Sept - Oct 2011

Oct

All Hallows Eve - Bron made bat biscuits

for the Tricksters of Valla Beach

I know, it's north American marketing, but imagine the time when church bells rang all night to comfort souls drifting in purgatory, and families visited the graveyards. There is not a single church or chapel here, a Dawkins revolution, or just too good a surfing spot.

If only adults were more tricksterish, more les perruques (Michel de Certeau) - as Australians were when I arrived just over 30 years ago. "The magician seeks to reconcile language and reality, the trickster accepts the rupture and exploits the resulting possibilities" Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) though Adorno did go on to suggest art can also subvert the rigid formations of modern life.

Population 7 billion humans today! See below, half way down April 2011 & Paul Ehrlich on why it is a problem in the SMH. "Perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell. The human enterprise is already too large to be sustained."

Four days off-line. Is there ever a good time? I thought after the BRWF is over i will go online every other day - “Because the essence of technology is not technology itself, we must reflect upon tecbne in other realms as well as that of science. We cannot do without technology, not simply for technological reasons, but because it is our mode of being. But it need not be our only mode of being.” Jonathan Bate

Bellinger River Festival

a great idea with sun, canoe races, poetry, music and plenty of usefgul information from the green groups all there. I learnt some Gumbaynggirr from Michael Jarrett a wonderfully enthusiastic teacher. I have invited him to BRWF 2012.

Michael Jarrett who teaches Gumbaynggirr language with one of his sons

Always a surprise in the garden, each and every day.

Roo & joey early 28 oct

Exploded Aseroe rubra (starfish fungus)

The Sacred Kingfisher streaking colour into its nest just below us is a wonderful sight (the hole in the termite mound in a dead Blackbutt - dead trees are important too).

My neighbours think our garden is untidy. Milton describes the Garden:

flow’rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art

In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon

Pour’d forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain.

Eden was uncontrollable (like Nature), Satan viewed it with ‘wonder’. Gardening then was obsessed with neat and tidy knot gardens, nature was a weed to be kept on a leash. And now having seen a segment of Backyard Blitz a garden show where most of the garden is stone or wood or structures of some kind of features, we are returning to that view. We must get art out of the natural aesthetic – let trees express themselves in diverse ways, we should not tidy up fallen wood, a crucial habitat for invertebrates and fungi, its locked up nutrients that must be returned to the trees.

As I wrote in a poem for the video ‘Vines’ – ‘we obsessively prune, weed, trellising the grape, tidy all our environments and all our shrines for neat sentences and control over our animals and lives.’

The population the day I was born was c2,678,788,342 and now is almost at 7 billion - See the population clock, and now has been projected to rise to 14 billion by the end of this century (a study by the United Nations Population Fund). We are increasing by 10,000 humans an hour. This is a problem, despite some claiming a technological fix will fix it, and western over- consumption is not the sole problem (George Monbiot).

23rd

I went for a run on the beach, after taking this photograph and now after a big breakfast feel bloated. "People gravitate towards rewarding themselves after exercise with sweet treats, which is like taking two steps back." says James Duigan.

I should stick to walking. Every walk is different, every walk is walked differently. Yesterday coming back up the firebreak, looking for the friar bird nest, we found another both empty and then noticed a Sacred Kingfisher flying into its nest, squeezing all that scintillation of bright colour down a small hole in a large dark beehive shaped termite mound high in a Blackbutt.

Walking is "primitive and simple . . . it brings us into contact with mother earth and unsophisticated nature; it requires no elaborate apparatus and no extraneous excitement." Leslie Stephen, "In Praise of Walking", (1901) (he was an author, mountaineer and father of Virginia Woolf).

The Dreadnought episode of Woolf cross-dressing deserves being more widely known and a televised re-enactment.

Virginia Woolf far left (1910) at the Bunga Bunga party (the term originally an indigenous Australian place name near Moreton Bay).

William Horace de Vere Cole, as ‘Cholmondesly of the FO’ with Virginia Woolf, sportsman Anthony Buxton, artist Duncan Grant and a judge’s son Guy Ridley, disguised as Abyssinian princes were welcomed on board the revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought at Weymouth Docks. They handed out visiting cards in Swahili and Buxton improvised Virgil’s Aeneid in a strange Greek accent, They asked for prayer mats at sunset, a. ‘Bunga-bunga,’ they exclaimed continually in admiration of

Buxton sneezed and one-half of his moustache flew off, but he retrieved tuck it before anyone noticed. The Navy couldn't find an the Abyssinian flag so flew Zanzibar's instead (though strangely when a student at Cambridge, Cole had impersonated the Sultan of Zanzibar).

HMS Dreadnought cost £1,672,483 (excluding armaments) and was the fastest battleship in the world at the time, but she never participated in any of World War I's naval battles (being refitted during Jutland in 1916). She was sold for scrap 1921 for £44,000. In 2010 World military expenditure was estimated to have reached $US1.62 trillion.

Senator Yeats spent most of the Irish Civil War 1922 – 23 at the Savile Club, in Piccadilly (founded in 1868 for the purposes of conversation and good company). At the same time Virginia Woolf was writing that Clarissa Dalloway, “cared much more for her roses than for Armenians. Hunted out of existence, maimed, frozen, the victims of cruelty and injustice . . .no, she could feel nothing for the Albanians, or was it Armenians? But she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?”

One and half million people, perhaps slaughtered and “Throughout eastern Anatolia, the names of Armenian towns have been changed and priceless monuments of medieval Armenian Christian art had been systematically destroyed.”

Ezra Pound had criticised US neutrality in the face of the Armenian genocide, his Cantos opened a collagist Modernism, an opening of form, a freedom, but his politics were rightwing and anti-Semitic. He made radio broadcasts for Mussolini and was going to be put on trial for treason but was sent instead to a comfortable asylum for 13 years. Auden, one of the judges who awarded the Bollinger Poetry Prize to Pound after the war, said he wouldn’t have if the award would have led to anti-Semites reading the Pisan Cantos and becoming disposed to violence (when it becomes an ethical not aesthetic matter). Clement Greenberg, on the other hand, wanted to refuse to honour Pound as a significant poet because he was a destructive citizen.

22nd

Nambucca River early

Oyster farm in mangroves

The mist rolled back off Mt Yarrahapinny

A Bluetongue welcome back

Balmain Show

Installation of Jagun, Light of the Forest, a cell in Balmain Watchhouse

I closed my opening of the show with this poem:

Jagun Fairy story (a video narration)

Light trickles through; it’s as if the world has been turned on its side and everything sensitised to that mysterious lie-down overloaded force of gravity, except of course, the trees and their syntax and the brilliancy of fast birds, elusive butterflies and alliterative insects refusing rest.

Let me tell you a fairy story from a Brother Grimm: “A temple is simultaneously a wood. What we think of as a walled building, merges, the farther back we go, into a sacred place untouched by human hands, in a grove and enclosed by dense trees. There the God dwells, veiling his form in the rustling foliage of the boughs. There is the place at which the hunter has to present him with the game he has killed and the herdsman his horses, oxen and rams. At a time when crude beginnings were all that existed of the builder's art, the human mind must have been aroused to a higher devotion by the sight of lofty trees under an open sky than it could ever feel inside the stunted structures reared by unskilled hands. . . . In the blowing of the wind, under the shade of primeval forests the soul of man felt itself filled by the presence of the ruling deities.”

Double drummers are squatting on the tree trunks, occasionally they sally forth to fall onto another, they are the loudest insects in the world; a Lewins Honeyeater shouts to be heard. You have to use your eyes and catch the light bouncing about, quick on its feet, revealing the old skeletons - the timber sculpture neatly sawn, wedged in the fork of a tree; stumps that passing loggers left behind, some weathered with teeth, cogs wanting to move the forest.

The view from my study is naturally unnatural, a difficult mapping of the human touch, like the rose-red ribbon tied to a trunk marking it for death. As light tumbles off the leaves, some reaches the ground in pieces like syllables fallen out of sentences. Our interventions quicken some natural processes and slow others. Subversive energies burrow, dig, roots stretch out in knots and nodes, there are no straight lines, no tethered animals, no gates or walls, no sleep, no north or south, just creative chemistry in spades, life and entropy of course.

[Jagun is the local Gumbaynggirr word for home]

~

The first voyage was that of Nicolas Baudin, in the Geographe and the Naturaliste (1800-03). He took along as artists Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit, whose works were published in the Voyage de Decouverte aux Terres Australes (1807). One of the prints from this volume is entitled Cabanes des naturels (natives' huts) and shows huts made around scrubby coastal trees, partly bent into shape and weighted with dead logs. The striking thing about this image is the way it echoes contemporary ideas about the primitive beginnings of architecture, and specifically a print included in the 1755 edition of Abbe Laugier's Essai sur l'architecture, showing a rather more regular construction of still living trees as columns and branches for lintels and roof-beams. Christopher Allen, The Australian October 22, 2011.

I am happy to have left the city, there are too few acts of kindness:

Michael Landy, 'Acts of Kindness' - on the gate to the old Water Police Station, now part of the Justice & Police Museum. Inside are the hung heads of Captain Moonlite and Thomas Rogan. They have aged without their full head of hair and beards.

"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." Susan Sontag. But these images are digital, we are losing touch.

Prison Mask c1878, the silent system, the guards even wore slippers. The social animal was turned in on himself.

The main exhibition was on ASIO: "It‘s estimated that ASIO files have been opened on more than half a million Australians; it's possible you might be a ‘person of interest’." What a waste of time. There are plenty of surveillance photographs of New Theatre (a couple of old NT lags were at our opening). I was mesmerised by B&W footage of Taronga Zoo, a windy day in 1962, shaky blurred images of a man walking two children.

AGNSW with Kiefer

Central Coast

On the way back north we visited Crackneck, we go every spring, always brimming with flowers, the Flannel Flowers were at their best.

Stopped off with Kit Kelen and Carol Archer, rescued a Red-bellied Black after WIRES and others couldn't come, but offered advice on handling the poisonous snake.

I threatened to annexe their island and install a drawbridge:

This Friday Oct 7 opening of our show

And there is so much work to working that there are moments, moments, where I stop and look around and it seems too arduous to go on. It isn’t of course. But that is why people have jobs and pay checks... it helps keep you from unanswerable questions. Diane Arbus, letter to friend, 1969.

Sept

A barbecue on the balcony with friends

is interrupted by a fanfare from 30, 40,

50 black cockatoos heading this way

in an eccentric dance on wide wingspans.

They look drunk, their rudder are loose,

they float across the tops of the blackbutts

almost stalling beneath a double rainbow.

They seem to take a very relaxed approach.

I have no idea what England is. I went to school in the countryside in the south, thought the country was middle class, and countryside with towns and a few cities - how stupid I was. “Since 1861 England has been an urban and industrial nation . . . Yet the ideology of England and Englishness is to a remarkable degree rural. Most importantly, a large part of the English ideal is rural.” Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920. Ed. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Croom Helm, 1986, p62.

The People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) released today the latest ‘the State of Britain’s Mammals’ today.Seven species of mammals with conservation priority are still declining. On each return I see too many people, roads, cars - I would see John Clare in tears and Samuel Palmer angry. .

We bury the kingfisher, mark the spot with a stone from the Irish coast.Wyn has plucked its feathers and will dig it up when the kingdom of soil has done its work, when the skeleton is fit for art.

Poem ten minutes old

Flying fast and straight at Wyn’s head Bang - shocked the White-headed Pigeon sails down and lies stunned. We head down with a box, find it sitting by the henge in undergrowth, left shoulder showing signs of the collision, but after an hour, to Wyn’s relief, it springs back into air and into the forest.

Bizarre transparencies, a page of invention, the elements of dead stars alchemised, heated into the substances we are, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, carbon, calcium and iron, all these and more way behind the first three minutes of the Big Bang when the expanding recipe was 75% hydrogen and the rest helium with traces of deuterium, tritium, lithium and beryllium.

That suggests life is a miracle we denigrate behind glass barricades as we fly/drive, or sit around an office or at home in comfortable exile.

23rd. Spring

A few minutes earlier this Father Christmas orchid was flowerless.

Eastern Robins, six days ago the fledglings were naked.

22nd. Saw our first Red-backed Wren of the season in the wattle on the dunes , not red but in the early sun a tangerine-blood orange, magnificent pure colour. And from the beach and a pod of Humpback whales travelling south then stopping to play, much fin slapping, the fins huge and barnacled.

How to identify whales.

Sept 21, All the migrants are here by now, Bee-eaters, Drongos, etc.

I was recently asked to provide a poem with translation notes for an anthology of Australian poetry that translators in any language could use - a brilliant idea from Kit Kelen. I sent him a poem 'Sunday Afternoon' with some notes, but he wasn't satisfied he wanted more of the story - so I had to reimagine the writing of the poem, my mood and what was going through my mind (and body) when I wrote it. Sunday Afternoon

Three Key Terms

Indigenous languages generally have no word for 'nature' or 'natural environment' because the terms presume opposition between ‘nature’ and culture / society. In traditional cultures, a continuum exists between humans, plants, animals, ancestors, spirits and even material such as rock, all of which may be endowed with consciousness / soul. The ethnographic record thus resists the imposition of a nature/culture dualism.

The Australian philosopher John Passmore noted this latter dichotomy, distinguishing two important oppositional notions of nature:

• an inclusive sense, in which humans are a part of nature, and

• an exclusive sense, in which nature bears no mark of human hands.

Sometimes, Nature is used as a separate term to express that part of the environment that precedes human activity; ‘a natural environment’ is in this perspective one, which has not been altered by human action. However, given hundreds of thousands of years of hominid interaction with the environment, and particularly recent the large-scale interactions (think for example of chemical pollution in the last hundred years, and GM modification in the last decade), there is nothing that could be called ‘nature’ in this strictest sense.

Ernst Haeckel wanted a term for the multidimensional struggle for existence that Darwin wrote about in On the Origin of Species (1859) and coined ‘Ecology’ ten years later. The last sentence in the Origin is one of its most important: “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

The scientific discipline of ecology may focus on one or more different levels: on populations of a single species, on an interacting community involving populations of many species, on the movement of matter and energy through a community within and ecosystem, on large scale processes within a biome, or on global patterns within the biosphere.

‘ecology is my word: tag

me with that: come

in there:

you will find yourself

in a firmless country:

centers & peripheries

in motion,

organic

interrelations!’

Dec 27th Tape for the Turn of the Year, AR Ammons

The definition of a concept fundamental to the ongoing survival of life mutates readily, but today here's my own definition (I was co-author of the first draft NPWS Biodiversity Strategy - that got canned):

Biodiversity is the continually changing array of life forms, the plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genes, the ecosystems they form and the processes they live by, in a unique, never to be repeated, evolutionary process that connects all life that originates from the energy and matter in the beginning of the universe.

Of course these terms are just a beginning - the term evolution

should be here - but is such an enormous concept

Spring - Orchids appearing

Greenhoods, Pink Fingers and Father Christmas orchids

Still searching

Koala scat near us. Yesterday morning heard a male growling. I took off into the bush looking for him, but returned with a tick on my right leg and leech on my left. "As the spring breeding season approaches, the male patrols his trees in search of females who are ready to mate, and, being a polygamist, the more girls the better. The action starts when our dominant koala spots another male hanging out in his territory. Outraged, he tries to scare off the intruder with a loud, harsh cry. It's a weird and spine-chilling bellow, half way between water gurgling down a drain and a log being hacked to pieces by a blunt saw." ABC

Nambucca estuary this morning (14.9) Warrell Creek on left, Nambucca River heading inland right. Gaagal Wangaann NP (pron. gargle wungarn) is the coastal spit on the left, owned by the Gumbanynggirr people, leased back to the government and jointly managed - we saw whales, dolphins, a peregrine falcon, topknot pigeons, ospreys and the beautiful striated pardalotes with nest holes in the beach.

Striated pardalote (Terry Evans)

Beauty

I just look around and see beauty - even in a fallen leaf.

Is beauty enough? Can it "press us toward a greater concern for justice" (Elaine Scarry) - or is it a distraction? “Beauty restores your trust in the world. During this past 13 years I've been working on a big project about nuclear weapons and the fact that the current military arrangements we have are not compatible with democracy. The more I work on that, the more it happens that I need to read poems. And work my garden. Beauty restores your trust in the world.” Elaine Scarry (David Bowman, ‘Does beauty really equal truth?’ interview with Scarry, Salon, Nov 9, 1999)

“The great aesthetic lesson of the twentieth century was that we could have art without beauty. Anyone could make something beautiful, but only a genius could make ART . . . a great deal of "art" over the last eighty years has assiduously avoided the beautiful.” Arthur Krystal, ‘Hello, Beautiful . . .' (Harper’s, 2005)

140 years ago Mathew Arnold published Dover Beach with the (hesitant) lines: “The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore . . .“

I characterise our crisis as more one of ecological imagination not of faith, of misunderstanding who we are and where we are. Christopher Hitchens ends his recent diatribe against religion by calling for a "new Enlightenment". What is needed is less hubris and more enlightened attention to our environments.

10th. Soulfood = Poetry, music, art at Bowraville Community Gallery with William Barton, myself and others. Part of Back to Bowra showcasing Gumbaynggirr culture, and local artists as the World rally passed by. The theme was - justice - with various reading selected by Victoria Thynne and the event and art exhibition was co-ordinated by Julia Morrell.

Will and Delmae Barton trying out a ceramic horn

It was my duty to name you . . .

But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone.

Pablo Neruda, ‘For All to Know’

I ate wild boar in a cellar at Cracow

and refused to visit Auschwitz because I’m a poet

and would have used the occasion to write poetry

unable to name all those slain by the celebrities,

those rotting with Bianor and Oileus, Xanthus and Thoon,

young men with parents, sisters, friends, but the camps

murdered their mothers, sisters and daughters too.

Justice requires names not victims backed into

a corner of earth, acolytes in the ceremony of war.

We have borrowed their rags and furled them.

We have used their language to pile more words.

We have lost their smiles and their memories.

Justice is a transcendent term like ‘love’ or ‘democracy’, words with no fixed meaning or end - the meaning has to be worked for, just like living a life. De Tocqueville in Democracy in America, argues that an “abundance of abstract terms” both “widens the scope of thought and clouds it.”

Zygmund Bauman notes that we can’t now think of final model of justice rather "a just society is one that thinks itself as not being just enough." (Arts Today 15 Nov 2000, ABC)

In his book Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin argues there are absolute moral values for justice and the building blocks are dignity and self-respect. But then again everything must be worked for: “Humanity is never completely realised, is never something natural.”Alain Badiou (http://www.lacan.com/badsold.htm).

[The natural is never completely knoweable or understandable and so is transcendent in this sense too]

Barry Charles & Paul Clement at Mad Hatters played down&dirty blues

Synergy at the Jetty Theatre - house full at only $5! What a versatile and fluid group. For over thirty years I have been going to their concerts. This combination was marimba-based and played Bach (transcribed from organ), Riley (transcribed from a SQ which I tried to imagine hearing and failed) and Reich revisiting his past in a 2009 work. My favourite was an old favourite that kicked it off - though to my surprise they added voice to a second part- Nigel Westlake's 'Omphalo Centric Lecture' (which began life for 3 bass clarinets). Very enjoyable but noisy - an elderly lady eating a packet of chips, though after an hour I want more textures than marimbas offer.

one crab dawn,

Castles made of sand . . . Valla

Sept 7. I talked about National Poetry Week on local ABC radio - my PhD was a defence of poetry at 390,000 words, I'll be briefer on morning radio - but why do I feel in defensive mode when talking about this art form?

I suggested listeners read a poem (aloud) or even write one on the theme of looking out of the window and post on Facebook (Philip Adams on Late Night Live used to ask guests what they could see out of their window).

I read a William Bronk poem:

One makes a poem as little as one makes

the weather. One goes to the window and looks out

and sees it there, outside. Read!

We go out into it if we dare.

and an extract from Robert Gray's 'A Day at Bellingen'.

I also mentioned the neglect of poetry and paraphrased Veronica Brady who laments that our culture is impoverished, due to journalists, politicians, and economists dominating our discourse, based on economic rationalism, which shapes our cultural values. She hopes for ‘a more “poetic” paradigm for thought and exploration.’ (‘Intellectual Belief and Freedom’, Meanjin 4, 1991).

Sept 3. Bellingen Energy Festival. Two great sessions were identifying eucalypts with Ross Macleay and Jan, and planting for birds with Brian Hawkins.

Another first day of spring ushered in by a Monarch butterfly, Tawny-crowned honeyeater and a shell-back tick (adult version of a grass tick) sucking my blood. It's ridiculous using European terms for the seasons.

In Sydney the Eora peoples had six seasons, the Yolgnu of North-East Arnhem Land also identified six seasons. Up there it is Rarranhdharr - hot, towards the end of the dry season, lightning is frequent and the Stringybark is in flower. The burning of the grass has ended and so nomadic activities lessen and it’s ceremonial time.- I am unsure how many the Gumbaynggirr have.

Leaves, Bellinger River

Hungry Head, north

The innocent tourists (poem for Soul-Food - the theme justice)

“What moves us … is not the realisation that the world falls short of

being completely just … but that there are clearly remediable

injustices around us which we want to eliminate.” Amartya Sen

We reach a city and visit jail, its dark stone quarried, dressed and heaved

block by block to black the sky and silence tongues. We hear the tale

of Bob and Jack, two Blacks accused of killing sealers Yankee and Cook.

Truganini was thieving with them and recognised Cook, he’d abducted her

sister

and murdered her husband. Acquitted, she was exiled back to Flinders

Island.

Our first public execution was a carnival by these walls. On a hot January

day,

a quarter of Victoria’s pale population watched the two men dressed in white

tour the town by horse and cart then dance a jig, a botched job, a spectator

pulled their legs, still they struggled. Let the dead keep their names,

Tunnerminnerwait and Peevay. If you had to start over, what would it take?

Ned Kelly’s lips stretch the death mask to a pallid smile, ears missing,

Irish victim, home-grown killer, first born in the colony to be hung,

widow’s son, cop killer. The main attraction is the plough forged

into armour. The Cold War’s end should have made us feel differently,

when missiles were smelted back into ploughshares and steak knives.

Depressed, we take a tram to a bright beach, chat to a Czech dressmaker.

I ask if she has any children, she had a son, a little boy, three years old . . .

the Nazis . . . her lip trembles . . . she’s nearly 90. I make her cry like a

child,

and cannot comfort inaccessible grief with a promise of heaven or the belief

that the divine will punish evil, if evil is still in the lexicon.

Cockatoo feeding habits, Jagun

Nambucca

Bearded Dragon, close enough to touch

End of the line, the V Wall

Sept 1

To welcome spring- available online from today my partner, Bronwyn Rodden's excellent thriller - The Crushers

(Kindle US / UK) - only US $2.99.

‘This is crime fiction set in the distinctively Australian Blue Mountains, revolving around Detective Ros Gordon and her colleagues as they aim to uncover the circumstances of the grizzly death of a young woman whose body has been found abandoned in a cave… The watertight plot and indeed structure are two aspects of the novel that really keep the focus sharp; we’re intrigued from the discovery of the body in the opening scene, and the tension builds as various red herrings make way for the truth....There’s some really strong characterisation… (and) the setting is beautifully evoked; as someone relatively unfamiliar with the mountains of New South Wales, the vivid sense we quickly gain of their mystique and threat is almost palpable, further drawing us into the story with a real appreciation of its setting.’ Kate Ballard, Hachette Australia publishers

Note: To PRINT your Kindle book there is a free software program at – http://www.ebook-converter.com/kindle-pc-converter.htm

This is only a 1mB file and automatically converts your Kindle book to PDF (Acrobat) which can easily be printed.

One important point about this simple program – download your Kindle book BEFORE opening the Kindle PC converter. Then go to the FIRST page of the downloaded book. THEN open the Kindle PC Converter. It will automatically open the first page then process all others in sequence. This may take a little while and the cursor on your desktop tends to jump all over the screen while this is happening. Shortly the PDF file will suddenly appear and then you can print out normally.

August

Seal recuperating on the Kalang

Yesterday on the Nambucca River I saw 5 azure kingfishers (one being mobbed by 3 blue-faced honeyeaters).

It was a relief since the first I saw was outside our door first thing- still warm, neck broken from attacking its reflection - the hormones of spring are kicking in.

After summer in Europe the colours here are astounding.

Have just seen two yellow robins fighting/mating (?) and a flock of galahs spiralling past - reminding me that I saw two sad specimens in two days a week ago, and in two different countries.

William Nicholson, The Rose-crested Cockatoo,1917