Last days of April 2012

APRIL

Sunday 30th: Fungi day - picking porcini and seeing all kinds.

Sunday morning - Robert Wyatt is singing to me; a Pied Butcher bird is calling – I hear it as music, but it is not music to the roos below, or the lorikeets or probably to the Butchers themselves. Music is universal in cultures (at the level of rhythm anyway) and deeply moves most of us – but we don’t know why. Is it:

1. a biological adaptation – in which case surely not simply for sexual advantage as Darwin reduced adaption to (alternatives are social or familial bonding) , or

2. a cultural evolution – a bricolage using existing skills and abilities such as language, pattern perception and emotion?

Autumn is here: starry nights, cold mornings, plenty of fungi about and Fan-tailed Cuckoos.

Cortinarius australiensis

This meaty forest mushroom is apparently inedible and with no common name. It should have a name - any suggestions?

I asked Gary Williams, a Gumbaynggirr elder who teaches at Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Centre for the Gumbaynggirr seasons. He told me: The two seasons are : galaagarr – warm weather andmaguurr – cold weather. There are times during the year when other things happen, that have no specific names, that denote change but these two words are the main ones.

Other Aboriginal languages have up top 8 seasons, yet we still talk of the four northern Eurpean seasons here.

From a poem of mine (from Sydney): We are now in the middle of bana’murrai’yung / when the tiger quoll seeks a mate and we haul down the doona.

The Maguurr light is immaculate:

Mangrove, Nambucca River

Letter Box Beach, Valla - tyre tracks -

In 1909 "it was a wild and lonely place but always beautiful." Early Valla Days by Kathleen Thurtell and 'Pop' Smith

End the week with a fish

at Deep Creek

29th: A wet miserable Saturday -

Went shopping in the morning: Built in obsolescence has become ridiculously pervasive: watches, cameras, and even a hand windscreen wiper-washer I bought this morning – no way of changing the sponge pad.

Thanks to the Capitalist move from production (Fordism) to consumerism - with serious repercussions for the health of our planet and our psyches. Charles Kettering of General Motors should be remembered , not for the starter motor, but for arguing in the 1920s that ‘The key to economic prosperity is the organised creation of dissatisfaction.’ General Motors began to introduce new model lines every year and ran advertising campaigns designed to make people discontented with the cars they owned. The emphasis on production now turned to the consumerism and vast marketing empires.

In 1954, Brooks Stephens, industrial designer (of Harley-Davidsons and early Jeeps) explained that "planned obsolescence" is "instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary".

Happiness is so topical with Depression now an epidemic - a Perfect Day will not suffice nor will buying stuff - see John Holmstrom's wonderful (5 page) cartoon. Four kangaroos browned by the rain in our garden are perfect (not The 5-HTT gene which regulates serotonin). Thomas Jefferson made a mistake in emphasising the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, now conflated with the "pursuit of pleasure' - happiness comes to you.