Silently, daily, diligently – cow plop beetles at work

Australia, I’ve just learned, is the home of an organization known as CRC CARE, which stands for Co-operative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment.

In a media release optimistically entitled “Here comes the clean-up army,” CRC CARE is promoting a book of articles about the possibilities of “clever trees, smart shrubs, cunning grasses and designer fungi” that may be used to produce “truly clean cities for the first time since cities were built.”

For only $230 you can buy “Trace Elements in the Environment,” edited by Ravi Naidu. For free you can learn more about it at www.ScienceAlert.com.au.

That web site is edited by Julian Cribb who published a related but less optimistic article recently in “The Australian” newspaper about how a reduction in rainfall due to climate change may bring back to this continent something it seems to have had not so long ago -- a plague of flies.

Flies used to be so bad here that eating outdoors in the summertime could be a health hazard and sweaty backs would be quickly covered. The plague may return if the worst-ever drought continues.

Plop, plop

Why? Because dung beetles need rain-softened soil in order to bury the 270 million cow patties that plop down on Aussie dirt every day. Left on top of the ground, each of these bovine gifts, Cribb writes, can produce 3,000 flies within two weeks. Let’s see… 270 million times 3,000 times the number of hot days each years equals: a lot of flies.

There’s no plague of flies here now but, sometimes and in some places, flies can be bad enough to encourage the sale of not-so-cool hats with drop-down nets that keep flies off one’s face and neck. A couple of those green hats made hiking north of Sydney possible for me and my wife last summer.

Without nets dangling from our hat brims, we’d have been driven batty by Blue Mountain flies, but according to Cribb we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet if the worst drought in Australia’s history turns out to be non-transitory, a permanent feature of climate change. Too much dry, hard dirt and our beetle friends are shut down.

The relatively fly-less life we enjoy is due to an expert in beetles who introduced the little dung collectors here forty some years ago in a program that Cribb says is probably “the greatest recycling enterprise in our national history.”

George B’s beetles

It may not be wise to consider too closely why these beetles choose to ball up and bury cow poop, but the result for humankind is the enrichment of pastures as well as the removal of millions of fly nurseries. The increased yields of meat, milk, and wool should have made this scientist’s name an Aussie household word, except that his business card read: George Boremissza, coleopterist.

George B’s program was axed after a couple of decades and Cribb says dung beetle science here is dead as the dodo, with only a few scientists trying to figure out what to do if the beetles can’t continue to silently, daily, diligently save our necks from flies.

It’s not the kind of science we do these days, Cribb says, in part because it doesn’t generate intellectual property that can create profit. Trees, grasses, and fungi that may absorb pollutants in the soils of our cities, it seems, have greater corporate income potential.

So, are we headed for cleaner cities that are fly-blown?

It showered yesterday in our part of Brisbane. Not enough to help a beetle, I fear. Just enough to darken the pavement, but a reminder that rain may someday return.

Meanwhile, though, with reservoirs at 30% of capacity or less, one hears few Australians poo-pooing global warming and its effects. And I’m thinking about how to make a hat with a drop-down net that reaches to the ankles.

Or, of course, we could all become vegetarian. Fewer beef eaters = fewer cows. Fewer cows = fewer plops. Fewer plops = fewer flies. Eat your veggies; save the world.

Maybe I’ll write a book about that idea, which I hereby claim as intellectual property. Maybe I’ll publish it myself. Maybe I’ll offer it for $230 a copy. Or maybe I’ll just do a rain dance. What do you suggest?

New Orleans a Year Later

After the Katrina disaster, I challenged a widely-distributed email critique of the people trapped in New Orleans at the Convention Center and the Superdome. Brisbane folk had been quite civil when this place flooded in 1974 and the writer found the behavior of New Orleans citizens, "minorities" in particular, to be shameful and a sign of the decline of Western civilization.

I argued that the situations were not comparable. Now it turns out that the horrifying reports of civil unrest among the flood victims were wrong. Despite the appalling conditions that existed there a little more than a year ago, only one violent death at those locations has been confirmed and it was a suicide. “People comported themselves with patience, with generosity toward those with even less, and with as much dignity as they could manage,” writes John Biguenet in an Aug. 20 New York Times web journal article.

Nearly everything we think we know about what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, he says, is probably wrong.

About 1,300 New Orleanians, about half white and half black, died from drowning, dehydration, and/or exposure within a week, but they were not victims of a natural disaster, he says. Other areas took the brunt of the storm and parts of New Orleans that would soon flood were high and dry after the storm had passed.

Katrina itself didn’t kill those people, Biguenet argues, citing the draft final report of the U. S. Corps of Engineers, in which the Corps admits: “foundation failures occurred prior to water levels reaching the design levels of protection, causing breaching and subsequent massive flooding and extensive losses.”

Only parts of New Orleans is below sea level. Biguenet and his wife own a house that sits a foot above sea level, but his neighborhood now floods uncharacteristically after rains. Why? The Corps of Engineers has, since the hurricane, plugged up a drainage canal, reducing drastically its ability to carry away water.

One thing most of us are probably right about? FEMA functioned terribly. The little horror story at the end of Biguenet’s report is well worth reading in the Aug. 20, 2006, New York Times.

Green Bridge Middle Closing Today...Hooray!

“Only four or five people a week will use it,” predicted a retired gentleman waiting on a park bench this morning to see the middle section of the St. Lucia-Dutton Park Green Bridge set into place, but he’s wrong. This suspension structure spanning the Brisbane River is coming together ahead of schedule and my wife and I will be among herds of folks using it several times a week as soon as it opens, perhaps before the end of the year.

A crane was in place this morning to lift a 3.6 meter mid-section piece into place and with that done, only a span over Sir William MacGregor Drive on the west end will be unconnected. Earlier this week the eastern end was linked to its approach ramp, so this $55.5 million (AU dollars) bridge for busses, walkers and bike peddlers is tantalizingly close to becoming useful.

What a joy it has been to see the two towers rise up out of the river over the past year and then to watch the decking spread bit by bit in both directions from each one. I have a few hundred digital photos of its progress and I think it's a beautiful structure.

A contest is underway now to name it, and one of the names being considered is “Green Bridge.” That would get my vote.

Another choice may be made by the officials, but this will always be the Green Bridge to me and, I suspect, to most of the rest of us who have watched it rise from the river. May it help keep UQ, St. Lucia, Dutton Park, Annerley, Fairfield, and the rest of Brisbane green and lively for many generations to come.

Oh, no! 01:02:03 04/05/06

Oh, no! 01:02:03 04/05/06

A friend in the United States sent me this:
>>On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. That won't ever happen again!!!!!!! Thank you.... You may now return to your life.<<

But it won't be true here, where the day is listed before the month and a digital timepiece might show 01:02:03 05/04/06. Not so much magic in that. I suppose Australia experienced a similar event at a minute and two seconds after midnight on the morning of April 3 last year when the time was 00:01:02 03/04/05.

We've heard no reports of major social disruptions because of that, but then we live in Brisbane, where people appreciate calm and boast that they live in "a big country town." Perhaps Sydneysiders partied in the streets.

I can't say because we were not here then. And we won't be where clocks line up so sequentially on Wednesday morning. We seem to be missing out on a lot of good stuff, just as we missed out on June 25 of last year completely. Who knows what happened that day?! Well, I supposed you may know, but we don't. Evidently we slept through it on a Qantas flight from LAX.

Oh, well. Australia gets its chance on the 4th day of May. So, you might say, it IS happening again, in Her Majesty’s Kingdom.

Wherever you are and whichever day this happens for you, I hope you enjoy this numerical oddity. But remember to celebrate responsibly. Your neighbors may not appreciate fireworks at 01:02:03 in the morning, especially if they are uninformed, which is surely what I would be except for having a friend in Maine, where people have time to notice major events.

-- Somewhat Befuddled in Brisbane Bob

Pre-emptive homesickness

“The farther from Texas a Texan gets, the more Texan he becomes,” wrote Willie Morris. Even though he was from Mississippi, he got that right. He’d spent some time at the University of Texas in Austin before moving to New York, writing books, and editing Harpers magazine. After a few years in Massachusetts, I developed a taste for something I had disdained while growing up: country western music. C&W for short.

All that “born to lose” and “your cheatin’ heart” music, I’d concluded, contributed to the pervasive sense of depression and defeatism I experienced in the part of rural Texas in which I grew up. I wanted nothing to do with that. Give me jazz and folk music and rock. Then, after a few years, I began to re-discover Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson. Next thing I knew, I’d begun to care, for the first time, if Oklahoma beat Texas in the Cotton Bowl. Suddenly, I could be brought almost to tears by hearing Dolly Parton sing about how she would always love me. Yee gads! Football? Country music? Thousands of miles from Texas, I had, in fact, become more Texan than I’d ever been.

Now, although I’m living in an entirely different hemisphere, I don’t feel so distant from “the old country.” The world is tighter because of this – the Internet and email – and because of air travel and cheap long distance phone cards. On so many different levels, everything is interconnected now and we’re only beginning to realize how profoundly that is so. I’m in Australia and one of every 20 Australians is living somewhere else, many in the United States, some in Texas. I wonder if it’s all different now, or if some of them have begun to develop new-found appreciation for Slim Dusty?

For sure they have to miss the sound of kookaburras. Just thinking about a time when I might be living somewhere else and unable to occasionally hear their loud, racous, insane, laughter-like sounds gives me a taste of what a nephew of mine refers to as “pre-emptive homesickness.”

Now there’s a term that could form the basis of a country and western song: homesickness for something you haven’t left yet.

Oh, wait… I think it’s already been done. I vaguely remember a C&W song that says “I miss you already and you’re not even gone.” Drat! My song-writing career is over before it could soar.

Hmmm. Maybe not. Let’s see... in the key of G… “Before I got started…”

The smell is not Chanel...

To my friend, Bill: Thanks for not accepting uncritically the email headed: ‘From Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia.’

This not-dated email claims to offer statistics on what’s happened Down Under now that it has been ‘12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.’ Ed Chenel, if there is such a person, claims that in the first year homicides increased 6.2%, assaults were 9.6% more frequent, and armed robberies shot up 44%.

His point: ‘The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens. Take note Americans, before it's too late!’

A quick search of the Internet’s Australian sites reveals that this email has been circulating, unchanged and apparently unquestioned by touch-not-my-gun folk, since at least as far back as Dec. 7, 2002, when members of a forum were asking, as you did, ‘Can this be true?’

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Ed Chenel email wasn’t accurate in 2002. Charged with keeping national crime statistics, this government agency reported: ‘Between 2001 and 2002, the proportion of murders, attempted murders, kidnapping/abductions and robberies that involved a weapon decreased.’ Note: DECREASED.

Two researchers, Mouzos and Rushforth, published in the January 2004 journal of the Australian Institute of Criminology a study entitled, ‘Firearm Related Deaths in Australia, 1991-2001.’ They found a 47% decrease in the numbers of firearm-related deaths during those ten years.

In April of 2005, using data submitted by police in Australian states and territories, the National Armed Robbery Monitoring Program found that more than twice as many people reporting armed robberies faced knives (46% of victims) as faced guns (20% of victims).

My web search of Australian sites showed me that the Chenel piece smells, but not like Chanel.

Finally, it occurred to me that this email might be something long since identified as bogus, so I went to the www.snopes.com web site and typed the supposed author’s name into their site-search engine. Bingo!

This much-circulated email has been well known for quite some time as untrustworthy. The Snopes site says: ‘The piece quoted above leads the reader to believe that much of the Australian citizenry owned handguns until their ownership was made illegal and all firearms owned by ‘law-abiding citizens’ were collected by the government through a buy-back program in 1997. This is not so. Australian citizens do not (and never did) have a constitutional right to own firearms — even before the 1997 buyback program, handgun ownership in Australia was restricted to certain groups, such as those needing weapons for occupational reasons, members of approved sporting clubs, hunters, and collectors.’

The guns banned after 1997 were primarily semi-automatics and pump-action weapons and ownership of those is allowed in some cases.

Writing in January 2004, the fraud-busters note that ‘the Australia-wide percentage of homicides committed with firearms is now lower than it was before the gun buy-back program, and lower than it has been at any point during the past ten years.’

Maybe that’s one of the reasons this American living in Australia feels safer here than at home. Take note Americans, before it’s too late.

Damned if I know…

A Canadian friend of mine wrote me recently that he’s pleased that I’ve settled into the part of “Her Majesty’s dominion” that is, with the possible exception of Alberta, most like Texas.

Both Queensland and Alberta do remind me of Texas in some ways. I was in Calgary during their annual Stampede week once, a rodeo-centered celebration much like the Texas State Fair, though smaller, of course. (We Texans still think size matters, except in regard to Alaska.)

Surrounded by plains as flat as the Texas Panhandle, many Calgarians, by their own choice or feeling pressured to do so by their civic-minded employers, spent the week dressed in cowboy hats, jeans, and sometimes even pointy-toed boots with high tops and big heels. Unfortunately, I didn’t own any cowboy boots, but I had jeans and I borrowed a hat with a wide brim to wear to the Stampede grounds.

I don’t see many cowboy hats here, but, as in Calgary, it is easy to imagine oneself to be within the bounds of her Majesty’s dominion. Bill Bryson, in his fine book about this continent called “In a Sunburned Country,” reminds us that Australian citizenship became possible only in 1949. Until then, Australians were British. To this day, Lions Clubs here open their meetings with a toast to the queen and no one has ask, “Which queen?”

So we’ve had to learn how to drive on the wrong side of the road while steering from the passenger seat. Canada somehow managed to escape that oddity, at least.

Australians also show their British heritage when they speak. Subways are “trams,” for example, baby carriages are “prams,” grocery carts are “trolleys,” and candies are “lollies.” The term “bloody” gets used a bit.

-- Our dams are low

Some of the terms and usages that strike our American ears as unusual seem to be logical variations of phrases we use, improvements, even. People here don’t “take a look,” they “have a look.”

Others make no sense to me at all. Clerks in stores use “thank you” where I’m accustomed to hearing “please,” as in, “That will be $12.98, thank you.” I’ve never heard “please” here at the end of these requests.

Chickens are “chooks.”

“Mob” often gets used a lot affectionately to refer to family, as in “our mob,” although it also means Mafia.

You may not need to raise your voice to “shout a beer” for someone. You just buy the next round.

But shouting is involved in “barracking.” My Aussie Pocket Oxford Dictionary says barracking can be either jeering at someone or cheering them on, as in “We’re going to barrack for the Lions.”

And then their’s the word “dam.”

For months there’s been too little rain both here and in the parts of Texas where my brothers live, and Brisbane’s water restrictions are about to become a notch more severe.

Why? Because, the local papers and newscasters say, the dams are low.

Then we should build those dams up, shouldn’t we, raise them higher so they can back up larger lakes of water when rains finally come? Wrong. Here, in Australia, “dams” are what I believe the rest of the world refers to as lakes.

There’s a beautiful color picture in a book I’m reading now, a naturalist’s report of a year spent in a rural area close to Melbourne, and the caption says, “Sunset reflected in a dam below Cochran’s Gap.” It’s a photo of water. The “dam” is the water itself, collected behind a …

Until this week when I asked the guy who drives the ferry we ride across the Brisbane River from Dutton Park to the University of Queensland, I didn’t know what Aussies call that damn thing that holds the water back. It is, he said, “the dam wall.”

Perhaps I should have guessed. The lake… I mean, the dam, is held back by the dam wall.

In the name of politeness, I am censoring all remarks beginning with “Up against the dam wall, you….” Politeness, I’m glad to report, does matter here a great deal.

-- Polite as Texans and then some

We Texans pride ourselves on being polite and friendly, but residents of Brizzy (as our city is called by people caught up in the national drive to save letters and breath whenever possible) are friendlier than most Texans in towns or cities of similar size.

You cannot stand still on a Brisbane street with a map in your hand without someone immediately asking if you need help. Even in the middle of Ekka, the Brizzy equivalent of the Texas State Fair, our brief pause to figure things out not only got us verbal directions to a display we wanted to visit, but a helpful critique of what parts of it were worth visiting and which were not, plus a tip about where to find free samples of wine, snacks, and honey. All this from a woman pushing a pram and holding the hand of a fidgety four-year-old.

And, bless them, our friends here make frequent use of a word I thought was a Texas colloquialism, "reckon," as in “I reckon so.” Makes me feel as at home as fried okra, but the politeness of these folks warms my heart.

Both Australians and the Texans I grew up with are careful to avoid giving offence. There’s a delightful civility about the Canadians I’ve met also (granted, I’ve never been to Montreal), but the politeness of Aussies is both noticeable and pleasant.

Sometimes, it can be tactical, too. I’d wondered about the frequency with which I was getting asked, “Are you from Canada?” Or, “Are you from Canada or the US?” Never having pronounced “about” so that it rhymed with “boot,” I began to suspect that politeness was involved in these questions.

A neighbor has now confirmed for me that suspicion. Because US folks are never offended by being thought of as Canadian but Canadians can get huffy if they're "accused" of being from the US, polite Aussies take no chances.

Being still in touch with what's going on with the US government and foreign policy via several US newspapers on-line and, on cable TV, delayed broadcasts of the CBS Evening News, I've been working on my Canadian accent. Maybe I can learn to “pass,” eh?

Oh, well, according to someone Bill Bryson interviewed for his travel book, Queenslanders are all “as crazy as a barrel of cut snakes,” anyway. What a put-down! Not at all polite.

That colourful falsehood makes me think of New Englanders describing a person of suspect abilities as being “one brick shy of a load” or, worse yet, “soft as a grape.”

My favorite put-down phrase, though, sounds Texan to my ears. About me and about most of the others attending Calgary’s Stampede the year I was there, you could have truly said, preferably with a bit of a drawl, “He’s all hat and no cattle.”

Now, that is a put-down!

Thanks for reading this. I reckon I’ll blog again one day soon, the lord willin’ and the dams don’t rise. -- Bob