Wild BNE

Brisbane residents have a strange relationship with Moreton Bay. We look at its calm blue waters and long for the surging surf of the Gold Coast instead. We feel intimidated by the wilderness of its untamed spaces and try to control what we can - a cycleway here, a canal estate there. Then we fly to far flung corners of the world to have experiences we might have found in our own watery backyards after all. I've been guilty of this too, I must admit. It wasn't until I strolled along the coast of Cornwall and sunbathed on the shores of the Great Lakes that I realised I had never appreciated the beauty of the environment I was born into. Now, when I see a film or television show where some neurotic New Yorkers head off to the Hamptons for the weekend, I feel privileged to have a beach of comparable quality close at hand. And so it is today that I found myself wandering along the creamy sands of Redcliffe's Queens Beach. Queen's Beach

OK, I know it seems odd that I should start my blog about the wildlife of Brisbane and surrounds by writing about the wildlife of Sydney instead, but I have a good reason which I will explain shortly. First, let me introduce myself! My name is Christian and I am a soon-to-be-thirty-year-old man who has returned to Brisbane after living everywhere else between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine. Much of this time was spent in Sydney and London, where I increasingly left behind my passion for nature as a "kid thing" and replaced it with a zest for nightlife, partying and travel. It wasn't until a disastrous move to and from Toronto that this began to change. In 2011, after a brief holiday and a fling-turned-relationship there, I moved to that friendly city with the hopes of making it my permanent base. What I hadn't counted on, however, was that Canada hadn't been as fortunate as Australia had been during the Global Financial Crisis, and full-time work was nig