WELCOME!

spring blows in

Sun, 5 Sep 2010 10:47:45 +1000

Photo: Near Bruthen, around Mossiface and Tambo Upper. I can tell you no more although I took the photo. There are many beautiful old sheds around east gippsland and the southern Monaro - leaning over and sinking to the ground, looking very photogenic.

The Great Dividing Range is definitely a barrier to weather. On the other side, rivers are topping their banks and houses are being evacuated in the biggest floods for 17 years and pretty little Creswick’s heritage shops are sitting in water. Here in East Gippsland we are getting the Monaro and South Coast’s winds, but not a drop of rain. The sun’s out and the daffodils have flowered over night. The silver wattles are turning gold. The wind is unsettling, but Spring is a season of winds, so nothing unusual there.

I apologise to my readers for the irregularity of my blogs. (I don’t know if I have any readers, actually.) Its a matter of time, solar power and subject matter. Today there’s a bit of all of those.

We’ve had a federal election, but there is no government yet. The election was the same day as Eleni’s 21st birthday party at the Scarlett Lounge in Richmond, which was very handy indeed. The food was excellent - tacas - prepared by the Centre for Refugees - and a good time was had by all, especially Eleni, who looked radiant. As did her sister and parents, in their older way.

Scarlet in name, Scarlet in colour. A great place for a party.

Good party, very interesting election results. What a night! The two party dominance rejected and the ALP still reeling from the response to its underrating of the intelligence of the ‘average’ Australian. There is no average - there might be a mean, on a range of numerical measures - but that is a fairly meaningless distillation of diverse views. The ‘mean’ showed the parties that Australians by and large want governments to be tough on (illegal) refugees, so out came those policies. Yet Australia as a whole rejected that.

Two weeks later we still have no government but I believe we are edging towards a rerun of the ALP but with so much conditionality imposed by the need to keep the Greens, Andrew Wilkie (interesting, that, in relation to Green politics in Tasmania and now nationally) and the ‘country’ independents on side. I am impressed by the thoughtfulness of Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, wondering if Bob Katter will blow it out of the water and seeing Tony Crook as another wild card - as anyone is, really, with so few seats needed to topple the government. I believe a chastened ALP could learn a lot from being forced to work in cooperation with others, it certainly made a difference in the ACT and Tasmania. But I do not believe that the ALP is capable of the change needed to make it a party which authentically represents the needs of Australia’s less than ruling classes. It is dominated by operators who have eschewed ethics in favour of outcomes narrowly defined. Its understanding of rural Australia is evidently weak - no wonder when all the attention is on marginal seats and winning the next election. Not many voters, but lots of seats.

As for the Greens, they have real power now, with the Senate majority (and a lower house member with potential colleagues on the crossbench - a foot in the door). I look forward to the change they can push from there.

We are in for interesting times!

Chooks, eggs and currawongs

Betty and Joan have been amazing, laying all through winter when they should have been having a rest. But in the hungry days of late winter, the eggs are eagerly sought by creatures other than me. Noting they were disappearing, and seeing the chooks getting agitated when choosing a laying spot, I remembered the currawongs that partied in the chook pen on occasion. There were 16 of them in there one day. Entering by the chooks’ back door (a wooden flap half way up the fence) like the parrots, they forgot how to get out. I went in there to help them remember. I even caught some with shadecloth then released them outside, hoping they would find the event so unpleasant that they would never return. One was not daunted, perhaps the same one who stole their eggs and broke the swallows’ nests to feast on the nestlings last year.

So to foil the currawong, the chooks are leading restricted lives. I lock them in every night and don’t let them out until they have laid their eggs. One afternoon I arrived home from the Neighbourhood House, opened their back flap noting there were two eggs and resolved to get them later, thinking the currawong couldn’t possibly be planning to visit that late in the day.

Wrong!

An hour later, the eggs were gone, although eggshell lay on the ground near the back flap. They must carry them, unbroken, in their large beaks. I used to find eggshell on the track 300 metres away, dropped from a high branch.

http://www.ozanimals.com/image/albums/australia/Bird/normal_N_Tilcheff-PiedCurrawong_05.jpg

I thought it would be a great permaculture technique to put them for half an hour on nice days in the old rabbit hutch so they could dig over newly prepared ground in the garden. Yesterday, they liked it. Today they were tetchy - because Betty wanted to lay an egg, as it turned out. They were compacting the ground with restless stomping instead of breaking it up.

There aren’t too many chooks you can pick up and carry under your arm and it makes them easy to manage. Even so, I can’t let them into my garden to free range because they love digging new ground and dislodging baby plants.

The goats are waxing nicely and have stopped getting out now that Chappie, the buck, has gone back to his home. I am feeding them heaps to encourage them to stick around and keep them healthy as they grow new goats for November-December birth.

Life logistics

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:25:35 +1000

You people who rely upon others to maintain your basic services, rejoice! I bet you take it for granted, that you can make a phone call when your plumbing goes wrong and know that when the power goes off, someone is already fixing it.

The glorious independence of managing your own systems fades when they go wrong. Summer presents the obvious water problems - not enough of it - but in winter, the hazards are different. Ice. On several frosty mornings my water system has frozen, to the extent that an icicle was, until 10 am, hanging off the outlet pipe through which the hot water service’s steam escapes. On those sorts of mornings, its not till 11.30 or so that the water pipes to the house unfreeze.

I consider myself a plumber. I had a week of constipated hot water because all the freezing put an airlock in the system. No showers and constant kettles on the stove (amazing how often you need hot water). A neighbour banged the pipes with a rolling pin and I kept turning taps on and off again, but finally it fixed itself when rain filled up the top tank. When no action is better than intervention.

If only I could fix everything that way!

I’ve got plenty of wood so life is comfortable. There is the radio drama of the federal election to amuse and exasperate. The way I deal with it - the shortsightedness, the populism, the focus on personalities not policies - is to see it as theatre, which it is meant to be, so tightly scripted. Ad libbing leads to trouble.

Its close to a melodrama - the dashing villain Abbot and dark characters like Latham appearing from a past littered with politically dead bodies to haunt Julia. Boadicea or Lady Macbeth? Depends on your political colour, your cynicism, your understanding of politics, including inside the Labor party.

Of course, while hilarious (sort of, and I can’t wait to catch up with Gruen and the Chaser during off-peak internet access time) its also immeasurably sad. If you believe what the scientists are telling us about climate change, then its morally reprehensible - for ALP and Coalition to be competing about who can offer least.

There is some very good news though - the valiant case being fought against VicForests for Brown Mountain has been won. It couldn’t not have been - the potoroos were there after all, not that VicForests wanted to see them.

And on the home front: Chappie, the prize boar buck from Goongerah, has nestled up with every one of my five does. Mind you, despite his wimpiness ands generally amiable character, he’s changed their pecking order; whoever he likes is (second) top goat. Mostly its the one who was bottom of the heap before - Ochre (the year she was born was an O year). The girls might be happy to see him go (he eats a lot too). That’s Chappie and Nellie in the photo with Ovaltine coming up behind - on a morning when the grass was silvered with frost.

And in November- December, dear little kids will be running and climbing everywhere and I will be trying each doe out for milking. There will be home-made fetta and perhaps even camembert.... Stay tuned to find out what really happens.

july is the cruelest month

Sun, 4 Jul 2010 22:51:28 +1000

Temperatures below minus 5 degrees for a week at Cabanandra, followed by cloudy days. Not good for solar power generation and bad for water systems.

I have been supplementing my solar energy with petrol generated energy because I now have a fridge and modem to run. A sunlight deficit is the disadvantage of my house site. Even on sunny days, Garden Hill swallows the sun around 3 pm in winter. On the other hand, the house is protected from the most severe winds which rattle the ridge top houses’ rooves. Also, the earlier loss of sun in summer- 6ish - is a blessed relief for plants and me.

I was away for most of the frosts; mind you, Melbourne had its coldest day in 49 years during my 20 hours there. I was visiting El, taking the train from Traralgon between two meetings on subsequent days, enjoying the two hour trip, chatting with people I would otherwise never have met. I went to my first movie in nearly two years (Mother and Child) with my child (who wept through it). We ate at Ghurka’s in Bridge Road - walking back to the flat was painful with that gritty city wind cutting through us.

When I arrived back to frosty, cloudy Cabanandra, the solar system had turned itself off (the freezer was still frozen, just). Luckily the batteries had built up again to light my night and save my food as the generator didn’t want to start.

The next morning I discovered that the water system from tank to house had sprung a leak - no wonder, the world was white with frost and buckets had ice two centimetres thick. I stuck the faulty section of poly pipe up with Gladwrap and packing tape, which lessened the stream to a steady drip. No ACTEW nor any plumber within 100 k so I had to deal with my first plumbing crisis.

How lucky that Gary S, a neighbour and co-co-opee, goes into Bombala every Friday without fail. He kindly took the generator and brought it back, repaired, by John Neven, once a bright eyed red haired little schoolboy at Tubbut. Gary was also able to pick up the joiners I need to repair the hose.

So today I tackled the plumbing job. I am pleased to say that it went without a hitch; I cut the right length of hose, I managed all the bits of the joiners and I lagged it with old towels and packing plastic, tying it up with wire and string. These processes which looked so intimidating that I let Bob do it all - lots of wives say a secret thank goodness for gender stereotyped roles. Now I discover that plumbing follows logical rules which I am quite capable of grasping.

I rewarded myself by planting the kiwi fruit vines and two fig trees. I love planting trees. In choosing its spot, I picture each one grown and the space it will take and create; how it will get along with its neighbours; its water needs and sun requirements. Then I dig a hole, sometimes resorting to the crowbar. Soil depth is negligible in some spots around the house. I throw in a bit of gypsum, to break down the clay, and then mix some well rotted horse manure with the soil, place the tree and fill the hole up with soil/manure mix. I step the soil down, sprinkle more manure and dolomite and ash, if its not an acid-lover. Then I place a netting tree guard around it - rabbits ringbarking the trunk and wallabies chewing leaves are the biggest threats to young trees - and last, but not least, I cut a piece of poly pipe and hammer it in the soil near the trees roots so it can be economically and directly watered.

Tomorrow I will plant the nashis and pears and the two chestnuts. Then I believe I will have in my orchard/garden most of the food-growing trees that will grow in this climate. A lifetime of pruning and putting up bird netting awaits me.

draped nectarine trees last summer

Out there in the political world, the big news is that we are led by a woman prime minister at last. Why don’t I feel gleeful? Many feminists do. She’s a ‘can-do’ woman. She did it and that is great. But I don’t like the way it was done. And I’m pretty sure I won’t like her policies on climate change, refugees and resource-based corporates given her history. But I will be happy to be wrong.

Oh for leaders who lead - to where we need to go. Oh for a media that doesn’t look for the controversy every time, making the real issues just part of the game.

This is so evident on the topic of climate change. First, we don’t hear about it very often (doesn’t have the bug stunning stats the media likes - even fast melting glaciers take a while). When a new finding or prediction catches the media’s eye (on a quiet day) the scientist may be interviewed. Because each scientist has to be ‘balanced’ by a (human-induced) climate change denier, these men (as they invariably are) give the appearance of representing 50% of the population, their views deemed as worthy as the evidence-based research findings of scientists. Climate change is a difficult issue, its implications are life changing so people would like to forget it and the sceptics give the appearance that there is some doubt. This has done the damage.

So Julia can leave climate change for now.... pull the asylum-seeker string instead. A sustainable population? Of course, so long as human rights aren’t thrown out along the way. And ‘sustainable’ is a whole lot more than numbers.

When will the chill winds blow?

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:39:11 +1000

They did for one day, yesterday, and the Cross Border Communities group picnicking in Delegate shivered without our scarves and beanies, because we haven’t yet changed our wardrobes over to winter.

But that was an aberration and it looks like I have won my bet that there would be no frosts before the full moon - tonight. Winter here starts with the first series of frosts and intensifies when there is snow on Tingaringy. We are still having sunny days with temperatures in the late teens. So I am planting and things are still growing. Few of the deciduous trees have yet shown their colours and I saw jonquils budding in a Delegate garden yesterday. Is it climate change?

This friend is worried because she has observed far fewer insects this summer. Without insects, there will be no birds.

Even though everything has slowed down, and most of the summer plants are exhausted and ready to sink into the soil, I am waiting for a frost before harvesting the pumpkins. Frost blackens and shrivels the leaves revealing the fruit underneath. It also hardens their skins and makes them better keepers. I am not sure where I will keep them - already I seem to have populations of mice in the chook pen, the greenhouse, the shed...

The sunrise above is from Cape Conran where I recently spent a wonderful weekend at the DSE cabins with colleagues from the Centre for Rural Communities. We spent hours beating the East Gippsland Sustainability Kit into shape punctuated by good food and walks. The cabins are amazing, and designed by my old friend Ric Butt from Strine Design in Canberra. Each hut is made from different indigenous timbers.

This is Cabin No 1, with walls of silver wattle and ceiling of blackwood. A kookaburra stole Andrea’s toast - can you call native birds feral? - and we spotted a long-nosed bandicoot one evening.

Friends from Canberra and Cobargo visited on Anzac Day weekend. We cooked, ate, talked, walked and planted two lemon trees. Very nice to feed people from the bounty of my garden and pantry, but also nice to enjoy their city cheeses.

Other eyes when walking are very useful - I would have missed this native snail.

I was sad to hear of the death of Fred Halliday over the weekend. Born in 1946, he was not much older than I am but heaps more productive with several more books still waiting to be published. A theorist within the International Relations discipline, he set up the Open Democracy web site. I cited him in my thesis (now a book) because he was one of the IR theorists who recognised gender as an issue. And he was unusual in that he had something to say about population.

Halliday: “the issue of demography is perhaps the most important single challenge facing the contemporary world ... As much as any other contemporary issue, it embodies concerns of state power, moral diversity and transnational consequence” (Halliday 1996, 322).

I wrote about the population issue for the Victorian Greens newsletter, an article to be published in June. You can be the first to read it on this web site (See writings).

Post-easter realities

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 11:05:49 +1000

It was a bit silly to adopt the festivals of the northern hemisphere holus-bolus. Easter is all about death and fertility and signified by eggs and rabbits. Obviously, fertility has won out over that significant death, the founding myth(?) of the Christian religion, a death which nonetheless means nothing to the vast majority of humans. Still, a four-day holiday is always appreciated.

Over the years, Australians have made the Easter holiday ours. We take off in droves towards the coast or the mountains or we prepare to receive visitors, if we are lucky enough to live in a nice place. Many go to the cities and towns for the various festivals, with Canberra a site for folkie pilgrims. We indulge our own individual spiritual senses.

I was a host this year and enjoyed the opportunity to sit and talk - actually, there wasn’t much of that because the visitors included three children, ten, seven and five - cook for more than one person and share produce from the garden. Apart from my six visitors, there were people all over the various properties which make up Warm Corners. So lots of cups of tea and coffee as people walked from one end to the other.

One of my guests turned my immediate landscape into an expansive Red Hill/Toorak style lawn making sounds with the lawn mower I tried not to hear as blade met rock. He also planted three new fruit trees, including a lime. I am going to venture into a small citrus orchard because I cannot live without lemons (about $1 each at present) and my potted lemon tree can’t do it alone. My very unscientific observation is that the weather is trending warmer, making citrus less risky. My bet is that our first frost won’t be until the end of the month at the next full moon. I will admit to losing if I am wrong. I would like to be wrong, of course, if it means that climate change has reversed.

At what point do we stop the fight to make governments and corporations act to prevent catastrophic climate change and settle in for adaptation? Luckily, at the practical level, the measures are much the same. I hope my place remains a haven of biodiversity and CO2 sequestration no matter what happens elsewhere.

It was especially good to have children around the place. In cold turkey from their keyboards and the drone of TV, they played Monopoly, made cubbies, skimmed rocks and paddled in the creek, watched selected DVDs, made apple juice in the fruit press, chopped wood, rode horses and kept everyone on their toes.

At the Bonang Hall on Saturday night, they danced (and were the only ones, apart from me who joined them for a bit). The music gig and barbecue were the first such events at Bonang for a long time and a mix of people turned out (half of them were our visitors!) Not exactly the National Folk Festival, peculiarly Bonang.

Easter in Australia is many things: our harvest festival, the transition from summer to autumn, fair weather, warm currents near the beach and, this year, the end of daylight saving. Up here, it used to herald the first frost, revealing the pumpkins beneath the withered blackened leaves, the chillies, tomatoes and other frost-sensitives’ skeletons on the fence. Despite the lack of this stark marker of the season’s passing, the evenings will be drawing in, giving us less time between work’s end and evening’s beginning: life is real, life is earnest. Politicians will turn their mind to elections, and we will hear about it incessantly in the media and for most urban-dwellers, the firewood-gathering instinct will be directed to the general accumulation of wealth which is, sadly, the prime motivation many people take to their work each day.

As for me, my winter security depends on finding a friendly reliable firewood-cutter. The pantry is full but the woodshed is emptying.

rain in a dry season

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:30:35 +1100

Two inches of rain in two days. Nice! and still warm so everything is growing madly. (I must go out and check against monster zucchinis.) Only one complaint - I clomped around for too long in wet boots and socks yesterday and now I have a sore throat. If it progresses it will be my first cold since returning to Cabanandra.

How can it progress with so many vitamins being consumed daily?

Rain in a dry season was the title of a novel I was writing and serialising in The Local Rag in the 1980s. It bore a startling similarity to my own life at the time and had to be discontinued in order not to incriminate anyone, most particularly myself. I still like it as a title though and am glad to be using it - somewhere.

I still dream about a novel but will have to wait for the pension so I have time to write it. Five years to go.... I read so many good books - having had a Margaret Atwood binge lately, with Crake and Onyx and the Year of the Flood - that I doubt my ability to produce anything that is not derivative of other authors or another version of my own life. Parts of which do read like a novel.

Politics touch the lives of all, even non-politicians. The Coalition is so excited because it has found a flaw it can finger in Peter Garrett’s performance as Minister for the Environment. The great idea of green loans for energy-efficient improvements was thwarted in the execution, as ‘too many’ people, excited by the idea of earning money for doing something worthwhile paid for their training and then waited for the work - which tended to go to the larger companies, not the small energy auditing businesses. Furthermore, so many people jumped at the chance to reduce their energy bills that a three year project will be lucky to last a year.

The insulation scheme looks like sharing a similar fate. Its the one that touches me, as my lovely house was never finished, and the A-frame iron roof is lined only with sisalation; no ceiling yet as it has been waiting thirty years for its owners (once Bob and kids and me, now me) to be able to afford insulation. I thought that the government scheme might help. Well there have been some hitches. For a start, the nearest licensed operator is in Orbost and despite promises, hasn’t yet made it up to look at my place. Why should he when there is plenty of work close to hand? I have contacted the government and spoken to a very nice woman, who rang the installer and put the hard word on him. Another phone call from him, but no appearance yet.

I have a builder lined up who would install the ceiling at the same time as the bats are put in; indeed would put the bats in himself but he is not a certified installer (and doesn’t want to be, since he has enough work as a builder and isn’t at all greedy).

In an isolated situation like this the sensible thing would be to reimburse on production of proof of the work being done to the house-owner’s satisfaction. This would put the onus on the householder and off the Minister. A political win-win and more people in need able to access the grant.

The problem common to these schemes is hasty execution, under-estimation of the need for the services in the community and putting it out to the ‘market’. First news was of the rorting and lack of oversight on contractors aiming to make money rather than do the job properly. Second was of the need to import fibreglass bats from China and now we hear that many of the bats are overdosed with formaldehyde. Third was the use of foil insulation in some cases which led to the deaths of 4 installers.

I am pessimistic about my ability to access the scheme, but am determined to be insulated and ceilinged before next winter. It is hard to keep warm in a house where the heat of two fires leaks out through the roof into the world - and to sit huddled by a stove when the house rattles emptily.

But I hate to see the Liberal climate deniers howling for blood when their contribution to reduce greenhouse gases was exactly nil, when they had the chance.

There are good things happening at the local level. the live music gig at the Delegate Show which I am organising along with Cross Border Communities (you won’t find a web site) is shaping up despite the pulling out of the exciting Goongerah band, Guitarded, due to a Goolengook forest celebration. I am calling for musicians to leave their mountain homes and strut their stuff. After the Show events are finished, Penny and John Judges’ bush band will start up - and from then on, its the blackboard.

Cross Border Communities is a sort of Transition Towns group - we are on about sustainability, building links across the Vic-NSW border and strengthening the local economy. It made sense to put our energy into strengthening an existing institution, the Agricultural Show, to augment the dwindling number of organisers and to attract a new bunch of people who don’t normally attend the Show.

In my paid work with the Centre for Rural Communities developing a kit for communities in East Gippsland to use to think about sustainability, I am getting very excited reading from the web many fantastic resources that are out there to do exactly that - help communities think about and come up with strategies to make their communities more sustainable. Canada is a particularly rich source and if the net is a guide, there are lots of great things happening there. Including at Whistler, where the Olympic Sports are being held. The Natural Step has manuals which are particularly user-friendly and now I am looking forward to using some of their strategies to find out what communities see as their sustainability issues.

At the home base, most of the work is related to food. Harvesting is now the major job in the garden, and second comes dealing with all the produce. Since my cucumbers were rejected by the Delegate fruit show for looking less than perfect, I have turned some into bread and butter cucs, made kasoundi with my tomatoes, plum jam with Jo’s plums, as well as bottling and drying them. I have made blackberry jam and bottled some - the most desirable preserved fruit in the middle of winter.

With Eleni and Bowen now ensconced in their Richmond flat, playing house, I have somewhere to send some of the dried fruit and jams and pickles my kitchen is producing. Can’t let the next generation starve!