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.

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.

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. 

WTF is happening to the human race? A rant

I haven't had a good rant for a while. Today's the day.

WTF is happening to the human race? Where did the love go? Why, all of a sudden, is an "I'm all right Jack" attitude pervading every aspect of life, from shopping to travelling to working and touching?

During the recent bushfire catastrophe there was such an outpouring of love from those who hadn't burned, to those who had. What happened to that?

Millions upon millions of dollars were donated by people around the world. People cared. Food, clothing, bedding, all sorts of goodies poured into fire-affected towns, burying us in mountains of love and "Licorice Bullets" (it's true - those chocolate treats turned up in Mallacoota by the pallet load) ... We saw the birth of the Empty Esky movement and the roads reopened and people who hadn't burned visited towns that had, to spend money there and help boost the devastated economies of fire-ravaged towns.

Ah - my furiously-turning cogs are seeing the common denominator. I think I get it now.

During the catastrophic fires there were 2 very distinct groups of humans: those who hadn't burned and those who had. A Helper group and a Helpee group. An "Us" and "Them" (this is something we humans do a lot). Or, pardon my cynicism, a group that could feel virtuous about their "altruism", and a group that should be grateful to be the beneficiaries of that "altruism". (Here's a hint, people - that's not real altruism.)

With the advent of COVID-19 that division has disappeared, my friends, and that is what has changed:

All of a sudden we've all been dropped into this toilet together and some people believe they have more right to the toilet paper than everybody else.

News footage of Aussies returning home last night - the final flights before the closing of our borders - showed people arriving from overseas destinations and being hugged and kissed by those meeting them at the airport. I'm hoping their next destination was wherever the traveller had to go for their 14 days of self-isolation - and I hope their happy huggy greeters went with them to isolate themselves as well, rather than dropping them off and heading out to the shops to pick up extra supplies.

These overwhelmingly younger people so easily and thoughtlessly abandoned current social-distancing principles - making an exception for people returning from overseas, FFS. Oh, that's right - there's this belief that young people will only get a mild dose of COVID-19, if they get it, so they're not afraid of catching it. Has it not occurred to them that they are very capable of SPREADING it to those who may not be as young or healthy as they are? Evidently not.

Don't get me started (oops, too late!) on those alleged busloads of city-folk who have been raiding the supermarkets of small country towns - because evidently, once they have stripped everything from their own city shelves, they have some sense that they are entitled to strip ours as well. Not only are they leaving remote places without supplies - they risk bringing whatever germs they may have to remote places.

Especially insidious are those who are trying to justify their selfishness by clothing it in Empty Esky virtuousness and self-congratulation. "I just spent $426 at your supermarket. Yeah, I'm helping you recover from the bushfires by buying up all your supplies - aren't I great?"

As for those who have hooked up their caravans and headed en masse to places like Lakes Entrance and Mallacoota - because we have had, as yet, no cases of COVID-19 in East Gippsland - their stupidity and selfishness know no bounds. A single case of COVID-19 in the holiday park here will spread like the fire we had at New Year. I shudder to think of the shared amenities blocks and the soup of pestilence that could be cultivated in them - or the way our already stretched health services will collapse under the increased burden of a COVID-19 outbreak here. Or the way that our high number of vulnerable, elderly or immune-suppressed local people will be affected.

Nationally, of course, teachers, once again, are losers - from comments made by our sloganising PM that suggest they are still viewed largely as babysitters, they are being expected to keep the streets safe from allegedly COVID-carrying children. Fuck what happens to teachers in the classrooms or playgrounds of the nation - as long as the rest of the country doesn't have to be responsible for keeping the young occupied and at bay for 6 or so hours a day. As an ex-teacher, I'm disgusted. Once again, the government fails to support teachers. (On the plus side, I have seen comments from parents who are sensibly schooling their kids from home, that "teachers should be paid a billion dollars! This is harder than I thought." Imagine doing that with thirty of the little darlings all day every day, love, not just your own tiny tribe...)

Last weekend I developed a foul headache, and by Monday afternoon I had a scratchy sore throat and a cough. I imagine it's something I caught from local children, who've had some kind of unidentified lurgy go through the kinder and school like a dose of Epsom Salts. As far as I'm concerned, just now, any bug is suspect - and a large number of our library patrons are elderly - so I put myself into isolation. Since then I've realised, after observinging the behaviour of so many human beings in the media & social media that we are clearly approaching this pandemic from very different places.

What a lot of people seem to be forgetting is that we are ALL in this together. Every single one of us has a responsibility to OUR COMMUNITY as well as ourselves. It's really what we should be thinking at any time we get a communicable illness, not just at a time where so many lives are at risk from something virulent that we have no immunity to and no cure or vaccine for.

In these COVID-19 times:
Don't think to yourself "I'm young, so it won't affect me. It doesn't matter. Business as usual."
Don't think to yourself "by running to a remote town I can outrun the virus and keep myself safe"
Don't think to yourself "the government will save us".

Don't behave only as if you don't want to catch COVID-19 - behave as if you don't want to spread it.

Repeat after me:

 It's not all about me. 

I am a part of the universe, not the centre of it. 

Oh - and keep your distance. Stay well, friends.

2020: the year of catastrophe

What a shit-storm 2020 is turning out to be!

We saw in the New Year in smoke and ashes, flames having licked away the landscape. Catastrophic fires, the likes of which Australia has never seen, gobbled and howled their way down the east coast of Australia, spitting out broken houses and towns as they went, turning livelihoods and economies to charcoal, incinerating wildlife in unimaginable numbers.

For week after week after choking week, major Australian cities were cloaked in thick smoke that stung the eyes, seared the lungs and set off smoke alarms inside office blocks. The pall circumnavigated the globe. It turned NZ glaciers a dirty brown and the blood-red ball that was the sun, rising and setting over a black and grey landscape, drove some people to the brink.

And then, hard on its heels, flooding rain that washed ash into the waterways, poisoning and choking life that had survived the fires, and storms that took off roofs, and hail the size of tennis balls that smashed windscreens.

And then – simmering away in the background while we dealt with all the shit that Nature could dish out – from a country far away came The Pandemic - COVID 19. At first it crept in, on planes and cruise ships, while governments prevaricated, pointed fingers, sat on their hands, told everyone to calm down, nothing to see here. Then they screened, isolated and quarantined, and finally legislated, and one by one the lights went out.

Lockdown in Italy. European borders closed. Extreme measures. Sadly, too late to halt the exponential spread of the sickness in places where the health of the economy was deemed to be more important than the health of citizens. One anonymous PM, whom I shall call the Evil Overlord, decided on Friday that mass gatherings of more than 500 people would be banned from Monday – when his happy clappy Hillsong conference (3000 attendees in Sydney, Australia) would be over. On Friday he had vowed to go “to the footy” on the weekend, to show there was no need to worry about the virus. The Friday afternoon diagnosis of COVID 19 in one of his close cabinet colleagues dashed his footy plans, but the Evil Overlord did not put himself into quarantine, the way he required the contacts of other COVID 19 victims to do. Another example, in glorious living hypocritical colour, of the two sets of rules he has - one for us and one for himself and his ilk…

Image source: Twitter

For several years now, scientists have been warning that the world is ripe for a pandemic. Just more science for governments to under-react to.  Sure, they’ve developed Pandemic Response plans – but they’ve waited rather a long time, during this pandemic, to enact anything that seems like a serious response.

Our particular evil overlord, who ignores Science (and common sense, many would agree), is one of the villains of the disaster movie that is 2020. There are others like him in some other powerful  nations – those who will always choose the interests of the rich over the rationality and common sense of science and the evidence of their own eyes. 

There’s a photo that’s been doing the rounds of the internet for quite some time – a young woman is holding up a placard that says “at the start of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored”.

That’s the disaster movie we’re living in the middle of right now – there’s no end in sight, and no sign of Bruce Willis. Fuck.

After the Fire 6 - The Silence of the Bush

Near Betka Beach. 3 weeks post-fire. Smoke haze has hidden the ocean in the background

 The bush was never meant to be silent

The trill, squawk or chatter of birdsong, the buzz and twang of insects, the reptilian rustle in piles of leaves, the sudden thud thud and crackle of wallabies or roos fleeing through undergrowth – the bush is usually a noisy place. To walk through the bush with only the crunch of your own shoes and the sound of your own breath in your ears is an unsettling experience. It’s devastating to creep along silent trails that were once so familiar and that rang with life. 

Even worse - the trees, those solid, dependable guardians of the paths and trails, may be absent or unrecognisable. Familiar landmark trees have become unfamiliar, if they're there at all. Sometimes it’s worse, somehow, to recognise them - old friends unclothed, blackened, crippled or felled. That big tree out near the Pony Club – a Grey fantail scolded me once from a branch that is no longer there, and there I watched a pair of Spotted pardalotes harvesting lerps. That empty space overhead, near the water storage facility, is where a pair of Mistletoe birds enchanted me in the spring, and the Eagle Tree behind my house - a tall skeleton that provided an excellent lookout spot for raptors - has been completely obliterated. Gone without a trace.

It's not without a an eerie, pared-back beauty but it's not how it's supposed to be.

The stark black lines of a charcoaled melaleuca forest thrusting upwards from silvery ash-covered ground 

The bush, however, is full of surprises. The regrowth of vegetation is almost magical.  Buds and shoots are bursting through blackened bark. Insects are returning. The birds that eat insects are returning. With the birds comes the birdsong. It's happening, slowly but surely - resurrection in action.

Tree ferns sprouting on Genoa Road

Grass trees re-emerging

Epicormic buds sprout differently on different types of trees – some appear in random clumps, others like the even fuzz along the length of a man’s arm, so that they look a bit like large furry pipecleaners - and still others appear to encircle a trunk in a delicate spiral pattern.

When Banksia cones burn, the seed casings open like golden mouths to spit out the seeds of their rebirth.

Swathes of burnt bush add layers of colour across the landscape in broad strokes of umber, gold, rust, sepia and deep black. Burnt vegetation has more subtleties of colour than you can imagine, and I’m pretty sure there are more than fifty shades of brown.

The beautiful Betka River

The spicy smell of regenerating bush – that warm eucalyptus scent with just a hint of smoke behind it - is actually exquisite, especially if there’s a waft of morning dampness to give it a bit of tang.  It's enough to put a smile on anybody's face.