September 2002 Archives

It’s officially hot now. Only a month into spring, and the temperature is crawling up to 30. Well, I just have two more days of it left, then I’m off to Tassie for a week, where it should get down to 7 degrees at night.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve been sweltering here in Brisbane, doing little more than moving from home to class to library to home, and back through the circuit again. It’s midterm season, but we only had one midterm, and four papers, all due on the same day. So I haven’t been getting out much.

Except on the weekend. My weekends have been spectacular. Beck and Paul took me up to Hervey Bay with them a couple of weeks ago, where they were going to visit some friends. Their friends have some lovely little cottages behind their house where we stayed—there were three beds in my room, and I somehow managed to select the one with the thinnest mattress. Go figure.

On the way up to Hervey Bay, we drove by the Big Pineapple. The Big Pineapple is a big pineapple, in the middle of a whole lot of pineapple plantations. That’s it. However, I did learn how pineapples grow! It was an amusing experience. Beck had warned me in advance that when she (who is from Adelaide, down south, and had never seen pineapples growing) first drove by the fields with Paul, she didn’t believe him when he told her they were pineapples. She was sure they grew on trees. He hasn’t stopped making fun of her since then.

I, for my part, would certainly have believed that they grow on trees. Paul said maybe it’s a gender thing. So I called my boyfriend, and asked him if he knew how pineapples grow. I believe his response was something like, “Oh sure, haven’t you ever tried to grow one?”

No, I’m afraid I haven’t.

At any rate, Hervey Bay was beautiful. We stayed right next to the beach, and I walked on the sand, tried to snorkel (but the visibility was nil, from a recent storm), and went whale watching. Hervey Bay is famous for its whales, and I was a little disappointed when I found out all they have are humpbacks and the occasional dolphin. After Santa Barbara, where I’ve seen blue whales and whole schools of porpoises, this sounded a bit tame.

But what the local marine mammal population lacks in diversity, it makes up for in enthusiasm and friendliness. My mind was simply boggled by how close these whales got to us. They were literally sidling up to the boat and inspecting us through the windows.

The whale watching was on Sunday. To get back in time for class on Monday, I had to catch a train at one in the morning, arriving in Brisbane at 6, running home for a shower, and back to school. Very exciting stuff. It actually would have been fun but the train smelled like a nursing home—I can’t explain how or why, but it did. And I was tired.

Anyway, papers, papers, and more papers.

And then, Sydney! Last weekend I hopped on a plane down to visit my friend Charles, and had a simply spectacular time. It was relaxing and pleasant, and involved a trip to the Blue Mountains, an opera, and lots of wandering around the city.

The Blue Mountains are so named due to the eucalyptus oils seeping into the air around them. The touristy bit was undergoing construction, and there were lots and lots of Japanese tourists around, but once we got away from all that it was lovely. We took the “Giant Staircase” down to the bottom of the mountain. “Giant Staircase” doesn’t sound that impressive, but you might be surprised. It just went on and on. At the top there was a warning “For Strong Walkers Only”. Charles looked at me, and said “Are you a strong walker?” After a moment’s consideration, I replied, “I’m a persistent walker.” He nodded. “Me too.”

So we went all the way to the bottom, not because either of us is in particularly wonderful shape, but because our pride would not let us do otherwise. Once at the bottom, we walked over to a tram that went back up to the top. Let it be here recorded that I would have climbed back up the staircase, but Charles was not too fond of the idea. Though in retrospect, I’m glad he made us take the tram.

That night we watched “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” which I’ve read, and tried out for a part in with Morgie last year (neither of us made it) and been wanting to see for a while. It’s really quite good. Pleasantly existential, but not exactly gripping action, so you kind of have to force yourself to pay close attention.

The next day was the opera! We saw “Carmen” in the famous Sydney Opera House, and it was lovely. Eating Maltesers and listening to arias is good fun. Carmen was depressing, though. Carmen is a bad bad woman, and Don Jose is a silly silly man. Also anything set in Spain and sung in French is inevitably a bit odd.

That night we played lots and lots of pool, in a place that had a huge fish tank next to the pool tables, and good music.

And then I came home, finished all my papers, and turned them in. At the moment I’m packing for Tasmania, where I will have a brief and blessed respite from the Queensland heat.

Mozzie bites herald the arrival of spring in Queensland, and summer thunderstorms are just over the horizon.

Meanwhile, I’m spending my mornings in classes and my afternoons in the library, slowly hammering out four different papers, to wit: the hermit crab project, a research paper on invasive species in Moreton Bay, an essay on fire in the Australian environment, and a report on the vegetation of Lamington and Stradbroke Island.

Our lectures are sometimes exciting and sometimes not--we have a feeling that we got the same coral reef lecture four or five times now, with slight variations and different professors. Almost all of our lectures are by different lecturers, which is nifty insofar as we often get a specialist on each subject, and not-so-nifty insofar as they don’t know what we’ve learned already, and tend to either repeat each other or completely bewilder us.

Occasionally we get gems such as the glow-worm lady or the dinosaur man. The glow-worm lady is doing her PhD on glow-worms and just thinks they’re the coolest things in the world. She likes bugs in general, so I e-mailed her about my fire paper, as the topic I’ve chosen is the adaptations (or non-adaptations) of Australian insects to the flammability of their environment. She gave me the name of a woman who apparently did her entire thesis on this subject, which is a bit overwhelming but certainly helpful.

The dinosaur man was introduced to us as such, and I had to stifle a giggle, as he looked the part. He was quite small and thin, but his hair was long and unkempt and so was his beard, and he looked ancient. He had us in hysterics for his entire lecture. He’s one of the few paleontologists who still believes dinosaurs had a polyphyletic origin.

However, apart from these rare delights, I’m generally not too impressed with the lecturers, and Mike and Ian, who run the whole program, are still my favorites. Today we had both, and neither had slept last night, between preparing lectures and wrestling with program glitches. Consequently they were very amusing today. Ian has characteristically dry Pom humor, and he always makes us laugh. Mike is just interesting.

Today his lecture was on a biogeographical theory proposed by a man named Tim Flannery in a book called The Future Eaters, which is our token textbook for the terrestrial ecology course, and which I’d really like to get now. It’s very controversial, but he argued that wherever early humans spread, they caused mass megafaunal (large animals, a rather vague category) extinctions, and this happened when the aboriginals moved in Australia some 60,000 years ago. The megafaunal extinctions are actually fairly well documented; the same thing happened in North America, around when early Native Americans were driving entire herds of bison off cliffs. The idea is, in their naïveté, big animals don’t expect skinny little humans to be a threat when they first encounter them, so they are immediately killed off.

Anyway, Flannery went on to say that in Australia, once most of the megafauna was gone, nothing was left to graze the Australian flora, which happens to be extremely flammable. So when it doesn’t get eaten for a while and builds up, big uncontrollable fires are the result. To prevent this from happening and to maintain a greater diversity of plants, Aborigines began a regime of controlled burning, also known as “fire-stick farming,” to take the place of the megafaunal grazers that they had killed off.

When Europeans arrived, they brought with them the European mentality that fire is bad, and stopped the burning. As a result fuel started building up again, and without the control burns that the aboriginals had used to keep fuel levels low, they reached a point where once a fire started (which it inevitably would) it burned out of control. This has been the story since European arrival, though there are a number of people pushing for management policies that include control burns.

The huge, infrequent fires have triggered another wave of extinctions, this time of smaller animals in what is called the “critical size range,” too small to escape the fires, but too big to hide under logs until the fire passes over. Most of the species in this size range that are still around are either endangered or likely to become so.

Anyway, that’s the theory. Right or not, it’s pretty interesting, and I’d like to read the book.

Additional injuries, since my second trip to Straddie and a week in the rainforest: wounded pride from carrying out a science project on hermit crab shell selection, of all topics one of the most overstudied and least peculiar to Australia, scattered bruises from mud-wrestling in the rain, a network of scratches on the back of my hand from the claws of numerous seed-greedy crimson rosellas and king parrots, and sore legs from running with Allie, the border collie.

This morning’s run turned into a fairly amusing episode of foiled romance, as on our way back Allie and I were assaulted and followed home by a large Husky blend. “Paul, Allie’s started bringing her boyfriends home,” called Beck when she found out, and added, “Of all dogs, we had to get the one that was a tart.”

Allie’s been de-sexed, but the poor bloke hasn’t quite gotten it--he’s in our yard now, still confused. We called his owner to come pick him up, as we didn’t want him to get run over in the street, which is a fairly busy one.

To elaborate on the hermit crab project, it really wasn’t that bad. In fact, I think I’ll be able to make quite a decent report out of it, but I’ve been developing the skill of making good reports from bad data for years now. The project itself was conceived by one of the girls in our group, and my friend Cara and I were fairly critical of it to begin with. Our sentiments, though purely professional, led to the injury of some personal feelings, and the threat of losing group harmony, at which point we backed off and simply acquiesced to the hermit crab plan, this not being a particularly important project in the grand scheme of things. The unpleasantness between all members of the group has long since melted away and all are now friends.

The experience, however, just went to strengthen my conviction that working in groups is never as productive or pleasant as working alone, and I can’t fathom why I’ve been forced to do it since grade school.

And, of course, I continue to be obligated to work in groups; while in the rainforest I actually ended up in the largest group, which consisted of seven people, filling out a proforma, profiling the rainforest, and sketching a biodiversity curve. The obvious conclusion to draw, of course, is that I must have something to learn from this experience, that I keep being thrust into it, but though I may flatter myself, I don’t think I’m half bad at working in groups, despite my disinclination to do so. I strive to maintain amiable relations, I attempt to keep everyone on track, and I always do my share of the work if not more. (Our rainforest group tied with another for the most species of leaves collected. Mike gave us chocolate.)

I don’t mind working with people, I know I’ll have to do that for the rest of my life. I think what may bother me most about working in a group is that no one’s in charge. Everything needs a central intelligence; the nervous system requires a brain if any sort of complex task is to be carried out. Nerve nets only work in jellies and sponges.

Either tell me what to do or let me tell you, but don’t let us all be equals.

That sounds odd, doesn’t it?