Lockdown 6: can we please can the protests?

I just finished watching a frustrated wedding business owner from Melbourne expressing his support for the anti-lockdown protest after yesterday’s announcement that Victoria would lock down again (Lockdown #6.)

 

His complete lack of logic destroyed any scrap of sympathy I may have had for him. 

 

A year and a half into this pandemic there are still people doubting its existence and treating mitigation/suppression measures as a human rights issue rather than a public health issue.

 

FARK! I’m losing patience with the media giving air-time to every single person who wants to have a whinge about their dreadful business prospects during this global pandemic.

 

We get it. We know times are tough. We know.

 

WE KNOW!

 

In case people hadn’t noticed, we’re ALL going through it. Everybody’s family life has been disrupted. Our bank balances & mental health have been affected. Our lives have changed. Some of us, sadly, are dead. Some are in hospital on ventilators, and we all find ourselves unable to plan ahead. 

 

ALL. OF. US. 

 

Does anybody really believe that having a whinge on the telly, protesting in a city street, punching a horse or chucking ink on a policeman will change anything for the better for ANY of us?

 

Perhaps Mr COVID-19 Virus, Esq., is sitting at home in front of the TV with the missus. Perhaps he’s hearing the sob stories, seeing the frustration and anger of the people acted out in public. Perhaps he’ll have a change of his little viral heart and will turn to Mrs Virus with tears in his little viral eyes.

 

“Geez, love, I didn’t think this through, did I? I didn’t realise I was being such a thoughtless bastard. I think it’s time we packed up and left. I just wanted to make a connection, but nobody likes us. This was a bad idea.”  No?

 

Well maybe this virus really is a truly Evil Overlord. If so, it must be delighted by all this chaotic protest! It’s probably turning to the missus right now with a giant

Muwahahahahahahahaha! 

Sweet! Look at those dumbarses suffering! This is great!!! What can we do to make things worse? Outdoor transmission? Check. Short transmission time? Check. ” No, I don’t think that’s any closer to the truth either.

 

Mr and Mrs Virus aren’t saying either of those things because guess what? COVID-19 is a VIRUS. It has no brain. No feelings. It’s not alive. It’s not a plot to steal human freedoms. It doesn’t vote Labor or Liberal or anything else. It doesn’t give a shit about your business or our economy or whether we’re happy, or even whether we live or die. 

 

IT’S A VIRUS, FFS!

 

We human geniuses have become so comfortable, so complacent, so much the centre of our own universe that we demand governments fix every little thing that goes wrong – even a virus. When they DO try to fix things, we argue, we whinge, we tell them it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable and hurting us and “not fair”. We want things fixed at zero cost to ourselves and we aren’t prepared to put ourselves out one iota.

 

Grow up, people.

I’ve made some lists - first, here’s a list of protests that MIGHT make a difference.

Protests against governments that cut medicare, that imprison children, that tax the poor and give the rich a free ride, that ignore climate change, that cut welfare, that love coal. Protests against government corruption and systemic discrimination.

 

And here’s a list of things that it’s just plain dumb to think you’ll solve with protests:

Bad weather, brittle fingernails, onions, a lumpy mattress, pineapple on pizzas, your cat waking you up at 4am, hangovers, the word “moist”, blisters and oily skin. 

 

And COVID-19.

Cashing in - a rant

Yesterday a book came into the library where I work. It was a children's picture book by someone from Melbourne; a self-published, rather poorly-written, extremely trite tale, as it turned out, about a summer holiday in Mallacoota that goes all wrong when a bushfire arrives and inconveniences a tourist family by burning down the narrator's holiday accommodation. I felt like throwing it across the library and jumping up and down on its glossy pages. The visceral nature of my reaction surprised me.

Mallacoota's time in the spotlight goes on. And on. And on. Hardly a day goes by without Mallacoota popping up in this or that news program or newspaper. Our real estate market has gone a bit mental and our long-term rental market is pretty much non-existent. 

Some unscrupulous landlords (local and non-local) have made an absolute killing since the bushfire. The cash-grab has been quite an eye-opener.

It's embarrassing. It's changed the way I see the place where I live. It's changed the way I see catastrophe - it's become very evident that one person's catastrophe is another person's cash-cow.

At work we've had to put up signs asking tourists not to question staff (some of whom lost everything) about the fires. Insensitive comments and questions probe like pointy sticks into deep wounds. Some tourists seem surprised when they come here and find regrowth and rebuilding - "you'd hardly know there was a fire," they say, filming new houses and lush new greenery with something akin to disappointment. What were they expecting? Bodies in the street? The real scars of the fire, while still evident in some of the scenery, are inside the residents of this town, plodding along every day, rebuilding lives and minds and homes and businesses while looking after tourists.

Those real scars, it has to be said, are also inside the residents of towns up and down the east coast of Australia; towns that haven't received anywhere near the media attention, focus or financial help that picturesque Mallacoota has. Add guilt to the list of bad tastes in my mouth.

Oh dear, it would appear I have disaster-fatigue. I wonder whether other people feel the same way?

The Porch Project

 

Porch is a rather pretentious word for the smallish, tiled concrete slab outside my front door. The grey tiles that covered it have been cracking for years.  It looked rather tired, dreary and run-down (perhaps in keeping with the rest of this little house, to be honest. Or its owner...). When I first had the thought to try my hand at mosaics, it was the “porch” I actually had in mind, but it sat in the too-hard basket for two or so years while I dithered and dallied and did Other Things.

After the success of the Snake Mozake earlier this year, I felt ready to give it a go. Also, I had a huge bag of cement that needed using before it turned into a Scummo*  

My front yard is very much a green space, filled with fairly overgrown shrubs – many of them native – doing their own thing. These days there’s nothing very ordered or manicured about it, although it was very neat when I bought it 9 years ago. There’s also a gorgeous flowering gum, beloved of fruit bats, birds and bees – that has been known to house the odd feather-tailed glider. It showers the “lawn” with enormous gumnuts that regularly try to kill the lawnmower. I wanted the porch mosaic to have a bit of that untamed bush greenery feel – to be an extension of my unruly garden.

So I pulled up the old tiles and chalked a design on the underlying  surface.

In many ways this project was harder than the snake – the overall area was a little larger; I had to use proper tiles rather than smashed crockery, which often has a bit of a curve on the surface; the old tiles, some of which I left on the slab, and some which I broke up and reused, were much thicker than the new tiles. Aaaaand - I had to trust, despite serious misgivings during the construction process, that the grouting would pull it all together and give the design some form. The mosquitoes and wasps were bloody annoying, and once again, my back and knees were crying for mercy after about 3 hours.

On the plus side, the site was less exposed to the midday sun than the cat palace.

I wanted to try and capture the feel of looking up through the trees to a light, bright morning sky. Something like this: 

Here’s what I ended up with after about 2 or 3 weeks… An Australian Bush Morning.  What d’you reckon? I like it!

There’s still a LOT of cement powder in that 20kg bag… whatever shall I do next?

 *big, heavy lump of uselessness. Pure coincidence that it's the same as the nickname I use for a certain Australian politician...

The "Snake Mozake"

Because cleaning all the gravel and digging up all the pavers during lockdown wasn't back-breaking enough... 

When I finished all the gravel work and looked at the cat palace I thought it was a bit bland...that big expanse of boring (but clean!) gravel and those plain, boring old pavers. The layout of those boring pavers, however, suggested one thing to me (especially living in Mallacoota, where such things abound!) - the wriggle of a snake across the ground - so the plot was hatched. 

I know! I'll make a mosaic of a snake! 

Look at the way those pavers wiggle -
it couldn't be anything else, could it?

I rather liked the idea of a giant Red-bellied Black snake. While the living version is highly venomous, folk wisdom suggests they are the "good guys" of the Mallacoota snake population. They're certainly preferable to brown snakes or tiger snakes, at least.

But back to the mosaic...

Apart from the heat and the flies and the ouchiness of the granite gravel, I didn't realise how hard on the body it would be. I've never made a mosaic before. I completely underestimated the amount of work it would entail. 

"Oh, it's just a few pavers", said I. Eight, to be exact. I discovered, during the clearing of the cat palace, that each paver weighed around 16kgs, so I decided to leave them in situ, and found myself  a piece of board and a foam kneeler to kneel on as I grovelled in the gravel at all sorts of weird angles.

 

Sooooo..... Eight 40 x 40cm pavers. Laid end to end that's 3.2m long, and 1.28 square metres. or, in the old currency, 13.7 square feet of back-breaking, knee-bruising, plate-smashing, tile-nipping hard labour.

I've smashed more plates than a guest at a Greek wedding. I've endured insect bites and arthritic aches, sunburn and broken fingernails. Oh, and twice I got so engrossed that I was almost late for work, and had to dash to the library, unshowered and with cement under my fingernails - but it's done and it was soooooo worth it! The Snake Mozake is now a beautiful colourful reality, and I love it!

Here's a closer look at each individual section

And - in case you're wondering about the cost of making this - 

Pavers: nothing - they were already there.

Cement: $30 - silly me, I bought a 20kg bag when 5kgs would've been plenty. Live and learn, (Not to worry though - now I have lots left over for any future projects - I have my eye on the front porch...

Grout: $22. I used just under 2 x 1kg boxes

Tiles: $12  The tile shop in Pambula sells small (95x95mm) tiles for mosaic artists @ $1 each. I used about a dozen

Plates: $20 old crockery from Vinnies, the Salvos and the Mallacoota op shop was $1-2 per plate, and I reckon I used about a dozen (and also scavenged a couple of old chipped ones from my kitchen cupboard.

Little round glass marbles - about $2 from the "bling" shop in Eden.

Total cost - somewhere around $85, and that includes plenty of leftover material, so you could probably knock at least $20 off the total.  Say, $65...

Doctor's bills and Painkillers: (just kidding!)

Time: About 35 hours, spread over a couple of weeks and with time off during a heatwave and wet weather.

Verdict: Challenging, fun, worth doing, will do again once I've recovered, ha ha ha! Oh, and I'm hoping it's the only Red-bellied black snake (Pseudechis porphyriacus) that I ever see in my cat palace!

What I Did During Lockdown

 It's tempting to say "2020 - what a WASTE of a year!"  but that would be very lazy thinking - not to mention completely untrue. 

That's what today's post is all about - I realise, looking back, that I can stop beating myself up over this "wasted" year - it hasn't been wasted at all, and I'm really amazed at what I've achieved. Instead of focussing on all the things I DIDN'T do - (I had no heart for painting or making a calendar this year, not knowing whether I'd ever recover the original outlay if lockdown went on and on and on) I've gone through the photos on my phone and looked at all the things I HAVE done. And I'm quite surprised!

Over the course of the 2 lockdowns this year I've:

Learned to give myself a passable home haircut - just don't look too closely!

Baked banana bread (hasn't everybody? Delicious, but I got over it pretty quickly - the old Covid waistline just keeps on keeping on, I'm afraid.)

Written and delivered an 11-part children's radio series (complete with weekly craft activities and a Facebook presence) called Elvis the Lockdown Dog. Nearly killed me, and I was pretty relieved to see the end of Lockdown #1, and to make sure Elvis "left the building".

Done "wildlife tours for myself" around my yard, photographing large and small visitors of all kinds.

Hung a screen door all by myself.

...and the biggie... weeded and re-landscaped a huge section of my yard totalling over 120 square metres. It could only have been done during lockdown. The thought of cleaning 120 square metres of gravel, armed only with a cheap peg basket and a couple of buckets, while "having a life", is a bit daunting, and should not be attempted by anybody intending to hang onto their sanity. Hot weather, wet weather and work gave me an excuse to stop now and then, and rest my shrieking muscles.

In reality, it was quite an hypnotic task. Gravel starts to "dance" in a sort of wave pattern as you shake it in your little improvised sieve, so you forget your aching back and the trickles of sweat that drip from the tip of your nose and chin. I listened to podcasts as I shovelled and sieved and cleaned and/or replaced the weed-mat as well. Anyway - enough talk - the before and after photos speak for themselves.

First - the Tibbs Memorial Garden (I had help from Tibbs the Literary Chicken for this one, so it's only fair, after her demise during lockdown, that she is memorialised in the space she helped create.

 

Next - the gravel patch between the woodshed (far end of Tibbs Memorial Garden), washing line and the cat palace.

And finally, the most difficult bit - the cat palace itself, where the weed-infested pavers had to be dug out, piled up and subsequently relaid. Of course, I ran out of gravel after having pinched it for Tibbs' garden -  and couldn't get the matching river gravel, so had to resort to granite chips. Harder on the cats' paws, not to mention a different colour (vive la difference???) so I've created a little cat-friendly network of stepping stones as well by relocating those 16kg pavers. Ugh, my hands are trashed, not to mention my shoulders.

I will never ever EVER attempt to do such a thing again - but I'm really glad I did it just this once.

The rehabilitation of about 50m of weed-infested gravel driveway should be the next project, but at the moment I'm a bit over gravel. Maybe I'll try my hand at mosaic, and give those pavers a pop of colour...

Pollywobble has given my work in the cat palace her stamp of approval. Basil, of course, is being his usual curmudgeonly self, and declined to comment.

EVENING UPDATE: BASIL RELENTS, GIVES GRUDGING APPROVAL. HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Random Ramblings and not-quite-a-rant - Masks

                                     

I pondered this earlier today as I hauled gravel and rocks and pulled out weeds in the cat palace - garden work provides wonderful opportunities for contemplation - did learning to wear underpants cause as much complaint as being asked to wear a mask? People happily keep their sweaty bits entrapped in undies without whingeing. When we had the bushfires and could SEE the enemy (smoke) we couldn't get enough of those tight, hot and heavy masks. People wear a dust mask when weed-spraying/installing insulation. Surgeons wear them when they cut people open. Why the widespread whingeing over this precautionary measure against the spread of a deadly and invisible enemy? (And don't get me started on the politicisation of masks!)

Here’s another thought – people appear to be quite happy to follow the dictates of fashion (those heels are SO last year, dahling!) or interior design (remember Mission Brown trim?) or the way your food appears on your plate at a restaurant – who can forget the deconstructed cheesecakes of 2019, piles of ingredients served on breadboards or in slippers or some such bullshit?)  As long as a vapid, vacuous celebrity tells you to do it, it’s ok. And yet – and yet – when epidemiologists and public health experts outline measures that should be taken for your own safety and the safety of those around you – people want to whinge and bleat and sook about rights and freedom and sovereignty. Why is that? It's been something I've pondered for months now. 

This awful pandemic has exposed a lot of ugliness and inconsistency in the people we share the world with. I haven't forgotten the callous calls, early in the pandemic, to lock down oldies because "only oldies die from this" (and then the irony, in the Victorian experience, at least, of those oldies in aged care being sitting ducks because of the casual workers who unwittingly took Covid to several workplaces where those vulnerable oldies were living.)  I wonder whether the mask-refusers are the same “lock down the oldies” people, or whether they’re a whole different group of selfish jerks?

It’d be nice to be able to rely on people to do the sensible thing – but we apparently all have different definitions of “sensible”. Unfortunately, this means the government has had to make a bunch of rules to try and stop the spread of Covid, and to keep us as safe as possible – and it’s using the “one size fits all rule”.

Is there anything wrong with that, when you’re talking about a public health emergency? I don’t think so. Here in this far-flung outpost of regional Victoria, we are expected to observe the mask rule, despite having had zero cases of Covid since the pandemic began. Fair enough. Making exceptions for every self-interested group is fiddly – and also leaves the government open to charges of unfairness.

Think about this: one rule for all means people don't (or shouldn't, at least!) moan about being left out or singled out. Yay, we’re all equal! Rich, poor, young, old blah blah blah blah. Isn’t that a good thing?

I'm having a lovely time, as I weed the garden, thinking about "what-ifs"... What if the government had said that everyone over (insert arbitrary age here) must wear a mask and everyone under that age had to take their chances? What if only those in "essential occupations" were allowed to wear masks? (Remember the early shortage of PPE, when the general public was advised that health care workers needed the masks more than we did? Bit of ill-feeling erupted over that.) What if only the employed were issued masks? What if only casual workers were allowed them, because they couldn't afford to take time off work? I'm still thinking of the loophole-seeking by some of those so-called journalists at Dan Andrews press conferences. (Everybody's special. Everybody has a compelling reason to argue and be non-compliant. Oh. please!)

If people were denied masks, I suspect they would suddenly all insist on having them! Perhaps a bit of reverse psychology could’ve been employed, tee hee - humans are such contrarians. We want what we can't have. We want what other people have (in fact, we want MORE – and we’re prepared to fight people in the toilet paper aisle to ensure we get it!) When we're told we must all have masks, we don't want them because we won't be told what to do. Our first response to so many problems in society is "The government should ___" but on this very important matter of public health and the common good, we want to ignore the government and make our own rules, because theirs make us uncomfortable. Boo hoo. (Personally, I’d rather wear a mask than a ventilator, but anyway…)

As we in this part of the world talk about opening up, easing restrictions and so on, those in other countries are starting to mask up, lock down – and far too many are dying.

Humans. Endlessly fascinating and so so frustrating, don't you reckon?

Stand down, Tofu - your services are no longer required

 Tibbs has left the building.

My life as a chicken-substitute is over. No more chooking in the woodshed on cold days with Tibbs the Literary Chicken, who liked anything by Ernest Henningway, but was particularly fond of The Crows of Kilimanjaro and A Farewell to Farms.

I’m heartbroken.

As a tribute to my little feathered friend, who was helped from this world by the vet today, let me show you the last garden project that we worked on together.

Before the new fence was built last year, there was a dead space along one side of the house, bounded by a gate and the woodshed and populated by a couple of straggly dead trees. some rocks and hundreds of fleabane weeds. My spare room looked out upon a brand new 6-foot fence and a bleak and cheerless wasteland, so Tibbs and I decided to revamp it a bit.

So.... first of all we dug out the rocks (and ate worms).

Step Two: we pulled out the remaining weeds and patchy grass (and ate more worms)

Tibbs posing: “All my own work”. What? No it wasn’t! (although she DID eat all the worms.)

She temporarily lost interest when I put down weedmat, but was happy when I got the gravel down. 

She was even happier to see the birdbath and rocks appear, some potted plants, and the new coat of paint that transformed the woodshed. 

In the photo below she is inspecting the new space - admittedly, still a work in progress, but vastly improved - and giving it her seal of approval.

On Sunday she started making strange noises now and then, a bit like a sneeze. This morning she had her beak open to breathe, was wheezing, and wouldn’t come out of the nest box.

Coincidentally, the wonderful vet from Orbost was making a house call to vaccinate the cats today, so I asked him to take a look at Tibbs while he was here. I told him about her recent oviduct infection, and my home vetting treatment – and he said I’d absolutely done the right thing. What was ailing her today was a respiratory infection of some sort – and with the recent outbreak of Avian Flu near Bairnsdale, he thought it prudent to euthanase her, notify the Ag dept and take her remains for testing. I cried buckets, sniffling inside my mask and thanking her for her company and her great help in the garden. I stroked her feathers as her eyes slowly closed and her consciousness ebbed away. 

Poor Tiblet the Giblet doesn’t even get to rest in the chook cemetery, here at home with her old buddies. Sigh. She always was the Outsider of the flock. I think it's appropriate, then, to rename her final project the Tibbs Memorial Garden.

Bye, my Tibby, and thank you for everything you taught me about digging in the dirt, enjoying simple things like a little sit in the woodshed - and the joy of hanging out in the yard with a feathery friend.

No such thing as a dumb question?

  

Actually, there is. Tune into Daniel Andrews’ daily press conference and you’ll hear plenty of them, usually from Rachel Baxendale – an obnoxious “journalist” for The Australian who sits starry-eyed at the knee of Peta Credlin to deliver breathless revelations on SkyNews about the Eviltude of Dictator Dan in the fight against the Victorian Covid-19 outbreak.

I was a high school teacher for about 2 decades. When I say that the behaviour of some of the “journalists” at Daniel Andrews’ press conferences gives me flashbacks to some of my worst Year 9 classes, believe it. Year 9s can be really obnoxious.

The particular breed of obnoxious Year 9 student that morphs into a Baxendale-style “journalist” at an Andrews presser  knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are smarter than the teacher. They know that every smart-arsed comment is a mark of their genius. Their main aim in the classroom is to impress their peers by scoring points against the teacher in pointless petty argument, and to waste as much of a lesson as possible.

No teacher has ever heard the sort of excuses or clever questions they can come up with and no teacher can fail to be impressed by their cleverness and ultimately cowed into submission by it.

Like a dripping tap, such students are relentless in the quest to wear down the teacher, badgering and haranguing until they achieve their goal,  the bell goes, or the teacher snaps. AND – they think they’re the only one ever to do it.

Is it any wonder teachers become jaded? I am flabbergasted to see Daniel Andrews show up day after day after day to answer the increasingly ridiculous questions respectfully and with seemingly infinite patience. I’d have sent the little shits to the Principal’s office by now, or slapped an after-school detention on them.

This morning in a Twitter thread about the repetitive, ignorant and time-wasting questions posed by Rachel Baxendale, somebody responded to one of my tweets with “It’s always ok to question things”.

So I questioned her – “Have you always been so disingenuous?”

She got a bit annoyed – “It’s a fair question. I was raised to be polite, think for myself, and ask questions where i needed clarification. It’s perfectly ok to do that. You don’t need to blindly accept everything and anything. That’s dogmatic. I was polite to you, leave it now.”

Sigh.

Here’s the thing, If you’re still asking the same questions over and over, many months into a pandemic – questions that have been answered several times already – you haven’t been paying attention. You don’t really want an answer. Your intention is to disrupt and distract and be a general pain in the arse.

Off to the Principal’s office with you.

 

Just call me Tofu

The formidable Sybil

One half of the dynamic duo, (my pair of Kikuyu-pulling garden patrol buddies), is no more. Boss chook Sybil departed this life last Friday, leaving Tibbs, her partner in crime, all alone in the world.

Feisty Sybil (named for Sybil Fawlty, in case you were wondering), with the top part of her beak shorter than the bottom, had a sort of bulldog look to her that went well with her bossy personality. She sometimes mounted the other chooks, just to let them know who was boss, and once she even attempted to crow.

One by one her loyal subjects dropped off the perch until only Tibbs, the outsider – the Omega chook – was left to keep her company.

When I discovered the dearly-departed Sybil and prepared her for interment in the chook cemetery, Tibbs came up close, uttering quiet respectful clucks and chitters that brought me undone. I didn’t think she cared, but if a chook has ever looked concerned, it was bottom-of-the-pecking-order Tibbs.

Chooks are sociable creatures who enjoy the company of their own kind, and don’t take kindly to being alone, so I made the decision to rehome her as soon as possible (after determining her good health). The last thing I need is a psychotic chicken who’s been driven mad by loneliness. I think my chook-keeping days are at an end.

Until such time as she is rehomed, though, I feel obliged to keep her company.  The day after Sybil’s demise, Tibbs wouldn’t come out of the nest box. She wanted to stay and mope. Uh-oh.

I put a mirror in the nest box (a strategy that really helped when Sybil was grieving the demise of her best friend, Manuela the Jumping Chicken) and she perked up a bit. Spending the long lonely days free-ranging in that big garden, however, was a step too far for poor Tiblet the Giblet. She relocated to the woodshed and wouldn’t come out. Sigh.

Soooo.... guess who’s been spending a lot of time in the yard with her since then, making inane conversation and making chicken noises? Evidently my Chookish is understandable as she’s started following me everywhere and talking back. She even lets me pat her (unheard of for this skittish girl!)

Chooking with my girl Tibbs

We are continuing the excavations she and Sybil (and the others, before they shuffled off this mortal coil) began, and are currently shifting about half a tonne of dirt back to where it once was in what may one day, in a chook-free household, be a vegie patch again. Tibbs and I have bonded over Kikuyu-pulling and weeding – activities now known as “chooking”, as we work together companionably in the yard until my hands and back can take no more. Tibbs is, I fear, far better equipped for chooking than I am – but I’ll give it my best shot for my poor lonely girl.

So - for now, just call me “Tofu” – a well-meaning but not-very-effective chicken substitute.

RIP Sybil.

Tibbs

Team Chook and the Kikuyu Project

Team Chook: focussed and ready for action

I alluded, in an earlier post, to my insane and largely futile attempt to get on top of the Kikuyu takeover of my yard.

Kikuyu grass is an impressive adversary. It snakes along under and above ground, pushing out pointy stabby runners and grabby roots. Do not turn your back on it, seriously! It crawls over and under things at the speed of - well, Kikuyu grass - inexorable and unstoppable in its quest for world domination. Forget lizard overlords - Kikuyu is worse than any crazy megalomaniac reptile.

Nasty pointy stabby runner looking for some ground now that it's
managed to burrow beneath the rocks of the retaining wall

Rocks are no obstacle to this stuff - it just powers on underneath

 

If it can't go down, it'll go up and over...

...and down the other side.

This stuff is monstrous, I tell you!

Wikipedia says: The tropical grass species Pennisetum clandestinum is known by several common names, most often kikuyu grass, as it is native to the highland regions of East Africa that is home to the Kikuyu people. Because of its rapid growth and aggressive nature, it is categorised as a noxious weed in some regions. (Hear hear! Here here! say I)

Lawn Solutions Australia says: Due to its vigorous growth patterns, Kikuyu is a very invasive grass and doesn't tend to want to stay put in its designated area.  (And that, my friends, is what's known as an understatement!)

I say: DAMN YOU, Kikuyu, you will not win!!!! Well, a slightly modified version of that - you will not win ALL the garden. Some bits are MINE!

Right about now you should be hearing the theme music from Mission: Impossible  in your head. It's what I hear whenever I look at the expanse of Kikuyu-infested gravel.

To launch this major operation, I enlisted two experienced excavators:

             

Agent Sybil...

...and Agent Tibbs

As these girls have been largely responsible for creating the environment in which Kikuyu can thrive, I thought it a nice touch of irony to enlist their help with the clean-up. Not that they were unwilling. Any chance to get beaks and claws into the dirt.

The area of the gravel patch and retaining wall, circa 2013 - pre chook

This is how we work: I identify a runner or a deeply-rooted flatleaf weed and start pulling or digging it out.  Team Chook joins me in a flash. The girls start pecking, scratching and kicking. Repeat. Over and over and over.

When my back starts to ache or my weedbag is chockers, I call it a day. I return to the site a couple of days later to find that Team Chook has excavated a whole new lot of runners for me. And so it goes on.

I feel a bit like an archeologist. The team has excavated enough Kikuyu to expose what I think may be the foot of the retaining wall. What appeared to be about 12cm high is easily 30cm high.

How was this deplorable annexation allowed to occur in the first place? The first thing you need to know is that I have a long, sorry history of garden incompetence, interspersed with sudden bursts of frenetic activity. The second is this: the chooks, scratching about in the ex-vegetable bed (I ceded the territory to the chooks after a long and fruitless (also vegetableless!) battle), kicked lots of lovely soil out onto the gravel. Weeds and Kikuyu leapt onto it. Layer upon layer kept being added. Eventually the Kikuyu (and minimal soil) provided a fab false "ground" for weeds to set roots into. (TAKE NOTE: This is how world domination begins - with a small corner of the gravel patch.) Compounding factors included a human (me) too flattened by Ross River Virus or other nasty ailments to do anything more than sit and watch helplessly during the last couple of major growth seasons. Sigh.

Thankfully, the pandemic lockdown has given me the time and energy to Fight Back. I will not be vanquished by grass! One day this small patch of garden will be mine again. With the judicious application of carefully shaped chook wire I may even grow lettuces or something.

In the meantime I'm refusing to think about the evil Kikuyu Empire's expansionist behaviour at my borders. That's a battle for another season.

Memorial...and random ramblings

Today is a very weird day.

It's 142 days since The Fire hit Mallacoota.

Today, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and almost 5 months after the fire changed life for everybody in this town, the Grocon cleanup crew have been demolishing what's left of  the homes of my next door neighbour and her next door neighbour, and I've been hit by a huge and unexpected wave of grief. Wow.

On the roof of my other next door neighbour's house stands a tradie with what looks and sounds like a giant hairdryer, drying off the grouting (or whatever it's called) on the roof tiles.

In the middle of the two, armed with one of those weeding implements, I battle Kikuyu grass, ably assisted by my two chooks, Sybil and Tibbs. Overhead - quite low, really, two Wedge-tailed Eagles circle. It's surreal.

I don't know quite what to make of it.

In the months since the fire I've been keeping an eye on my neighbour's place. It'd be a pretty low act for somebody to rob someone who's already lost everything - but it happens, so I've been the archetypal stickybeaking neighbour, dashing outside to check out any unexpected noise coming from "the ruins". Usually it's just a bemused kangaroo hopping over the downed roofing iron, but I also startled the insurance assessor, early on...

I learned, early on, that rubble doesn't sit still. In the strong winds that we get here, the roofing iron has flapped and danced, shifting its position on the land. I used to worry that it would become airborne, but it didn't.

I learned that weeds don't mind creeping underneath the rubble, inching their way across the landscape , and I pulled out great swathes of Thunbergia as it crept under the shifting sheets of iron.

I learned that the ruined landscape, the longer it sits there, starts to look normal. I am no longer horrified by it. When my sweet, thoughtful neighbour says she feels so bad that I have to look out at it every day, I don't know how to react, because my first inclination is to shrug and say "nah, it's ok" - but that sounds so callous. It's not ok, but it's become the New Normal and I've stopped being horrified by it.

When Grocon first arrived to start the job, there was a sense of relief.  And yet, this morning when they put up their temporary fencing and the demolition machine moved in, its long articulated arm lifting and shifting screeching piles of roofing iron, I was overcome by completely unexpected grief; grief for my neighbours and the homes they've lost, because until today, those "homes" were still there in some form. Now they, and everything they contained, will be cleared - erased from the landscape. It's so awfully sad.

That started me thinking then about how those of us who haven't lost anything, actually HAVE - and on top of the "survivor guilt" is the guilt I feel when I dare to acknowledge the fire's effects on me - the loss, however temporary, of a fabulous neighbour; the feelings of security and safety I used to have; the loss of the town I know and love - while I sit in my still-standing home.

Saying "well I lost something too, you know" sounds whiny and  pathetic in the face of other people's overwhelming losses, so you don't say it - and you try not to even think it - and that comes at a cost too, I suppose. I am one of the lucky ones, after all. And as I watch the excavator lift armful after armful of twisted furniture - there goes a bedframe, and a sofa-bed - and listen to the men in Hazmat suits raking over broken glass and crockery, that is reinforced.

Trying to look anywhere but next door, I think again about the Wedgies. The other day, when Grocon was occupied cleaning another ruined property just up the street, I noticed the pair circling very close to the road and quite low over the clean-up area. It was quite a buzz. Imagine my surprise, then, to see a pair circling quite low over the current clean-up area this morning.

Perhaps the rubble has been a temporary home to all sorts of little critters - rabbits, antechinus, bush-rats - and the Wedgies have learned to follow the excavators, whose giant pincered arms resemble the curved beaks of carrion-eaters, pecking away at the wreckage.  Those clever Wedgies must've learned that the giant orange machines mean a potential easy meal for them as the little critters flee the giant scything beaks.

Encroaching rain chased me indoors after about an hour of Kikuyu-pulling teamwork with the chooks, and afterwards, this:

As I said - it's a weird day.

Behind the Barricades - Stay at Home, Day#??

My Isolation Hair is a fright and I don't even care!

My daughter says I look like a mad scientist - I'll take that as a compliment!

I actually forgot it was the Easter Weekend this weekend. By the Thursday before Good Friday there's usually excitement and activity building over the big Easter market and the influx of Easter visitors from all over. The place is usually hopping. Not this year.

We saw our tourists depart, almost in convoy, about 2 weeks ago, after government orders to close caravan parks. While part of me was very glad to see them go, I also felt terribly sad for them as I watched the caravans roll past. They were heading back into an uncertain and fragile situation in their own home towns and cities, and it must've been frightening.

Mallacoota is a ghost town, coming into what would be our second-busiest time of a " normal" year. This entire year has been anything but normal! Most of the shops are closed. The library is closed. COVID-19 sanitiser stations have been mounted outside our supermarkets, where valiant staff continue to keep the shelves stocked. The Post Office arcade has 1.5m lines painted on the ground.  The volunteer-run community radio station, which is also the local emergency broadcaster, has seen some changes as a few of our older or more vulnerable presenters go into self-isolation.

My April calendar image seems strangely appropriate as we are all "confined to barracks" and isolated from our normal lives. Many people don't meet your eye when you pass them in the street, as if they think infection might be spread at a glance.

The District Health Service is overseeing deliveries of medication, groceries and newspapers to those in isolation. Dr Sara from the Medical Centre keeps the community up to date with a weekly radio interview.

I don't know whether the school will re-open next week (must find out). The Sanctuary - a youth centre set up during the fires, is operating in a virtual world, making the most of ZOOM for its activities.

Anxiety over the threat of pestilence and a sense of impending doom underlie the gentler rhythm that life currently thrums along to. Everything has slowed to a dreamy snail's pace. It's like mid-winter, only warmer.

Whopper fungus!

The quietude at home is punctuated by the rumble of supply trucks rolling past. The bushfire clean-up continues. As far as we know, we are COVID-19 free, but we are cautious.

Personally - I'm loving the serenity, and as an almost-hermit anyway, things haven't changed all that much for me. I haven't succumbed to any crazy urges to clean the house, although I'm attempting to get out and weed the garden a bit more. Unfortunately the mosquito population is as healthy as ever. Mini "nature walks" at home have yielded some interesting things, and the armchair birding has been fruitful.

A good deal of my usual "spare" time is being gobbled up by an imaginary dog called Elvis, whose adventures in Lockdown Land have been airing on the local radio once a week. A twenty minute program takes me a full day to write, although I hope I'll get quicker as the pandemic rolls along.

Elvis the Lockdown Dog

I've realised how often I touch my face without even thinking, I'm sure my hands have actually changed colour and I don't think the end of my nose has ever been so itchy.

We live in weird times. Come for a walk in the garden.

Common Bronzewing, looking anything but common.

Red-browed finch

King Parrots

 

Rainbow Lorikeet

Crimson Rosella

 

Brown Thornbills

Satin Bowerbirds

Australian Wood ducks

Welcome Swallows

Emu - yes, really!

Boredom? Not a chance! Well, not so far, anyway.