I have a friend, Wayne Brennan, who says the most interesting things people do are done in the fine grey area where the mundane and the sublime intersect.
Wayne also loves music and he regularly plays with the Australian actor, Jack Thompson. For this reason I sat up in my chair last Thursday evening when I was at the National Landcare awards. Tim Freedman, the lead singer of the Whitlams, had just finished a song and said Landcare Ambassador and special guest, Jack Thompson, was a fine harp player. Tim asked Jack to join the band in a blues number (picture above by Mark Graham). It was a sublime and unexpected moment.

I am not saying that a Landcare awards night is mundane – it’s just that I was not planning to end up on the edge of my seat absorbed in extraordinary music performed by people who think planting trees is important.

The day before I had been on a dentist couch getting a 35-year-old filling replaced, listening to the wrinkly rock legend Alice Cooper list his top ten songs on a local Power FM station. Cooper’s number three or four was Midnight Oil’s Beds are Burning. So I sat up again when Federal Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, walked into the Great Hall of Parliament House where the event was held. Garrett has the stride of one of those massive War of the World-tripod-monster-machines and worked the room with a patient grace. He has the capacity to draw people to him in a way that is almost tidal.

Down here where I live on the south coast there is a little Landcare group and I know personally how hard it is to maintain the momentum of local effort.
Anyone who has attended a landcare day is aware how hard won every little and big project is. There is the work of grant-writing, then community organising, then planting, watering, mulching and tree guarding. There is always a small core of people in each community who are so dedicated it is hard to understand how their energy and commitment burns. But burn it does.
For all these reasons the singing, the harmonica playing, the enthusiasm of powerful politicians, the presence of hundreds of gleeful rural people inside Parliament House, all on a balmy spring Canberra night left me feeling quietened as I walked across the bridge over Lake Burley Griffin, back to my hotel shortly before midnight.

Where the sublime and the mundane intersect in the context of a national landcare awards night is not so much in all of the individual projects. Rather, on a night like that it is impossible to ignore the fact that little fires of determination to make things better, burn in almost every corner of the continent. All night the audience listened to stories from people who are desperately trying to make their part of the world a bit greener. I reckon there is something sublime and honourable in that – something almost musical.

Check out the landcare winners, the singers and the harmonica playing…