with a loose, informal display of pretty frilled petals.

Probably its most seductive feature is its intense, spicy fragrance which will quickly fill a room, when a bunch is placed in a vase. This perfume is inherited from its parents (Fragrant Cloud x Dr. A.J. Verhage) also renowned for their strong scent. It has been awarded the Royal Horticultural Society Award of Merit 1993 and World’s Favourite Rose 1994. When introduced, its colour and size of flowers were considered breakthroughs. This lovely rose is readily available and will reward and delight any rose lover!

This post is part of the Floral Friday Fotos meme.

WATERHOUSE

John William Waterhouse RA (6 April 1849 – 10 February 1917) was an English painter known for working first in the Academic style and for then embracing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter. His artworks were known for their depictions of women from both ancient Greek mythology and Arthurian legend.

Born in Rome to English parents who were both painters, Waterhouse later moved to London, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art. He soon began exhibiting at their annual summer exhibitions, focusing on the creation of large canvas works depicting scenes from the daily life and mythology of ancient Greece. Many of his paintings are based on authors such as Homer, Ovid, Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Keats.

Waterhouse's work is currently displayed at several major British art galleries, and the Royal Academy of Art organised a major retrospective of his work in 2009.

This post is part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,

and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme,

and also part of the My Corner of the World meme.

The Lady of Shalott is a painting of 1888 by the English painter John William Waterhouse. It is a representation of the ending of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1832 poem of the same name. Waterhouse painted three versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1915. It is one of his most famous works, which adopted much of the style of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, though Waterhouse was painting several decades after the Brotherhood split up during his early childhood. The Lady of Shalott was donated to the public by Sir Henry Tate in 1894 and is usually on display in Tate Britain, London, in room 1840.

This dramatic painting illustrates an episode from the journeys of the Greek hero Odysseus (in Latin, Ulysses) told in the poet Homer’s Odyssey in which the infamous Sirens lured unwary sailors towards perilous rocks and their doom by singing in the most enchanting manner. Odysseus wished to hear the Siren’s song and ordered his crew to lash him to a mast and block their ears in order to ensure their safe passage.

Waterhouse has depicted each Siren with the body of a bird and the head of a beautiful woman, which came as a surprise to Victorian audiences, who were more used to seeing these mythic creatures portrayed as comely mermaid-like nymphs. He borrowed the motif from an ancient Greek vase that he studied in the British Museum.

When Ulysses and the Sirens was first exhibited, at London’s Royal Academy in 1891, the painting was praised by most art critics of the day. MH Spielmann, writing for the Magazine of Art, declared it: ‘a very startling triumph … a very carnival of colour, mosaicked and balanced with a skill more consummate than even the talented artist was credited with … The quality of the painting is … a considerable advance upon all his antecedent work’. At the time of Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s purchase of this picture for the National Gallery of Victoria, in June 1891, the Ulysses was only the second work by John William Waterhouse to be acquired for a public gallery.