Ban the bunny.

You may not know that in Australia the rabbit is a declared noxious pest. For much of the last century rabbits have been in plague proportions in many country areas. Lacking a natural predator, they multiplied like, well, rabbits. During the Great Depression in the 1930's many people survived on rabbit meat which was cheap and easy to obtain. City streets reverberated to the cries of "Rabbito" and housewives ran out with their sixpences to buy. The irony here is that rabbits were introduced to give the ordinary man the opportunity to hunt them and eat the meat, a luxury enjoyed only by the landed gentry in England.  In fact many original settlers in Australia were convicts transported for the crime of poaching.
 It was only with the introduction of a disease called myxomatosis that any kind of control was possible, as rabbits became immune to this virus, another one called the Callici virus was introduced and we wait to see if this is the answer to the rabbit problem.

(photo; National Archives of Australia)

This is an image taken during the worst time, the rabbits having totally denuded the land.
It is quite odd then that bunnies feature so much in our Easter celebrations. A number of determined people would really like to use an indigenous animal in place of the rabbit and they have nominated the Bilby. The Bilby is  shy nocturnal creature  with a pouch in which it carries it's young, obviously designed for carrying Easter eggs as well! Interestingly the pouch faces backwards so that it does not fill up with dirt when the animal digs for food.
All of this information is to introduce this etegami, one of my series on Australian animals.

Don't you just love those big ears?

Bad press.

One of the most dangerous animals in the bush or even the city is the fruit bat or flying fox. Don't get me wrong, he won't come after you with guns blazing, though he can scratch and bite. The danger is less obvious. Flying foxes have been in the news these last few days because  they are carriers of a deadly virus which attacks and kills horses who then pass it on to humans. Veterinarians who have attended the sick animals have died and through no fault of their own, the foxes get the blame.
Mind you, they don't enjoy a good reputation, mainly for their habit of denuding orchards, taking up residence in urban areas in large smelly, noisy communities and generally pooping where they feel like it.
Much to our dismay we have learned that FF pooh can strip  paint off a car overnight and leave a nasty tacky residue wherever it falls.

All of that said, I do enjoy the sight of them wheeling into the park across the road for their nighttime feast of fig fruits and we are occasionally able to rescue some fruit from their nightly raids on our grapevine and fruit trees. They make an awful racket in our grape trellis as they squabble over the fruit, rather like the mating shenanigans of cats, very loud. The bats sleep hanging upside down so that is why this etegami looks a little strange.

I couldn't resist posting this photo of these orphan baby flying foxes which I found on the internet. Sorry I could not find who took the photo, maybe someone will enlighten me so I can credit it?

And, as a total non sequiter.. a photo of the dinner I made last night, kind of Chinese, Japanese fusion mixed with a good deal of ineptitude (it tasted fine though).

The last laugh.

Following on from that other dangerous bird the emu, I give you the Laughing Jackass or Kookaburra. This bird is a first class hunter and his favourite foods are bugs, lizards and wait for it...snakes (we will come to those later)!
It is a sight to gladden the heart of the average herp-ophobe (is there such a word?) to see one of these guys dispatching a snake with a deft flick of that murderous looking beak. Apart from their diet they are known for their raucous laughing call which can go on for quite a long time mostly at sunset or sun-up. They famously live in families with many uncles and aunts helping to raise the voracious young so their dawn and dusk chorus can be the combined voices of several individuals. I love the sound of their laughter, it always makes you smile no matter how down in the dumps you are. Lucky for us, a family of Kookaburras  have made the park across the road from us their headquarters this winter.

The Kookaburra is actually a type of kingfisher and sports the characteristic flash of iridescent peacock blue feathers on the wing.

A favourite nursey rhyme and 'round' sung by  Australian children is "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, mighty king of the bush is he, laugh kookaburra, laugh kookaburra, etc," (copyright held in the US by Larrikin music) was the subject of a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement by the band Men at Work in their 1981 song "Down Under". The song was the theme song for our (successful) bid for the America's  Cup yacht race. Larrikin was subsequently awarded damages as the judge deemed that the flute riff in the song was plagiarized perhaps unwittingly, we like to think , by the composer Colin Hay.
So, the kookaburra did get the last laugh!

Curiouser and curiouser....

The Australian Emu, that great flightless bird, has the reputation of being very curious. My Grandma would say that to attract an emu you should lie on the ground nearby and wave a dishtowel, then they would be sure to come over to see what it  is.
I never did test this hypothesis but a small mob of emus lived on her farm and often came to the fence of the house yard just to check out what was going on.
Emus are the scourge of picknickers in wildlife parks and will steal food from your hand (or mouth!). They are particularly partial to barbequed meat.

Like the big kangaroos, emus have very sharp claws and they can do a lot of damage when cornered.
The quote is from the poem called 'The Emu Hunt' by  A.B. 'Banjo' Patterson one of the early Australian poets who romanticised the bush, creating a nation of people who refuse to accept that we are one of the most urbanised countries in the developed world and the 'outback' is not our spiritual home.

Etegami Aussie animals.

I thought I would attempt a series of etegami depicting the true nature of Australian animals. It is easy to be beguiled  by the appearance of strange looking creatures, imagining them to be cute cuddly Disneyesque critters but beware of the bush!
The Big Red kangaroo or Old Man kangaroo as the males are called can stand over 6 feet tall and deliver a blow with his hind legs that can disembowel you. Another trick they have is to lure a pursuing dog or  dingo into a waterhole and drown it by using their stubby arms to hold them under.
There are some mild mannered kangaroos and wallabies who will tolerate human interaction but usually on reaching maturity they are very unpredictable and many a pet 'joey' has been released back into the bush when it turns nasty.
So here he is the biggest, meanest bloke of all 'Big Red'.

Pie in the sky?

No, lettuce in a windowbox. Can you claim to be connected to the earth if you grow your veggies in a suspended pot?
Yes! there is that same visceral satisfaction fellow gardeners will know that comes from growing, harvesting and eating your own produce no matter the scale or method.
My  mediterranean mix of lettuce is loving the cool damp winter we are having and I am loving eating it!

Sometimes I feel like 'The Little Red Hen' in the children's story. She grew things all by herself so she ended up eating it all...now if I could just figure out how to grow chocolate!

Magpie madness.

One of the harmless pastimes led by elderly folk is to feed the birds in their backyard. So it is with us, the Prof and I enjoy watching the family of four beady eyed carnivores squabble over the left over dog food on our back verandah while we enjoy our 'petit dejourner' . Occasionally things go awry when one of the bolder or more adventurous birds decides to explore our house in search of the mother lode of dog food.
I awoke this morning to a great ruckus, himself had left the back door open for the convenience of our remaining ambulatory dog (the other having been confined to his bed for the last four years where he is waited on hand and paw). The inevitable happened we were hosting a frightened magpie and you know what magpies do when they are frightened! I spent the next wee while scraping magpie poo off walls, floors and various surfaces around our family room and kitchen!
Thankfully he finally made his way out, lured by more dog food, without further damage to himself or the house.
Not having the time or presence of mind to take photos I am posting a detail from a painting I did many years ago of a magpie taking a drink in our drought ravaged garden when we lived out west and that will have to do.

Another detail to put it in context although this shows only part of the 6  by 4 feet painting.

Groundhog? no, Wattle Day!

Here in the farthest reaches of the universe where everyone hangs upside down, we look to the first wattle to bloom as a promise of Spring. Allegedly there are  at least 365 varieties of wattle (mimosa), ensuring that one of them blooms on any given day in the year. This may be folklore but I believe it, along with fairies, free lunches and the promises made by manufacturers of anti-wrinkle creams!
The earliest and possibly showiest, bloomer is Acacia baileyana, the Cootamundra wattle (Cootamundra being a town way, way out west in the colder regions) beautiful as it is, when it gets to the coast, it goes nuts and becomes a bit of a pest).
Wow what a preamble! The wattle features on the Australian coat of arms and is beloved of bush poets and composers of doggerel. Unfortunately, not many words rhyme with wattle (bottle, throttle) so it is generally referred to as mimosa in poetry.

It's a tricky subject to paint, sharing with many native flowers, a kind of formlessness, but so seductive in real life that it is impossible not to try.  Unfortunately it also heralds the start of the 'sneezin' season'.

Henry Kendal is another of those tragic poets to die young, his most famous poem is 'Bell Birds' which in the days of such torture, was sadly cheapened by the fact that every schoolchild was forced to learn it.

In case anyone is pedantic enough to point it out, the official Wattle Day is now September 1st but like almost everything  familiar and normal , it has been changed arbitrarily from the original day, August 1st. However, dates are irrelevant to when you feel Spring in the air.

I have been busy......

No, not really but I have been working on a new blog.
It was clear that this blog was getting to be a bit of a mess, etegamis in, etegamis out (and shake it all about, so do the hokey cokey....) whoops, where was I?  Aah, yes, new blog.  Thus, I have set up 'Etegami Inbox' to  post all of the lovely postcards I receive HERE.
I shall still be posting my own work on this blog as well as all of the other stuff I warble on about. In any case, please don't abandon this listing hulk of a blog to that Never Neverland of sad unvisited blogs which one sometimes stumbles across. There is something so sad about an abandoned blog. Did the author die? run away to join the circus? become  incarcerated for unspeakable crimes (they seemed so nice too) or just plain run out of things to say? We will never know, a bit like the meaning of life really.

Still raining.

Yep! a whole week and a half of rain, no gardening and not much of anything else. The ash cloud from the volcano is still playing havoc with flight schedules and so no 'better half' either!
I thought this would be an appropriate subject, not only is the lemon tree the one bright spot in my garden but I am trying to get into the mindset of 'making lemonade'.

I'm seriously thinking of changing the name of this blog to Etega-me Etega-me as it seems to be about little else these days, meanwhile the many other projects I have lying half finished are rumbling in the background I EXPECT TO BE CRUSHED UNDER A MOUND OF ORIGAMI PAPER AND KNITTING WOOL AT ANY MOMENT!

My dear departed MIL was most anxious when she was terminally ill to clear out all of her craft materials, patterns and half finished projects before she left us so that we would not think her hopeless. It is getting to that stage here but rest assured, barring an unfortunate meeting with a bus, I ain't planning on going anywhere soon.      

!