64) Australian Wood Duck

Chenonetta jubata

The night begins with an excuse: if I go for a walk to the creek, the path will take me past the house of somebody I want to see.  I send her a text message; I ask her if she’d like to join me.  We’ve walked the same route once before.  She replies that she’s not at home, and with that small announcement – less than one-hundred and sixty letters, a smattering of pixels on a screen smaller than the palm of my hand – I’m absolved.  There’s no reason to go for a walk which I never really intended to take and which was only ever an excuse for something else.  If I stay at home and watch television instead nobody will ever know.

Yet there’s a part of me, always, that insists that such subterfuge and deception – however innocent, however innocuous – is somehow corrupting.  There’s a noisy part of my mind that insists that an action, once declared, must be acted on.  So I put on my shoes and I walk towards the creek, down the street, into the cool mid-summer twilight.

I decide to take the high road, left along Clifton Hill’s esplanade and then across the old stone bridge that carries Heidelberg Road across the Merri Creek.  In places such as this, at odd intervals here and in North Fitzroy, the creek cuts a deep gorge and is flanked by cliffs five or ten metres high on either side.  In a recent winter, in a heavy downpour on a poorly lit road at night, a woman missed a corner and drove her car into just such a gorge, injuring herself and killing her elderly mother.  Perhaps I’m thinking of this when I walk along the footpath across the bridge and a car passing barely a metre from me in the other direction has a loud and sudden blow-out: it happens right next to me, and I leap and shout in shock and fright, and when the car stops twenty metres down the road I hesitate and then go to make sure the driver is okay.  She is; she leans across from the driver’s seat and asks me what the damage is.  I look and tell her that her front left tyre is completely ruined.  She asks: and the back?  The back’s fine, I assure her, and she thanks me, and so I feel myself absolved of obligation.  I continue on my walk.

The sound of traffic on Heidelberg Road is ever-present, as is the sound of the Eastern Freeway a kilometre away, but between them is Yarra Bend National Park which in places has the appearance of almost pristine bushland.  On the western fringe of the Park the bike path along which I’m walking skirts across the top of the highest cliff above the Merri Creek: signs warn of danger but at one point a look-out has been built so that walkers and cyclists can gaze at the trickling water below.  That water is at this moment clogged with algae; yet the creek is distant enough that it appears picturesque all the same.  I’m moved to take a photo on my phone, looking north.  Across the creek, to the west, somebody has several years ago carved in the grass of the hillside an enormous representation of a Heron (Ardeidae), like the chalk Horses (Equus ferus) found in the English countryside.  Behind me I hear the usual commotion of Rainbow Lorikeets (Trichoglossus haematodus) flying in screeching formation high in the open air; something moves me to turn and watch them and when I do so I notice the unmistakable shape of a Goshawk (Accipiter) flying above the eucalypts.  Goshawks are predators of small birds, and even this far into summer the Noisy Miners (Manorina melanocephala) and other birds chase it, harassing it in the sky lest it should think to descend into the trees and hunt for their young offspring.

I leave the lookout, trying to chase the Goshawk too in my own restricted, earth-bound way; but by the time I rejoin the bike-path the bird has already disappeared into the trees.  But I’m walking again, anyway, and so I continue, and reaching a point where I might turn back I feel suddenly that to go home now would be too soon, so I continue, along the bike-path, around the corner, under the high concrete arches of the freeway where young Pigeons (Columba livia) are cooing tremulously.

I cross the small footbridge over the Merri Creek adjacent to the freeway; only a few metres to my left is the broad Yarra River.  The water is dark, though at eight PM the sky is still light.  In a large expanse which until only a month ago housed demountable buildings and refurbished shipping containers there is now just bare earth, though grass is starting to regrow.  Just out of site, below the steady roar of Dight’s Falls, bright new metal houses the new fishway which has been completed at last, just when it seemed that it never would be.  Through the grilles you can see the water rushing through ever-narrower chambers, rising gradually but inexorably from the lower river to the elevated water above the falls.  Perhaps fish are passing there already, discovering new routes and mapping them in their minds.

The sound of all that water collapsing in on itself fades quickly as I walk back towards the creek’s ingress.  I find a gravelly ramp down to the water and I squat there, watching a Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo) stretch its long wings like a scarecrow on the far bank.  I take my eyes off it for just a moment, to play with my phone, to write something on twitter – unthinkable for me only six months ago – and when I look up, inexplicably, silently, the Cormorant has been joined on its log by an Intermediate Egret (Mesophoyx intermedia).

The new bird is in its breeding plumage: great fronds of wispy feathers erupt from beneath its wings, and as the Cormorant folds its black wings and tucks its head to sleep the Egret passes its beak carefully over those brilliant white plumes, putting each filament in order, moving its head down the shaft of each feather again and again until its plumage is tightly zipped back in place.  Down by the water the temperature is dropping and even as I begin to shiver the day-time birds are huddling deep into themselves, nestling in the warmth of their own feathers.

Tiny creatures, fish or insects, unseen, disturb the river from below, and the water is pricked with a thousand shifting holes and interruptions as the surface is broken by miniscule mouths.  From time to time the wind stirs and gives the river goose-pimples.  As the sky slowly becomes pale and then begins to darken, clouds of insects begin to hover above the river, and as I gaze through the swarms towards the Egret and the Cormorant on the far bank it’s as if the birds are being projected on old film stock, rich with speckles and blemishes.

Abruptly, my attention is interrupted by an unfamiliar call: a sort of squelching yelp, a quack and a croak all jumbled together as one.  I look sharply to my left and see gliding down the river, low above the water, from some unseen hidden roost, a Nankeen Night-heron (Nycticorax caledonicus).  It is only the fourth one I have ever seen in my life; only a week and a half earlier I had never seen one at all.  I’m astonished that a bird that long seemed so elusive and unseeable should be so casually flying down the Yarra River.  I’m even more astonished when it alights on the same log already occupied by the Egret and the Cormorant.  They look up briefly from their roosts at the newcomer but return without fuss to their sleeping positions: heads tucked, legs straight, perfectly still.  The Night-heron has been still all day, and now it begins to hunt in its crouching, hunch-backed way, peering intently into the water.

The Night-heron’s activities are just beginning, but every other bird is turning in to roost.  A pair of Australian Wood Ducks swim past me, up stream; a male and a female.  They see me and briefly turn towards me, and for a moment I can see the feverish activity of their legs beneath the water, beneath the serene stillness of their bodies as they glide against the current.  After inspecting me from a slight distance they turn again and continue on their way.  The male is rich chocolate brown and pale grey, and as he swims across the surface of the river, which is now still with evening, the colour of the trees and sky reflected in the dark water match his plumage exactly.

As I watch the birds come and go I have my phone in my hand: some strange new urge is making me share the scene before me, posting on Twitter, crowding all my wonder and delight into so small a space.  A year ago I would have decried just such an action; I would have denounced myself had I been able to see it.  Yet now, unexpectedly, I find that it is the urge to share everything in this odd medium that has kept me rooted to the spot, kept me from wandering away out of boredom, for nearly an hour, as the river ripples and settles around me.  When it gets dark, and I get hungry, I stand up and turn for home, blissfully happy.

Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org

63) Eastern Grey Kangaroo

Macropus giganteus

We’re driving to Canberra.  One of my oldest friends, and me.  I don’t drive so I’m keeping her company, letting her talk so she doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel.  It’s a thirty-eight degree day and from Melbourne to Canberra is a nearly seven-hundred kilometre drive.  It’s two days before Christmas; we’re going to our families.

There are Kangaroos everywhere: lying dead and brutalised on the sides of the highway, their bodies sometimes as soft and tranquil as a toy animal but more often their flesh and blood and bones torn and shattered and smeared on the rough bitumen.  Sometimes Australian Ravens (Corvus coronoides) flap listlessly from the corpses but more often the dead animals are alone.  There are so many; too many even for scavengers to make use of.  As my friend and I joke about the numerous kayaks and jet-skis and trailbikes we see being towed up and down the highway we barely mention the marsupial slaughter that constantly confronts us.  They say travel is as much about the journey as the destination but we just want the journey over with.

The Hume Highway is flat and direct, and only Holbrook with its famous submarine is now left unbypassed.  Cars promenade along its main street in both directions; just outside town witches hats mark the starting point of new road works.  Other towns pass as merely names on exit signs, optimistic arrows off the highway: Wodonga; Tarcutta; Thurmoola. When we arrive in Canberra at last we pull over so my friend can take a phone call.  I stare out the passenger-side window, trying not to listen.  In the trees is a shape and it might be a kangaroo or it might be just a pile of sacks and sticks.  If it’s flesh it is so long dead that its form has disappeared into the waving golden grass.  Cars rush past us, their wheels juddering on the small white humps that stud the road, warning of the approach of one of Canberra’s notorious roundabouts.  The shapeless thing in the grass is left abandoned and unnoticed.

On Boxing Day I go with my parents to their holiday house, on the Brogo River near Bega.  With us are two of their oldest friends, visiting from the UK.  They’ve never seen Brogo before; I think at first that they have but I soon learn that I’m wrong.  I spend time with them, and with my parents, but I haven’t been here for months so I spend time alone, too, re-exploring old paths.  Walking up the road from the house to the gate on the morning of the first day I stumble upon a small but healthy group of Kangaroos gathered around an old dam.  On the second night, after everyone’s gone to bed, I hear Boobook Owls (Ninox novaeseelandiae) hooting mo-poke in the full moon and I go searching for them.  I find two; as I approach the first one I disturb an unseen Kangaroo whose thudding footfalls in the scrub panic the owl into flight.  The second owl is not so cautious, and I stare at it for minutes on end.  Its eyes shine dazzlingly bright in the beam of my torch.  As I stare it defecates on the branch below it, a long white spatter, and as a response to my intrusion I can’t fault it.  The next morning I leave the breakfast table when I hear a Superb Lyrebird (Menura novaehollandiae) calling in the gully; I expect it to hear me stumbling towards it and to run shrieking down the hill, but instead it allows me to watch it scratching in the dirt beneath a fig tree.  I almost stop breathing when I see its long, plumed tail trailing behind it.  Usually Lyrebird songs are resonantly loud and accompanied by a dance, the shimmering of that long tail, but this morning, practicing outside the winter breeding season, the bird sings softly to itself as it forages, like somebody whistling while they work.

Our friends from the UK have only a few weeks in Australia so I try to find as many animals as I can for them, but it seems as though every creature I spot is gone by the time I can point it out.  King Parrots (Alisterus scapularis), Spotted Pardalotes (Pardalotus punctatus), Satin Bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus), all fly away.  The two Wedge-tailed Eagles (Aquila audax) that have circled the valley in front of the house for years never appear.  After two days, though, our luck changes: it begins in Bermagui, with two enormous Stingrays (Myliobatoidei) that are patrolling the waterfront where a fisherman is throwing freshly caught fish into the water.  Tourists point and laugh as the man’s small dog tiptoes along the wharf and barks excitedly at the pack of Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo) and Australian Pelicans (Pelecanus conspicillatus) that scrabble for each scrap of flesh.  That evening, driving back to the house well after dark, we stop for an Eastern Grey Kangaroo that is standing in the middle of the left lane of the road, directly in front of us; it lollops unhurriedly into the bush.  Moments later I spy another standing like a ghost just outside the beam of the headlights – “Kangaroo on the left” I say, hoping to alert our friends, but when my father reacts by immediately pressing the car’s brakes I remember all the dead kangaroos on the side of the Hume; I remember that Eastern Grey Kangaroos are the main cause of traffic accidents back in Canberra.  I watch the edges of the road all the way back to the house.

We all drive back to Canberra the next day; the day after that my old friend and I drive back home.  Back to Melbourne.  My brother is with us now, too.  We notice that the road is new; we see, for the first time, that a week earlier we’d been driving on the old tarmac, and that to double the size of the Hume Highway the government has simply laid down two bright new lanes alongside the old ones.  Now the old road that went in two directions only goes in one; now it’s only the old road that goes to Canberra.

The Kangaroos die as readily on the new road as on the old: their corpses punctuate the long drive once more.  Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes), too.  We wonder if perhaps there are so many dead animals on the road because there are also, out there in the bush, so many ones that are newly alive.  I recall the scores of Grey Fantails (Rhipidura albiscapa) and other small insectivorous birds I’d seen at Brogo; I recall the recent rain and think, we are in a time of plenty.

We are driving back to Melbourne for the New Year, but we are leaving something behind, too.  It can’t be avoided.  A home is the place that formed you as much as it’s the place you live; leaving Canberra once again, turning away from the dead animals, I’m struck dumb by how unspeakably beautiful the Southern Tablelands are this summer: pale golden grass; distant indigo hills.

Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org

62) Common Carp

Cyprinus carpio

A few weeks ago I found myself, somehow, in a conversation about the Thames.  Somebody disparaged the river, and remembering a particular anecdote from a university lecture over a decade ago I took it upon myself to defend the river’s health: the restoration of the Thames, I explained, had been a major success story, and a visitor to London is now likely to see Swans (Cygnus) and other birdlife inhabiting the waterway.  The river may not be pristine, but life has a way of asserting itself.

Nonetheless, “it still looks as dirty as the Yarra”, as my conversational opposite remarked.  The Yarra River, Melbourne’s river, is notoriously brown and muddy; some of that is just its natural condition, but it’s fair to say that nobody in Melbourne would ever consider swimming in it.  At places where the river’s flow brings the water butting up against hard obstacles – bridges, embankments – the collection of detritus is enough to put anyone off.  Yet birdlife of all sorts can be found along the length of the river, and for birdlife to thrive there need to be not just plants but fish and other animals upon which those birds can feed.  The river’s not perfect; but it’s a long way from dead.

Lake Burley Griffin, in Canberra, is another oft-disregarded body of water which sustains more life than many people credit it with.  Before I moved to Melbourne I’d delight in frequent sightings of Darters (Anhingidae) hunting in the lake’s depths, diving for long periods before emerging, but barely – their bodies below the surface like submarines, and just their thin and spring-loaded necks and heads held serpentine above the water (hence their other name, “Snake-bird”).  Grebes, too, could be seen bobbing on the surface of the lake, tiny like rubber ducks in an enormous bath; in winter they all looked alike, but come spring and summer the males began to moult into their breeding plumage and Hoary-headed Grebes (Poliocephalus poliocephalus) with their striped heads could easily be distinguished from Australasian Grebes (Tachybaptus novaehollandiae) with their yellow facial spot.

Darters and Grebes are both predators, swimming with great agility beneath the surface of the water after fish and smaller animals.  So, too, are cormorants, which are also numerous on Lake Burley Griffin – Great Cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo); Little Black Cormorants (Phalacrocorax sulcirostris); Little Pied Cormorants (Microcarbo melanoleucos).  The very presence of these birds suggests some degree of health and life and vigour beneath the lake’s muddy surface, but speak to the average Canberran and they’ll swear blind that there’s nothing in that lake except Carp.  Bloody Carp.

They must be the most hated fish in Australia.  They’ve driven out the natives; they stir up mud; worst of all, they’re no good for eating (though try telling that to the Chinese-Australians who line Lake Burley Griffin with their fishing rods and baskets all year long).  Once many years ago when walking along a quiet edge of Lake Burley Griffin, around the fence of the Yarralumla Nursery towards Weston Park at whose tip the lake is at its narrowest, I came across a hand-written sign pinned to a tree.  A boast: the sign’s author proclaimed himself the Carp killer, the Carp executioner, the bane of all Carp; he offered a bounty on Carp; he cursed them beyond all bounds of reason.  He could, frankly, have been anybody in Canberra – or in Australia.

His mission to rid the world – or at least the lake – of Carp was destined to be futile.  There are unknowable numbers of them in the depths of those waters.  They must bump against Scrivener Dam and feel their way curiously along the concrete wall that binds their habitat, preventing it from gushing in torrents into the Molonglo River.  One spring I was walking along the lake, again in that same beech-dappled stretch of the bike path that leads from residential Yarralumla where I lived to the grand Yarralumla of Government House, when I was distracted by shallow splashing and sloshing in a willow-ringed pond to my right.  Carp, spawning: somehow I’d lived my entire life in that same small part of Canberra by the lake and never seen such a thing before.  The great fish writhed just beneath the pond’s surface, or occasionally broke it to splash and gulp and twist their pale bellies to the sun.  They chased each-other; they lunged at each-other; it was an ancient and unmistakably carnal ritual.

It was hard not to see it, also, as a kind of declaration of ownership; an ostentatious display of fecundity and vigour in a body of water usually regarded as stagnant and unsalvageable.  Carp can reproduce in phenomenal numbers: according to the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, a six kilogram female carp can produce 1.5 million eggs.  Of course the great majority of these will die or be consumed before they even get a start in life, but even so – the potential is staggering.  No wonder the Carp, when I saw them in that small inlet of the lake, seemed to make the water quiver with the solidity of their flesh.

Early on a Saturday morning recently, just the day after that conversation about the Thames, I was riding my bike back home along the Merri Creek here in Melbourne.  Riding slowly beneath the Eastern Freeway, fifty metres or so upstream from where the creek flows into the Yarra, I was distracted by the plopping of water.  I stopped my bike, and leaned against the chain-link fence; there again, a splash sent ripples across the murky surface of the creek.  And again, and again.  I had an inkling what was causing it, but I wanted to see – to make sure.  (As I waited I recalled how, years earlier, I’d heard fish leaping unseen from the surface of a distant and very different river, the Lemmenjoki in the far north of Finland, on a still autumn evening when the last insects of the season had hatched in a great swarm above the water.)

In front of me a couple of people had stopped too, their attention also having been caught by the sound.  “Is it a Platypus?” the woman asked excitedly, perhaps with more hope than expectation.  I didn’t want to disappoint her, and for a moment I even dared to hope that she might be right – unlikely as it might have seemed to see Platypus at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, beneath the Eastern Freeway (yet Platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, are known to live in the Yarra’s catchment, in creeks further out of the city; they may even live in Fairfield and Kew, only a few kilometres from where I and my fellow observers were stopped).

I quickly dismissed thoughts of a Platypus sighting from my mind; but I was quietly hopeful of something else: a Grebe, or a Cormorant, or some kind of swimming bird.  Some unusual Duck (Anatidae) – once, in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve outside Canberra, I thought I’d seen a Platypus, and been scarcely disappointed when the animal turned out to instead be the even rarer Musk Duck (Biziura lobata).

I was hoping for anything, really.  I was aware that November had slipped away from me, and with it another spring, and my annual chance to see the Sacred Kingfishers (Todiramphus sanctus) whose migratory return a few years ago to the Yarra River and its tributaries was hailed as a truly tangible sign of the waterways’ recovery and restored health.  Two years ago, in my first few months of living in this part of Melbourne, I’d seen several Kingfishers – but growing complacent with time I’d neglected to amble along the creek and the river the year after that, or this year.  Now they’ll have dispersed along the river, and begun nesting, and my chance to see them will probably have passed for twelve months.

Whatever was splashing in the water that day under the Eastern Freeway couldn’t have been a Kingfisher, of course, but it had to be something.  Some rare fish – just last week I noticed that the workmen constructing the long-projected fishway at Yarra Bend had finally packed up their construction site and departed – some aquatic mammal or diving bird.  Anything but Carp.

But Carp they were.  I’d known, really, that the creatures fussing the water couldn’t have been anything else.  When they eventually showed themselves they seemed to rise in their dozens, a great chain of them; and yet, to my astonishment and to the astonishment of the couple with whom I was gazing into the water, they were exceptionally beautiful.  There’s something stirring about seeing a creature utterly at home in its environment, and as those great fish turned their bellies to the sun just beneath the green surface of the water and rolled like a line of celebratory streamers downstream to the Yarra they were no less magnificent than any Platypus or Kingfisher.  They moved so languidly that even when one broke the surface it was with infinite grace and elegance.  They twirled and twined around each-other ecstatically; they barely seemed to exert any effort at all; and then, in an instant, they were gone again, sinking into the thick depths of the water.

I had to get home: I was returning from the market and I needed to get my groceries into the fridge.  My fellow observers turned away from the water.  None of us had seen what we had hoped to see; and yet I don’t think any of us, in that moment, wanted to see anything else but Carp.

Image sourced from http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/

61) Domestic Goat

Capra hircus

By the time you write yourself a letter, and carefully fold the aerogramme, and lick the gluey edges so that they seal, and hand it to somebody else who will stick a stamp on it and put it in the post for you – by the time you’ve done all of those things, and then waited two or three days for the letter to arrive, you’ve nearly forgotten that you sent the letter at all; and thus, when you open your letterbox after coming home from work in the near-twilight of a mid-spring evening and see in there the exuberantly patterned aerogramme that was in your possession for ten or fifteen minutes the previous weekend, there is a moment in which you don’t recognise what it is that you’re looking at; you don’t remember having ever seen, let alone touched and marked and addressed, such an envelope before.  Then, just an instant later, you remember, and the surprise and delight is so startling that you can’t help but grin.  You can’t help but be happy.

It’s the same sensation, perhaps, that you would feel if you climbed the stairs of an extravagantly decorated 1920s theatre and found, near the bar, a small goat defecating discreetly on the carpet.  You would probably have been to this theatre before, on an earlier Sunday, and so you would have expected to see a goat, or some other farmyard animal; or if not necessarily expected it, then certainly anticipated it as a possibility; yet seeing the animal, nonetheless, would be such a great joy and surprise that you would be unable to prevent yourself from crying out and touching the goat, stroking its hair, laying your fingers gingerly upon the horns growing out of its head.

There’s something endearingly old-fashioned about a goat.  There’s something about a goat, the look of it, the sound of its bleating, the wiry yet surprisingly soft texture of its coat, that marks the animal somehow as ancient – and indeed the goat is one of the oldest of all domesticated animals.  Starting with the Wild Goat or Bezoar (Capra aegagrus, still found throughout central Asia and the Middle East today), our Neolithic ancestors began herding goats millennia ago, and despite all the unfathomable time that has passed between then and now neither we nor the goats have changed very much.

The earliest evidence of the domestication of goats comes from two sites, in Turkey at the north of the valley of the Euphrates River; and in Kurdish Iran.  Remains of Domestic Goats found in these two sites date back some ten thousand years; a few thousand years later the long stretch of land roughly between these two sites would become the cradle of modern civilisation: Mesopotamia.  It was here that urbanisation began, with the emergence of arguably the world’s first cities; as populations grew and these early cities became larger and more frenetic with activity it became necessary to develop a method of keeping track of trades, finances, debts, and all the other daily negotiations of human society.  People began making marks in clay to serve as aides memoire – people, in short, began writing.

In Mesopotamia, writing began as a means of keeping track of traded goods.  Then as now, a great part of the economy was based on agriculture – and there must have been more than a few goats tabulated in those ancient rudimentary written words.  Then and now goats must have been bought and sold by the hundred: the goat, wild or domestic, has always been a herd animal.  This must have been one of the things that made it attractive to humans in the first place; and perhaps it’s not so fanciful to imagine that our ancient Mesopotamian ancestors recognised in herds of goats some kind of kinship: that animals such as goats group together to feel safer from tangible threats such as predators is not really so different from the way in which more abstract fears – loneliness; isolation; estrangement – lead people to seek out the company of each-other, particularly in cities.

Though we prize our individuality, we want nonetheless to feel that we are part of a community greater than ourselves.  We live cheek-by-jowl with each-other; we cherish good neighbours; we start to feel strange when we haven’t communicated with anybody in a while.  How excited must the originators of those first early written missives have been, to have created a new way to communicate to each-other previously incommunicable thoughts?  We write because we wish, in some way, to share our perception of the world with our fellow humans – to ask if anybody experiences the world the same way we do.  Though we too readily forget it now, we in the Western world have inherited from the ancient Mesopotamians a culture and a sense of community that is based in a fundamental way on the written word.

Yet the written word is useless if it is not read.  It is the reading, the listening, the experiencing of writing by others – whether that writing is mercantile, practical, fanciful, or fictional – that gives the written word its purpose.  Writing is about reaching out, grasping at comprehension across the otherwise unknowable boundary of another human’s individual consciousness; writing ensures that words and stories and experiences can survive beyond the fragile lives of their creators; writing creates communities, and through communities, comfort.

Every month just such a community – loose, shifting, growing, but always unified in spirit – gathers at the Thornbury Theatre, in Melbourne’s north.  The Thornbury Theatre was once the Regent Theatre, a cinema opened on the 8^th of August 1925.  Now, after decades of dormancy except as a banquet hall, it hosts live events of all kinds, from music to wrestling.  For the last two years it has also hosted Women of Letters, a literary event in a city full of them but one which almost immediately, and completely organically, acquired the kind of excitement and dedication that people only bestow upon things that they truly love.

If you live in Melbourne you probably know all about Women of Letters already; if you don’t, here are the basics: created and curated by Marieke Hardy and Michaela McGuire, at the end of each month the event draws together, before an invariably sold-out audience, a disparate group of five women – different women each time, though several have by now appeared more than once.  These women will each have been asked to write a letter inspired by a particular theme; they then read the letter out.  Anything beyond that is left to the writer’s discretion, and the letters range from the bawdy to the raw to the wry to the heartbreaking – usually all in one afternoon, frequently all in one letter.  Between the reading of the letters and a brief question-and-answer session, the audience is provided with pens, postcards and aerogrammes, and invited to write a letter to somebody, to be posted by Marieke and Michaela.

That’s what happens in literal terms, but such a description gives no impression at all of what it is that keeps several hundred people coming back to the Thornbury Theatre every month, begging for tickets if necessary and turning up early to queue out onto the street.  There’s a promise of a Sunday afternoon’s entertainment, of course – but entertainment can be found anywhere.  What Women of Letters provides more than anything is a sense of belonging.

A male friend of mine asked me a couple of weeks ago if men were welcome.  It’s true that the great majority of the audience is made up of women, but nobody who attends a Women of Letters event is made to feel out of place.  It’s precisely this warmth and openness that brings people to Women of Letters.  We’re all there to listen, and hearing women – hearing people – recount astonishingly frank and honest stories of their own lives galvanises us into the understanding that community, fellowship, a sense of shared experience, will always be the essential aspect of the experience of being human.  We are social animals; we are the only animals on earth who create anything like a city: a space shared by millions of individuals with no genetic relationship with each-other, no base biological reason to put up with each-other.

We make our communities not just physically, but emotionally as well.  Above all, emotionally.  And in our better moments we try to reach out to others – to our fellow humans, and sometimes – though too rarely – to other animals caught up in the maelstrom of human life.  Besides celebrating the art of letter-writing, Women of Letters was started expressly to support the work of Edgar’s Mission, an animal shelter outside Melbourne dedicated to providing sanctuary to animals from factory-farms.  Factory-farming is the brutal end-point of domestication: a production line of animals bound in servitude to a life and death of the utmost cruelty and despair.  From time to time one of the animals from Edgar’s Mission will be brought to Women of Letters, up the stairs to the upstairs entrance of the Thornbury Theatre, to remind everybody what it’s all about: to remind us all of the consequences and responsibilities of the thousands of years of domestication and animal use and abuse that have been at the heart of human life for longer than we can remember.  From before we had writing; from before we had cities; from before, even, we had communities, we had animals in our lives.  They are there still, every aspect of our life is abundant with them; in their own way they are part of our community – and as we talk to each-other, write to each-other, listen to each-other, we should make the effort to remember them, too.  They have been with us for so long.

Image sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org

60) Woolly Mammoth

Mammuthus primigenius

In August this year, an eleven-year-old boy walking along the banks of the Yenisei River in Russia’s far north found the preserved carcass of a Woolly Mammoth.  The body was frozen; the remains were astonishingly well-preserved.  The animal’s fat-hump, like the hump of a Camel (Camelus), was still intact – the first time an adult mammoth had been found with such an appendage.

The Woolly Mammoth was but one of several species of Mammoth, but so ingrained is it in the popular consciousness that for most people – certainly for me – the Woolly Mammoth is the Mammoth.  Though the species went extinct thousands of years ago, it’s not unusual for specimens to be found from time to time; though the end of the ice-age probably doomed the Woolly Mammoth to extinction, those parts of the world where it lived – including modern-day Russia – are still cold enough to have preserved the remains of countless animals, and not as fossils but as organic matter.

The remains found in August will be transported to St Petersburg for study.  That city is already home to perhaps the most famous Woolly Mammoth in the world, the so-called Berezovka Mammoth.  The Berezovka Mammoth is a nearly-complete animal mounted in a glass cabinet in the Zoological Museum of the Russian Academy of Science.  It’s old – it was discovered a century ago – and it has a mothballed appearance: there’s little evidence of the wool that once covered the animal, and half its trunk is missing.

I was lucky enough to visit St Petersburg – and to see the Berezovka Mammoth – in 2003.  Though my primary reason for travelling to St Petersburg had been to visit the Hermitage – I spent two afternoons there, and still sometimes gasp at the memories – a host of secondary attractions piqued my interest, and one of them was the Zoological Museum, and its Mammoth in particular.  Seeing the animal was something of a disappointment, as it happened: it was tattered and shabby. The lighting over the cabinet that enclosed it had a particular dimness that suggested parsimony rather than the need to preserve the specimen from damage.  The display seemed almost deliberately downbeat.

Yet it was there, all the same: stuffed, tattered, faded; but still a Woolly Mammoth.  As iconic a creature as has ever lived.  Like the Mammoth discovered this August, the animal in St Petersburg was found by a river – the Berezovka River, naturally, far away in Siberia.  So much is found by rivers, by bodies of water.  Leaving the Zoological Museum I walked back east across the Dvortsovvy Bridge, across the Neva River towards Nevsky Prospect, the grand boulevard which terminated at the Hermitage.  By the Neva, at a distance, I saw a man with a docile Bear (Ursidae) on a lead beside him: the animal, whose standing height can have been barely taller than its captor, looked forlorn and despairing.

Entirely by chance, I visited St Petersburg in the year of the 300^th anniversary of its founding.  To make the city presentable on such an occasion great amounts of money had been spent on cleaning and restoring public areas and historical buildings and monuments.  The money was provided by the Russian government, and it’s surely not a coincidence that Vladimir Putin is a son of “Peter”, as Russians call the city.  When I was there, for only five days, every golden statue glowed; every piece of marble shone.  The Church on Spilled Blood was dazzling, as if some jewel-encrusted cave had been flipped inside-out.

The trams were dirty.  The cars were beaten and run-down; the river had an exhausted look to it.  Beyond the glamour and beauty of Peter the Great’s “Venice of the North”, there was an actual city full of people whose lives were no more or less extraordinary for all the glory of their royal home.  When I visited St. Petersburg it was September, autumn, well outside the mid-summer tourist season.  The skies were grey and hung low and heavy with rain; the hotel where I stayed, though expertly run, was infested with Mosquitoes (Culicidae), a remnant and a reminder of the swamp that the city was built upon.  Their presence made sleep impossible until sheer fatigue at constantly swatting them set in.

My companions in the hostel for the five days I was there were a mix of English, Americans, and particularly Canadians.  One of the Canadians had learned not even the most basic of Russian before his visit to St Petersburg, and when attempting to communicate with the Russians he did so with a rudimentary language of finger pointing and miming.  Yet when interacting with other English-speakers such as myself he was a perfectly hospitable companion, funny and sociable.  There’s an instinctive camaraderie that comes with travelling, and for five days he and his fellow Canadians were the best friends I had in the world.  Each night we’d reconvene at the hostel and recount our experiences of the day – what we’d seen, what had happened to us.  The weather was dispiriting; the city was magnificent but aloof; most of all we relished being able to communicate with one-another in our own language, without thought or effort.

If my Canadian friend’s communication with the Russians seemed strange or even obnoxious, perhaps the people of St Petersburg did not invite upon themselves any great degree of politeness.  When I first arrived in the city I found them pushy, and rude, and after the warmth and openness of my previous two months among the Danes, the Swedes, and even the more reserved Finns, the Russians seemed brusque and unfriendly and even slightly threatening.  Fortunately there was a lifetime of distractions in St Petersburg, and even in the ever-recurring drizzle, walking around the city was a mesmerising experience.  Any perceived rudeness from the city’s populace barely seemed to matter.

Of course, the residents of St Petersburg disregarded me because they had no way of communicating with me; I realise now that I felt the same way towards them, yet had not the grace to acknowledge that the fault lay anywhere but with them.  This attitude began to change when I met a man who tried to sell me books.  He was hawking them on the street; he accosted me as I was leaving a restaurant where I’d been eating dinner.  I didn’t buy anything off him – I didn’t have the money to – but he had a few words of broken English and we chatted for a few moments, bonded by a shared love of literature.  Our conversation amounted to little more than monosyllabic expressions of delight and appreciation – but it was all that was needed.

Subsequent to that encounter I realised that if I could break through the language barrier that was isolating me from the natives of St Petersburg, their character seemed to change completely.  Where once they had seemed pushy and rude, elbowing me out of the way in queues at the metro, they now – those few with whom I was able to communicate – seemed extraordinarily generous – with their time, with their advice, with their sense of common humanity.  A woman working behind the counter in a gift shop talked me out of buying a cup and saucer there, pointing me instead in the direction of another shop with far better, and cheaper, products; at the end of my trip a man went out of his way to lead me to the station from which I had to catch the train back to Finland.  Perhaps it’s the collective memory of long decades of totalitarianism that creates such communal attitudes.  It saddens me to think that many tourists, cowed with fear by the stories of crime and con-artists that attach themselves to any large foreign city, might never experience the generosity and kindness that I came to think of as the authentic Russian character.

The Russians had seemed rude at first because I wasn’t making the effort to see them as anything else.  Likewise the Berezovka Mammoth had seemed underwhelming because I wasn’t taking it on its own terms.  Had I seen it immediately for what it was – the nearly perfect remains of an animal that had been alive perhaps tens of thousands of years ago – maybe I would have been astonished, perhaps I would have overwhelmed.  The Mammoth discovered in August by the Yenisei River will not take the Berezovka Mammoth’s place – despite being nearly intact it’s skin and bone, like the bodies of ancient people dragged from bogs – but it may not be so long before we find another specimen comparable to the Berezovka Mammoth.  Is this something to look forward to, though?  The Yenisei Mammoth may well be “the Mammoth of the century”, but despite the excitement, its discovery is not something that we should be eager to celebrate.  Hidden at the end of the ABC News Online story through which I found out about the Yenisei Mammoth’s discovery, is the following sentence, ominous in its banality:

Global warming has thawed ground in northern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of Mammoth remains.

Things are not always what they seem.  We have to make the effort to understand them.  It was global warming that, at least in part, led to the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth.  It’s global warming – this time of our own creation – that is bringing them back to us.

Image of the Berezovka Mammoth sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org