Healesville Sanctuary

Healesville Sanctuary, or the Sir Colin MacKenzie Fauna Park, is a zoo specializing in native Australian animals. It is located at Healesville in rural Victoria, Australia, and has a history of breeding native animals. It is one of only two places to have successfully bred a platypus, the other being Sydney's Taronga Zoo. It also assists with a breeding population of the endangered helmeted honeyeater.

The zoo is set in a natural bushland environment where paths wind through different habitat areas showcasing wallabies, wombats, dingoes, kangaroos, and over 200 native bird varieties.

Conducted tours, bird shows and information areas are available to visitors.

History

Dr Colin MacKenzie (knighted in 1929) set up the Institute of Anatomical Research in 1920 on 78 acres (32 ha) of land which had formerly been part of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve. The Reserve passed to the Healesville Council in 1927 and became the Sir Colin MacKenzie Sanctuary in 1934.

The first platypus bred in captivity was born at the Sanctuary in 1943 when it was managed by David Fleay.

Healesville, Victoria

Healesville is a town in Victoria, Australia, 52 km north-east from Melbourne's central business district. Its local government area is the Shire of Yarra Ranges. At the 2011 Census, Healesville had a population of 6,839.

Healesville is situated on the Watts River, a tributary of the Yarra River.

History

The creation of a railway to the more distant Gippsland and Yarra Valley goldfields in the 1860s resulted in a settlement forming on the Watts River and its survey as a town in 1864. It was named after Richard Heales, the Premier of Victoria from 1860–1861. The post office opened on 1 May 1865. The town became a setting off point for the Woods Point Goldfield with the construction of the Yarra Track in the 1870s.

Present

Healesville is well known for the Healesville Sanctuary, a nature park with hundreds of native Australian animals displayed in a semi-open natural setting and an active platypus breeding program.

The Yarra Valley Tourist Railway operates from Healesville Station on every Sunday, most public holidays and Wednesday to Sunday during school holidays.

Roger Shah

Roger Shah (German pronunciation: [ˈʁɔdʒɐ ˈʃaː]; born 29 November 1972 in Esslingen am Neckar, Germany), also known as DJ Shah and Sunlounger is a German electronic music composer and producer.

Biography

History

Roger Shah was born in Esslingen in southern Germany to a German mother and a Pakistani father. His brother Pedro del Mar (real name Patrick Shah), also a trance DJ, hosts a bi-weekly vocal trance show called Mellomania. Roger first began to hit his production stride in his native country in 1999 putting out the tracks "Claps", "The Mission" & "Tides of Time". In 2003 his "High" release was signed by Virgin Records imprint Nebula. This marked his first non-domestic release, and over the course of the next 5 years he inked productions to a range of trance labels such as Black Hole Recordings, Anjunadeep Records and Vandit Records.

Roger Shah has featured in DJ Mag Top 100 list 5 times, peaking at #21. He received a double EMPO nomination for Best Trance & Progressive DJ and Best Radio Show and an IDMA award nomination as break through artist in 2008. With more than 500 releases, his music videos watched about 90 million times and having played at the most important clubs such as Privilege Ibiza or Zouk in Singapore as well as at a lot of major festivals such as Ultra Music Festival in the olympic stadium in Seoul and many A State Of Trance events around the globe.

Sanctuary

A sanctuary, in its original meaning, is a sacred place, such as a shrine. By the use of such places as a safe haven, by extension the term has come to be used for any place of safety. This secondary use can be categorized into human sanctuary, a safe place for humans, such as a political sanctuary; and non-human sanctuary, such as an animal or plant sanctuary.

Religious sanctuary

Sanctuary is a word derived from the Latin sanctuarium, which is like most words ending in -arium, a container for keeping something in—in this case holy things or perhaps holy people, sancta or sancti. The meaning was extended to places of holiness or safety. A religious sanctuary may be a sacred place (such as a church, temple, synagogue or mosque), or a consecrated area of a church or temple around its tabernacle or altar.

Sanctuary as a sacred place

Shah

Shah (Šâh or Şah) (/ˈʃɑː/; Persian: شاه‎‎, [ʃɒːh], "king") is a title given to the emperors/kings and lords of Iran (historically also known as Persia). It was also adopted by the kings of Shirvan (a historical Iranian region in Transcaucasia) namely the Shirvanshahs, the rulers and offspring of the Ottoman Empire (termed there as Şeh), the Bengal Sultanate, as well as in Georgia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In Iran (Persia and Greater Persia) the title was continuously used; rather than King in the European sense, each Persian ruler regarded himself as the Šâhanšâh (King of Kings) or Emperor of the Persian Empire. The word descends from Old Persian Xšâyathiya "king", which (for reasons of historical phonology) must be a borrowing from Median, and is derived from the same root as Avestan xšaΘra-, "power" and "command", corresponding to Sanskrit (Old Indic) kṣatra- (same meaning), from which kṣatriya-, "warrior", is derived. The full, Old Persian title of the Achaemenid rulers of the First Persian Empire was Xšâyathiya Xšâyathiyânâm or Šâhe Šâhân, "King of Kings" or "Emperor". This word is commonly confused with the unrelated and distinct Indian surname Shah, which is derived from the Sanskrit Sadhu/Sahu (meaning gentleman ).