Local Market Forces

I stumbled upon a haul of obscure SF paperbacks in a bookshop in Holland Park, as we were due to drive home in the tiny hire car I'd driven up from Lismore while the garage got on with fixing our car's gearbox. I ended up leaving the books at a friend's house in Brissie for collection upon my return. There are even a couple of Zelazny books I've never read before.
Back in Nimbin, there was plenty to clean up following the heavy rains - mudslips, flooded trenches and washed away logs, and a brief (but apparently Nimbin-wide) plague of native mice (antechinus).

Our log fire has been lit more or less constantly, as temperatures dropped to lows of 1°C and 2°C, and real frost has been crunching underfoot in the morning. Chopping the wood for the logfire is probably the most rustic part of our lifestyle in the bush here (as everything else in the house is electric or gas) but happily it warms me up both in the doing and through the resulting split logs. It is only as cold as this in winter when there are cloudless skies, so the days have been bright and wonderful, with the afternoons around the 22°C mark - more or less what I think of as "perfect" weather.
Probably because the temperatures only get down towards freezing just before midwinter, most of the deciduous trees in this region lose their leaves very late as well - often in mid-June, which means that the striking red and gold leaves appear at the same time as the bright blue sky days, as in this picture of The Channon's Sunday market. I have further developed my incipient obsession with SF literature by joining a local science fiction reading group. Neuromancer, Slaughterhouse Five, and the Tripods trilogy are the eclectic first three books read since I started going - I'm hoping the wide range continues, and hoping the group picks something I haven't read before soon, too.
Louis reminded us to attend the Djanbung Gardens open day on the third weekend in June - there were excellent walking tours, and Louis gave an interesting speech on globalisation and local consumption/trade patterns and possibilities. The following day, we engaged in two most excellent opportunities for local trade, by attending first the Dunoon Wide Garage sale, and then The Channon market. Home-made pumpkin soup was on sale as a winter warmer, and thus fortified, we trudged the length of Dunoon, scouting for interesting bargains and unusual nik-naks, while all around us ocker Aussies got into their utes and drove every thirty yard gap between people's stalls, loading their accumulated loot into the back and giving us strange looks for having the temerity to proceed on foot.
Naturally, I accumulated another handful of silver age SF books.