Ok today I am going to tell you a little about Aboriginal art, I am sure most people have heard of Aboriginal rock paintings and engravings so here is just a little about them.

Aboriginal paintings are found on the ceilings and walls of rock shelters, which occur wherever suitable rock surfaces and outcrops exist. Figures include humans, kangaroos, emus, echidnas, grid patterns, animal tracks, boomerangs, axes, hand stencils and other motifs. Paintings are drawn with white, red, yellow and black pigments and charcoal drawings are also common

Around Sydney, there are probably more than 2000 engraving sites, only half of which have been accurately recorded. Rock engravings are usually located on highly elevated, smooth, flat surfaces, but in some instances can be found on large vertical rocks. They were made by drilling a series of holes in turn which were then connected to form a line. In the local area, designs include fish, animals, humans, wooden artefacts, and mythological beings.

The precise meanings behind the engravings are not known. Interpretations of what the engravings meant to their makers are sketchy, but the most accepted understanding is that they are products of sacred ceremonies, which were periodically re-engraved as part of ongoing rituals. Because there are no initiated descendants of the people who made the engravings, no one is able to re-engrave them in a culturally appropriate way. They are therefore eroding away from natural causes, human foot traffic, and the ever-increasing use of remnant bushland.

Engravings occur usually where there is a suitable exposure of fairly flat, soft rock or in rock overhangs. People, animal shapes and tracks are common as well as non-figurative designs such as circles.

There are also scarred trees they are evidence of bark and wood being removed for shields, shelters, coolamons (whatever coolamons are) and canoes. These are rare in the Sydney area. The trees can be divided into three groups:

• Bark removal for use eg. Coolamons

• Wood removal for use eg. boomerangs

• Evidence of climbing footholds eg. hunting possum

The tree was not killed by these methods and therefore scarring is evident.

Then there are Carved trees, these trees have complex patterns cut into the tree, where a piece of bark is removed and the underlying wood is carved. When a carved tree is found next to a grave, it is usually a sign of family ties or the totem of the deceased person.

The designs are often intricate spirals, diamonds and circles, and were carved using a stone hatchet or, more recently, a steel axe. Carved trees are important because of the ceremonial meaning to Aboriginal people.

They are probably the most naturally threatened site because of bush fires, environmental deterioration, and tree regrowth. They are also at risk from clearing. There are no carved trees surviving in the Sydney area.

It is Saturday night and I am writing this on my tablet while I wait for Tim to get out of the shower so we can watch something on telly.

What a day after taking Leo home Tim and I went and bought new summer sheets for the bed in the van. We then went and changed the sheets before heading over to Kathy’s place to pick up whipper snipper but Kathy hadn’t used it so after a short visit we left. We stopped at Bunning’s and Tim got mouse traps and then we went to the Eastern Tiger for lunch.

Now it is raining and we had a bit of a storm.

I was able to have a nap which was good, don’t have time for a nap Monday to Friday.

It is now Sunday and I am back to finish this up, Tim has gone to work for so I am home alone for a while, Natasha rang and asked me if  I would watch Blain for an hour or so,  I said I would but only for an hour or so as I don’t want to have a child here all day.

It is another hot day here, yesterday was hot as well and of course yesterday I had long pants on as before we left I went in and changed out of my shorts, not sure why I changed out of my shorts I would normal just wear the shorts as it turned out it was a good thing I did change as Tim wanted to stop and have lunch and I wouldn’t want to do that if I had been wearing shorts.

This morning I spent 50 minutes exercising using my Wii Fit so I am happy that I doing a longer workout, yesterday it was 45 minutes I have made sure to tell Tim how long I am working out so he can stop thinking I am doing nothing at all.

On Sunrise this morning there was a lot of talk about the Melbourne police trying to move on some homeless people if you just saw the story you would think, talk about heavy handed and no compassion for the homeless because some of the news reports only showed the pictures and didn’t explain that first most of the protesters are not homeless but are people who turn up to protest anything and everything. Also not mentioned on some reports is that all the homeless have been offered accommodation and those being forced to move on refused the accommodation and then we also need to remember the police officers assaulted during the operation.

I get annoyed when some reporters only report part of the facts and make things out to be worse then they are, I don’t watch much in the way of news reports as you can see the same story on three different channels and get three different set of facts and you have to figure out what is the truth.

Seems there is a new skin patch that tells you if you are getting sunburnt it is still in the early stages and not widely available but it sounds like a great idea, if it helps prevent sunburn.

There is a new drug available for those like myself that have type 2 diabetes as it lowers sugar levels and helps if you have heart problems, sounds like it is a good thing, but I forgot to jot down the name of the drug.

Another non news story was about Beyonce is having twins, so interesting for some but not for me, I really don’t care.

Yesterday there was the story of the man who threw his 7 month old baby out of a window because of a fire, this happened in Blacktown the baby girl was thrown from the window her parents were woken by thick smoke filling their second-floor unit and made a desperate decision to throw baby Nevaeh Rose out the window to waiting neighbours who caught the baby with a blanket. Nevaeh is Heaven spelt backwards.

One of her rescuers, Tony Finn, has insisted he is not a hero and said “it’s just something anyone would do in that time of crisis”.

“We used the blanket to catch her when they chucked her down for us,” he said.

“[We] caught her like a football – pretty much just arms out and pulled her back in.”

Well it is now Wednesday again and its a warm wet Wednesday as well after two days so hot one felt like they were melting while outside, in fact yesterday around 11am I was walking inside the house after having to go to Leo’s school he was out of medication and noticed the clock that sits outside on the table it has a thermometer in it and it read 53°c that was of course in the sun but still can you  imagine how people who had to work out in the sun coped yesterday.

Anyway moving on this week I am sharing a collage of Sandra’s family, Sandra is my third sister she is 15 years younger then me.

Here I am doing another post about the history of Aboriginals,like many cultures the Aboriginal people would pass down stories, myths, legends and dances from one generation to the next, they are not alone many other cultures have done the same.

The Aboriginal people have what is called The Dreaming, The Dreaming is history, it tells of how the world was formed, how the world which was featureless was transformed into mountains, hill, valleys and waterways, it tells how the stars were formed and how the sun came to be.

In the Sydney metropolitan area there are close to 5,000 Aboriginal sites, yes 5,000 that is a bloody lot. These sites are under threat every day from development, vandalism and natural erosion, these sites naturally cannot be replaced so once destroyed they are gone forever. Some sites are still in reasonable condition such as the sites located in Land Cove, North Sydney, Willoughby and Ku-ring-gai areas, these sites hold an important part of our history.

Naturally the Aboriginal people, who once occupied these areas, left important evidence of their past and way of life before colonisation. All Aboriginal sites are significant to Aboriginal people because they are evidence of the past Aboriginal occupation of Australia and are valued as a link with their traditional culture. Clues to what these sites were used for can also be surmised by talking with Elders from other parts of Australia where traditional knowledge has not been lost to the same degree.

The Sydney Basin is one of the richest provinces in Australia in terms of Aboriginal archaeological sites. There are thousands of Aboriginal sites, more than half of which contain rock art, and in Sydney’s sandstone belt at least 1500 rock shelters have been discovered to contain cultural deposit.

All Aboriginal sites have legal protection under both state and federal law and it is an offence to damage or destroy them without agreement from the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC).

On this day 77 years ago in the town of Parkes in the state of New South Wales, a wonderful woman was born, my mother Mavis Jean. She is the eldest of four children but now only herself and her baby brother Francis are left.

When she was about 4 years old her mother and father separated and later divorced, mum, her brother Ronald and sister Dianne went with there mother and lived in the Wauchope New South Wales district. In fact mum lived with her grandmother till she was 14 and her grandmother died, it was traumatic for mum losing her nan as they were very close.

Her father stayed in the Parkes district and later remarried. She had not seen him since she was aged 7 and lost all contact with her father from about age 14. On Saturday 24^th May 1997 mum met her father again after 50 years. She found him living in Blayney NSW, also at this reunion she met, for the first time, her cousin Patricia Ann Crane. Mervyn died 5 months later on the 24^th October 1997.

When mum was 10 years old her mother married Ronald James and pretty much from that time on he was in mums eyes her dad, this is one of the reasons she had no desire to find and met her natural father. She is glad she tracked Mervyn down but he wasn’t her dad. Her dad died on the 4^th November 2010.

Sometime in the late 1950’s she met Denis and they married on the 19^th November 1960 and had 5 children together of which I am the eldest, she now has 18 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, with two more great-grandchildren due this year.

As many know on the 19^th November 2016 her mother passed away aged 95, this affected her a lot and since her mother’s passing she has had many health issuers, she is in pain 24/7 and has been for many years and also has had a couple of incidents of delirium and being off with the pixies but things are improving and she takes life one day at a time.

Family is very important to mum and she loves having her family around her, her children are blessed to have such a wonderful, loving and caring mother who we all know is there for us whenever we need her.

In 1978 she suffered a stroke when her youngest child was only 6 weeks old, she was told at the time she may not walk again or have much use of her arm but she made a complete recover from her stroke because she had a new born baby and a toddler and not recovering wasn’t an option in her eyes.

Mum has been known as Mae for most of her life, and the name Mae is common in our family now, my sister is Sandra Mae, her daughter is Temika Mae, my daughter is Jessica Mae, and my granddaughter is Sydney-May.

Ok have wanted to write a post since Friday and here it is Sunday morning and I am at last doing one this is because Friday afternoon I felt drained of energy and pretty much the same feeling yesterday afternoon. This morning when my alarm went off I couldn’t wake up I was that tired that I didn’t get up till 7.30am, two hours after the alarm went off but it is Sunday so that is ok.

Yesterday Jessica, Kelli and myself took the boys Blain, Leo & Daemon to what is called a pop up water park which they loved, I saw the tickets on Groupon and bought them but the girls paid for them they were $12.50 a saving of $7.50 we bought 4 tickets on each for the boys and one for Kelli Jessica and I didn’t go on the rides or slides or get in the pool so we didn’t need tickets. For those who don’t know a pop up park is a temporary amusement park set up in vacant lots for usually only a month or so often during school holidays, the aim is to get children out of the house and away form electronics and doing stuff. The park we took the boys to was about a 45 minute drive from us in Salt Ash.

Friday saw Tim having the day off he had an appointment to have an ultrasound done of his stomach because his last blood test showed a problem with his liver, I have a problem with my liver it is a fatty liver and I expect that is what the ultrasound will show is the problem with Tim’s liver.

Jessica was telling me that she also has a fatty liver and she has small kidneys for a woman her age but at this stage they are functioning ok so not a problem.

Now that reminds me of mum, when she saw the specialist last Wednesday she was told that since she didn’t have an type of stroke the specialist didn’t know why she was referred to him, he did, however, tell her that he believes one of the reasons for her delirium was the fact that her kidney function was done the lever should be around 60, when she went to the hospital suffering from delirium it was 20 and her last blood test had it at 40. He told her that with the level being so low it meant that her body wasn’t flushing the medication out of her body completely thus meant she was getting a build up and that was causing an overdose affect. So he said that her GP needs to investigate that and try and discover the reason for it and do something to fix it or counter it or whatever they do. I reminded mum that she has those tumors on her adrenal gland and she should check that, that isn’t causing her problems now what she has is a benign tumour.

Tim wants to go over to my parents place and I asked him if he needed me to go with him or not as I want to vacuum out and wash the kitchen floor and I have laundry to do and well as over stuff, he said no he doesn’t need me but what about Jessica’s car. We have to take her car back to her, I said I don’t think she is doing anything today so we should be ale to take it back to her after lunch and if she wants it she will ring me and I will take it over earlier.

We have her car as yesterday we took my car to the pop up park as I have more fuel and when we were going home after we dropped Blain off at his mums, Leo was unwell we had to pull over so he could throw up and she felt like she just wanted to go home so that is what she did so we will return her car to her today.

Hello everyone today is Australia Day it was a bloody long time ago when the first Europeans arrived to take possession of the country by a bloody long time I mean 228 years.

It is a pleasant day here not hot nor cold, not wet but have had some drizzle. I for some reason wasn’t feeling the best this morning and ended up going back to bed for an hour before doing lunch.

Mostly for us it is the birthday of the love of my life, Tim, he is 56 today we are having lunch here but Natasha says I didn’t tell her but I thought I did send a group message to all the girls via Facebook but she didn’t see it so she isn’t coming and it is my fault.

Also today was my brother in-laws birthday so today his family are scattering his ashes at his favourite fishing spot, he passed away last February. So yesterday my sister was telling her daughter that they were going to scatter his ashes she wanted to know what his ashes are so she explained how some people are buried when they died and some people are burnt up. So today they are going to scatter his ashes at his favourite fishing spot. My niece said you burnt Uncle Mick now you want to feed him to the fishes, she then outright refused to go to scatter the ashes. I will find out tonight if she went or not.

So I will end this with a dozen facts about Australia because it is Australia Day.

1. Australia is as wide as the distance between London to Moscow.
2. The biggest property in Australia is bigger than Belgium.
3. More than 85% of Australians live within 50km of the coast.
4. In 1880, Melbourne was the richest city in the world.
5. Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman, earns $1 million every half hour, or $598 every second.
6. In 1892, a group of 200 Australians unhappy with the government tried to start an offshoot colony in Paraguay to be called ‘New Australia’.
7. The first photos from the 1969 moon landing were beamed to the rest of the world from Honeysuckle Tracking Station, near Canberra.
8. Australia was the second country in the world to allow women to vote (New Zealand was first).
9. Each week, 70 tourists overstay their visas.
10. In 1856, stonemasons took action to ensure a standard of 8-hour working days, which then became recognised worldwide.
11. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke set a world record for sculling 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds. Hawke later suggested that this was the reason for his great political success.
12. The world’s oldest fossil, which is about 3.4 billion years old, was found in Australia.

As some of you may have noticed I wasn’t around much yesterday I was feeling pretty sick and spent most of the day in bed, also had Leo for most of the day and he was here last night as well, because his mum said the night before he cried and had a tantrum because he wasn’t able to stay at nanna’s house that night.

Anyway this week I am sharing a collage of Sue’s family.

 

Good morning world, it is Monday here and suppose to be another pretty hot day but as I start this it is only around 20°c anyway I am going to share some of the things I heard while I am watching Sunrise (morning news show)

First up they were talking about how young children in kindergarten are being given medication for ADHD, well as the grandmother of a child with ADHD I can tell you that it wasn’t that easy to get Leo medicated. He went through a lot of being observed by professionals and talking to specialists and we tried a number of things to alter his behaviour before he was prescribed medication. Leo off medication is a little boy who is bouncing off the walls and can’t control his temper and our bursts at all.

Also on Sunrise was a lot of talk about people chucking a sickie on Friday so they can have a long weekend, Thursday is Australia Day so a public holiday and they reckon people will be calling in sick on Friday. Now Tim isn’t working Friday but he has put in for either a RDO or an annual day off so not chucking a sickie at all.

Also saw that some people want to change from calling people overweight to overfat, what the hell No that is just wrong, as my grandsons would tell you fat isn’t a nice word to call people. Yes I often call myself a short fat middle aged woman and that is fine I am the one saying it.

Yet again in the news there was a story about someone crashing a car into a house, this seems to be happening at least once a month and it is amazing that not more people are hurt when this happens, how fast must people be going to end up in a house.

Of course Trump is in the news again, because he tweets without thinking and then had to re-tweet to clarify his first tweet, now the second tweet was only done in my opinion because one of his advisers told him to do so, although strangely enough I agree with the first tweet, if all these people now protesting had in fact voted maybe he wouldn’t have been elected.

However, how on earth he could thing there was a record breaking turn out for his inauguration, maybe he had a moment when he confused the protesters with the inauguration turn out, or he is just living in a fantasy land of denial.

Madonna really should think before she speaks also, saying you have thought about blowing up the White House is just stupid and there are disturbed people out there who could think hey Madonna wants to blow up the White House so I will do it for her.

Just heard that there is going to be some changers to the bail hearings in Victoria after that guy who went berserk and ran people down the other day because he was out on bail and his bail hearing wasn’t heard by a magistrate but by someone who wasn’t a magistrate, but a bail justice, these people have no formal training so why on earth they would be able to hear a bail hearing and decided if the person could be released on bail. I don’t know much but I know that, that doesn’t sound right. Seems if a person was arrested on a weekend or at night their hearing would be heard by a bail justice as the magistrates wouldn’t be working now that is going to change.

Yesterday I did go to Speers Point Park for Sydney-May’s birthday party it was a nice afternoon Leo had a good time and I think Sydney-May liked her presents not only was her mum’s family there also her dad and his mum came and Michael’s parents and sister in-law and her children came as well as a friend of Sydney-May’s and the girls mum so a good turn out.