Tom M. Wilson

I live in the south-west of the Australian continent. Although if you look at an ariel photograph of the city of Perth you won’t see much wilderness, you could be mistaken.  The eleven year old boy, marvelling at the living creation, lives on.  The blue on the map hides something.

The other morning I was on Rottnest Island with a group of friends.  I clambered over the rocks.  Alone for this experience.   It is good to be alone in nature – after being in the human realm so much one needs a shot of the primal elements straight, no chaser.  One needs a face to face sensual interaction with air, water on skin, rocks under feet, other species looking indignantly at one and then backing away, sounds sifting under one’s membrane of hearing.  I dived down, using my body, feeling my body moving, and at the depth of three or so metres I grabbed hold of some brown, green sea weed, sloughing in the wave motions of the sea, and watched a well camaflouged brown fish back in and out of its covey of weed.  All the domesticities of washing up, putting clothes away, are washed clean from one’s screen with a trip to the ocean.  Blown away with the trip out.  The fresh air of going forth, taking only one’s body and a towel, and slipping into a wild biota.  Going down, the warm salty water slipping over the body.  And it enlivens the system.  The doctor should surely prescribe a regular interaction with the more than human world once per week.  Jacque Cousteau stands for more than a faded seventies tv fashion.  He stands for the virtue of being a savage in the blue.

These photos were taken on a $45 underwater camera.  Steve Andrews, a PhD student at Curtin University, was exploring the idea of bring out people’s appreciation of the marine environment through giving them cameras and sending them forth to take photos of things that mean something to them.  Steve’s project is called Show Us Your Ocean, and if you’re in the Yallingup/Margaret River area of south-west Australia, where he’s normally based, then I suggest you get involved.

A school of kingfish, or yellow-tailed amberjacks, cruised past me, rays of sunlight dappling their pelagic muscles.  These big, fast pelagic predators used to be sometimes found in the Swan estuary in the nineteenth century, but no longer.  Their power is humbling to be around.

The heat has been far too much this last weekend in Fremantle and Perth – so hot that every few hours I would wake at night, unable to sleep because of the temperature in my room, go take a cold shower, then go back to sleep for a while before involuntarily waking up again.  But apart from the ocean there is another thing I like doing in this weather.  Projecting old, rare footage from Jamaica and its musical heritage in my garden.  Good friends, hot nights, good music.  With a couple of cold beers, some uplifting well amplified island riddims, and a mist of water now then sprayed over the grooving crowd… moments like those when you loose yourself in the music and the motion and you feel your spirit rising up… make everything seem worthwhile.

Iain McCloud of the band Nugget, spotted at a big, underground party this last weekend in Fremantle.

The elements are in place.  Summer has finally arrived.

New Year’s greetings.  This is a bit belated, but I couldn’t write an entry in this blog at the time as I found myself many leagues from the good burghers of internet commerce.  I thought it would be an appropriate perspective to start two ten with: air that smells so good you want to gulp it down as it folds its way through a window in your tent, arabesques made by early morning silvereyes, the colour green and the sensation and reality of height.  In the 1970s film Rockers the character of Higher is the wise rasta who speaks from the hills of becoming irey and gaining coverage of I-heights, loveful heights.  This is the character I’m symbolizing with the red, green and gold in this photo.  This is the style in which I commence 2010.

My sense of height changes in karri forests. I stand and watch a karri tree leaf falling from far above in the canopy and spiralling down slowly through the cool, still air.  It is so small and falling for so, so long.   It is still falling in diminutive delicacy.  As I stand and watch the idea of a leaf falling from a tree gets reconfigured in my head.  Then this single leaf arrives on the ground

The ground crackles.  It has been about five weeks since I was last in the southern forests of Western Australia, and in this short time things have really dried out.  It feels like the middle of summer down there.

For some of the time I was in the south I was staying with botanist John Pate near Denmark.  I slept in an old 1920s settler’s cottage and one of the first pleasures of being there was the liberation of having so much space around me as I went to sleep at night, with paddock rolling off to the south and a copse of fifty year old karris partly obscuring a beautiful view of the southern ocean in the distance.  There aren’t many people you encounter these days who really know their local geography, and the names and history and dynamics of the nonhumans lives around them.  John Pate is one such guy.  His conversation as we walked his handmade trails through the karri forest was interesting.  At one point he told me that in the last ten years or so he’d noticed a drying of the climate which has resulted in some of the karris in front of his house thinning in their canopy.  His wife had once asked him to chop some down so that they could have a better view of Wilson’s Inlet, but now it isn’t necessary as the thinning in the canopy lets you glimpse the view between the trunks of the trees.  Turning to the latest news from Australia’s bureau of meteorology we see that average temperatures for the whole of this last decade we’ve just been through were 0.48 degrees above the 1961-1990 average, confirming that John’s observations of his forest are very pertinent.  On another subject John also expresses the view that, despite the noise made by forestry professionals, forests don’t need to be managed.  He does not burn his forest, and if a fire from a lightning strike went through his forest the ecosystem would just start up again as it has for thousands of years.  He does not feel like the owner of his forest, just somebody who walks through it and knows it intimately.

He enjoys feeding the superb blue wrens on his verandah with meal worms.  They chirp in a high pitched, touchingly insubstantial way, and then hop onto his hand for a bite. The gaunt and affable guardian of the wrens.

I hope your resolutions for the twelve months to come hail from greener and higher places.  Happy New Year from an indolent garden guest.

That’s me practicing my interview technique with a youth contingent from the Perth hills.

This morning I met Scott Jones, part owner of Planet Video and volunteer wildlife carer, in Mt. Lawley.  We went to his house first of all, to pick up an injured Wattle Bird he’s been caring for in an aviary in his back garden.  Then we drove east to Martin under the hot December sun, with the little Wattlebird sitting in a darkened cage on my lap.  We were headed to the Darling Range Wildlife Shelter, a centre for the care and rehabilitation of injured wildlife.  Scott volunteers his time here every Saturday afternoon and had offered to show me around the place.  The shelter is a collection of low khaki buildings, aviaries and pens sitting against a background of native vegetation at the feet of the Darling Ranges (directly east from South Fremantle, just north of Armadale).  Western Australia has plenty of two ton lumps of metal hurtling along sealed surfaces at high speed.  The state also has plenty of animals unacquainted with the intricacies of road safety practices.  In sum we have many injured animals needing care and human attention.  The state Department of Environment and Conservation does provide a wildlife care hotline (ring it if you ever look and find a joey alive in the pouch of a dead female kangaroo lying on the side of the road), but generally the Department’s level of funding means that it must channel its money into the conservation of endangered animal species.  Volunteers take up the slack.  At places like the one I was visiting, such people do rewarding things like feeding helpless and swaddled joeys bottles of milk.

I and Scott walked around the shelter.  We walked through a series of large, grassy pens in which progressively older kangaroos were hanging out and doing some healing.  The first bunch of motely youngsters stood scratching their chests in endearingly unsteady style, sprawling lazily on their backs, or having a quick tussle in the shade.  When I approached one young grey came up to me immediately, wanting to interact.  This curious young dude was happy to be picked up.  Holding the little, gangly life in my arms I couldn’t help but smile at the way he tried to burrow closer.

I’m accustomed to kangaroos being extremely fearful of human presence, perhaps a result of being hunted for many millennia and only the most-wary-of-humans surviving to pass on their genes.  Being surrounded by year old joeys, unsteady, big-eyed, and very friendly, was gratifying.  The wall dividing the species was down.  While these little guys just wanted to suck on your finger (some personalities admittedly being bolder than others), the red kangaroos in the next area we visited were even older and more boisterous.  Red kangaroos are naturally more bold and rowdy than grey kangaroos.  Two or three of these youngsters came up to me, heads up and nuzzled a strap on my camera.  Then one of them decided to grapple my leg, and have a bit of a playful wrestle.  It’s a bit like when you play with a dog, except that it isn’t a dog you’re knocking around with, it’s an ancient Australian marsupial lifeform.  Cool eh?  Lucky these reds are still half my size and can’t win too many points against me.

I asked Scott Jones about his thoughts on the commercial harvesting of red and grey kangaroos in Australia for meat and skins.  Some of our discussion will be broadcast soon on RTR FM in Perth.  Soon I’ll also be talking with Michael Archer, author of the book Going Native, about this same subject.  They have very different opinions on the topic.  Surrounded by affable little joeys I thought it was an interesting context in which to do such an interview.  More about this later.

Marsupium means pouch in Latin.  Hanging in a pouch, or a bag, is where these little marsupials are most relaxed in their first few months of life.

Kangaroos on the radio 30 December.  In the meantime, thanks Scott.  You’re doing a great job.