Steve Hopper

Hi, Sarah.

Sure can.

In fact, from the ABC window, I'm looking out right now.

Looking at Mount Clarence, which is one of the two little granite peaks in Albany, and it's clothed with flowering eucalypt at the moment.

What sort of eucalypt?

Mary is the one that's in flower, and these hills are of granite rock, and there's a species that's confined to the granites called Eucalyptus cornuta, which was the first eucalypt named by Europeans in WA.

So there's two of them there.

Occasionally.

Albany is blessed with a very maritime and modest climate.

So while you've been frying through most of Southeast Australia and Brisbane, we've had very telling maximums of 20 degrees centigrade.

I do.

Most Australian homes do that use hardwood timber.

So in Western Australia, the first export was in fact after sandalwood was jarrah.

which they used to call mahogany in those days.

So it's a really rich red timbered and easily split eucalypt.

These days it's used more and more for fine furniture and for artwork because it's such a useful and malleable eucalypt timber.

I was born in a little town just near Byron Bay called Bangalow and spent my pre-primary years at Ballina, where the family home was.

And my parents were a bit itinerant, so they ended up like gypsies moving up and down the east coast from as far north as Karanda.

near Cairns, right down to Tasmania.

But halfway through their journeys and up and down the east coast, my father got a job in Western Australia as a skipper of a tug that was dredging Coburn Sound.