Sarah Drummond's Blog, page 6

A day at the tower

 The path winding between granite and a yellow tingle tree on the way to the fire tower. It's morning and white-breasted robins hop from karri hazel limbs ahead, to lead me away from their chicks.

At the summit, I wipe sweat from my face (it's a decent climb), wind up the shutters and check out the view. A few small blue smokes rising in columns from the last burn. That red device hanging over the gunsight is amazing for weather recording - something we do every hour.

There's some odd critters up here, probably due to the altitude. People from anywhere other than Western Australia will tell me that "this isn't a mountain, it's just a hill!" but being closer to the sky than most country around here, there is definitely a change in habitat. A girl named this stick insect Frank. Frank has two other mates, just hanging in the tower.

... some kind of lady bird I never see anywhere but here, roosting on Quokka poo near the stairs.

... a king skink always gives me a fright on the steps!

... and a beautiful lacewing ...

And then there are the eagles, Waarlitch or Wedgetail Eagles. I always know they are on their way when the other birds down by the river start screeching. "Waarlitch! Warlitch!"

If you hang around in one place for long enough, you see some amazing stuff. It's a waiting game ... bushfires, critters and rainbows.

Bit pleased with myself here in the photo above. The bushfire is out on the horizon. I called it in at 50 kilometres from the fire tower and got it within 100 metres, after its position was confirmed by the spotter pilot. Judging distance is difficult out in the flatlands to the north, with few landmarks such as hills, paddocks or mobile phone towers.

I listen. Sometimes it's classical music on the FM channel, sometimes podcasts or audio books. I listen to the spotter pilots from other districts on the UHF or turn on Spotify to find Johnny Cash. Reading makes my eyes tired and takes them from where they should be - the horizon. 

We are only allowed to work four days straight and I know why. After four days my eyes are sore and my brain is fried. Mostly, my tower partner tries to avoid four straight days on the roster. Up here too long, we begin to make mistakes and feel a bit crazy. It's a weird combination of being on high alert all day and bored at the same time. A day off to reset and rest is important, especially when both of us work other roles during the fire season.

So, after four days, it's a blessing to head down to the beach at my house and watch the swans fly east in the evening, sit in the yellow sand with the hound and watch the sunset.

 

Latest fake news on the quokka scenario

 Apparently, the Thylacine sign that appeared just up from my driveway in 2020 was a response to the Quokka sign put up days before. The reasoning was that no one had seen a quokka on this road for more than forty years - but no one had seen a Thylacine either - so the best minds at the inlet decided that the Quokkas must have killed all the Thylacines and then erected the Quokka sign in a kind of passive aggressive tactical maneuver. In an epic act of resistance, locals decided to write an email to the council who eventually produced another sign.

Here is my initial investigative report released two and two thirds years ago. I'm happy to report that the Thylacine sign challenged Quokkas, and that break and enters by Quokkas at the inlet halved by at least a quarter. This was a massive success in lawn order.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I saw a Quokka crossing the track as I was driving to work. It was very close to my house. I know they are dangerous when cornered, so I didn't stop the car and anyway, I wasn't wearing any PPE.

This sighting of a killer, delinquent Quokka on the track was interesting. BUT on my way home from work, I noticed that the Thylacine sign was missing. Someone had removed the sign, post and all. IS THIS A COINCIDENCE??? I think not.

Stay tuned folks for further updates. Next week I interview Doctor Runnell McSquarePoo, an expert on the sinister habits of all maligned marsupials.

Fuck I've gotta start a true crime podcast *mutters* onto something here

Lightning memories

We're expecting lightning tonight. As I write, the high pressure grows as two systems work to smash against each other. In the early afternoon the spotter pilots were tracking the storm as they worked their district circuits, trying to get home before the tumult. 

Below is the map of the last dry lightning event a week or so ago. Bushfires followed that red seam within 12 hours. We're all hoping this next one comes with rain.

 

I rang Stormboy, who is camping on his homelands. 'There's a good storm coming,' I said. 'Where are you?'

'Marine Drive. Where can we see the storm?'

'I reckon, head up to the lookout, over the Sound, when you hear thunder ...' and then, a childhood memory hit me. 'O wow, Stormboy? I've just remembered something.'

'Yeah Mum,' he said.

'When I was a kid, my Mum and Dad said "let's go! There's a storm over the Sound." and they went up to the same lookout I'm telling you about now. You know the one.'

'Yeah, I know the lookout,' Stormboy said.

'And I think I was about 8 years old. Mum and Dad were watching this lightning storm just ripping around the Sound. We were in the car. I was terrified, in the back seat. I thought I was gonna fucking die! Mum and Dad were so into it and didn't even notice how freaked out I was.'

'I know that feeling Mum,' said Stormboy. 'Dad took me up to Sandpatch to watch a storm. Lightning was, like, forking into the sea and also hitting the wind turbines. Terrifying. I thought I was gonna die too and Dad thought the whole thing was brilliant. Still, it was one of the memorable moments of my life.'

After our conversation tonight, I thought, is this a normal parenting thing?

 

Language, kerosene and the snake

 Bloody snakes ... this time of year I'm very glad for the sliding glass doors at my house. I can see what's outside before I go lurching out in bare feet. The front door is north facing and so it is a happy place for snakes to power up their solar energy in the mornings.

There's been a tiger snake hanging around there for the last week, which usually sidles into the geraniums when I open the door. But yesterday it just lay in the grass, all quiet. I was doing my laundry when I saw it through the glass door. I opened the door and threw a cake of soap at the snake. It didn't move. Flies and ants hung on it's ready-to-moult roughened skin. I threw my machete next (it's by the front door for this purpose) but the blade landed nearby and still the tiger didn't move. I thought, maybe it's dead? After all, the insects are loving this critter. Just to be sure, I found my ging and loaded it with lead pellets. Scatter shot was my next weapon. Unfortunately the rubber on the highly illegal ging busted and there were lead pellets all over the laundry floor. I picked them up and threw them at this bloody snake. 

'There are so many places to go!' I yelled. 'Just fuck off, will ya.' 

Finally, throwing a whole shovel did the trick. Snakes don't like shovels, apparently. They are fine with soap, machetes and buckshot but shovels ... whoa. Snake slid off into the geraniums like a gangster.

'My least favourite season around here is summer,' a surfer colleague said to me recently. 'There's shit surf, there's bushfires and then there's the tiger snakes.' 

I sprayed kerosene around the front door, not because I wanted to burn the house down to get back at the snake (though tempting), but because I know these critters absolutely hate petrochemicals. My latest plan is also based on Foucault's 'language as power' theories: I'll call this serpentine visitor Miss Nope Rope McDanger Noodle in order to curate a casual 'irreverent' vibe -where the snake's power as the personification of evil, death and The Fall is nullified by my excellent sense of humour.

So far, this is working.

Misunderstanding

In my defense, it was getting late, into the windswept and interesting hour. On the second day of the party, I slept in my tent and woke up hot and hungover. It was evening again and the birds were calling -  a mirror to the dawn chorus we'd listened to, ecstatic and tired after the all nighter. 

Someone had lit the fire in the drum and they were about to torch the bonfire. Sprat hosed down the surrounding wattles and then kinked the hose, in case of emergency. Sister dolloped diesel over the wood pile and lit a match.

Later, as the sacrificial sofa folded into itself on bonfire coals, partygoers straggled back to the main camp where we sat on chairs and surviving sofas around the fire drum. A DJ played under an Oztrail shelter and blue laser lights shimmered through the peppermint trees. Two young men came to sit beside me by the fire.

"I'll give that a three," said the man in a hat, pointing at a woman slouched in a saggy blue velour couch. 

"Yeah, I reckon, a bit awful," said his friend. "But that one's better," he nodded to another woman sitting upright in a comfy looking camp chair. "Seven?"

I could feel my whole body tighten. I remembered when, as a twelve or thirteen year old on my first visit to Middleton Beach with mates instead of my parents, a row of men held up score cards for every girl or woman who walked past. They were probably only a few years older than me and a roar of laughter went up every time they held up the numbers. It was terrifying. "She's pretty," one would say. "Pretty fucken ugly," another said and held up the number three. More laughter.

So back to 2022 and a very different generation of young men, I turned to them, seething. "How old are you guys?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" The man in the hat said. 

"Are you, like, fourteen or something? What makes you think you can behave in that way? In this era?"

"Um ... what?"

"Who the fuck do you think you are?" I must have looked angry. Apparently when I'm really angry my left eyelid twitches.

He stared at me, looking baffled. "What's your problem?" He got up and he and his friend walked away to join another subsect of the party.

An hour or so later, the man in the hat returned to sit by my side. By then I'd had a bit of time to think about the scenario. I'd begun to doubt not myself but my idea about what they'd been doing, based on looking at my own prejudices after that experience as a kid at Middleton Beach.

"Hey ... you know how I jumped on you a while back -"

"Yeah! What was that about?" He asked.

"Were you rating women? Because that's particularly gross you know."

He stared at me and then started laughing. "No man! Oh wow. If you'd just said that ... we were rating chairs. See that one?" He pointed to the blue sofa, now occupied by a man in an Always Was, Always Will Be hoodie. "It sags in the middle. It's fucking awful. We were rating chairs, Sarah. By the way," he pointed to the plastic primary school chair I was sitting on. "Yours is a five."

"This is a very attractive chair, thank you very much," I replied.

 

 

Weeding out the diesel

Just been reading Don Watson's Watsonia*, a collection of his essays and articles over a lifetime. Watson wrote, among other things, speeches for the former Prime Minister and Hawke-era treasurer Paul Keating. Not sure, you can fact check me on this, but I reckon he wrote the Redfern Speech, nearly approaching its 30th anniversary and a pivotal moment in our nation's history. Below is a shortened version.

Watson has an interesting take on writing political speeches, saying that his words belonged to the politician who spoke them, not to those who wrote them. I understand this sentiment as - speech writers are given talking points and then work those points into something beautiful and stirring. Those words no longer belong to the writer. It all sounds a bit meta but ask any writer if their words belong to them once their books go out into the world.

Anyway, folded into his book on topics so varied as the impotent decency of John Hewson, Australia's problematic relationship with Indonesia re East Timor, cricket and the politics of class envy, was a chapter on marijuana. So bear with me now as I head from international politics, the floating of the oz dollar and pathos of child jockeys, to the most illustrious vocation of growing weed.

'Seasonally Adjusted' begins with "So it is autumn. To put us beyond the claws of winter, we should be storing up and making mulch." Yes, he's talking harvest time. "Turn the apples into cider. Stew those stone fruits." This story is a hymn to the gardener. "Gardening increases the level of personal debt,' he writes. "If you have a garden, you do not need any other worries.'

One may garden in Australia to their heart's content, he continues. We may grow wolfhounds or fairies. We may grow bank robbers or aphids or even the ladybirds to feast upon them. We may grow colonisation, 'We may throw clods, spit and barbecue animals. There is nothing to stop us indulging in idolatry ... we may sunbake, smoke and use a chainsaw.'

'No one will dob you in for dreaming there, but if you grow marijuana, they will.'

If you grow weed in your backyard, you'll get dobbed in, writes Watson. Coppers will leap your camellia to get to the weed after the neighbour has done an 'Alert but not Alarmed' call. It's like the worst crime possible. Then the police will uproot all the offending plants and take them away in evidence bags to burn on a bonfire of righteousness ... 'well most of it anyway,' Watson writes, in a tongue in cheek reference to police unofficially taxing the revenue of weed growers.

This "most of it anyway" reminded me of an incident in our great south coast about thirty years ago. After the raid of a massive bush crop, the local police took the plants to the local tip, poured diesel over it, lit a match and left. It didn't burn.

Word went out that there was heaps of dope at the rubbish dump. In those days, the dumps were not continually monitored by people so it was a free weed for all. To this day there are stubby holders commemorating the event. All I can remember was the amount of hash I smoked during that time. It always smelled vaguely of diesel.

At around the same time, the Prime Minister was giving his Redfern speech. I dunno how this all connects up. It probably doesn't, except for Don Watson.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

* love this re context. Watsonia is the worst weed ever!

 

Noticing

Hey this is interesting ... the marri tree I thought was killed by the Armillaria fungi has come back to life. It lives about fifty metres from my house and has done so for at least the last century. Now it's sending out epicormic growth, which means it's stressed but a whole lot better than being dead. Here is something I wrote about the tree, that ancient King, a few years ago.

"The armillarias killed the old marri down by the inlet shore in the winter. Armillaria mycelium is no friendly communicant for trees but its aggressor and will feed on the decaying carcass for decades. The thugs of the fungi kingdom. The mushrooms, beautiful sheaves of gold, perfect and succulent, climbed the craggy bark like marauders up the castle keep, relentless, until they cancered the ancient king."

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth,
Our foot’s in the door.

Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms'

 

The Last American, or 'Dead Cities'

The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is supposedly in the genre of science fiction. It's one of those books that during most recent pandemic times and climate crises was touted by bookshops to move from "science fiction to the Australiana section". The narrator Ish is a young geographer who heads up into the mountains near his native San Francisco on a field trip to research his PhD. Earth Abides was published in 1949, so not long after a real, apocalyptic world event and like Camus' The Plague, is considered a great existential novel of its time.

Ish's name could derive from Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Perquod's encounter with the great white whale, or perhaps from an Indigenous American man called Ishi who walked into Western, urban society after his tribal society was vanquished by disease and colonisation.

I've been listening to the audio version of Earth Abides after reading Mike Davis' Dead Cities and Other Tales. Apocalyptic fiction is so good for long drives but my love for this genre has history. What would you do/be/become as one of the last humans on Earth? I mean really, I love this shit. Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Attwood, John Wyndham, Jim Crace and H.G. Wells combined philosophy, poetry, ecology and wholly sensible thoughts to create their dark visions of our humanitarian future.

In Earth Abides, Ish emerges from the wilderness after having suffered a rattlesnake bite. He's confused about whether the snake venom also caused a weird illness, with his rashes and lesions and a high temperature. The electricity and water are still on at the general store when he gets there but nobody's home. He leaves a note, promising to pay back the fuel bill. Gradually he realises the extent of the plague. There are moments of Ish moving from civilised to feral when he breaks the window of a newsagency to read the last papers published (seven days previous 'Situation Acute!!!') to when he requisitions a police officer's motorcycle.

There are no zombies in Earth Abides and I do thank Stewart for this. Instead there are some pretty mediocre survivors: a drunk with haunted eyes, a grifting white couple you'd normally place on the outskirts of a crack den and a mad hoarder who has stashed 24 copies of the same magazine edition, just in case. Ish wonders ... did any of the good, any of the useful people survive? In general, it seems that humanity has been cleanly, almost surgically excised from the world.

One of the most poignant parts of the novel for me were reading how nature took back the cities. Cities and indeed dwellings take constant maintenance to keep nature at bay. My own house looks like Halloween right now because I like to let the daddy long leg spiders take care of the bush flies. (Caveat, I do vacuum up the poor buggers twice a year). In Stewart's scenario, when the culverts aren't cleared and the weeds aren't sprayed, Highway 66 devolves, or evolves, into sand and then trees.

This is fascinating! "This grandly suspended, inorganic metropolis," wrote Earnest Bloch, "must defend itself daily, hourly, against the elements, as though against an enemy invasion."

In 1996, New Scientist writers called upon ecologists and other experts to try and qualify how quickly nature would take over cities, once humans were removed.

"Within five years, New Scientist found, weeds would indeed conquer the open spaces, pathways and cracks of the city ..." The buddleia, sweet lil butterly bush, was found to be the biggest bad ass of bad asses in this whole article. 

So Buddleias are able to grow through concrete to source nutrients and water (don't plant them near your septic tank folks) and are basically touted as the plant that will thrive and dismantle our infrastructure, destroying our tallest buildings and roads. THE BUDDLEIA WILL TAKE YOUR SOCIETY DOWN. When humans don't have enough energy or workforce to keep them at bay, those motherfucker buddleias will rule.

Once again - I just love this shit. In the end (?) Ish creates a society of survivors and it's always fraught with its own existential questions. Given the era of writing (1940s) he sprays himself with DDT to get rid of fleas, speaks of his marriage partner as 'fulsome' or 'fertile looking' and engages in all the racial dynamics of the time, which is odd but ... okay George..

I fell asleep several times listening to the audio book, waking to hear that ants had died out because they didn't have as many cadavers to feed on, fell asleep, woke up to when the big cats predated upon the small house dogs, fell asleep, woke up at dawn thinking, 'This is an okay day, today.' Had some strange, lucid dreams in the interim.

In the morning, my dog licked my spare hand as I pushed the fruit bread decidedly into the toaster and the electric kettle bubbled to a shut behind me.

 

GR Stewart, Earth Abides, Random House, 1949

Mike Davis, Dead Cities and other tales, New York, 2002.

I have a beach again

 

 

So that tree that suddenly burst into flower while underwater is now a land lady! The sand bar broke on Saturday and the water has been going out to sea ever since. 

 

This is the peppermint tree that has been living under water for months! She now has a beach too.

Sea ladies, land ladies

Tonight I heard the swans returning from their wintery, inland sojourn. It was just a few calls, it must be the early ones. Later into the second spring and then the early summer, masses of black swans call all night.

The inlet is about to break out to the sea. For weeks now, the inlet has been inching up into the bush on the north side where I live. There has been no beach to ride my tip shop bike along for months (please see previous post). I'm looking forward to riding along my personal beach, given my outlay of a five dollar bike. Anyway, here's a photo of what the beach looks like today.

The first one is of my driveway. The second is of a peppermint tree that grows on the beach about fifty metres away. Look at her, feeling out tree roots into the bush. Beyond her, a melaluca standing in the water bursts into yellow flowers.

Within a few days, I think the sandbar will break and this tide will swish out to sea, and these trees will be land ladies again. I'll keep you posted.