Today makes 5 weeks that I have been in Australia. I suppose, in such an amount of time, I should have managed to post something interesting about my stay here, but I've been busy, sick, and a little lazy.
Since the day after I arrived, I have been working (Monday through Friday) doing water quality sampling work for the Queensland government in streams all around south-eastern Queensland (within about 200 km of Brisbane). My co-worker, Hsuan, and I generally head out on Mondays hit about 4 streams, then check into a hotel for the night. We repeat through the week, spending the night in a different hotel almost every night. We usually work 11 to 12 hours a day, but we come home earlier on Fridays. Our sites are not prestine specimines of Australia's glorious environment. Some of them are just completely wrongy - with oil slicks on the top or contianing more cow poo than actual water. They varied widely. Our work isn't physically strenuous, but the days are a little long. This work didn't get me into places as amazing and beautiful as some of my other jobs have, but I was in good company, the pay was excellent, and I had a great time. My co-worker and I have a very similary (i.e. sick/crude) sense of humor. He is easy going, efficient, and has a particular love for icecream, so we got along just great. We didn't see heaps of wildlife, but we did see a couple of turtles, kangaroos, walabies, and bogans (australian for white trash).
I finished off field work last week and did a bit of office work and some training for the new job, which will take me out to the Lake Eyre Basin in central Australia for a couple of weeks. I got to do some 4x4 training and wilderness first aid. I have a couple of more days of work, then a break for about a week and a half till I leave for Lake Eyre.
The photos below are ones I took during our field work...
Lotuses
Non-native cactus - it is the size of a tree!
Very large Goana on very large eucalyptus tree
Peacock at our hotel in Mt. Tamborine. They woke me up at 4:30am every morning we stayed there. Useless, but pretty!
One of our nicer field sites with plenty of green filamentous algae.
Hsuan excited to find all the beautiful algae in this creek. We collect the stuff for stable isotope analysis.
Sometimes our work was delayed by cow traffic jams.
We worked a few sites at a military shooting range. I really love the unique warning signs!
This sign is on the front cattle gate of a property we accessed for survey work. It is funny because a bogan is a trashy person in australian lingo.
A typical eucalyptus grassland
I am holding almost all the waders used on the survey run! They were very heavy, but mostly clean thanks to my hosing efforts.
Me engaging in "buggery". We use this net to conduct vigourous sweeps of the stream edge to collect aquatic invertebrates.
Me drinking a ginger beer (perhaps the best part of being in Australia) in a park with our work ute.
Hsuan and I enjoying some cheeky icecream. Some might say we made good lazy government employees.
Since the day after I arrived, I have been working (Monday through Friday) doing water quality sampling work for the Queensland government in streams all around south-eastern Queensland (within about 200 km of Brisbane). My co-worker, Hsuan, and I generally head out on Mondays hit about 4 streams, then check into a hotel for the night. We repeat through the week, spending the night in a different hotel almost every night. We usually work 11 to 12 hours a day, but we come home earlier on Fridays. Our sites are not prestine specimines of Australia's glorious environment. Some of them are just completely wrongy - with oil slicks on the top or contianing more cow poo than actual water. They varied widely. Our work isn't physically strenuous, but the days are a little long. This work didn't get me into places as amazing and beautiful as some of my other jobs have, but I was in good company, the pay was excellent, and I had a great time. My co-worker and I have a very similary (i.e. sick/crude) sense of humor. He is easy going, efficient, and has a particular love for icecream, so we got along just great. We didn't see heaps of wildlife, but we did see a couple of turtles, kangaroos, walabies, and bogans (australian for white trash).
I finished off field work last week and did a bit of office work and some training for the new job, which will take me out to the Lake Eyre Basin in central Australia for a couple of weeks. I got to do some 4x4 training and wilderness first aid. I have a couple of more days of work, then a break for about a week and a half till I leave for Lake Eyre.
The photos below are ones I took during our field work...
Lotuses
Non-native cactus - it is the size of a tree!
Very large Goana on very large eucalyptus tree
Peacock at our hotel in Mt. Tamborine. They woke me up at 4:30am every morning we stayed there. Useless, but pretty!
One of our nicer field sites with plenty of green filamentous algae.
Hsuan excited to find all the beautiful algae in this creek. We collect the stuff for stable isotope analysis.
Sometimes our work was delayed by cow traffic jams.
We worked a few sites at a military shooting range. I really love the unique warning signs!
This sign is on the front cattle gate of a property we accessed for survey work. It is funny because a bogan is a trashy person in australian lingo.
A typical eucalyptus grassland
I am holding almost all the waders used on the survey run! They were very heavy, but mostly clean thanks to my hosing efforts.
Me engaging in "buggery". We use this net to conduct vigourous sweeps of the stream edge to collect aquatic invertebrates.
Me drinking a ginger beer (perhaps the best part of being in Australia) in a park with our work ute.
Hsuan and I enjoying some cheeky icecream. Some might say we made good lazy government employees.
1 comment:
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