Creature of the Shade

world's tallest (pause) moss

Sydney

When I was about 12 years old, I got my first inkling that things that seemed really terrible could also be very funny.  I had been walking home from the bus when a little yappy chihuahua got too much leash from its distracted owner, and ran up to bite me on the calf.  It was the first time I'd been bitten by a dog, so it was Great Rite of Passage, freighted with luscious, ennobling worries about infection and disease.

When I told my mother, I used tones that made the importance clear, and even inserted a dramatic pause:  "Mom, I was bitten (pause) by a chihuahua."  And she laughed.  Hard.  Gasping for breath, really.  And then she explained to her mortified son that his pause was to blame:  "You said 'I was bitten ...' and paused, so I visualized this huge angry dog.  Then when you said 'by a chihuahua' the big dog just imploded in a way that was very funny."

Something similar happens with the phrase "world's tallest moss." 

Phil and I encountered this Dawsonia in a rainforest gully on Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains.  It is, strictly speaking, the world's tallest genus of mosses.  There are several species, and I have no idea which one this is.  Some online sources suggest it can reach 1m in height, amazing for a plant with no vascular system to conduct nutrients efficiently.  UBC Botanical Garden notes that "some cells differentiate into analogues of the water and nutrient-conducting cells of vascular plants, while others become the thick-walled cells necessary to support the free-standing height."  So it may be a little like an early draft in the evolution of vascular systems that later freed plants to reach for the sky. 

So yes, the world's tallest moss.  Or if you the sensation of semantic implosion, the world's tallest ... (pause) ... moss.

space

Sydney

When I first imagined moving to Australia, it was about space.  Everything felt spacious here.  The bracing void of the continent seemed to promise more room in all dimensions, not just between cities but between moments, between thoughts, even between walls. 

But metaphors have half-lives, and as they decay the raw becomes rawer.  On my first flight across the continent, I set myself a task.  I would fix my eye on the patch of red land below me, framed like a picture in the airplane window.  I'd take this picture as an object of meditation, follow my breath, and commit to remaining with it until something about it changed.

I could never do it.  Perhaps the picture in the window would be scalloped pink dunes, stretching across the picture frame, rolling slowly to the left with always a new identical dune rolling in from the right.  I'd watch as hundreds passed, waiting for the variation.  Something.  I didn't need a road, a town.  A tree would have done, or even just a shift in the pattern of dunes, a spare beat in the rhythm.  Nothing.  The land did change, but at a pace below human perception. 

And I thought:  Yes, I needed space.  But nobody needs this much space.  

 

australia: the path

Sydney

 

I took this photo in the Northern Territory, in Litchfield National Park just south of Darwin, but it's a good image of the Australian woodland as archetype.  An Aussie friend saw it and said at once: "Yes, that's our national landscape.  And that's our path."  Maybe it goes somewhere interesting, but chances are it will lead to more of the same.  At once we were spinning out the Australian national character:  Don't get excited about the future; it's likely to be disappointing.  Best keep your nose down.  It'll probably just go on and on like this.

If you head out of any mainland capital and go for a walk in the woods, then except for the rare patch of rainforest it's likely to have this feel:  A pervasive grey-green or "khaki" color.  Trees of various sizes, at various densities, but mostly eucalypts, and mostly not very tall.  Shrubs and grasses, now and then an herb.  A heavy duff of dead leaves, slow to decay, smothering many sprouts. 

The soil seems color-coded by region in a way that only underscores the sameness.  In the north (pic above) there's often a burgundy tinge to the soil.  In the southeast, around Sydney and Canberra, the path is usually orange:

... and in the west, I'm told, it's often a sandy beige.   Sometimes the path leads somewhere amazing: a rock formation, a rainforest, an unusual flower or bird, but these things are striking in a distinctively Australian way, because of the reliable background on which they appear.

Even incongruity becomes reliable.  Callitris, for example, is a conifer from the cypress family (juniper, redcedar, sequoia etc.) that somehow ended up in Australia.  Conifers are so unimportant in Australian flora that I always think of Callitris as somehow exiled or astray.  I've seen it in many dry woodlands in Australia, and in its thick dark green mass it always looks an exotic from the American west or Japan.

There's nothing like deep green to make you notice how grayed-out the background is.

There were many pleasures in my quick trip to the tropical north, but the strongest impression was of this remarkable constancy.  Plants I met in the north were mostly different species of genera that I know from Sydney.  It was a different team but with the same specialised roles, playing the same game.

hello from batchelor, northern territory

Sorry for the light posting.  Lately I have spent too many days in small rooms, most recently at the Planning Institute of Australia conference in Darwin, on Australia's tropical north coast.  Tonight, however, I reach you through the thinnest imaginable thread of wi-fi from the Batchelor Butterfly Farm (and Tropical Retreat) in Batchelor, NT, near Litchfield National Park. Uploading photographs would take forever, so we'll have a go at naked text.

Signifiers at hand:  Eating dinner at a long polished-wood table on a large verandah, a soft evening breeze piercing the humid heat without really making it cooler.  A little buddha at the end of the table.  Hindu prayer flags, fifties jazz, a noisy frog atop the wooden butterfly on the wall.  Kitchen behind me, to my right an elderly Aussie couple chatting with a young Spanish couple about the economy.  A talkative host, fiftyish, long hair, thin shirt open to hairy chest, who tells us he likes it here but would rather be in Bali.  Around the corner (for all great Aussie verandahs wrap around) a knot of young backpackers in the smoking section, laptops glowing with the news from Denmark.

Batchelor is not quite the stereotypical Aussie middle of nowhere, but it's far from anywhere but Darwin, which takes pride in being nowhere near anything.  A week ago, on a short drive from Brisbane to Toowoomba in Queensland, I enjoyed a series of road signs counting down the km to Darwin, something like:

    TOOWOOMBA       15
    CHARLEVILLE      320
    DARWIN            3592

But I flew to Darwin, coward that I am, and today, driving south into the great north, reading signs like

   HOWARD SPRINGS    3
   KATHERINE            268
   ALICE SPRINGS    1482

... I wondered if I would ever set off on a long road trip again.  I don't own a car, and drive only on special rental-car occasions, so there's always a sense of event about it.  For a moment I wondered what it would be like to drive to Alice Springs, accumulating the rubbish of life in the back seat, chapped faces hurled at the hot red wind.  It's one of those things that friends do together to see if they're really friends. 

But once I left metro Darwin, and the road straightened out, the speed limit went up to 130 kph (81 mph).  I gasped -- I had literally never seen a 130 kph sign before, but for obvious reasons couldn't take a photo.  Briefly I tried speeding up to 130 on the two-lane highway, something I've probably not done since a very brief period of reckless teenagerdom.  But many things that feel thrilling at 16 feel suicidal at 46, and this was one of them.  The triple-trailer trucks (called 'road trains' here) would have to dawdle after me at 110 until the moment, bound to come soon, where they could see 20km of dead straight road ahead, stretched taut as though tied to the horizon.  Then they'd show me who was boss.

So it will be short drives for me, I expect, for all the banality of planes.  Short drives that end, on good days, at odd places like Batchelor, a town laid out around grand park squares on Garden City principles, as though ready to become Canberra, but still just a small place where the CBD is a very large general store and service station and liquor store and post office, and the beautiful people are at the Butterfly Farm.