Welcome to the land of the black swan.

First some context… In 1870 Western Australia was granted representative Government, cutting loose from mama’s apron strings back in London. Until 1964, only those people who owned property were entitled to vote in Legislative Council (upper house) elections. Pathetic! That would have counted me out from voting on that one.

Parliament house is on a hill just west of the Perth CBD (and, incidentally, just around the corner from King’s Park, an area of wild woods bigger than Central Park in New York City). The two Chambers of Parliament House were completed in 1904. Later, in 1964, the eastern front was added. This is the main entrance for the public and it isn’t extremely august looking, but at least you get to walk up some stairs to get to the entrance. I’m sitting on these stairs in the above photo.
And now, after a searching and extensive historical discourse, I turn to WA politics in 2006.

Let us start with good news. The state government Department of Planning and Infrastructure is concerned about cleaner transport options such as hydrogen fuel cell buses, biofuels, gas buses (179 provided so far) and cycling paths ($68 million spent) and a initiating a program of community education to reduce car trips. This state government has significantly expanded Perth’s public transport network, for example between 2001 and 2006 putting $1.6 billion into doubling passenger rail capacity. They are also encouraging new developments along rail lines. This department is currently developing a mandatory building sustainability index (like the one in NSW), which will require energy saving measures be incorporated in the construction of new buildings in WA. Not bad stuff.

However, figures on, for example, transport show that the state government certainly should be busy. At present 8 out of 10 people in Perth drive to work. Check these figures out:

CBD parking spots per 1000 people
Perth: 631
Australian average: 489
US average 468
European average 238

Percentage of work trips on public transport
Perth 9.7 %
Melbourne 15.9%
Sydney 25%
Australian average 14.5%
US average 9%
European average 39%

My environmentally based focus on politics continues… From the Department of Agriculture and Food we have heard, as usual, concern for invasive species that plague crops and pastures, for example the newly arrived Starling in Western Australia, and the Rainbow Lorikheets in the Perth metropolitan area. As per normal, much concern for the breeding of crops and animals, and the export of agricultural produce from the state (no concern that the export of primary products in large amounts is not a sustainable industry due to its impact on global heating and its reliance on increasingly expensive oil).

From the Department of Conservation and Land Management there has been concern with containing the soil-born disease dieback in areas where it has infected the native flora, with maintaining and creating national parks and marine parks (any time now we should hear about some good news in protecting the waters of Rottnest island), and with combating the spread of invasive fauna such as pigs, camels, goats, wild cattle, foxes and cats. Conservation through the nomination of national parks as well as the encouragement of nature-based tourism are also priorities.

As for the Department of the Environment, well this one and the previously mentioned department have now merged. Climate change is a concern here and on this matter the declining rainfall has motivated the construction of a desalination plant which will be powered by wind energy. Government agencies have been required to gradually reduce their energy usage. Carbon trading is being investigated. Despite some concern over climate change, WA only gets 3% of its electricity from renewable energy, smaller than any other state, and only plans to get 6% by 2010 (and this is not even a legislated target). South Australia gets 11% and has legislated to get 20% by 2014, NSW gets 8% now and has legislated for 15% by 2020, and of course Tasmania gets 81% from renewable sources as we speak. The Greens, the Liberals, the Nationals and the Independants are all pressuring Western Australia’s Labour government to commit to 20% renewables by 2020.

Today I heard, from an source not to be named, that the Premier of Western Australia saw An Inconvenient Truth last month and had a moment of truth and revelation. The government will release its climate change action plan in the first quarter of 2007. If Al Gore’s message has really sunk in with the head of state government, then we may have something exciting waiting for us some time in the new year.

Looking back, one of my favourite recent moments of clarity from Parliament House came from the Green member of Parliament Paul Llewellyn when he, in his inaugural speech to the upper house, envisaged Western Australia in 2055. Among other things he put forward a picture of an ‘internationally recognised tourism industry based on sail and solar powered ocean liner technology’. I can imagine how beautiful my little port town of Fremantle would look full of such ocean liners. Huge swathes of white sails lazily flapping from towering masts… The masts festooned with elaborate computer-controlled riggings… In a sense, we would be moving forwards by moving towards Fremantle’s historical.

At the start of last year over 3000 people voted for me to take a seat in the lower house of state parliament, representing the Greens. I received sixteen per cent of the vote, which was more than double won by the previous greens candidate for the area. True, I didn’t end up with a seat in Parliament House with my name on. But ever since I’ve believed, like Al Gore, that you’ve got to change public opinion before the politicians will shuffle along in its wake.

Now you’ve read this blog entry, don’t worry about lumbering old state politics. Just talk to your neighbour. Get back to the politics of you and me. Ask that only half convinced friend to see An Inconvenient Truth. Leave a copy of Gore’s book of the same name on the kitchen table.

[Thanks to the Department of Agriculture and Food for the photo.]

If I ask you where you live you’ll probably tell me a particular suburb and a particular street number. But where you live is also defined by your bioregion, that is your watershed, the plants and animals that are native to your place, the climate, the soil beneath your house… This is basic knowledge, and yet so many of us cheerfully walk around each day as ecological illiterates. We can read a complex alphabet developed into Western Europe, but we can’t read the shapes and forms of our home place. Walk into the middle of your local university, supposedly a city’s greatest repository of learning, and ask the first academic you bump into about the soil which lies beneath our feet. From the distinguished, tenured philosopher specializing in Hegel you will get a blank look.

Most people in Perth live on the Western Coastal Plain, where the soils are largely yellow or brown sand, often with a grey surface, and with limestone further down. Rain falls on the ground and soaks down through the sand to underground to aquifers and to the Swan river. Our suite of native plants and trees are exquisitely adapted to this ecological niche.

Certain people in this city choose to resist these physical realities, and to pretend they live somewhere like England with deep topsoil with plenty of organic matter in it. They plant non-native plants which require lots of piped in water and fertilizers. The phosphates from the fertilizers flow down through the soil to the Swan River and create massive algal blooms in the water each summer which use all the oxygen in the water and kill everything in that ecosystem. Ignorance isn’t always bliss.

This week I and my brother and father were twenty metres beneath the old Fremantle Prison. We were exploring an underground passage way dug out by convicts well over a hundred years ago. The passage had been dug out of the limestone by hand, and our torch lights flickered across the uneven rock surface. Water flowed through the bottom of the passage at some points. The air was musty and damp, and as we walked along we noticed thin, hairy tree roots hanging down out of the shadowy ceiling. Some native tree had sent its roots over twenty metres through this limestone in search of water. That is true knowledge of one’s place.

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Don’t worry about this blog entry – just technical stuff.

[In a new development, all of the photos in this blog entry can be viewed in a larger size if you click on them.]

In the above photo you can see the skin of a Wandoo. While the leaves fell each autumn back in Europe, when white people came to this land they found an invertion of their experience: here it was the bark that was shed as the seasons turned. Some Australian trees have a thick layer of bark to insulate them from the fierce fires which can burn in summer.  Others, like this Wandoo, sacrifice their bark to the flames to escape too much damage to their trunks.  To be honest this tree is normally found a bit further inland and had been planted by human hands.

After the previous blog I wrote on soil, I thought I’d show that there really is a diversity of natural beauty which springs forth from my sandy home.

Between the Indian Ocean and the hills behind Perth, the Darling Scarp, sits the Swan Coastal Plain. This is an area of Banksia and Eucalypt Woodland. Agriculture and urbanisation have lead to clearing and fragmentation of this woodland, however pockets remain. Murdoch University has one of the largest campuses in Australia, and here, camera in hand, I found one of these pockets of original life.

Now we’re in the real woodland. There are plenty of species of Banksias endemic around here (50-60), and this is the immature flower of one of them (I think it is Banksia ilicifolia). Its conical shape makes me think of it, for some reason, as a trophy of the bush. Aboriginal Australians used to soak Banksia flowers in water and then drink the water for a sweet beverage. Each Banksia cone is actually covered with thousands of tiny little flowers and each flower is dripping in nectar, a high-sucrose substance. Each year the Banksia grandis, the most imposing looking Banksia flower, would bloom and the Australians would gather to celebrate the ‘yellow season’. Sounds good to me.

This is the sap of a Marri tree. Marri trees are always giving you the impression that they are bleeding from a mortal wound, and layering their dried blood on the woodland floor beneath them. In fact this stuff is properly called kino, and is a sugary exudation from the Marri which was used by the first Australians as a medicine.

Nuytsia floribunda, or the Christmas Tree, puts out some new flowers, soon to be a riot of yellow and orange (those are a couple of Marri trees in the background). I really love these trees. Every December I know it is getting close to Christmas when these beautiful flowers start to explode out of the dull green leaves of certain trees. Forget the bunting in the main street of the city, this is the real colour of our yearly celebration. Of course it is pure chance that this tree works in time with a ritual derived from a land over thirteen thousand kilometres away.

I don’t often write about boats and perhaps this is strange considering that I live in a port. So, let’s go for a wander down Slip St.

This is the street in Fremantle where ships were built many years ago and then launched down the slipway at the west end of the street into the sea.

As you can see, there is still some wooden boat buidling going on. My brother, Sam, studied wooden boat building in a workshop on Slip St. a few years ago. He helped to build a ten metre long whaling boat, exactly the same design of boat that was used in the second half of the nineteenth century to take pilots (people who would help guide ships into strange harbours) out to jump onboard incoming ships off Rottnest (the island off the coast of WA). Here it is…

The design is called a clinker, because of the overlapping planks that make up its hull. Five men would sit in it and pull on these oars. In making this vessel my brother made of himself a point of connection with hundreds of years of human history.

This is a piece of technology whose use emits zero CO2 pollution into the atmosphere.

It is also lovely to look at. Not to mention made with an impressive amount of skill, care and attention.
As the process of producing a bit of steel uses ten times as much energy as the equivalent wooden plank, wooden boats such as this one also have it over vessels with metal hulls when it comes to discussions of in-built energy (assuming you harvest your wood in a sustainable manner of course).

In Perth, a sunny city on a coast, there are tens of thousands of boats used for cruising around and having fun in, and most of them are propelled by many hundreds of litres of petrol. No leisure activity should necessitate the burning of fossil fuels. Unless you can change formula one racing to electric vehicles, then get rid of it. This is where boats like the one above come in.

I’d happily row around the Swan river on a summer evening in this thing with four or five of my friends and a few cold beverages stowed within reach. If I wanted to go further afield then one could contemplate another zany and avant-garde form of zero-emissions technology: a sailing boat.

Imagine this: It is 1865 and you are standing on the wooden deck of a seventy metre long tea clipper, surging west over the Indian Ocean. Four masts tower above your head, each with six massives sheets of white canvas billowing outwards, not to mention topgallants and other smaller sails full of the salty wind. The hold is full of wool from Australia, or maybe tea from China. Ships from earlier centuries, like the Duyfken, were happy to steam along at six knots with the wind behind them. As you stand there on the deck know that beneath your feet nearly one thousand tons of wooden clipper is moving at twenty knots.

As I imagine this moment I realise that this is a point in which I can see a sophisticated technology, the culmination of hundreds of years of human ingenuity and maritime history, shine forth proudly. And then, at the same time, I realise that I’m looking backwards in time at our past.

In 2006 the world’s fastest sailing vessels are now slick and shiny catamarans made out of carbon fibres, but after well over a hundred years of tecnological development and many millions of dollars invested, they can only add about another ten knots to the speed of these nineteenth century clippers. To this day ships like the Cutty Sark and the Flying Could were the fastest ever commercial sail vessels.

Oil is currently seventy two dollars a barrel, and big sailing ships take many hands on deck to operate, each sailor needing to be paid. Sailing ships are not economical to transport goods for trade at present only because full environmental costs are not built into the cost of a barrel of oil. When it is the China Clippers of the 1860s and 1870s may start to look like not only the beautiful, silent and swift paragons of human civilization that they truly were, but also blueprints for a saner future.

Before white people populated the Swan river this beautiful little succulent called samphire (Halosarcia lepidosperma) used to be found all over the place. Now I have to go further afield to find it.The other day I and my brother headed over to Rottnest, an island 18 kms west of the coast of Perth. This island hadn’t been inhabited for thousands of years prior to the nineteenth century, and Rottnest island pine and tea trees clothed the land. These trees can happily manage with exposed, salty conditions, but not with prying farmers and errant fires. The nineteenth century was not kind to Rottnest, and today, as we saw standing at the top of the lighthouse in the centre of the island, it is quite deforested.

People who live in Perth nearly always have memories of going on summer holidays to stay in a cabin or a bungalow on the island off the coast. I have such memories, and they are good ones.

My dad was telling me the other day of how he and his friends would go over as teenagers in the 1960s and camp in the campground. The roads were not sealed then, and they were allowed to have a fire at their camp site. They would catch thirty crayfish a day, and they would all sit by the fire at night playing the guitar and hanging out.

As you can see, this island has developed a special place in my dad’s affections. Over the last seven years he has been over once a year each winter to help plant around 25 thousand a year of the native tea trees or pine trees. I think its nice to see this kind of reciprocal care between a person and a place.

The Rottnest Society is the organising group for the plantings, and you can get a free bed in a cabin if you go over and help with the planting for a weekend in July. The fence in this photo is stopping quokkas, the gregarious mascots and macropods of the island, from eating the young trees.

Eventually the native pine trees have a deep shade of green that you’d never expect to come out of this salty and sandy island.

Me and Sam walked down to Armstrong Bay and jumped into the water. The clarity of the water was such that even though I wasn’t wearing a mask, I could see for metres and metres every which way I looked.

Bubbles drifted up to the surface as I slowly exhaled, and looked at the sea floor beneath me and the plants around me. The light illuminated everything, so that the browns of the sea grasses and the greens of the other plants glowed brightly. The cool water slid over my skin, and for that moment I could have my dad forty years earlier: I was just a male body under the water, marvelling at the colours and the brightness in front of me, off a beach on Rottnest. As long as I was underwater for that moment I felt free of time and free of all the troubles of the world above the surface.

A couple of weeks ago I quoted Green member of the Western Australian Parliament Paul Llewellyn when he, in his inaugural speech to the upper house, envisaged Western Australia in 2055 having an ‘internationally recognised tourism industry based on sail and solar powered ocean liner technology’. I’ve been doing some reading.  Paul was wrong to have sketched such a vision as belonging to as far away an epoch as 2055.

The Royal Clipper is 5000 tons worth of ocean-going ship for carrying tourists around the place.  It uses the power of the wind. India to Greece is one route they do which might be interesting. I’m not attracted by the whole ocean cruising tourism thing, but I wouldn’t mind sipping a whiskey in some wooden interior redolent of a London club, knowing that it was Aeolus, the god of the winds, and not the Dug up Dead, fossil fuels, that was abetting my travels.

I also recently mentioned the Cutty Sark in this blog. Wouldn’t it have been great to have been onboard in 1885 heading towards Sydney when, under full sail and at a rate of 17 knots, she overtook the steam ship Britannia? I like the poetic justice of this moment in history.  The age of steam was threatening to entirely replace the age of sail, but here were the sailors of the Cutty Sark, looking back in their clipper’s wake at a ship within whose iron bowels sweaty stokers laboured in the dark to feed coal into infernal furnaces.

You are looking into the eye of Acacia cyclops.  Acacia trees number nine hundred and fifty species in Australia, and they are amazing at taking nitrogen, one of the things that plants really need to grow, out of the air and fixing it down in their roots.  This species is endemic to the south-west of the country, and it has plenty of seeds out at the moment.  These are seeds which can be picked and ground up and used as flour, for a loaf of bread say.  That is the plan for one element in my Christmas lunch this year.

The aboriginal name for Fremantle was Booyeembara, which means place of the limestone ridges.  That is what I and my friends were standing on this afternoon as we picked Acacia seed pods and put them into our bags: a limestone ridge above the harbour.  This bit of disused land is normally only haunted by graffiti artists and black cockatoos.  Until the seed pickers arrived.

We all sat around my kitchen table this evening, drinking beers and hulling the pods of the acacia.  I’ll take a photo of the loaf of bread that all this goes towards creating on a Christmas day blog.

Wink.

Even the limestone background has hints of Greecian antiquity.

This afternoon I was on a three-masted barquentine called the Leeuwin, sailing off Fremantle. I spent a bit of time lying on my back up on the bow sprit, the bit of the ship which sticks out the front. This is what I saw looking up and back at the sails.

We spent most of our time travelling at about five knots. This is something like the speed humanity, or those select members of it who did get about, travelled around the globe for the four hundred years before the twentieth century. There was no noise of a mechanical engine roaring. Later, I stood watching the water slip by the ship’s rails, listening to the sea’s slap and trickle on the hull below. So this is what travel used to be like, I thought to myself, slow, but quiet and very peaceful.

Yes all you northern hemispherians, the water is just fine down here in Australia.

This evening I was hot from the thirty something degree weather we are getting in Western Australia, and the Indian ocean was my destination.  Just as millions of Indians bath in the Ganges as a spiritual exercise, I get a really profound feeling of renewal when I re-emerge from the sea in the evening after a dip.

Looking out to sea, what do I see…

2006 was the year in which it was predicted that, if current trends continue, all the major fisheries of the world will collapse by 2048 (which means they will be reduced to 10% of their original capacity).  ‘Current trends’ mean a global system where fish are sought out with sonar, a technology developed in World War Two to detect submarines, and scooped up in massive nets.  If we forget the hi-tech element, the essence of the current war against fish can be understood by us landlubbers if we imagine two jeeps speeding across the African savanna with a huge net strung between them, picking up every lion, antelope and sparrow to get in the way.  Of course we wouldn’t condone such a practice on the African savanna, and we shouldn’t condone such rapacious, indiscriminate and, ah, plain dumb harvesting of populations of species which exist beneath the waves.  To make sure you’re not taking part in this stupidity, get hold of a copy of the recently released Australian sea food guide, or the equivalent for your country.
But looking out to sea I’m also seeing mystery…

2006 was also the year in which the global Census of Marine Life further revealed how little we know about what is out there beyond our shored horizons.  This well-funded international project discovered, to give two examples, a previously unknown species of crayfish off the coast of Madagascar whose length spans half a metre, and, off the coast of New Jersey a 20 million strong bunch of fish swarming in a school the size of Manhattan island.   The scientists taking part in the Census of Marine Life know that when their project finishes in 2010, they will still not have shone an all-seeing light onto all that is out there in the sea.

Mystery endures.  And I’m still happy to be standing here on the shore, exploring the fragments of life out here on the periphery.

Christmas morning I sat at my kitchen table and a nutty, coffee-like smell that isn’t exactly like nuts or like coffee, wafted my way.  I was smelling acacia seeds popping and jumping on a frying pan.  This smell is the smell of Western Australia, I thought to myself.   We chefs did a bit of work getting the little bits of red stuff off the seeds, before we could get to this late stage.  And although the whole process takes ages, the smell is worth it at the end.  We made two loaves of bread with acacia seeds mixed into the flour.

Here’s to Euro-Australian fusion.  Happy Christmas.

So this is my home town, all alone besides the big, old Indian Ocean. Let’s narrow things down a bit…

This is the port town of Fremantle, part of the larger city Perth. You can see two patches of green at the top of this photo: these are the two remaining good sized patches of nature around here, otherwise known as Bold Park and King’s Park. I treasure them.

The red arrow is pointing at the gardens and building known as FERN (Fremantle Environment Resource Network). Let’s look closer…

You can really see in this photo the way in which Fremantle is involved in the sea, the way in which this port town leans against and takes into its open arms, the lapping ocean.
The red arrow shows the way for present purposes. You can see that FERN sits in the corner of the grounds of the Fremantle golf course. At the corner of Montreal and High streets, for those planning a visit.

Our regular Tuesday evening meals will start again on the second Tuesday in January. On this first event for 2007 I will be fermenting some civil unrest; from approximately 6.30pm. To be specific, I will be screening some films, streamed off the internet, using a digital projector. These include a video made about a conference in Lyon called ‘Towards Car Free Cities‘, and a film out of San Francisco about an ingenious style of car busting. I might even show the Edward Abbeyesque video for discontented youth now on the net.

I love to watch the astounding cinematography of the BBC’s recently released ‘Planet Earth’ series with the sound turned down and ambient music by the likes of Eluvium or Markus Geunter coming out of my stereo’s speakers. However this film screening at FERN will be much more about involving you and I in environmental action. My brother gave me a year-long subscription to Carbusters magazine for Christmas, and it has introduced me to a whole new social movement and its milieu. The films I will show will present the growing car-free movement, a movement which empowers urban citizens to express their discontent over gas-guzzling oil addiction.

See you there.

This is the bell of the Scots Presbyterian church in Fremantle. It was made in London, and has been ringing over the roof tops of Fremantle for the last 110 years.

This morning I climbed up through a series of very dusty chambers and ancient wooden ladders to the top of the church spire where this sight confronted me. It is not generally open to the public, and my thanks go to Sandy, the obliging old fellow who took me up there (none of the other churches in town would let me go up their spires).

I hear bells like this one toll every day and every night while I lay in my bed before driting off to sleep. Their sound means something to me.

First, it is part of the identity of this place I live in. Hi fi, that is, coherent and unique sounds, and not low fi, meaning the background hum of traffic and the like, is partly constitutive of a place’s identity. Then, the sound is like the birds which regularly cry ‘Attention!’ in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island: it is a call for us to bring attention to the moment. Finally, the sound is a calming reminder of a more monastic pace of life.

But you may be wondering why I’m writing about a church bell in this blog. At the start of December, thanks to the organising efforts of the Climate Institute, 16 of Australia’s religious communities signed a document called ‘Common Belief’.

In this document some very important things are contained, some of which I want to highlight.

In this document, a bishop of the Anglican church called the destruction of the environment a ‘sin’. He called climate change a ‘core matter of faith’.

The Australian Christian Lobby said that we have a moral duty to be stewards of creation.

The Buddhists said that ‘when one treats nature as a friend and teacher, one can be in harmony with other creatures, and appreciate the interconnectedness of all that lives.’

Australia’s Catholic bishops said that we are indebted to environmental activists, as ‘such people show that humanity elevates itself when it reaches for a heightened consciousness of Life on Earth.’

The Islamic faith was in accord with all of the churches when it said that ‘people of religion must forget their theological differences and work together to save the world from climate ruin.’

The Salvation Army decried the the ‘environmental vandalism’ that is rapid climate change, and said that we must each take ‘practical steps to regenerate and conserve’ the Creation.

The Uniting Church admitted it had been complicit in the abuse of the creation in the past, and renewed its commitment to treat ‘the earth itself and all the life that it supports’ as precious.

I’m not religious, but I now see that I share some common beliefs with my church-going neighbours.

Environmentalism used to be seen as concern of a ‘special interest group’. No longer. Now it has been publicly acknowledged for what it truly is: an essential part of a thoughtful and ethical human life.

The bell tolls for you.