BRRRRR! For a while there this week, I felt I was back at Stanthorpe, where the monkey sings soprano in July, and where I learned to ride a bike with both hands in my pockets so that I could ride down Showground Hill without them falling off. The hands, that is.

Our winters here are hardly anything to grizzle about, but it’s nice to know the sun’s on its way back south, and every year I like to record the first sighting of the lovely purple hovea as our harbinger of spring.

This year, though, other observers have beaten me to the punch. I’m told the hovea has been out for a few weeks. It’s a shy little shrub, almost unnoticeable in the understory alongside our roads for most of the year, and then suddenly, there it is.

Keep an eye out for it, enjoy its ephemeral contribution to the natural beauty of our region and add your voice to the pleas of those who want to see the remnant bushland alongside our roads preserved.

I was first alerted to the need for this many years ago by a famous landscape gardener whose name is perpetuated in the Edna Walling Memorial Garden at the entrance to the Buderim Forest Park. Edna, who was then living in a little cottage on Buderim’s Lindsay Road, warned that with the continuing disturbance and destruction of native bushland along our highways and by-ways for what we would now call “infrastructure purposes”, the region would lose much of its visual charm.

It is from our cars that most of us see what’s left of our native bushland, and for every tree, for every little hovea bush that falls to the bulldozers, we are the poorer. All the more reason to protect what’s left.

Winning drop
BUT back to Stanthorpe. I visited a tiny winery up that way six or seven years ago, liked what I saw and tasted and wrote about it in this column. Now, only 11 years after the first vintage, and for the second year in succession, Boireann, at The Summit, is among fewer than 10 percent of wineries scoring five red stars in the prestigious James Halliday Australian Wine Companion 2009. Nice to see a couple of Queenslanders, Peter and Therese Stark, mixing it with the likes of Penfolds, of Grange fame.

History of ownership

AAT’S observation last week that cashed-up foreigners have been pushing up Australian real estate prices for years has been queried by blogger Yoyoma from Mountain Creek, who wants to know on what it was based.
Fair question. It was based on years of reported foreign ownership of Australian real estate. My concern was not that overseas buyers have been snapping up second-hand homes at will (they can’t under Foreign Investment Review Board rules), but that their investment in property generally has had a flow-on effect on all real estate prices.
rich.29@bigpond.net.au