Hot August Day

Yesterday was Adelaide's hottest August day on record.

Not that I think the globe is warming or anything silly like that.

An intricate, beautiful world

When I turned the key in the ignition this morning, the car radio was set to RN, where Michael McKenzie, host of Bush Telegraph, was chatting to a man called Andrew Murray from a project called Southern Ark.

They were talking about ecosystems, a subject dear to my heart ever since the Matric Biology exam in which I wrote a surreal, heat-struck rave comparing an ecosystem to a piano. More specifically, they were talking about the fox eradication program in East Gippsland.

It seems that since the program was implemented, the potoroo population of East Gippsland has gone through the roof. This came as no surprise to a farmer's daughter who vividly remembers the sight of fox-mangled newborn lambs, to say nothing of the slow-burn paternal displeasure that accompanied it, and the retaliatory (and also slow-burning) poison gas thingies that he used to chuck down the foxholes.

(While this sounds mean, it's nowhere near as bad as the reason foxes were introduced into this country in the first place in the 1870s: they were brought over so that people could chase them down with horses and dogs, thus terrifying and exhausting them before having them torn to shreds, in the hateful, vicious sport of foxhunting.)

The potoroo, it seems, eats a particular kind of truffle-like fungus. These truffles grow in the roots of trees and shrubs, not parasitically but in a symbiotic relationship in which the truffles enable nutrient takeup from the not-very-good-soil. Because the trufffles grow underground, they can't spread their pores by shedding or bursting like mushrooms or puffballs, so they rely on the potoroos to eat the truffles and spread their spores via fur and gut. The potoroos, in digging for truffles, aerate the soil and help the breakdown of leaf litter, both of which improve the nutrient value to the trees and shrubs. Via mobile potoroos, the spores are spread, new truffles grow on new roots which uptake nutrients to new trees, and the forest maintains itself as habitat for more potoroos.

Andrew Murray explained this lovely bit of bio-clockwork to Bush Telegraph host Michael McKenzie, who was clearly mesmerised by the neat, balanced beauty of this scenario; you could practically hear him listening, and when Murray finished the description there was a little pause in which you could hear McKenzie being too enchanted to speak and then remembering he was on air. 'What an intricate, beautiful world we live in,' he said.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas: The Elephant and the Dragon

Last night's opening session of the Festival featured a panel of five speakers discussing the economic (and, to a lesser extent, other) futures of India and China. There was broad general consensus that neither country is going to sweep ahead into world domination the way some people are predicting, and that, to paraphrase the Federal Leader of the Opposition, everybody needs to take a cold shower.

The general view, agreed on in particular by the calm and softly spoken Joseph Cheng and the ebullient Ramachandra Guha, was that in terms of global power and superpower there will be no shift to a different unipolar (or bipolar, as during the Cold War) world but rather an expansion into a multipolar one, with different kinds of power -- economic and other -- distributed across a number of different countries and regions.

Though the point was made several times that 'China and India don't get on' and that therefore talk of some future 'Chindia' alliance probably wasn't to be taken seriously, Cheng and Guha (as representatives of their respective countries) weren't letting this get in the way of a visible mutual respect that clearly deepened as the session progressed and turned into one of the little things that make these occasions so memorable: watching some kind of developing interaction on the stage that doesn't have anything directly to do with scheduled program but, in a small human way, brings the whole thing to life.

Guha, when introduced, bounced up to the mic as though on springs and made an electrifying beginning by reminding the audience that 'In five weeks from now, the 15th of August, India will have spent 60 years as an independent country.' (Well, it electrified me; it may seem like 'history' to the young folks, but 1947 was the year my parents got married and the person I was sitting with, the admirable Morag Fraser -- a member of the Festival's Advisory Committe from its inception -- was already a toddler.)

He went on to read out various prophecies by mostly British journalists and historians that had been made over the decades since 1947, repeatedly predicting that India would fall apart into a failed state: 'For the first five decades of our independence, Indians were told that we were going down the tube ... The Indian elite is now wallowing in a sea of self-congratulation.'

Guha and Robin Jeffrey, a Canadian scholar from Canberra via Chandighar, Sussex and Melbourne, had what were for those of us who have never been to India some quite eye-opening things to say about the diversity of that country from state to state: India has twenty-something different languages, written in ten different scripts, which seemed to amply justify Guha's praise of the way the Indian government manages at a national level to hold the country's 'shambolic' federation together.

Guha and Jeffrey also both made the excellent point that in the face of this diversity, with holders of high office in the Indian government included Muslims, Catholics, Sikhs and at least one Untouchable Hindu, it was bemusing to see the Australian government's attempts via the proposed citizenship test to impose some kind of official monoculture.

The usual format of these panels is one speaker after another followed by audience questions, but Peter Mares introduced and then skilfully facilitated from the Chair an intermediate stage of conversation among the speakers that brought out some of the most interesting remarks of the evening. (All who ever take or aspire to take the chair at festivals and conferences, take note: this works, provided you're well-prepared.)

What emerged from this stage was the closest thing to a disagreement that the panel produced all evening: asked about China's environmental problems, which is Mares' own specialist area of expertise, Cheng replied that there was a new awareness at government level of this issue and of the necessity to do something about it urgently; it involved, he said, some revivification 'not so much of Confucian but of Taoist values', of living peacefully and in harmony with nature -- 'and this is an implict criticism of Maoism.' Colleen Ryan, the Australian Financial Review's China correspondent, politely disagreed: 'The pollution there is just tragic. They're killing their population.' (She may have been referring to this.)

Panelist Philippe Legrain had talked with a scepticism belying his 33 years about the imponderability of the future, concluding that 'Predictions about the future are a mug's game', which made me think of Emma Thompson's hysterical turn as the Hogwarts Professor of Divination, Sybil Trelawny (of which we will be seeing more within a week when the new movie comes out), and did seem, considering the theme of this year's Festival -- 'Which Way to the Future?' -- to be a bit of a cold shower in itself, albeit obviously true.

But the most cheering thing anyone said all night came from Joseph Cheng: 'Over the next 20 years China and India just want to have a peaceful environment in which to concentrate on domestic modernisation.' Amen to that, I thought.


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Nature notes

This is a little house, a single-fronted maisonette with a front garden the size of a hanky, and only three rooms apart from kitchen and bathroom.

But then when you look out the back door, you realise the yard goes on forever, long and narrow. The large tract beyond the garage was pretty much reclaimed as bushland by whoever planted the fifteen or so native trees that have, since I moved in nine years ago, grown to twice the size they were when I arrived: eucalypts, acacias, ti-trees, bottle-brushes, Geraldton Wax, a pepper-tree that used to be a sapling but isn't any more. The back yard is so big that instead of the usual three neighbours (both sides and down the back), I have five. It's a very old suburb with some nineteenth-century law about subdivision.

So I was down there today, attempting some hopelessly small and fussy task by way of land management, when I heard an explosion of bird-chatter over my head and a little off to the right, which is, I read later in the bird book, what happens. I followed the noise, expecting to see a flock of noisy littlies -- sparrows? Honey-eaters? Or rainbow lorikeets, perhaps? -- but instead what caught my eye was a big, dark shape on a branch about twenty feet up. At first I thought it was a possum, but it was completely the wrong shape. Then I thought "cat" -- but no cat up a tree would sit in that position.

Then I registered that it was looking straight at me. Out of big, unblinking, yellow eyes.

It was an owl.

Four o'clock on a sunny Easter Saturday afternoon in suburban Adelaide and I'm being stared down by a boobook owl.

The bird book says they're active at night but roost in the daytime, when they are often buzzed by flocks of little birds, usually honey-eaters. (Honey-eaters are cheeky little sods and wouldn't think twice about buzzing a velociraptor, much less an owl.)

I don't think it took fright at me. We looked at each other for a bit -- if I didn't know better I would have thought it had come to tell me it was time to get down to Diagon Alley for next term's Hogwart's supplies -- but then the buzzy little birds started to annoy it and it flew away: low and slow and heavy, but silent, in that glider way they have. The most I heard by way of noise was a soft whfffff, like an arrow.

And then my heart, going kafoomp kafoomp kafoomp.

Ecosystematic: what goes around ... and around ... and around ...

Ever since I realised how many blackbirds, honey-eaters and pigeons make nests in the yard and garden every year, I've been taking the lint from the clothes-dryer filter and leaving hanks of it draped around on branches and bushes instead of throwing it away.

I always feel a bit mad doing this, and it makes the garden look extremely strange. But then in late summer when I haven't used the dryer for months and am cutting back the overgrowth, or in midwinter when I'm doing the pruning proper, it always makes me glad that I did it whenever I come across yet another one of these from the last nesting season, the way I did today:




'Gaston Bachelard, writing about nests in The Poetics of Space, quotes from Jules Michelet's L'Oiseau (1858): "There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird's breast, its heart."

... Although Bachelard writes about the naive wonder we feel when discovering a nest, I disagree when he suggests that a living, useful nest is valid to our set of images and metaphors associated with nests but that the empty, abandoned nest is nothing. ... The delicate structure; the natural, dulled colour of the materials; the shaping; the accidental debris, the memory only, of seasonal usefulness; the architecture, the shaping of the space but not the space itself in Bachelard's philosophical terms -- the beauty that literally takes my breath away sometimes -- have nothing to do with images of home, warmth, security, refuge ...'

-- Gay Bilson, Plenty: Digressions on food