Considering they’re down to a few dollars a kilogram bananas are surprisingly hard work. I wrote, recently, about how sorely our family’s patience was being tested as we watched a mammoth bunch of bananas – literally the size of my five year old daughter – refuse to ripen on one of the palms we planted last year. Eventually, with banana prices back then still around $12 to $15 per kilogram, I hacked it off in the hope that it would hurry up the process. We hung them up downstairs in the shade and cool under the house and for a month they did nothing. Finally I hauled the huge bunch and dumped it in disgust in the compost, way back in the far corner of our yard. A few days later, upending a load of scraps I saw that some of the bananas I had tossed out had amazingly turned yellow. Brushing aside a few potato peels and tea leaves I opened one up and it was delicious and for a few moments I understood the thrill our resident brush tailed possum must get when he strikes compost gold. For about a week we feasted on bananas slowly ripening in the compost bay.
Townsville is a place that has really surprised me. Firstly, the weather this winter has been astonishing – like an endless southern autumn, with day after day in the mid-20s and then night after night buried in doonas. If winter was like this every year and there was no such thing as cyclones in the wet season then everyone would move here.
This city also has a reputation for being an army town, full of XXXX-drinking Queenslanders and so I was a little skeptical about what kind of a cultural fest Townsville could put on. But it was a cracker and it really made me think how amazing it is when all different kinds of people come together, rip off their normal clothes and just celebrate with good food, crazy music and spectacular beach-side winter weather. Here’s a movie I made with some highlights from Saturday night..
When it comes to gardening I am the fantastical dreamer and Prue the magical realist. She promises (and delivers) on turning our 700 square metre block in Townsville into a market garden while I try and convince her we should go for an exotic, impractical tropical orchard. When it comes to our yard I am almost completely disenfranchised and although she has occasionally promised me my own little bed in a dark corner for me to do with what I will, I know it would just end badly for me. [Read more →]
In 1983 Lodestone Reef, east of Magnetic Island, was the scene of a series of gruesome attacks by a five-metre tiger shark. It was also in the path of Cyclone Yasi and so I was curious to finally get there on the weekend and see how the Reef looks four months after one of the most powerful Australian storms smashed across the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. I only got to do two dives at one small area of Lodestone but what I saw was sobering – a section of the reef that was torn up and turned to rubble. There was still plenty of beautiful things to see but anyone who thinks the reef can cope with a future where events like Cyclone Yasi are more common needs to have their head read. It is a pity the politicians who are about to vote on a carbon tax can’t dive. Here’s a short film I made about the trip.
Our street in Townsville is so wide that the people on the other side look like they inhabit a whole other universe. The road often looks more like a vast asphalt car park than a thoroughfare. When we first moved there Prue and I formally applied to council to plant out part of the nature strip and to re-establish a garden out on the road area. It might sound a bit radical but all along our street there were once garden beds interspersed with car parking spaces. On our street alone there are literally acres and acres of unused territory covered in the enemy of anyone trying to hide from tropical heat – black tar. We didn’t want to plant Californian redwoods or anything – just a few small shrubs and little trees to attract birds and butterflies. Maybe, we thought, we could also get some fruit trees in as there were a few crooked old papayas in a decrepit unloved streetside bed 100 metres down the road. Our application was rejected. Council said it had a policy of removing such gardens and, as if to prove a point, recently tore one up that was just up the road.
Yesterday, an old friend and colleague told me about his street in Sydney, where he and his neighbours assumed permission, dug up their concrete footpaths and planted wonderful and productive garden beds. They have entered their street into a sustainability competition and are hell bent on winning the people’s prize. Go to this website, watch the film and, if you like what you see, give them a vote.
I don’t usually like to blog about personal, family things but this one is an exception. In March last year my sister’s eight-year-old son, Jeremiah Del Tufo, died from brain and spinal cord cancer. It was the most traumatic experience that our family has gone through and for Jeremiah’s parents, Nicole and Dave, and his sister, Ava, it was and is still horrific beyond belief. The past year has been awful but a new baby sister (and daughter) is on the way and in a couple of weeks the Del Tufos and their local community down on the NSW south coast, near Milton, have organised a J-Day. The night Jem died Ava was by his side and I will never forget how brave she was. Apart from being the best sister her brother could have had, Ava has the most amazing mop of curly blond hair. For J-Day she is going to shave it off and is determined to raise money to try and make sure what happened to her brother doesn’t happen to someone else.
This is the piece she is circulating about her fundraising effort:
Just before Cyclone Yasi I joined an expedition with scientists out to Myrmidon Reef, 120 kilometres off Townsville. This week I was asked to talk to Radio National’s Robyn Williams - Science Show – Cyclone Yasi – about the reef. Before the interview I called the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and asked for a briefing on how Myrmidon fared after the cyclone as they had dispatched a survey team to the area. Bafflingly they refused to give anything more than a vague press release issued a couple of weeks earlier and access to some pictures on their website…What is going on when a publicly funded organisation refuses to inform the public?
South Townsville. It’s about 8pm after a Saturday night spent with friends on a Queenslander house’s deck and I am cycling home. The rest of my family is driving. The reason? We have a ute with only three seats and, because there are four of us, either my wife, Prue, or I has to ride. Neither of us really regard it as a short straw because there is nothing better after a big meal than to stretch your legs on a tropical evening.
Almost invariably – and it is a matter of some pride to the nominated cyclist – no matter where we start from in the city the person on the bike gets home first.
There is still no power here in many parts of Townsville and the streets remain strewn with trees and powerlines. I filed this story to the Guardian in London late last night:
All everyone wanted was to get to the morning after the cyclone before. The citizens of Townsville had been told that category five tropical cyclone Yasi was so vast a system it would take many hours for the worst of the wind and rain to pass.
Just before midnight on Wednesday evening I sent a text to a friend who had been through cyclones and who had chosen to evacuate her home for fear of flooding. I asked her whether she thought the gales would worsen. Her reply made my heart sink: “Definitely.”
An Australian environmental news website edited by author and journalist James Woodford: photos, blogs, discoveries and guest viewpoints. Contact us at jameswoodford1@gmail.com
