Apocalyptic Days

Rock of Ages Blown Away

These apocalyptic dust storms are becoming a little tiring. Everyone at the annual local tree fair stands around discussing everything but the weather for a change, trying to ignore the obvious disaster occurring all around us as insinuating tendrils of dry distant Lake Eyre slip into our nostrils and silt up our lungs.

There are less people buying trees this year. Everyone mingles on the margins of the old corroboree ground, gossipping round the edge of the racetrack whose green grass covers the old celebration circle of the Gumbaynggirr tribe. There was once a magical crystal-studded pool at one of the centres of the oval track, filled with pure water, studded and girt with clear quartz columns. It was bulldozed to a morass of broken rock and muddy soil two generations ago, desecrated by rednecks to ‘keep the boongs away’.

They created a muddy dam in another spot instead, to water the cattle that are fattened on the old corroboree ground. As I’m too fond of saying (in paraphrase of Joni Mitchell’s Parking Lot), you can’t know what you’ve lost when it’s gone.

It’s not as if the Gumbaynggirr tribe is extinct, or been displaced by the forced evictions and removals that were meted out to them by the invading Eurosurpers. They still live everywhere hereabouts, but the sacred corroboree ground is now a dream lurking somewhere in the soil.

My mother lived on the hill opposite the gates of the racecourse with my grandparents and her older sister Dolly, where they ran market gardens and nurtured fruit trees until the Great Depression. That was before imported fruit flies destroyed the local stone fruit industry, and before the region dried up and blew away. Much of Oz was enveloped in dustbowl conditions seventy and eighty years ago, just like the trashed middle portions of the United States. Most of the primordial forest along this eastern seaboard had just been decimated by the first massive wave of ‘land clearing’. That was the last time the dust blew this thickly; an old-time human lifetime ago.

My grandfather Richard is a tall pillar of rugged pink flesh in my memory, surmounted by a bushy white beard and a crumpled Stetson hat. He died when I was a toddler, but my Random Access Memory can still draw on images of the elderly Scotsman who took his new Aboriginal bride to the hill above the racetrack. My mother’s and her mother’s stories, and those of my Auntie Dolly, fill in a minute fraction of the vast gaps of my modern ignorance; all of them are long gone, now, and hardly anyone alive in this rural region remembers them today.

When my mother was a very little girl, playing on the hillside above the recently fenced-off racetrack, the vista that faced their house was comprised of the rugged hills where I now sit and write this little tract on a laptop. I didn’t know any of this when I moved here from the big Smoke twenty years ago; all my mother’s family were already dead or disappeared, and I was then unaware of the fact that I’ve come to inhabit the land of my mother’s childhood dreams – the mysterious gorge country of the then-unmapped hinterland. *

My mother’s family moved away in the Great Depression. When everything dried out Richard kept the family alive for the first year on bread and dripping, along with plague rabbits he hunted with a .22 single shot rifle. He sold up the waterless land on the hill and leased a milk bar café in a downstream town on the riverside closer to the Pacific Ocean. It was a real money-spinner in those straightened days, right at the spot where coaches and buses pulled up on the old dirt highway, to await the punt which would take them across the shark-infested Nambucca.

Richard gave a section of the land by the racetrack to two of the local clans of Gumbaynggirr men and women who survived on his block. In those days aboriginal people were classed as wildlife and, as they weren’t citizens of the country that had stolen their homes, they weren’t allowed to own land. So it was all taken away from them – including the little parcel Richard had given them, which was handed over to a local timber mill that still cuts scrappy vestiges of the once mighty forest and carves the surviving ironbark trees into pallets and tomato stakes.

As Auntie Dolly told me in the ’90s – when I finally found her in a Pentecostal refuge near the nation’s distant capital – Richard made enough money from the riverside shop to move his wife and daughters to Sydney, a place where he could never stand to stay. He spent his remaining years in the bush, remitting monies to his family but living in places remote from their hearth; though perhaps not as remote as the place where I write this now.

Fanning the Flames

The fire in the valley had almost gone out when the dust storm arrived. Now tendrils of smoke are all but invisible in the overwhelming mass of vaguely reddish greyness. The dawn of the first dust storm (three days ago) was all red skies over paradise, and as the morning progressed an orange haze became a muddy morass that slowly filled your airways and coated all the newly minted spring leaves in a fine dusty powder.

I’m told that sixteen thousand tonnes of soil is blowing across the coast and into the ocean each and every hour. It’s hard to say how bad the fires are, but very little smoke is evident to my clogged senses. Award-winning documentary maker David Bradbury recently warned what could happen if the proposed open-cut uranium mine in central Oz goes ahead, and millions of tonnes of radioactive tailings are strewn across the landscape each month. Any further dust storms will then be leavened with alpha and beta particles and sweep across the most populated areas of the country. +

Of course, co-opted ‘experts’ have had their say, too. They claim such a scenario is ‘unlikely’ – which is also the way other ‘experts’ describe the dust storms we’re currently surviving. They even have the gall to suggest that radioactive particles will be ‘diluted’ by masses of surrounding dust. These morons don’t seem to have any idea about radioactive fallout or contamination. You can’t ‘dilute’ radioactive particles. They either enter your body – and wreak terrible havoc - or they don’t.

Many people will fail to recall what happened after Chernobyl went sky high and spread poison round the world. When a hundred tonnes of radioactive Ukrainian mixed herbs arrived on the docks of Oz, the ‘minister in charge’ allowed it to be ‘diluted’ (at a 10:1 ratio) with clean, non-radioactive herbs. This only served to spread the poison more widely through the population. I haven’t eaten European cheeses (or herbs) since 1986, but of course, hardly anyone will realise that the most ‘benign’ fallout from Chernobyl – Caesium 137 – has a half-life of just under forty years. Most will accept the assurances of ‘public health authorities’, just as they do with regard to GM foods and pesticides, herbicides and other agents of ecocide.

‘Clean’ dust is bad enough, thanks. All you people who think nuclear power is a clean alternative to toxic fossil fuels have been grossly misled by industrialists with (in)vested interests and their show pony spokesturds. Or perhaps you believe you’re immune to the cancers which are expanding through the world’s populations of humans and other animals, or think that making doctors and lawyers and weapon makers richer is a good idea.

Future Shock

The noise of the windstorm is deafening, a continual nagging susurrus amidst tidal surges of roaring atmospheric waves. In past years such winds have driven many new settlers mad, sending them scurrying back to cocooning cities and towns. After a few days the noise can drive people mad; one year back in the ’90s I watched more than a dozen relationships shatter under the strain around here, in one fractious winter when this little valley was almost completely depopulated.

It wasn’t very cold; it never is, here in the subtropics. But the wind proved unbearable to many who were not securely fastened to the earth, or secure in themselves. The women left first, hotly pursued by their men. Now most of them live at the beach, or back in the cities.

Better than living ‘On The Beach’, I guess. But it’s far better to be active today than radioactive tomorrow. Help fight the good fight, folks – vote Green, live green and stand in the paths of corporate bulldozers, if you want to be on the side of the saints. Stop the destruction and replant your little patch of earth.

As my mother’s mother would have said, “Saints preserve us!” But after all’s said and done and all demiurges are appeased, no-one can preserve us but we, ourselves.

The more things change…

- R.A.

PS – The neo-Reichian cloudbuster seems to have worked quite well to decrease the intensity of the fires. I’ll have to try it on the local manifestation of this semi-continental dust storm, too…

* See Second Chance Tortoise in these pages for the story.

+ See the New Illuminati

Images - http://i.usatoday.net/weather/_photos/2009/09/23/sydney-dust1x-topper-medium.jpg

& author’s

For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

( These sites are about to be closed along with ALL the free Geocities sites -

Save the World from RamPage

TimeSpace

RingWood )

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

Unclear Poxylips

Wild Bill Desertmaker

Ringbarker Supreme

Twin Jindas

When A Tree Falls

How many hermits hear?

The trees keep falling for days. They smash to the ground without the least warning, loud thumps and apocalyptic crashes that startle you at the oddest times or rouse you from sleep.

Most of the birds and furry animals in that stretch of burnt forest are already dead, and all the charred falling tubes and chunks of Creation’s destruction are unlikely to hurt them any more – except by reigniting flames and starting the process afresh in untouched adjacent areas. The fire went out after only a couple of days on this side of the ridge; experiments with the neo-Reichian cloudbuster seem to indicate that ‘soft electrons’ can affect bushfires as well as the weather.

‘Smoke’ rhymes with ‘choke’ for good reason, no doubt. The smoke has just begun to subside. But now someone’s taken advantage of the confusion to light up an entire mountain, only a mile from where the flames have just been extinguished. It’s a place where I’ve seen bettongs – tiny foot-tall kangaroos - in the past, and sighted an even rarer Brush-tailed rock wallaby and surprising numbers of Parma wallabies.

Who knows? They may still be alive, despite the odds.

There have been lots of little differences around here in the last couple of months, including a few minor changes in the lifestyle of your her(m)etic correspondent. When I turned up on the main street of town in a ‘new’ fourteen year-old four wheel drive, gas powered panel van, various odd bods circled its white oblong seamlessness the first few times I parked on the main drag. They gave me suspicious glances and asked me where it came from.

One even kicked the front tyre, saying “Rich man, rich man!” like someone out of Borat’s Kazakhstan. “How did you get that?” Such is the nature of the charming little village closest to the forest I live, where a fourteen year-old vehicle is regarded as ‘new’ and a sign of some unspoken and secret guilt or transgression on the part of the owner.

As a result I tell no-one of the new ‘firefighter’ water pump, that recently took a day to set up in the little pump shed on the bank of the rainforest river near my shack. Such opulence is rarely understood or sanctioned by those hereabouts, even when it arrives as a result of government largesse. Thousand dollar grants were given to anyone whose dwelling was damaged by floodwaters, and even this unlikely stroke of good fortune can be grounds for resentment in these remote part – even though pretty well everyone was also given a thousand bucks as part of the government ‘stimulus package’. Some lucky taxpayers even received two such thousand dollar payments.

What a wonderful part of the world.

My brother gave me a king-sized futon mattress that fills the back of the van, and I sleep in the comfortable lace-lined space reasonably often – on most weekends, in fact - when travelling to nearby towns to visit the kids. The older Jackaroo Deva has been put out to pasture. There was nothing left but rust to weld the roof onto and no garage would reregister the old workhorse, but it’s still a goer. It’ll make a good driveway vehicle for negotiating the many precipitous muddy streaks that run up and down hills around here and it can still cross rivers and streams far more readily than the ‘new’ van - but it’s currently stranded in town. I foolishly left the wondrous old beast in a friend’s backyard when I went to the Emerald City in search of a ‘new’ vehicle, and they drove it incessantly, even after the rego had run out - right up to the point where the muffler blew apart leaving an impressively warped steel can lying on the road.

Red-dreadlocked Rusty Fireye assures me he’ll have it fixed and that I’ll have it back soon. I have his thirty foot rainbow bus parked near my shack as collateral, I suppose. It’s virtually fossilised, but will probably make someone a great bedroom some day.

New Neighbour makes New Neighbourhood

There’s also a new neighbour or three in this remote little valley. Most of the region is up for sale, or has just sold, or both. The vacant block of land next door – about two hundred and forty acres – has changed hands for the first time in decades. I met the new neighbour on the day he arrived, driving one of two bulldozers he’d brought to the block up the new driveway he was building, followed and preceded by a pack of impressive Bull Mastiffs. When he climbed from the vehicle to introduce himself, wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Destroy Everything!’ I shook the smiling man’s meaty hand and welcomed him to the valley.

He’s a logger, an (ex) bikie, and purchaser of various sundry sun-dried blocks of forested land in the region. He’s set up a small sawmill on a place I pointed out – a flat piece of ground from which you can almost see the sea (you have to climb the hills another few hundred metres to really see the Pacific). He also parked his caravan in that same comfortable spot after experiencing a few freezing winter nights at the bottom of the valley. That’s where I plant trees which require a good frost before their fruit will set – ‘tropical’ apples and pears, nashi fruits, chestnuts, maple syrup trees and a few other imported species.

He’s more interested in hardwood, and has bought a block possessed of some of the hardest wood in the world; iron-hard Ironbark, steely by name and ferrous by nature. Uncle Jobie and some of the other local aboriginal tribal elders have often remarked that Ironbark is the only timber you can cut from these hills in an ecologically sound manner; they grow straight as spears, don’t form many habitat hollows, animals seem to avoid them and their oils impede the growth of other plants.

After repeated burning and two cycles of past logging, they’re also just about the only commercial timber left on his block, which is half surrounded by the far less trammelled parcel where I live and write this little missive.

It could all have been a disaster so easily, of course; but no – by some miracle he’s the kind of logger that doesn’t want to tear great holes in the canopy or touch the recovering rainforest at all. He’s aware of the habitat trees on the block, and unlike most loggers doesn’t cut these hollowed-out animal hotels down to make way for ‘healthier timber’. He’s actually aware that he’s cutting trees that take a human lifetime or longer to mature, and is looking after his soil and forest – so far, he’s a fair dinkum forester, not a logger at all! He’s even collecting native seeds to replant the small breaks he’s making in the canopy.

It’s hard not to make a mess with a bulldozer, but he waltzes around in his machines like a ballet dancer. The noise that comes from his machinery isn’t too bad. The other new nearby neighbours are building a hardwood house themselves, and certainly aren’t hypocrites (though they didn’t move way out here to have their peace disturbed and grumble a little when he’s out of sight). Wood is deservedly worth a mint these days; many people build steel-framed houses because it’s cheaper!

Mercifully, the dogs are well-trained and obedient – unlike the huge goats that have been fleeing from them and running onto my place. They were dropped into the forest by the pyromaniac beef fattener who lived up the road until the arson fines finally drove him out. I’ve seen goats completely destroy thousands of acres in drier country. The arsonhole managed to leave a herd of goats in the forest as a reminder of his stupidity, but I don’t expect they’ll last too many generations around these parts.

They’ll probably end up like the poor deer that were released into the bush after the pyramid scheme fantasies of their owners collapsed in broken bank balances and crocodile tears – an occasional dwindling danger on the road, gradually eaten from the region by dingoes, pythons and the occasional hunter.

This week I’m planting more rainforest, and walkways of coffee beans. The fruit is very tasty and a real adrenaline rush – and when you’ve eaten the fruit you still have the beans. Next season it looks like I’ll be planting more gum trees on the ridges, interspersed with Red and White Cedars, Black and White Booyongs, Red and Yellow Carrabbeans and other varieties of lost forest giants you’ve probably never heard of. I’ll be planting Tallowwoods and White Mahoganies, Bluegums and even Ironbarks back on the next door neighbour’s block.

These big hard trees grow incredibly slowly from a human perspective. The forests grow even more slowly, when they’re allowed to diversify and expand at all. The soils regenerate with positively glacial slowness, and when they’re depleted trees and forests become mere fading memories. You can’t possibly know what you’ve missed – can’t ever truly know what was here once it’s gone. The future for those who take and take without putting back, or without leaving time for recovery, is easy to see – just look at northern Africa. Just look at any desert where humans once lived in paradise, until their meat animals killed the remnants of productive forests encased in a diverse web of life. The trashed remnants of ecosystems rapidly disappear; the poor fools who ‘owned’ them thought they’d leave ‘just a little’ for themselves, but that’s not how it works, dude.

You always need to leave more than you think.

PS - The universe is infinite, regardless of the transient opinions of last century’s purblind sciences. In an infinity of eternity, any subset of eternity can also be eternal. Every living, breathing moment is eternity, and you are eternal.

Just an eternal thought.

PPS – Three events occurred in the last three months which could be termed ‘cryptozoic’.

1. Six weeks ago I was playing a lan game at with the kids at the internet access point of Wonder Boy’s remote community. “Dad, dad!” the ten year-old yelled when he went outside to take a leak. Such was the excitement in his voice I leapt to my feet while he called, ‘Quick! Quick!” and made it outside in time to see the brightly glowing disc that he was staring up at.

It veered across the night sky, apparently ‘just’ a brilliant glowing light a few hundred feet overhead. Then it turned to dive into a cloud bank and its shape was more clearly defined; a planar geoid, or flying saucer.

A few seconds later the other kids made it outside too, but by then the object had disappeared into the thunderheads.

2. Huge humanoid footprints appeared in the soft drying mud at the bottom of a newish dam I installed a couple of years ago (that still doesn’t hold water). One and a half times as long as my feet and twice as wide, the toeprints were very widely splayed.

The new next door neighbour saw them with me and only one explanation seemed feasible (aside from a pointless hoax that was unlikely to be discovered by me or anyone else, such is the remoteness of the spot). My new logger neighbour also told me that he and a friend had taken plaster casts of similar prints on another block he’s foresting on. In Oz the fashion is to call these big-footed beings ‘yowies’, but that’s a translational mistake made by most unedumacated Eurosurpers. The local Gooris call them ‘Yarra’, or ‘Yerren’ (sometimes in plural).

3. Driving along the bank of the Bellinger River, Wonder Boy leaned out of the new van and exclaimed, ‘Wow – what’s that?’ This time I wasn’t quick enough to see what he described as a huge, furry, beaked, finned aquatic creature about the same size as him, juggling a fish in its huge goose-like beak.

Nothing still exists (officially, at least) in Oz waters – but aboriginal legends of similar creatures abound, often called ‘Bunyips’ in other parts of the country.

It’s also noteworthy that a new species of tortoise was discovered (this time officially) in the Bellinger River less than a decade ago – the ‘Bearded tortoise’. The Bellinger River is very large, and has very deep holes…

The more things change…

- R.A.

Images - author’s

For further enlightenment see –

Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

( Save the World from RamPage - TimeSpace - RingWood ) – These sites are about to disappear along with all the free Geocities sites, so be quick! Make copies if you like!

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

To a Wild Life

Reflective Pause

West from Home

Fires and Fireflies

Three Moons Later

my roof

A constellation of fireflies glides through the undergrowth before me, and behind me the hills are ablaze with fires of a far more destructive kind.

September 11^th is a date with particular local meaning and resonance, one that predates the notorious events of 2001 by precisely one year. On that day in the year 2000 the remote valley where I’m writing this little screed was engulfed in a massive bushfire for the first time in nearly a century. Hundred foot high candleflames roared upward from massive ancient hollow-stemmed old growth trees like a vast satanic birthday cake, feeding choking black smoke into a Mordor-like cloud which hung low over the forest, lit from below by mad orange belchings and luminous flashes.

I toted a heavy backpack full of water about for days on end, spraying out small fire fronts and spot fires that the overworked brigades couldn’t keep up with, and batted out flames on the wooden walls of various houses and buildings just as they broke out.

Now some dimwit has lit up a small blaze in a patch of forest over a ridge in the next valley (torching a stolen car in the forest), and the fire brigades have taken their cue to light up the entire side of the forested valley opposite my home along a ten kilometre front in a ‘preventative backburning operation’.

westward from home

Many consider such behaviour a good idea, and in many places they may be correct; but around here, where a mosaic of recovering rainforest is interspersed with ridges of gum trees, regular burning simply decimates the fire-retarding rainforest and encourages the pyrophytic (fire-loving and fire-tolerant) plants. Without burning, the rainforest – which once covered all these lands in a massive unbroken canopy of water-retaining Old Growth - will grow to predominate and ultimately stop any massive fires from forming in the area, just as it has for millions of years. When the forest is burnt too regularly or fiercely – as it just about always is by ignorant and well-intentioned or perversely driven pyromaniac human beings – we’re just setting ourselves up for bigger and more disastrous fires in the future.

In other places where drier forest types predominate, prescribed burning makes a lot more sense – but even there the soil structure and microfauna are usually obliterated and the diversity is denuded by regular torching of biomass. The CO2 emissions barely bear considering!

As I write, the koalas whose spring mating calls have just begun to be heard again (for the first time since the last man-made fires of two years ago) have been silenced once more. They and a multitude of other endangered species with which you are probably less familiar are being burned, choked or driven out of the only areas in which they can possibly survive.

Almost all the fires I’ve witnessed in this area a have been started by human beings, with the exception of a single lightning strike whose resultant spot fire was put out by the accompanying and subsequent deluge. Every fire leaves the ecosystem and soil structure in a worse state, less resilient and less capable of recovering from drastic destruction – just like most of the rest of the planet. The threat of climatic catastrophe oft pales to insignificance before the daily reality of human-induced change, which amounts to nothing more than rampant destruction of the web of life that supports us all.

Meanwhile, as the firemen of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 imaginings are made all too real - actually incinerating the leafy pages of the book of life while imagining they’re doing the right thing - killing tens of thousands of endangered nesting quolls, glossy black cockatoos, lyre birds, koalas, phascogales, bandicoots, possums, various gliding marsupials (ranging from thumb-sized Feather gliders to huge Greater gliders), raptors, macro and micro-bats, a myriad of birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects (including this magnificent display of fireflies) and unheard-of unique plants, the world burns before my eyes while I water the tree nursery and mulch the rainforest plantings and vegetables. And continue to pull pyrophytic weeds like lantana (introduced by the last two centuries of Eurosurpers, so like and unlike me) that are growing under the forest canopy out by their roots, so they don’t wick any flames into the sensitive rainforest.

Life goes on, after a fashion – but on the surface, everything seems to recover; how can anyone who hasn’t seen what’s been obliterated possibly know what was out here?

When last I wrote in these pages (before being locked out of this site while its hosts overhauled the entire system for three months) the floodwaters were licking at the banks of my front yard, and had blocked all roads to the outside world. Let’s see what happens next, hmm? It’s likely that there’s about to be some noteworthy volcanic activity on the Pacific Rim.

Time to go see how the neighbours over the river are holding out; one couple who are building a house and three particularly vulnerable and currently vacant dwellings, whose owners have moved into town. No-one even informed any of them that their land, trees and sundry property were about to be burned in this ‘controlled backburning operation’.

The more things change…

- R.A.

Images - author’s

For further enlightenment see –

Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

Save the World from RamPage

TimeSpace

RingWood

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

Dave’s Hand-Made Home

Breakfast of Many Meat Eaters

(Rosalee)

Endangered Rainforest

Back from Oblivion

The Her(m)etic Hermit has just been allowed back into this blog! Stay tuned for more entries soon; just now, half the valley is on fire and I’m a little more busy than usual…

Image - http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/08/11/science/11tier.xlarge1.jpg