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Floriade 2012, Commonwealth Park, Canberra. 25th anniversary of Floriade.
As Canberra emerges out of its long, cold and miserable winter each year a festival of flowers called Floriade is held to celebrate the arrival of spring. During mid-September to mid-October, Commonwealth Park gets a stunning make-over which paints large areas of this park with vibrant colours made up of tulips and other flowers, one million of them in fact (according to the Floriade official page). To have that many bulbs planted, have them blooming during the festival period, and then cleared up so the park looks "normal" again the rest of the year are I think all quite impressive achievements.
Here's the Floriade official homepage.
There are no kangaroos in Austria. We're talking about Australia, the world's smallest continent. That being cleared up, let's dive right in! Australia is a sovereign state under the Commonwealth of Nations, which is in turn overseen by Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth. The continent was first sighted and charted by the Dutch in 1606. Captain James Cook of Britain came along in the next century to claim it for Britain and name it "New South Wales." Shortly thereafter it was declared to be a penal colony full of nothing but criminals and convicts, giving it the crap reputation you may have heard at your last cocktail party. This rumor ignores 40,000 years of pre-European human history, especially the Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime, an interesting explanation of physical and spiritual reality. The two biggest cities in Australia are Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney is more for business, Melbourne for arts. But that's painting in very broad strokes. Take a whirl around the panoramas to see for yourself! Text by Steve Smith.
