‘Dad look at this,’ my nine-year-old daughter said to me in awe. Polite, silent, internalised groan. Was it Bindi Irwin on television again? Some new lyric she’d finally heard in a Taylor Swift song? No, in her hand was an apple.
‘It’s the perfect apple,’ she said as proudly as if she was the smug chicken […]

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By JAMES WOODFORD
I hate to say it but there is one small way Opposition leader Tony Abbott is right. His two most repeated and quoted recent comments on the environment may sound like hyperbole but he is in fact absolutely correct.
Whether it be an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax the new measure will […]

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Vivienne left a comment recently on this website which said: ”Environmentalists should be either vegan or vegetarian”. I am neither. By Vivienne’s reckoning, I am automatically part of why the world is in trouble.
I am the father of four carnivorous children - a fact several people have told me is inconceivably at odds with a […]

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At the end of a depressing week of bad news, I thought I would offer up a change of pace….
Every man has his story about his midlife transition to Speedos. Some hide behind the foil that they have no choice - an excuse like their surf club makes them do it. For others it follows […]

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A few weeks back I saw a local newspaper story that featured my local member of state parliament down on the NSW south coast, in a boat off Batemans Bay.
He and a couple of local fishermen were grizzling about how hard it was to go fishing now there is a marine park in the area. […]

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Eggs are good but chickens themselves aren’t actually very nice. We only overlook their many foibles because they turn the chaos and filth of our compost bins into one of the most elegant and aesthetically pleasing objects in the known universe – an egg.
The other evening after watching Nathan Rees at the state ALP conference […]

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Ok I admit it. When I was a kid I was a stamp collector.
But I gave up scouring through the Australia Post philatelic magazine about the same time I stopped using my Malvern Star ten speed racer and let my VFL junior supporters’ membership lapse.
What I am saying is that I wasn’t the coolest […]

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There are things we want to watch, things we decide not to look at and things we should be forced to witness.
Did you see Mark Kavanagh, the trainer of Melbourne Cup winner, Shocking, as his stallion tore down towards the finish line?
On television, Kavanagh’s ecstasy was so complete it looked as though he was being […]

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Some of you may have heard I had a serious accident in April this year, which is a bit of a lame excuse for why I have neglected, Real Dirt. I fell off our roof while adjusting the solar panels, landing on my head, knocking myself out and ending up with six days of amnesia. […]

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A swamp wallaby - one of the few native mammals surviving the fox invasion. Picture by Wil Allen
Story by JAMES WOODFORD
Having left Sydney five years ago, we have discovered that farms and forests are not just being over run by seachangers but also by a secret underworld of swarms of exotic pests.
In the past few […]

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