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I love music... Styles? - mostly anything good!
"pd's deadly discs" are on the Playlist jukebox below (clicking will open a separate tab). The Playlist contains contemporary favourites and old songs which have affected me since I was a teenager... to the present day!
Click the square below and have a listen to a Playlist tune, turn up the volume (on top right) and sing along with my alltime faves. You will have to stop the Rory McLeod song above first...

I especially enjoy...
Australian Indigenous Musicians ~
Wild Water, June Mills, The Mills Sisters, Bunna Lawrie & Coloured Stone, Sunrize Band, Letterstick, Saltwater Band, Nabarlek, Shellie Morris, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Jimmy Little, Kev Carmody, Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, Stiff Gins, Tiddas, Wildflower, Warumpi Band, No Fixed Address, Emma Donovan, Pigram Brothers, Yothu Yindi, Kutcha Edwards, North Tanami Band, Waak Waak Jungi, Dan Sultan, Glen Skuthorpe, Leah Flanagan, Sweet Cheeks, the MERRg, Troy Cassar-Daley, Warren H Williams...
For further information on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians check out: Australian Indigenous Music - mujik.com...and...Skinnyfish Music

Here is a track from the ol' fella Archie (plus some vibrant aboriginal art and photographic images)...

'Jamu Dreaming' by ARCHIE ROACH

Ten Canoes(...thanx Gez), The Tracker (with Gulpilil).... No. 2 ( from New Zealand), the classic Lawrence Of Arabia, The Wizard Of Oz (since I was 6)... Blow Up, Woodstock, Easy Rider - (all from the late 60s)... UK black & white films from the 30s, 40s & 50s...The Plank (a great Brit comedy!)
Foreign stuff with subtitles (then I can read as well!) Spanish and French comedies are good... Japanese anime & dramas are fantastic... Head On is an interesting German-Turkish production with some magic music... Latcho Drom, the Gypsy music classic and 1 Giant Step are brilliant!
Love Bollywood extravaganzas too!!!

REAL LIFE PROGRAMS (not Reality TV...!!!)

Music concerts and documentaies...
Wildlife documentaies... especially with David Attenborough narrating...'Life On Earth' (brilliant!)...
also 'Big Cat Diaries' and 'Meercat Manor'...
Weird fantasy such as 'Dr Who' and 'Red Dwarf'...
'Minder', 'Fawlty Towers', 'Pie In The Sky', 'Doc Martin', 'The Bill', 'Absolutely Fabulous'...
...and most other British drama and comedies.

The Atlas...(much to my daughters' chagrin!)... Field Guides to Birds... anything on Nature, Rocks, Trees...



'Lord Of The Rings'...(read 15 times I think)... 'The Hobbit', Farmer Giles of Ham, 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil', 'Smith of Wooton Major', 'Tree and Leaf'... anything by JRR Tolkein who was such a master storyteller...

'Wizard Of Earthsea', 'Chronicles of Narnia', 'The Belgariad'... 'Dragonquest'... 'Wind In The Willows' and a plethora of other fantasy novels...
Picture books, Art & Photography...

~ An Ode To Our Planet... Mother Earth ~

Cycad Woman Kangaroo Man

GONDWANA, 360 Million years ago

The CYCAD

A water droplet exuded from a female pore on a spear-like leaf of the phallic-shaped plant, bringing with it from within a miniscule speck. An egg of sorts, this speck waited with infinite patience until the tropical forest was ruffled by a stiff breeze. The breeze, somewhat colder than in previous times, still managed to carry a pollen grain from the male cone of another cycad. It was trapped by the droplet and fused with the egg. Reabsorbed the fertilisation began and a round olive green seed gradually plumped with the promise of new life. Suddenly the ground in which the cycad stood shook as a lumbering giant amphibian fell and died. The weather was becoming unseasonably frigid; too cold for such beasts, which amazingly were ancestors of the modern kangaroo. An ice age was encroaching.
Would the cycad survive the freezing conditions to come?

WOIWURRUNG-YORTA YORTA, 36,000 years ago

The WOMAN

She dribbled water from a small bark coolamon into the seed paste she was grinding in a smooth depression in the large red rock by the creek. The small woman was making damper from plump grass seeds she had recently discovered growing along the banks of the creek, which serpentined through the vast black gum forest. Usually she gathered them on the plains. Palming the familiar weight of the water-smoothed grinding stone in her callused brown right hand, she added a few more tiny seeds to the mix with her left. A few spilled onto the surface of the flat rock and collected in an incised leaf shaped pattern. As she brushed them into the depression with her fingers she felt a round protrusion in the leaf pattern. She puzzled over what magic had carved the strange design. Perhaps long ago it had been created by a man, in a similar way to the rock-art made by her mate sometimes. Unbeknown to her she was touching the fossilised remains of a cycad leaf and its seed. Just then the woman was surprised as the ground shook beside her and the limp body of a big red kangaroo thumped against her leg. Looking up she saw the grinning face of her mate, a bloodied spear and woomera held over his shoulder. He ambled down the creek bank to wash the dust and mire from his body and slake his well-earned thirst in the gushing crystal flow. The woman wondered as she gingerly placed a rounded piece of dough onto the hot coals of their fire:
"Would he like the new damper?"

FIVE MILE CREEK, 36 years ago

The KANGAROO

Ripples spread across the water as, disturbed from its evening drink at a billabong, the roo bounded off through a scattering of black gum trees, beside the creek. An old man with a fishing rod cursed as his line tangled in the branch of a drooping willow. "Damned things!" he declared to his lithe brown dog, which had just reappeared from the direction of the long-gone roo. The man was sure the willows were poisoning the stream and driving away the fish. There were so many of them now springing up along the banks of the meandering watercourse. Further downstream the roo had stopped, as it was still thirsty. The section of the creek it approached for its drink was a series of stagnant pools at the bottom of a small rocky cliff. People from the nearby village used the gully as a rubbish tip, as it was convenient to back their utes up to the cliff-edge and unload their household or farm junk. Near the base a large flat rock, with a smooth depression and a fossilised leaf in its surface, propped up a broken bike frame. When the roo drank from a pool it jerked upright as a bitter taste entered its throat with the water. An oily black slick swirled sluggishly from a half-submerged tin drum. The letters POI... were just legible on the tin's peeling label. Instantly the ground beside the pool shook as the young roo dropped with a crash to twitch a few times then lie deathly still in the dry grass.
Would the black gums die out too, along with the kangaroo, the cycads and the native grasses?

WOODEND, 36 minutes ago

The MAN

"The first reliable water after the struggle through the black wood on route to the Goldfields," he remembered his grandfather saying of the reason for the establishment and naming of the growing town he lived in. Straightening up the man brushed the soil from his hands. He had just finished planting another black gum seedling on the slope of the recently cleared creek bank. As he was digging the hole he had come across a bit of old tin, almost eaten away with rust. A rounded pebble with a worn side and an ancient medicine bottle had been unearthed also. The glass must have been in a hot fire as it was melted into a flattened, distorted shape, but still recognisable as a bottle. The young man found he had popped the bottle into his pocket, when he changed his clothes back at home half an hour later. Rinsing encrusted muck off his little treasure under the laundry tap, he thought again of what his late forebear had said. He considered for a moment how the rare black gums had once blanketed the surrounding hills, and he pondered his own small efforts at tree planting. Unexpectedly the floor shook as the backdoor slammed open and his five-year old daughter -came bounding through from the backyard. "Look Dad, I'm a kangaroo!" she squealed, as she hopped along the corridor. He grinned at her departing back and went back to his musings. As he emptied the dirty water from the newly scrubbed, warped bottle, the man asked himself:

"Would the creek ever become reliable and fresh again? Would it be the end of the wood or just the beginning...?"