Post-Australia Day rant

Post-Australia Day rant

According to our own national anthem, our treatment of asylum seekers is positively unAustralian

I love this country. I really do. I've travelled widely across the world and can think of nowhere else on the planet that I would like to live or raise my children. I lived in the USA for a couple of years and it just doesn't compare to the Lucky Country. Our climate, our resources, our people, our way of life, our environment, our food – and even our struggling education and social welfare systems – really are some of the best in the world.
I consider myself proudly patriotic, but not jingoistic. 
I don't want to get all Sam Kekovich on you, but I will barrack for and support Aussies playing any sport (particularly my beloved Wallabies), up to the point when they start cheating, bad-mouthing or displaying bad sportsmanship. Then my allegiance falters.
Today our Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the ABC as "unpatriotic" because of its coverage of particular issues. Isn't the difference between patriotism and jingoism the ability to see when your own nation is being unjust, or needs improvement? I think those who work to make our society even better are often being extremely patriotic. Take the extraordinary Ian Kiernan who loved Australia so much he wanted to clean it up, and has now taken his message to the world.
What makes up Australia, and Australians, is one question I've been dealing with in a major feature for Australian Geographic (to appear later this year). We come from all over the world, and may be as loosely tied as barbecues, a belief in a free go for all and some sort of mythical baptism under fire at Gallipoli.
However, if we want to help define what being "Australian" means, surely we should look straight away at our national anthem. (If you've forgotten, it isn't Waltzing Matilda, it's Advance Australia Fair.)
In the sometimes-sung second verse, known far better by primary school kids than most of us adults, there is a key line, which Tony Abbott and others of his ilk seem to be ignoring. It says, boldly and in black and white:

"To those who've come across the seas, we've boundless plains to share".

There it is people. According to our national anthem, we have abundant riches and space to share with "those who've come across the seas". That means asylum seekers, Tony.
The way I read our national anthem, it is UNAUSTRALIAN to think anything else.
If we no longer believe those words, perhaps we should change the anthem to something like: "For those who've come across the seas, we really do not care", or "you just can't have your share..." or "sod off and leave us, yeah".

But until we do, I believe that our treatment of "those who've come across the seas" to be paramount to our definition of what it means to be an Australian.
I am extremely proud to be an Aussie, and hope that we can find new ways to love and care for those fleeing all sorts of horrors in other parts of the world, in order to come to "the lucky country". And that doesn't mean sitting for untold years in the heat and heart-breaking detention centre on Manus Island.



 

Turkeys on the march

Turkeys on the march

One of Australia's most bizarre birds has been steadily expanding its range for decades 

The Australian brush turkey, bush turkey or scrub turkey

I was surprised on one of my regular lunchtime walking loops around Milsons Point/Kirribilli recently. There, within a few hundred metres of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, about 20m from the water itself, was a brush turkey. It was doing what brush turkeys do best - wrecking a garden by scraping all the loose vegetation, living plants and anything else, into a huge mound. I had to laugh. Even there, in some of the most expensive real estate in the country, a wild creature was causing havoc.

Brush turkey in Kirribilli, near Sydney Harbour.

When I was a kid, brush turkeys, or bush turkeys as some people call them, were rarely seen on most bush walks around Sydney. 

Occasionally in the deep recesses of a rainforest we'd see them, but in the 1970s, the furthest south their range reached was what is now Wollemi National Park, in the northern Blue Mountains. Brush turkeys are known up the east coast all the way to the Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, and have been wreaking havoc in Brisbane backyards for as long as most people can remember. There they were (and still are) considered a pest by many residents.
A couple of decades ago, they began to move into the Central Coast of NSW in bigger numbers, and started to annoy people there. Their march has continued south, through Sydney and down past the Illawarra. They particularly love rainforests and wet, leafy, shady environments, but will make do with the lovely mulch on offer in most gardens.
Nowadays, on pretty much any bushwalk around Sydney, the Blue Mountains, or any coastal area north of Jervis Bay, I encounter brush turkeys. They waddle around, usually quite unperturbed by humans (unless you are running, in which case they stupidly run ahead of you), building their vast nest mounds, which average about 4m across and 1–2m high.
I've actually loved this change – seeing such a large, wild animal up close regularly is to me quite a joy. So much of our wildlife is skittish, only seen at night, or small (or all three), and it is wonderful to see these big black fowl (they grow to 75cm in length), with their red heads and yellow wattles, going about their business.

In spring and summer you can also see the gorgeous little brown chicks running through the scrub. 

There are some 22 mound-building birds in the world, and Australia has three of them: the brush turkey, the orange-footed scrubfowl (only in far northern Australia), and the rare arid-zone species, the malleefowl. All of them are bizarre in that they build these extraordinary mounds which are specifically designed to reach a very precise temperature – in the case of the brush turkey, 33°C. The male (who nearly always builds the nest) regularly takes mouthfuls of the rotting compost pile in the mound in order to determine the temperature, via a sensitive thermometer inside his mouth, then will adjust the mound by adding more material, or stripping it away to raise or lower the temperature.
About 16 eggs are laid into this massive mound, and the poor chicks, when they hatch seven weeks later, have to dig themselves out, and immediately fend for themselves. They can fly almost straight away, although they usually spend their days on the ground and only fly to a roost at night.
Now, I love them, but I understand I don't have any in my beautiful garden causing a ruckus (my three chooks do that already).
Evidently, once they have decided to build a mound, you are destined to have a mound whether you want one or not. Rather than continually trying to destroy the mound, or shoo away the bird, you are better (according to all the advice) to provide a spot for them, with plenty of mulch and shade, and then to use rocks or gravel for mulch in the rest of your garden, hoping that they'll leave the rest of your garden alone. I'd be keen to know if this works, or if you have any other stories of interactions with these birds.
Brush turkeys have had much of their natural habitat taken away and are still extinct in some areas of their original range. In so many ways, I'm delighted that these wild, bizarre creatures are coming back to some areas that were originally theirs to start with. Maybe we can get emus back next...
www.kensbigbackyard.com.au    

Nudists and campfires

Nudists and campfires

What do these two things have in common?

This year is a wonderful blank sheet. Who knows where any of us will be in a year, a month, even a week from now? Life continues to surprise, delight and occasionally exhaust me, and I am excited to be dreaming up a whole new year of things to do and posts to write. The majority will be on great ideas for things to do in the great outdoors, places and people who inspire me and stories from my travels as a journalist and lover of the outdoors. There will no doubt be more walks, canyons, rock climbs, campsites and mountain bike tracks to describe. Occasionally I'll write about something else that tickles my goat, but I hope always you'll find them enjoyable, accurate, well-researched and worth spending five minutes reading. Look out for a new category that I might call "Thecology", blending ecological understanding with the idea of a Creator figure.
Last year, in terms of readership, two of my posts stood out way above every other. One in particular has so far received three times more page views than any other post. And that, no surprise, was on Sydney's nudist colony. Yes, people, put the word nude, nudist or any hint of people seeing some flashed flesh, and you'll increase your hit ratio. It's a shame, but that's reality.
The next most popular post was on where can you have a campfire near Sydney. I'm glad that there are still enough people out there who want to camp and have a campfire to find this interesting, and I'll continue to search out good places (for myself as much as for you, dear reader!)
My part-time job as associate editor of RM Williams OUTBACK will no doubt take me to some pretty interesting places this year, and my own business as a freelance journalist and editor (yes, I am available for hire people) will hopefully get me into some other trouble around the country. I look forward to sharing insights, practical information, interviews and occasionally strong opinion about this wonderful, mixed up, exciting world we live in.
See you on the track.
www.kensbigbackyard.com.au

PS. Despite the Christmas rush, there's still plenty of copies of Top walks in NSW around, so grab one and plan to knock off a few walks in 2014.