I don’t plant annuals, so my garden is never the riot of colour that others manage. I rely on bushes and bulbs to surprise me with blossoms.
Outside the house yard, the surrounding bush does the same. Lately there has been an explosion of blossom on a select few of the Angophora floribunda trees. The chosen ones have been so covered that it looked like clotted cream from a short distance.
I am assuming this is what caused the splashes of cream I could see a week earlier, way off on the far slopes of the higher ridges opposite. Too far away for detail, even with binoculars.
But in the immediate bush, I have no trouble spotting the highlights of summer wildflowers here, the Hyacinth Orchids, Dipodium punctatum. Apparently these orchids live on subterranean fungi which form on the decaying matter of the forest floor.
On tall maroon stalks, their strikingly coloured and splashed pink flowers stand and demand attention amongst the greens and beiges of the tussocks and blady grass. They get it.
The view from the inside of a cloud does not extend very far.
Today, past the first dim line of trees, I see no mountain ridges or rainforest gullies or even eucalypt forest. They might no longer exist.
If the evidence of the eyes counts, the world might end 100 metres from my verandah.
I love this intimacy with clouds, this damply veiled weather; it has inspired a short story of that name, ‘Cloudland’.
But after all the rain we had, I really ought to be mowing. I can see that grass growing.
In areas like the orchard, soon the mower will have difficulty cutting through its density. Up here in summer, early morning grass can be too wet from dew to mow; it’s too hot by the time that’s dried off, so early evening is the only available time — if I’m not too tired by then, or have obeyed the beer o’clock call.
I did mow last evening, so my conscience is clear there.
Ah well, guess I’ll just have to stay indoors — and write!
This is West Australian farmer and rural writer, Fleur Mcdonald – and her old mate Rex. Fleur invited me to be her guest writer for February, and that lengthy blog entry will go up on her website on February 1st.
Please pop over to the west for a visit with me — plus there’s a personalised copy of The Woman on the Mountain to be won.
Fleur and I write in very different genres and styles, live in totally different landscapes — and I’m old enough to be her mother! — but we developed an e-kinship when Fleur’s first novel, Red Dust (see my review here) was about to be released and she was working on her second, Blue Skies.
Red Dust was a bestseller, Blue Skies is coming out soon — and we’ve continued the friendship. I hope to get over to Esperance to meet Fleur in real life one day, but meanwhile I’m e-visiting my e-friend!
This photo of a vigilant kookaburra on my yard gate suits this extract from the chapter on Kookaburras in my book, Mountain Tails:
Moist ground, short grass, worms a-wriggling, birds a-watching — snap!
Kookaburras claim my fence posts, my gates, my tree guards, my guttering, the glasshouse roof and the bare wintry branches of my stone fruit trees. Like sentries in castle turrets, they keep constant watch on their kingdom. For ages they stare fixedly at a spot in the apparently motionless paddock. It’s as if they are commanding a worm to emerge there by such concentrated power of will.
‘In a cold wind they fluff up their feathers: basic off-white, elegantly speckled and heavily striped in chocolate brown, barred with black, underscored by amber, and with those sometimes hidden, so often surprising, sky-blue dabs and dashes on the wings. A backcombing breeze makes their flat heads look ruffled and peaked like punks, but their heavily made up eyes are not distracted from their task.
Their beaks are big and tough and capacious, hooked at the end. Good for catching much bigger prey than worms or beetles, but that’s what’s on the menu in this clearing. Just a snack in between the morning and evening song sessions.
These are Laughing Kookaburras, sometimes called Laughing Jackasses, the largest members of the world’s kingfisher family, all of whom are carnivorous for more than fish. This sort likes mice, as well as worms and insects and reptiles, and there are lots of small mouse-like marsupials here to make residency in my Refuge worthwhile. There are also lots of tree hollows, so it’s a good nesting and breeding place for kookaburra families.
The last chapter of my book, Mountain Tails, is called ‘Missing Tails’ and as 2010 is the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, an extract from that chapter seems appropriate here.
The illustration for that chapter was the Greater Bilby, listed as ’endangered’ in Queensland and ‘vulnerable’ nationally — the Lesser Bilby is already extinct.
I am fortunate to be able to live amongst so many wild creatures, who belong here more than I do or ever could. Yet there are lots of tails I’d love to see but never will, because they’re extinct, or so few are left that they’re on the critically endangered list, or the steps on the way to that, the vulnerable or threatened species list.
The more I learn about the amazing animals around me, the more I grieve that so many equally unique and interesting Australian creatures are now gone. Their combined richness is what biodiversity means, and even though we may not understand how, all creatures, including us, have or had a place in an ecosystem; we are all linked. Like any chain, break or even weaken a link, and things eventually fall apart. Unfortunately those links are often invisible to us short-sighted slaves of Progress — until the effects of the breakdown, mostly irreversible, cause us trouble.
Australia holds the shameful record of having wiped out the most mammal species of any country in the world: 27 unique types of furry warm-blooded creatures, like us but oh so different, will never exist on this earth again, thanks to our clumsy Progress. And we’ve done it in only a little over 200 years. We’ve been rotten caretakers, compared to the original ones, who managed it so well for thousands of years.
We can add 23 bird species and four frog species to the tally of Australian creatures that are now gone forever. We can’t do a thing about this but we can help in trying to prevent it happening to the 22 animal species that are critically endangered right now, and the 345 species that are threatened!
My wildlife refuge is my own way of doing this, plus having my property conserved in perpetuity under the Native Vegetation Act, but there are various avenues and degrees of involvement for concerned people, landowners or not, including volunteering, observing and recording, donating and lobbying.
Even in towns, we can at least try to do no more harm, for example by keeping pets in at night when many native animals come out to feed. Think of small creatures like the Lesser Bilby, lost forever, every time it seems a chore to do so. It probably didn’t ever live in your area, but others of the 54 extinct animals did. If you want a more personal iconic image, find out from your local National Parks office what is under threat in your region, what birds, mammals and reptiles might not be around much longer.
When I see the wild animals around me living such efficient and rich lives in the natural world we inhabit here, requiring of me only that I should leave them alone, I wonder that we got our priorities so wrong, on such a large scale, in this country.
Take a look at the website for the Convention on Biological Diversity. UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon talks about the sad state of our world, where human activity is wiping out species at about 1,000 times the natural rate.
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The significance of ultra-abstract art often eludes me; I might appreciate it as design and colour, but it doesn’t speak to me. I don’t warm to it, relate to it, as I can to the merely abstracted, stylised, simplified, where the origin is vaguely discernible. In the latter the artist’s treatment of it stimulates my imagination more than straight realism would.
The cabin might be full, but I live in the midst of a forest that can dazzle me with temporary exhibitions of works of art like this one. The paint was fresh and bright after a spell of rain; a week later the colours will dull and fade, or flake off.
