tom m wilson

Clive Hamilton has been busy digging up the truth on the Howard government’s self-serving response to climate change. He has just published a book in which he brings the truth to the surface. I heard him talk last Wednesday at UWA in Perth.

If you didn’t manage to get your hands on the book or get to a lecture, you can hear Hamilton talk at the University of Sydney a couple of weeks ago.

My favourite quote from the talk: What do you call a climate change sceptic’s think tank? A sceptic tank.

Nuf said.

The other day I was in the belly of a wooden whale: standing in the burnt out core of an ancient tingle with my friend Sunny, looking out like Jonah from the beast. Being here with food, fire, friend, trees, sky, birds, winds, colds, warm suns, being here with the basic elements is good for the soul I’m sure. No advertising to spin you off course. No texting mobile phones to chop up your minutes. No errant knaves, just the knaves of wooden chapels, like the tingle I’m standing within and looking out from the triangular entrance. Sunny wandered off from the tingle, but I stayed within, looking closely at the breaches in the trunk where light and spiders webs coalesced.

All of a sudden the sound of Sunny’s bamboo pipe echoed through the Valley of the Giants. The high and delicate notes came to my ears through the maze of green leaves and came muffled by the wooden buttresses to my sides, but they came as if from the loci genus, the spirit of the place.

This morning I’m leaving Western Australia. My recent time in the forests of the south (where I took some new photographs which have been added to my gallery) was a bidding farewell to this place. I’m about to travel around the world, going today to Coffs Harbour, and then to New Zealand on Tuesday, and hence Samoa, North America, Europe, Bali and back to Perth. I’m going to put some of the dates of my travels on the front welcome page of this website if you’re interested.

Along the way I’ll be updating this blog, when I get the chance.

I’m about to go to some strange places, but everywhere I go I feel that the biosphere is my home.

I’m sitting in a cafe in Bellingen, a small country town on the Belliger River in north-east N.S.W. This morning I paddled a kayake with my friend James up the Belliger River, and as I did so I remembered Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda, the final scenes of which are set on this river. Oscar is taking a church made of glass up the river on a barge to Bellingen. The year is around 1880, and the town he is trying to take this church to is one of the first pioneering town’s outside Sydney. Oscar is an idealist and a dreamer and the impracticality of these attributes in the Australian wilderness is represented by the heat pounding down upon him as he sits inside the now cracking glass house by himself. As the barge moves up the river Carey talks of how the white colonists saw only looming trees and failed to percieve that the land about them was thick with stories and myths, belonging to the Aboriginal culture. This morning as I pushed my way up the river with my paddle I didn’t even see banks thick with trees: in 2007 the banks of this river are mainly cleared for cattle. Oscar dies in this place, and this great Australian novel ends with a fatalistic view of white settlement on this continent. But throughout the final pages of the novel, and the final scenes of the film of the same name, I think the beauty of this part of the central east coast of Australia comes through.

This is Dorrigo National Park, just up the hill from where I sit and write this in Bellingen.

The subtropical rainforest, beneath the canopy. The central east coast rainforest reserves of Australia are the largest areas of subtropical rainforest on earth.

The humidity in the forest is very high, and the air is cool as we’re at about 800 metres.

I can say that my time in these hills was happier than Oscar’s.

I flew over from Sydney on an Air New Zealand plane a couple of days ago and looking beneath me I saw the Southern Alps, with their empty, wide, brown valleys, and craggy peaks. A man from flat and olive coloured Western Australia finds himself in tall mountains, and his soul swoops up with the crests of the snow dusted summits. Honestly.

I stayed in Geraldine, a small town at the foot of the moutains, on the first night. The next morning I stepped outside to see giant sequoias growing in the Geraldine camp ground where our wee white cabin stood. The air was cold and crisp, and the air was still and bright. This evening I’m staying in an old farmhouse just outside Twizel, up on a spacious plateau in the moutains. The fire warms the sitting room, but otherwise it is pretty cold in the evenings, if the days are surpringly warm. The land is dry here, after a long dry summer, and not nearly as green as last time I was in New Zealand one November.

The rivers run cold and clear over grey pebbles.

The colour of the water comes from some mineral – silica I think – suspended in the glacial melt.

Light and shadow battle it out.

Tomorrow is my birthday – I’m turning 29 – and I’m happy to say that I’ll be staying at Kinloch Lodge (there is a link to the place on my links page, under places), a beautiful place north of Queenstown. If anybody wants to ring me, you can use the number on my welcome page, or use the number of Kinloch on their web page.

And yes, the view from this rock was pretty good.

I’ve been at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu, near Queenstown, for the last few days. I thought Western Australia was young when it came to the arrival of the white skinned folk, but they didn’t get to New Zealand till around 1840, and to this valley till around 1860. More than other places I’ve been, Western civilization is a fledgling creature.

Red beech bark…

A bold visitation from a miromiro? If you know what this bird is let me know. I and another photographer were walking through the beech wood on Saturday morning when this little fellow decided to pose for us. He came within five centimetres of my ankles, and then jumped on this fungi covered log, when I took this shot.

Kinloch Lodge’s view over the water… We’re at about four hundred metres here and those mountains are about two thousand metres tall. The light falls over the tussock grasses and tumbles down through storm clouds, and there is literally a different mountain every ten minutes to look at.

Colours of the forest floor…

The road to Kinloch…

Beechwood is found deep in the valley, and goes up to 1150 metres, at which point the alpine tussock grasses take over. With the coming of climate change the beech woods will literally be – and already are – marching up the mountain sides in New Zealand.

Tonight I’m in Te Anau, and tomorrow I’m going on a boat on Milford Sound, a fiord in the wilderness.

Yesterday I, and an English guy I picked up hitchhiking made our way to Milford Sound, in the bottom south-west corner of New Zealand. The route into the sound is through steep valleys covered in beech forests and alpine grasses. The amount of water falling from the sky around here is seriously large, and when it isn’t raining all this water tumbles down cascades and waterfalls, like this one…

After making our way through a tunnel through the guts of a vast grey, rocky mountain which looked like a war-lord’s castle, we came down in altitude to the sound.

Here you stand at sea level, and look up to cliffs and peaks that shoot up vertically to two thousand metres. With all this grandeur it can be easy to forget the smaller details…

Going out on a boat on Milford Sound was strange. Everywhere you look the scale of the cliffs and the lush hanging gardens on the cliffs, seems implausible. Another boat passes by a waterfall on the other side of the sound, and you realise how an otherwise quite large vessel is made to look like a grain of sand at the base of the waterfall. The boat came up to the face of the cliff at many points and upon looking upwards at the falling water and clinging trees I had the feeling that this was hardly real. A baroque reality.

After going out to the Tasman Sea the boat turned around and we faced the entrance. I imagined being a lost sailor and coming to this shore, not knowing this was New Zealand. What would I think? I’d scarcely believe that this amalgam of something out of Rober Louis Stevenson and Samuel Taylor Colderidge was actually planet earth.

Standing in the Sound and looking around the ampitheatre the hardest thing to fathom is that there are 13 other sounds, very much like this. Now that knowledge really makes one feel insignificant.

This morning I’m in Queenstown and today I’m heading down out of the high country, down to Geraldine, and hence to Samoa tomorrow.

I’ve now been on Samoa for four days. Samoa consists of a couple of small islands in the South Pacific, not far south of the equator, and about 180 thousand Samoans. I’ve been staying with a friend who is working for an aid program of the Australian government, Ausaid, in the capital, Apia.

This place is really a land unto its own. Despite having had a New Zealand administration from 1914 to the sixties, English is not understood by everybody, and Samoan is most assuredly the language of the land. ‘Saaa Moa’…. pronounce it that way, and do so with a deep voice and an air of brusque finality and you’ll sound like an insider. My lips had been cracked and almost bleeding from the dry, cold air of New Zealand, but within minutes of stepping out of the plane they felt ok again and rehydrated. The air is sopping with humidity here and the temperature is always in the high twenties. Apia is a small town for a capital, and the place has a dilapidated air, perhaps prematurely aged from the tropical conditions. Faded Coke signs are here and there, and taxis crawl down the high street. Leaving uncharasmatic Apia, you head into the suburbs, which here are just villages which join up on the edges. Lots of space and virulent greenery. Except in the middle of town there are no pavements, and the seemingly blithe indifference shown by the motley strollers to oncoming traffic is surprising. School boys walk along wearing skirts, which all the men wear here. Older men are generally fat, except if they are playing sport, in which case they are very athletic. The taro, chicken, pork, cream and Vailima (the local beer), with no shortage of deep fried options, is the die (not to forget the great tropical fruit everywhere growing), and beyond bok choy greens are a rarity. As you pass around where I’m staying there are hedges, stray dogs, lots of churches, breadfruit, mango and papaya trees. The men generally seem to be quite macho, and the way that you communicate here seems to be, well for the men, speaking in short bursts and deep tones in a way which is subconsciously perhaps intended to express their control of the situation.

I’m sleeping under my tripod with a mosquito net I brought with me draped over the top of it – National Geographic journalists on location eat your heart out! I have yet to have the courage to do much photography of the people here, but that will come. For the time being here are three photos of the island. This is the real Samoa as far as I’m concerned anyway, not Apia. I have a mobile number here also: 7582361 (you’ll have to find Samoa’s area code also).

The south side of the main island, Upolu, looking eastwards.

Everybody wears colourful shirts with flowers on them… perhaps this kind of thing was the inspiration.

There is only one road that crosses the centre of the island. Here I stand looking southwards. Lots more photos to come!

Samoa is made up of two main islands, Upolu and Savaii (you pronounce Savaii like you pronounce Hawaii). Upolu is where the capital is, and where most people live. It is about 70 kms from east to west, and about 30 kms wide. The islands have some rare wood pigeons and flying foxes, and plenty of species of native rainforest trees still growing up in the mountains. The pigeons act as the dispersal agents for the seeds of some of these rainforest trees, so if the pigeons go (and they are hunted for food), the trees will go. If the trees go the pigeons will lose their nesting places and food sources, so they will go.

Although this island has green everywhere you look, nature does have some troubles. The four pictures below (from Samoa: Mapping the Diversity, R. Gerard Ward and Paul Ashcroft, Suva: University of the South Pacific 1998) show how much forest has been chopped down in the last fifty or so years. The centre of both the islands is full of mountains, and it is for this reason that the forest remains in the centre of the islands. These uplands have a much higher rainfall, lower hours of sunshine and temperature, steeper slopes and poorer soils than the lowlands. So like many places in the world, nature hangs out and hangs on where the ground is too steep for humans to grow stuff on it.

The two pictures below are of the main island – home to the capital and where most Samoans live. Witness the even greater change between the fifties and the eighties on Upolu.

From the mid 1950s to the late 1980s the amount of forest on Samoa went from 74 per cent of its land area to 55 per cent. Before Europeans arrived here the population was stable and forest regeneration was allowed to happen as they moved their root crops from one area to another. Then along come the white folks…

The Germans and then the Kiwis encouraged the expansion of cash crop production: coconuts, cocoa and bananas. This combined with the clearing places on the edge of the forest to plant taro, and a rising population from the 1920s onwards, saw the forest retreat. New roads now aided the clearing of the land for agriculture. The high rate of clearing slumped a little when there was a collapse in the export trade of bananas in the 1960s. But then by the 1970s there were Samoans living in New Zealand and Samoa started exporting taro for their taste preferences overseas, and this continued the high rate of clearing. The introduction of the Taro Leaf Blight in 1993 destroyed this export trade, and some former taro growing land has regenerated.

Then there was the change in tenure practices. Land was traditionally controlled through the title of the matai (chief), but more and more people have tried to control land as individuals. The act of clearing a bit of land traditionally gave you ownership of it, so people have tried to clear land to get land for themselves.

So on Samoa in the late 1980s forest loss was 2 per cent per year – about the same rate as the loss of tropical rainforests worldwide. Unlike other parts of the world, only a small amount of this loss comes from logging for timber. There has been some, but by 1992 only 14 per cent of the primary forest on Savaii was suitable for logging, and there was none left on Upolu.

So you have to hand it to the champions of Western civilization. Sure there are some sealed roads on the island now, and some hydro-generated electricity, both good things. But the West can be proud at having brought Samoa export trades and a dash of selfish individualism which in combination have gradually skinned the lowlands of their nation. I was hoping to be able to walk around some flat, lowland rainforest with big old trees, but that isn’t too easy nowadays.

In case you don’t know him, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer from the nineteenth century who wrote many poems, travel books and novels, including Treasure Island. He loved language, and his poetic turn of phrase is obvious even in his fiction. He also loved adventure, and this combination of a love of language and adventure made his books quite popular in their time. He travelled to beautiful places in France and America in a time when a British gentleman travelled in style, and there were some very stylish places to travel to. Travel was also a more serious undertaking in those days; as he writes on chartering a ship accross the Pacific: the vessel ‘ploughed her path of snow accross the empty deep, far from any hand of help’.

Stevenson was a small man with a big nose, and long dark hair. At the age of forty or so Stevenson moved with his wife and her children to Upolu, the main island of Samoa, just up the hill from where I’m writing now. He built a lovely white, wooden-boarded, two-story house next to a steep hill which overlooks Apia. He had health problems throughout his life, and he died in this house four years later. The house has in the last ten years or so been restored to more or less how it looked when the family lived in it over a hundred years ago. Walking through it you could imagine blinking and having Robert or Fanny stroll into the room to proffer a gin or a port, depending on the hour of the evening. I have to admit that I appreciated the light elegance of the stylish English nineteenth century after being in the chaotic downtown Apia just down the road.

In some parts of this island there really is a Treasure Island aesthetic. Look for yourself.

On the south side of the island there are secret coves which could be approached over the fringing reef, beneath billowing cumulus clouds.

Here I and a couple of friends found an ocean trench, a deep hole in the ground close to the shoreline into which the ocean ebbs and flows under the ground through caves and tunnels.

This open roofed cave is like a ten metre deep and thirty metre wide natural bath tub, with a sandy bottom beneath a couple of metres of fresh sea water. After climbing down a ladder into the water, with a slightly cooler temperature, ferns hanging off the dark rock walls, one’s voice bouncing off the surfaces with an errie echo, and then having a couple of errant coconuts bobbing by in the lambent blue twilight, I truly felt like a character out of an R. L. Stevenson novel. This would have to be my best moment so far in Samoa, and it was a moment when I said to myself ‘no wonder Stevenson settled on this island for the last few years of his life.’

This is the man’s study, on the second story of his house, surrounded by a spacious verandah over which refreshing sea breezes would flow to cool the brow of a toiling scribbler.

Doesn’t Upolu’s southern coast just look like a scene out of a pirate-festooned book or film?

This is the room of Austin, the son of Fanny, Stevenson’s wife. Stevenson’s fiction is adept at imaginatively performing the struggle for survival in the wilds of nature, and maybe in this way it speaks to that aspect of the young adventurer inside of many men. On the little mountain besides the house the man is buried and on his tomb reads the inscription: ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea/ And the hunter home from the hill.’

Young boys have this spirit of adventure in nature – I know I did – and in this way I found Austin’s bedroom to be, ironically, the most R. L. Stevenson room of any room in the house.