Anon - not logged in Report This Comment
Date: January 27, 2025 12:04AM

Whilst the overseas tourists are shepherded to The Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australians go to the Ningaloo, on the other side of the country, where these will swim up and nudge your canoe. They're very heavy of course and will sink it. So the canoes you hire have a pontoon on either side, stabilising them. The sharks don't understand what's happening, so keep nudging. It makes for awesome drone photography.

Captcha: bodgey looking external wooden staircase, not under cover. Does Australia have anything so dumb?

quasi Report This Comment
Date: January 27, 2025 12:30PM

This reminded me of the visit to the Georgia (USA) Aquarium I had with my son and his family in 2016. There's a massive tank full of sea life with a plexiglass covered walkway through it. I got a bunch of crappy pictures and this is one of the better ones. Where I live, the manatees are the large, harmless critters that are most likely to unintentionally to knock you into the water from your kayak.

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Anon - not logged in Report This Comment
Date: January 28, 2025 12:21AM

Dugong, as we call them, are passive, and weight like that on the move will knock things over. We have an odd setup here in that dugong are protected species, but aboriginals can hunt them for food.

It's one of the odd things coming out of the Mabo court case. Terra Nullius, was always an odd wording and interpretation: that the Australian continent was empty. We can all see aboriginals. It should have been empty of government and land ownership. The Mabo case threw it out with mixed results. Aborigines should have been just integrated and be done with it. Now we've had an incident over fishing for dugong where someone was threatened with a spear.

It all seems to go back to Captain Arthur Phillip, who commanded the First Fleet to Australia. He was a bad choice. There are a number of odd claims about him that I haven't looked into. Nevertheless, there are no monuments to him, but 50 statutes to Captain Cook, who discovered and claimed Australia for Britain.