Home is where your stuff is

Well, some of your stuff anyway - if we take the title of this blog post literally, I live in a storage unit in Wonthaggi.

We had a few weeks of back and forth between Busselton and Perth trying to find a place to live before finally moving into this adorable furnished apartment in Margaret River, a touristy tiny wine town about 50 km south of Busselton.  We have a six-month lease, which should give us about four months after bub's birth to practice not killing her before starting to move around with her too much.

We have the entire upstairs - the big balcony is off our open plan living/dining/kitchen area, and the smaller one is off our giant bedroom - can't wait to sleep with the sliding door open all summer long!

Living room - get jealous of our awesome TV.  Eric is trying to dig ours out of storage while he's back getting the car

We live just off the main street of shops on a hill overlooking and open green lot with budding trees and the surrounding forest.  Both balconies in the photo are ours, which I think will really benefit our mental health when we're cooped up with a newborn on some gorgeous summer days.  There are some awesome surf spots and lots of wooded trails nearby, though, so hopefully we'll get outdoors as much as possible.  We're two lots down from the spanking new supermarket, and a 10-15 minute waddle from the local library and recreation centre, both of which are quite posh given the affluence of the area's (mostly part-time, I think) residents.  I felt severely under-dressed at the farmer's market on Saturday, where I was able to buy fresh pastries from a grouchy Frenchman with a wonky eye.

During our search, we were able to escape the worst of the last weeks of summer rain at our friend Rachel's place in Perth.  The countryside surrounding the area is positively bucolic, but apparently that comes at the cost of several months of ceaseless rain.  We tried exploring some of the national parks around Perth, but Rachel kept finding two dripping refugees pulling pathetic faces at her door.  Now it's quite cozy to be cuddled up on my own sofa watching the driving rain outside.

Serpentine Falls with a deceiving patch of blue sky - it rained on the 300 metre walk back to the van

A sloth at the Western Australian Museum, just because sloths are so freaking cute

During our search for somewhere to be, we were also starting to sort out how to have a baby.  I mean, I'm hoping a lot of it is gravity and drugs, but some of it at least is paperwork and red tape.

The ladies at the hospital were really impressed when I listed "Kookaburra Caravan Park" as my address on the registration documents.  If only they had known that I didn't even reside there full time!  It's good to start people off with low expectations, although it's interesting to watch how their perceptions impact your treatment.  I don't think my admission of drinking to occasional glass of wine would have been as much of an issue if the midwife didn't also assume I was also engaging in other backpacker behaviours, like smoking weed and existing on cornflakes alone.

Although we're delivering the baby in Busselton, we are going to complete our antenatal classes here in Margaret River.  Because they're constantly trying to improve their statistics in a quest for more funding, the Margaret River hospital really pressured us to deliver locally. However, the hospital is slightly larger than my parents' house, and they can't perform C-sections.  If you have any complications, they rush you by ambulance to Bunbury, over an hour away.  My doctor referred to them as not practicing first-world medicine, which only affirmed our decision.  Anyway, it's only a 35 minute drive from Margaret River to Busselton, and given my mum's labours, I should have at least that much warning.  Maybe we'll just move back into the Kookaburra Caravan Park closer to my due date...

It is a bit odd now to be settled into a place but still be "on vacation".  Eric leaving the morning after we moved in to retrieve our VW Golf Wagon from Melbourne has probably contributed to my contemplative mood.  After all, it's very quiet when the only person I have to talk to is an unborn Sea Monkey who is starting to move around less and less as conditions become more crowded in her world.  For the moment, she'd better stay in there since if she came out now, she'd be sleeping in a cardboard box and getting pushed around in a shopping trolley lined with pillows!  It's really made me miss Otis, as he and I used to have lots of long chats when we were home alone.

For the doubters - there's definitely someone in there! I love my outie belly button - it is as soft as a pig's ear.

Speaking of pigs, getting amongst it - local children performing Animal Farm, a dark choice for the kiddos methinks

Anyway, I've been pondering what the point of it all is.  I feel slightly adrift or purposeless or like I'm in limbo, I suppose, waiting for life to be meaningful again.  That's not to sound dark and hopeless; it's really quite pleasant filling your day reading books and wandering around a little country town, but it does feel a bit self indulgent.  Maybe it's just that good old Catholic guilt kicking in, or maybe it's just that I'm ready to get on to the next stage and meet our little girl.  But I'm always rushing on to the next stage instead of enjoying where I am at the moment.

I think in our normal lives we have a sense of importance because we're busy, busy, busy, rushing to work and trying to fit in errands and exercise and a social life.  Work in particular, I think, gives us a sense of purpose, as much as we all say like to leave it behind.  However, I'm starting to do some contract work for my company, and while my immediate reaction was a sense of relief at having some structure and a purposeful way to fill a few hours, does it really give my life meaning?  Part of this has to be anxiety about spending our savings when we're bringing pretty much nothing in, but would the money we could have earned during this year in combination with have the money we spent back make my life more meaningful?

Most of us are engaged in work that doesn't really provide "meaning", no fault of our own.  It's just that many of the things that have to be done in the world these days have been artificially constructed by our society.  I went to see a documentary at the local cultural centre this weekend about the group settlers who were first shipped to this area from England in the 1920s, and almost none of our jobs existed then.  I've also been reading a biography of Woodrow Wilson, and I've been struck by how many people, particularly women, were unemployed.  Certainly most of them were bearing or raising children for a good period of their lives, but what about the childless women or the aristocracy?  Did they feel pointless?  I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't have questioned their purpose; I'm just curious if they perceived anything unusual about their situation or if it was just culturally normal back then.

I know some people would say that once we have this baby, I'll realise the point is to contribute to the next generation by raising a good little person.  But isn't that just biology?  Am I more meaningful than a sow giving birth to the next generation of bacon?  (I'm really on the pigs today!) And two years ago when I thought I couldn't have children, would anyone have told me my life was pointless?

Aside from a bit of contract work, I have a to-do list of things like updating our contents insurance and researching cloth diapers to complete this week.  That's what gets me out of bed eager to make my coffee and get started at the moment, getting to cross things off a list.  Perhaps then we're just programmed to thrive on goal-directed activity of any kind, some of us more than others.  I worked on a cross-cultural comparison of the personality trait achievement motivation in graduate school, so I know that drive is far from a universal social construct.  The family I stayed with in Costa Rica was the happiest group of people I've ever met, and they spent at least half of every day playing dominoes and soccer together.

The only other thing I can think of is that it's really just the collection of very small things that gives life meaning, like cuddling my cat or walking in a warm breeze or eating a crusty pastry.  Those small moments of joy are what we live for, and if we're lucky, they're a significant portion of our lives when taken cumulatively.  My current lifestyle allows me almost continuous access to what would normally be blissful, like reading all day under my Eskimo blanket, and it's the lack of contrast or ease of access that mean it doesn't stand in sharp relief.

To summarise, some of the things I thought gave my life meaning, like working to earn money to buy things, clearly aren't the point of it all, and I'm really going to try to enjoy the little things more, because I think they may be what it's all about (not the hokey pokey).  Perhaps even having the time to think about these things or to learn a little bit about myself is one point of it all.  Who knows? (If you know, please forward the answer to my email address with the subject line "meaning of it all".)

UPDATE:

I thought of another one walking home from pilates: Learning something new or doing something you didn't think you could!  I think that gives life meaning, although maybe that's just linked to the achievement motivation thing.  Not that this was brought on by my outstanding performance at pregnant lady pilates, where I pretty much did everything wrong.  But there's not much pride when you're a bunch of fat women rolling around on the floor with spiky balls and whatnot under your bums.

And back to Perth...

Eric at The Pinnacles

Galah nesting atop a Pinnacle

Our last big stop was Kalbarri, which I think is Aboriginal for “closed”.  The national park: closed.  The famous BBQ fish shack: closed.  

As we headed south to Geraldton, I couldn’t figure out why the scenery was so appealing until I realised that we were seeing the first trees in months.  The northwest has nothing but waist-high shrubs.  Suddenly, farmland with crops instead of half-starved sheep seemed really exotic.  And then it started raining!  For most of a week now, it’s been raining, and we’re only beginning to get tired of it.  It’s just so nice to see clouds instead of constant baking sun.  The wildflowers clearly appreciated it, too.

From Geraldton, we expected it to take a couple of weeks to reach Perth.  With the rain and unfavourable surf conditions, though, we found ourselves 50 km outside the city in less than a week.  As much as my pregnant back is beginning to tell me that sleeping in the van is no longer appropriate, it made me really sad to realise that the travelling portion of our year is essentially over.  But Kick-y Longstocking keeps reminding me that the next phase of our time off will be pretty exciting, too.  Tomorrow we head down to Busselton to start looking for a six-month lease on a house to bring a baby home to.

Book report 7

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age by Marcus Rediker

This is one of the books my sister, Piglet, had to read for one of her Master’s courses and bought for my Kindle for Christmas.  All I know, is it was more interesting than anything I read in graduate school.  It provides great detail of myriad aspects of the “pyrate” life between 1716 and 1726, the era from which most of our common images of pirates are taken.  For example, one of the first things pirates really did during this time after taking a boat was to sew a black flag with a skull and crossbones, which signified that they were beholden to no country.  While pirates were more numerous during this time than at any other, they were also being pursued more vigorously by governments and executed in record numbers.  Pirating as a career was virtually non-existent after this decade of looting and debauchery.

Although pirates lived up to every image we have of them burning boats, stealing every bit of gold down to the Captain’s fillings, and surviving mainly on rum, the author takes a very sympathetic view of the pirating life.  Prior to 1716, most pirates were actually privateers with charters from one government or another to attack an enemy country’s boats as an unofficial extension of the Navy.  However, during this lull in hostilities between Spain and England, there were record numbers of unemployed sailors looking for a way to support themselves using the only skills they possessed.  Given the surge in supply, conditions on merchant ships were more horrendous than usual, with many likening the harsh working conditions in exchange for meagre rations to slavery.  In fact, sailors on the slave ships died at rates similar to the human cargo from Africa.  In such abysmal conditions, many sailors came to see hanging if tried for mutiny as preferable to taking what work they could onboard a ship or begging on land.

In fact, most pirate charters were surprisingly democratic in response to the unfair dictatorships under which most of them had previously laboured.  They elected their captain, but they also elected a quartermaster to oversee the captain’s decisions.  A council was usually convened for particularly important decisions, like which route to take or whether to attack a nearby ship.  Neither the captain nor the quartermaster received better rations or a significantly larger share of the loot than they common sailors.  A share of the loot from each raid was typically set aside to form an insurance pool should any pirate be injured or take ill.  Really, the pirates were just ahead of their time; they were trying to create a world where people were treated equitably and with dignity in a time when that just wasn’t done.  It was such a threat to those who had the power, whether merchants or governments, that they had to be wiped out as quickly as possible.

Despite having full bellies and fair treatment, most pirates didn’t expect to live long.  Between government executions and the general hazards of a violent life at sea, mortality estimates range between 10-50% of pirates on the sea during this decade.  As most of their mottos reflected, though, a short life as a pirate was better lived than a long life as a slave.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

It’s difficult to know how seriously to take this book since the author has a clear agenda: to vilify the CIA.  Although I haven’t yet finished the book, he’s clearly building to the argument that the CIA lead us into war in Iraq due to organisational flaws that have surfaced and been ignored for decades.  However, many of his most damning passages are taken directly from reports written within the CIA and only released in the last ten years.

The book is a litany of CIA operations gone wrong, which were typically sold to the American public as successes.  Even the sitting presidents during most of the CIA’s history relied on the CIA to report on their own effectiveness, which often constituted misplaced trust.  From just after World War II, when the CIA was created, right through to the present day, it seems that the CIA has attempted to interfere with the sovereign government in any nation it viewed as suspect or merely inconvenient.  Until the end of the Cold War, this was most conveniently done by labelling a government “Communist”, even if they didn’t even know the meaning of the word.  In many cases, we worked to replace democratically elected governments with right-wing dictatorships that we thought we could control.  I think the author summed it up nicely by saying that we partnered with communists to fight fascism during World War II but reversed that to partner with fascists to fight communists ever since.  Although both are flawed in practice, at least I like the ideas behind communism more than those underlying fascism.

On a personal note, it was interesting to see how many times staffing was suggested as the primary weakness in creating a legitimate intelligence force.  It was repeatedly suggested that the CIA doesn’t hire the “right type” of people, nor can they retain the talent they do hire.  This is the basis of my field, and the sister company of the organisation for whom I worked in Minneapolis and Sydney actually had the contract to re-vamp the CIA’s hiring practices around 2005.  I wish I’d been involved in that project, and I’d be interested to know if they were able to make a difference.  I often find that even when clients are paying us massive sums to “fix” their problems, they often create the greatest barriers by narrowly defining what changes are possible, failing to implement the suggested tools and processes, or undermining the legitimacy of the work we do.

Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West by Dorothy Wickenden

The author is the executive editor of the New Yorker who was given a packet of letters her grandmother wrote during her year teaching on the Western Slope of Colorado.  In 1916, the area was still extremely remote with children skiing several hours on barrel staves to reach the school in the winter.  Making the book even more interesting for me, the area lies just outside Steamboat Springs, which is now a popular ski town that Eric and I passed through several times.  She even visits Strawberry Springs, which was then a camp for aspiring dancers and is now an amazing hot spring known for allowing nude bathing after dark. 

The grandmother, Dot, and her best friend were almost 30 years old and seeking yet another escape from marriage and polite society.  So far, they’d managed to spend a year in Europe and almost as long in New York City since graduating from Smith University, whose president felt that girls should complete courses in the same subject areas as at men’s universities, even though women couldn’t be expected to learn at the same level of depth or complexity as men.  The girls’ positive attitudes toward things like waking up with a thick blanket of snow on the duvet atop their shared bed and breaking the ice on their wash water was surprising given the affluent lives they lived back East.  Ironically, the author remembers that despite being unconventional for her time, her grandmother still admonished her for any behaviour that could be interpreted as “common”, which included wearing trousers!

As the year concluded, both women moved on to lives that better fit others’ expectations of them.  However, neither had an easy life, and I’m sure their experiences on the frontier prepared them better for disappointments and tough circumstances than following the path of most of their peers would have.

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong by Emily Oster

I listen to an NPR podcast called Planet Money that presents two short episodes a week relating principles of economics to current events.  A couple of weeks ago, they had an episode with this author, who did both her undergraduate and doctoral work in Economics at Harvard.  She and her husband, also an economist, now both teach at the University of Chicago. 

When she got pregnant, she was frustrated by the lack of clear data available to support decision making.  As she dug more deeply into some of the commonly stated “facts”, she found that many were based on outdated research or practices.  As one example, the ban on food in most delivery rooms stems from the risk of regurgitating food into the lungs and choking to death…back in 1950s when women were put under general anaesthesia to give birth.  Even if you have a C-section these days, you’re not going to be knocked out. 

Because the medical professionals with whom she interacted during her pregnancy did not seem to be any better informed than online chat forums, she decided to examine the source of conventional wisdom on a number of topics related to pregnancy in order to draw her own conclusions.  As someone with a strong background in statistics and research design, she was able to identify flaws in a number of commonly cited studies that essentially render their results meaningless.  She was also able to interpret the results of more rigorously executed studies to determine for herself what behaviours were safe.  She acknowledges that individual circumstances contribute to decision making but presents the evidence as clearly as possible to support that process.

Although a number of the decisions for which she presents data are well behind me now, and I think I worried a lot less than she did about many of them, it was still interesting to see how little the data supports so many of the things I’ve been told (ok, mostly read online since we haven’t seen many doctors).  Very helpful was the discussion of data relating to the actual process of giving birth since that’s starting to be something niggling in the back of my head.  Although reading about labour for an hour or so made me feel a little short of breath, it’s probably good to get used to the idea that this baby is coming out eventually.

Bound South by Susan Rebecca White

After reading about labour, I needed some brain candy.  This was a fun novel about the modern South, specifically Atlanta, that attempted to explore substantive topics like race/class relations and acceptance of homosexuality.  I finished it in just over 24 hours, so clearly it was a fun read.

Nancy Wake by Peter FitzSimons

Nancy was an Australian who was heavily decorated by the French, English, and US governments for her exploits with the French resistance during WWII.  Obviously her strength, courage, and perseverance during several years behind the lines in occupied France were admirable, but I was almost more impressed by unrestrained approach to life.  As a struggling runaway from an oppressive mother, she used a sudden windfall of 200 pounds to book first class passage to England via Canada.  Rather than travel more economically to leave some funds off which to live, she drank the best champagne and stayed in the best hotels all along the way.  Throughout her youth, rather than save something for tomorrow, she maximised every experience.  At the beginning of WWII, she and her husband entertained lavishly, despite being aware that eventually privation and rationing would leave them nothing to fill even their own plates.  To be fair, before that time came, Nancy was fighting in the forest and her husband had been tortured to death by the Gestapo, so there was no point saving for later.  As a planner who spends more time worrying about tomorrow than enjoying today, I wish I could be a little more like Nancy.  I hope I can encourage our daughter to enjoy life more and worry less.  

Carnarvon, Kennedy Range, and Monkey Mia - but mostly baby dolphins!

Our wildlife encounters have continued as we work our way south.  From Coral Bay, we headed to Carnarvon, detouring about 75 km down a side road to camp at some blowholes we’d heard about from campers at Ned’s.  Every seaside town with cliffs advertises blowholes, but most of them are unspectacular except in really rough conditions.  Even in only moderately rough seas, though, this blowhole was shooting

water up a good 30 feet with a  cannon-like boom. 

Blowhole

We settled in for $5/night camping just down the dirt road from the blowholes, where a large number of grey nomads live for months at a time in a kind of shanty village, and had a lovely afternoon exploring the beach until we were told just before sunset that we had to leave for lack of an onboard chemical toilet.  Rather than trek all the way into Carnarvon, we pulled down a dirt road half way to town where we were serenaded all night by a chorus of bleating wild goats. 

Each area we travel though is inundated by some non-native, feral pest that destroys the local plants and animals.  As cute as the tiny marsupials they displace are, it’s tough to blame an adorable baby goat or lamb or calf, especially with their floppy, uncut tails.  They’d probably rather be well fed on a farm than foraging on the roadside.  As much as I’ve read about the horror of modern slaughterhouses, I doubt being hit by a road train or slowly dying of starvation/dehydration are much better ends.  As a cat lover, it’s reflex for me to cheer on the cats we occasionally see darting across the road, even though they’re one of the worst predators. 

Leaving Goatville, we headed into Carnarvon, the fruit and veg capital of Western Australia.  Over 70% of WA’s winter produce comes from the area surrounding this little town.  The wide riverbed appears dry most of the year, but apparently there are deep aquifers running just below the surface that allow massive plantations to thrive in the middle of the desert.  We spent the day cycling to the local swimming hole and the Big Dish, a satellite tracking station that assisted NASA with communication on our side of the world for the Apollo missions, rewarding ourselves at the end with unbelievable chocolate-covered mango and custard apple ice cream bars at one of the fruit stands. 

Eric with the satellite tracking dish in Carnarvon

Also at the fruit stand was actual fruit.  When travelling in northern Queensland a few years ago with my sister, Angela, she dragged me along to an exotic tropical fruit tasting that I ended up loving.  One of the fruits we were able to try was the black sapote fruit, which tastes like rich chocolate pudding but cannot be found in grocery stores because it bruises exceptionally easily and only lasts about 24 hours once it’s picked.  I ate one right away in case they didn’t survive the bike ride home and saved the other two to mash in with strawberries and a bit of sugar that night for dessert – divine.

Black sapote - why can't all fruit taste like chocolate pudding??

Mashed black sapote

From Carnarvon, we headed inland 260 km to the Kennedy Range.  Given that August is one of the two best months for viewing wildflowers, the journey was as much the attraction as the destination.  As an added bonus, the road runs along the trucking route that Charles Kingsford Smith (like most of his mates, I call him Smithy) established while he was dreaming of flying across the Pacific.  That’s not to say that the two days of hikes weren’t also “gorge-ous” (couldn’t resist), but the flowers definitely made the long, hot trek worth it.  

Over 65 km of the trip in each direction was on corrugated dirt roads, and Gascoyne Junction, the only fuel stop, is so remote that until construction of their petrol station is complete, you have to go into the Shire office and ring a man to come let you fill up from their fleet pump.  We were impressed that the fuel only cost about ten cents more per litre than it did in town.  Wildflowers and exceptional government service aside, we just kept trying to figure out why anyone lives this far out, particularly given that we hid in our van from the heat and the flies during the bulk of the afternoon, and it’s still mid-winter.  Summer temperatures rarely dip below 40 C (108 F).

Eric at Honeycomb Gorge, Kennedy Range

On one of our hikes at Kennedy Range, we walked back along the road to see a colony of Dawson’s burrowing bees that the camp hosts told us about.  As you can tell by how close they allowed me to get to take photos, these bees were not interested in us at all.  They literally live for sex.  The female digs a burrow, constructing a nice turret on top.  As she emerges once the nest is complete, a number of male bees are waiting, driven into a frenzy by her virgin pheromones.  The strongest male wins (again with the attempted gang rape – it’s not just for sea animals any more), and as soon as the copulation is complete, she is left alone to lay her eggs and then die.  After the motherless eggs hatch, they defecate and then remain in a sack of their own poo for a year as they mature.  Not sure what the poo does for them, but it’s fascinatingly gross.

Dawson's burrowing bee nest

Pulling back through Carnarvon for more groceries and fresh water, we made it all the way to Denham just before dark.  Denham is the small town near Monkey Mia, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the state, perhaps Australia, for its dolphin encounters.  Back in the 1960s, a fisherman and his wife living on remote Shark Bay kept up the Aboriginal tradition of feeding the dolphins fish scraps.  Over time, campers began to make their way to Monkey Mia, where they could buy a bucket of fish to feed the now-tame dolphins.  About 20 years ago, the Department of Conservation and Environment realised this unofficial attraction had gotten out of hand and stepped in to regulate the feedings and start a research program.

Currently, there is a small area where up to three feedings a day of up to five female dolphins at a time are conducted between 8 am and noon.  Visitors are allowed to stand at water’s edge, and a few lucky participants are chosen to deliver a fish to a dolphin.  Most importantly, no individual dolphin is given more than a small portion of the fish it needs to survive on any given day.  While the first feeding is well attended, the second and third feedings are often bypassed due to lack of interest from the dolphins, for whom the feedings are now more social than essential.  While only a handful of dolphins are enrolled in the feeding program, a number of their friends often accompany them to play in the feeding zone, and sometimes even the target dolphins will swim in to play to the crowds without accepting any fish.

After our recent wildlife experiences, including seeing hundreds of dolphins at pretty close range, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.  It seemed a bit Sea World to see tame dolphins come in for a scheduled feed.  Still, I was a little disappointed as we walked up the beach to leave not having seen a single dolphin.  Two feedings had taken place that morning, but a third feeding wasn’t anticipated.  Just as we were walking toward the path to the car, though, a fin popped up just outside the feeding zone.  We wandered over to sit on the beach and were in prime position when a pod of about ten dolphins, including two or three calves, entered the feeding area.  I was front and centre on the waterline as crowds of people came rushing from every direction.  Eric, being the most amazing husband, sprinted back to the van for my camera, realising that I wasn’t considering moving an inch.  It was 11:40, and the dolphins seemed to know time was running out to get a final treat. 

Only one of the mothers, Nikki, was in the feeding program, so she and her calf played just feet from the water’s edge for about fifteen minutes as the volunteers went to retrieve a bucket of fish.  The other dolphins played a few feet farther back, waiting for their mate.  Nikki is the daughter of one of the dolphins who was fed back in the 1960s, who was found a few years ago washed up on the beach with a stingray barb in her heart.  Nikki is 37 years old, which makes it remarkable to me that she has a new calf when her species only tends to live about 40 years.  It was kind of cool that Nikki and I were only one year apart in age, and I’ll have my own calf when I’m her age.  Sadly, of the nine calves to whom she’s given birth, only one other survived.  Nikki’s other calves were born during the free-for-all feeding days, when dolphins became dependent on unlimited feeding from tourists and failed to teach their young to hunt.  Like most of the dolphins even in this protected area, Nikki has scars from both shark attacks and boat propellers, with a large chunk of her dorsal fin missing from a particularly close call with a boat.

Awwwww....mum and baby

Baby dolphin cuddles mum - priceless

Given that Nikki and I are on a first-name basis, it’s probably clear that I LOVED the whole experience.  I’ve never been that close to a dolphin, and the only other baby dolphin I’ve seen was on the glass-bottom boat tour near Exmouth.  I’m not sure there’s anything more adorable than a baby dolphin.  Frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever be so jaded that I don’t squeal, “Ooooh, dolphin!” when I see that characteristic dorsal fin pop out of the water.

How does one mother emu lay eight emu eggs???  She must've been busting.

Last week on the Ningaloo Reef

Parrot fish are very pretty and numerous on Ningaloo Reef - they eat the coral

Sting ray - watch out, Steve Irwin-ites!

Our last week on the Ningaloo Reef has been amazing!  There are three species of sea turtles who live in this area, Green, Loggerhead, and Hawksbill, but in our first few weeks we only caught a couple of fleeting glimpses of ones swimming away from us.  Then last Thursday, we went for a walk down the beach south of our campsite where we’ve walked before without seeing anything except a mouldering dead dugong, and there were turtles everywhere.  Our planned 40 minute walk turned into a two-hour turtle spotting extravaganza.  At any given time, you could look out and see at least two or three turtles just under the surface or popping their heads out of the water..

Fortunately we had an opportunity the next day to enquire about the turtle explosion.  On our last trip into town we signed up for a tour of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) research vessel Solander followed by talks from nine scientists about their research on different types of local marine life.  The research vessel, running at a cost of $17,000/day, takes a crew of six, including an on-board chef, in addition to up to twelve scientists on two-week to month-long excursions from the Exmouth marina.  I can only imagine that getting a spot on the boat is like winning the lottery for the scientists, who must be able to collect enough data to keep them busy for ages. 

After a hot day, it was lovely to sit on the shaded deck of the Sportfishermen’s Club, eat some fish and chips and Tim Tam cake, and listen to the scientists as the sun set.  We learned about the Irikandji jellyfish, which are only the size of a $2 coin but can kill you (or at least make you very ill).  Most years, there are two or three confirmed stings in Exmouth, but there have already been more than twenty this year.   Since all “sensible questions” were rewarded with a beer coozie, I asked why such a small animal needed to pack so much poison.  Does he think he needs to take down a shark?  The hypothesis offered was that due to their tiny size, they need to be able to instantly immobilise a predator.    

Learning time!

The high school science teacher, also a marine biologist, reported on her leadership of a local citizen science group monitoring the turtle population, which reminded of Earthcare’s work in St Kilda looking after our fairy penguins.  I spoke with her afterward, and she said the turtles seem to have begun mating quite early this year, which is probably why we saw so many in the shallows.  She told us that if you see a turtle on the beach, you should absolutely not return it to the water as it is likely an exhausted female trying to escape amorous males.  At times, so many male turtles can be attempting to mount a single female that they drown her.  We saw some copulating turtles from the beach a couple of days later, but fortunately it was a one-on-one situation.

Another scientist reported his research on the humpback dolphin, which we realised we’d seen the day before and mistaken for an ill bottlenose dolphin because of his mottled colouring.  A poor PhD candidate, this researcher spends all of his time kayaking a set route that zigzags the reef with a GoPro and a GPS.  Eric said he needed interns, but I think he is the intern.

That night, we slept down a dirt road near town rather than driving the 40 km back out to camp so that we could be up at 6:30 am to attend the local surf competition.  The fine for illegal camping is $1,000, but I convinced Eric that the likelihood of being caught in the vast nothing that surrounds Exmouth approached zero.  He also wasn’t too keen to face the gauntlet of suicidal kangaroos that just hang out in the road by the hundreds between town and camp, meaning that we have to make the trip at 40 kmph or less.  Eric is still laughing that upon one near collision, I threw out my arm and tried to protect him, which nearly led to an accident since I happened to immobilise the arm he needed to shift gears.  Oops. 

Given that the surf is only worthwhile about one in every four days that we check it, we were glad to see that the waves were big and reasonably clean the next morning.  The under 12s in the first heat were better than Eric and I probably ever will be, surfing in waves that would probably kill us.  Actually, I probably wouldn’t have even been able to paddle out, and I’m talking about before I was smuggling a beach ball in my swimmie.  At least we had heaps of whales and turtles close in to cheer us up and to entertain us between sets.

At the surf beach - haha

After we’d seen enough of the surf competition, we hopped a few beaches, arriving at the marina in time for our glass bottom boat tour.  A couple of people at Ned’s Camp had told us that the captain, Alek, made the trip a bargain at $60 with his charismatic personality.  We certainly felt that was the case, and we got in two good snorkels as well.  The current was quite strong, so everyone else was out of the water in five minutes, but Alek kept yelling at us to stay in as long as we liked.  Some of the coral bommies were 800-1,000 years old and so much bigger than anything we’d seen in our shore-based snorkels.  Once they grow close to the surface, the bommies begin expanding outward and end up as these massive columns surrounded by an incredible variety of fish.  Alek was Polish but learned English from an Irish guy before attending the University of Wisconsin and marrying an American.  After 17 years in Australia, his accent is the most confused I’ve heard. 

Alek shared with us that while dolphins are one of the few species that mate for pleasure, it is only enjoyable for the males since, like the turtles, they go in for gang rape.  I’m beginning to wonder why evolution hasn’t seen the females of some of these species develop anatomy that makes intercourse more pleasurable.  Was the clitoris a fluke, or is it that human females are wily so that adaptation was necessary for our species to survive?  Then again, until recent times, I question how many human females were really getting much out of sex either.  One episode of Puberty Blues calls that into question.

The next night at happy hour, we were scolded for staying the night away from camp without a hall pass.  We had mentioned it to a few of our honorary grandparents, but apparently they didn’t offer that information during concerned discussions during our absence.  Poor Eric – the oldies were mostly concerned about the loss of their pregnant lady, about whom they seem quite proprietary at this point.  At our last happy hour a couple of nights later, Thelma announced to the table that I was leaving, and Eric piped up with, “I’m leaving, too!”

Sunset at Ned's Camp

Last happy hour at Ned's Camp

We had some nice walks and snorkels our last couple of days at Ned’s Camp, but a cloud was hanging over us.  We were really sad to be leaving after a month.  At any other time in our lives, four weeks of vacation would have seemed like ages, but this particularly lazy month went by too quickly.  After a last breaky at Whaler’s in Exmouth and a re-supply at the market, Turquey had to carry us 155 km, her longest trip in a good while, to Coral Bay.

Coral Bay is the southern end of the 290 km Ningaloo Reef.  While a smaller town even than Exmouth, we could quickly see why Johan and Marlene, our friends from Karratha, said they preferred Coral Bay.  While Exmouth and the surrounding areas feel quite barren, Coral Bay surrounds a picturesque inlet with palm trees and flowers that makes you feel like you’re at a resort in Mexico.  After the basic pit toilets at Ned’s Camp, the salty showers and pool at our caravan park feel like luxury accommodation.  It’s so nice that I’ve convinced Eric to extend our two-night stay to three.

Mantas don't have stingers, except the males to subdue their mates.  We swam with a female manta, who had bite marks all over her, indicating a recent mating.  Are all sea animals rapey??

Shark on a massive cabbage coral

Today we spent most of the day on a snorkeling boat chasing manta rays.  Although the visibility was really poor when we got in the water with the rays, the other two snorkels were nothing short of spectacular.  We saw some good sized reef sharks, which was cooler (and less terrifying) than I expected.  Eric was sceptical of paying $170 each for yet more snorkelling, but he felt it was money well spent after just the first time in the water.  We met some nice Southerland Shire folk on the boat, as well as an American and her Aussie boyfriend who are working in Coral Bay for three months.  Our snorkel guide works nights at the pub, so we’ll likely see her for dinner tomorrow night after our last day on the reef.  She was really lovely and let me use her old wetsuit on today’s trip since it’s a bit nicer than the standard ones.  Now that I look quite pregnant, everyone seems anxious to look after me, which is very sweet, although Eric also keeps noticing people staring at me inexplicably in the streets, like they’ve never seen a pregnant person before and think I should go home.

Flowers in Coral Bay

Sea Monkey on board

Sometimes you get what you need

Sturt Desert Peas - different species from the ones with black centres seen in Karratha

Rock lobster heads

These flowers smell just like grape popsicles - such a strong scent we can smell them with the windows up!

I was having a bit of a “poor me” episode about a week ago, brought on by sweltering on a beach for a couple of hours watching Eric surf.  Usually while he surfs, I get in my hour to an hour and a half of walking that I try to do most days, but it was just too stinking hot.  I hiked to the top of a big sand dune where I had a bit of mobile reception and attempted to call my sisters, but they were both engaged. There was a bit of shade on the edge of the dunes, but as soon as I sat down there, I was attacked by a swarm of mosquitos.  Given that mozzies in this area carry encephalitis that eats your brain on a good day or kills you on a bad one, that didn’t seem like a great option.  By the time Eric came out of the water, his telling me how awesome the surf conditions were pushed me over the edge into tears.

It’s not that I don’t want him to have a good time, or that I don’t want to be pregnant, but sometimes I wish he could carry the baby for a few hours while I go surfing…or do anything besides go for another freaking walk.  To be fair, 98% of the time I feel really lucky that I get to be the one who is pregnant.  I mean, feeling this little Sea Monkey kicking around in there is just amazing, and I'm fascinated reading about all the things that are going on in there.  Really, I think I was just feeling isolated, because as much as I love Eric, I need some girl talk now and again, and not with the 60+ crowd at happy hour.  In particular, I think I wanted to talk to someone in the same situation and hear that it’s normal to be apprehensive about what life is going to be like in a few months.

Being an engineer, beyond being supportive as he has been throughout this pregnancy, Eric immediately went into problem solving mode.  Fortunately, through our conversation, he realised that the best solution might just be a nice lunch at Whalers in town with a cheeky glass of refreshing white wine.  After we followed that up with a cookies and cream smoothie, I was most of the way back to sanity.

Although I don’t view food as an inappropriate coping mechanism, an even better solution dropped into my lap a couple of days later at happy hour.  Another couple our age from Melbourne rocked up who are a month ahead of us on the baby calendar with a little girl.  Not only that, but he lived in Denver for a time, and she lived in San Diego, although they are English and French respectively.  AND he is an engineer with a love for beat up old cars, and she is completing her post-doc in the social sciences.  Freaky really.

We spent the next couple of days sharing meals, snorkelling adventures, and sunsets on the beach, which was all lovely, but peripheral to the good conversation.  In particular, having a chance to hear the similarity of concerns for what this whole baby thing is going to mean was like pulling out a plug of black tar that let me breathe more freely.  They were only here a few days, but by the time they left, it felt like a weight had been lifted and I could get back to enjoying our lazy days instead of letting the anxiety gnaw at the back of my brain.  It was really like a nice, totally unexpected gift from the universe.

We’ve been so lazy in fact that I have nothing else to report for the last week or so.  I’m trying an experiment where I don’t eat any desserts except fruit or tea just to see if I can, but so far that hasn’t been sufficiently difficult to be interesting.   We just try to enjoy each day of reading for hours, punctuated by a walk or a snorkel or a bike ride and capped off with happy hour each evening.  It’s going to be strange in a week or so to hit the road again, although even then our major stressor is just finding a spot to camp for the night.

Book report 6

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

This book provided the escape into fiction that I’ve been seeking.  It’s the story of a family who finds their life performing gator wrestling shows on their remote swamp island obviated by the death of the mother, their star performer, and the opening of a modern amusement part on the mainland.  Most of the story is told from the perspective of the pre-pubescent daughter who dreads leaving the island for suburban life and sets out on an adventure to the underworld to save her family.  There’s just enough of the surreal to make the book fun without verging into the realm of being a ridiculous ghost story.  Good fun, and sufficiently compelling that I barely put it down until I finished it.

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The title refers to the challenge we as humans face deciding what from the variety of foods available to us is good to eat.  While some animals, like koalas or whales, have specialised diets, we are more like rats, nibbling a bit of this and that to see what kills us.  Somewhere in the world, just about every plant and animal has been classified as food, even when requiring elaborate preparations to nullify toxins or to make them digestible.  To illustrate a few common decisions made daily by Americans about what to eat, Pollan attempts to trace the origins of three meals: a family feed at Mc Donald’s, a home-cooked meal from Whole Foods ingredients, and a painstaking hunter-gatherer feast. 

Discussion of the Mc Donald’s meal leads to a description of what the author calls the industrial food chain.  Prior to the 1970s, farm aid primarily took the form of government loans to help farmers survive years of bad crops.  However, in the mid-1970s, a few years of good weather saw crop prices drop, which lead farmers to withhold some production.  The resulting increase in the retail price of groceries lead to demonstrations by angry shoppers that got the attention of the government.  Nixon’s secretary for agriculture solved the problem in the short term by changing the structure of farm aid to setting a floor on crop prices, with the government paying farmers the gap between that floor and actual market price.  This encouraged farmers to produce regardless of market conditions and to consolidate into ever-larger farms focusing on single crops, primarily corn.

Most of this section of the book talks about how prevalent corn is in American diets, even though we don’t see it.  The surplus of cheap corn lead food producers to develop new ways to use it, such as in preservatives, as animal feed, in ethanol, and in artificial sweeteners.  Corn as animal feed enabled factory farming as farmers were no longer limited by the amount of feed their own land could produce through pastures.  None of this is inherently bad; it’s more the secondary effects of overly sweetened, preserved foods on our national health, particularly on those in lower income brackets who consume a disproportionate amount of these inexpensive foods with negligible nutritional value, and the waste and cruelty associated with factory farming that should give us pause.

The second part of the book leads Pollan to explore a few of the brands he picks up in his local Whole Foods, whose labels suggest they are produced in agrarian paradises.  What he finds is that the “organic” label has evolved to mean something quite different from what the original small farmers who were trying to create a new way of looking at food and community intended.  Most organic fruits and vegetables are now produced by one of only a few large corporations, and organic meat is produced on factory farms that look very much like other factory farms.  The only real difference is the pesticides and antibiotics employed, which depending on a consumer’s concerns may still be very meaningful.

At this point, a handful of farmers view their practices as “beyond organic”, and the author spends a week working with one of them.  His animals are pasture-fed, and he raises a variety of plants and animals that are inextricably linked in an efficient chain of production.  If food, particularly meat, was produced this way, it would be more expensive but infinitely more sustainable.  Steak or even chicken with dinner would be a treat again, the way it was 30 years ago before factory farming artificially drove down the cost of meat.  The price of food would once again take into account hidden costs like environmental degradation through single-crop farming and animal waste disposal.

Strangely, he uses the existence of these “beyond organic” farms to argue against being vegetarian or vegan, even though most of us don’t even have access to this kind of meat and dairy, and he admits that even the farmer with whom he worked had to employ an industrial slaughterhouse with questionable practices for his beef and pork.  Given the first two-thirds of the book, I was genuinely shocked at his conclusions and almost antagonistic tone, which probably contributed to my being defensive and shutting off a bit for the remainder of the book.

It might also be that the last third of the book was just boring.   There were a hundred pages about hunting for mushrooms in the forest, and the rest was a florid discussion of the thrills of hunting.  If you’re going to eat meat, killing and butchering it yourself is probably the most honest way to go about it, but it’s still not something I’m likely to ever try.

Although I disagreed with some of the conclusions he drew, I learned some interesting facts about food along the way, and it’s made me think more about what I eat.  For example, did you know that the only fuel your brain can consume is sugar, which is why we continue to crave sweet foods even after we’re too full to eat other things?  That’s why dessert is at the end of the meal; we’ll almost always “make room” in a way we wouldn’t for an extra helping of bread, meat, or veggies.  In conjunction with the inexpensive supply of artificial corn-based sweeteners, this is why food manufacturers are constantly looking for new sweet products which we will be biologically compelled to over-consume. 

Breakfast is often sugary enough on its own, but I almost never finish lunch or dinner without having at least a small piece of dark chocolate (and more often a few).  As such, I decided to try cutting out sweets for a bit.  I’m not so mental as to try to eliminate sugar entirely, since that would mean giving up things like bread and PBJ; I’m just forgoing that sweet little taste after meals.  In these first few days, it’s been more difficult behaviourally than biologically, showing that I eat dessert out of habit rather than from need, but it will be interesting to observe the effects over the coming days.  All bets are off, though, when we get to Carnavon, famous for chocolate dipped bananas, mango smoothies, and black sapote ice cream!

Charles Kingsford Smith and Others by Peter FitzSimons

I’ve been wanting to read this book for several years and was happy to finally get the chance to figure out why the Sydney airport was named after this guy.  Although the book asserts that his fame was equal to that of Lindbergh, I’d never heard of him until coming to Australia.  His feats, like being the first pilot to circumnavigate Australia and cross the Pacific, were impressive, but I think the fact that he flew with a crew instead of alone and made stops along the way kept him from capturing the public imagination in the same way that Lindbergh did.  The support of the PR machine that is the US media probably didn’t hurt Lindbergh either.

FitzSimons does an excellent job of communicating the risks taken by pilots in the era following World War I when flying records were set one month and exceeded the next as technology and pilot skill increased exponentially.  It really took guts to be a pioneer like Kingsford Smith and set out on these adventures over the bones and wreckage of fallen colleagues.  Unfortunately, this constant psychological strain, combined his experiences during the war, lead to Kingsford Smith’s demise after two decades in the air, but it’s a hell of a story along the way.  Given the number of people who died flying in the early days, it's amazing how many were willing to be pioneers in this area.  Without them, we never would have gone from the first powered flight to a man on the moon in just 66 years.  And we think technology moves quickly now!