MORE Co2, OR LESS?

Posted on January 18, 2020 by wp-admin

MORE Co2, OR LESS?

RAIN AT LAST in Queensland and New South Wales, Australia……..we’re happy, but does it change the gloomy long-term forecast?

From a parochial observation, until now the writer has missed-out on the joy of a breaking drought, but last night the clouds came this way for a change, and inches of rain poured down the cavernous cracks in the soil: ah, at last, the drought has broken. A lucky drop, though; just local, and not affecting the overall situation. Too late for many farmers, of course, and great tracts of the country keep missing the cloud-belts.

Tempting to relax with the relief of good rain, washing away the dry gloom. Tempting to hope that the aquifers are re-filling. Tempting to watch the green shoots colouring the brown wastes, and hope that the land will return to fecundity.

The inches of rain that lighten the hearts of the lucky recipients are a bitter irony to the majority that miss out, particularly those burned-out. The horror of a charred ruin that was once a home, now soaked, the black charcoal sprouting green shoots, the insidious gums reviving amongst the desolation they have caused.

I can only imagine the pain of those pitiable householders and farmers watching the too-late rain falling on their wrecked endeavours so soon. Such awful irony. Even to state the obvious in print is insulting: ‘this rain, had it fallen two weeks ago, would have changed our futures from destitution to viability.’

The national hope is for a return to a climate that we can cope with, despite its awful disasters interrupting isolated ventures. It is obvious that local rain would inevitably lift the spirits, but we must constantly be aware of the overall situation, and watch the national rain-gauge with close attention, and plan accordingly. The lucky majority of folk in our major cities, soaked with rain, must not influence the vital action to protect the unlucky majority of farm-land presently under threat of extinction.

Farm-land which has become unviable, threatening the survival of our vital productive communities. The land supports the cities: not vice versa. Long-term planning must go ahead no matter how reassuring the local rainfall. Farmers and farm-land must be kept operational at all costs, if possible. The alternative is depopulation of vast areas of rural Australia, a situation which would be ruinous.

More Co2, or less? All eyes must be on the national rain-gauge. Where is our climate headed? Is it ‘business as usual’, or ‘prepare for the worst’? The science of the weather is all-important; we are fortunate to have enabled research recently which is far-reaching in its discoveries on a global scale. International climate models become more sophisticated by the day, and long-held beliefs are being relinquished.

More Co2, or less? The on-going preoccupation with the dangers of fossil-fuel burning is on the brink of being revealed as a furphy. Current science is advising the opposite view; we need more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, not less, it is said. The vast store of carbon in land and ocean is undeniable: this at the depletion in our atmosphere, the weather-maker.

How is it possible that the science, which has created a whole-world outlook, could suddenly be reversed? Are we being duped by vested interests? Is fossil-fuel the danger or the saviour? We have known for generations that the climate which created the vast coal and oil deposits was staggeringly wet; only constant rainfall and copious Co2 engendered such fecund growth. Science is now suggesting we need to burn more of this stored carbon, not keep it in the ground. For the benefit of the climate, and for us.

Buteyko-beathing! Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the body, with vital effect on health. The victims of nervous trauma, breathing their own Co2 from paper bags. Is the fear of increasing carbon in the atmosphere unfounded?

Greenhouses have been gassed with growth-promoting Co2 for some time now. It is a conundrum: why not, therefore, promote more Co2 in the atmosphere? There is still plenty of oxygen for the creatures (us) on the planet. The conflict of information from various fields of research will resolve many questions, attitudes, and beliefs over the coming years; old assurance becomes undermined by new information. Certainly we individuals are following the accelerating accumulation of knowledge with rapt interest; it will affect us directly, and soon, and is fascinating to watch science unfold, opinions to reverse, and world-view reveal!

The question of the effect of more atmospheric Co2 on the oceans (which would become more acid), and the corals, and all ocean creatures, is a debate not yet resolved, and continuing with vigour. The effect on land looks positive, but that debate rages on the Internet: Google yourself into an opinion……it’s all happening right now.

What irony if the oil and coal interests (which appear to be succumbing to popular opinion) were beneficial all along? What irony if the Green movement has concepts which prove not to be the safeguards of life? No green without rain. What of the floods and blizzards in other parts of the planet? Science and reality are confusing. Turning-over a scientific stone reveals so much to be investigated and more importantly, interpreted. It is the interpretation that is vitally important.

If the previous interpretation of climate-science is proving to be misguided, what then?

Here I sit at my keyboard, and the lovely, lovely rain cascades in torrents, filling my senses with delight and my tanks with pure, pure tapwater. It’s been a long time. Hard to be globally-aware when locally gratified! Typical human.

Interesting smells

Posted on January 16, 2020 by wp-admin

Interesting smells, attractive smells, romantic smells…..or,

LED BY THE NOSE! A nosey, nostril-nuanced narrative.

Have you ever had that ephemeral whiff, just caught in passing, that reminds you of something from long ago, perhaps from childhood? But a whiff that won’t stick around long enough for you to latch on to, and jog your memory? What was that? I KNOW that smell! But what?

Since I moved from city to bush there has been a remarkable nasal improvement: the I-suppose still looks ornery, but its internal equipment now fires on all cylinders, and startles me sometimes. I find myself in sudden pauses, head tilted up, rapid light sniffs……mmm, what IS that? Ah! Rare flower-smell from childhood, coming from, coming from………no. It’s gone. What flower was that? Yes, foxglove! But where? I see no foxgloves.

But somewhere near, behind a house, will be foxgloves. Unseen, but beckoning, and reminding. Children with foxglove fingers. Did you ever do that? My fingers probably too fat now, but I’d like a close-up sniff, get my nose into that memory of old gardens half a planet away.

Every time I cut a small cabbage in half, I have to immediately get my nose into the exposed green convolutions and breathe deeply: a strangely heady feeling of essential cabbage, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just hypnotic, for an instant.

Roses too, of course. Some varieties positively concussive in their spellbinding head-rush. I am the weird bloke leaning over your fence with his face buried in the flora. No ulterior motive, just drawn irresistibly to the great, soft, luminous petals.

Smoking, alcohol, chemicals, artificial cosmetics, traffic toxins, industrial waste drifting airbourne through city neighbourhoods; dragging our nostrils through the de-gassing detritus, and the horrendous ubiquitous scenting of everything from toilet-cleaners to toothpaste. No surprise that our sniff-organs have rotted in-situ, barely able to acknowledge the perfume-soaked effluvia of the woman, or man, on the bus.

But lo! A couple of years in the bush and those city-trashed nasal receptors have shed the shield of shite and are once again receiving loud and clear. Who’d have thought!

There’s an experience only motor-cycle riders get to enjoy. At night there are many blossoms exploding with nectar-of-the-dark; moth attractors, bat-tempters. Those in air-conditioned cars would have no idea of the nasal treasures passing by unsmelled, but on a bike, every kilometre is filled with floral delight. At night, other smells seem to be enhanced too; mown grass, hay bale-ready in the paddock, their aromas descriptive, somehow: the first moist and greeny, the second mellow yellowing and foody. No wonder cows love it.

At night, on the bike, a rural road is healthily tar-scented, a passing dairy richly brown with liquid wonderful waste that is not wasted. A bush sawmill of resin and sap and steaming scented stacks of sawdust, and fresh-milled boards releasing their years of xylem and phloem to the still night air. It’s that silent dark that enables smells somehow.

When I was a young innocent hoon in a distant land of field and hedge, on a moonlit night we would ride our motorbikes helmetless and headlightless, at horse-gallop, on winding leaf-hung lanes, through solid cloud-walls of aroma changing with each bend. The true and only motorcycle experience, our exhausts quiet with full-baffled muffles, our hair free, our noses at the ready for pleasure, the moonlight our guide. On today’s city freeways, at a hundred and ten kilometres per hour; where’s the pleasure?

Now, in rural Queensland, we have our horrendous troubles, but at this moment there is a soft rain falling on the cracked dirt that was once a lawn, and the stressed trees are redolent with long-awaited wet.

In Witta, the marvellous, much-missed moisture is right now full of roasting coffee! An unknown neighbour roasts and packs the beans: one day I must call in, say hello, and nose about, truly. For though the smell is moreish and entrancing, (don’t the coffee-shops know it!), I am unfortunately too sensitive to the liquor to drink. It makes my heart beat madly and eyesight flicker and lurch: I must not drive a car.

Beer, though. A love-hate affair. There’s so much atrocious brew out there, and meddling amateurs of no lore or wisdom, or obviously nasal acumen. I will not drink, no, not until I’ve tested. Nose in glass first! Euggh! Stray wild stinking yeast in the brew! Can’t they tell? Don’t they know? Millions of dollars spent on equipment, and no sense of smell………and consequently taste. The nose leads, and success or failure follows. Those wine-buffs understand, but a buff is often mostly bluff. (Double-blind testing always reveals their laughable short-comings; but that’s another story.)

There are so many marvellous smells out there to be enjoyed, and a few to turn your nose up at! Girl with a turned-up nose no insult, ha! We are, sadly, as a race of mostly city-dwellers, losing our sense of smell to the effects of pollution; chemical-overpowering of delicate membranes. A whole sense, one of our only five, is being stifled, obliterated, and most of us can not afford to escape the pollution towards clean air.

My sympathy goes out to those who have lost their nose-power. It’s not a minor affliction. It is a sad loss, and every rose is a reminder. We who retain that sense are lucky. There’s a small loss in language too; have you noticed? The subtle difference between ‘Can you smell?’ and ‘You do smell!’ Enough, already, who knows where the nose goes?

Ah, this too-little rain. Enhancing all scents. Almost endearing us to the wasteland-creating eucalypts and their released kino; the sharp but pleasant antiseptic oil most noticeable in rain. All too brief, ineffectual, this rain. Too little, totally tantalising; a tease when we need serious soaking. But the smell of the wet bush!

STOP LAUGHING, this is serious. Jerbourg Hotel #2

Posted on January 13, 2020 by wp-admin

No laughing matter, and we tried not to.

I was helping out in the posh private lounge bar of the Jerbourg Hotel one day, a humble servant to the few misguided residents. The boss usually served the bar in here, leaving me (thankfully) to deal with the riotous riff-raff in the huge public lounge, where the money was made.

The Jerbourg hotel was old and rather stylish in those days, say fifty years ago, a bit run-down, and furnished in the dated ‘fifties way; lots of Laminex, vinyl tiles, boring light-fittings, steel-and-plastic furniture. But the rooms were spacious with massive windows, and class that was hard to defile.

The seating was ubiquitous throughout: those steel-and-woven-plastic circular things on thin, splayed, steel legs. Of the Era; once ‘modern’, but convenient hotel-ware because of their stackability. They had round cushions like pancakes which also stacked conveniently.

That day, in the private bar, was a very large woman. I mean big, even by today’s standard. She directed me to carry her cocktail to a nearby table of the matching steel-legged variety. There were a few other customers, looking on with prurient interest at her vastness. I instantly perceived the peril ahead, but was powerless to prevent it, hypnotised by disaster, as humans are.

I couldn’t stop her, and if I had, her outrage would have been unbearable. So she backed up to the seat, lowered herself as far as the tendons in her massive legs would allow and fell the remaining six inches.

And kept falling, the splayed steel legs continued splaying as she descended, wrapping the circular frame tightly around her arms and body in a perfect cage. There she lay, bound and supine, on the shiny vinyl.

We all saw it happen as if in slow motion. The room was soundless and motionless for long seconds. The prurient fascination held us spell-bound and briefly expressionless, until excruciatingly-suppressed laughter took over. The huge woman lay silent, trapped, dignity defiled. The pain of maintaining a straight face unbearable.

There was no getting the chair off her while she was on the ground; her massive weight kept the folded steel in position. It took six blokes to stand her upright, with no safe place to put hands for the effort, or to keep her legs from folding at the knees. Those little battery angle-grinders were not yet invented.

Now vertical, she glared, stony-faced, mute, caged, unengaged. Images of mediaeval torture flashed. And experimental asylum treatment. We paused. Considered the situation from a practical, engineering standpoint, humour dismissed temporarily, while she stood, hating us.

Two men to hold her steady. Two more on each side. One leg each on the floor, one leg each bracing and pushing, two pairs of arms pulling the steel apart.

The enveloping device was straightened. Released, she staggered wordlessly out of the bar, poor woman, to deafening silence. I did later hear talk of suing the hotel, but such was the laughter finally released (two releases) that I’m sure sense prevailed.

The boss bought a round as the giggling dissipated and I removed the mangled chair from the room. I kept it for a while to illustrate the story to friends. As red faces returned to their normal colour, a couple of men left the bar and we heard a roar of laughter in the corridor, which set us all off again.

The large person quit the hotel immediately, and I believe no mention was made of an unpaid bill.

MALENY SPARROWS

Posted on January 10, 2020 by wp-admin

MALENY SPARROWS; the last of the breed?

We were having a nosh at the Italian restaurant opposite the post office in that little compound of shops in Maleny, sitting outside, and listening to the cheerful chirping of a few sparrows, whose very distant ancestors had been imported on sailing ships from the Old Country, what, 150 years ago?

These little nondescript brown birds were endemic to the British Isles, tolerated but pests nevertheless, and thrived in their millions around all human endeavour, seemingly unable to survive without us and our buildings. Certainly few if any were ever seen in rural areas, or forests, moors, uninhabited coasts; but every village and city gave them nesting sites.

In fact sparrows nest exclusively in human habitation. Never in a tree, or a hole in a bank, or in a field, but always, with rare exceptions, in a roof of human construction. Needless to say, the roof must have its faults, to allow access to the little birds, and any thatching is open to infestation, which is why modern thatch is now covered with steel mesh.

Any crack or gap, or cracked tile, or vent, or loose fascia, or missing brick, any tiny hole will be found and used by a keen sparrow-pair for their family. The best, and most inviting access, however, was found in Australia: the un-nailed corrugations of roof-iron at the fascia. Now that nail-patterns are now standardised with roof-screws, and every corrugation fixed at the gutter-edge, that sparrow-access has gone, and most sparrows with it.

In fact we are such a wealthy and fastidious lot that our buildings both domestic and industrial, are virtually sparrow-proof. Well-built and maintained, they offer no fortuitous gaps and holes for a nesting pair, and that pair will not choose any natural site for their home; not a tree, or hedge, or earthen bank will be considered.

I have long thought that this lack of nest-sites is responsible for the demise of sparrows. Within the last 50 years our suburbs and cities have been sparrow-proofed. No sites, no nests, no sparrows; it doesn’t take long: they don’t live long.

Likeable as the little mites are, and cheerful in chatter and song, and cute around restaurant tables (to the customers, not the health authorities), there is a condition caused by sparrows that is utterly impossible to live with.

One hot summer night in my VJ lodging, a typical old Queensland house, I woke up as is my wont for my mid-sleep read; around one a.m. The book was propped on the wall, but after a while a curious effect had me staring at the VJs, which appeared to be somehow hard to focus on. Never seen this before; was it tiredness? Eye-strain? The paint seemed to be shifting slightly as I stared at it. I put on my magnifying specs: the wall was crawling with millions of microscopic crab-like creatures.

So was my bed, my clothes, everything. Sparrow-mites.

I had been uncomfortably itchy for a few days, and assumed prickly-heat and the climate was to blame, but no; bloody sparrows were nesting in the roof, and their parasites had invaded my space. All my clothes and bedding had to be washed, the room cleaned and fumigated, the roof off and all nests, and sadly, chicks too thrown out and the spaces sprayed. I used cans of Aerogard……the first available stuff I thought would do the trick, and it did.

I spent the whole day roofing, cleaning, spraying, fumigating and washing clothes and bedding. This is why sparrows are disappearing from our suburbs. Although I was happy to have them around, I had never suffered their parasites before, and never wish to again; the itching and rash took three weeks to dissipate.

Perhaps in cold old Britain the sparrow-mites don’t proliferate to such an extent, for I never heard of the situation over there. I made sure the roof of our rented house was impregnable after that episode though, and perhaps my attitude is causing the demise of those cute little creatures. But where do they live in Maleny, and the few other places where they exist, like Newcastle, NSW?

Well, there must be secret holes and gaps in roofs wherever sparrows are found. And should those be closed, the sparrows will die-out shortly after, for they will not adapt to any other environment, for they belong with us, and if we reject them, it seems they have no place to go.

If we can’t live with sparrows (and I don’t recommend it), perhaps we could give them suitable housing, specially built at some little distance away, exclusively for their use (not mice or rats or humans), for pest as they are, they are OUR pests, and I for one would miss them.

Help save the innocent cheeky sparrow, we’d be lonely without their cheerful chirping, and would have to pick up our own crumbs. Or rats would.

Henry Lawson

Posted on January 9, 2020 by wp-admin

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF HENRY LAWSON, from 1885 to 1922

THE PERTH/FREMANTLE RUSH, 1896.

I was browsing in the Lifeline shop some time ago, (I’d like to think supporting their cause rather than gathering cheap treasures), and bought the two massive volumes of poetry, anecdotes, essays and romantic stories: the complete Works of Henry Lawson.

The first volume lives and is read in the toilet, an irresistible habit frowned on by all women, the second on the kitchen table. So it’s been Henry Lawson night and day for weeks now, and he’s telling me of Perth, Australia, only seventy-three years before I myself arrived here broke, a New Chum. But what a different Perth!

Now well acclimatised to his style, and steeped in his detailed account, re-living the very events of the day, I read this minute of his arrival in Fremantle and Perth, with wife and a pile of luggage, and little cash, to townships exploding with growth, and plentiful work. The reporting starts in 1895 as the massive rush gets under way.

The wife, he thinks, may have been a mistake. There is no accommodation, only the best hotel is available, and avoided, because of its huge cost. Dossing-down on a veranda is only for single blokes; then there’s all the luggage. Later in one trunk he finds his wife has packed a selection of flat-irons……….

This current trip takes place in 1896. Lawson reports that ‘The population of Perth and Fremantle at the end of the eighties was about 7000 each; that of Albany 1000 or 1500′. And that: ‘The population of Perth in the winter of 1896, when we were there, was about 40,000, and hundreds coming every week!’.

The story is immediate and fascinating. He and his wife have the choice of renting at thirty shillings a week (a search they gave up: ‘The awful hunt for lodgings…‘) and take matters into their own hands, and ‘build’. In his own words……

‘WRITTEN ON THE SPOT’: ‘We have given up the awful hunt for lodgings, and have joined a camp by the river. We have been our own architect and builder, and are now the proud possessor of a bag-and-canvas covered frame, with a tent inside. Galvanised iron cases make an excellent floor — the sides and ends serving as joists — and packing cases come in very handy in the shape of furniture. A nail-can, with holes knocked in it, does very well for a fireplace, and the smoke ascends to the blue vault above without the assistance of a flue.’

The whole lot cost five pounds, and included ‘a wire mattress, stretcher, bedding, etc..’ A home for the two of them. Rent would have gobbled-up their five pounds within a month. I read on in fascination, and have first-hand, immediate description of everything that is happening right there in Perth, 124 years ago.

Still reading, of course. Will report on progress as I find out…….keep in touch.

Eucalypts and fire-prone species must be cleared from our suburbs. First essay: see also “The impoverished Australian Environment”.

Posted on January 7, 2020 by wp-admin

EUCALYPT AND FIRE-PRONE SPECIES TO BE CLEARED from our dwellings.

In our hearts we knew that the gum-trees surrounding our housing were a risk, but with the alternative being a naked block of dust, what other option was there? Any trees are better than none, has been the opinion of all. Until now.

We’ve put up with the ever-present fire-risk; and the occasional eucalypt falling on our houses and power-lines and cars. And ourselves, too. We’ve put up with the danger and inconvenience for the sake of having a bit of ‘nature’ in our suburbs, in our back yards, and the wildlife it attracts.

But the time has come when we must draw the line. The climate is drying, and as it dries the eucalypts and fire-prone species have the upper hand: they win in the game of survival. Thousands of our people are now homeless, many financially ruined, because of this fashion for accommodating eucalypts and fire-prone species in our environment.

Each one of us is now at risk, and the cities no longer immune. Queensland is at present having a lucky respite, compared with the devastation occurring in the south, but unfortunately our luck may run out. I look at the tinder of the parched vegetation all around, and hope; just hope.

Ancient and magnificent rain-forest in our national parks, and on the elevated areas, is finally succumbing to the dry. We never thought it could possibly happen; there’s no way that forest could resist fire now. If those areas hang on, eventual rains will quickly revive the trees and the moist ground-cover, but if fire goes through, the entire biodiversity may be permanently lost.

This is a frightening time for all Australians to be living through. There is no security. The government of the day is introducing schemes which should have been in place months ago when the outcomes of drought became obvious. Better late than never, but what of all those who have lost everything?

Now, perhaps, the eucalypts and fire-prone species will be cleared away, from both the burned and spared communities. For those ravaged and blackened areas, the ruined houses will remain ruins, but the eucalypts will revive almost immediately, ready for the next conflagration. Let us not welcome them back.

Let us bulldoze the stumps, the trash, and eradicate the coming seedlings. Clear the suburbs of further inevitable eucalypt danger, and maintain the gum-free zones until our chosen fire-resistant species take hold, and shade our environment, mulching and moistening and enriching. Swap a gum-tree, that weed which produces no cover, or humus, parching the lanscape, for a forest tree of dense shade.

Surely, surely now, our love-affair with the eucalypts, and fire-prone species, is over? The sparse, straggling bush must for ever be associated with danger, and loss, and tragedy.

Marinus (Reen) Ranke

Posted on January 5, 2020 by wp-admin

MARINUS ( REEN, or RINI) RANKE

Please look at the blog for Ray White’s, Stones Corner, where Reen was manager, long ago. It should have been his blog!

Rollo Sherwill

Posted on January 4, 2020 by wp-admin

ROLLO SHERWILL

Carpentry, joinery, cabinet-making and building workshop, Guernsey, Channel Islands.

I was, still am, a potterer. On the beautiful island of Guernsey, fifty-odd years ago, I pottered at cafes and restaurants, and bar-tending (see blog). My pottering had produced a very small excess of funds with which I bought a very small, old carvel fishing boat, with a very small motor, the sort you see in little hire putputs.

In my ignorance I took this little craft and built a little cabin on it, with dreams of a bunk, and a stove, and a mast and sails. Crazy, but I was a kid, and I wanted to sail, and put down crab pots, and fish with spinners for mackerel.

The jobs were completed; the boat looked so cute with its gaff-rig and jib, and staysail. Innocently, I put down my ten home-made crab pots in the waters around St Peter Port, with marked floats, all secure. The next day all had vanished; cut, or stolen, by real fishermen. But that’s another story, in which I must welcome a treasured friend, Vic Sanderson. In fact, there are dozens of Guernsey stories, encompassing the entire island, from surfing at Vazon, gardening at a French name I forget, a new baby at Les Canichers, a band at Jerbourg, a wreck of copra, me a tour guide of no skill, alcoholic spirits in tea-pots, a Citroen light 15, the awful seizing of two new marine engines, beach parties, a bakery odyssey, The Hairy Mouse; in fact a life of concentrated events., each one of which would run for pages, opening cans of worms on the way.

Back to the plot; one day I was there on the careening-hard, working on my nautical mission, with tools and marine-ply arranged around the tiny craft (named Tea-pot, by the way), when I was approached by a handsome, slightly older stranger. He introduced himself to the semi-naked hippy (always ready for a swim) as Rollo, and politely inquired as to whether I was a carpenter.

A trade! I wish! I was a practical baby, and loved making things; then there was Art School, (but that’s another story, totally). But a trade! A means of employment! I had to admit to Rollo, no, no carpenter. But he persisted: you look like you know what you’re doing……(the tools were lying around).

Would you like a job? He said; well, actually, yes, I would: things had ground to a stop, forcibly ejected, I was, from a most successful cafe I was running whilst the owner was overseas. He claimed his territory back and immediately went broke. Ha! Rollo thought I could handle the job he was working on,so……

It was the conversion of a tunnel, excavated by the invading German army, into an aquarium. Yes…….not a venture that I would have deemed either viable or lucrative, but Work, Employment. I started the next day, keen and capable.

Rollo Sherwill was the most kind of bosses, a mine of knowledge in the trade into which I had been gratefully inducted. His workshop was the most delightful environment, his staff all supportive gentlemen, his work most varied and interesting, and sometimes curious, and esoteric. There was no job of either delicacy, or complexity, or scale, which he wouldn’t tackle. The learning experience for me was the most valuable asset, treasured for the rest of my life.

I was, unfortunately, too young to be aware and suitably grateful for my invaluable experience with Rollo. I should have stayed; possibly have become a fixture in his enterprise, possibly to have achieved residency status on that island paradise, a good job, and maybe good pay later, and and maybe respect. Without doubt, for the rest of my life I owe my small skill to the trust and patience of Rollo Sherwill.

But I met and drank with two Liverpool blokes, who were horrified at my tiny wages, with wife and two children now to support. There was a project on a huge building site, for which they were looking for a cabinet-maker. I applied: it was a doddle, compared with our exacting standards, and got the job. The Scouse lads said I would earn twice as much.

Telling Rollo was awful. I felt, and was, a complete ungrateful prick. He offered to double my wages, but it was too late. I know I should have stayed, but the decision was made. I offered to stay as long as was necessary to finish the work I was on, and while he found a replacement, but it was over. And I both regret and understand my decision today.

Briefly, my new job was a price on making small bedroom drawer units for almost a hundred new units. I was given a unit as workshop, and I supplied a materials list, which was enormous (eight drawers per bedroom, two bedrooms per unit, 100 units). I needed two extra units for storage.

Having experience of mass-production, I set to work cutting every individual part from my huge stock, a job that took weeks, with no pay: the lads were horrified. But once the assembly started the little drawer-units came together at twenty a day, and accelerating, and were carried out of my workshop to be fitted.

My final pay was enormous, beyond all expectation, and salved my conscience slightly with regard to Rollo. But it is to him that I owe my skill at the trade, if I have any, and it is to him that I dedicated my book ‘The Building of the Queensland House’.

And without Rollo’s support we lost our residency status on the island of Guernsey, being just a few months short of the cut-off period of five years. Perhaps we had a case, but we were too young to know. Paradise lost, back to bleak England, then to bright Australia, carrying Rollo’s wonderful tuition with me.

Thanks, Rollo Sherwill, for starting a young idiot on the way to a lifetime of skill, a career, and solvency. (So far……)

John Weysome

Posted on January 4, 2020 by wp-admin

John Weysome, The Jerbourg Hotel, Guernsey.

Long, long ago

THE BOSS AND THE TILL. (A till is now called ‘cash register’)

Every seven years or so, I read, 98% of the cells of our bodies are replaced, except for just a few long-lasting ones in our brains. So John Weysom, my patient boss, and myself, are many times different folk since the days I was his barman. But this memory lingers.

John was a young bloke in those days, and had inherited the old hotel from the family, I believe, but his hopes had been elsewhere, perhaps, when our lives briefly touched. He hired me as a barman for the deserted and enormous lounge, with its huge bar and windows sand-blasted opaque from the driving salt air of that beautiful promontory, on that beautiful island.

I was a strange, annoying child, given to periods of silent introspection, a gloom which settled over me for days, sometimes, when it became painfully difficult to converse normally with people. It was an illness which afflicted me for decades, gradually fading with age. At the time a source of irritation and teasing from my friends: Andy’s in one of his moods. I’d recover to become normal after a while, usually a day or two. No idea of the cause.

John Weysome gave me a talking-to, one day, when we were doing the barman’s inevitable chore, sorting thousands of empty bottles. He accused me of ‘dumb insolence’, having caught me in one of my ‘periods’. I had no defense to offer, not understanding my condition either. This upset me, and him, considerably, but I became an asset in the bar; it was gratifying to have the responsibility and the freedom to run it as I wished.

But this is a story of a different kind. Time went past. My job at the Jerbourg Hotel was my project, too, and every idea I had attracted more young customers, and I was allowed to choose helpers behind the bar, and bands for the room, and decorations and themes, and design cocktails, and order special beers. It was a great job, and I’m sure the boss was pleased, until one day……..

The five of us barpersons (two were girls) were ordered to assemble, one day before opening time. Bear in mind we were all relative amateurs at the job. Highly successful amateurs. The bar was no doubt the most successful on the island at that time; we had fun, we worked hard, we earned our wages, but, like our boss, we were not trained, we were too busy always to run an orderly business: the empty bottle situation, for example. There was no time or labour to sort, pack, and return them, just a huge heap, and growing daily.

We realised that there was some trouble, some threat, but what? John confronted us: someone was robbing the bar. We had one week to produce the culprit. After which, with no result, we were all sacked, no references.

Well, we were all mates, and good kids, relatively, and we knew none of us was stealing, and had no idea what action to take. It really was a strange situation, and depressing, to be accused, and threatened, and it put a cloud over what had until then been a joyful job. Today, the way we ran that bar would be called a criminal outrage, an accounting nightmare. But there was no bar more successful. For example, shortly after I was hired, John Weysome said, Andy, if you’ve got everything prepared and ready in the bar, don’t try to look busy; sit down, have a drink, read the paper, relax, be ready for the first customers! What? Imagine a boss saying that today! But John, like us, was a gifted amateur.

The dreaded week went past without confrontation or sackings, and we began to relax, though wary. Undoubtedly there was a problem big enough to upset even John’s accounting, but what? We were still sure of our group innocence. Towards the end of the second week after accusation, and after a staggeringly busy night, I was doing my lonely job of emptying the tills of their damp, packed notes and change; such crude accounting: it all went into a bag for John to sort out. The old pub tills were thrashed every night in a hopelessly amateur way, the drawers hard to close, and stay closed, in the frantic rush.

In the empty, now-quiet bar, I had a beer and tried to work out how to make the till-drawers work better; perhaps they needed oiling? Now any normal bar-person would not believe how stupid we all were, how unbelievably dopey, the boss included.

I got on eye-level with one of the tills and worked the drawer. It WAS really hard to close without violent slamming. Somehow there must be a way to get it out to clean and adjust. And of course I found the little recessed knobs on the sides, at the back, that released the drawer, and I found the hundreds and hundreds of tight-packed notes, two-inch thick wads compressed and added to each frantic night. Each till was the same. There were thousands of pounds stacked away in that bar. No-one had ever taken out the drawers.

Before work next day I called John to meet me in the bar early, to tell him I had found the thief. I was behind the counter, he at the bar. Neither of us spoke, he waited for me, I silently sprang the first empty till drawer, put it on the counter, reached into the cavity and gathered the solid block of notes in my fingers and placed it next to the drawer.

Then the second drawer, then the others. The sheer volume of compact cash really was astounding. John was astounded. We packed up the cash, he shook my hand, and with teary eyes said he’d see us all later. He was a romantic bugger, certainly not your typical publican, obviously: didn’t even know the till-drawers were removable.

When the others arrived I told them the story, and that John wanted us to stay behind for a while after the bar closed that night. Apologies, bonuses, and a rise in pay for all of us, and the bar at the Jerbourg Hotel powered on. An enriching experience for all concerned.

RON SHILLABEER

Posted on January 2, 2020 by wp-admin

Ron Shillabeer, good Samaritan.

It was over 55 years ago, and I suppose Ron may well be dead. I had briefly drifted unknowingly into the protection of kind-hearted strangers, and, at that time, had no concept of what was occurring.

I was about eighteen years old, a stupid, unwise child, pottering carelessly about my home town, New Brighton, in the wilderness of Merseyside. I had started at the local Art School, which took the place of my parents, who had moved to the south for work and residence. They kindly supplied me with a small income for rent of one room, food, and art materials: I soon altered the items to beer and art materials, but that’s another story.

It was an exceptionally cold winter, the school (college, posh-speak) was closed for the break, and I decided to hitch-hike to the childhood paradise of Cornwall, for no sensible reason, and with no sensible cash.

I packed my ruck-sack with guessed necessities, including a supply of Savory Ducks from a strange shop, the only place on the planet that sold them. A savory duck was, I suppose, a large, mysterious spiced dumpling, wrapped and cooked in a caul of some entrails, eaten cold or hot. It was very, very cheap, impervious to destruction, long-lasting pemmican.

I hitched from early morning, through the night, in a southerly direction, veering west as lifts dictated. I trusted every driver implicitly, and slept in the cab of a big truck on the way: no entertainment for the driver. When I woke it was black-dark and snowing heavily. The truck stopped. The kindly trucky said this is as far as I go.

He told me the name of the village, but I had no idea where it was. The snow was falling softly, there was no light except the occasional glimpse of a far-off winter moon. There was no alternative but to put on all my clothes and waterproof, and walk, hoping for a lift. There was no traffic. I remember thinking how pleasant life was, and walked for an hour, looking for a sign, a light, a shelter. The snow thickened, a haystack in a field loomed, and I remembered stories of the comfort therein. It was an old-fashioned stack of sheaves, before the days of bales, and I kicked my way in a foot or two off the snowy ground. Kicked and kicked until I was completely cocooned, and not just cosy, but hot. The stack itself was warm, and I slept unseen until well-past the late winter dawn.

Wriggling out of my nest I found myself exposed in a vacant field, with traffic staring at me as it passed, which bothered me not. More lifts, more Ducks eaten, beers and sandwiches in a thatched pub: big fat sandwiches, cheese and onion, and so cheap. I was in Devon, it seemed, there was real cider on the pump too; murky, dry, flat. No more alcoholic than beer, but strangely toxic due to the malic acid, hence the hangover…….

It took all day to get to Cornwall; no sensible folk were on the road as the snow fell steadily. Drifts were building up against the hedges as my last lift dropped me off in a random village as early darkness fell. I had no Idea where I was, but it was at least Cornwall, if not Polperro, and I spent most of my remaining cash on a room for the night, in a tiny cottage, and, feeling weird and with the urge to hibernate, went to my nest and snuggled in.

Morning, late, and ready to set off (such an unsociable boy), was surprised to be offered breakfast: ha, it was bed AND breakfast I’d paid for, lovely, while the snow fell, and fell. Now I wasn’t entirely aimless and stupid, though penniless. It was my intention, at my Polperro destination, to look for work and pay my way, preferably in a pub, where I had experience. In the summers, in New Brighton, I worked on the hot dog vans on the beach for rent and beer money. But this was winter in Cornwall.

I enquired of my nice landlady of the possibility of a temporary job in the village, mentioning the pub as a shining hope, but, she said, we’re all closed-up here m’dear, no-one can get in nor out, there’s no work for anyone til summer, and you won’t get through to Polperro, nor find work there if you do. So, being easily disabused, and callow, I instantly gave up. Now I know better; then I needed cheek, cheerful boldness, and sparkling wit, none of which I possessed.

You won’t be going anywhere in this, m’dear, she said, but I didn’t like to admit I had no cash, so warm and full of food I tramped through the now-deep snow to the busier of the few roads, where amazingly a vehicle with chains picked me up and on to Torquay, and dropped me at a certain cafe. Though I didn’t know it, my life was being planned by total strangers.

At the cafe I admitted to owning a few shillings; what could I get? Now this is weird again. I was brought heaps of food, and milkshake, and pudding, thinking this is marvellous for the price, and stuffed myself. The cafe would accept no money. Where was I going? They said it’s late, and knew of a cheap bed for the night, set off in the morning. A mystery diner in the cafe offered me a lift, well thanks so much, and I was dropped of at a pretty cottage and introduced to Ron Shillabeer. That’s four consecutive Samaritans.

It was as if I had a sign on my head saying, look after this waif, he knows not the world and its ways. Ron Shillabeer welcomed me to his home, and showed me to a perfect little bedroom full of windows and warmth, but, I said, I’m sorry, I can’t pay for this, I must keep going to Merseyside (I still had a few indestructible ducks left).

But he insisted, and said not to worry about payment, and that he would be out early in the morning, and to make myself at home. He invites a total stranger and leaves him in alone with the run of his house.

I slept a dead sleep, and woke early to an empty house. I felt mysteriously honoured, and trusted, and full of wonder. What kind of society had I stumbled upon in Torquay? Where everyone’s aim was to look after me? In fear of breaking the spell, I arranged my room exactly as I found it, erasing all evidence of my existence. I think, I hope, I left a note of thanks, but can’t be sure.

Somehow the blizzard abated as I left the west country, and somehow I got back to New Brighton with my few shillings intact and no ducks.

That was one of the most savage winters in Cornwall and Devon; good choice of season and destination for hitching! I think now how delightful it would have been to have had sufficient funds to stay in that lost Cornish village for the duration of the blizzard, to settle in and be like Ratty and Moley in Moley’s little snow-bound cottage.

It’s a lifetime ago, but I’ll never forget the unsolicited kindness of those saints in Torquay, and of that dear stranger Ron Shillabeer, and all the drivers that picked up a young scruffy boy of little conversation, with no thought of reward, and only one hesitant fondle of my knee……..

EUCALYPTS: GUM TREES ARE FIRE TRASH

Posted on December 30, 2019 by wp-admin

EUCALYPTS: GUM TREES ARE THE WEEDS THAT SPRING UP WHEN THE NATURAL VEGETATION IS ERADICATED BY FIRE.

Let us finally reject any romance attached to the eucalypts and related species in Australia. We now know that the reason why the endemic gum trees have replaced the natural forest in Australia: FIRE. FIRE. FIRE.

The old bush stories of the 1800′s, dreamily pondering the never-ending scrub, while the billy boiled with a gum-leaf for flavour, and the grey-green leaves drooped sparsely from the straggly, shapeless, fire-ravaged trees, those stories never saw the cause of such desolation, and took a perverse rose-tinted nostalgia in what was assumed to be a natural habitat.

Not so. That endless bush was, and is, a most unnatural condition. An artificial, impoverished environment brought about by thousands of generations of incendiarists, out for a cheap feed. Burning, burning, burning.

There are stories that the first settlers of this country, fifty, sixty thousand years ago, brought their agricultural heritage with them, and planted the crops of their native island homelands, and established static communities. Many tribes, from many lands; different languages and physiognomies. They brought their homeland habits with them, as the Europeans did just yesterday.

They discovered, who knows when, that their settlements became unviable, the climate unreliable, their farming inapplicable to this insecure continent. Who knows how long the giant aboriginal herbivores (and carnivores) survived the invading humans; obviously they were exterminated at some early stage, as were the moas and other large creatures of New Zealand. The New Zealand history is well documented, and similar events must have taken place in Australia thousands of years prior.

Perhaps, as in New Zealand, the early settlers neglected their homeland heritage, and lived for generations on the dopey megafauna, the huge creatures that had no fear of man, having never experienced such a rapacious creature. Easily approached and speared, or trapped and speared, or even then, so long ago, burned and speared.

Perhaps, as in New Zealand, many of the plants and domestic creatures brought to Australia from home villages across the oceans, were neglected and thus lost to future generations, because of the seemingly endless larder stocked with food-on-the-hoof. Apparently tame creatures waiting for slaughter.

Even in such an enormous continent as Australia, 50,000 years is plenty of time for invading humans to exterminate all the megafauna, all the small fearless birds and animals, leaving only those more difficult to catch, kill, or burn. Those creatures with a long training to avoid attack by flight or caution. The creatures, some of them, that survive today. Exterminate, too, vast territories of original vegetation, leaving just the eucalypts: gum trees, the fire trash.

We will never know just how huge was the diversity of fauna and flora in Australia, before the arrival of humans. Except for the northern rain-forest and isolated remnants elsewhere, the continent is utterly impoverished, and we have yet to come to terms with that reality.

HUMANITY IS AN EXTERMINATING CREATURE, AND RIGHT NOW, AS 2020 TICKS OVER, WE ARE STILL BURNING, BURNING, BURNING OUR ENVIRONMENT, BOTH BY DESIGN AND ACCIDENT.

EUCALYPTS: GUM TREES, ARE FIRE TRASH. We have created this endemic vegetation through our incendiary habit, and now the habit has become a necessity for the protection of our communities and farming. Burn the bush has become a mantra. We cannot live with the bush. We CAN live with the rain-forest, but our fire-habit now endangers the remnant rain- and vine-forest throughout the country.

Examine the characteristics of the eucalypt. As a large group of varied species, they have their stark beauty, and where there is adequate moisture, a sculptural, towering presence. Like many plants we call weeds, though, under certain conditions, (that is, fire), they have the ability to not only take-over the landscape, but to strip the soil of nutrients and humus, and open it up to erosion and ultimate desertification; a desert of sparse, exposed monoculture.

A eucalypt desert is self-perpetuating. It renders the environment unsuitable for other tree-types. Its mode of growth takes advantage of sparse rainfall; rapid germination from fire-resistant seed after rain, and results in dense masses of saplings, reaching skyward at great speed whilst moisture lasts. Then, as the soil dries, closing-down and sealing-off, to await the next rain. Most saplings die before then. The remainder, thinly-spaced, hang on, and hang on; growing, then waiting. The minimum survival activity. There is no shade beneath a gum tree. As the trees mature, in their shapeless, stunted way, they yearly drop sheaths of sterile bark, twigs, branches and boughs, to litter the lifeless gravel beneath; the fire-load that creates no mulch and eradicates all opposition: the dangerous tinder we must burn for our safety. And so we promote and continue the cycle of desertification of the environment.

The fire-risk to the rural areas of Australia was created thousands of years ago, by fire, and now we must exacerbate the situation by burning the dangerous fuel-load, the eucalypts, the gum trees, the fire trash. Is it ever possible to reverse this cycle?

YES……….

TO REVERSE THE CYCLE, PLANT RAIN-FOREST, AND PROTECT IT.

Protect it as we try to protect our houses and crops. Eradicate the gum trees, the fire trash, from our urban peripheries, one step at a time, acre by acre, with buffer-zones of grass-land between, and plant fire-resistant shade-trees initially next to the settlements. Even grass-land enriches the soil with mulch. Who would object to swapping the gums for giant figs?

As a demonstration of ignorance of the recent past, some thirty years ago certain rural housing settlements were encouraged to plant (instead of the natural local rain-forest) eucalypt species on their acre-lots. The tiny wisps of tube-culture were offered free; the offer was taken-up by most households, and close-planted, usually on the periphery of what had been cleared farm-land lots.

THE WRONG TREES, IN THE WRONG PLACE, IN THE WRONG ENVIRONMENT.

Those innocently-planted gum trees, the fire trash, are now a gigantic menace, an enormous risk to the householders and the community. Ineradicable because of the staggering cost of removal, yet a constant danger. No-one can afford to eliminate even one of these huge weeds, and many houses are surrounded by dozens of them, at the instigation of a misguided government program. And this was relatively recent.

Even now, eucalypts are being planted where rain-forest species belong. This must stop, and the process reversed. I know of small remnants of original forest that have never been cleared; a few acres here and there, in various localities. To see them is to understand how they survive today with no particular protection or maintenance. Firstly, there is no undergrowth that can burn. There is open space under the canopy, in deep shadow. Secondly, fire-weeds such as lantana and gum seedlings are shaded out. Thirdly, the ground is covered in deep, moist mulch, unlike the sterile gravel of eucalypt tracts. This mulch is protected by, and protects the very forest that created it. No passing incendiarist could set fire to these remnants.

Now if those remnants were un-bounded, their seedlings would spread out from the protection of the parent forest and eventually overpower the scrub. THIS IS THE VEGETATION WE NEED TO ESTABLISH AROUND OUR COMMUNITIES. At a suitable distance, of course. No-one wants to live under giant shade trees, and if you disagree, try the experience; the mould, the blocked gutters, the gloom, the rusting vehicles and stained washing! Ah, but as a playground, and a protection, and a rain-maker……….

Back to the message. Gum trees are fire trash. Eradicate them from our environment a bit at a time. Remember; one mature gum tree can seed ten hectares of grassland, and the saplings reach five metres in five years, and burn, and burn and burn. But will not die. Everything else will die, including the grass, the land, the soil, and the native creatures. See how quickly farmland reverts to sterile scrub; all the pioneering effort wasted, obliterated. If farmland is to be reverted to forest, it must be rainforest, not eucalypt.

Lets re-establish our heritage forest species, eradicate the fire weeds, and reverse the process of impoverishment of our environment, starting now, right in our neighbourhood.

Local councils: help us , nurseries: grow us the trees……..THE TREES WE NEED.

QUEENSLAND DROUGHT, BRISBANE DOWNPOUR!

Posted on December 15, 2019 by wp-admin

QUEENSLAND in Drought, Brisbane in flood! Now if that isn’t ironic!

I spoke to a mate in Brisbane yesterday; his suburb is soaked, he’s squelching about in his tiny back yard, which at least produces a few bananas.

Most back yards in the new suburbs are non-existent; gutters touch neighbour’s gutters, concrete in between. No garden, as such, and certainly no veggie-patch.

All that glorious rain, wasted on sterile suburbs, run-off into drains, into the ocean: wasted.

City folk can’t believe there’s a Queensland drought. How can they? Their suburb is flooded! Of all places for the rain to fall, on millions of acres of concrete and bitumen…….bloody typical. My drinking-water is nearly gone, and their car is a sodden write-off. My car can never rust, the way things are going.

Strange that supposedly good areas for rainfall, the high hilly areas that force the clouds to drop their burden, seem to be neglected now by rain. But in Brisbane, of all places……all that rain, and none in the dams, because there are none. What I could do with that run-off! Don’t they know there’s a Queensland drought?

My friend said the storm was exciting and marvellous, but complained about all the mess. What I’d give for a bit of his mess; the cracks in the ground here are cavernous, they’d take all his run-off and more, and still leave a foot of dust.

So the city folk are blase about this dying country……………..

……………….they’ll get the message, and soon. Queensland drought?

Queensland drought: THE SHAME OF FIRE.

Posted on December 15, 2019 by wp-admin

Queensland drought; bush-fire: the eradication of a country’s fauna and flora.

It’s a conundrum, a contradiction, an oxymoron; a green drought, back-burning for safety, firing to prevent fire, etc.. We have to live with fire in the bush, it seems; there’s no avoiding it. The human fascination with fire. The fire-bugs amongst firemen. The deliberately-lit bush, by both children and adults. Burning by the aboriginal tribes for food:easy pickings, saves much hunting-effort.

Fire has been ravaging Australia for 60,000 years. Changing all environments for the worse, from coast to coast. Impoverishing biodiversity. We may never know the number of plant and animal species lost to fire since humans first colonised this country. Who knows what was the extent of dense tropical forests and rich grasslands before ‘man’ first committed his depredations? The sparse fossil evidence is of huge creatures filling every niche from plains to jungle; creatures which could never survive today on our desiccated landscape.

A landscape created entirely by fire-stick. We humans cannot resist a good fire. Stand with your back to the wind, drop an ember from the carefully-tended fire-pot; watch the destruction, listen to the roar and crackle of the flames, the millions of tons of vegetation consumed with absolutely no effort. Later, when the ground is free of embers, collect the singed and gasping creatures, sufficient for the whole tribe to further roast.

Only a certain amount of burned, crippled food can be eaten. The rest goes to waste. The fire rages on. There’s no one to stop it, only a natural barrier, a dry creek, a rocky bluff. Eventually it will die out, after it has destroyed a vast area, as it has done time and time again over the millennia since the invasion of humans.

Fire has destroyed this continent, and the destruction continues. The lifeless soil of the desert, bereft of all humus and all nutrients is the result of fire. A dense forest can be reduced to a bare plain of sterile ground in a very short time, by constant burning. Eventually nothing will grow there, nothing that can be burned.

Nurture a fragment of rain forest, surviving in a cleft hillside, a hill naked except for sparse eucalypt and wattle. Cancel all fire from that hill. Do nothing else. Nothing will happen, perhaps for years, then rain will come. The hill will bloom, the scrub will become leafy for a while. But seedlings from the tiny rain forest nursery will take root amongst the fire-raddled scrub, and grow up green and strong in the field of grey. Deep-rooted, shady, mulch-creating species that will eventually overpower the fire-trees and cover the entire hill. The process would take only 200, 300 years.

In certain types of country, for example around the Bunya Mountains, the original dense forest species are hard to eradicate. Cleared hillsides sprout the native species very quickly, before the fire-trees have a chance to take hold. A cleared area will return to its original diversity within 100 years, given ‘neglect’. Assume neglect implies re-afforestation. Perhaps because the Bunyas generate vast numbers of wind-blown seeds, any cleared area quickly regenerates.

But look; now the Bunyas are burning, and all because of Man. Sure, lightning is sometimes to blame, but we humans are the root cause of loss of habitat. Second in importance to protecting housing and infrastructure, is the saving of the diverse forest. Bugger the gum-weeds, protect the Buyas, Mt Glorious and Nebo jungle, Springbrook, Tambourine. Although most of the animal species have been eradicated centuries ago, the seed-bank of those areas is vital. And that is just in the Brisbane environs.

We cannot afford to lose those areas through fire. Fire which etches away at the peripheries of the Great Remnants year by year.

The koala hangs on by a thread. How it has survived so far is a mystery. Such a creature has only one advantage: it can eat gum-leaves. It has adapted to survive solely on eucalypts. That advantage has kept it going since humans interfered with its habitat but at what cost? Every human-lit fire killed all the koalas within the burned area, which would within a year or so be re-colonised by the un-burned neighbours. There are now few koalas left to re-populate; fire and de-forestation will finally exterminate the few survivors.

At a time when Australia had no humans, say 50, 60,000 years ago, the koala may well have been a different creature. Its present diet of gum-leaves is due to the burning of the original forest habitat. The lack of nutrients now available has caused the koala brain to shrink within its skull, and the little creature to become a fragile shadow of its former robust physiognomy.

Endless artificial, human-induced fire, has reduced the iconic koala to its present sad state; both its body and its environment impoverished. Perhaps, before the arrival of the fire-stick, the little sleepy-eyed, slow-moving creature was a robust, intelligent and active marsupial, with a brain more than twice the size, and a strong and vigorous body. A similar creature to the ground-dwelling wombat, which has retained its body-mass and intelligence, along with its diet.

Not just koalas. The magnificent remnants of the vast Australian jungle harbour much diversity. Should fire destroy those areas finally, after so many thousands of years, we have only ourselves to blame. being cavalier with our flames, and neglect of our duty to protect.

As with virtually all the ailments affecting this planet, humans are to blame, and overpopulation the accelerant . Even the tiny and diverse groups of tribespeople arriving by boat 50,000 years ago had a devastating effect on the fauna and flora of the place we now call Australia. And perhaps even the weather. This Queensland drought had its seed sown all that time ago, with the loss of the giant herbivores and endless, endless burning of the environment.

The Queensland and New South Wales drought, and the droughts that have affected the entire country for millennia, are going to oust us in the long run, unless we can put a stop to this maniacal burning.

Rain forest alone is the final barrier to burning of the bush. We must protect and enlarge that forest at all cost. We must spend this dwindling coal-bonanza on fleets of water-bombing aircraft stationed and ready at all major centres, to protect us AND the environment we rely on. An endless Queensland drought, such as we may at present be experiencing, will soon make it impossible for us to continue surviving. We can’t head to the hills; only to the far north and south………

………………..Tassie here I come!

Queensland drought: THE VIABILITY OF AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITIES DEPENDENT ON RAINFALL

Posted on December 8, 2019 by wp-admin

CAN OUR COMMUNITIES SURVIVE CLIMATE CHANGE? First published September 2019.

SURE, ARTIFICIAL, EXTERNALLY-FUNDED COMMUNITIES CAN SURVIVE in hostile environments; in Nevada, Dubai, Antarctica, for example, but what of our towns in Australia, when suddenly deprived of water?

Within three months of the start of this Queensland drought, water is being tankered-in to many townships.

The ramification of this current weather-stasis has not yet dawned on the Australian people. In particular, it has not impinged on the combined conscience of politicians. In general, it does not occupy space in newspapers, radio, television, or the internet. Yet.

Trucking water to a town! What? No alarm-bells ringing? No future foreseen?

Of course it had to be done: absolutely necessary, but the situation is more serious, the problem far greater than the immediate requirements of a township.

Extrapolate, extrapolate. Suppose this Queensland drought does NOT break. There is science to support open-endedness to this current climate period. There is no prediction of drought-breaking rain at any specific future. Right now, all media and policy should be focused on the possibility that water-supply is no longer guaranteed for the majority of settlements in Australia.

Not all centres of population are affected. The far North and South are at present beyond this Prolonged Weather Stasis pattern, and perhaps will receive higher-than-average rainfall. It is inevitable that these areas will suffer a major surge in growth due to the evacuation of waterless communities elsewhere. Curiously, the Northern Territory is losing population right now, perhaps because of the soaring temperatures of climate change, but its rainfall is so far guaranteed.

Bearing in mind the above, consider the ramification aspect.

Immediately, those towns shipping-in water will have reduced real-estate values. Likewise with fire-affected rural areas. The longer the drought, the worse the outlook. Jobs, infrastructure and population will disappear along with dam-levels Townships will become deserted within a surprisingly short time. It has happened before; there are ghost-towns in Australia, and some as a result of drought.

Disaster is already near for dairy farmers, and this is no fear-mongering, it is happening right now. Small-crops, nurseries and orchards are in immediate danger, and bores are running dry. What on Earth will replace bore-water?

Folk being what they are, hope will have the majority hanging-on in the dogged expectation of better times. And it would certainly take courage to assess the situation critically and calmly, and conclude that a quick exit would be wise and beneficial.

We have experienced terrible hope-destroying drought in Australia before; read Henry Lawson for the awful tragedy affecting selectors. But this drought and its cause may be a situation never-before experienced by Europeans, and may even be the reason the Aboriginal population became peripatetic, forsaking farm practice.

The frustratingly-variable rainfall we all experience in Australia, and are resigned to, may be on the cusp of change for the worse: a sudden and permanent decrease. It is possible that the country has been through many similar episodes, and that the cause is continent-wide and on-going burning by humans, for 50,000 years. (See blog: ‘Will it ever rain again in Qld?)

The drying episodes are self-accelerating. After each prolonged drought, that is, a drought of longer than six months or much more, the desiccation of soil-moisture reaches a depth such that even deep-rooted species fail, never to return. We are perhaps experiencing such a hiatus. We must include ourselves, as a deep-rooted species. There is a limit to our hanging-on. At present there are no agencies stating that the drought WILL break: it will rain again, but that’s not the same thing. Will the ground-water ever be replaced, the bores run as before?

As with other recent blogs on this vital and current theme, I hope to hell I’m wrong. It would be the most marvellous relief to be proved to be a fear-mongering idiot, as a vast weather system rolls across the entire continent carrying steady, solid rain for week after week. No good praying, no good wishing, no good putting down more bores. If the rain does come, plant trees, trees, trees. And NOT eucalypts. They are weeds, not trees.

Post Script, 12th December 2019: What a difference a few months makes to awareness of the severity of the situation. All news is now full of the drought. ABC news/weather yesterday mentioned ‘no break in the current pattern until April 2020. This is an increase by two months of the previous estimate. This putative date takes us past the period of our ‘normal’ summer rains and into what used to be the ‘dry’ winter.

The winter/summer rain patterns have broken down during the past decades; coastal Qld. and NSW no longer seem to experience the xmas thunderstorm deluges, nor the dry months of winter, although this concept is very much of the author’s memory. Nevertheless, should the dams and the soil continue desiccating, what then?

Seriously, no rain for a further five months, and an open-ended forecast, is a reason for drastic action by governments AND individuals. Think, think: what will YOU do?

Queensland drought: THE GRAB-BAG climate in Australia

Posted on December 7, 2019 by wp-admin

THE GRAB-BAG: symptom of the Queensland drought.

I SAILED ABOUT THE PLACE FOR TEN YEARS, in a lovely old ketch-rigged double-ender. Not in an adventurous way, mostly down the coast and back, seldom out of sight of land.

For fear of disaster, an ever-present trepidation affecting all wise sailors, I carried a grab-bag. A bag containing essentials necessary when abandoning ship and taking to the inflatable. Top of the list was the EPIRB. I won’t list the other contents, but you can imagine great thought went into the selection, and the immediate accessibility and portability of The Bag.

Those days are over for me, and a modern grab-bag now contains fantastic technology.

Well, I thought those days were over, but now, on hitherto safe dry land, the fear of disaster returns, and the grab-bag is ready again.

Now, today, the contents of the grab-bag are stacked near the back door, and they won’t fit into a bag, but must nevertheless be loaded into the car in a few minutes, ready to abandon ship.

The ship, in this case the house, could disappear in a roar of fifty-metre flame within minutes of any warning, though hopefully within hours. But you never know. Who will wake you in the dead of night?

The exit must be fast. No time for decision-making; choice must have been decided and packed in advance. What to take? Too late, too late, too late; just go, go go.

Who would have thought, this time last year, that such a situation could come about? What previous weather-pattern in our short European history could have set an example, a warning of possibility? There have been awful, prolonged Queensland drought in the past, but this looks different. This may be pattern-breaking; a drought that continues, continues.

In our subconcious, we wait for Christmas thunderstorms; every afternoon without fail. Without fail……..

Then the January rains, when the whole world is hot, and damp, and mouldy, the creeks are high and roofs leaking.

But this Christmas and January may be different. January, February and March may go past with only the occasional local wetting. Then on into the year, a year of no hope, hopeless. Our hope-gland run dry through over-use. Then what?

Already after just over three months since a warning from the BOM, (not broadcast, but simply stated) the possibilities are being examined by everyone. Some political parties are of course still in denial even now. The country is not yet on a war-footing, but soon……could this be the worst Queensland drought on record?

The prospect is ruinous. Turn off the rain, what survives?

Queensland drought: WILL IT EVER RAIN AGAIN in Qld. and NSW?

Posted on November 28, 2019 by wp-admin

WILL IT EVER RAIN AGAIN?

IS THIS QUEENSLAND DROUGHT THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING?

PHILLIP ADAMS, THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, NOV 23-24 2019: The Gravity Of Water.

HE WRITES, ‘It will take a thousand millimetres to even dent the drought, let alone break it’. I tend to agree with him, invariably. Now you know my politics and philosophy.

A couple of days after reading his article, I had digested the implication of a metre of rain; he’s right, of course. We are unlikely to get a metre, of course. Of course.

On a previous blog under a similar heading I suggested that climate change occurs as a series of steps, not necessarily a gradual slope. I proposed that the tree-cover of any given area may not recover its former health after a prolonged drought, and that many species of vegetation may die out. Seeds sprouting after showers but killed-off in dry soil.

I considered that the the desertification of Australia occurred in this way, from the Centre to the extremities, with tropical and temperate forest retreating after each drought. (By forest I mean trees, not open grassland).

Phillip Adams’ insight: a thousand millimetres of rain, answers a few questions.

Rain after a prolonged Queensland drought does NOT return the situation to normal. Does not replace sub-surface moisture. Rain only instigates a Green Drought. Tree-cover is constantly using deep moisture to survive; the shallow-rooted species (gums, wattles) dry out and die first, but hang on as seedlings, for a while.

When the sub-soil is thoroughly dry, and the deep-rooted species finally die off, they will never return, unless their seeds have Phillip Adams’ metre of rain, in one, long, gentle episode: rain that will penetrate the sub-soil and hold a reservoir to nurture the survival of temperate-forest species.

Hence the drying-out of Australia. A prolonged drought, and there have been many, is not relieved by rain. Neither is it relieved by sudden torrential down-pours, and this is the forecast for the future in Australia, as predicted by the effect of global warming and climate change, and particularly Sudden Stratospheric Warming: fewer and heavier rain-events.

Perhaps the inadvertent but perceptive statement from Adams answers the conundrum of the drying of Australia. In a nutshell, after a prolonged drought, the situation does not return to normal, despite ensuing rain, even good rain. Tree-cover is only maintained by regular rain, dependable rain, whether light or torrential.

Tree-cover is also self-sustaining, to a great extent, barring human interference; artificial destruction (by burning) permanently alters the forest environment, and each fire-event impoverishes both the soil, the species, and the climate.

(For decades I watched the effect of the regular annual burn-offs of Mt Coot-Tha park in Brisbane. The result was a desolation of rotten old trees, no mulch and unviable stunted saplings. A few years of ‘neglect’ enabled straight, healthy sapling to survive with no scars; saplings that would eventually form a healthy forest of shapely trees. Then the burning started again.)

Our climate, long ago, sustained forest coast to coast in Australia, perhaps during the final era of the mega-fauna. The climate no doubt was variable sixty thousand years ago, with floods and droughts, but NOT with fire. Fires were rare and local, and caused only by lightning. Once humanity became widespread in tribes across the continent, and the large grazing species exterminated, and tree-cover regularly and universally burned, the destruction of habitat and consequently of climate, became inevitable.

Fragility is the word. Poke a stick at the environment, and who knows what the result will be. And it’s not just humanity poking the stick: we can’t be to blame for everything…..we haven’t been around that long. It is problematic to blame ourselves for global warming, but very possible. The climate as we think we know it has had many many drastic changes long before humanity existed. The effects of CO2 and its depletion, creation of oxygen, the changes in the Earth’s axis, the movement of the continents, ice ages, asteroid impact: the causes are many that we know of and surely we know little. Burning fossil fuel?

I should be most interested to be able to examine the overall vegetation of Australia during the era of the Megafauna, say 60,000 years ago, or at least before the arrival of humans. There is no doubt that, compared with the present, extensive forest and jungle would cover most, if not all of the continent.

Driving through hundreds, thousands of kilometres of impoverished Queensland landscape, on roads lined with sparse eucalypt and sclerophyl forest, one will often see, in a hillside cleft, a fragment of rain forest dark green against the surrounding grey. A patch of lush green containing no gum trees; hanging on despite the dry. Existing not because of a secret water-supply, but because it is inaccessible to fire. Even on Mt Coot-Tha itself, in the heart of suburban Brisbane, there is a tiny pocket of the original virgin forest surviving in a steep gully, never having been burned: a bright green remnant, a reminder of what Australia was like before Fire.

These tiny remnants once covered the whole country. Their very existence is proof. Even now, a long fire-free period would promote a small expansion of these pockets of tropical forest. This I see happening wherever fire is repressed for a long period, regardless of the rainfall. The dense, shady tropical areas of figs, tall bunias, kauries, hoop pines, vines and deep-rooted species will grow where at present dry bush exists, if, and only if fire is kept away. Those forests of dense shade suppress eucalypts, squeeze them out. Suppress fire too. But the boundaries of rain-forest are vulnerable, and shrink with each burn-off.

Soon the last of the koalas will be burned out of their habitat, either by design or accident. The eucalypts are fire-trees. The dense vine-forest with its clear underwood is resistant, but is reduced in area with every fire encroaching from the bush. The koala will soon be extinct in the wild, despite all conservation, because of inevitable fire; there is no safeguard. Fire is inseparable from humanity; it’s what we do.

There is, then, no doubt whatsoever that the depletion of tropical forest and vine forest, and perhaps thousands of species that depended of those forests, is due solely to deliberately-lit fires. And this for at least 50,000 years. Is this Queensland drought likely to be the worst on record, and is it due to the culmination of centuries of incendiary habits?

The extent of those original pre-human forests is unknown, but may well have covered the entire continent, excepting the grass-land created by the giant herbivores. Dense tree-cover promotes rainfall, soil-conservation, and soil-moisture. Gum-species deplete the whole environment; they are the weeds that survive on the wasteland, contributing nothing, promoting fire.

Here’s a plan, a start, a reparation………Isolate the tropical remnants from fire by gum-clearing and slashing, and those remnants will grow outwards and thrive. Start at the urban centres and work outward. The recent horrific fires are nearly all eucalypt-based. Gum-trees retained in and near housing: crazy. Get rid of them, plant figs, for example; there are hundreds of varieties. Big, shady, undergrowth-killing figs. Within twenty years a park-like garden free of weeds and lantana could surround outlying homes.

So, there’s no doubt in my mind. Science will catch up and prove me right or wrong, but those tiny patches of green in a wasteland of burned landscape show what once existed. How far did the green extend, long, long ago. Perhaps to the Now-Dead Heart of the country…………

Here’s a question. That tiny remnant of original vegetation, surviving in a cleft of rock on Mt Coot-Tha: just how long ago did it extend in every direction, right to The Bay, everywhere? Are there ancient stumps or even roots surviving of pre-fire years, which can be dated? We assume that the landscape of this area has always looked the same, but it has not. The endless tracts of eucalypt-forest are recent; but how recent? 500 years? 5000 years?

Take an area which has never been totally obliterated by regular human-lit fire: the Blackall Range, 100km north of Brisbane in Queensland. It could not be burned-out because the dense tree-cover had no combustible undergrowth sufficient to provide the heat, plus a generally moist humus even during drought. Not obliterated by fire, but by tree-clearing European farmers, exactly dateable, and recent. Now the rainfall has even deserted this once-green oasis: are we surprised? Now the fires have access, finally.

We cannot both clear land and have rainfall-plus-topsoil; an impossible situation.

One metre of rain in one long, gentle event. I can’t see it happening. But I hope. However imagine the complaints; we’d all be praying to our mythical gods for sunshine. More than a week of rain would turn us all into Poms.

WITTA DOGS chapter three

Posted on November 28, 2019 by wp-admin

WITTA DOGS and suburban dogs in general

Today, and my moaning is monotonous, I know; the Howler did the morning shift, howling loud and long from dawn to noon, shredding the peaceful hours between ride-on roaring.

When its owner came home to an apparently silent dog, another neighbour with two yappers left for destinations unknown. The Yappers, as usual, considered that their lives were from that minute utterly desperate, informed the neighbourhood loud, long, and incessant, stimulating a few distant mates to sing the chorus.

Enough of the silent, inward moans from me.

One day, one of the houses nearby will be sold, as happens quickly in this popular spot. Sold to someone who doesn’t give a damn about neighbourly feeling, and sets about silencing the community dog-pound. With vigour and determination.

First, she will record the cacophony. Quality sound, time, duration, date, and address all meticulously formatted. The echoing early hours will be a symphonic storm of dog-yells. She will do this for a few weeks, and select the most irritating for archives.

On a bad night, she will contact the police, the local pound, and the RSPCA, leaving urgent messages, because none of those services operate after sundown, and the reason burglaries occur then.

She will repeat the calls next day, with follow-up messages by mail, email, and the multitude of electronic media now available.

She won’t give a damn about the neighbourhood, but will force signatures to a most specific document of complaint, cleverly worded, with emphasis on nuisance, noise-pollution, insomnia etc.. I’d sign it. She is also strangely attractive, and a very good talker.

Enough signatures and recordings (four rabid neglected dogs in constant chorus, 7pm to dawn: 9 hours of cacophony……..and that’s just one example from her library) will insure that the offending dogs will be silenced, humanely. Remaining alive, but voiceless, and at the owners’ expense.

Now bear in mind that right now, and for the five previous hours, as I type, two nearby Yappers plus occasional friends have been in constant row. And are yet. Not more than three seconds silence at any time for that period. And daylight is fading. It could go on all night, and has many, many times.

The sound is somehow magnified as darkness falls. The later, the louder. Pre-dawn the worst.

The woman instigating the silencing will have everyone’s support. All us weak-willed, lily-livered, afraid-to-offend wusses will serve our bold leader to achieve what we should have done years ago.

Even the owners of the most aggravating dogs will sign, ha ha, because THEY DON’T KNOW! And right now………….

…………. I await their return, and a peaceful night.

P.S. Darkness. Even the birdsong ceased. Echoing double-yapyapyapping ricochets, rending the still air.

WITTA DOGS chapter two.

Posted on November 26, 2019 by wp-admin

NOT JUST WITTA DOGS.

MOST OF THE ONE-ACRE BLOCKS ON THE HILL ARE DOG-POUNDS.

You must think I’m a boring old fart with nothing better to do than to listen to dogs all night and day. And you’d be right. Along with all farmers, the forced inaction due to the drought leads to boredom, wife-beating, the pub, terror regarding the future, bankruptcy and blogging.

My avos are dying by the day; there’s nothing I can do, no water I dare use to effect a little dampness to the roots, and each dead tree represents years of nurture and cost. As for general plantation-maintainance, using a tractor is asking for trouble. One spark, just one.

Already many neighbours are burned-out; both land and hope, and my turn could happen any day: twenty years of work obliterated. If the house survives…….but I daren’t think about it. The fact that we’re all in the same boat is no consolation.

So, searching the BOM for any hope each day, as we’ve been conditioned to do, is fruitless and disillusioning; this is a rare and devastating drying-event with no obvious ending, and absolutely no solution.

It’s the inaction that focuses the mind on irrelevant irritations, especially in the quiet of the night, when all the deserted, neglected dogs for miles around are screaming with loneliness.

A new voice made itself heard over the past day: small and howling with utter sadness, hour after hour. We haven’t had a howler before. It seems to engender sympathy with its deserted state, rather than the intense irritation caused by the rabid yappers.

The yappers rule, unfortunately. There’s no sadness in their incessant row. They are just spoilt brats with indefatigable peace-rending. Little machines that no-one ever shuts down.

The big woofers are not so bad; they briefly speak in deep tones out of a sense of duty, then leave off. And here’s the point of the whole problem. It seems that all these canines are kept as some sort of miss-guided home-invasion protection. A cheap warning alarm to keep the nasty ones away. Well, do I have news for you.

A big woofer is a deterrent. A yapper or three is an invitation: there’s no-one home. Yappers advertise to the whole street that the house is available for ransacking. Empty a few cans of boiled cow over the fence and in you go. Take your time, the dogs will let you know when it’s time to scarper.

At night, with the owners tucked-up and the yappers snoring in or under the bed, the invaders gain silent access undetected, until it’s too late. Yappers have little or no awareness by ear or nose; just constant hunger for canned mush. Once asleep only a poke with a sharp stick will rouse indignation..

So all that row, night after night, year after year, serves only to irritate the neighbours. The moral; if you really feel the need for a watch-dog, then GET one. There IS such a thing. And it’s not a pack of tiny yappers. It’s a quiet, vigilant blue-heeler, or a small alsatian-cross, or something not in-bred and fluffy. I know, having suffered severely from a silent and effective guardian.

In youth, selling door-to-door in a desperate attempt to feed starving babies, I became used to household dogs and their danger-level. Ninety-nine percent softies. The occasional one avoided was a danger not only to me but to anyone, including the owner. An eater of small children. But usually that dog displayed its viciousness with snarling dentition and insane focus. We had one in our street in Nundah which used to terrify the kids coming home from school, and anyone passing the gate unaware. I took to carrying a squeezy bottle of dilute juice from those little explosive peppers. Ha! Problem solved. As it lunged savagely at the Cyclone gate it copped a squirt right in the tonsils. Immediate silence. Immediate backing off. I only had to do it once. It remembered me for ever, and I could pass in peace and safety. God help any child that opened the gate to deliver a message.

Now, back to the door-to-door. I always knew I wasn’t welcome, but what’s a starving boy to do? This house was in Gladstone, and on my ordered route, no shirking the rule. I had knocked on the front door; no answer, but the folks were busy inside, so I persevered. Try round the back. I was wearing the uniform of all car-salesmen and others of ill-repute. It was universal and considered stylish for a month or two during that era: white trousers and shoes.

I carried my heavy roll of sales-gear over one arm, my door-rapping knuckles at the ready, and started up the back steps, unaware of the danger. Half way up an agonising pain in my thigh. Utterly scream-worthy, and I did scream. Unbelievable immobilising torture of four big canine teeth which met and clamped through my leg. Scars there fifty years later.

The dog was most excellent; no noise, no warning, not even a growl, no shaking of its prey, it just held me, and its grip tightened if I flinched a millimetre. All I could do was yell, and holy shit did I yell.

A nice lady opened the back door, shocked at the sight of this poor young white-trousered, white-faced bloke with blood streaming down his daks, filling up the white shoe on the way down. The dog let go at a word, and I collapsed where I was. Never seen so much blood, and it was all mine. Dripping from tread to tread.

But, oh, if I had been a small child.

I wonder today why there was no thought of ambulance. Or police. Or charges laid. I limped back a mile to my car and drove in great pain to the motel for R&R. I frightened myself with the trouserless sight as I stripped off in the shower, but though there were four intersecting holes in my upper leg and massive bruising, the bleeding stopped quickly and I was able to limp to a surprised surgery for a tetanus-shot.

Now THAT was a watch dog, and no yapping.

Wrong Name. Should I care?

Posted on November 24, 2019 by wp-admin

WRONG NAME. USE THE CORRECT ONE.

OR; DON’T BOTHER: WHO CARES?

AS A NEW CHUM, or annoying Pommy cunt, as the locals called me, I stared about me in wonder at the glorious technicolour marvels of of the place. And the other stuff, mostly shit-coloured.

I woke up in Australia in a camp-bed on a veranda. Until that very minute I had been a blank-eyed zombie, shuttled with family from city to city, boat to train, shank’s pony, more train, all day and night, to a final bed that didn’t rock. Three days with prams, suitcases, backpacks and blank-eyed zombie wife and children.

I woke up in Australia in a camp-bed on a veranda, from a nightmare that started months and oceans ago in a rented cottage in the cold rain, on the other side and hemisphere of the planet. But that’s another story.

My eyes opened and slowly focused on brilliant colour, movement and sound. Near my head, back-lit vivid green banana-leaves and pendulant black-purple flowers swayed and shrieked. No: two crazy-coloured upside-down lorikeets shrieking. There was no sky. No lowering black clouds. Just luminous, dazzling blue light.

I had become a child with endless questions. What’s that? What’s that bird? This plant? That tree? Frogs and bandicoots and snakes and lizards parrots birds ants more lizards spiders butterflies toads trees trees trees eagles hawks. I knew nothing. I recognised nothing. It was wonderful.

After a while, I discovered no-one else knew either. Everyone called the same item a different name. Even said the same name differently.

My troubles started with the cedar. And furniture. Being a carpenter, joiner, and cabinet-maker, and trained in all three allied trades, I thought I knew my wood. Well, Pommy wood, and a bit of exotic European and American stuff. So I knew what a cedar was. And I recognised the beautiful cedar furniture of colonial craftsmanship; or I thought I did.

Where were these cedars. I asked, over the years; many people, in many places. Almost none left, they said, cut down sixty, eighty years ago. Some rare ones they knew of and described; more puzzlement. I had seen cedars in the Old Country, on grand estates, and the descriptions folk gave me did not tally. Nowhere could I see a cedar, and the lack was beginning to irritate me. Every antique shop had Australian cedar furniture. Where were the bloody trees?

One day a wise person took me to the botanic gardens. There: THAT’S A CEDAR, he said.

Wot? No it fucking wasn’t. Even the label said Toona Australis. (Later changed to Toona Ciliata) That’s not a cedar, said I. Cedar is a CONIFER, a pine tree, looks like a Christmas tree, a sort of fir tree, has resin, not sap, makes amber after a while, has cones, etc..etc..

No wonder I couldn’t find the thing. There are NO cedars in Australia. Never have been. The wood is admittedly similar, but the smell is totally wrong: a Toona smell, not a Pine smell. Though both very nice: very different.

That’s when my problems with names started. Years of searching for a non-existent tree.

In Australia anyone can call anything whatever they like. And do, with conviction, ha ha.

Scientific names are poo-pooed, Aboriginal names sneered at. Though things are improving; after all, Aboriginal names came first, so there’s the precedent, undeniable. Except there are hundreds of local languages……..choose one! Ha ha again.

We are forced, when we wish to refer to a particular plant or beast, to use the scientific names, if there is to be no mistake. But for the most part, the Latin-based names are crap and irrelevant, and ‘honour’ some person, rather than being descriptive. And even common names are often totally misleading (Passion fruit, for example, and more later).

Common names have another issue: they change from generation to generation, place to place, and become utterly distorted over the centuries, as old Herbals illustrate. So we must fall back on the scientific names: there’s no alternative.

Except! Oh no! Even the scientific names suffer the bastardisation of the commons. Wistaria is now wisteria on all labels, to rhyme with ‘mysterious’. Wrong. And what the hell is a monsterio? Wrong again! The popular and lazy and ignorant version of a delicious-fruited, common, local, magnificent climbing plant, most aptly named though very seldom eaten. You don’t know what you’re missing! And more later, so read on, while I check some spelling and look-up a few things……..

Where was I? Well, for a start, the beautiful climber was named after Dr. Wistar, despite all the recent nursery labels. (Older labels got it right). And Monstera deliciosa is confused with, oh, I can’t be bothered.

Now Naturtium officinalis is Watercress! Yes! Delicious watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Two Nasturtium sandwiches please.

Then some loony thought that Tropaeolium, with its round leaves and pretty flowers, tasted a bit like Nasturtium and foolishly called it that. And so did everyone else, the pathetic idiots. Did the loony not know he was eating Tropaeolium? He must have known it wasn’t watercress; it looks totally different. How, then did he describe the plant? Er, it tastes a bit like Nasturtium? He could have died, eating stuff he knew not what. And so it goes on.

You can’t trust the name of Anything. Are you my father? Everything is insecure.

Mountain ash is Eucalyptus regnans. It’s not an ash. It’s another bloody gumtree.
Tassie oak is, ha ha, Eucalyptus regnans…….
Silky oak is Grevillea robusta. Neither the timber nor the tree is anything like oak.
And so on. Most of those trees with Pommy names are not what they’re called.

Prickly pear or Tree pear is Opuntia. Sure, it’s prickly. The plant has savage spikes, and the fruit, which neither looks nor tastes anything like a pear of any sort, is covered in tiny bunches of minute needles which break off into your skin, lips and tongue and irritate painfully for days, and can leave lesions for weeks………sure, very pear-like. Nevertheless, handled with care, the fruit is delicious. And a noxious, invasive, imported species, all Opuntias are a bit of a pain in the arse: never crap on one by mistake.

And as for Bush Tucker; I can see that a kangaroo steak might be delicious, but being vegetarian I look to native plants. And with the exception of Bunya and Macadamia nuts, most seem to be decorative or toxic or both, and many have European mis-nomers. Any Australian fruit or vegetable with an English name is likely to be a totally unrelated species, and very painful eating. As Crocodile Dundee said: ‘Sure, you can eat it, but it tastes like shit.’

The Aborigines ate all sorts of stuff; they had to. Their whole existence was a knife-edge search for tucker. Feast or famine. And while we’re considering this, three nasty facts. Governor Phillip, and all-round good bloke, fed many parties of starving natives which stumbled into camp, some dying there. Their expected food source failed and all would have perished without his nurture. During his time this was a frequent event. Australia is a hard place.

‘Fire-stick-farming’ is a very polite term for habitat-burning. The bush creatures were burned alive: easy tucker, but so many must have died that couldn’t be found or eaten, and the bush became more impoverished with each burn-off. Now the white man is doing it, to protect housing. And on it goes.

The third nasty fact is the disappearance of the giant megafauna, which took place at the time Australia was first settled by humans, sixty-odd thousand years ago. The same dying that happened to the moas in New Zealand, for the same reason: easy pickings. Big tame food, stick in a spear, or light a fire, and run away. It is thought that the death of the mega-fauna combined with constant burn-offs permanently altered the climate through loss of rain-forest and grassland. It could all have happened in a few lifetimes. The vast areas of desert may have been green just 60,000 years ago.

The French, starved by wars, ate snails: read Guy de Maupassant. Now, of course, they are delicacies. The English would eat nothing but beef once; there must have been a lot of it about, but the Highland Scots thought plain oats in cold water was food, poor bastards.

Anyway, back to the plot. At a rellies’ farm near the Bunyas was a strange tree, native to the area. It was a tree that would have looked ok upside-down; roots like branches and branches like roots. The name I was given was fakkerlakker. Other farmers thought the same or didn’t know. It reminded me of a toilet-wall notice from long ago: ‘Max Factor knacker-laquer adds lustre to your cluster and glamour to you rammer’. Nice. Interesting spelling and alliteration. But I looked in vain for the real name, until I came across Phytolacca, which seemed to fit, except this was a South American tree, and it seems these Australian ones were scrub-remnants left as pets after tree-clearing, like occasional bunyas and figs. So there’s still a mystery.

Side-tracking, Aussie giant fig-trees really are figs, and some have quite edible fruit. An enormous one I know of, in an area of enormous ones, suffered sadly during one windy night, and two-thirds of it fell down. The tree had been visible for twenty kilometres around. The fallen, interwoven trunk smashed through the dense scrub, shaking neighbours in their beds: they thought earthquake. I climbed onto the enormous trunk, over four metres high (that was its diameter, and more) and stretching sixty metres into a massive tangle of branches and vines. Now here’s the strange thing. Within a year and a half there was nothing to see of all that fallen timber. It disappeared into dust and mulch. The moral: don’t build out of fig-wood!

As for Passion fruit and passion flower, Passiflora edulis, the problem is with the change in the meaning of ‘passion’ from tortuous pain to sexual desire, and its strange misuse for sickly, fizzy, alcohol: Passion Pop. Check with the Roman religious industry for its ludicrous name………

This subject is never-ending. The name of absolutely anything you can shake a stick at is usually doubtful, often changing. And that’s just in one language, so there’s never a fixed reference-point. Scientific names attempt to standardise, and be universally specific, and naming things is an esoteric industry now, and we’d be lost without it. But the common folk prefer our old colloquial terms from the gardens and bush of our childhood. We’d probably get the name wrong. So be it.

The Fourth Dead Hare

Posted on November 23, 2019 by wp-admin

LAST NIGHT SAW THE DEATH AND DEVOURING OF THE FOURTH HARE, within a few metres of the previous three. This morning, in the heat, very small stinking remains covered in frantic flies. Flies and smell led me to the site instantly, just metres from the back door.

This within two years.

Ok, so this is a neighbourhood of dogs, none of which, however, I have ever seen on the loose, especially at night. Never seen a stray dog wandering, or a fox or dingo. Or a big goanna.

So questions: Why four deaths in one small area, over less than two years? Why near the house and next to parked cars? Were the hares brought there, or killed there? In each case the hares were mostly eaten in situ. Once only the feet and stomach remained. All bones were usually eaten. Once there were two hares’ remains next to eachother, suggesting that the site was, is chosen for devouring, not necessarily for killing.

Surely wild dog or dingo…….but how could either one avoid detection for so long, when it is obviously a regular visitor. Headlights have never picked one out; never a glimpse. No scats have been found on roadside or garden. (Obvious, full of claws and fur.)

I regularly see wild dogs and dingos, snakes and goannas, at my place in the ‘bush’; night and day: they are not so secretive as to permanently avoid detection.

A local pet, perhaps, wandering at night whilst its owner sleeps. This seems the most obvious culprit, and I can think of one. But wouldn’t it take the kills home to eat? And why choose this place for all kills? Bone-crunching is a noisy business; why haven’t I heard it? Last night, within ten metres of where I was sleeping, a big hare was eaten, bones, head and all, and |I heard nothing.

A camera would have to be set up and maintained for a year or more to catch the culprit. If the camera pointed in the right direction.

And why hares, only? Why not snakes, or bush-turkeys, or the dozens of tiny local yappers? These last are out loose night and day, most the size of a hare. A dingo wouldn’t hesitate, though yappers are mostly noise and fluff. There are plenty of yappers we could spare, gladly. Or wild ducks, which always are wandering about? (Though that would be a shame.)

I like the hares. They do eat stuff we plant for ourselves, but not much. They are mad, and entertaining, and picturesque. They are homeless from birth, and have no den, burrow, or nest. Their survival in Australia is miraculous. They cause little damage or harm, and offer much entertainment. They can out-run a greyhound in an open paddock. (Not on a confined track: no room for jinking.) There are never many of them about, unlike rabbits.

Help me find the hare-killer. How can it be done?

andyjenner.com

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