Big Eagle – Rosedale

The difficulty is that the image is loaded. An eagle grasping a serpent is one of the most widely used emblems in the world, and it belongs to several completely unrelated traditions: it is the central device of the Mexican coat of arms, drawn from the Aztec founding account of Tenochtitlan; it appears throughout Christian and heraldic art as good overcoming evil; it runs through classical antiquity, where an eagle carrying a snake was read as an omen and turns up in Homer; and it exists independently as a simple observation, because wedge-tailed eagles genuinely do take snakes.

Each of those readings would produce a different story, and picking one on the strength of the picture would be invention. So this record states the object and leaves the meaning open.

Rosedale sits in Gippsland, in Wellington Shire, on the road between Sale and Traralgon in country that is farmland and coal-fired power stations rather than tourism.

What would settle it is small and local: a plaque photograph, a shire record, or the Rosedale historical society. Until one of those turns up, this entry says what it can see and no more.