Fred Baker

Coal port takeover

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Although I’d only been home for a few days, last Saturday I drove to Newcastle to help take over the harbour entrance to this major coal exporting port.

It’s the fourth year that the dynamic climate change action group, Rising Tide, have organised the event at Horseshoe Beach. This is a peaceful, family-oriented way to protest that the continuing export of our coal for the world to burn in power stations is fuelling global warming and thus climate chaos.

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That’s me in the red hat, centre left, camera in hand.

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This lone polar bear –  who sat there all day – said it all. The police boat kept a close eye on him: it’s the silent types you have to watch.

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Kayaks were supplied, but many people brought their own water transport, from surfboards, sailboats and rubber dinghies to inner tubes and floaties. Some had made rafts of limited navigation and dubious flotation abilities, but great ingenuity and sense of fun.

I didn’t do much paddling about, being a bit of a wuss waterwise, opting to help out in the kitchen tent instead.

This year, the port authorities didn’t wait for the people occupying the port for the day to have the chance to actually stop any coal ships leaving the port. They cancelled them anyway.

This made the protest a success before it started and also kept the tension and the numbers of police down from previous years.

See Rising Tide’s website for further details on the day and their ongoing great work. People power does work: you might like to get involved.

Kikuyu punishment

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kikuyu grass stops mower

A month away from the mountain is a long time. The bush itself requires no attention from me, but my domesticated area does, and the 350mm of rain in February has effected a great deal of green growth. Not all is welcome.

I continually apologise to the environment for my ignorant crime of introducing kikuyu grass here thirty years ago. As punishment, its runners are the scourge of my garden, but until lately the horses kept its main expanse munched very short, its patches the first thing they headed for whenever I let them into the house yard.

With the horses gone, that munching is much missed now after my month’s absence. Mowing is the only answer, and with these dewy autumn mornings that has to wait until the sun is hotter than I like for outdoor work.

Thick and tall kikuyu is a hard task for a mower and when wet it is an impossible one, a sudden choked capital green full stop.

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Kikuyu mist

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Just before the heatwave ended, I noticed a patch of the dreaded kikuyu grass seemed to be dying off, becoming pale and yellowish and oddly ‘misted’.

The native grass parts of the ‘lawn’ were browning off but usually the kikuyu is the last to go brown in hot and dry times. Its runners extend so far underground and it is such a determined survivor that it is a supremely equipped invader.

Originally from east Africa, it is a particular scourge on the coast where good rainfall allows it to mount fences and swamp sheds under a bright green tide if left ungrazed. 

I curse the day I bought it here, on the advice of the then Soil Conservation Department, to hold the soil on freshly made banks and dam walls. Fortunately it does not do very well here where it can be grazed by the native animals, so it’s mostly only inside my house yard.

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There are no horses here now  to be let in to eat my grass, and I haven’t got around to mowing yet.  When I  took a closer look at the odd patch of kikuyu it seemed to have very fine spiderwebs over the whole widening arc. But they were nowhere else.

Having never seen this before, I wondered why it should be connected to the lack of grazing or mowing. I began to  wonder if this wasn’t some sort of slime mould, as they can take the most extraordinary forms.

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But when I searched the net I discovered that it is a rare event: the flowering of the kikuyu.

Why it should be happening in only a small patch, I don’t know, but apparently ‘the pollen sacs, or anthers, extend above the grass on slender white filaments and give the area a whitish cast’.

Another site said that it flowers infrequently and that when it does, the area may seem ‘covered in spidery threads of white filaments’.
Without  a doubt this is what I was seeing.

Pennisetum clandestinum is the botanical name for kikuyu … and ‘clandestine’ is most appropriate for its strange and secret flowering. Yet another example of the amazing ways of nature!

Cotton caterpillar

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As I was about to pull up a wild cotton plant spotted near my big dam,  I noticed this spectacularly marked caterpillar.

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Khaki, powder blue and black, in stripes and spots and vees. Then I saw a little one further down the plant. They appear to be double-ended, with those handsome black antennae at each end.

I couldn’t possibly pull out the weed while such beauties were busy eating their way to cocoonhood.

I don’t have a caterpillar book; does anyone know what this will become?

Back soon

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stationI am going travelling so I will be out of regular internet contact for a few weeks and I may be unable to reply to comments straight away.

But posts already in the system will still go up and I’ll do my best to catch up when I get back to my beloved mountain.

See you soon

Sharyn

Morning jewels

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Last week gave me a morning of perfect synchronicity between light and water. A dewy night, mist lifting in time for the morning sun to illuminate the thousands of spider webs strung through the trees. They are probably always there, but invisible until diamonds are added.

There were elaborate and intricate multi-storey webs, webs that incorporated bright leaves into their settings …

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— and webs that bent twigs to frame their creations.

By contrast, this week has been hot and dry; no mist, no dew, no diamonds, only the bright morning light.

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This web, a regular at the end of my verandah, shone finely outlined like a giant thumbprint, the classic spiderweb we learn to draw without acknowledging the complexity and range of spidery spinnings.

Spider fruit

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I usually don’t inspect a dish of grapes for animate occupants. But after this discovery I certainly shall.

Having eaten a small cluster of sweet black grapes, bought from a regional organic farm, I was about to select another bunch when I glimpsed hairiness where there ought only to be glossy fruitiness.

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I blinked: was it hairy stems? But no, definitely hairy spider legs, as it emerged from the side of the bowl.

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 I hurried outside with the bowl and gently tipped it onto the verandah, where it posed for a minute.  Another Huntsman, although not as bulbously brown as the big one on the rafters.

 ‘This is going too far!’ I admonished it, but it ignored me as it ambled over the edge.

I washed the grapes and remain vigilant.

Friar-bird flash

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This odd-looking bird is a Noisy Friar-bird. Friar because of the hood? If so, this friar has a very messy white clerical collar.

I have lots of them here but have never been able to catch them with the camera, as they move very quickly and seldom stay still for long.

But the days are hot and the bird bath is tempting. This one allowed a wattlebird to have a brief drink at the same time and then harangued it loudly, beak open and red eye sparking, until it left.

These birds more frequently drink at my dam, as I described in The Woman on the Mountain:

My small dam in front of the house is a great meeting place — hanging out at the local pool. As always when different gangs meet, there’s a lot of showing off, like the wattlebirds daredevil-diving from a high branch to skim the water and up to a tree on the other side. I sometimes see strangers, such as a lone cormorant or heron, stop by for a drink or a swim. Wood ducks from my big dam try too, but the magpies hustle them on their way, protesting, quacking and flapping.

Some of the get-togethers down there sound like unsupervised group therapy. The weird friar-birds, with their bald black heads and knobby beaks, have a scale of maniacal cackles straight out of bedlam, and over the top of them loudly boast the wattlebirds, ‘I got the lot, the lot, the lot!’ The racket goes on and on, up and down, back and forth, apparently reaching no satisfactory conclusion — a bit like parliament on one of its less than statesman-like days.

Mountain Tails are wagging

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mt-coverAs the advance copies of my second book, Mountain Tails, are about to arrive, anticipation is mounting here on the mountain.  All our tails are wagging!

Just like an expected baby, joy and fear are intermingled for me until I hold the actual book. I cried when I first saw 
The Woman on the Mountain;  I expect I shall do the same with Mountain Tails.

I can’t wait to see it, and stroke it – and read it, as it will look so different from my A4 manuscript! 

It will be even more exciting because I have done a black and white (and  grey!) illustration for each of the 44 short tales — anecdotes and observations, mixed with what I have learnt about these wonderful native creatures with whom I share my place. 

They continue to amaze, amuse, infuriate and educate me. I hope my book will do the same for my readers, and help ensure that no more of our wildlife vanishes into the extinction with which so many are threatened.
 
I keep telling various of my wild animal neighbours that they are in the book, or apologising to those who’ve only moved in since I handed in the manuscript. I haven’t apologised to the python, but it would have made a great tale, and a great subject for drawing.

Perhaps there will need to be a sequel.

Here’s how Chapter One begins:

Welcome to my Mountain
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Short or tall or really small,
Furred or feathered, smooth or scaly —           
I’m the poorest creature here, without a tail at all.

Being the only human resident of a wildlife refuge, on the edge of a national park that is far from any town, I see lots of creatures behaving ‘wildly’. They can be so natural because they ignore me, as they should.

After all, I’m obviously of an inferior and inadequate species: no tail, only two legs, pathetic hearing, poor vision that’s shockingly so at night, no built-in insulation of fur or feathers, and an apparent inability to survive on the local abundance of grass, leaves, roots and other creatures.

To that general picture of modern white Australians, my neighbours might add other deficiencies peculiar to me: knees that can’t be relied on to bend, as knees must, to climb up and down slopes, inappropriate Celtic skin that burns to cancerous spots under our sunshine, and a lack of any singing talent.

and it ends:

I offer my readers, old and new, this illustrated collection of ‘Mountain tails’. Mostly short, a few tall, mostly new, a few classics — to make you smile, chuckle or sniffle, say ‘Oo-oh!’, ‘Aha!’, or, better still, ‘A-a-ah!’.
Come take a walk in my gumboots and meet my neighbours.

Mountain Tails will be in bookshops in early April, or you can order from the publishers, Exisle, online. More information from Exisle here.

Fiery future fuelled by Rudd

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The death toll from the Victorian fire storm is now at about 170.  With the words of shocked survivors and images of whole villages obliterated, blown apart as if by bombs, cars and their occupants burnt as they drove to escape – we share vicariously in their nightmare experience. 

Like everyone else, I am preoccupied with what has happened, is still happening in other areas — and the threat will continue. Victoria is burning. Nowhere is safe until rain falls.

Having been through two major fires here, and chosen to stay, I can only begin to imagine what those people went through.  I know what intense radiant heat feels like, but even the experienced and well-prepared down there found this time it was beyond human endurance and had to abandon at the last minute.

The speed and ferocity of that fire was unprecedented. But not unexpected: the predicted effects of global warming had been of increased heat, extreme weather patterns, a drier south-east — hence more severe and frequent fires.

Welcome to the nightmare of climate change, which I prefer to call climate chaos. Look at Ingham.

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Code Red for climate emergency

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5% reduction won’t give her a future, Mr Rudd!!

Over 2000 people, wearing red, came to Canberra on February 3rd to link hands and red banners and tell Mr Rudd and Ms Wong that they have got it terribly wrong. 5% carbon emissions reduction will do nothing to halt our runaway global warming crisis. 

If our ‘leaders’ haven’t yet joined the dots, maybe they’ve noticed the prolonged heatwaves in Victoria and South Australia and the floods in Queensland, with 75% of the state a declared disaster area.

Excessive heat or excessive rain – infrastructure and services like transport and energy have collapsed, and people are suffering. 

Climate chaos is not good for the economy either, Mr Rudd.

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We went there on the opening day of Parliament to remind them this is a Climate Emergency, a red alert to act NOW. We were so many we encircled the block. 

But our message was eclipsed by Mr Rudd’s announcement of his billions of dollars to ‘save the economy’. What a shame he didn’t use those billions to take bold steps to save the planet at the same time.

All he gave was a drop or two for home insulation. Instead of splashing spending money for consumables about, he could have installed a solar hotwater system in every household — for free.

With one stroke he could have boosted green industries, created jobs, reduced energy consumption and removed the need for any new power stations while renewables kick in.

Well, they will only do that if the government gets serious about supporting them instead of coal power.

And there’s no sign they are contemplating that.

Individuals and community groups, young folk and old (like me, below, in the red hat) felt strongly enough to travel from all states to show their extreme concern in a peaceful way.

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Giving money for schools  is fine — but saving the planet that those well-educated kids will need to live on would be a hell of a lot finer.

When will they wake up to this all-too-real emergency and act?

Thanks to Graham Brown for the photographs.

Bush beauties

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At some point in summer I will catch a glimpse of a faint splash of pink in the long tussock grass. The native Hyacinth Orchids are back!

They are hard to spot because they are solitary flowers; Dipodium punctata does not grow in clumps. They are also only thinly dispersed here. Like me, their needs for space and privacy are large.

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They have no leaves, as apparently their thick fleshy roots draw enough food to sustain these exotic-looking beauties.

Undistracted, the dark burgundy stem shoots up about 60cm before erupting into a raceme of pink stars spotted with deeper pink and burgundy.

The new buds at the top clasp each other closely until it’s their turn to spread their petals and show their star quality –’Ta-dah’!