With apologies to Noiseworks. (80's Australian rock band, one of whose songs inspired this shot's title. Better viewed if you have the song running through your head, even if you can't get it out of your head for the rest of the day.)

After leaving the Port Arthur historical site, our first stop was at the Tasmanian Devil Conservation Park. (Technically it's in the town of Taranna.) One of the featured activities is hand-feeding the kangaroos and wallabies.

The mob (yes, that is the correct collective noun) knows when the food is coming. As we went through the double gates into the enclosure they swarmed toward us, intently focussed on looking for the zoo keeper to arrive with the magic bucket.

I have quite a few shots of the 'roos and the feeding (which I'll post in due course), though not of ME feeding them. That wasn't really an option since when I held out my hand with some pellets one 'roo grabbed both sides of it with his claws (which incidentally are quite sharp; you don't want to mess with an angry kanga) and made it clear that my hand was going nowhere, not even to the 40D, until every last pellet it contained had been hoovered.

In the end I opted for this shot of a German tourist who was there at the same time as us and who had a rather gentler encounter with a wallaby (which is very much smaller than a kangaroo). I cropped this one a bit; the original shot has a kangaroo approaching the pair from the right of frame but I preferred to emphasise the diagonal that runs from the wallaby's tail to the top of her head.

The conservation park is down on the Tasman Peninsula, which is a chunk of land which juts out to the east of Hobart. This was one of the reasons that Port Arthur was chosen for the penal settlement; the peninsula is separated from the main island of Tasmania by a narrow (and therefore easily guarded) strip of land called Eaglehawk's Neck. My thoughts are with the residents down there as at the time of posting (05-Jan-13) a heatwave sweeping most of Australia had generated 40+ degree heat even in Tasmania. This resulted in wild bushfires around the north of the peninsula and further up including the town of Dunalley, whose old style pub we stopped at for a very enjoyable lunch on the very day that this shot was taken. Dunalley has lost about 65 buildings, a nearby village 15, and there may have been one life lost though thankfully that's still not confirmed. As the Arthur Highway which leads from Hobart to the peninsula has been cut, some of the residents of one village had to be evacuated by Police launch.

Last Year
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