***SHhhhh***

The photographic Odyssey of our most excellent Australian adventure continues! Here are some images from my camera taken while we were staying with a very nice French guy called Djo in Tannum Sands. Shots from Brisbane and Mooloolaba (about 16GB worth) were stored on a faulty hard drive, perhaps never to return! Luckily, I may be able to recover some of them from our host in Mooloolaba - but these would not include images from Frazer Island, sadly. Let's all keep our fingers crossed that Delia's computer makes a wonderful comeback and all of the files are not lost to digital oblivion!!

Tannum Sands got its name from the beach's noteworthy ability to transform innocent white schoolboys into crispy red crustaceans on class excursions in the 1800s.

Our host, Djo, in his nice house. He works for a French crane company and enjoys a plush lifestyle and a high salary, despite working many hours per week

Father and son fishing on the river in Tannum Sands. What's that? They spotted something in the water!

It was a Green Sea Turtle, swimming along the river, coming up for air. The markings on the shell of the Green Sea Turtles are as beautiful and intricate as those on their heads and flippers, but this guy had so much algae and barnacles on his shell, you can't see it. Judging by how excited the little boy and his dad were, I think we were lucky to see this turtle.

The aluminum smelting plant in Gladstone, which employs a large percentage of the population around the city. Industry is at the heart of the Gladstone region despite the fact that it is also publicized by the Queensland government as being the "Gateway to the Great Barrier Reef." We were devastated to learn that a proposal has already been passed to start construction on a Coal Seam Gas-fired power plant on an island just off the coast near Gladstone. The Coal Seam Gas will be used to power a new aluminum smelting plant. Coal Seam Gas plants use a highly destructive process for extracting the toxic chemical from undersea repositories. The process, called "fracking" breaks up the bedrock, extracting some of the gas that seeps out and allowing much of the rest to flow out into the open sea, poisoning life to the point to total extinction in a 50km radius surrounding the site. Damages may also be noticeable further out. Heron Island, Lady Musgrave Island, Fitzroy Reef, One Tree Reef, Mast Head Reef and other coral cays and reefs that are known to be part of the Great Barrier Reef are located about 50km off the coast of the Gladstone region. This means that the new Coal Seam Gas project will effectively demolish several of the southernmost reefs and coral cays of the Great Barrier Reef (the largest living thing on Earth), massacring the threatened and endangered wildlife that lives there and spoiling these beautiful places forever. If you wanted your children or grandchildren to see islands with one of the the highest levels of biodiversity concentrated in one place anywhere on Earth, well, it's too late. Because the Gladstone and Queensland governments turned away from UNESCO's pleas to keep the reef safe. They have turned away from the Australian people and the integrity of their natural environment in favor of a quick payoff, a handful of jobs and nominal long-term rewards.