Changes to Equal Rights Legislation

Right, about these recent changes to the EqualRights legislation here in Victoria, I’m not happy and I have concerns. Let me say straight up that I don’t think there should be any exemptions to the law.  It defeats the whole purpose of the law and effectively implies that there exist second class humans unworthy of legal protection. Allowing religious organisations to discriminate against gays, lesbians (and the whole queer spectrum), as well as single mothers, people living in ‘sin’ and whatever else offends their mediaeval morality is a giant step backwards for human rights in general. As a lesbian myself, I find the privileging of religious bigotry in our legal code deeply offensive.

Some of you may be thinking, ‘Goodness, what’s all the fuss about? Surely no gay person would want to work for a church that doesn’t approve of them?’ The trouble is, we’re not just talking about churches and schools anymore. Ever since John Bloody Howard turned over some of the functions of the welfare system to private enterprise in the late 90s, religious organisations have got their fingers in more pies than ever before. Now we’re talking about hospitals, universities, nursing homes, respite care, disability services, charities, camping grounds and employment agencies, among others. That’s suddenly a whole lot of jobs in a whole lot of sectors where gays, lesbians, single mothers and de facto lovers are no longer welcome. Whatever pathetic, specific cases were made in the past, such as that having a gay teacher in school was potentially hazardous (presumably we were able to waft invisible gay germs at the students), they don’t add up as a justification for a blanket ban across so many different sectors. If these groups receive government funding they should obey federal laws but instead they’re allowed to thumb their nose at us and go back to discriminating against whomever they wish. It sucks.

The truly disgusting irony in all of this is that the people now being allowed to indulge their bigotry are precisely the same people who historically tortured, hanged, burnt at the stake, imprisoned and locked us up in asylums. The Christian church has been a powerful bully, used to getting its own way for more than fourteen centuries. During that time it fought every democratic, educational and tolerant initiative. It only lost its coercive power over ‘heretics’ and unbelievers in the last couple of centuries and like so many other bullies that have been stripped of power, they have the immense gall to turn around and squeal that now they are being discriminated against! ‘Oooo-er, stop oppressing me! Stop restricting my right to exercise my deeply held religious beliefs! Respect my God-given bigotry!’

Homophobia is not the only prejudice deeply embedded in the Bible. You can make a similar case, with loads of scriptural justification, for slavery and racism. With this new government respect for religious views are you going to allow churches to be racist again? I thought not. That would be a step too far in the twenty-first century. So it’s just the queers and the fornicators on the bottom of the heap…again. Gee, thanks. Speaking of the queers, it might be time to reflect that historically we are the last minority to be picked up by the tolerance bandwagon and the first to be pushed off when times change. The only people who fight for our rights, are us. I’ll be turning 50 soon and I’ve seen the pendulum on tolerance for queers swing three times in my life, from increasing tolerance in the late 70s to the homophobic backlash when AIDS was discovered in the 80s to the increasing tolerance again in the 90s. With a new conservative government in power in Canberra, I wouldn’t bet against that pendulum swinging again. Maybe it’s time to forget the trivial side issue of gay marriage and concentrate on the ongoing fight for full, equal, human rights. Sixteen centuries and still waiting.

Oops, I think I want to hit you.

I was raised a fundamentalist Christian and I have religious scar tissue. And a fair whack of residual anger as well. I keep it under control most of the time, but occasionally, especially if I’m pre-menstrual I can get quite snarly and rude, as some unfortunate Jehovah Witnesses discovered last week. They had no way of knowing that on that particular day I was snarly enough to head butt puppies and stomp on cute little bunnies without a second thought. So when they came knocking at my door, I tried to be polite but couldn’t stop myself from blurting out something along these lines, ‘Don’t waste your time my friends, I’m really not interested. I was raised a Mormon and nowadays I don’t want anything to do with that violent nut-bag Yahweh or any of his minions.’ They were a little taken aback. I don’t think they’d ever heard their god described as a nut-bag before.

Sadly, this is not the weirdest thing I’ve said to religious types who’ve come knocking at my door. Many years ago I was living in Brunswick. It was the anniversary of the Granville train crash and I was thinking about my father, who died in that crash. I’d always blamed his death on the fact that that day, of all bloody days, he’d decided to give up smoking. Instead of sitting in the smoking carriage at the back of the train, he’d sat in a non-smoking carriage in the middle of the train: the carriage that took the full impact of the bridge collapse. If he’d been sitting in the smoking carriage as he usually did, there was a good chance that he would have survived. The reason he had given up smoking was because he had become a Mormon shortly before his death, but for some reason I hadn’t really linked those two things before. I’d blamed the non-smoking for being in the wrong carriage but not the Mormons for making him give up smoking. That day however, I suddenly made the connection and felt a surge of anger towards the Church. In an example of gob-smacking synchronicity, just as I had this realisation there was a knock at the door and there were two Mormon missionaries. I spluttered incoherently for a while and then managed to spit out, ‘YOU GUYS KILLED MY FATHER!’, before slamming the door in their face. I’m not proud of it, but hey these things happen. If either of those guys ever read this, I’m sorry. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There have been many other times and occasions when I’ve got very angry about religion and its effects, but in all that time I’ve never once been tempted to smack someone in the gob. For that level of outrage, it took a New Age person. I loathe the New Age movement. I see it as a pointless, smug, middle-class, secretly self-loathing, self obsessed, navel-gazing adventure that usually ends with people disappearing up their own fundament and thinking they’ve found God, instead of their own crap. I particularly hate the idea that there are no bad things in the world, just ‘valuable lessons’. The most vivid example of this pathetic sort of thinking happened to me after a gig. I’d been talking about being a survivor of childhood sexual assault. I hasten to point out that it was my step-father who abused me, not my real father. After the gig a New Age wanker came up to me said, ‘Wow, your step-father must have really loved you to give you that beautiful lesson. He’s probably your soul mate, because only someone who really, really loved you would choose to incarnate as your abuser so you could benefit from such a difficult, wonderful lesson.’ I am rarely speechless, but that day I was without speech. I was too busy trying to figure out whether to punch her in the nose so hard that it would end up in her brain or whether I should try and rip her ears off. She didn’t seem to have a single clue as to how insulting and horrible her misguided thoughts were. It is the closest I have ever come to doing physical damage to another person.

Since then I’ve thought a lot about this ridiculous magical thinking of the New Age. For starters where is the head office or the clearing room where all this careful allocation of necessary lessons is being organised? Who is behind it all? ‘Cause if there is some organising committee, they’ve failed dismally. If all this crap is being carefully meted out for the personal growth and development of every single person on the planet, then no one would ever commit suicide. Someone must have got the dose wrong. Taken to its logical extent, this sort of thinking is a recipe for apathy and non-action in the real world. Because if every single person in the world has ‘chosen’ all these things, if there really is a good reason for all the horrible things that happen in this world, well then, we don’t need to change a single thing. The world is perfect exactly as it is and we don’t need to worry about stuff like poverty, hunger and disease any more. It’s all meant to happen. And if you believe that, then a) better check and see if your brain has accidentally fallen out of your skull and b) I’ve got a bridge AND an Opera House I’d like to sell you.

You Wouldn't Bloody Read About It

Over time you get used to the cultural imperialism and arrogance of America. You get so used to history being re-written in World War II films that you no longer react when you see only American soldiers depicted in D-Day films. You merely sigh when a different film shows the American military capturing an Enigma machine instead of the British. After a while you even stop noticing that although our TV screens are awash with American product not one of our shows, not one, will ever appear on the mainstream channels in America. If they like one of our shows, they’ll remake it with an American cast, but you’ll never see the original. These are all old insults and like I said, we’ve all got used to it.

However annoying these things are, they’re all in the realm of fiction where artistic licence (and cultural arrogance) are pretty much expected. But when it comes to the reporting of history, you expect better. If you consult a book that purports to be an encyclopaedia and find breath-takingly inaccurate information, you’re allowed to get a little grumpy.

So here’s the thing. I’m working on a new introduction for the book I’m writing. I wanted to have a line about how the sky is no longer the limit and hasn’t been since the 1950s when Sputnik was launched. I thought I’d better check that Sputnik was actually launched in the 1950s and not the 60s. I could have Googled it, but the computer wasn’t on, the Microsoft start up takes so bloody long and besides, I can’t fricking stand that Google always seems to send me to bloody stupid, bloody annoying, bloody poxy Wikipedia first.  I find it simpler and easier to consult the reference section on my book shelf. Call me an insane old Ludditte but I trust books more than the Internet.

Sadly, the book I picked up let me down badly. So badly I even briefly considered throwing it in the bin. It’s a little one volume encyclopaedia put out by Columbia University Press and ok, it was published in 1983 but it’s still useful in terms of history and Sputnik should have been in it. The cover assured me that it was not just ‘..comprehensive and authoritative,’ but ‘was prepared under the guidance of  a distinguished panel of scholars.’ A distinguished panel of incredibly biased American scholars would have been more truthful. I’d known for some time that this particular encyclopaedia was really good for facts about America, but not so much for other countries and their histories. I’d encountered omissions before, but not outright fraud.

So I tried to look up Sputnik. No listing. Rude but not unusual I thought. It’s probably in the section a few pages back, under the heading of Space Exploration, I thought. But no, by a clever sleight of hand and the drawing up of biased categories, there was not a single mention of Sputnik in the entire section. The two categories listed were Manned Space Flight Programs and Space Probe Programs and because Sputnik was not technically a probe, they managed to ignore it completely, the rude bloody bastards! The first human made device to ever leave the Earth’s atmosphere, the first ever artificial satellite to orbit our globe and 26 years later the Americans who wrote this book couldn’t even bring themselves to mention it. I mean, I knew the Americans were touchy about losing the early stages of the Space Race, but to hold a grudge for almost 30 years, that’s just nuts. (In case you’re interested I did manage to find the launch date of the first Sputnik -1957- in another of my books, a dictionary. An English dictionary.  From England.)

The rudeness didn’t end there. By another sleight of hand in the listing of the various space programs, they managed to disguise the true Russian contribution to the exploration of space. By listing the programs alphabetically instead of chronologically they managed to give the top six entries to America instead of Russia. It starts with all the Apollo launches and you don’t get to anything Russian till half way through. It’s only when you carefully check the column headed Year of Launch that you realise that you’ve been conned. Especially when you notice that Yuri Gargarin and his first manned flight comes last on the list. Damn the Russians for using words like Vostok and Zond for their missions! If only they’d named them all Aardvark or Aasvogel (a South African vulture) they could have beaten the Americans linguistically as well as in the real world!

Wait. Strike that. The American authors would have figured out some other scheme instead to keep them at the top. Those thin-skinned, delusional, arrogant, petty-minded, bloody purveyors of American propaganda. I could go on, I know lots of other rude words, but I might end it here. Can’t be too rude about America these days. Not since Obama signed an Executive Order that allows the American military to grab anyone they want, from any country in the world and then take them back to America to stand trial for the crime of terrorism. Or being Un-American. They’re the same thing aren’t they? Either way, better zip my lip.

The Weirdness of Time

Ever since I was a kid I have been fascinated by the bendiness of time. It amazed me that two hours spent watching a film could flash by in seemingly no time at all but that two hours of church on Sunday could drag on and on and on…and on. Once I thought I could even see new grey hairs appearing on the head of the person sitting in front of me. Church time dragged that badly. Time going slowly wasn’t always a bad thing. In primary school it meant that the six weeks of summer school holidays seemed to last forever and when school started again my friends would have visibly grown or changed over that time. Seems odd to think about it now when six weeks can fly by and nothing seems to change at all. Actually it’s not just weeks that fly by as I get older, whole bloody years seem to evaporate before my eyes. Didn’t we just have Christmas like ten minutes ago?

My first real taste of how bendy and flexible time could be was in a psychology class at college called ‘Altered States of Consciousness’ and Len Kane, if you’re out there, you were one of the best damned teachers I ever had. The class took place in the evening and the first thing Len did was teach us a few basic relaxation and meditation techniques. So each class would start with everyone lying down for ten minutes practising those techniques. It was a fine way to start a class, even if some of us nodded off and started snoring. After we’d been doing this for a few weeks one night Len said, ‘Ok I’m going to play some music now. When it stops I want you to come back to full consciousness.’ Once we’d all sat up, Len asked us how long we thought the music had played. The guesses ranged between 6 minutes and 12 minutes. Len just smiled and said that it was only 90 seconds long. Which surprised us all, but proved that time can flow differently depending on what physical state you are in.

The next experience I had with bendy time was when I became a comedian. It didn’t happen often but occasionally I’d forget what I was going to say next or someone would heckle me and for a moment on stage I’d freeze. As my mind raced frantically to figure out what to say next, time would sort of telescope and start running at different speeds. In the outside world, probably less than 5 seconds would go by before I spoke again, but on the inside that 5 seconds would feel like minutes. I could have whole conversations in my head and re-run routines to figure out which bit I’d missed, all in the space of 5 seconds. It’s a very odd feeling.

So I have a bit of experience with the nature of time and how it can telescope in and out and run at different speeds, but I was still astonished by something that happened a few years ago. Thanks to the joys of telephone banking, I can now tell you precisely how many coherent thoughts I can have in the space of a second. For those of you who haven’t used telephone banking, when you ring up to get an account balance, an automated voice tells you much money you have in the account. The pre-recorded voice runs at normal speed until it comes to the actual dollar amount. That bit can’t be pre-recorded so it takes a bit longer to say the dollar amount as the computer pulls from its files the right sequence of words to match the numbers. As a result it sounds a bit like this: ‘You have…two…hundred…and…thirty…two…dollars in your account.’ The time gap between the numbers is less than a second. It’s noticeably slower than the rest of the message but not too annoying.

So here’s the background to my little adventure. I had about a hundred dollars in my account. I was waiting for two payments to come in. If just one had been deposited in my account it would have gone up to over five hundred dollars. If both the amounts had gone in, it would have been over a thousand dollars in my account. So when I rang to get my account balance I was really hoping to hear an amount in excess of one hundred dollars. When the computer voice started saying my account balance, the first number I heard was, ‘You have…one…’, and everything you are about to read happened before the next number was said. First came the absolutely-speed-of-light assumption that my account still had only one hundred odd dollars in it. Then came a whole bunch of quick thoughts; ‘What?! At least one of those cheques should have come in! That gig was four bloody weeks ago. We’re going to have to make another follow-up phone call. Damn it!’ And then the voice said the second number, ‘…thousand…’. Both the cheques had gone in. Happy days.

But when I got off the phone and thought about what had happened, I was quite stunned that by a computer quirk I know knew that I could have five coherent thoughts in less than a second. I find that mind boggling. All the thoughts differed in length but seemed to take exactly the same amount of time to unwrap in my brain. And there is simply no way that I could have physically said out loud those five thoughts within the space of a second. I reckon it would take at least 8 seconds to say them. I’d always known that thought was faster than speech, but I was staggered that according to my rough calculations, thought is eight times faster than speech. It explains how writers can pop outside for a cigarette and come back five minutes later with a whole book sketched out in their mind. Because five thoughts a second means that you can have 1500 thoughts in the space of five minutes. It sounds incredible, but I suspect that it’s true. Unless my brain is a complete freak of nature and thinks faster than anyone else on the planet, which even with my genetic Dutch arrogance I find very difficult to believe. I’m just not that special.

The other implication from this accidental experiment I find a little disturbing. Because by the end of my five thoughts in one second I had built up quite a bit of anger about what I thought were late payments. It only lasted till I heard the second digit, but it was definitely anger. The fact that I could generate genuine anger within the space of a second, I find very scary. It means that I can get angry before I can even say the words to explain why I’m angry. It makes me wonder how many times we get angry before we even know ourselves why we’re angry. It might even be possible that by the time we verbalise it we’re already rationalising and justifying something we didn’t consciously start. It’s enough to make you want to have a Bex and a good lie down. Or have a long chat with a neuroscientist. Or maybe just have a few too many beers and a quiet think. Hmmm, think I’ll go the beer option.

A Floating Tangent

I’ve just finished a segment for the new book I’m writing. In case you’re interested it has the very unassuming and humble title of, ‘How to save the whole damn world: a madly optimistic manifesto.’ Like I said, humble. Strangely enough I’m finding it hard to snag a publisher. They seem to think it odd that a comedian might have some big ideas that could be useful. They also think I should work with a respectable economist if I want to get some traction. As if! Economists are barely legitimate purveyors of magical thinking and spurious figures. I wouldn’t let them near my book if they paid me all the Dollarized Yield Curve Notes or Constant Maturity Treasury Floaters in the world. And yes, those are real terms.

But I digress. I was working on a chapter about the possibilities for the safe exploration of space. As you do. The chapter was getting a little long and there was one particular tangent that I just could not justify or fit in, so I thought I’d put it out here on my blog.

Have you ever watched a documentary and heard someone say something so unutterably stupid and wrong that you want to punch the telly? Happens to me a lot. In the context of thinking about space exploration and the best sort of fuel to use in space craft, I watched a doco called ‘Moon for Sale’ on SBS. At one point they were talking about nuclear fusion power as opposed to fission power. Instead of splitting an atom to release energy, you fuse two light atoms together and that releases even more energy. Fusion power is the nuclear engine that drives the Sun. The advantages of fusion over fission include: using less fuel for the process and thus creating less waste and that waste is much less radioactive. It’s not commercially viable yet, but people are working on it. One of the versions uses Helium (lightest atom in the universe) as the fuel. Trouble is, a hell of a lot of neutrinos are created in the process and they tend to shred the containment shells of the reactors really quickly. They have to shut down the reactor and replace the shells on a regular basis. It’s frustrating, inefficient and wasteful.

It turns out that a change in the fuel could make all the difference. Helium found on the earth is not the ideal fuel, but a variant form of Helium called Helium 3 (He3) creates far fewer neutrinos and thus causes less damage to the reactor. He3 is produced by the Sun in vast quantities and carried away from it in the solar wind. Over the millennia many tons of He3 have landed on the surface of the Moon, and now the surface rocks are riddled with the stuff. Here comes the point where I got really angry. Some American tool appeared on the doco to advocate strip-mining the surface of the Moon to obtain He3. Even though it would be stupidly expensive to conduct mining operations on the Moon and even though completely strip-mining the entire Moon would only provide 200 years worth of reactor fuel, this was the only option for obtaining He3 that this complete and utter dipstick could imagine. I was screaming at the telly, ‘Why go for the secondary source you numbskull?! Why demolish the surface of our glorious Moon when you can COLLECT IT IN SPACE FOR FREE?! It’s coming from the Sun you idiot, NOT the Moon. Go to the source, not the accidental bystander you cloth-eared, pointy-toed, son of a %$#@&%, who probably $%@!* pigeons when you think no one is looking!’ As you can probably tell, I take my science seriously.

It always causes me a moment of despair when I see such wrong-headed thinking. It speaks to the innate conservatism of the human species and how long it takes for new ideas to take hold. Reaching right back into pre-history, we didn’t change the design of our stone axes for more than a 100,000 years. That’s how innately conservative we are and although it can be bloody frustrating, it does make evolutionary sense. If something works, you keep doing it and don’t give it up until something better comes along. The trouble is, who decides that something is better and how do you convince everyone else? That’s the bit we always struggle with.

As a result, I think we are still bound by our essential conservatism in such a way that we have actually preserved mediaeval and even Neolithic sensibilities to this day. The reason the guy in that doco wanted to strip mine the Moon was because ‘mining’ is still the only way we can think of to obtain minerals and metals. For more than 3,000 years we have done it the same way: crack and grind rock out of the earth and then heat it, beat it and treat it. The machines may have got fancier, the factories may have got bigger but in essence we’re still doing it the same way we did it in the Neolithic.

If you can’t picture a truly 21^st century way of mining and processing minerals, try this on for size. In 30 or 40 years time when we’ve cracked proper nano-technology and have really good sub-surface scanners, all you’ll have to do is find the spot where the vein of the mineral you want is closest to the surface and simply inject a few billion nano-machines. They will then tunnel down to the vein, extract every last atom and return it to the surface in the form of pure ingots of the metal or mineral. As they extract they could also rearrange the remaining rock into braces so that the cavity formed by mining retains structural integrity. No cave-ins or land subsidence to worry about. Pretty nifty idea eh?

I think the saddest example of this conservatism occurs in medicine. I saw a doco on SBS called ‘Miracle Cure?’ that talked about modern cancer treatments and was shocked when a researcher actually stated that we were still attacking cancers with essentially mediaeval treatments. We may give them fancy new names but surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy are the same old cut, burn or poison methods of centuries ago. Surely we can do better than that? When I heard that comparison I was shocked, but not really surprised. I’m not all that impressed with modern medicine to be frank, and those sort of statements don’t upset me as much as that guy in the Moon doco did. I think it comes down to my own biases. I’m a bit of a space nerd and therefore imagine that other space nerds are as open to new ideas and embrace intellectual change as much as I do.  I get more upset when I see examples of stupidity and conservatism in their ranks. Maybe I need to go and have a good hard look at myself and admit my own biases and stupidities. But being a human, I probably won’t.

Gardening as War

Sorry about the brief pause. I’ve been waging pre-emptive war in the garden. Trying to get a jump on all the weeds and thistles before that two week period in early spring when the garden goes nuts. A couple of years ago I failed to wage my pre-emptive strike and I ended up with six-foot thistles that I had to take down with an axe. And I swear I can actually see the blackberry plants growing, they seem to add inches over night. It’s war I tells ya, war! So at the moment I’m out in the garden a few hours every day weeding, pruning, cutting and generally smiting. My current list of most loathed weeds is as follows; cleavers, wandering weed, dandelions (especially the saucer-shaped holes in the lawn they leave when you dig them up) and goddamned hate-you, hate-you, wouldn’t-want-to-date-you agapanthus, with their horrible Medusa-head worm-like roots and their nasty habit of choking every other plant in the garden to death.

If I speak with the fervour of a convert when it comes to gardening, it’s because I am a recent convert. It’s like some switch was flicked in my brain when I turned forty and I suddenly looked at the garden in a new light. All I could see were weed-choked beds and bushes and trees in desperate need of pruning. How could I have not noticed that the camellia ‘bush’ now had big straight branches reaching up almost four metres in the air? Or that the hedges were completely overshadowing the pool and the front garden? Tackling more than eight years of neglect in the garden has been a huge task, but I’ve quite enjoyed it. On some level, I think my Dutch and Prussian genes have applauded all my attempts to create Order out of Chaos.

 I think they may also like the unacknowledged violence of gardening. Sure, ‘gardening’ sounds like a nice, safe, gentle domestic pursuit and conjures up images of ladies with big hats cutting flowers for the house, but there’s more to it than that. Once I’d started on my gardening adventure I soon realised that a lot of the time I was a like a school teacher trying to keep a roomful of unruly teenage boys (is there any other kind?) from strangling each other. ‘Stop it! Sit down all of you! OI! Agapanthus, I’ve told you twice already, LEAVE THAT TREE ALONE! And Blackberry, get your hands off that poor azalea or it’s back in the naughty corner for you.’ Actually, sometimes it’s more like being the referee in a cage fight than a teacher.

It took me a while to realise the inherently violent nature of gardening. My first attempts at pruning were quite timid and gentle. I didn’t want to cut too much off and hurt the plant. Little did I realise that plants are masochists who have been conditioned to rebound after being attacked by goats and other animals. The more you hurt them, the more they seem to respond. This was graphically illustrated for me a few years back when a neighbour’s car ended up in our living room, (long story, some other time). On its path of destruction the car went over the top of an azalea bush and ripped it to shreds. Once I trimmed all the broken bits off, there wasn’t much left and I thought it was a goner. Instead, next spring it grew more and had twice the flowers of the other plants in the bed. So now when I prune, I try to channel my inner goat and really go for it.

To counter balance some of the violence, I’ve also developed somewhat of a rapport with local birds. We don’t use pesticides or chemicals in our garden and the birds seem to have figured out that our garden is safe to browse. Even our cats don’t scare them because frankly, our cats are pussies. They may look longingly at the blackbirds but the parrots and kookaburras terrify them. The blackbirds used to wait for a while after I’d weeded a patch of garden before moving in to catch worms. Now they hop along beside me as I go. They seemed to have spread the word to the other birds as well, so now I get king parrots landing on the back porch demanding to be fed. No matter how many times I patiently explain to them that I do not feed wild birds, they don’t seem to believe me. Especially when a local kookaburra has evidence to the contrary.

It happened like this: one morning I walked out on to the back porch, ready for a little gardening. A kookaburra was on the back porch looking at me expectantly. As I headed down the garden, he followed me. As I set to cutting all the dead leaves from a tree fern, he sat on a tree branch near and watched me. At one point I thought I saw sudden movement on the trunk of the tree fern, thought it was a bug of some kind and turned away to dump some fronds on my rubbish pile. While my back was turned, the kookaburra swooped in next to me and grabbed something from the tree fern. He came within three feet of me as he did it. When I looked up at him, perched on the tree branch again, I realised that he’d caught a frog. Felt bad for the frog but good that I’d helped a kookaburra hunt.

So that’s gardening for you. More death, hunting, sex and violence than it’s given credit for, in addition to the more familiar themes of peace, tranquillity and inter-species friendship. I tell you, sometimes when I walk out into the garden I don’t know whether I’m going to be channelling a goat, St Francis of Assisi or the Marquis de Sade.

Clean Up on Aisle Five

There was a story about the Pacific gyre in the news recently, that island of floating rubbish that has greenies tearing their hair out in despair. In one of nature’s many quirks the different currents of the Pacific Ocean conspire to gather all the rubbish of the ocean in one spot, the gyre. A bit like how all the leaves in your pool get swept to the middle as the pool pump creates a vortex around the edge. The collected rubbish pile in the gyre, much of it plastic, is getting bigger and bigger and the plastic itself is breaking down into smaller pieces and affecting all marine life in the area. It’s a horrible, terrible mess and no one quite knows what to do with it. Volunteers have gone out and tried to tackle it, but a few small ships with nets can’t hope to make an impact on it. Larger, industrial ships will be needed but then you run into the problem of clearing the fish and dolphins that swim under the rubbish island out of the way. Can’t endanger your greenie credentials by killing fish and dolphins even if you’re clearing up a major problem…that affects fish and dolphins. So everyone is flapping their hands and saying how terrible it is, but nothing is happening.

Well stop your flapping and listen up, as I turn a sow’s ear into a beautiful purse. If we really want to clean this mess up, it will take a bit of money and some research but it’s totally do-able. If every Pacific nation kicks in some money we’ll build a small flotilla of big, rubbish-munching ships and factory ships that can recycle all that plastic back into feed stock for new plastic products. The money from selling the feedstock will help fund the flotilla. Then we get some marine biologists to research what sounds, blasted underwater will scare fish and dolphins away. Not loud enough that it will damage their little fishy brains, but enough to make them crap themselves and move away. I’m thinking the hunting calls of killer whales might do the trick. Any fish too dumb to flee from the sound, or any dolphin insanely feisty enough to want to tackle a killer whale will just have to take their chances with the big ships. Think of it as culling outrageous stupidity from the fish and dolphin gene pool.

Once we’ve cleaned up the current mountain of rubbish, take a minute to think how mind-bogglingly useful that ocean gyre truly is. If it didn’t exist, if it wasn’t there to gather all this crap in one relatively small spot, if all that rubbish had remained evenly spread throughout the whole ocean, it may have taken decades to realise just how much garbage is out there. Years down the track a marine biologist may have noted the increasing amount of tiny plastic pellets found in the bellies of dead fish and then it might have taken even more decades to figure out what was actually happening. As it is, the ocean has virtually picked up a microphone and announced to the world, ‘Clean up on aisle five please, clean up on aisle five, STAT!’ (just to mix up my metaphors even more charmingly). It truly is astonishing.

I should point out here that there is more than one ocean gyre. There are actually two in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic and one in the Indian Ocean (the poor third world ocean always gets less than the big fancy oceans). I don’t know if they all collect rubbish in the same way as the infamous Pacific one and we just don’t hear about it, but I’ll take a punt that the same physics is at work and that they too collect rubbish at their centres. So once our flotilla is up and running and has cleaned up the Pacific gyre, then we can send it on to the other gyres. It means that we have a marvellously effective way of cleaning all the world’s oceans and keeping them clean by patrolling the gyres on an ongoing basis. One flotilla, rotating through five specific spots on the planet will be able to do that. So look past the horrible, nasty floating island of rubbish we’re hearing about now, and marvel that the ocean currents have naturally evolved a system of garbage collection so efficient that any pointy-headed engineer would be jealous. Let’s use it quick, and then we can cross another item off the environmental ‘to do’ list.