Friends Reunited

Before I talk about chocolate, I’ll start with the very pleasant news of Toxic Math’s surprise visit from two great friends from Blighty. Alistair is a one time Toxic Math contributor, and we’re both pictured here wearing our best Australian. What’s equally surprising is how remarkably well such a secret was kept from me, namely by my girlfriend, who had been planning such a shock for months before hand, rather accurately as it turns out, and completely without my knowledge. Either this questions my observance or the quality of her subterfuge: anything else I need to know about, darling? Maybe a secret Warhammer addition, perhaps? This, in part, is why this addition of TM is slightly overdue, and probably why the next one will be too. As many people who have enjoyed the east Queensland coast will tell you, the fact of the matter is that we’ve just been having a little too much fun.

Now, chocolate. I have now had two conversations with separate Australians who are both convinced that Cadbury chocolate is a local product, and not a proud British institution, for which I argued the latter. Before we go any further, I am right about this - John Cadbury opened his first cocoa shop in Birmingham in 1824, inherited by his sons but spearheaded mainly by George Cadbury who would turn the business into a mighty industrial force with the opening of a purpose built chocolate factory located in the sleepy village of Bournville, four miles south of Birmingham, complete with housing and amenities for all employees. But the history of Cadbury’s in Australia is such a long and distinguished one that you can fully understand the sentiment involved in wanting to claim the brand as their own.

For starters, the factory here in Hobart, Tasmania, was the first one outside of Bournville, built in 1918 just as the Cadbury name began to seriously diversify. They worked tirelessly as the official provider of chocolate for the Australian armed forces during the Second World War. According to their website, “Cadbury ration chocolate in brown-paper wrappers was supplied to troops in the field, made from a special formula so that the precious parcel did not melt in the heat of the tropics or the desert.”

There are now factories in Melbourne, Victoria and New Zealand, not to mention Cadbury factories located around the world. Patriotic Brits appeared to lose their crème eggs when it was announced that the American food giant Kraft were to buy out the company in 2010 for the substantial sum of £11.5bn, but before we get too emotional about these things, it is worth noting that by this stage, Cadbury were far from an exclusively British product: the company also owned Trebor Bassett, Fry’s, Maynards, Halls and, until the demerger in 2008, they had been known as Cadbury Schweppes since 1969 with much of its factory work based in Poland.

Through their acquisitions Down Under, well known and uniquely Australian brands like Freddo and Cherry Ripe would end up carrying the Cadbury name, and so a long list of exotic and sumptuous chocolates began to emerge. Take a trip into Australia’s two leading supermarkets, Coles or Woolworths (which, rather fortunately, has nothing to do with its failed British namesake), and just look at what glorious, calorific indulgences are available only on this side of the Cadbury hemisphere: dairy milk blocks filled with macadamia and cashew nuts, peppermint flavours, a desserts range with Black Forest, Tiramisu and Crème Brulee, and many, many more. And what do we get in England? Boost bars. And a Twirl, if we’re lucky. That certainly doesn’t seem fair.

Because many of these types of chocolate could be easily obtained in the UK. Things like Rocky Road (a lethal combination of marshmallow, cherries, peanuts and coconut), Top Deck (a block of both milk and white chocolate), or even the Snack block (with individual pieces containing different flavours; some filled with caramel, others strawberry, orange, and Turkish Delight), could be easily replicated. So I contacted Cadbury Australia for an explanation, and Customer Services’ Tracey Delaney offered this: “Cadbury Australia manufactures many products that are not available throughout the world. Cadbury UK have their special products just for the UK as dose [sic] New Zealand.” Which may not fully explain such a grave injustice, but may give the English one more reason to be jealous of Australia.

Rockhampton is the capital of beef, apparently, which may explain why there are so many large cattle statues as you enter the city, all in praise of the bovine delights which have brought such great fortune to the region thanks mainly to two large, still functioning abattoirs. It has the same sprawling feel of suburban Bundaberg built in a similar spirit of turn of the century Americana. By the way, Australia are quite fond of their Big Things, as you will no doubt discover, with giant shrimp, burgers, crocodiles, toads and other seemingly random assortments regularly dotting the landscape. Rocky’s five large cows represent the different species which are bred here, and inevitably slaughtered, of course, in rather brutal numbers.

Anyway, we’ve stopped here as we travel north along the Bruce Highway, connecting the majority of Queensland’s east coast, to take part in a more hands-on, Aboriginal experience, courtesy of the Dreamtime Cultural Centre. Set in 30 acres of ancient tribal lands (although, lets be honest, most of modern Australia has been built on ancient tribal lands), this is an insightful if slightly over-egged tourist shop which hosts tours involving the history of the Torres Strait islanders in Queensland, and a gift shop where you can buy Aboriginal art, literature, didgeridoos and boomerangs. Speaking of which, the more practical side of the tour allows visitors to give this ancient throwing stick a spin for yourself, after a helpful demonstration from tour guide Wayne. It’s more tricky than it looks, which isn’t too surprising, and a complete physical marvel when you actually sit and think about it - the sort which could drive mathematicians nutty.

But Wayne’s real talent lies in his didgeridoo skills. This ancient Aboriginal instrument, which can be played in a multitude of different tones and pitches given the extent of the player’s skills and their sheer lung capacity, is intrinsically linked to different ceremonial dances and stories. It’s also a male fertility symbol, but Wayne’s quite open to women giving it a go, although his rather stark advice is for them to “not do it in public.” Hard luck for a young Canadian tourist, then, who seems quite keen to try beat boxing underneath the ceremonial didge drone. “Most people tend to respect the instrument,” Wayne says by way of a courteous put down, and the conversation moves swiftly on.

Incidentally, ‘didgeridoo’ is not onomatopoeic, which is what I initially thought. In fact, it’s not even an Aboriginal word. It belongs to politician and anthropologist Herbert Basedow, an Australian no less, who lived for some time amongst the more remote Aboriginal tribes of the Northern Territory and published many books on the subject. He seems to have become fascinated with this musical aide, which was simply made from the hollowed out, termite bitten wood of a branch or trunk and suitably named it a ‘didgeridoo’, but to this day, the local tribes will not call it this. Wayne tells me the most common name for the instrument is ‘yidaki’, although even this term varies from town to town.

Home Sweet Home

A few weeks ago, I commented on the sugar cane fires that used to be a regular sight in Bundaberg. I had been reliably informed that farmers don’t tend to set their fields ablaze quite so much anymore - “health and safety gone mad,” probably - but this certainly wasn’t the case earlier in the week, where a number of local farmers turned their crops into smoke-filled scenes from Apocalypse Now. A striking sight, I think you’ll agree. This is done to kill any vermin in the undergrowth, and careful attention is paid to contain the blaze and avoid any wild fires spreading into neighbouring fields. Which is why cane fires only ever happen at winter time when the temperature is cooler, and the crops are appropriately sheared before hand. We chanced upon this one just as the sun was setting, but I counted four other fields which had been set alight, all within relatively close proximity.

This asylum seeker row in Australia looks likely to unsettle Labor’s chances in the forthcoming election, despite the party taking a more hard line approach and adopting a change in leadership. I find it particularly hard to fathom the notion of the opposition: that so-called ‘boatpeople’ might pose a threat to the Australian way of life and - this reason seems most peculiar - that Australia might not be able to support any more people. Former PM Kevin Rudd put forward the idea of the ‘big Australia’ when he came to power in 2007, with plans to increase the country’s population to 35 million by 2050. Let’s put this into perspective: the population of England is 50 million, and, yes, nearly two thirds of Australia is arid desert - completely uninhabitable - but considering that you can roughly fit around 50 Englands in Australia, we’re still talking about an incredibly vast area of land. If there is anywhere in the world where these desperate people could feasibly go, then surely it is Australia.

The ‘big Australia’ was Rudd’s way of curbing the country’s aging population. As the number of Australians aged between 65 and 84 looks set to double in the next 40 years, there will need to be a steady stream of eligible workers ready to plug the financial gaps, not just to provide the necessary pensions and health provisions required, but to also cover the deficit as new retirees step out of the workforce. And who will plug that gap? Well, there have been three boats full of people since last Sunday who would be quite prepared to help, considering that the vast majority have already been unceremoniously displaced from their own countries (many of Australia’s recent arrivals are from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq) and have survived a long, arduous and uncertain boat ride in some considerable discomfort just to come here.

Peter van Onselen, writing in The Australian, put it well when addressing the fact that since 2007 - when Kevin Rudd’s Labor came to power - only 4,500 refugees have attempted to seek asylum in Australia, many of which have been assessed as eligible to fit into the country’s yearly quota of 13,750 refugees. “Australia's refugee numbers will always be low because of something called the ocean,” he writes.

But there is a clear notion of ‘not in my back yard’ going on here - as new PM Julia Gillard faces strong local opposition to the building of an offshore processing centre in East Timor, a small Southeast Asian country 400 miles northwest of Darwin. The East Timor parliament rejected the idea on Monday, and Gillard has been playing down the embarrassment ever since, now setting her eyes on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island while negotiating new terms with East Timor in what appears to be a large scale refugee version of ‘Deal or No Deal’. A cartoon in The Weekend Australian by Nicholson depicts Gillard telling a reporter that “we won’t rush our decision” as an octopus sprawls its tentacles over boxes labelled with a number of different locations - a parody of the German octopus who was alleged to have correctly predicted a number of significant results at this year’s World Cup. For Gillard, barely three weeks into her new position, the immigration issue is proving to be her toughest challenge yet.

But the history of Australia’s immigration policy has never run smoothly, and there are echoes in Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s ‘turn back the boats’ rhetoric that, distastefully, conjures up memories of the country’s more extremist past. It is worth noting here that Abbott has since refrained from using this soundbite and even corrected it, claiming that the Opposition (a coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals) will only turn back boats as a deterrent to people smugglers. But still, such corrosive language only acts to highlight inherent concerns about the dangers of immigration, a populist thought from the more right wing members of Australian society.

We’re yet to comment on the 'White Australia' immigration policy, which was inherited by successive parliaments over a period of 72 years, and prohibited people from entering the country on the grounds of race. Moreover, it was only abolished in 1973, after taking a period of roughly 25 years to dismantle.

The argument for such legislation was originally and primarily targeted against Chinese and Japanese labourers who, during the turn of the century, started arriving into Australia in large numbers for work on gold mines and sugar plantations. Chief organiser of the policy, Alfred Deakin, put it like this in 1901: “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.” Those wishing to enter the country would have to pass a controversial dictation test, obviously in a language which they couldn’t understand, all as a means of placing “certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants,” according to the words of the original Act.

For another example of racially-motivated border provisions, we need to turn to the unsavoury character of Pauline Hanson, a former fish and chip shop owner who started her political life as a Liberal MP, before leading her own One Nation party with a strong anti-immigration stance. She made a fiery maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1996, which explained how she wanted ‘multiculturalism abolished’, among much else. “If I can invite whom I want into my home,” she said, “then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”

In 1997, Hanson took the strange step of recording a video of herself to be played in the event of her assassination, leading with the words: “Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered.” Disconcertingly, One Nation picked up quite a sympathetic following, acquiring one quarter of the vote in the Queensland state elections of 1998, causing a rise in right-wing parties to form across the continent with equally strong and verbal anti-immigration policies.

All of which makes Rudd’s ‘big Australia’ prophesy even more courageous in the face of such opposition from certain ugly factions of society. Of course, we should not confuse these outdated opinions from the very real and prominent issue of Australian immigration today, and Gillard is more than sympathetic to the cause. “There are racists in every country,” she said in a speech on Tuesday in Sydney. “But expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.” As a mere aside, it is worth remembering that Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet: according to the 2006 census, a population count of 20 million included citizens from over 200 countries, with 45% either born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas.

We can only hope that Gillard doesn’t completely U-turn on Labor’s initial plans in the face of mounting pressures, especially as a tactic to merely appease the dissidents and stay in power for another term.


Incidentally, a quick note on the Americanised spelling of ‘Labor’ in this context. There doesn’t appear to be any concrete reasoning for this, as the party was formally known as the Australian Labour Party since their formation in 1908, but then changed the spelling in 1912. So it was clearly a conscious decision. Some credit the change as a way of modernising the party following the influence of the United States labor movement at the turn of the century. Alternatively, it could have been altered as a need to differentiate the party name from the more general labour movement in Australia. Regardless, it seems that both spellings of ‘labour’ were used before the formation of the ALP, so the reason for the variant is all a bit subjective. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘AFL: Western Bulldogs v Port Adelaide’ (Ten)

“Port Adelaide’s forward structure is working a lot better,” says the commentator at the start of the second quarter, which is good to know, although I’m not entirely certain what form a forward structure might take, let alone one whose function is improving. Actually, I’m not really too sure of anything here, as Aussie Rules is a completely baffling sport to me. It’s played predominantly in New South Wales and Victoria, and according to one of my Queenslander friends, “I’m not even sure they understand it.”

It’s phenomenally popular, though, taking up almost daily prime evening slots that something like ‘Coronation Street’ might occupy in the UK, and on a Saturday night too. The Australian Football League is the official governing body, mass marketed just like the English Premier League, and it’s commonly referred to as ‘footy’ by its followers. This, in itself, is quite confusing, as ‘footy’ is also used to describe rugby league (and union, actually), and there have also been calls to refer to soccer as football, further confounding things. This runs the risk of serious social suicide if you’re ever asked whether you saw the footy last night. In Australia, ‘footy’ just about covers everything that involves a pitch, large balls and goals posts.

Speaking of which, there are four posts in this game - two of a slightly smaller size - and different points are allocated to a ball passing through either side. Stick one down the middle and you score even more. This much I can just about fathom, but the rest seems like an absolute free for all: there is no offside rule, as far as I can tell, so the ball can be passed up field, or just booted as far as possible and (hopefully) into the waiting arms of a team mate. Catch it properly and the whistle blows. Players back off and the ball is hoofed up field again. This seems similar to the free pass rule in netball, but there are tackles too, hefty ones, just like in rugby, while the whole game is played on a cricket pitch. To use a cooking euphemism, the sport is basically like a Spanish omelette - a real hodgepodge of ingredients with no one having any idea how they got there.

Incidentally, the Western Bulldogs are Melbourne based, and there is a nice half time excerpt of the team paying a visit to a special indigenous training school in the Northern Territories (tonight’s game is held at Darwin’s TIO Stadium). Roughly 11% of all professional AFL players are indigenous Australians, and the sport is keen to be seen as playing a major part in the regional development of poor, indigenous communities. Furthermore, the AFL’s commitment to the cause is seen as a key motivator in discouraging racism within the sport, which is unfortunately still a bit of an issue. At a charity luncheon earlier this year, high profile former footballer Mal Brown referred to Aboriginal players as “cannibals”. He bizarrely excused himself by saying it was meant as “a term of endearment”. Such instances are also apparent in the other ‘footy’ sports, but seem to be dealt with swiftly and apologetically, even if they do suggest that, behind the scenes at least, these sports are not completely exonerated just yet.

From Wonglepong with Love

Here’s a fun if ultimately juvenile way to spend an arvo: trying to find funny Australian place names. There are many, ranging from Humpty Doo in the Northern Territories right down to Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The more bizarre locations derive from ancient Aboriginal terms, ranging from names of specific tribes to proverbs, landmarks and respected elders - as in the word ‘bunda’, which means ‘important man’, which when conjoined with the German word for mountain, ‘berg’, creates the name of my current location: Bundaberg.

But still, it’s hard to not crack an immature smile at any of the following: Boing Boing, Wee Waa, Tittybong, Wonglepong, Burrumbuttock, Humpybong, Moolooloo, Woolloomooloo and Bong Bong. But then even the colonialists weren’t seemingly without a sense of humour: there is a creek in South Australia called Cock Wash, while a rather steep mountain in Victoria has been christened Mount Buggery.

All of which leads neatly onto the origins of place names, and just how many locations coined by homesick English settlers are still in circulation today. In an attempt to populate their own piece of Blighty down here in Australia, you will encounter many townships in the country that still hold very recognisable British namesakes, like Ipswich, Croydon, Hungerford and Scarborough in Queensland, to locations in New South Wales like Newcastle, Kendall, Tottenham, Epping and Exeter. There’s a Peterborough in South Australia, a Sheffield in Tasmania, a Highbury in Western Australia and an Ascot in Victoria. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the names of the states themselves, with Victoria obligatorily named after Queen Victoria, similarly to Queensland, while it was Captain Cook’s original idea to name the whole country New South Wales, in recognition, allegedly, of the Welsh countryside which Cook believed bore a striking resemblance to Australia’s east coast.

I’d like to question Cook’s reasoning here, mostly because when his vessel, the Endeavour, first made contact with the eastern shores of Australia in 1770, he was surveying the botanical wilderness of the accurately named Botany Bay, which is where he first made contact with the natives, noting that “they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not.” He would then run aground in Cooktown (named thereafter) for seven weeks after crashing into the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living thing and an area of truly outstanding natural beauty. Now, I’ve been to Wales a few times, and my recollections are somewhat different. That’s all I’m saying.

I was told about Pulled Apart by Horses’ debut on the Triple J radio station via text message. They’re a scrawny bunch of shouty ragamuffins if ever there was one, and while I was drumming in Leeds band Wintermute, we played a number of live shows together and grew to be very good friends. If I think of memories of Leeds, then surely Tom screaming “I’ll make you dance with my balls of fire” on their track 'High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive' is pretty much up there as a leading thought. Or maybe the time when we stumbled into the recording of their first EP (we were practising in the same pub at the time) and assisted by shouting backing vocals into the microphone.

Their album is out now on the Transgressive label and their appearance on a Triple J playlist is big news, not solely because it’s the only decent radio station here, but mainly because it broadcasts across the whole country. Local station Hitz FM is particularly un-listenable, boasting about playing ‘today’s best new music’ before launching into 'Come As You Are' by Nirvana (from 1992), or some godforsaken nu-metal record from the late 90s. Its interpretation of ‘new music’ appears to be based solely on playing ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga three times in one day.

Huge things beckon for these chaps, which is an exciting prospect, and should hopefully be enough to keep them within easy reach of antiseptic and band aids for a very long time. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Border Security: Australia’s Front Line’ (Seven)

The main reason I wanted to talk about this particular programme is, of course, to discuss rabbits. They may be cage-dwelling bundles of cute, floppy eared domesticity in Britain, but Australia’s relations with the unassuming European rabbit has been quite tumultuous to say the least.

This is largely thanks to an early Somerset-born settler named Thomas Austin, whose pioneering expeditions in the mid nineteenth century saw him eventually acquire 11,736 hectares (around 45 square miles) of land in Victoria. Austin was a member of Victoria’s Acclimatisation Society, whose ill informed if not malicious intention was to introduce new plant and animal life into their new and bountiful environment. Yet Austin’s intentions when he asked his brother to send over 24 grey rabbits from England (along with ‘five hares, 72 partridges and some sparrows’) was less of an attempt at preservation. He wanted them so that he and his guests could enjoy a spot of game shooting. “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting,” is how Austin put it at the time, which is just about the gold standard in the history of understatement. Nothing could have been more profoundly to the contrary.

For starters, the fresh pastures and mild Australian winters proved incredibly habitable for rabbits who, being completely new to Australia, enjoyed the freedom of having no natural predators. So they started breeding like, well, rabbits: an average litter size can be between four to eight bunnies, and the female rabbit can produce seven of these a year. Couple that with the fact that new born females can start breeding from six months old and we’ve got a quick and considerable number of rabbits on our hands. So much so that the bilby - Australia’s rabbit equivalent - would almost be driven to complete extinction in the shadow of their new rival. Rising rabbit numbers feasted on native plants and dived into young trees, particularly jeopardising the topsoil on valuable farmland which would take hundreds of years to recover.

One suggestion was to build a giant rabbit proof fence to ebb the growing tide, and three were eventually built in Western Australia. The biggest stretched for over 2,000 miles and was completed in 1907 after taking six years to build. It is now known as the State Barrier Fence as it crosses the state from the north to the south - an incredible feat of engineering which, at the time, cost £337,841 (just under £20 million in today’s money) and, quite annoyingly, didn’t work. European rabbits are known for jumping to an incredible height, as well as being highly adept burrowers. Shooting was (and still is) advised to help control population growth, but this would prove just as futile. Authorities have now turned to more biological means, like the horrifically sounding ‘rabbit haemorrhaging disease virus’ which is highly infectious, causing fatal organ failure and causing a rabbit to be ready for stewing in just under 24 hours.

Although it is unfair to label the fault solely with Thomas Austin and his 24 furry friends (indeed, many other settlers would follow Austin’s lead in introducing small numbers of rabbits into Australia), the current population of European rabbits is predicted to be somewhere over the 200 million mark.

I mention all of this merely as a means of understanding why Australia is so precious, almost to the point of paranoia, with regards to the stability of their sumptuous and unique landscape. Much of the plant and animal life in Australia cannot be found anywhere else in the world, and even the slightest outside interference (like Austin’s 24 rabbits) can cause an awful unbalance. A few weeks back I mentioned the introduction of the cane toad from Hawaii which was designed to feed on the growing numbers of sugar cane beetles busily munching through crops in Queensland, but the toads were quick to concentrate on procreation instead. Since the introduction of 102 toads in 1935, they, like the European rabbit, now number in the hundreds of millions.

Now let us consider those really, really small living things, like micro-organisms found in fungus - like, say, the chytrid fungus, which is currently threatening the lives of many Australian frog species since its introduction into the country. How it got here is a matter of some considerable debate for environmentalists, whether a poisoned specimen somehow entered the country or infected water was at some stage released unknowingly. Regardless, it’s here, and the fungus remains the single biggest threat to amphibian life and the main cause in the decline of over 385 different frog species. Then there is the plant life: the Australian government spends $3.5 billion a year on the management of weeds. It is second to land clearing as the biggest threat to the country’s biodiversity. Half of Australia’s most poisonous weeds have crossed the border deliberately - ‘a third of which as garden ornamentals’.

And so we finally get to why a Chinese lady was having such a hard time from Nadia, a quarantine office at Melbourne airport, on this week’s episode of ‘Border Security’ - a long-running behind-the-scenes look at the day-to-day life of customs officers at Australia’s busiest airports - especially after failing to declare a huge amount of nuts, seeds and plant life buried in her luggage, despite the strict instructions which greet passengers upon entering Australia. Quarantined goods include all foodstuffs, animal products, skins, feathers, wool, bark, dried flowers, fruits and herbs, right down to soil on your shoes and ‘biological specimens including tissue culture.’ Our disgruntled visitor causes a big drama and refuses to budge for five hours after being issued with the on-the-spot fine of $220.

Also featured is a British backpacker trying his best to look unassuming when traces of morphine and methadone are found in his suitcase. More alarming is how closely he seems to resemble me. His interrogation doesn’t go well, particularly when he refuses to visit the toilet alongside a customs officer, but they let him through regardless. “Maybe I look like a dirty, seedy criminal type,” he says, “Maybe it’s the beard.” Speak for yourself, mate.

Kangaruined

The kangaroo may be the internationally recognised symbol for Australia, adorning everything from Qantas airlines to the country’s coinage, but people will still tell you that these giant marsupials can be an absolute menace. You may be shocked to learn that you can legally shoot wild kangaroos here, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes (if not being used for their meat and skins, there are strict documents to support killings for “damage mitigation”, “the provision of meat for pest animal control programs” and “recreational hunting”), but the real danger is during their rampant mating seasons (that’s springtime and early summer), when kangaroos can often get a little too close for comfort.

Like in 2003, when New South Wales resident John Crouch, while holidaying in Queensland, was forced to kill a wild kangaroo with an axe when, for no apparent reasons, the creature attacked his wife. They can grow to an incredible size: Crouch’s encounter was with a kangaroo two metres tall. In the wild, away from the close proximity of humans and the security afforded by captivity, kangaroos are known to gather in packs, becoming scarily muscular and really quite fierce. In more built up areas, they are notorious for feeding on marshland near the roadside and can cause untold havoc on the dimly lit highways. Earlier this year, a female driver in the outback of the Northern Territory hit a kangaroo so severely that not only was her car promptly disqualified, but she also found herself in the grossly unfortunate situation of being stranded in some of the most inhospitable terrain with limited means of rescue. It is small wonder that Rolf Harris sang about tying them down.

We travelled to Woodgate, some 20km south of Bundaberg, with the intention of catching a glimpse of these unique creatures in their natural habitat, and sure enough we managed to see this one, and many more besides, merely a few metres from our car. There is something so rewarding about spontaneously catching sight of creatures in the wild, particularly an animal so alien to any other culture. Just remember to keep your seatbelt on.


I wanted to start this week by talking about the Hypervision Optical Measuring System, which is a fantastic machine but, granted, is hardly the sort of conversation starter that will get you noticed at parties. If indeed you have already raised your eyebrows at the mere mention of this, then clearly you are someone well versed in the world of laser optics, but for the rest of us, this expensive machine is single-handedly responsible for why farmhands may be finding it hard to get work in the Bundaberg area. And here’s why.

An OMS can not only distinguish between various types of freshly picked produce, but can also utilise this information to separate vast quantities into different sizes, colour and quality. At the farm where I am currently employed, hundreds of thousands of locally picked grape tomatoes are fed into one of these machines on a continuing daily basis, where each tomato is individually scanned and differentiated in increments of mere microns. It is the centrepiece of a large refrigerated warehouse, permanently set at a chilly temperature between 10 and 12 degrees. Using laser optics, it takes the OMS a thousand to a million points per second to detect the correct grade of a single tomato, a job that could take a team of manual labourers weeks to perform, and at some considerable expense to the farmer. But despite this astonishingly efficient technology, the kangaroo item took the lead, but that’s mainly because it had a better pun.

But still, this doesn’t fully disengage those workers who are willing to manually separate fruit for a living, something which - unless there is some form of devious sexual thrill to be derived from frisking through small red tomatoes that I’m not yet aware of - is ultimately a thankless and monotonous task. I work with six graders whose job it is to pick out inadequate tomatoes prior to being placed into small punnets, which are then weighed, labelled and stacked for shipment to supermarkets across the country and beyond, to locations as far flung as Darwin, Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. They work in what is deridingly called the ‘dog box’. On a busy day, we are personally responsible for the shipment of somewhere in the region of 22,000 punnets, and each item of fruit has had to meet the regimentally high standards of each individual grader. That’s just a little something to think about when you next find yourself in the fruit aisle at Tesco’s.

The staff are kept in check by Crystal, the farmhouse matron who appears to have trained at the Heinrich Himmler school for workplace motivation. When she is not berating the workers or threatening them with the sack, she is offering remarkably confounding advice. For example, I was once told to hurry up while grading, but take my time in doing so. Her passive aggression is the schoolroom equivalent of asking to borrow a pencil, and then punching you in the arm for taking too long.

Much more amiable is the 17 year old Joel, who I have talked about before. For someone so cheerful, he is strangely bemused by Owen, one of the older workers who looks a bit like Richard Dreyfus and has the sensible, compassionate demeanour of a TV handyman. “I don’t understand people who are happy all the time,” he says, which is agreeable, especially when your job is to look at fruit all day.

He also possesses a remarkable turn of phrase. I once asked Joel if he feels lucky. “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” On skydiving, he asks simply, “Why would I jump out of a plane if there was nothing wrong with it?” Baring in mind that he dropped out of school two years ago, it is still sometimes difficult to see how there is nearly a ten year age gap between us.

Our good friend Julie sums up the job like this: “It is the only prison camp where they let you out at night.” There is certainly an almost military edge to proceedings, with all staffers required to wear a uniform of white lab coats, latex gloves and, for an extra swipe at any last remaining dignity, a hairnet. A friend once asked me whether I also had to wear a beard net. These do exist, by the way, and would essentially mean that I would be spending a typical shift of 10 to 12 hours with a bag covering my entire head.

As a final note, I would like to add that it is a sobering thought to know that if you were to die tomorrow, it would be to absolutely no consequence to the synchronised procedure of working life down at the farm, other than it might cause a slight upset to their rota system. And, even more tragically, when it comes to identifying the body, you will almost certainly be wearing a hairnet.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Miracles’ (ABC1)

Occasionally you catch a show that just boggles your brain, and this new ‘extraordinary stories’ series does just that. The format reminds me of the BBC’s ‘999’ which featured the dramatic tones of Michael Buerk and a roster of amateur reconstructions which, by comparison to this, now look like quite trivial if undoubtedly horrific stories of misfortune. ‘999’ was a terrifying show which made a kid stuck down a well look like some kind of hostage takeover situation, and never failed to give me nightmares. ‘Miracles’ focuses instead on such unfathomable acts of human survival that, despite its title of biblical proportions, couldn’t really be called anything else.

Tonight focuses on Polish-born paraglider Ewa Wisnierska, who in 2007 was practicing in New South Wales for an upcoming competition when the weather down south took an unexpected turn for the worst. Recorded footage on the day shows fellow paragliders observing large, ominous looking clouds appearing before them and promptly gliding to the ground. But the incoming storm would prove too quick for some, and before Wisnierska could find time to react, she would find herself caught up in fierce winds and, in a freakish incident appropriately called ‘cloud suck’, lifted between two cumulonimbus clouds. Wisnierska was now, quite literally, in the eye of the storm, climbing upwards at a rate 20 metres per second to an altitude of (get this) 32,600 feet. That’s nearly 10km off the ground.

While up there, she passes out from hypoxia (caused by a lack of oxygen) and drifts, high above the storm, just below the earth’s stratosphere where the temperate reaches a startling -50 degrees. It is here where she hovers for somewhere within the region of 30 to 45 minutes, before her glider collapses and she falls unconsciously to the ground at a speed of 200km an hour.

Now for the miracle. Not only does the wing of her glider spontaneously reopen, but she summarily regains consciousness due to the increase in oxygen. Despite being covered in ice, she then manages to somehow muster enough energy to navigate herself away from the plight of the storm and land safely, some three and a half hours after taking off. Her superhuman survival is made all the more poignant when we learn of Chinese pilot He Zhongpin, who was only 500 metres away from Wisnierska when he was also sucked into the cloud, only to be struck by lightening and killed instantly.