Bertie and the Echidna

Echidnas are cute but, until now, I didn't know just how cute. I saw one near the house once. It must have been young and confused because it was quite small and trying hard to be invisible when Bertie (the dog) trapped it in a corner. (For those who don't live in Australia or New Guinea, an echidna is a monotreme - an egg-laying mammal - which resembles a large, variegated, long-spined hedge-hog, or smallish, short-spined porcupine.)

I suppose Autumn must be a busy time for echidnas because Bertie seems to be finding them everywhere these days and is developing a bit of an obsession with them (although not as bad as the obsession he has with the feral cat he chased up a tree a few days ago!) Today he found the specimen below in our little orchard.


To help you make sense of this picture, this is a full-grown echidna - maybe 30cm long (that's a foot in old money) - desperately trying to bury itself in the ground. The little group of spines on the right is the echidna's tail. It's head is well buried.

It was still digging when I shot this picture - and slowly disappearing. I imagine this is a fairly good defence. It certainly had the dog flummoxed as all the poor little dimwit could get to were spines. It was pretty creepy too. It looked like some kind of evil cactus, pulsating as it slowly sank into the soil, probably digesting the last dog foolish enough to put its snout too close.


And, in honour of Bertie's first birthday (which was two days ago) here's a shot of him looking into our current echidna problem.

As Others See Us

I've been heavily involved lately in the design and construction of a gazebo on the garden. This is a fabulous, palatial building, five by four metres by 2.4 m to the eaves. I did the design myself and I'm at the point where all the materials have been ordered and delivered, the site has been levelled and the post-holes dug. Now, with Wifie's help, the first few uprights have gone in and it is beginning to look a bit like a building and not just a building site.

I was going to leave all this out of my blogs since it is hardly something most people will be interested in. But, yesterday, I happenned into Wifie's office while she was writing an email to a friend. Reading over her shoulder, I realised it was about us building the gazebo. I just had to show this to you. Not only is it written in her dry, witty tone but, for me, it was one of those moments where you get the 'giftie' of how others see you.

Here is the relevant extract from her email (with her permission).

We were rather slow getting on with the patio and gazebo. The drawings went on for many iterations and it was a wonder we didn't do a prototype. Eventually, Graham started digging the base but didn't get very far because even a mattock was very hard work. I talked him into letting me phone a man with a bob cat and he levelled the site and dug the post holes. Of course, the bob cat's work is by no means accurate enough for our designer, engineer and workman. Then it took a while to order the wood until I finally suggested that we go and see what sizes they could supply which would help with the design iterations.

We started work last week and are doing a post a day except days when we have to go shopping/ Bertie training/ anything else we can think of. It's mostly been too hot to work after about 10 am hence the one-post-a-day. The post holes were within tolerance but the first post we put in, we got to one side of the hole and now have to compensate with all the others. This results in much standing around debating in quarrelsome manner. We had finished number 3 yesterday morning in 26 degree heat at 10 am. At 2 pm, the heavens opened, hail the size of broad beans came down, then more rain than we've seen in months and the patio base was a paddling pool with the post holes forming plunge pools at its edges. Bertie thought it was wonderful until his leg went down into a plunge pool. Today we bailed out the plunge pools since most of the water drained into them as we took it out. Because the soil is just decomposed granite about the texture of course sand and it sits on rock, there's not much natural drainage going on at the moment which is strange when you remember we're on almost the highest point for some distance around.

If we get the uprights right, the rest won't be so hard. We're very glad we decided to build the gazebo before laying the patio as by now we would probably have dislodged all the slabs and maybe even thrown them at each other.

And, for those who are finding it hard to visualize a three-post gazebo with built-in paddling pool, here it is.

2008 Retrospective

Some year, huh?

From the Obama election win to the all-but-collapse of the world economy (see 2009 for the grand finale) there have been some major world events none of us will forget in a hurry.

On a personal level, this has been an amzing year too. I finally ran down my consultancy business and retired - just in time for my savings to be halved by the America-led economic collapse. (Thanks, guys.) In return, however, I got a full year of living on this mountain, surrounded by beautiful forest and wildlife, with nothing but peace, sunshine, and my wonderful wife to keep me company. I measure my personal wealth in terms of how much leisure I have to pursue the things I enjoy, so 2008 has been a year of immense riches.

I also got a dog. Bertie - or Gobby, as I mostly call him - is a purebred mixed blessing. Handsome, fit and happy, great fun, clownish and playful, he's also a right royal pain in the arse. Mostly, now, he can control his bladder. Mostly, he doesn't steal and eat everything in his reach. But he still likes to jump on guests and chew their faces, and he has picked up new tricks, like jumping in the dam and then drying himself on the carpet, and chasing after cars like a bat out of Hell. Has he improved my life or not? The jury is still out, but 2008 is the year I'll remember as the one in which Bertie was a wild and crazy puppy.

And then there was the writing. If you only know me from this blog and not the other one, you might not even be aware that my new career as a writer of fiction has finally begun to take off. In May I won a place on a 'manuscript development retreat' after submitting my unpublished novel Time and Tyde in a national competition. It didn't lead to publication or anything but it gave me such a huge boost in understanding of the whole writing and publishing business that, in the seven months since then, I have had four short stories accepted for publication (only one is out so far), I was short-listed in one short-story competition, and was the winner in another. I have also written and polished a whole new novel (called TimeSplash!) which I am now looking for an agent to represent. This may not seem like much, but it represents a major breakthrough for me. In the whole of my life until May 2008, I had published only one short story, and had never won a writing competition. If I can keep up the momentum, 2008 will be the year I remember as the turning point in my writing career.

And there were lots of other things too - Wifie built her first website, Daughter passed her driving test, the Large Hadron Collider came online and went off-line again, I finally got a phone line installed (at enormous expense), I got in touch with all my long-lost neices and nephews in the UK, and so on, and so on.

All in all, quite a year.

I hope your 2008 was a full and rewarding one and that 2009 will be even better for everyone (prolonged global recession notwithstanding).

Snow!

It's snowing!

Big white flakes of wonderful snow are drifting down out of the sky. It is something I haven't seen for twelve years, not since I lived in Switzerland.

Snow isn't completely unknown in Australia - they even have skiing here on the high ground around Canberra - but it's quite rare in Queensland. In fact, it's only because I live at 1,000 metres in the most southerly part of this enormous state that there is any chance of it at all. Even then, snow is a moderately rare phenomenon and can't be relied on most years.

Yet here it is, drifting down among the gum trees, settling on the backs of disgruntled lorikeets and cockatoos, falling on my little cactus garden. It's a miracle. No, a blessing. A kindness. Yet another way to experience the beauty of this amazing place in which I live.

I suppose I ought to stop gushing and get back to work but Oh Lord! it was wonderful.

There's More To Life Than You Can Imagine

David Attenborough is someone I admire immensely. I saw an episode of his latest series Life in Cold Blood the other day and I was impressed all over again by the incredible complexity, diversity and beauty of Life. It's enough to make you feel sorry for those poor people who believe in gods.

There was a frog in the episode. The male, who looks about a quarter of the size of the female, is too small to get his arms around his mate's body, so he can't hang on while they have sex. So the little guy exudes glue from his belly and sticks himself to the female's back! What's more, these frogs live in a hostile, arid environment and they need to be underground sheltering from the heat rather than frolicking on the surface like moonstruck calves. So the female frog digs a burrow, with her prospective mate still glued to her back, and they mate underground.

Now this isn't the weirdest thing in Nature. Not by a long chalk. But who could have imagined such a way of life? Not us, for sure. Our imaginations are just not that good. Which is why I feel sorry for the poor god worshippers. Since none of their beliefs about the universe are real, they are limited to what people can imagine. Worse, they are limited to what people once imagined at the time their sacred texts were written, and are now fixed (barring a little embellishment by theologians from time to time). Of course, the old fantasists certainly had their moments – the world on the back of a turtle, twenty-seven virgins for every martyr, the creation of the world happening just a few thousand years ago – but mostly it is all stultifyingly dull and simplistic. Childish, actually.

When you compare these ancient yarns with what Nature shows us, there really is no comparison. Consider the fractal beauty of a tree, the bizarre but elegant 'standard model' of quantum mechanics, the existence of shrimps that pick up grains of sand and drop them into holes in their heads to use as ballast, the grand, swirling ballet of stars, dust and gasses in a galaxy, the deep mystery of electromagnetic fields, the way the brain uses cilia in a spiral cochlear to sense different frequencies of sound, the many kinds of blood chemistry that exist for the transport of oxygen around so many different kinds of bodies, the existence of quarks, the sheer number of things – atoms, stars, brain cells, species of nematode worm – and the incredible sizes of things – the distance from here to the Oort cloud, the spacing of molecules in a quartz crystal, the 'walls' of galaxies that span the universe, the nano-fibres on a butterfly's wing that give it such iridescent colours.

It is all so breathtaking and astonishing and none of it, none of it at all, was dreamed of by the people who fantasised about gods instead of looking with open minds and receptive hearts at what is really out there in the world.

And the little guys in the picture above are pine processionary caterpillars - 16 of them - photographed by me this morning. They walk around in nose-to-tail processions like this at this time of year, looking for a good place to pupate. Now which religious text ever imagined anything like that!

Sterilising My Drinking Water The Easy Way

One of the many things about living out here in the bush with which I am unfamiliar, is the way water is collected and treated. My new house has three separate water collection systems. One is a ginormous plastic tank which collects the run-off from the house and shed roofs. The next is a small pond (or 'dam' as we call them here) that collects water that runs off the ground. The third is a pair of large plastic tanks which constitute a waste treatment plant for sewerage and other domestic waste water. The waste water plant generates relatively clean water which it then pumps out into a garden sprinkling system. The dam water is untreated and also has a pump, which we can use as required for garden watering or whatever. Water from the ginormous plastic tank that catches rainwater from the roofs, is pumped up to the house to provide our domestic supply.

The dam water and the treated waste water don't bother me. We only use them on the garden (or will, once we have a garden). It's this rainwater/drinking water system that bothers me. This water comes off the roofs straight into the tank where it sits for very long periods before being pumped into the house. The tank is closed (apart from two fat overflow pipes with a mesh over their ends) but the water that flows into it comes from the roofs and gutters. Apart from whatever airborne dust, smoke, pollen, and other organic matter landing on the roofs, there must inevitably be bird droppings and dead insects falling onto them all the time. Surely this means the water can't be quite sterile and must have quite a lot of stuff living in it?

It's not such a big deal because Wifie and I never drink unfiltered tap water anyway and any other water we consume in our food is always put through some kind of cooking process that would sterilise it. Yet it is just a little bit unsettling that the water we consume has been used to wash a roof with and has then sat in a big tank in the hot sun for weeks or months before we get round to pumping it into the house! Also, the fact that more and more people around the world are drinking re-cycled rainwater from just this kind of system and no-one is jumping up and down and saying what a health hazard it is, is actually quite reassuring.

Yet I have been wondering what to do to remove any risk whatsoever. And I think I have the answer: make rainwater tanks out of clear plastic.

I came across this idea in August 2000 when New Scientist reported on an Oxfam meeting that discussed the use of solar disinfection to combat a shortage of chemical disinfectants in Assam, India. (Issue 2253, New Scientist magazine, 26 August 2000, page 14. You may need a New Scientist subscription to read this online. Otherwise, your library probably has it.) A team of Swiss researchers in Duebendorf has show that filling a plastic bottle with water and leaving it in the sun can effectively disinfect it in as little as one hour. Martin Wegelin, who headed the Swiss research team, says that if you paint half the plastic bottle black and stand it on corrugated iron, it will heat up much faster and cut the time needed for thorough disinfection. The combination of heat (the water temperature goes above 50 degrees C) and ultraviolet radiation kills most micro-organisms, including 99.9 per cent of Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae (which causes cholera), and the parasite Cryptosporidium (which causes severe diarrhoea). This last is particularly interesting to me since I remember an outbreak of Cryptosporidium and that other popular faeces-borne parasite Giardia intestinalis that hit the water treatment plants in Sydney one year when I was living there and meant that we all had to boil our tap-water before using it for several weeks until they got the outbreak under control.

So, if it works for a couple of litres in an old Coke bottle, maybe it also works for five thousand litres in a clear plastic rainwater tank. If no-one has done the science yet, remember you heard it here first and don't forget to add my name to the patent, please.

Change Of Life

So, here I am in my new home in the country – or the bush, as we learn to call it here. My life is in flux. For the first time, Wifie and I have moved away from the cities we have always been forced to live near and have taken up residence far, far from the madding crowd. So far, in fact, that we don't have mains water, or sewerage, or even a telephone line. The postie drops our mail half a kilometre away at the bottom of our 'drive' (a dirt track that is all but impassable in the wet). If it wasn't for that lonely pair of wires bringing electricity up here, we might be living a very much more primitive life. The nearest shop is twelve kilometres away, the nearest small town, twenty.

We live at the top of a thousand-metre-high hill and the forested valleys and hills of Queensland's Granite Belt sweep away below me in all directions (see above). Forty-six acres of those forests and hills belong to Wifie and me. It doesn't sound like a lot but, in several exploratory walks, we have not yet found all the boundaries and we still make amazing discoveries whenever we go wandering – granite bluffs, huge meadows, boulders as big houses, gorgeous, exotic plants (including three species of wild orchid so far) and beautiful forest glades. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen – and I live there! The more gaudy bird-life includes crimson rosellas, king parrots, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and eastern rosellas, and there are often wallabies in the 'garden' as well as feral pigs (not yet seen bet heard snuffling and grunting in the dark), lizards and snakes (including a gorgeous red-bellied black snake we found near the house the other day - see below). We've seen wild cats, a fox, rabbits and, in early Spring, the roads are full of long-necked turtles crossing at their leisure. The air is full of the sound of cicadas chirruping and, in the evenings, the frogs join in the song.

The ground immediately around the house has been cleared but nothing has been done with it so Wifie and I spend our time making plans for a garden. We've already planted a few fruit trees and we've put in some of the prettier native shrubs (grevilleas, bottle-brushes, banksias) but there is lots to do. Even this 'garden' is huge and we have to adjust to the idea that 'gardening' here will involve earth-movers and lorry-loads of materials. Our days of picking up a bag of gravel or mulch from the garden centre are over. Such things now need to be ordered by the cubic metre, delivered in trucks and spread by bobcat. Even the 'ordinary' garden tools are different now. Strimmers, mowers, weed-sprays and so on, that used to be adequate for a suburban home, we are replacing with heavyweight industrial equivalents. And, for the first time in my life, I own a chain saw and an axe. I got them so I could cut up wood for the wood-burning stove but now I see many other uses. A recent storm, which brought a small tree down across the drive a couple of weeks ago made me realise that a chain saw is an essential part of my new life. Without the means of clearing a fallen tree off your drive, you could be stranded up here!

And at night, when the skies are clear and the Moon is new, the Milky Way is a river of light that runs from horizon to horizon, turgid with stars - more stars than I have seen in my life before, more stars than I even knew were there. It is breathtaking. Astonishing. The glory of the Universe revealed just for the effort of lifting up your eyes! I watch satellites amble past, meteorites zip by, and whole galazies - the Large and Small Megallenic clouds - hanging like misty islands above me. And if you think I'm waxing a bit poetical here, all I can say is, you should see it and then we'll see who's totally blown away.

It's exciting, scary, humbling, and uplifting. It's a wonderful adventure and a dream come true. I am an immensely lucky person.