Introduction.
Chapter 1.A Visit to my Farm.
A Visit.
Thinking.
The Hidden Agenda.
A Map of the Farm.
A View of the Farm from the Jungle Path.
The Jungle Shrine
Chapter 2.Weird Things.
The Power of the Coincidence.
The Local Town and its Secret Meaning.
Symbols
Another Weird Month in the Pocket
Chapter 3.The Mysterious Bond between Humans and Dogs
Nell and the Dead Koala
Death of Nell, Part Human Dog.
Three Dogs
Looking at Nell.
Chapter 4. Snakes and their Portent.
Snakes.
A Reply to Snakes.
Chapter 5.Visitors.
Meiko
Tatiana
Pixie
A Visitor needing Jungle Therapy.
A Visit after a Gap of Twenty Years.
A Visit from a Lady called Sheeba.
Kerry.
Cindy.
Two Girls.
A Brother Sister Combination.
Jane.
An Unsuccessful Visit.
My Fantasy.
Loving your Work.
Boredom.
Chapter 6 Stories from Friends, Neighbours, and Relatives.
A Family Coincidence.
Zen, Amish, or Presbyterian.
Murderous Neighbours.
Married Life.
Extra Help.
Untold Stories.
Gympie Messmates.
The Family Jinx
Gertrude’s Confession
Chapter 7.Farm Life
Rustic Australia.
How I Found $350,000.
Fire Come Quick!
And What’s Even More.
The Cow a Tragically Cursed Animal.
Snakes as Metaphore
Chapter 8. Philosophy.
Is the Energy of Sex Needed to Save the Planet?
Dogism
The Kingdom of the Mind.

Introduction: I bought my farm now 34 years ago and it was in a seriously degraded state. It looked like an ecological hell, the house was dilapidated and looked like it was about to fall over from the leaning stumps. This is my story of my treeplanting efforts and how it has been turned into a verdant paradise. I host the occasional visitor who come here to do some work in return for keep and to learn about growing trees on farms and while here they experience a full dose of rustic australiana and to participate with me in my charmed life style. This book is a collection of essays that I’ve written over the last few years about my thoughts and experiences.
I’ve even had the opportunity to have read and broadcast a seventeen of them over the radio on Radio National and they have even said that they liked my stories and to keep sending them in. Although the planting and growing of trees may seem ordinary, it seems to me, a former good
Presbyterian, to have opened the door to things I could never have imagined.
The stories are as they were written at the time and are all 100% true. An alternative name for my manuscript is "Trees and the Working of Magic".

Chapter 1. A Visit to My Farm
 
A Visit. I host the occasional visitor where visitors do some work in return for keep but a visit to my farm isn’t like a visit to a more ordinary farm. The reason is that I plant and grow these trees for timber, a very long term project where the returns are in the theoretical and distant future as opposed to normal farming where the returns are more immediate.
Although the physical work is important, the biggest challenge is in fact, psychological. The work of site preparation, planting, weed control, pruning and then eventual growth takes many, many, years before a possible income is generated.
So far my wait is now over 30 years and all with the risk of cyclones, droughts, fires, market fluctuations, and changing government regulations. It is a strain which no normal outlook can endure. A different approach is required. Work here has to be done like a hobby or better still a meditation. The enjoyment is not to be thought of as a reward in the future but in the present moment itself. The pleasure of growing trees as something of beauty, the pleasure of repairing the environment and the work becomes yoga in nature.
I am not a workaholic. Work has to be seen in its true perspective. The rules for work here are one, only work when one hears “the call”. Two, work always as slowly as possible. While there is movement there is still hope, and three, if you wish sit and daydream and enjoy a heat induced rustic reverie, it is okay since it must be for a reason. Just one inspirational thought may by pass a life of drudgery. It is the philosophical recompense that is out goal and the chance to reflect on life and its meaning.
The good news is that while we sit and think and devote ourselves to the Religion of Good Ideas, my trees are all out there growing all day, every day, year in and year out. Time may weary me but my trees are getting better day by day.
Some time in the future, I’ll have my sawmill and hopefully all will be well but in the mean while, I’m left with my thoughts. I suppose this book is about my thoughts and experiences. Yes thinking is my religion and even recompense.
Thinking. What a great and mysterious process! Planet earth, once a barren rock, eventually delivered humans by the not understood means of evolution, and since then, we humans have then added civilisation. All of our efforts have come about by thinking and the resultant inspirational thoughts.
When the torch light of the human mind is directed to a problem, marvelous solutions have appeared. Jumbo jets fly reliably and passengers don’t even consider or even have the thought of the technical problems that have had to have been overcome for 350 tons to fly 400 passengers at 600 miles per hour from one side of the planet to another in 20 hours and in safety.
The internet looks so natural but the coming together of so many areas of human thinking to direct a controlled stream of electrons by binary mathematics to me and my computer screen is incomprehensible! Individuals have spent their whole lives just working on one problem and when a solution is reached, the general public buys it, uses the consequences and takes the benefits, and forgets the mental effort which has gone into it.
Thinking is applied in technology and good thoughts can eventually be proven over the bad ones because they work. Thinking is also personal and we apply it in our ordinary lives and I argue that the process is still equally powerful. We live on the cutting edge of time. Our lives are not static and decisions must be made from one moment to the next. An issue arises, we think about it and come to a conclusion. Unfortunately not all of us look at the situation dispassionately and clearly. Too often many of us just follow the established and inert pattern of hackneyed phrases, clichés and platitudes. Perhaps we could look at scientists and musicians because these people have proven good and inspirational ideas to see how and where their ideas came about.
I suppose that I have two general ways to the reservoir of ideas. One can come anywhere, anytime, while doing anything and a so called good idea will come into my head. The other is upon waking and a good idea is just there waiting. These good ideas are exceedingly precious because one good idea can inspire and dominate us for the rest of the day, the week or the rest of our lives. Receiving ideas seems a passive thing. The subject matter or situation is know, the question is posed and we just wait for the new idea to land from where we do not know. That subconscious space is like a void behind a door left open. I never feel responsible for an idea, I didn’t put it there, it just arrived, but I am responsible for what I do with the idea. One thought can motivate us into action and its consequent results.
Some time we have a problem and no thought seems to come for a solution. Day after day the problem grows and so does the tension and stress. It is commonly argued that this tension is a bad thing but I would argue that it is necessary. The tension I hope is like a pressure cooker and the resultant reluctant thought will be eventually born. Other times we have the thoughts but due to inertia we don’t act upon them. Sometimes we are literally terrified to break the patterns of our normal and becoming redundant self. These can be taboo and dangerous thoughts we dare not even mention.
This inaction leads to I believe depression. We have the thoughts but fail to act on them. If we have a certified good idea in our head, it is demanded we must act upon it. If it is a bad idea, it will eventually be forgotten, and die.
A good idea demands at least the first step be taken and this will lead to its sequence of another idea or more action. If a problem occurs the solution may seem impossibly far away but all that is needed is the immediate first step and the consequences need not yet be know but will eventually follow.
Maybe the lesson is just general life experience which leads to a greater knowledge of life. Evolution occurs for species and life also seems to be a learning experience as we evolve from one idea to the next. How else can we resolve the sometime difficult problem of telling the difference between a good idea and a bad idea as initially they may look the same but by the experience of life. Another general rule is that when in doubt, do nothing. Time will define more clearly the problem and the needed solution becomes clearer. If thoughts are so powerful, maybe they can even transform our ordinary lives.
A place needs to be always left open in our mind for the arrival of thoughts. Maybe if noted closely and acted upon with propinquity, that is at the right time and place, they are serendipitous, that is that no matter what, good fortune will always follow.
The sun is always shining, the traffic lights are always green, we meet the stranger and receive the message and the inexorable flow of time continues on with us welcoming each moment. Evolution continues to what we hope is the eventual redemption of this beautiful blue green planet and we play our little part in the whole scheme of things and it all progresses smoothly. We can only hope! Oh blessed reverie!
The Hidden Agenda that Fated me into becoming a Treeplanter
What are the events in my life that have some how set the scene for me to become a tree planter? After I had been living here for quite a few years, and had started on my tree planting way of life, I started to think why am I doing this? As a child, I lived in an old timber town which was famous for its hoop pine forests and the timber which they produced. By the 1950’s when I came to live there, the hoop pine industry had completely gone. The rainforests of hoop pine were logged out and gone. The town was only half the size it had been and there were still several derelict houses around and the bare ruins of others. Just in front of the house was the remains of an old bullock wagon and just down the road and a turn right away from the town towards where other houses of the town used to be was a still complete bullock wagon. In the school grounds was the remains of one of the steam engines which brought logs from the forests to the town sawmill. The timber business was gone and so had much of the town.
Not long after we arrived, some of the hoop pine that still remained around the house had a large crop of seeds and I can remember with some of the other local children collecting these seeds and planting them or else collecting these seedlings as they germinated and helping them to cast off their husk and planting them. In a letter I wrote to my aunt at that time I said that I had about 90 of them in pots. Now hoop pine is a remarkable tree and it able to be suppressed and to still grow very slowly for many years in this most restricted environment.
In fact 17 years ago, I had the “good” idea of growing some hoop pine in some bottles. I chose a bottle because I could keep them in doors and no water would leak out as it would from a conventional pot. Anyway all 3 hoop and one bunya are still alive and well and they have hardly grown at all. Just give them a little of what they need for life and they will hang in there. Three of these hoop pine from Canungra were kept alive in these pots for about 20 years by my mother until she eventually gave them to me to release here. One was even actively kept by my mother as a bonsai in a tiny pot, about 3insx2insx1ins and was still only about 1foot tall. All three are growing at my front gate and one is even quite large and all are healthy.
As a child I also used to think where I could plant them out. I even thought of having a farm and planting them there but I didn’t know how that set of circumstances could some about. I used to sleep on the verandah in those days and I used to look out onto the slopes of that unusually named mountain called Mt.Misery which rose beside the town. On its slopes going down to the town and the site of the sawmill, had been planted several rows of hoop pine that went half way up the hill side. I had been told that they had been planted many years earlier by the sawmill owner, a Romeo Lahey. An obvious gesture to all the destruction of the hoop pine that he had participated in, in his short term exploitation of the resource. The story is in actual fact a bit more complicated because Romeo Lahey was one of the leading conservationists of this time and it was his efforts that lead to the declaration of Lamington Nation Park, Queensland’s first great national part and the forming of the National Park Association. Even as a child I was vaguely aware of this paradox.
The departed timber industry and the social disruption indicated by the abandoned part of town, the gesture of the tree planting to some how indicate the direction that should have been taken , and also the advantages of a large National Park from which flowed Canungra Creek which was reputedly never known to run dry, and where I spent much of my spare time.
Years later, I now have a degree in forestry and am working for the Queensland forestry department growing hoop pine in plantations. The problem I have is that they in the 1970’s are still clearing valuable rainforests and good eucalyptus forests to plant their hoop pine while there are vast areas of already cleared private land that once had a good forest and has now degraded and growing mostly weeds.
I also hate going to work every day and because of my rather austere nature have saved up enough money to buy a completely clapped out farm myself. What do I plan, well of course, I intend to be a tree farmer and grow hoop pine on these eroded and weed infested slopes. I’ve grown trees in the forestry and now I intend to do it for myself . Eventually it will make some money and it will be a vast improvement on what is there already.
One thing happens after another. Each step seems sensible in itself but little do I realize at the time that some how it is fate or my subconscious that is setting me up to play out the consequences of my thoughts that were set up for me early in life.
How did I end up here? Well I have also found another peculiar thread. I surmise that when my parents first meet, one said to the other, “Where do you live?”. The reply was, “ Bunya Street”, [which was true,and in the bucolic sounding suburb of Greenslopes], and the other said, “That is strange since there is a largish bunya pine in my back yard!” (which was also true).
I could be cruel and say that is all they had in common other than being good Christians but they did eventually get married, my grandfather in the meantime did plant in the back yard of his house in Bunya Street, not a bunya but a hoop pine, but I can see what he was getting at. That tree now many years later dominates a part of the landscape of the Greenslopes suburb while the bunya pine at the other house was eventually cut down because it was too prickly, and dangerous with its large nuts that sometimes fell from it.
I did though help my grandfather cut down a runt hoop pine in the back yard beside the garage and it was used it as a Christmas tree one year.
I was eventually conceived just west of the Bunya Mountains and so when I visited the farm here for an inspection before buying and I saw a bunya pine at the front gate, planted by the previous owner in a fit of prevision along with several other bunya pine, naturally I feel that I have come home.
My sister now lives in my grandparents house in Bunya Street and I turned into a tree planter, growing mostly hoop pine but also the occasional bunya. No wonder I like to keep one growing on the back verandah in a pot. Is that called a talisman?
On the subject of growing trees. Growing trees is very exciting as they get bigger and bigger and transform the environment back to green health but it is a slow gratification. Sometimes though I need to cut one of these older trees down and recently I cut down one that was 124 feet tall. Growing trees may be exciting but it is quite a thrill in another way to cut it down. Don’t worry, I sold it for money and other better trees have taken its place.
An overview of my farm from The Walking Track. If a visitor arrives, I usually take them for a walk on my walking track circuit. I even host the occasional group and recently took an artistic group for this walk. This is how I described my walk to them.
The source of the inspiration for art is the real allure and can it be found in the wild beauty of the jungle? The track is about 3 km long and can be walked briskly in about an hour. I sometimes walk it as a walking meditation. The Jungle Path as a Venue for Art. Visitors enter through a large old silver gate and then up to the old style Queensland house The path starts here and leads from the comforts of the house and into the dark and mysterious realm of the jungle.
The path is the ribbon of smooth over rough places, leading us in comparative safety and security into the unknown and uncivilised jungle. From the path we view into and over the wilds and feel that the unknown has been tamed.
Art is the achievement of civilisation but uncivilised nature draws us with the allure of its beauty. My path explores the tension between these two opposites.
The House. I’m very keen on the metaphor and coincidences and although I won’t go into them here, I’d like to point out the similarity between the shape of the roof of the house and the mountain behind. From the deck at the back of the house, the sun on the summer solstices rises at 6am exactly behind the peak. This and a few other things I take as the house and landscape as being sort of my own personal stonehenge.
I’m always looking for evidence as to how the void or the subconscious influences us either as for example fate or artistic inspiration. I look to Nature and here it is the mysterious jungle and landscape that is our source.
As far as I’m concerned, I live in a paradise but I’m sure that the previous owners would have thought that they lived in hell.
Gully Water Hole. The first seat is at a water hole in the gully. This water hole is miraculously always full as it is fed by a little gully that I’ve never know in over 30 years to stop flowing. A carved sign says, “Normality Ends; Reality Begins”?
Just over the other side of the gully is a tree with the initials of CM carved into it. Who did this and for what reason is now totally lost.
The Ozzie Sauna. That’s what I call it but its not a sauna but an out door bath with a 44 gallon drum, filled with water and heated by a fire. With the help of an assist to set the fire and bucket the water, the person taking the bath gets as red as a lobster before jumping into the water hole to cool down before returning to the bath again. This can be done all year round because our winters are very mild.
Pine Plantation. A little further on, we enter one of my ordered forests with the trees so tall and straight and all planted in rows, well sort of anyway. One of the trees here has done the impossible and instead of growing upwards like all the rest of them, has by a freak of nature grown into a circle before heading upwards again. The impossible has become possible. The natural laws of nature have been turned upside down and there is a sense of the unease.
Placed Rocks. We now glance at a strategically placed rock and the question is posed, is it natural or has it been placed there by the hand of man and if so, for what reason? Is the motivation art or is it just a whim? Man has been placing rocks for thousands of years and I’m drawn to the pastime as well but I don’t know why. The next rock looks like a horses’ skull. An interesting small rock catches my eye and I pick it up and carry it with me to place in a suitable location. A Spherical Rock. The next rock is a sphere resting on another rock. Under the plinth I have stored a piece of chalk, and using this makeshift globe, I might draw the outline of Australia. If my visitor is from overseas, I might then invite them to draw their own country.
The Hut. A small clearing is entered and here there is a small and remote hut. Inside are a wood stove, a single bed, and a desk. This is occasionally used by visitors looking for solitude and a back to nature experience. On the back door is a little mural painted by two hippy girls. One a business graduate from the US with a professional background and whose father was employed on some secret mission in the Pentagon and the other a natural free spirited hippy from NZ. Together they were travelling the great magical land of Oz doing spontaneous abstract murals as acts of goodwill. After sampling the casual life of a hippy, I never discovered how successfully the US girl returned to the grim reality of her business world. Above the door is a sign carved by another visitor saying, "The Edge of the Known World". The path is taking us beyond the known and into the mysterious unknown.
Cairn. Next a fork in the path marked by a cairn, the ancient sign of human habitation. This should still be standing unless the cows have knocked it down since they hate all aspects of my landscape art. The left hand path goes down into the rocky gully, and past a probably a dry waterfall. This path which we probably won’t use goes directly up the hill, over a balancing rock, through a tunnel large enough to walk through, past a bat cave, lookout and onto the camping cave.
Ozzie Gothic. Go straight ahead and if you look carefully at your feet, there is a piece of bent and rusted barbed wire. Further to the right, is even the well preserved remains of an old fence. This fence is symbolic of the changes that have occurred. One hundred years ago this was untouched rainforest. It was cleared and burnt and turned into bananas and pasture for cattle and a fence was build with confidence for the future. Now this phase seems almost impossible to perceive as the jungle advances slowly and relentlessly and civilisation is in retreat. This is an example of what I call Australian gothic. A now a mysterious ruin of a lost or declining civilisation and a pioneer way of life now almost totally lost.
Sally’s Horse. Just before the next intersection, look up and there is in abstract form a galloping horse in wire and fibreglass.
Jungle Cave. To the left, the track goes across the gully, up the slope, and past a giant ancient rainforest tree. This tree’s botanical name was named after the government botanist who as a boy lived over the other side of the range. He wrote a famous rainforest book in 1926 with photos of large rainforest trees with men strangely juxapositioned beside them holding their axes. To look at an axe, it is paradoxically mostly wood except for a one side sharpened 4 ½ pound piece of steel attached to one end. These men when the botanist left the scene, proceeded to cut the trees and whole forest down and then to burn the whole area when it dried out totally killing all plants and completely blackening the area making it look like a blackened moonscape. In fact this was one of my jobs while working in the Government Department of Forestry and I have to confess that I have even been employed as axeman and have even participated in this type of procedure. The smoke from these huge fires could be seen for many miles around.
Over more rocks and on to the camping cave. Some one even came all the way from the U.S. to camp in this cave and experience the closeness of nature but living here is very rugged. This cave has been visited by a child as young as 6 weeks and a man as old as 87 years so the path can’t be too severe.
The Jungle Shrine. A little further on along the main track is another seat and my jungle shrine. Here there is a collection of quirky and poignant things, an old cow bone, a broken piece of pottery, bent pieces of wood, reject glass beads and even a piece of gold foil. I like very much the Japanese word of wabi sabi. This word is the basis of Japanese aesthetics. It means the profound in the ordinary, the aesthetics of imperfection and the subtle beauty of nature. Here visitors are invited to mount the dais, sound the gong, a fortuitously found hub cap, and to extemporise on their jungle thoughts. For example, to quote a visitor, "I used to walk up to your big silver front gate and think that what ever lay beyond it was a mystery, now that I’ve had a look, I now know that the mystery is even greater!" Yes I like the thought. This now isn’t so much jungle art but jungle theatre or if it’s a confession, it becomes jungle therapy. I’ll come back to this later. Visitors are invited to collect a piece of broken pottery and to take it with them and to add it to the walking track where ever it seems appropriate. When we walk the path, we wear it down fractionally and it is beneficial to make a little reparation. These discarded pieces of pottery which were once useful, broken into uselessness and now have become useful again. To walk the path and to be momentarily caught by surprise by a glint of broken pottery may allow us in the instant to see things differently.
The Goddess. Further into the jungle and another seat. Here there is the Goddess Pomona, found broken and abandoned at the local tip but here glued back together and hopefully with her powers restored. A drink is offered with a natural rock chalice from the clear water from an almost permanent spring. More broken pottery, this time from a local artist. Another cairn is slowly rising as suitable rocks are found and added.
The Lookout. The path now turns to the right and gradually climbs the hill side. A lookout rock is reached with a view over the valley below. In a crevice in the cliff behind the lookout is another cow bone. This bone has the word "GOMPA" painted on to it. This bone was found when I planted the Gympie messmate tree beside the lookout. Bear a moment’s thought to the days when one hundred cows lived here and they needed to graze so high up on this rugged hill side for grass. Circumstances change. The word gompa is a shrine dedicated to the Buddha. This was painted by a Japanese lady who visited here a couple of years ago called Meiko and I have an essay about her a bit further on. She worked as what she called as a yoga coordinator in a zen monestary and had also studied in India. She was of a very abstract nature. For her, beauty was found at every turn of the path and every twist of a leaf. When she walked the path, at suitable places as reverence to the beauty of nature, she painted a japanese character in watercolour paints on leaves, rocks and stems. Upon seeing the cow bone, she prostrated herself in deference to the lost life. On it she painted the word, gompa. I suppose as an attempt to somewhat redeem the situation. Never has my walking track been so greatly revered! The view over looks the valley we have just walked up and across to the trees and caves on the other side.
A Deciduous Fig. A little further on are some fig trees growing over rocks. These are the same species that are growing over the Buddhist temples at Ankor Wat. A closely related species to this tree, was under which the Buddha received his enlightenment. The high roots and low branches symbolically pull together the distant worlds of earth and heaven.
A Cliff Face with a Face in the Cliff. Just beyond is a human face in the cliff. The face looks rather severe as it looks down on my farm below. On each cheek is painted a Japanese character. One is now almost invisible due to the ravages of time and the meaning is now lost, the other is a word that may be translated as respect.
A Rocky Grotto. Another cliff and some over hanging rocks with a ledge upon which I place my rock. This is my art in the making. There are a few other things and another character. This can still be understood and recently I was told that it says "thank you". I appreciate the thought. A Painted Face. An artist visited me recently who specialised in what I call minimalist art of a few lines and this is his contribution. He also did mafia types.
Log Seat. On now to a large seat made from the wood from a giant tree. This tree was so large that the cross cut saw that cut it down had only an inch on either side to work with and so the process was very slow and difficult as the story was told to me by the old man who cut it down in his youth. Eventually the tree was felled and speared down below. We can’t help but dwell on human folly. The effort to cut the ancient forest, the effort to grow bananas on the steep slope, the effort to keep it free of weeds for grazing cattle, the lost battle due to the persistence of the invading weeds, the supreme battle to attack the weeds and plant a new forest while staggering over these giant logs and the effort to keep the weeds in check until the trees can stand alone. We sit on the seat and ponder!
The Severed Head. Further on and to another seat. Looking up and tied into the fork of a shrub, we can see a rock in the shape of a severed head. This is an example of suiseki, a Japanese word meaning something found in nature that represents something else. Visitors are invited to take a piece of chalk and enhance the features to perhaps make it clearer as to who it is who is found here. In the middle ages, severed heads of criminals were placed on stakes for their shock value and to help maintain law and order. I have not come to a conclusion as to the purpose of this severed head. He now has a chip from his nose from when the cows knocked him down the hill while in a different location. It was quite a struggle to find him in all the lantana and rocks below and to carry him back up the hillside.
Short Cut Return. Keep walking on, through the eucalyptus forest and onto the slashed track. Keep going until there is an intersection. Here a turn to the right is a short cut return for those who have had enough. Straight on and in to the rainforest again with another large tree and piles of rocks. Through another planted forest to another seat where there once was a view down to the house below which is now hidden from view because of the growth of the trees.
Views and Completing the Circuit. Further on with views to the valley beyond and towards my farm before down the hill and past older plantations of pines and Gympie messmates, across a gully and on to the driveway and then returning to the house. The circumabulation has been completed.
May I finish with the Buddhist word of kora? This means to walk around an object of respect as an act of devotion and meditation. Is that suitable for here?
My Jungle Shrine and Ritual. At the back of my farm, I have a walking track that follows parallel to the gully and up into the rainforest and jungle, past the hut, the turn to the cave, and on to a small clearing and on to my jungle shrine. Here there is a plank for a seat and a rocky shrine containing a few quirky things such as a cow bone discovered when I planted a few trees there, a couple of valueless jewels, a few broken shards of pottery, and a collection of bent pieces of wood. Around the clearing are a few other symbols, a donated garden elephant which was to be cast away with a globe on its back, an obelisk, a gong from a found hubcap, and a chair as a substitute throne. These objects mean nothing in themselves but are an attempt to set an atmosphere of mystery and other worldliness. Here is the dark and mysterious jungle as opposed to the know normality of every day life. I suppose that I have my own ritual here and this is what it is. There is some raised ground and visitors and invited to take to this make do dais. Here they are invited to extemporise. What I mean is to open your mind and to talk freely on what ever thoughts come into your mind. Most of us live in a regulated and normal society alienated from the natural world. What I suppose that I’m trying to do is to have acknowledged by speaking freely and spontaneously , to admit the power, beauty and even relevence to us of the natural world and its power to inspire. We are now in the jungle and jungle rules prevail. This is the challenge, can one speak truthfully and without self censorship as one allows a flow of thoughts. Surely now is the time to say what ever one likes. If it makes things any easier, maybe there could be an extra rule of secrecy and confidentiality if there is a likelyhood of it being some form of confession. A pure heart is an advantage. This may seem a harmless game but it is really a step into the unknown to speak the train of unbridled thoughts provided they can be successfully harnessed.
Me, if I take to the dais, I think that I’ll keep my thoughts to myself though!

Chapter 2.
Weird Things.
I don’t go out of my way to particularly notice weird things but I must admit to being fascinated by them and what they imply. Most people are very dismissive of coincidences but I certainly like them and keep an open eye for such things. Here is a collection of some of the weird things that I’ve noted.
The Power of the Coincidence.
The first is a story from a hard headed engineer who wrote a book called more or less “Great English Railway Accidents” and in it he relates an accident he experienced and the importance the coincidence played in this heat of the moment thinking. I have the second edition which brings things up to date. In this edition he tells of an accident in which he was actually involved in as an unwilling participant. A train was travelling at speed from London to Bristol when he noticed that the train was travelling at speed on a temporary side track. He noted this and hoped that there was a fast change over from the temporary line back to the main line. Just then the carriage starts to violently shake and he realises that there isn’t and the carriage starts to tip over. What is his thought in the heat of the moment as the accident unfolds? He thinks of the coincidence and not the obvious fact that he may be immanently be killed or injured but that , “me, who has even written a book on british train accidents am now actually in one myself”. He is an engineer and doesn’t play upon the obvious irony or the strange twists of the human mind. He lets it pass that in the heat of the moment it is the coincidence that has his attention and not the immediate danger to his existence. Why is the coincidence so important to us? It has to be that our inner being feels isolated and alone and the hope and wish is there that God [or more correctly the goddess of fate] actually cares and even gives us a sign that our petty lives don’t go unnoticed. The book is called “Historic Railway Disasters” by O.S.Nock and has been freely interpereted. One person was killed and a number were injured so it was a legitimate accident. It’s the weird things that trouble our mind and it is frequently these that we remember rather than a prozaic chronology of events.
The Local Town and its Secret Meaning. Gympie is the nearest town and it is common knowledge that the word is aboriginal for a local small tree that once was common along the banks of the river. The tree though is exceptional for its ferocious stings for anyone who touches the leaves. The word for this small tree is usually said double as Gympie Gympie. The tree does occur here on the farm but it isn’t very common. I’ve been stung on numerous occasions particularly when I used to work for the Department of Forestry. A sting can be very painful and is not taken lightly. There are several bush remedies but I don’t believe them. The best thing to do is to just leave it alone and eventually the pain will disappear after an hour or so. If however you bump the spot you were stung or experience coldness, the stinging sensation will return. This can go for up to nine months as I can testify. There is though a deeper meaning of the word Gympie and that is that the word actually means Devil. To say Gympie Gympie is plural meaning Devils. The inference is that the plant has the Devil in it because of its terrible sting. There are two weeds here that are also associated with the Devil and they are, Devils Apple, an attractive plant with an attractive fruit which is thought to be poisonous and Devil’s Fig. Both plants are prickly and undesirable. No wonder this deeper meaning is kept secret as it is just understood as meaning this stinging tree. With a town called Devil, no wonder weird things occur. I’m always on the look out for symbols and this is as essay on some of the symbols that I’ve found associated with my wonderful house.
Symbols. I am someone who is most blessed and gracious to live in a most wonderful house and in a most wonderful location. My house is made of timber in the Queensland style and was built in 1929. It is in need of a coat of paint but that will happen in due time. It has a sun deck on the eastern side to greet the rising sun with optimism and a protected verandah on the northern side for warm relaxing. I also love my wood stove, my grand piano purchased at a garage sale, my harmonium bought for $25 from a very old family friend, the wife of the former moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Queensland, and my 1911family heirloom piano. This was purchased new by an old relative who was professional musician, composer, music critic and raconteur. I even sought to learn to play the piano on this piano and I also taught my daughter to play on it as well.
I also appreciate the secluded location at the end of the road with mountains on three sides. I also feel the comfort of a healthy environment from all the trees I’ve planted to restore this formerly devastated landscape. I once had a dream and in it was an old book in a dusty corner titled, “Trees and the Working of Magic”. Apparently, the magic is even stronger if you have planted the trees yourself. Food for thought as I’ve transformed the landscape there.
Although my property is only quite small [125 acs], I’ve discovered here several caves. Even as a 10 year old child and living elsewhere, I discovered a cave that the owner of land didn’t know about. An owl flew out of the cave as I approached it for the first time and sat on a tree just outside the entrance.
I’ve also discovered several very old and large trees here as well as a spring that keeps a gully permanently flowing no matter how dry it gets. This keeps my water hole in the creek always full. Truly miraculous and I am most grateful.
The mountain behind the house which dominates the view is sort of imitated by the hipped roof of the house. The slope of the house’s roof is 30’. I’ve noted sun rise times and for three months of the year as spring and summer progress, the sun rises at 6am because the mountain slope is about 26’, the degrees of latitude south. On the solstice, the sun rises right behind the mountain peak. My own sort of powerfully symbolic stonehenge.
This alliance seems to be so powerful that it has twisted the house around about 6 inches on its old stumps, it had a severe twisting lean on it when I purchased it, caused by cyclones I suspect, to align itself up more with the mountain peak and the solstice. A new set of stumps set in concrete have now stabilised the position. I’ve also noted the sun set. As the sun dips below the horizon, it casts a shadow of a cross from the sash window onto the bedroom wall. I’ve marked the cross and the date and time. On the summer solstice, it just touches the pane of glass in the window on the northern wall. On the 20th August, with the kitchen door closed, the sun as it sets casts a circle of light through the keyhole and onto the kitchen cupboard for a few minutes which I then marked. This only happens for a few days of the year. I then noticed that the circle of light is also cast in almost the same position for the 26th April but then that is what you’d expect except that the first date is my birthday and the second date is my grandfather’s birthday, the one I’ll mention in a later story. It also happens that my neighbour’s grandfather’s birthday is also the 26th April and his son’s birthday is the 20th August. His father was born next door in 1929, the property they still own.
The youngest son of the original owners, now an old man, very occasionally visits me. He told me that he was present by a coincident when the previous owner’s wife died. She was standing at the above mentioned spot washing the dishes. She collapses laughing uncontrollably, is helped to her feet and says that she is alright and continues washing, she then collapses a second time laughing and is taken into the lounge and dies there. This is infront of the pane of glass in a window which the snake strikes that I’ll tell more of in a later story. I was told that she was the actual owner of the farm. Her husband had a brother who was a lecturer at Queensland University in of all things, geography. I wonder what his land use thoughts were when he visited here.
My sister’s family is friendly with his son’s family. The farmer’s signature is under the house and so is the original owner’s signature. I’ve recently read a book called, “Memories and Visions of Paradise”. It is about the myth of how humans once lived in Paradise and then experienced the fall due to the tree on knowledge and the snake. I certainly believe that I live in physical paradise and believe in the eventual restoration of paradise here on this earth someday. The future great sacred planet earth!
My farm only actually came onto the market because of the death of the previous owner’s eldest son due to death from snake bite. This is as told to me by my old neighbour. This now to me is a very sobering and symbolic though and also because I do come across dangerous snakes occasionally. More on this later.
I don’t go out of my way to collect stories and weird things but they just seem to be brought to my attention. I think that I live in paradise, they thought that they were living in hell.
One day I went to visit a neighbour and as I was walking up the hill, I noticed that the only hoop pine tree beside his house had a lean on it. I said to him, “That pine tree has a lean on it. Are you concerned about it?” His reply was that there was nothing to worry about. That night, the tree fell over right on top of his gas guzzling Chrysler Valient and totally wrecked it. What do I think of that?
For the last two years of my primary school, we used to travel either on the back of a truck or by a small bus [a kombi van] to the local regional school where we did manual training of wood work, technical drawing and metal work and the girls did cooking, sewing and home economics. One morning I remember we were delayed because there was an accident on the quiet country road. An Austin A40 car had collided with an unloaded timber jinker. It was even obvious to us that the timber jinker had jack knifed and had hit the car. This is a common problem with unloaded jinkers and it is why they are usually hauled onto the back of the truck when unloaded. When we got to school we were told by word of mouth that the lady in the car was actually a teacher at the school and had been killed.
My two professions are first, forestry, and secondly teaching and to have the timber industry collide so brutally with the teaching profession is even now to me upsetting.
Another Weird Month "In the Pocket". I live at a place called Cedar Pocket and so I call living here as being “in the Pocket”.
Reality seems to give me a hard time and this last month has been even more unusual than most. A fresh whole fish appeared on my back deck. I suspect that this must have been accidentally dropped by a bird but it is a most unusual thing to happen. It was only small about 4 inches in length and would have come from a nearby creek. Just a few days after this, just behind the house, I discovered a ghastly inverted echidna. I saw on the ground this flesh red ball like thing. Upon looking closer, I find that it is an echidna that has just the previous night been caught and eaten by a dingo. It must have grabbed its nose and then started eating it from there. Some how the natural tensions of an echidna makes it invert as its insides are eaten out and what I found was the flesh coloured inner skin on the outside and all the spikes pointing inwards. Its in my shed if anyone is interested.
A few days later I’m in Gympie and I have a moment to spare before the opening of the post office. I notice a car with the number 999 and I casually remember the fundamentalist Christian who was in my staff room when I was a teacher. He had purchased a new car and it had the number plate number of 999. I asked him what did he think of that? He said that he didn’t mind because if ever his car was inverted and the number becomes 666, the sign of the beast, it would have been the work of the devil and to be expected. I went to the post office and returned to the library car park and as I was driving out, I noticed the car in front of me with the number 666 and I think that that is a bit unusual, when I then noticed the car beside it with the number 666 as well, I start to wonder what is going on. I then drive to a friend’s place just out of town and I happen to notice a just a very few number plates of only a very few cars, but what goes past but the number 222. Yes I was very careful with my work when I got there.
A lady visits me and we go to my shrine where she gives a little talk on spontaneous free speech and its challenges. During her stay, a sign is carved and hung which says "Reality Ends; Normality Begins". The day after her departure, a radio dramatisation starts written by Gertrude Stein, a famous jewish lesbian, [same orientation as my visitor], written in the spontaneous style of the free flow of thoughts and its quirky story line. My visitor spends a night sleeping in the lounge but the next night returns to her bed room complaining that the ticking of the clock is annoying and makes sleep difficult. The very afternoon of her departure in the morning, I return home and while winding the spring of this faithful and reliable century old family clock, the spring breaks and the clock is now very silent.
A week of storms commences. One storm has the rare event of hail only, and no rain, while the sun is still shining. A hail only sun shower I suppose. Another storm makes the electricity go off at 7pm after only about 6 hours of electricity supply from the previous blackout. It is 3pm the next afternoon when another storm is threatening and it looks as if there will be no return of electricity until at least tomorrow. I then telephone a friend who is coming for dinner and ask him to purchase a bag of ice to keep the fridge cold for another night. The storm comes and it is severe with huge hail stones. One I measure with my vernier calipers to be over 4 inches in diameter. What an experience it was being on the verandah while these huge blocks of ice come blasting out of the sky. The noise of the crashing on the verandah roof was deafening. My visitor tells me that it is the loudest noise she has ever heard. It is terrifying to think of being caught outside while these missiles are being fired. They crash into the concrete driveway skirt and bounce away or imbed themselves into the soft ground of the lawn. Luckliy it doesn’t last long and the onslaught is over. We go out side and collect a bucket full of ice and put it in the fridge. I then ring my friend again and say, don’t bother purchasing the ice, as it has already been delivered and is now in the fridge. Yes there are a few dents around the place and even a broken pane of glass. The new verandah roof has 5 distinct dents, but luckily no broken glass or damage to the cars and thankfully my satellite dish still works. The electricity was off for about 40 hours. The longest loss of electricity I’ve experienced here until it returned slowly. At first there was just an intermittent red glow in the light bulbs but slowly the glow increases to clear incandescence, the fridge starts to work and we are back to "normal"? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Post Script. I may be weird, or pathetic and some things are best not spoken but I have to admit that on the day that I completed this little story, we were invited, even almost insisted upon to visit some lesbian friends in the evening. They claimed that another friend of mine who was visiting was one of theirs and they wanted to prove it. In fact they were wrong, she describes herself as being one of that uncommon and little know about group called the asexuals. Only one car went past and I couldn’t help but notice as I waited for it to pass over the one lane bridge infront of me that it had the number 999!

Chapter 3. The Mysterious Bond between Humans and Dogs.
The love between dogs and humans seems to also be a source of unusual things. I have owned a couple of dogs and one in particular was Nell who probably loved me obsessively and here are some of her stories.
Nell and the Dead Koala. I’ve owned my farm for over 25 years now and I’ve never seen a koala here in all that time, although a koala was seen in the tree beside the house just before I bought it. About two years ago when it was dry, I found a very dead and rotten koala in a dry creek bed. I had a shovel with me and I lifted it out of the creek with that. It was so rotten that its head fell off. I then took the head back to the house and was able to clean it out with the hose. It was so decayed that the contents of the skull and the fur all came off easily.
I now had a koala skull which in actual fact I gave away the next day to some one who was interested. The next day I decided to go for a walk “up the back” and Nell decided to come with me part of the way and then she thinks that it is too boring to go with me and so she decides to go and have a feed of dead koala. She is a natural scavenger and almost certainly hasn’t eaten koala and is probably looking forward to tasting something new.
I come back to the house and after a little while hear a commotion going on and I decide to go and investigate. I go and have a look and see down on the creek flat my precious dog Nell being attacked by about 6 dingoes. I looked at them and they looked back at me.
I take a moment to recognize something out of the ordinary. Initially my brain doesn’t compute before I recognized what I was looking at. They all looked the same, largish, fairly young and quick moving and all red. I had never seen a dingo here and to see them all in this situation, all of a sudden was quite peculiar. In a second or two we each recognize each other and we each think that we are looking at the devil incarnate.
I said to those dingoes, “Get to hell out here and leave my Nell alone” , and they all left in a flash. I went and checked Nell out and she seems okay. I then went over to the dead koala and it was still there. I then helped Nell back to the house and looked at her more closely and I found that she was covered in bites including a large cut on her back.
The next day I went and looked for the dead koala but it was completely gone. All that remained was a few pieces of hair. I suspect that those dingoes came back during the night and ate that rotten old dead koala. A very dreadful meal, only for the desperate. I suspect that those dingoes would have preferred succulent dog to rotten old koala!
Nell is a tough cattle dog, used to bumps and knocks and makes a quick recovery, but I don’t think that even to the present that she has ever eaten koala, fresh or rotten.
Just recently I had to bury the dog just down the road who was killed one night by dingoes and dingoes have killed quite a few other local dogs.
Nell eventually dies and yes in unusual circumstances and this is her obituary [obitchuary?]. This story is two stories in one. With in it, an unusual event occurred as I was editing and rewriting it several years after I had first written it.
Death of Nell, Part Human Dog. Nell was a dog of mine who has just recently died. It was Friday the 4th May, 2001. I had just picked up a visitor, Cornelia from Gympie and later in the morning we went for a walk up to the cave. Nell and the two other dogs [Elkins and Zest, two city dogs belonging to my daughter Emily who are having a country holiday with me], came all the way to the cave. This was a bit unusual for Nell who for the last few months had only been walking to the steep rock just past the big tree and waiting there for my return, but this time she probably came a different way because since Geli's father [a friend of mine who lives just down the road, has an 87 year old father] wants to walk to the cave, I've made the track a bit easier by having a new deviation bypassing the big rock and Nell must have noticed it as she followed slowly behind. She stayed at the cave as we walked on to the lookout.
On returning to the creek, I noticed how slow she was and so I carried her back some of the way. We then walked back to the house and Nell followed along slowly behind. That night she ate dinner normally but on Thursday she was in a bad way.
In fact one time during the day, as I walked past her and gave her an affectionate pat, she didn't immediately respond and it took quite a few moments to wake her from her deep sleep. On Thursday I had to take some photos for a talk I have to give on Friday week, in Gympie to a group called The International Wood Collectors Society and it will take 3-5 working days to develop the slides so it will be a bit of a rush to have it done on time.
By Thursday afternoon I decided that because she was in such a bad way that I'd have to take her in to Gympie on Friday when I have to deliver the films for developing and Cornelia has also decided that she would like to depart as well. Thursday evening, I carried her up stairs to sleep on the verandah. That night for reasons I don’t understand, she twice takes herself downstairs and I have to carry her upstairs each time.
Unfortunately on Friday morning a school rang and I had to go to school (only the second time this year). I very occasionally go to school as a relief teacher. The plan was to come home, collect Nell and take her to the vet. The vet I’m sure would certainly have said that there is nothing to be done and all he could do would be to put her down. I wouldn't have done it as she didn't appear to be in any pain but just with a poor ability to move herself. I probably would have left it a few days until it appeared necessary.
Driving home along Deserio Road , Nell's collar falls mysteriously [Just at this very moment I have to have to interrupt the main story. Nell has died now almost three and a half years ago and I’m at last rewriting this little essay. Kay from next door arrives now and , I put down my pencil and she tells me that their dog Gyzmo has just died from snake bite and would I please come over and help with his burial. Naturally I agree to do so. He was last seen asleep under his favourite shrub beside the house. Tens minutes later, he is discovered dead having rolled out from below the bush. Kay did hear a few whimpers but didn’t investigate.
Now at this moment, Gyzmo is dead, at nine years, and now with Nell in dog heaven. Dogs give their lives so willingly to save their masters and mistresses lives. How tragically weird, that Gyzmo should die at this very moment and on the very word of “mysteriously”.
Nell and Gyzmo were not really good friends but were never the less very familiar with each others lives. Nell’s attitude to Gyzmo was “spare the bite and spoil the pup” while Gyzmo just thought that Nell was a “bad tempered old bitch” which I suppose was true and that if all female dogs were like that he would have nothing to do with them. Gyzmo was very sensitive and would hide under my bed whenever there was any loud noise particularly thunder.
Now back to the main story before this unsettling and weird interruption] drops out from the bench below the glove box on the car’s dashboard and I notice that the odometer is reading an ominous 170707. I arrived home about 3.30 and she was already dead on the verandah where I had left her just outside the kitchen door.
I sat beside her for a while thinking what I would do and the faithful and beautiful dog’s life that she had lead . Kay arrived about an hour later and I told her what had happened. A whole rainbow appeared over the eastern sky and even a second rainbow could just be seen above it. I went and dug her grave. It is just above the dam and on the southern side below the maple. I came back and told Geli who is having a Buddhist retreat this weekend at her ashram She said to leave Nell’s burial until the morning and I did so.
At about 7pm the power goes off and doesn't come back on. At 4am, a electricity truck turns around at the house and 10 minutes later, it returns. This time I talk to the linesman about where the fault could be that they cannot find. It is strange going out and seeing Nell lying there. She looks alive but is quite dead. As soon as it is light I take her in the wheel barrow and bury her. It is the time to do it.
I decide that in the next few days or perhaps after winter, I'll plant a maple there with a little fence around it to protect it from the cows and hopefully it will do well. Elkins decides not to attend the funeral and Zest, has an attack of screwlooseness at the last minute and runs into the bush chasing phantoms. I lay her on her back facing upwards and looking like a baby human before covering her and saying my final farewell. A few hours later and the electricity eventually comes on.
On Saturday morning I decide I will go and plant a tree above her. I have a smallish Queensland Maple and hopefully it will survive the winter and the risk of frost. I plant the tree and build a cow proof fence around the grave for protection from the cows. Sunday morning is clear and I decide to remove Nell's name tag from her collar and to place it on a picket at her grave. The morning is clear and sunny and as I walk to the grave it becomes cloudy. While there some cows come to visit, is it our of respect, but Zest doesn't think so and tries to bite one on the nose. Clouds blow up, there is thunder and in a moment it is raining. I walk back to the house in the rain. The passing of a great dog and the elements acknowledge her achievement and we hope the passing from one kingdom to the next.
May I list some of her achievements? Singing to a hall full of people at a concert where a patron describes her performance as being the best act of the show. Singing on the radio, and being recorded and her performance being repeated several times. Being photographed in colour on several occasions, for the local newspaper, three times in a nation wide magazine and even a colour photo on the internet yet being tragically and ironically a black and white dog.
All this fame though was handled with modesty and humility. She was obedient, intelligent, courageous, and with a warm disposition and great understanding of words and yet all this with only half of her brain. The other half of her brain was occupied with only one thought and that was to bite cows.
Nell was an Australian cattle dog. What dogs they are, devoted, intelligent, obedient and loving. We deeply regret her passing at 14 years. Several years later the 4th May comes up again. Three Dogs. Three dogs used to live next door to each other in a little cluster of houses at the end of country road, Nell, Gyzmo, and Chopin. My dog Nell was very clever and dog famous. Singing in the local hall to an audience, singing on the radio, a colour photo in an Australia wide magazine and the local newspaper although ironically and tragically being a black and white dog, yet a very loyal and affection rough and tumble cattle dog. Gyzmo, the youngest of the three, is also very clever but a bit of a whimp when it comes to cattle but he thinks of Nell as just a bad tempered old bitch. Her attitude to him is to spare the bite and spoil the pup. Chopin, loyal and faithful to his mistress and her daughter but probably a bit socially inept. Nell dies on the 4th May, 2001. She has had a long and happy life and although her death is tragic, it is quite natural and unavoidable. I then send an email to my daughter telling her of the death of her dog, I call it, “The Death of Nell, part Human Dog”, where I also reminisce on her achievements and the unusual circumstances surrounding her death. I write a few short stories and about 4 years later, I decided to pull out this email and edit it. I am actually rewriting by hand a few sentences and have just written the word, “mysteriously” when I hear a 4wheeler arrived at the house. I put my pencil down at this exact word and go out side and meet my neighbour and she tells me that their dog Gyzmo, has just died from snake bite and would I please come over and dig his grave and officiate at his funeral. I do this immediately. This year on the 4th May, the fifth anniversary of Nell’s death, I receive a telephone call from my other neighbour, although she has now moved a little further away, to say that Chopin is just about dead and would I please dig his grave to bury him here. He dies and is later buried this day. Weird Eh? The mysterious bond between humans and dogs. Looking at Nell. A lady was visiting me and after being here for a while looks at Nell one day and just says out of the blue, “ For some reason, when ever I look at Nell, I always think of Meg”.
Strange to say but the name given to her by her puppy owners gave her the name of Meg. Robyn and Emily decided to change it to Nell when they chose her from the litter. It was only many years later that they told this to me.

Chapter 4. Snakes and their Portent.
I’ve also collected a few more weird stories but this time about snakes.
Snakes. I’ve been bitten. My wife was bitten in my presence. A workmate I was working with was bitten. The previous owner of my farm, eldest son was bitten and died.
I’ve seen a cow die from snake bite in only twenty minutes. The result of the autopsy from the death of a neighbour’s horse was snake bite.
To watch tv in the neighbour’s house, the noise of all the snakes slithering in the ceiling is a distraction. The last time I walked the walking track circuit here I saw 4 snakes and also on the previous walk. I’ve stepped on snakes with bare feet, I had them slither over my foot, I’ve picked them up by mistake and I’ve had them fall on my head.
I’ve even swum into one while swimming. I’ve seen one strike the window in the kitchen and the venom has run down the full length of the pane of glass and I’ve seen my dog almost bitten, but not quite.
A kid in my class at school had seen so many of his dogs die from snake bite that he believed that a dog always gave 3 kicks before finally dying.
While driving along one day in the rain and eating a meat pie with my left hand and steering with my right and I peering through the windscreen wipers backwards and forwards motion, I saw this thing appear from the grill of the car. I couldn’t work out initially what it was, whether it was a piece of bark or what as it was sticking up about a foot and swaying about in the wind and the rain. It then climbed on to the bonnet and I could see clearly that it was a snake. It then lost its “grip” and flashed past my driver’s window.
I have the occasional visitor from overseas where visitors do some work in return for keep. They sometimes ask about snakes and if I tell them some of my stories, they wonder if they will last the distance. I say that if I have done so, so far, they shouldn’t have any trouble. What I’ve said is all true but it isn’t really as bad as it may seem, but then again I haven’t told all my stories either.
The visitor who found a snake in her bed I’ll keep to myself though, at least for a little while yet! A Reply to Snakes. I’ve been questioned about my story “Snakes” and so this is my, “Reply to Snakes”. I’m told that there have been some people who have been going to visit my farm and haven’t done so because of this story.
What was meant to be an Australian story of ironic humor has been misunderstood as literal and so I’d better give a bit of an explanation an antidote. I have to repeat that although it is all true, it isn’t as bad as it may seem! Some people have no sense of the ironic!
To begin with, the statement that, “I’ve been bitten”, is only just true. Some things that have happen in my life are not necessarily to my credit. Many years ago, a few of us were fooling around with a carpet snake, a very docile and harmless snake, which swung around and one of its fangs [I’m told that this is a wrong word as a carpet snake which has no poison does not have fangs, but teeth] and one of these razor sharp teeth just nicked my thumb and sliced my skin and a drop only of blood was the spilt. “My wife was bitten in my presence”, is also true but the snake was a completely harmless grass snake. A work mate who was bitten only told me this after we had finished smoko so that he could then tend the minor wound with some disinfectant from a harmless carpet snake bite. This is what he told me anyway. I didn’t question him at the time.
The death of the previous owner’s eldest son is tragically true but really there is more to the incident. It wasn’t here but on a nearly farm. A group of them were blowing up stumps. They placed the stick, lit the fuse and ran back to take cover. It blew up and in the confusion, they eventually noticed that he was missing. When they found him he was convulsing but because he suffered from epilepsy, he was left unattended and by the time assistance was given it was too late.
Running in longish grass is always dangerous because you can come upon the snake before it can get out of your way. Yes I have seen a yearling calf, quite a largish animal, die from what I presume was snake bite. This is I believe the only animal to die in this way on my farm in over 30 years. I first saw it when it was panicing and running around. It slowly became paralyzed in its back left leg and so could only run in a circle and bellow hysterically. The rest of the herd were curious and stood around in a circle staring in dumb bewilderment. The running became slower and slower until it just fell over dead! Yes a sobering experience. Coincidentally, this animal was to have been sold and butchered later in the afternoon.
Yes there are plenty of snakes in my neighbour’s house which has a ground floor and an upstairs and is right beside a piece of rainforest. All of them are harmless and only sometimes is the slithering in the ceiling a distraction.
Usually when I walk the walking track circuit, I don’t see a snake but at the time of writing, I happened to see a sleeping carpet snake and three harmless rock pythons sheltering in a fissure. When I walked the circuit again the next day, the three were all still sheltering in the crack and the carpet snake was still asleep in the same place as is their habit. Yes I’ve stepped on them, had them slither over my foot, picked them up by mistake.
The one that fell on my head was again a carpet snake that was resting on top of the door going under the house when I opened it without looking and it falls on to me. Yes I was swimming in a neighbour’s dam with some friends when I was momentarily distracted and I suppose it swims into me. The impact was over in a moment and I then watch it swim away.
My theory is that if you stay calm, and I’m sure I’m correct, all will be well. Basically none of this worried me at the time and probably I’m worried even less now. The one that struck the pane of glass in the kitchen, I don’t really know what caused it to do this, maybe its reflection, but I was inside and it was outside the window closed. It was a brown tree snake which has poison but again harmless as its fangs are too far back in its mouth to be any risk.
The class mate of mine and his theory, this is what he said but you need to appreciate that this is from the late 1950’s when every one was much more gun ho and red neck in outlook than today. Maybe he was just making it up, I don’t know but I know that on the front fence of his farm, his father used to tie up wedge tailed eagles that he’d shot.
Yes the second paragraph about the snake on the bonnet of the car is totally true but it is so quirky that I wanted to include it somewhere in one of my short stories.
Yes I have the occasional overseas visitor and they do ask about snakes. Yes, we frequently see snakes but the dangerous ones much less often. In fact the danger from snakes here is just nothing compared to the dangers of city life that my visitors take for granted from things such as car accidents, plane crashes, street muggings and so forth.
The lady who found a snake in her bed is true but in all my years here, I’ve never had one in my bed or anyone else’s bed. The snake was only a tiny baby snake. Maybe she had picked it up in her clothes that she left on the lawn and carried it inside this way. I don’t know but it gives my story a quirky conclusion.
Many alienated humans have an unnatural phobia of snakes and other harmless creatures and sometimes even of much of the natural world. How can we become the god like custodians of the planet with a mental outlook like this? Fears and phobias are maybe real enough in the ethers that plot our lives but not these beautiful and mostly harmless creatures. The carpet snake, which can grow to 14 feet [4m] [according to one of my books] is one of the very few creature that has incredibly no fear of humans [the green tree frog is another]. How this is possible I don’t know after the many thousands of years of brutality at the hands of humans?
A most wondrous thought. Today I think the only snake that I saw leapt out at me while I was cutting a dense vine on the shed beside the house. I thought for a moment that I’d cut it in half. The one that I nearly stepped on between the house and the dairy I think was yesterday morning.
P.s. Strange to relate but just after I have finished writing this reply, I hear that my new neighbours but one have just moved out and their place is now on the market, because of, “too many snakes”. Strange eh?

Chapter 5. Visitors.
I host the occasional visitor and here are a few essays about some of them. Maybe to set an atmosphere I'll give my thoughs on travel and I'll include an actual quote from a visitor. I’m not a traveller myself as I don’t really believe in travel as it is done by most tourists.
I don’t believe in the novelty of gawking at a changing scenery or the cliche of a famous object. I’d like to know the essence of things and the comfort and relaxing beauty of my beautiful home and surroundings I personally think that no holiday could surpass.
I do though like meeting new people and hearing their stories and learning new things about myself. This I think is the purpose of life.
If travel were a pilgrimage on life and Nature, I’d be interested but that generally isn’t the case. If I host a visitor though, I treat their visit as a pilgrimage on this theme.
A visitor once said to me, "Upon meeting a stranger and feeling the rapport, it is an opportunity to explore yourself and the other into psychology and other regions normally left alone. The two of you have no personal history and no status to maintain and the two of you may never meet again so future reputation counts for nothing so take the opportunity to tell me or ask me what ever you like!" She also went on to say that she thought that London was a place where a lot of these sorts of encounters took place.
Meiko. Mieko arrived in disarray. No money, no bankcard, no passport and almost nothing other than the clothes she was wearing. It turned out that when she left the previous host, she had left in bad circumstances and had to leave almost immediately leaving most of her things behind. In fact I had picked her up from an exotic eastern religion nunnery where she had spent a few days recovering from the previous host.
A few days later I contacted the hosts and made arrangements for them to send her possessions on to me and they warned me that she was a difficult guest. It took two weeks for her things to arrive which seemed an excessive length of time and in the meanwhile I had to lend her money and so forth. Yes she was difficult but she was also very well meaning and idealistic.
She was very abstract in a Japanese way and extremely impractical and disorganised. She told me that she was employed as a yoga instructor in a Japanese zen monastery and was in Australia to try and sell some pieces of art she was carrying with her which she said were quite valuable. As well as being knowledgeable with Shintoism and Buddhism she was also familiar with the Indian religious traditions having also spent some time there. In fact we get along quite well because I'm a bit of a mystic and a bit abstract myself.
Mieko spends her time in the dairy busying herself doing her art and reading, and I get on with my tree planting past time. Another thing we have in common is the appreciation of nature and its beauty. She is one of the very few individuals that I have shown my collection of old twisted pieces of collected wood that she also finds most enchanting.
The most important way that I put my interactions with nature into practice is with my waking track. Here on the farm, I have made this path that connects the features of interest such as the hut, cave, large trees in the rainforest, and so forth with seats conveniently placed but also more abstract things, as meaningful rocks placed strategically, a shrine with its collections of offerings and my favourite, a rock in the form of a severed head. The Japanese word is suiseki which means an object occurring naturally in nature which looks like something else.
Mieko is in raptures with the shape of the rocks, the twists of the vine and the colours of the leaves. The shrine which came about when I discovered an old cow bone and placed some convenient rocks over it to make a little shelter, for her is deeply and powerfully symbolic. This is the Hindu influence.
That afternoon, Mieko goes off on a walk on her own. I can hear her voice singing shinto songs of devotion to the beauty of nature. A most satisfying sound for me to hear, someone appreciating nature. Late in the afternoon, I'm still wandering about and I can still her melodious voice? How beautiful. I listen,...... and can I even understand some words? Can I hear, "Bob, I'm lost, Please come and save me!! Help, I'm lost". Yes it's true! I call out, "Yes, Yes, Yes, I'm coming!" An unprepared struggle in shorts and bare feet, through the jungle, the vines, the thorns over rocks and up the steepness to find her and return her to relative civilisation.
What may be simple tracks for us to follow, to her more used to the throng of the crowds, is a labyrinth of confusion. The next day she is off again upon the path. This time she is certain she will not become lost. At each turn of the track she comes upon a scene of beauty. She paints a Japanese character in water colours to show appreciation on rocks, leaves, and trees. At one place she removes her clothes, she tells me, to be closer to nature. At the shrine she prostrates herself for half an hour in respect to the dead cow. Here she even paints the English word, 'RESPECT' on the bone to sanctify or maybe to remedy the situation.
At the small cliff where there is the impression of a human face, she paints a Japanese character on each cheek. At the severed head, another character. At each seat she sits and contemplates. The Japanese word I like is wabi sabi, the profound in the ordinary.
Yes I don't think that my path has been more greatly appreciated. The mile walk takes most of the day to complete. She eventually leaves.
I don't know how she has gotten on or where she went. She has left behind her valuable paintings and I'm still not sure what to do with them. She even photographed the cows looking at these paintings which is an example of some of her type of art. One of the cattle she named, Latchme after the Buddha's wife because she was so beautiful conveniently ignoring the fact that he was a steer so we renamed him Latchmo..
Yes she left disorder when she left but if you can't help it is it alright. Her personal background was interesting and maybe an explanation. Her father who owned the family business was a volunteer to be a kamikaze pilot in the war. Obviously he must have been devoted to the Japanese way of life and its cause but now after selling the family business, his main interest is golf, an expensive hobby in Japan. He has shown no tolerance to her eccentric ways and is probably quite cold and detached to her in the Japanese way.
When she was about 15 years old, her mother died and he very quickly remarried his wife's sister. Mieko's aunt now becomes her mother and she calls her mother. I believe this change was difficult and confusing for her to make at such a sensitive age. Her mother is dead but she has now has this somehow close imitation of her mother as substitute. She finds it impossible to settle down to a conventional Japanese life style. Yoko Ono is an inspiration to her.
Meiko did utter the words here, perhaps though in a different context but non the less greatly appreciated, "I have truly found paradise". A statement I take to have broadly ment me and my planted arcadian paradise.
Tattiana. I saw a notice on the Lonely Planet bulletin board which by the way they call the Thorn Tree from someone wanting to live in a cave for a month and be a hermit.
I emailed back saying that I had a cave in the rainforest and that she was welcome to use it. I told her that life would be tough but it was available. I also said that I would want to see her every four days just make sure that she was okay both mentally and physically.
She told me a little about herself. She was a recent graduate from what I call a back to nature university in Oregon, the most environmentally conscious state in the US. She had studied subjects such as human evolution, the evolution of civilisation, conservation ecology, and so forth.
Her father was formerly a pilot with a commercial airline and her mother a air hostess. As a reward for recently graduating, she was being given an airline ticket which they could get at a discount rate. She eventually arrived which I was a bit surprised about because people often make plans and nothing comes of it.
She spends the first night in the spare bedroom of the house. The next day, I show her the cave in the rainforest and on the way there, I also show her the hut on the edge of the rainforest. I leave her there and make arrangements to meet her for breakfast in four days time and to see how she is getting on.
In due time, she arrives and we discuss the experience so far. She tells me that she did spend a day and a night in the cave but did find it difficult and moved into the hut with the relative luxury of a bed with a mattress, a wood stove and no bats flying around at night to disturb her.
Every forth day, she would come and we would discuss things and maybe go into Gympie for shopping , to visit some friends and even a trip to the beach at Noosa.
After being without company for four days with no radio, tv, telephone, or even books that I noticed, she was quite happy to visit and talk.
She told me that she was a lesbian. I thanked her for telling me this for although of interest, there wasn’t really any need. She said that she had a girlfriend back home. She then asked me if I knew of any available ladies who might like to visit? She then told me of her desire. She would like a different lady to visit her every night. I asked her, what about the girlfriend back home? She said that if each girl visited for only one night, then that was quite alright as that was only harmless gaining of experience and infact was even desirable but they would not be permitted to stay any longer because that would then be seen as becoming in competition with the permanent relationship.
Unfortunately one of my characteristics is that I let opportunities go due to either laziness or foolishness. I could at least have tried and made an effort to find at least some ladies to visit. It would have been possible but unfortunately I did nothing and let normality and complacency rule.
This was a seriously missed opportunity on my part as there could even have been something in it for me as well. Eventually she leaves and returns home. She becomes a fire fighter for the fire season in the Rocky Mountains where discipline and total effort is the order of the day. She then is accepted into the police academy. The last I heard was that she was finding it extremely boring and all the other normal students not appreciating her breadth of life’s experiences. I don’t know if she ever completed the course.
She said that all she wanted to do was to have adventure and to do good. I don’t know if that is what the life of a police officer is like though?
Pixie. The aptly named Pixie gave me an arrival time for bus but she wasn’t on it. I waited for a little while and what else could I do but to come home.
This was just before mobile telephones so what else could I do but to come home again. An hour or so later, I received a telephone call to say that she had arrived and would I please come in and pick her up. She said that she was sorry but she had missed the bus and couldn’t contact me any earlier. She decided to stay in the hut to be close to nature. She spent most of her time there and some time helping me.
One morning she arrived at the house in a bedraggled state and covered in cuts and scratches. I asked her what had happened? She said that she had gone for a walk in the afternoon and had gotten lost. Dark came upon her and she was stuck and had to spend the night where she was in the jungle.
That night we received an inch of rain as well. I told her that I had thankfully spent the night soundly and comfortably asleep in my dry bed. Something that I wouldn’t have done if I had known that she was lost in the jungle somewhere.
Anyone who gets lost in such circumstances I don’t have much sympathy for. To go for a walk in the afternoon and not to observe your back is foolish.
The hut is located where it should be difficult not to find it again since there is a gully in the front of it and there are slopes all around. I asked her out of curiosity where she actually went but I couldn’t get a clear answer. Yes, I was thankful she departed still in one piece.
A Visitor needing the Jungle Shrine Therapy. I once had a Japanese visitor who had been travelling around Australia for almost a year and yet for all that time of speaking basically exclusively English, her English still wasn’t very good. I asked her about this and she agreed. I then asked her as to what her Japanese was like and she said that it also wasn’t particularly good either. She went on to say that whenever she spoke, her friends often spoke over her. This set me thinking.
The lady was obviously very adventurous and independent to travel around Australia on her own and so I suspect that she might have had difficulty fitting into the rather restricted life style of many Japanese ladies. She was also naturally very polite and so I surmised that she must have suffered from what I call personal self censorship. In other words, she would have felt the pressure to fit into the conformist life style expected of her but her nature was one of independence and free thought. In conversations, if she spoke from the heart, she would have said progressive things that might not have been acceptable and felt the need always to check and censor her speech so that she could conform. This would have robbed her speech of vitality and spontaneity causing her lack of fluency.
I should have offered her my cure of extemporisation at the Jungle Shrine where it is quite alright to say what ever you like. In other words, I should have reassured her that she is now deep in the jungle where you can do what ever you like and that she is invited to speak spontaneously what ever comes into her head. If she wanted to say, f..., s..., f...,s..., that is quite alright as how could I care less.
We then could have gone on to vigorous heartfelt conversations spoken from the heart with vigor and conviction. Unfortunately she left just a few days later and I didn’t get the opportunity to offer her the cure of Jungle Shrine extemporisation.
The Jungle Shrine extemporistion ritual can take a variety of forms. Since we are at the Shrine, we are within its mysterious realm, but surely the greater mystery is the half hidden world of our subconscious, that source of imagination and creativity. Maybe we can negotiate the terms of the extemporisation.
Choice of language is an option for some. It doesn’t have to be in English. Maybe sounds could be substituted for words, or even just movement. Maybe it could be a question and answer time? Could the performance be enhanced if there is taken by all an oath of secrecy as to what ever transpires. Should the performance have a time limit? Should time be allotted after the show for a discussion, or once the show is over, should the blanket of secrecy be strictly maintained with a return, [or maybe now it is an attempt to return] to normality as if nothing has happened. What the show is, isn’t so important, what is important is that it comes directly without self censorship from the heart.
Yes this is my landscape theatre. Maybe it is now landscape therapy? Here deep in the jungle, different rules apply.
A Visit After a Gap of 20 Years.  Many years ago when I was married to Robyn and our little baby Emily was only one year old. Robyn was driving close by to here and picked up a young hitch hiking couple. They seemed nice people and Robyn invited them back to the house and they lived with us for about a week.
Their names were Emma and Rob. We got to know each other quite well. Emma even knew three of the authors of the books that we had on our book shelf. One was an uncle who was an art critic, the other was a neighbour from home in England, and the third I’ve forgotten.
They decided while at our place to go their separate ways since Rob needed work and money and Emma was eventually to go back home to England.
We kept in contact for a few weeks and when Robyn decided to go to Toowoomba for a week’s drama course, we contacted Emma to help me to look after our one year old daughter, Emily. This would enable me to keep doing my tree planting work on the farm and Emma was happy to have a place to stay. We made a happy “family”, father, daughter, and foster mother. We even went in to Gympie to do shopping and to see the real estate agents since Emma was to inherit some money and was even thinking of buying some land in the district. Eventually the week was up and Robyn returned and Emma left to shortly go back home to England.
This was the last we ever heard of each other. Keeping in contact is difficult especially when one is traveling and going back home overseas.
Twenty years later and I’m still working on my trees. Some are now much bigger but the recently planted ones still need much care and attention to keep them ahead of the weeds.
This day, I’m up the back doing my normal tree caring program when I hear the dog barking. This is a bit unusual so I decide to come back to the house to see what is going on. I find at the house a couple, their three children a car and caravan.
They introduce themselves as the long departed Emma and Rob and their three children. A fifteen year old daughter and two younger sons.
Yes I do remember straight away since for some reason, the memory of some people still remain with us. I was able to recall straight away the authors and other experiences. They said that they were just passing through the district while on holidays and thought they would try and remember where I lived and to see if I was still here after all that time.
If it was clever for me to remember straight away, it was even more clever for them to remember how to get here since when they initially visited, they had no car.
It is strange to be reintroduce after twenty years. Where have those twenty years gone and what is there to show for it. Somehow meeting puts us back twenty years and we tell a few experiences and of new circumstances to fill in the gap of the time. We also can’t help but think of what we have done and has it all been worth while and to at least think of what just might have happened if some how we had chosen a different path and would it have been any better? Those twenty years have gone and are lost completely and cannot be recalled but I cannot but be haunted by the thought of other paths and other gains and losses that were once available. We go for a walk together with the kids, to the cave and the hut and then we go picking avocados so that they can have a good feed of fruit when they get back home to life in the Blue Mountains and normality.
Maybe it will be less than twenty years before they visit again and what will they find next time? A Visit from a Lady Called Sheeba. I can play the piano and one of my favourite pieces is by Handel called “The Entry of the Queen of Sheba”. Sheba was a pagan Queen who visited Solomon the Wise in the Old Testament story.
A pagan Queen is called a sibyl, a magical lady who has powers and the vision of the third eye. She was off to visit Solomon the Wise who at the time was building his famous temple, and to obviously compare notes with him. Not only was she famous for her powers but also she was very beautiful. Unfortunately, although she was very beautiful, she had one fault, a club foot which she was most ashamed of.
On her way to Solomon and at the edge of the building site where Solomon is building his temple, she comes across a log which crosses a stream. They had tried to use this log in the building of the temple but some how its length kept changing and so it was discarded and just used as a bridge to cross the stream. When Sheba arrives at the log bridge she sees that the log has come from a tree in the original Garden of Eden and that a sucker from that log will eventually grow into tree which will in turn be cut into timber to be made into a cross upon which the Christ will be crucified upon so out of respect for the log, she raises her skirt to reveal her club foot and wades through the stream.
With that act of humility, her club foot is miraculously healed.
Well I have been visited by a lady who was called Sheeba, but she was a dog and she didn’t have a club foot, but her owner did. He was the unfortunate victim of thalidimine, a tragic drug given to his mother before he was born.
Unfortunately there was no act of humility on his part and he left again with his club foot, but Sheeba the dog still remains, she eventually died of old age and is buried here.
Kerry. Kerry was a 52 year old lady from London who visited me about 2 years ago. She was studying at a university in the east of London doing subjects such as sociology and anthropology. I remember that she had a daughter who lived a street or two away from the street that my great aunt lived in from the 1930’s until about 3 years ago when she died.
She had a few good stories to tell. The one that I remember most was that she was a marimba player in a band that played at different venues. Apparently there could be up to 30 members in the band if all were called upon to play. One of the venues that she played in was something that we don’t really have in Australia and that was “The Sex Maniac’s Ball”.
Some of the stories were quite is it interesting or is it amazing?
It is interesting that the rules of normal society can be changed and we are able to adapt to the new circumstances so quickly. I remember that she even invited me to the next ball if she is their playing there. I didn’t know what to think of the offer. Perhaps it’s lucky that I’m a bit of a stay at home. She also played at a street demonstration to legalise prostitution.
She stayed a few days and then I took her off to a beautiful national park near here where she went for a swim in the ocean. She said that she was a good swimmer and often swam in the seas in Ireland. She went into the water and started swimming straight out to sea and then she just continued until she was completely out of sight. I didn’t know what to do.
People do drown at this isolated beach. Do I run up to the other end of the beach and try and contact a rescue helicopter to come to her rescue. Do I try and find a good swimmer to swim out to sea to try and find her, or do I even swim out myself. Maybe I could just bury her rucksack and pretend that I have never met her.
I was feeling quite sick and didn’t know what to do. I decided to climb out onto the nearby rocks to look further out to sea. From here I could just see her in the distance and I tried to wave to her to come ashore. Yes she came back and asked what was my worry.
I said that when she said that she was going for a swim, I thought that she was just going to play in the waves, not swim way out to sea. She said that she was sorry but that she was a good swimmer. That’s where we departed.
She spent that night and perhaps even another camping on the beach and enjoying more healthy swims in the great Pacific Ocean. She emailed me a few times from London to say that she had settled down to the hard work of a university student and that is the last I heard of her.
Cindy, Cindy was basically a good girl who had gotten off the rails and a friend had recommended to her that she come and live here in the hut on my farm, with me and Robyn and our daughter Emily, together with another lady living in the dairy and her two children to get her life back together by living a more wholesome country style.
Cindy wasn’t her real name but was the name that she worked with on various occasions as the jobs required it[!] Since very few people here knew her by this name, I’ll use it to hide her real identity. She was only 18.
She lived in the hut for 2 months and even moved into the dairy when it became vacant when Cheryl had moved out after several years. She was a great help to me on the farm and in the house with Robyn and also was a great friend to young Emily. One of the positive legacies of her stay was the painting of the hut and many years later, it still hasn’t been repainted. She also left behind an attractive little hanging pot which I still have and cherish and use as an ashtray for the occasional visitor who smokes. Robyn was an arts school graduate and an art teacher and Cindy had good natural artistic abilities. Robyn convinced her to practice her art and to get together a folio of her drawings. These were then submitted to the Toowoomba College of Art where she was accepted as an art student. Her departure was the last we heard of her.
About 16 years later, time has marched on and I’m now divorced and living on my own. I receive a sweet letter from Cindy asking if she can visit again. Naturally I agree and a meeting at the local bus station is arranged. When I meet her, I can immediately see that the intervening years have been tough. In fact it is just as I’m driving out of the car park that she says that she has a pain in her neck and needs to go to the chemist to get some pain killers.
It has taken no more that two minutes before my personal red danger light to come on brightly and undeniably. It is Sunday afternoon in country Queensland and there is no chemist shop open so we decide to drive home and I’ll check my cupboard at home.
This is a bit of a tall order as I never take headache tablets or pain killers. We look in the cupboard and find a few headache tablets from Robyn’s days here as she had quite a liking for them and a few pain killer tablets I was given when I had a wisdom tooth extracted but didn’t bother to use. The collection was offered and in the instance all were gone and the situation is calmed for the moment.
We get talking, and to sum it up, everything bad that can happen to a lady had happened to her including naturally jail. She was returning again to get her life back in order or that’s the story I was told. Arts school was initially a success but after a year and a half, the old ways of self destruction couldn’t be help back and her bad ways had returned.
At this time, an opportunistic self proclaimed spiritual healer was conducting meetings just down the road. Cindy is accepted as a helper as are all comers and becomes an active participant in a weekend celebration. At the end of the succession, which is mostly made up of older middle class ladies, some money is missing. The finger is pointed at Cindy and a scene ensues but nothing is proved. I even comfort her in her distressed state. Cindy moves into the dairy and at least I don’t have to worry about the house burning down from an untended cigarette. The well trodden path is followed of contact with charity groups and accommodation is arranged with furniture, food and a transfer into Gympie. I still occasionally visited her in town which she is grateful for. One time, on departure, and on the footpath, she gives me a close embrace and tells me what a wonderful friend I’ve been to her in difficult times and that she is most grateful. Me the sucker, bask in self satisfaction and return her affection. At the next stop in town, I put my hand in my back pocket to pull out my wallet and yes, it is gone! How boringly predictible and how stupid of me! Yes I could even feel her hand slipping into my back pocket but choose to go with the good times and a sexy squeeze to the bum.
Yes, I’ve learnt my lesson and I don’t return. The boyfriend from Moe arrives and she takes to wearing black around town. What has been achieved. Nothing! Her initial plan to return to the hut where she lived all those years ago and partly reformed never came about. She and her boyfriend eventually leave town and I’m sure relieved.
Two Girls. Two girls came to visit. One was an educated American and the other was from N.Z. The American particularly loved the presence of the NZ girl and the two seemed to enjoy just being together and doing little things together. Perhaps they were lesbians or should have been or even wanted to be, I just didn't know and didn't ask. The American even said to the NZ girl, "How could I ever be unhappy in your presence?".
The girls camped in the dairy, in the hut, on my verandah, and even in the paddock. Work here is only done by offering.
If someone wants to sit and do nothing but take in the fullness of nature, I don't mind but if I do need help with something, I will ask though.
One little project the girls worked on was the painting of a little mural in the hut. They traveled with paints and this was one way they made a contribution where ever they went. First of all they just drew lines all over the area to be painted. Then they took out the paints and brushes and coloured it in as they saw fit. They then looked at the patterns and interpreted symbolic representations. The painting is still there to be seen in the hut. It came to pass that the American girl was actually a graduate in business studies and had an important and serious job back home. She came to Australia, with a warm climate and links up with a hippy girl with a different life style and the two travel the country together.
In Washington, where she came from, her father had a job in the pentagon which was so important that when he retired, he was able to keep his job and the job was so secret that she didn't even know anything about what work he did.
The two eventually leave and I cannot but wonder what become of her when I suppose she returns home and has to become serious again. Going from a cool climate to a warm climate and moving from a stressful lifestyle to one of complete doing only what one feels like is easy and is like going down hill. Going back home is going in the opposite direction and like going up hill. I never did hear how her return went and whether she ever recovered from her Ozzie holiday.
A Brother/Sister Combination. I think that I’ve had only one brother/sister combined visit. They were hitch hicking north from Melbourne to Cairns and stopped here for a few days. They telephoned and arranged for me to meet them in Gympie.
When they were here, they stayed together in the dairy and seemed very close. The interesting though is that they were travelling very light and didn’t have a change of clothes. This I couldn’t help but notice because she was wearing the entire time a black tee shirt and the bottom was a orange background with black stripped skin tight tiger costume including a full length tail.
They even did a few jobs for me including pruning some trees, tiger costume tail and all. They were always polite and most cooperative.
After a few days they departed and I left them on the side of the highway. I couldn’t help but wonder how their hitch hicking went dressed like that. Was the tail helpful or not.
Their mother was a social worker in Melbourne if that could be some sort of explaination.
Jane. Jane had just finished studying second year mathematics at London University which she said was extremely difficult and I’m sure that she was quite correct. She said that she had enjoyed studying maths at school and even found it easy but now at London University it was just too difficult and she needed a holiday in Australia to relax.
Unfortunately though she didn’t have very much money. She was obviously very close to her father who was a solicitor and had inherited from him a love of literature. She donated “Titus Groan” to my little library in the dairy.
Her father worked for UK Telecom prosecuting people who defrauded the company yet her mother would spend her time removing unmarked stamps from envelopes to yes defraud the Post Office and to save a few pennies. This frugality she inherited from her mother but I don’t know how these differences were reconciled at home.
She told me a little tree story. She came from a place called, Seven Oaks just south of London. It had just recently experience a tornado which had blown over six of these ancient seven oaks. At the school carnival, the kids once would cheer, “Come on Seven Oaks” but not any more but, “Come on One Oak”.
When she arrived, she had just hitch hiked down from Cairns to here in south east Queensland, alone, scantly dressed and without much money. She spent several weeks here and even caretook the house while I went away for a week. When she departed, I dropped her off at the highway and she went south to Brisbane. She then changed her mind about going south and hitch hiked north all the way past Cairns, past Cooktown and further on to Laura to experience an aboriginal festival before hitch hiking south to Sydney and then back to London and Seven Oaks. What a journey! She wrote to me from England thanking me for her time here and telling me of her adventures. Luckily she didn’t come to any harm. I don’t know what happened to her and if she returned to University and some sort of study.
The strain of life, and the breaking of the normal bonds that bind people and the breaking free of these shackles may drive people to do things that they normally wouldn’t do in more considered circumstances. She was also perhaps an unrealising advocate of the theory that I also agree with that the more beautiful the girl, the more ragged the clothes. Beautiful girls wearing beautiful clothes is actually a degrading of their devine grace.
An Unsuccessful Visit. I’d like to think that all or almost all of my visitors have a good time but occasionally it doesn’t work always work out. I received an email from a Danish lady who wanted to visit who was seventy years old. I don’t mind that some one is 70 but I also think that it could be a bit of a strain for them to accommodate my rustic ways.
I have a feeling that I should say no because I don’t think that it is a good idea but I know that I’d be criticized by the politically correct that I exclude people because of their age so against my better judgement I say yes. After overcoming some initial confusion about her arrival time since she emailed me the time she was arriving and didn’t do it by telephone.
As a consequence, I hadn’t checked my email that day and so she had to telephone me when she arrived so that I had to drive in to meet her. That was a bit lucky because I could easily have been off some where else.
Visitors sometimes say they are coming then don’t turn up. That is alright because I don’t go out of my way to accommodate visitors unless I know a definite arrival time.
Anyway I meet her, do some shopping for groceries and come home. As I’m putting the food into the fridge, she says that I’ve bought a bottle of cream when I have one in the fridge already. I say that the one in the fridge is empty. That day and evening she starts telling me all her complaints and I’ll just list a few to give an idea of the situation. She hates mosquitoes although I believe that I have almost none. She hates the down stairs toilet and the grass is too long and needs mowing. We have a talk about children and I tell her about my precious daughter being in Switzerland. She thinks all single children are neurotic.
She was married for 20 years and there was nothing good to say about all of that time. Lucky I don’t mention the prejudice about older ladies without children. Her biggest fear and complaint though is snakes. Now here unfortunately she has come to the wrong place which I have to explain to her as sensitively as I can that there are plenty of snakes here. For breakfast she asks about the milk and where did I get it from. I said from the dairy farmer next door so she won’t touch that. On her breakfast of weetbix and mangoes, she only has cream. I have never see some one have so much cream on their cereal but I just sit quietly and let it pass unnoticed. She comments she has to go to considerable lengths to prevent getting an up set tummy. She also doesn’t like rain water tanks. She does come for a walk for me on the walking track and is quite sprightly for a 70 year old although she doesn’t actually say that she enjoyed the walk. We only do half the circuit though. She did acknowledge that I must have put much work into growing all those trees.
On the afternoon of the last day, I go for a walk to the back of the farm to do some work and I leave her sitting of the back verandah doing some reading. When I come back she tells me of her little adventure. She says that while quietly sitting here on the verandah, a snake actually tried to climb up her leg. When she looked down and saw it there, she kicked it off and screamed so loudly that she thought that I would have heard. Fortunately I didn’t for if I’d heard it, I may have had a heart attack from the shock. The snake reappears, I see it and identify it as a green tree snake and then off it goes. She continues reading and about 15 minutes later another smaller snake appears on the verandah with her. Luckily I’m here and remove the snake. (It just jumps off the verandah and into the “long” grass). It is small consolation to her that this has never happened before.
The next morning, I take her into Gympie and she is off to the next host. She thanks me for an eventful visit and thankfully she is gone. Conclusion, I must say no to anyone I don’t think is suitable for an Australiana experience. It turns out that she is a Servas host in Denmark and has the very occasional visitor. She doesn’t like the cold of a Danish winter and so travels to a warmer climate with limited money. She then feels it is her right being a host herself to stay with as many hosts as possible. She was with a host before me and left me to go to another host. This is a considerable psychological strain for it is very difficult to keep up the flexibility to keep adjusting to the personal rules that run each house hold and basically an older person cannot cope especially if the host is in a different environment to the one the visitor is used to.
Visitors need to find a host they feel comfortable with and stay a little longer there so that they can accommodate all the many influences that they are experiencing and then leave in a more settled frame of mind prepared for the next adventure.
My Fantasy. I once met a lady at what I could loosely call a tree lover’s meeting. Naturally I invited her to come over to my place one day where I could show her some of my many beautiful trees. A few days later she visited and we went here and there looking at the many trees that I’d planted and some of the naturally occurring ones as well. Some were straight and smooth and others were bent and rough.
Yes I admit that I found it all quite exciting describing this and that to her and she seemed to be most impressed asking questions and wanting to know more. It was late in the afternoon and I invited her to stay for dinner. A meal was cooked over the wood stove using some of my ample firewood and a pleasant atmosphere was set.
After dinner sitting on the verandah with a glass of wine, we move closer discussing the arcane subject of the aesthetics and intimacy of trees. It wasn’t long before we go off to bed together and consummate our common passion.
This is my confession. I wish to meet a lady who looks at my trees and thinks that they are sexy, and then automatically thinks that I’m sexy as well because I have planted so many of them and I love them so much. This I’m told is a bit strange but to me it is absolutely natural. Maybe this story is a confirmation of my belief. I live in the hope of a similar encounter. If it happens once, it could happen again or so I like to think anyway. Yes, she lives locally and I occasionally visit her but nothing more has happened between the two of us. Probably the passion of the trees just over came us at the time.
A year or so later, she told me that she had applied to study forestry at a university but had decided against it because of other commitments. She has since temporarily moved away but I’m left with my trees as consolation which is not so bad and to wait for what I don’t know. I once had a dream and in it was an ancient book lying in a dusty corner called, “Trees and the Working of Magic”. Apparently the potency is even greater if you have planted the trees yourself. I wonder what other information it contained.
Loving Your Work. Three of my lady visitors have worked as prostitutes or so I have been told. One, I think that I mentioned it briefly in an earlier story, the second I was told about after she had already left by a friend of mine who was staying in the dairy at the time who had a brief dalliance with her while she was here. The third was sharing the house with me when she told me her story.
Prostitution is a fascinating subject. It is both extremely personal and yet readily available provided the money is there. It deals in passions that are almost beyond the limits of what humans can accommodate yet the prostitute handles it all in a business like manner. The prostitute is both hated by society and yet is often passionately loved by her clients. She sees herself as carrying out a necessary function in society and yet receives no social assistance or acknowledgement.
The profession of prostitution is truly an arcane subject that I feel that I have been most privileged in having someone confide her story even if rather superficially to me. My visitor told me that she had worked from an escort agency. Whenever she felt like work, she would contact the agency and they would give her an address. She would go there and only if she liked the look of the place would she then knock on the door. When the man opened the door, she would look him up and down and do her assessment of him. If she thought that he was of good character, she would go inside and was willing to have sex with him. If she didn’t like his appearence, she would not enter but contact the agency and tell them of her decision. She said that they always backed her decision. She thought that she was pretty good at assessing the character of people from first impressions. She said that it never happened that once inside that she ever refused someone. She said that virtually every time she was treated with respect. Generally the client would confide in her his most heart felt secrets which she would listen closely to and feel genuine compassion for him and sex would easily follow. She said that she would spend a longer time with her clients than was considered necessary. She said that one of the job requirements was that you had to like sex. She said that she kept a notebook and noted down all her clients. If any of them didn’t treat her well, she wouldn’t go back there again. She said that she did have some regular clients but she didn’t mind whether they were a regular customer or just a one off as there was always a bit of a thrill with some one new. She was quite a small person of rather delicate features with a rather dark complexion. She said that she sometime played the role of a young girl for her clients. She told me that, and these are her exact words, “loved her work”. She liked genuine intimate conversations where people tell of their deepest feelings. Naturally she needed to also like what followed. She firmly believed that she was of assistance by doing much social good. I don’t know how she was paid or what her fees were but she did say that sometimes she was given a bonus which she did appreciate. When she visited me, she was travelling around Australia on her own with plans to go to the tip of Cape York. She had a boyfriend, was it in Melbourne and spent much of her time sending and receiving text messages. She had an unusual nickname for herself which was “Around the World Fairy” meaning something like that she was as free as a fairy who was neither bound by convention or place and free to travel wherever and whenever she liked and bestow her blessings wherever Fate took her.
I’d like to think that she did enjoy her stay with me. She was here for several weeks. She didn’t really do much work which I don’t mind but she did help in the garden and caretook the house for me when I went away for a few days.
A few months after she left, she did send me a post card from Alice Springs saying thank you and that all was going well on her travels.
Boredom. A quote from another visitor who spent some time.here and I’d like to think enjoyed her time here may sum up the reality of the situation.. “My fear is that I’m a boring person but what I find interesting is other boring people and their petty quirky interests.”

Chapter 6.
Stories this time from Friends Neighbours and Relatives, saints and sinners, are they driven, crazy or just eccentric and how would I notice anyway?
The first one is from when I visited an old school friend who has purchased an old Presbyterian church. In my school days, I was Presbyterian and he was Methodist. The churches have since united but church numbers are still declining but there still isn’t much fun for the congregation, but maybe this old church is going to be different. Zen, Amish or Presbyterian.
Churches in rural areas have been closing down due to a fall in attendance and the churches have had to be sold and used for other purposes. An old school friend of mine has purchased a now defunct old country church, hall and manse.
I went and visited arriving late Saturday and he was to return late Sunday. On wakening on Sunday morning, I get up and walked directly from the back of the manse and into the back door of the church. This old church was built over 130 years ago and is now showing its age. Inside it is completely empty except for an old harmonium. At this end of the church, the floor is slightly raised and then there another small step up to the pulpit. Behind are two imitation gothic doors. As a child to young adult, I used to attend this denomination church and to see it empty and abandoned is a little unnerving. I then opened the front doors. I then sat down at the harmonium and started to play a few hymns, “Oh for a Thousand Tongues”, “Immortal Invisible” and so forth. You never know who might just turn up off the street. The wooden resonance of the harmonium and the empty wooden resonance of the church early on a clear and still Sunday morning was to me certainly a lonely and abstract zen like spirituality. I played for a while but no one entered.
I then walked onto the street and over the bridge and the very next building was the Methodists just about to start a service with an old lady rushing for the appointed time. Just two doors up again, I can hear another church service and their incantations. Over the road, is yet another church but there is no action here as they now only have one service a month.
Walking back, I can hear hymns being played with the Methodists. No, I’m not needed here as an emergency organist as I may have fantasized. I return across the bridge and into the lonely church. This time I stand at the pulpit. I notice that here the red carpet is totally worn away down to the floor boards. I think of all those dower and joyless sermons of obedience to God’s will; no wonder, the church is empty! Please don’t despair, renewal and revitalisation has come. The 1% of essential truth has come through. This complex is now being transformed into a centre for arts and creativity and yes again a source or inspiration. Maybe this time, a bit more joyfully.
A Family Story of Coincidence. My parents purchased the family home early in 1963. We then got to meet our new neighbours, Percy and Blanch. There was really only one neighbour because at the time, the block of land on the other side was more or less empty. When my parents, actually my mother, got taking, she discovered that Percy worked for the City Council. My mother remembered him as being the person she replaced when he volunteered for the army during the war and she had started working for the Council She had known him by name and now she could meet him in real life.
They continued talking and it turned out that Blanch had worked for the Courier Mail and had known and worked for my father’s father.
An old page of the paper was discovered and on one page of it, was a picture of my grandfather and on the other side was a picture of Blanch.
Many years later, Blanch dies and Percy is left on his own. One morning Percy didn’t make it over the road for the appointed lift into town and the next morning, the driver of car looked through the bedroom window and found him dead in bed. They were childless and without any other surviving relatives and so my parents became the benefactors of their will.
My mother was a help to Blanch in her declining years and a comfort to Percy when he lived alone. I wish now that I had been a bit more responsive as a youth and living next door. I did though do a few small jobs such as mow the lawn. I was told this by my mother at the time. I noted it and kept on with my life.
My mother has now died and my father because of his closed nature keeps this fact an absolute secret and shows no gratitude at all.
Murderous Neighbours. When I met the lady I was to marry, I also met a friend of hers, Peter. Two years later he purchased a house in Brisbane in the adjoining suburb and living over the road from him in house number 16 was a wild and independent family. After a few months they moved away from number 16 to become my neighbours here on my farm. This is where I meet them. On several occasions I was invited to visit them but I preferred to keep my distance. Even so, when they moved out a few months later, they still came and visited me to say farewell. From here they moved to Fraser Island where they and their numerous children lived the life of nomads camping on the beach and making a good living catching worms for the recreational fishing business.
About this time, I moved to Brisbane for a few months work to make some money. I stayed with Peter in the spare room underneath his house. Just previous to this, the council had stupidly and ignorantly condemned this house and demolished this old and now empty house. The wood was just left behind in a big pile to root away. The owner was an old man who at best had lost all interest in everything. I saw him and agreeded to buy this wood for $25 and to take it away to my farm here. On my return, I used some of this wood to build the small hut at the back of my farm for the occasional back to nature visitor to use.
While on Fraser Island, the family meet by coincidence a friend of mine who is having a short holiday. She is impressed by their raw nature and so spends some time with them and their nomadic lifestyle. Upon returning home, she invites them to visit her and her partner at Kin Kin, the district adjoining me here.
One day, I just happened to visit my friends while they were visiting as well. I admit it created quite an impression their sump oil painted Landcruiser with the dogs as guards tied up beside it. I then went inside and recognized them and renewed my acquaintance with them. The partner of my friend, a sensitive and cultured man was frankly shocked by these people. He later confided with me that he found them “Neanderthals” and it became another sensitive difference of opinion between the two of them. The worming business was very successful especially with all the kids working and also helped by the kids not worry about schooling and in no time at all, enough is saved and they purchase a small farm between here and Kin Kin .
A change in lifestyle is now needed. The nomads have to settle down to something approaching responsibility and normality. What a strain it must have been we can only now surmise. After only a few weeks of this lifestyle, it appears that he and his wife go crazy and start to murder the children. Rumors abound as to what precipitated these actions but the truth may never be known. He is arrested almost immediately and she runs off into the bush. It takes a few days to find her and I even participate in the search. He hangs himself in the watch house at Gympie before even going before the magistrate. She then goes before the courts on her own but is classified as having a character weakness of being totally overtaken by another personality, her husband. She then is not responsible for her actions and is basically let off. She then has to go to a psychiatric hospital where Peter, a social worker and former neighbour of hers looks after her interests. At the time of the murders, Peter, yes another Peter, the father and husband, was actually writing a book except that he couldn’t read or write but was dictating it to his wife. It was to be called of all things, “How to be Successful”. I wonder what ever happened to his half competed manuscript and what would it have contained?
Many years later, I’m building a verandah extension onto my house and am using some of the wood from my stockpile. I happen to use a piece of wood with the number 16 as a house number on it. Peter confirms with me that this must have come from the demolished house in Brisbane. This time, I decide to use the piece of wood the other way up so the number, which can still just be read, is now the number 91. You just never know.
I was married once and my ex wife didn’t share my passion of treeplanting to restore the environment and the zen like austerity that was required. She was a bohemian arts school graduate who came from the north shore of Sydney. While living with me she saw herself as being a frustrated artist but in moving away she has in my opinion returned to the style of a girl from the north shore of Sydney.
This is my story of Married Life and the futile struggle to make me give up my treeplanting ways and accept sort of normal values.
Married Life. On meeting Robyn: “Anyone who meets me is really privileged as my father is a successful millionaire businessman from the north shore of Sydney.” On leaving school: “I was going to go to a Swiss finishing school but fortunately I was able to talk my father out of it.” On being an artist: “Bob I’m an artist and the only thing from stopping me from being one is you being such an ignorant bum.” On the artistic works of Beethoven: “Just a storm in a teacup.” On the previous boyfriend: “He was just a convenience to me.” While living with me: “Lets move the house to the top of the hill.” On coming to a divorce settlement: “I could have taken you for all you’ve got.” On her second marriage: “I was never married a second time”. This is just conjecture on my part but I suspect that she has completely forgotten that she was briefly married a second time. On giving up subsequent boyfriends: “I’ve given up on boyfriends for good as I now own a chain saw and get more fun from that.” On sex: “I have no sexual feelings having transcended that puerile state years ago and with you I have extra no sexual feelings.” On mathematics: “What has maths ever done for me? Nothing!” On maths and science teachers: “All maths and science teachers are weirdos and social misfits” I was soon to become a maths and science teacher. On going to the doctors with a migraine: The doctor, “She thinks that she is going to die but I don’t think so.” This piece of information she told me. She went to the doctors with this complaint. When he briefly left the room, she has a quick look at her card and that is what he had written. On putting something back together again but wrongly: “Bob, don’t discuss this with me, I KNOW.” On discussing a sensitive issue: “When in doubt, always be confident.” On coming to a compromise: “It’s all or nothing.” On the harangue as a means of discussion: “You love it.” On water pollution control: “The building inspector eventually let me put the septic outlet into the creek.” On principles: “Everyone has price, [to buy out their principles], you just have to find it.” On me and my rustic lifestyle: “A fool’s paradise.” She’d sware [like swagger] off to teacher’s training school with a head full of how wonderful she was and how boring and ordinary everyone and everything else was. One day she told me as she climbed up the seats and steps and took a seat of the high sided lecture hall, a fellow student kneeled down in front of her, picked up her foot and kissed it. She told me she thought it was "so boring and pathetic". The theme of the story isn’t without underlying basis of truth to it though. She’d go off to school wearing one red sock and one green sock but that is what is expected of a first year art teacher. R liked the company of homosexual men and even lived with them. This is something I haven’t really understood. I suspect it is for really several quite complex reasons. She’d like to hear of their sexual exploits and then sort of be a mother to them, maybe to tell them they were naughty boys and then to maybe even encourage them at the same time. She’d like to dress up and camp it up with them liking to show off her charms and a knowledge of their world but all in a totally safe and platonic situation. On visiting me years later: “This house is the biggest pig sty I have ever laid eyes upon. How anyone lives in a brothel like this, I just don’t know.” A few moments later: “I suppose that I shouldn’t speak to like this anymore.” Me: “I just couldn’t care less.”
There must have been something in the marriage because the day after Robyn was remarried [just briefly though], I severed [cut off], the side of my ring finger with the machette in an instant. I then bandage my finger with my hankie, not actually looking to see what has happened, and complete my work. If I remember correctly, it was even the next day and while next door, that I had the hard headedness to actually remove the hankie and have a look at what had happened and saw that it wasn’t just a cut but a compete severing. As if I didn’t know it already, this was a symbolic reinforcing of the severing between the two of us, an actual excising.
Although we are still friendly and talk occasionally, there is a philosophical gulf between the two of us. I’m abstract and rustic while she is definitely very modern and consumer oriented. I can now see what she must have been suppressing while living here. Another example of what I naturally interpret as being the weirdness of the bond between the two of us occurred one day when I visited my parents in Brisbane in the family home.
We now have been divorced for many years. They had lived there for over 30 years and I had done so for some of that time at a busy intersection. In all of that time, there had only been a couple of minor accidents and none while I was there. I arrived and after greeting my parents, I immediately telephoned Robyn to arrange a meeting with Emily. It is only to be a brief conversation but while I’m talking to her, I hear the crash of an accident out the front. I immediately go and have a look and see a man lying in the middle of the road and being attended to by two ladies and the traffic starting to bank up. I come back inside, tell Robyn what has happened and hang up. I then immediately telephone 000. This is the only time in my life that I’ve called the emergency number and I’m always perplexed as to how it happened at that moment. I’ve since learnt that there were two nurses in the car behind him who were able to attend to him immediately. It was reported in the local newspaper that when he was being operated on, he suffered a stroke, an extra complication I suspect to his injuries. He was riding a motor scooter and hit a car. I don’t think that his injuries were life threatening. Is it macabre to say that while lying in the middle of the road, his blood ran from there and into the gutter. Yes a sober reminder to always be careful and cautious in dangerous situations, maybe emotional ones as well as injuries can occur here as well.
Extra Help. My daughter lived with me on my tree growing farm when she was a child. She even has helped me plant a few trees and has watched them grow. She would even occasionally come with me when I would cut down a few of the older trees. She said that she found this extremely boring and so would bring a book with her to read while I did my work. The only thing that she said that she had the slightest interest in was the moment that the tree crashed down to the ground.
She eventually leaves home and studies journalism at university. Upon graduating, she leaves home to travel and work in England. She gets a job in of all things, advertising but I suppose that it isn’t too bad since of the contracts the company gets is to educate people on the need for recycling. Another job they get is to advertise of all things, the breathing of fresh air as opposed to the smog of London. On the day of the photographic shoot, the model doesn’t show up and so they decide to photograph my daughter as the model breathing fresh air. For a week or so, she must have had one of the most recognizable faces in England with a half page colour photo in all the leading newspapers and on billboards.
Is that strange that someone from rural Australia is used to encourage the English to breath fresh air? She is now back in Australia and engaged to of all people, an arborist [a tree doctor] and works still in advertising on the 36th floor of a city high rise building. When ever they visit me, I take them for a walk and show them one of my favourite trees, whether is the tallest and straightest or the shortest and thickest but always something that I think is special. Whenever I visit them in the suburbs, I’m also taken for a walk and am shown a poisoned tree stump as a statement of pride as a job well done, that is no house damaged. This I also understand but I’m also aware of the juxtaposition. I’ve even suggested an advertising strategy for them. Why not paint on all tree stumps, the company name, “Sydney Tree Care”, the contact phone number and the statement, “the ultimate solution”?
On my farm, I still sit and wait for the trees to grow bigger and dream of my eventual sawmill but at least I know where I can get some extra help from to cut some of the trees!
Introduction to Untold Stories. It was probably my grandfather who gave me my love of trees and yet I know little of his life. Strange to relate, but with in days of completing this draft, my sister gave me a copy of only a few page diary that my grandfather started to keep when he traveled back to England to visit my grandmother’s relatives after a gap of 33 years. I didn’t even know of its existence until just very recently. In it he writes the words, “the value and beauty of trees” which is then repeated. Words which to me now seem prophetic. I can remember their departure and being in their cabin which is just mentioned. At the time, I was only 2 years and 11 months old which must make it my earliest verifiable memory.
Untold Stories. I’ve had the chance to speak to three old soldiers from the Great War. Perhaps the one who told me the most was my grandfather in law. He twice drove up from Sydney to visit us when I was married and on the last occasion to see our newly born baby daughter. He said that he hadn’t taken the war seriously until he was marching up to the front for the first time and passed a cemetery with all its white crosses. He then realised it was a serious business. He said that he was very lucky to have survived. Once in a trench and sheltering under a sheet of galvanized iron, a shell landed beside him but didn’t explode because of all the mud. If it had gone off, it would have been the end of him. He was a gunner and in 1917 while involved in the terrible battle of Passchendaele, one of his mates was injured out in no man’s land. He goes out to rescue him and carries him back to a casualty station. While there they observe blood running down his leg. Upon inspection, it is revealed that he has been shot in the lower leg. The bullet passing between his calf muscle and the bone. He then goes off injured. To quote his exact words, “the atmosphere was so thick, I just didn’t feel a thing.” The next day, all his gun crew is blown up.
He told me that he was involved in an incident that became a controversy. Late in the war, he is in the trenches when the Red Baron flies over his section of the line in his red Focker triplane in hot pursuit of another plane with yet another British plane behind. He grabs a lewis machine gun and fires at him as he races over head. The Red Baron then crashes or lands [it is disputed] 100 yards away. Apparently a book was written entitled something like, “Who Shot Down the Red Baron?”. Ron Brooks, my grandfather in law said that the author interviewed him about the incident and that he is mentioned in the text. I haven’t looked it up to see what it says.
Recently I saw a BBC documentary on the tv about this incident and the controversy surrounding it that contained some re enactments. In this they interviewed several Australian soldiers who were holding a lewis gun and they gave their account of the event in a comic broad Australian accent. I imagined that one of them was playing the part of Ron Brooks, gunner.
As a young child, my parents took my daughter to Sydney for a visit. While there, I wanted her to meet her great grandfather but I was told that it wouldn’t be possible. He had become too old and decrepit. On the first night of her being in Sydney, he died. It turned out not to be possible after all.
I met on a few occasions, Jack Burrows an old friend of the family. As it turned out, he enlisted about the same time as my grandfather, they sailed together on the same ship arriving in Egypt as reinforcements for the Gallipoli campaign and camped at Helipolis at the foot of the pyramids. Both went on to France in 1916 for the Battle of the Somme, my grandfather at Poziers and Jack at Frommers. These are both very severe battles with many Australian losses where both were promoted to officers in the infantry. For my grandfather, officers training school was at Oxford University which must have been quite a change from the family blacksmith shop in Rosewood which was where my grandfather commenced his working life. Both married English girls from London and both returned to Australia in the same ship which is where they met. They arrived just a few days before 1920. Both worked for the PMG and lived in adjoining suburbs in Brisbane. Jack lived a healthy life until he was over 100 years old and most of that time in the same house. He didn’t speak much of his experiences but he did say that in 1918 during the great German offensive, they were marched in to hold the line. The British army was in a chaotic retreat. My mother told me that this was where he won the Military Cross but this as it turns out was just a myth. Yes, the Australian soldiers held the line. He said that at the end of the war that he was, “totally wrecked” [meaning mentally and physically]. He said that on the morning of the Armistice, their line was being shelled right up to the last minute and people were still being killed. When my grand mother was dying in hospital, there was a wreck of a lady in the bed beside her. She had completely lost her mind and was totally incoherent. I was told that her husband had died on the morning of the 11th November 1918.
What a horror it must have been to hear of the signing of the Armistice and then to learn a few days later that your husband was one of the very last to have lost his life on that very morning. My grandfather probably had the most difficult war of all if that can be imagined. His battalion had the second highest number of casualities of the Australians. Something like three thousand or was it five thousand in a full strength of a thousand. Sometimes their numbers fell to as low as 300 but they still had to fill the line as if they were of full strength. He died when I was quite young and I didn’t really get to speak to him about it. I did ask him a few childish questions and he did answer them but I was told very firmly by my mother that “the war must never be discussed”. I did pick up a few things along the way though.
When my grandfather had a headache, I was told that was because he still had some shrapnel stuck in his head. I’m sure that this couldn’t be true but it all added to the unspoken family myth. I have a copy of his medical history. He was injured at Bapaume, a few days after returning to the front as an officer. A bullet graze to the face and an injury to his elbow.
My grandmother was psychologically unstable and the families’ main role was to keep this under control as much as possible. She did have an older brother who also served. I was told that he was injured twice. On one occasion, while lying on a stretcher and waiting to be loaded on to a ship to be returned to England, his father comes across him while working on the docks. In the next war, I was told that their family’s London home was bombed by what I was told was a “direct hit” and totally destroyed in the blitz of 1940.
Never to mention the war was almost normal at the time but I have picked up a few bits of information along the way. A book was written about my grandfather’s battalion by one of the officers. It is full of platitudes and jingoism but there is mentioned one act of kindness that my grandfather was responsible for. It involved sending up to the front line some dry socks that the soldiers appreciated in those difficult and muddy circumstances. I still own a few remnants from the war. His three volumes paybook, book two still covered in the now dried mud from Passchendaele and a few photos and some postcards. Some of these have been donated to the war memorial. One of the post cards was of interest to them because it was written in French since apparently he made an effort to learn the language while there.
When my grandfather left school at 12 years, he worked at his grandfather’s blacksmith shop at Rosewood. When he enlisted, he put down his trades as blacksmithing and engineering. By 1915 he was a qualified engineer with the PMG. On returning to Brisbane just a few days short of 1920, they live at Wellington Point near his parents’ farm. He becomes a vegetarian and travels daily by train to the city for work. He then buys a house closer to the city at Greenslopes because I’m told “he can’t stand the smell of the abattoir the train goes past”. He also joins the Theosophical Society and makes a serious study of the worlds beyond. Years later, both grand parents have now died and I’m looking at a very few things under the house at Greenslopes. One of the things that was there was a rather rare tool called a debarking bar. [A tool for removing bark from logs]. You can see by looking at it that it has been hand made in a blacksmith’s forge. I plant and grow trees on my farm for timber here in Cedar Pocket and this tool is most useful for me. Whenever I use it, I can’t help but wonder about the coincidence as to how and why it was made and how it got to be underneath their suburban house for me to find and use, years later.
It was probably my grandfather who gave me a love of trees and often took me for walks. I also wonder about all those other untold stories and incidents, many of which though were probably even beyond the finding of words to describe.
In the United States, there is incredibly a historic group that re enacts the exploits of the AIF 12th Battalion.
Farm Life. These are a few of my thoughts and experiences of farm life here. Farm life here as I’ve said earlier, isn’t like a more normal farm. Gympie Messmates. At midday, I usually have a nap or maybe they are a reverie. These little sleeps are most peculiar. I usually fall asleep so easily and in a matter of usually 5 to 10 minutes and very occasionally up to 30 minutes. I may have dreams and thoughts and then to wake up so completely refreshed is extraordinary.
Today in my little nap, I recall having a sort of dream where I was being dictated to and writing down some sort of story. I was about 2/3rd of the way through when I awoke. I completely couldn’t recall what the story was about but this little incident I wrote down straight away afterward my nap but I don’t think that they are related at all.
Early in 2007, I was needing a calendar and since I didn’t have one, I then usually look through my old calendars and see if any of the previous years coincide with the coming year. Fortunately I found an old almost unused diary that my mother kept from 1962 which is the same as the required year. A few years later she had written a bit more in it but this time using it as a note book. After using it for a while, I happened to notice that on the 13th November she had written the words, Eucalyptus cloeziana. Now this is very significant to me because it is the botanical name of Gympie Messmate, one of the three main trees that I’ve planted here. Gympie Messmates are deeply important to me and I am very familiar with all aspects of them from seedlings, young trees, large trees, their timber both sawn and in the round. Several good looking Messmates also occur naturally on the farm as well. I can even remember the first Gympie Messmate that was pointed out to me. It was while I was working in the Department of Forestry close to here. It was a young tree that was planted a few years earlier and it looked very impressive. The old overseer/ganger who pointed it out to me was a committed member of the local branch of the Freemasons. I was only 19 years old at the time and I’d like to think that he was impressed with me because, although he couldn’t actually invite me to join the Freemasons with him, because one needs to make the move ones self, he said that if I wished to join, he would recommend it.
At my parent’s home, there are two Gympie Messmates in adjoining suburban blocks that I used to walk past when ever I visited and when for a walk. My mother had a great love of nature and has an interest in my enterprise. My father though has no interest in me nor my 34 year tree planting project. I find my project interesting environmentally, financially [years of austerity to possible eventual returns], and psychologically but he in that time has never ever asked how I’m getting on or what I’d doing on the farm. He would be utterly incapable to do so. I once showed him a 3 minute video of a small sawmill I needed to purchase and maybe he could help but he fell asleep while watching it, when he awoke, I showed it to him a second time but he fell asleep a second time. I’d say his lack of interest is genuine and not put on. Any spare cash, he has invested with my developer now ex-brother in law and seems to have some interest in that.
The Family Jinx, as written on the 15th March 2008. I only became aware of the family jinx as a consequence of a good friend of mine telling me that he had only just discovered that instead of being born on the 12th August, something that he had believed for over 30 years, but that he was actually born on the 13th August. He now had his birth certificate to prove it. His mother had successfully covered up the fact until he now. This happened many years ago but it set my mind thinking because there appears to be an excess of twelves in my family! If one is born on the 13th and there is a superstition about this number, it would be possible to cover it up with varying amounts of ease and security. The most likely date that it would be changed to would be the 12th as the twelve is a good and pleasing number but the 14th is also there as an option as well. It happens that both of my parents were also born on the 12th as well. My mother had two siblings and one was born on the 14th and their mother, my maternal grandmother was also born on the 12th. I have two sisters, one was born on the 12th August as well and the other on the 15th May. This is an unusual date in itself because if it is written as 15/5/51, it is a palindrome number and if it is written as 15/5/1951, it is an all odd number date and this won’t occur again for another 1103 years from now. I’ve mentioned my two sisters, my parents, my mother’s parents and their three children including my mother. A total of 9 people of which 4 are born on the 12th and one on the 14th. My contention is that all this couldn’t be true? There must have been some fudging of the figures somewhere. Some attempt to shirk the jinx of the number 13. This I think would have been particularly easy for my father and his mother in law as I think that they would have been home births. My mother’s father was born on the 26th, a double 13. My mother also had a brother, my uncle, who was a pilot during the war. He was unfortunately killed on the night of the 14th/15th August, his younger sister’s 17th birthday. There were hundreds of thousands of bombing missions during the war particularly over Europe. One can imagine my surprise when I walk down the main street of the local town and look in a book shop and see a photo of this actual mission. This was a small and actually pointless mission bombing the docks of Marseilles. Only one plane was lost and that was my uncle who crashed his plane on landing killing all the crew instantly. This mission was in preparation for the allied landings in the south of France. It was thought that the Germans would have resisted the landings but they withdrew and blew up the rest of the docks the next day. This was my uncle’s 26th mission. The docks of Marseilles were the actual place his father, my grandfather actually set foot on Europe 28 [twice 14] years earlier bound for 3 years of hell in the trenches. He served with the 12th Battalion, the Australian battalion that had the second highest number of causalities. Initially he was assigned to the 26th Battalion together with his brother Jim but was transfered to the 12th. Jim, a carpenter also survives the war but dies early of a ruptured appedix because he self diagnoses a pain in the gut with castor oil. His battalion captured the German tank now with the museum that I once early one Sunday morning climbed inside. I also had a third blood relative who served in the RAF. He was a rear gunner who lost his life when flying with the squadron leader as pilot, their Lancaster bomber didn't return from bombing the aircraft factory at Dassau very late in the war. He was 39. The plane is still missing. My concern is further raised because my other grandfather dies on the actual day of my youngest sister’s birth, the 12th August so I suppose that his date is correct. She grows up, marries on the 12th July, the birthday of my maternal grandmother, the same date that my other grandmother will die on a couple of years later. She is then divorced on the 12th followed by a vitriolic and litigious financial divorce settlement. My maternal grandmother goes on and dies on her daughter’s, my mother’s birthday, the 12th October.
I eventually purchase a farm. In fact because of legal reasons, I have to arrange the purchase of this one larger farm which is actually the amalgamation of two smaller farms. They are the only farms at the end of the road. They are the numbers 1 and 2 which look like a number 12 to me when drawn on a map. Of the two farms, I own the number 2. Just recently, the local government has changed the numbering system on the road and I have been allocated the number 100. I’m told that this is a good number and should add 10% to the farm’s valuation in the unlikely event that I sell it.
I eventually marry. I’m a 20th August and she is a 2nd August which seem strangely close to me. We have a daughter who is born on the 28th. She grows up, leaves home and has just recently purchased a house. What number is she drawn to, yes, the number 12.
I visited it for the first time a few weeks ago and I had a look at the numbers in the street. Yes they are unusual. The street numbers seem to start on her side of the road at the number 12 with her and continue up to about 18. On the other side of the road, there are the numbers 7, 9, 11, and no number 13. It just isn’t there! I’ve told this story to just two ladies. One just happens to reside at the number 301, which seems like a sort of reversed 13 to me and yes she is undeniably fighting her demons. The other resides at 1030, another variation of 13. She though has not attempted to shirk the 13 jinx when the council allocated her this number. She is most definitely “complex” and although being a sensitive idealist, she has fallen so utterly short of her goals one has to wonder why? What other influences have made her so comprehensively ineffectual! At the moment she is going through a fractious divorce settlement. When I told her this story, she told me that her now ex husband is an early in the morning 14th baby and his mother, a difficult woman I’m told, was a 26th baby.
And what is the family jinx? Well there are many issues but they are to do with in effect, psychological disfunctionality. A key issue of it at the moment and one that I feel deeply is the now undeniable fact that my father is a miser. I’ll state clearly what this is, that is one who loves money for its own sake more than anything else. My father was a senile 90 a few days ago. Was it the 12th as is the common opinion or was it really the 13th as I wonder? Let me state clearly, I, when or more correctly if I eventually get the opportunity, I resolve to break his jinx. Good will and life affirmation shall be my means! Om.
January, 2009. Fred dies on the 27th December, 2008. What number is this? 27/12/2008 27 is 2+7=9 12 is 1+2=3 2008 is 2+0+0+8=10: 10 is 1+0=1 The number becomes, 9+3+1= 13! Received from my sister on the 3rd February, 2009. I got a card from Ron, one of Dad's crew members. Fred was a navigator during the war flying out over the great expances of the Atlantic Ocean for up to 24 hours at a time. It was quite a navagational feat to do all this flying and then to successfully find their way back to base without being too lost by only using dead reaconing. Fred though would have been in his element sitting at his little desk and doing all those calculations all day long. He definitely prefered numbers to people and the crew would have appreciated his soberity and successfully guiding them back to base all those times. "It was 4.10.43 that Fred and I flew with Les Shield skipper of the crew. As navigator Fred plotted our way back to base on 31 occasions over 343.05 hrs of operational flying over the expanse of the "Atlantic Ocean", and the "Bay of Biscay". I'll never forget him. Ron P.S. Our first operational trip was Les' 13th trip, our first as a crew the date Friday 13th 1943 ie the 13th lunar month,
My mother's father made quite a detailed study of astrology and even cast quite a few charts. I doubt that he would have done it knowing that the dates of two of his children were wrong so I suspect that all the dates that he dealt with were correct. My father's mother though was quite a card player and was well aware of the concept of lucky and unlucky numbers but I don't think that she ever displayed any interest in astrology. Yes it is Gertrude who lives at 1030 and this is her confession.
Gertrude’s Confession. Gertrude is a dear friend who lives just near by. She is one who passionately hates sin and her whole life is lived as a mater being drawn to great sinners and entering into this futile struggle. She claims that God has called her to build an Ashram and although she hates building with a passion, she has driven herself and particularly others to her calling and now the Ashram is built. The challenge is now to stop this building drive and to actually turn it into a functioning Ashram. Yes, another person with a calling.
The weird thing for me is that if you walk around all the buildings, there is only one date to be seen, carved clearly into a post, and that is strangely the 4th May, 1987. In a previous story, I told of Nell and the strange events around this date of her death. On this day, Nell was just a few months old and it appears that somehow Fate had given us nature mystics something strange to think about. Gertrude, is actually having trouble in changing her life’s direction from saint and mater and Ashram builder to head Abbess and this is her confession of her troubles [as I’ve conjectured]. Gertrude Confession. “I was born into a ruined Germany at the end of the war, both parents were refugees from the lost far eastern part of the old Germany. Home was a cement block in a high rise building which the family felt safe and secure and were thankful for considering what could have been the case. Many an afternoon and evening I was locked in this house, either by myself or looking after my twin baby brothers while both my parents worked late while saving to improve our situation. Home was a solid bastion of security against the dangers and ruins of the outside world. When I was about 15, I was privileged to be able to assist my parents build a home for ourselves. Cement was the chosen medium because of its strength and security in a dangerous world. At last having our own home was a great improvement on the quality of our lives and best of all we even had a garden where we could actually grow things. Life now seemed good and I had even contributed. Years later and I’m now a young lady traveling through south east Asia and on to the great empty land of promise, Australia. Here I already had an inspiring friend carving out a house and home in the great god forsaken and unpaved wilderness. The open spaces had drawn me here and now with residency status, we (my husband and I) purchased a large cleared and desolated old cow paddock. This barren landscape was to be turned into a paradise of light and learning if we only had the energy and inspiration to sacrifice ourselves for this greater goal. I felt called to build an Ashram to educate humans into a better way of living and appreciating nature. Pregnancy and a trip home to Germany and my partner has build in my absence a beautiful cement block home. Upon my return, this house has now transformed this wasteland into a comfortable and wonderful home. It has again greatly improved the quality of life of my little family. I am again so thankful. When opportunity knocks, grasp it with both hands. Fate has now allowed me to buy truck load after truck load of reject grade cement blocks all for the price of just delivery. An offer too good to miss. A whole village is now created , although it is in actual fact, in pieces and just needs to be assembled. My calling is to build, and god help me, I intend to do so to improve the world. All I have to do is to inspire others to assist. Problems occur in my relationship and so the first task is to build another home for my estranged husband. Once this is completed, money is now in short supply and so he returns to Germany for the security of reliable work. If god loves me and my project, this pile of blocks is to be placed one on top of the other and the gaps then filled with cement. I fervently pray and I’m rewarded by the arrival of a visiting part time German builder. Work is illegal and the wages are cheap but with god’s assistance, all is possible. The petty rules of man as they appear in the form of council regulations, work permits, and building codes are all irrelevant to a higher calling. The first accomodation block is completed. Should I now start my venture? But no I decide I need another accomodation block to increase numbers to 50 to make things seem more worthwhile and wonderful. Here on my own again, my heart goes out to a resident German builder and we come to some arrangement between building and the returning of favors. Cement is a wonderful and warm medium. It is beautiful and strong and will last at least a 1000 years. All buildings must be built to last. I particularly hate timber. It is a pathetic and cruel medium and I will never use it. I would rather line the walls of my buildings with the bones of dead humans than use timber. A tree is more beautiful than a human. To cut a tree for timber is a sacrilege against nature, the provider for all of us. A sawmill is worse than a death camp. I weep when ever I pass a sawmill and see the desecration of the most noble monarchs of this planet. The only reason I will use wood is if it is cheaper and easier and then I must submit to the higher calling. Another German suitor is evicted because, although cultured and intelligent, ‘He is a lazy bugger because he won’t build in cement’ . With accommodation for 50 people, I am now forced to build an ablution block (toilet and showers). Money now comes from work in Gympie at the women’s refuge but this work is degrading and disenchanting . The only thing that keeps me here with all their sordid troubles is the pure thought of my Ashram and its help in a troubled world. The kitchen is started and in difficult times like this, it is my hatred of the building process that keeps me going. After much pain and suffering for all involved, it is completed. Out of reverence for what has been achieved and to the greatness of god and his ways, my builder brother arrives and is soon put to work building a temple to all the gods and goddesses. Never has there been such a holy building built with such swearing and reluctance but with my soothing encouragement and assistance it is completed and consecrated. He departs immediately and I’m told for good. I have the occasional visitor where visitors do some work in return for keep. In the description of my farm, I clearly say that I expect maximum work plus total commitment to my calling. I get volunteers but few have the commitment that I expect from them and they soon leave. I need people who can share my inspiration as it has been shown to me. The younger generation show no appreciation for the sacrifices that have already been made and are usually of little assistance. At last, it is completed and I step forward to be the guress (the rarely used female form of the word guru) of my beautiful Ashram but unfortunately by now I have no devotees and no inspiration and so I have to quickly step back again. A trice bankrupted advertising executive arrives looking a venue to take his life in a different direction and into an even more exhaled position as a spiritual healer. A smooth way with words, a giant ego, and some dubious help from above I am given a lesson in opportunism. After a few months of cancer cures and an ignoble departure, I’m on my own again. I’m on my own and restless. I can’t help my self can I? Beauty and creativity cannot occur in a state of mess and disorder. For miracles to work, all needs to be in order. All I need is a small shed to be neat and tidy. It is agreed. This is my confession, I admit I’m a sick person and I’ve now gone too far. It has been pointed out to me by all my dear friends and relatives. It is there in front of my very eyes. I cannot deny it. I can hear their words, I can see my actions, I know it is true, but in my heart I cannot accept it. This small one roomed shed out of cement blocks naturally, I decided to make into two rooms. It would be just a little bit extra and so why not? Well then a third room might as well be added as well. I just couldn’t help myself. I know I’m naughty, (cavalier even I’m told). This illegal building is now with in sight of the busy road and inviting a visit from the dreaded building inspector. I try to hide it behind a few trees and with shade cloth. The building is even illegally placed being too close to the road and my neighbour’s boundary. It is also the size of a house and looks like one as well. Why have I done it? Why risk all 20 years of building for what? When it is pointed out to me, I viciously attack them as best I can with what I’m told is a technique of aggressive victimhood and my detractors are stunned into silenced. Please help me, I’m a masochist. I hate building with such a passion that I even love to hate the process. The more I hate it the greater the sacrifice and the greater the good. The more pain the better it is. I must also be a sadomasochist because I also enjoy making others suffer while building. If people enjoy themselves while building, they are not working hard enough or with total commitment. I’ve even deducted wages because workers have enjoyed themselves. I can see it has gone too far. I need a cure. Martyrdom and sacrifice have displaced inspiration. I need to fulfill the role of making this Ashram work and to stop this curse of building. Should I take up whipping myself, or whipping others. It must stop. I’m even running out of land to build upon. How am I to be cured? Please! Help! Help!” The cure that I recommend is: TABOO PLEASURE??!! Not another place of self denial, pain and suffering for God but a temple for pleasure and learning! Footnote: Gertrude has returned to Germany for recreation and therapy but secretly she has been helping her “husband” renovate his house. A return ticket to Australia is already booked but I suspect that a cure is still as far away as ever.

Chapter 8. Farm Life. Yes it is all farm life here but life on my farm isn’t like a more normal farm. Rustic Australia. I host the occasional visitor who comes to my farm to experience a full dose of rustic australiana with a life on the edge of the jungle. On my farm I plant and grow trees for timber. A long term and idealistic project where the plan is to repair the environment and to eventually make some money.
All of my visitors speak english to some degree. This is most fortunate as this is the only language that I speak. As a consequence I always thank my visitors for all the effort that they have put into learning english and I hope that it has been worthwhile for them. This has made me to be an advocate of english and its many merits.
English is a very dynamic language and is always picking up new words and concepts that it likes and adding them to its already huge vocabulary. To help me in my english appreciation lessons, I have made up a list of my favorite words suitable for here. Words such as serendipity, silviculture, arcadia, bucolic, shrine, conviviality, cadence and lingua franca are examples and now the word, wabi sabi has been added from the japanese. This is an old fashioned japanese word that is the basis of their aesthetics meaning the subtle beauty of nature, the profound in the ordinary, and the aesthetics of imperfection. Its opposite is probably the modern. I have mentioned it to a couple of japanese and they said that they had heard of the word but had never used it. To emphasise the point, I’ve had carved into a solid block of wood, the obscure japanese characters for this word. I then carved on the reverse side the word Wabi Sabi in “english”. So far, I’ve only shown this to one japanese visitor. Upon looking at the japanese characters, he couldn’t read it as expected. I then reversed the block and he could now see the word in “english” which he could read in a flash! His immediate comment was, “Oh, how most unfortunate”. Meaning he knew the importance of the word to japanese culture and yet he couldn’t even read it in japanese and could only do so in “english”.
Oh yes, the joys and responsibilities of being a custodian of the great eclectic english language. Wabi sabi, maybe it is found here in even an over abundance!
How I Found $350,000. This story is in two parts and has nothing to do with the million dollars worth of marihuana found on the hill behind my farm. When I purchased my farm in the aptly named Cedar Pocket, I always knew that there was some red cedar growing here. In 1989 I cut and sold one of these trees because it was damaged and although it would have remained alive for quite some time, the timber would have started to deteriorate and its value would have declined. I did quite well out of it selling the best of the wood for $5,000 /m3. This then prompted me to do an inventory of all my red cedar trees to see how much I actually had and to clear around and prune them to form. This involved much struggle through lantana and weeds and into the rugged nooks and crannies but eventually my figures indicated that I had about 70m3 of standing volume of red cedar, much more that I had anticipated. If I sold some timber for $5,000/m3, then 70m3 must be worth an incredible $350,000. This is fantastic. Some people walk down the street and find a dollar coin and think that it has made their day, me, in effect go for a walk “up the back” and find more or less $350,000! This is the end of Part One. Part Two of the story isn’t so good and if you only like good news stories, you should stop here. The problem is that the top money is for the best wide boards and only from big trees and this is only a small fraction of the whole as unfortunately most of my trees are small and young. The other serious problem is that sawmills are mostly devices for making sawdust and fire wood and sawn boards are really just a by the way product. A realistic valuation would be very much less. Red cedar may be Australia’s premium cabinet timber, a timber of remarkable beauty. It is a valuable asset here, which I greatly care for and appreciate. The standing volume has increased to over 100m3 but certainly there are other more commercial species to grow for timber that would give a better return. At the moment I can’t even give away the tops of the recent tree that I’ve cut. Cabinetmakers and antique dealers even give the wood a mythic quality with its deep red inner glow and the subtle figure of the wood and yet I see this figure growing daily in my trees I wonder who else has some hidden asset in the back blocks of their farm?
Fire, Come Quick! A few weeks ago I received this dreaded call. A close by lady friend rang and her exact words were a jumbled and agitated, “There is a fire and the house is about to catch alight. Bring a spanner to disconnect the gas bottle. Click”, and that was it! Luckily I recognized the voice and knew instantly where she was. The weather was dry and I suspected the worst. I immediately grabbed my shoes, pulled on some long pants and a long sleeved shirt, grabbed my knapsack and filled it with water, jumped in the ute and drove off down the road. The spanner will have to be the adjustable spanner in the car’s tool kit. In a moment or two, I look across to her place and can see a column of smoke rising up and I wonder what I’m going to be in for. As I approach her house, I can see the fire in the long grass around the side of house and into the pile of timber stored for the planned house extension and the flames licking the side of the half completed house. The owner meets me distressed and exhausted from beating the flames in an ineffective effort to control their spread. I immediately start work with my knapsack. Many years ago I used to work in the Department of Forestry and it was quite a common occurrence to control small fires with a knapsack. The first task is to extinguish the perimeter and to stop it spreading up the hill and then completely out of control, and along the side of the house. I do this and then start to extinguish the fire as it is just starting to get a hold in the pile of wood with the aid of the dry grass. In just a few minutes, the fire is extinguished and I can now relax a bit and over look the blackened site and put out a couple of relights. The house owner is extremely thankful!
A few minutes after the fire is out, the local town’s fire brigade arrive and with their huge pump and hose, they completely soak the area preventing any more relights. The chief fire officer then asks a few questions as to how it started and so forth. He then congratulates me on my effective and prompt action to arrive so quickly and to so effectively put out the fire. He then says that it might have been a good idea if I was wearing some shoes. I said that in the rush, I just didn’t have time to put then on and just had to be a bit careful and to step carefully over any hot spots. May I strongly recommend to country readers that they always have a knapsack and water ready, suitable clothes which means long pants and a long sleeved shirt and yes shoes, if or more likely probably, when they get the dreaded call. It is completely impossible to fight a fire close up with out long pants and a long sleeved shirt. Yes shoes are essential as well, it is just that I didn’t have the time and could get away with not wearing them this time.
I have received a few such calls over the years and a simple knapsack is a very effective tool in controlling small fires before they can turn into something much more serious.
The Cow, a Tragically Cursed Animal. The next time you sit down to eat a steak, bear a thought for that proud but tragically stupid animal, the cow that has had do donate its actual self for you and your passing pleasure. For each mouthful you take, think of all the mouthfulls the cow has had to have made of grass, a food that is so lacking that us humans can only barely eat it at all and then to have to regurgitate it and to chew it a second time before sending it off to the second stomach for further digestion and eventual conversion into meat and milk. The ratio would have to be a million to one. Not only is it a totally inproportunate imbalance, it is some how even worse that slavery because it is a mockery so extreme that we don’t even see the joke. We have become too far removed from the reality of the situation.
Us humans can be gross lazy fat slobs and the cow, even perhaps bulky with muscle but not fat as us humans are, and having to work so hard just to live on that most desperate food of all, grass; us humans are so totally unaware of the situation that we are blind to the fact that the cow must be carrying a most terrible curse, a jinx from God the Creator, for it all to be so self perpetuating without us even noticing or questioning or being even slightly concerned.
Our connection with cattle goes back to the dawn of civilisation. The cow goes extinct in the wild probably because it is just too bulky and stupid to compete in the world but some how survives in the margins of human settlement because the predators of the cow keep their distance from us cunning and ruthless humans and so the close association of humans and cattle is established. Nature must have then decreed that if humans have saved the cow from extinction, they can have as a reward the right to treat them as they like. We then ruthlessly and persistently manipulate the situation to our advantage with the implicit justification that as a creature they only exist due to our protection. The cow would have to be the laughing stock of the animal kingdom. They are big, commonly grow to over one ton in weight but their most notable feature is their stupidity. They have a big brain but it doesn’t work very well. They have eyes that look sidewards and can only just see forwards out of the corner of their eyes. Their nose points forwards for smell and their ears can listen either sidewards or forwards but if listening forwards they often block the sidewards vision of their eyes. If you approach a cow, it will try and listen for you and smell you but it cannot see you clearly straight ahead. This sends a confusing message to their dull brain which again further jumbles the information.
Maybe a life of grazing is very dull and so a dull brain is a help to pass the time but it comes at a cost which the cow is perpetually paying. The cow knows that it is an at risk creature and so has a furious appetite for grass. It wants to get as big and as fat in as short time as possible for in its great bulk it feels safe. This would have to be the cows biggest error of judgment for this is also the point of common interest between us humans and the cow. We also want them to get as big and fat in as short a time as possible so we can then send them off but here our interests are clearly divergent to the cow’s.
I’m a small time cattle producer and I know their ways quite well but even me who is sympathetic to their life’s dilemma, sometimes as a joke, call our to the cows and ask if they are getting big and fat as fast as possible knowing they will answer yes, which is to my advantage, and they mistakenly think is to theirs. In fact the cow has such an appetite that it will even get through fences to get to better grass to get big and fatter quicker so much so that it becomes a nuisance and has to be sent off for processing even sooner and even bigger. What a tragic joke at their expense. The life of a dairy cow is most disciplined. Me as a minor beef producer an envious of the well controlled and regulated lives of the dairy cow. My beef cattle just wander around aimlessly and look to cause me as much trouble as possible while the dairy cows are so controlled and under the thumb. Any form of dissent is treated most harshly and a tightly regimented order is maintained.
Usually the working life of a dairy heifer is set on its dairy path when the young heifer, living with her many sisters and sharing a common boyfriend, falls pregnant and gives birth to her one and only love child. Usually the father is a beef animal and the calf is sent off in a few days and she is inducted into a life of a dairy cow. Here she is fed plenty of grass and in the morning and evenings even comes willingly and lines up outside the dairy to be herded inside, to have the milking machines applied and the milk forcibly pumped out of her. This indignity she does willing all for a few licks of molassas and a cup full of rich grain. Where are her free spirited animal principles? About a month later, she starts to cycle[hormonally] and is fixed up by this time by an unknown and impersonal father who arrived in a test tube. A cow is now lactating and carrying her new infant. No wonder when you look into the eyes of a milking cow, you can see the strain of overloaded motherhood. Cows produce milk in proportion to the amount of grass they eat and life’s treadmill is set in motion. Any cow that realises that she is on this working treadmill for little personal gain, decided not to participate in the system and instead of furiously eating grass all day just to have her milk pumped out of her for just a taste of concentrated food and none of her maternal instincts satisfied decides to reject the system and sits under the tree all day. Unfortunately there is a fascist regime in place and free loaders on the system are discovered straight away. Each month there is the dreaded herd recording. Here all cows have their quantity of milk recorded and any cow that is lazy and below her fixed quota is immediately removed from the herd and compliance is maintained. Those that keep up the good work have eight months of lactation and simultaneously carrying the child, an annual month’s holiday, birth and back to the treadmill. This time if the calf is a heifer, it is kept to grow up and to eventually replace the non performers of the herd. A couple of days of mothering which is all the only mothering it gets, the young calf is placed in a solitary confinement jail cell and fed plastic milk from a plastic tit attached to a metal bucket. The mother is distressed at the loss of her calf but after a couple of days seems to get over it. The situation is made even more ironically tragic by the fact that the mother walks past the calf’s cell with its infant and is with in two feet of it and yet it is too stupid to recognize its own distressed baby. Obviously the calf must feel severe rejection. It is then given this plastic milk for a month and is then released to wander aimlessly with its peers, given a bit of grain until it reaches adolescence. These calves are lost souls with no parental guidance at all and the only contact allowed is with others in a similar predicament. Generation after generation of no mothering, no wonder they are poor parents and yet breed to produce vast quantities of milk from udders so large the cow can hardly carry it.
Us humans have become now the consumers of all this milk produced in vast quantities for their now lost babies through the impersonal milking machine as a cold substitute for the babies suckling. What a tragic caricature this long, long, ago noble creature has become. Some cows are so addicted to a life of work and obsessively eating grass that they can actually lactate all the way, passing the repeated dreaded herd recording tests, until they give birth to the next calf while lactating for the first calf and so miss out on their annual month’s holiday. A feat I didn’t think was possible until I received one of my present generation of calves. Initially he was very runty as too much of his mother’s nutrients had gone into milk production and not to him and he was also a quite stressed young calf. I hand reared him with the others on the plastic milk and tit but as he grows older, he is given extra food as molassas and grain and it becomes clear that he has an eating disorder probably similar to his mother as he become crazed and frantic when this food is presented to him and excessively and neurotically suckles his friends ears and other appendages. His name is, Son of Workaholic Mother. Yes, I give all my animals names and yes they all do have rudimentary personalities with their little likes and dislikes.
A beef calf on the other hand is mothered obsessively but true to the tragic state of the cow, the calf still grows up to be as stupid and as useless as a dairy calf which receives almost no mothering. It would be nice to think that the loved calf would be a more rounded individual but unfortunately that isn’t the case. The excessively mothered beef calf if left alone, eventually grows to be even bigger than the mother and yet she continues to see it as her precious baby who she eats much grass for to keep lactating which the calf keeps consuming all the while she keeps thinking of it as her baby. If feed is in short supply, she can lactate so much and produce so much milk for her calf that she will loose condition and can even die to feed her fat baby who becomes fatter and even more indolent. As the calf grows bigger and if a male reaches maturity, this can lead to such scenes of such debauched and unnatural derrido I balk at describing. Suffice to say that the calf will suckle, then try to mate with his mother, then attempt to gang bang her with his peers, then watch voyeuristically a friend taking a liberty, then fight with his peers, then run off with his mother and suckle again from her for comfort before the whole debauched sequence will occur again and again and this lasting over several days.
Yes cattle need the firm guiding hand of us humans. Yes, the bull specifically, but cattle in general, are the symbol of excessive libido energy and with good reason. My neighbour had a bull which he kept well behaved and locked in the bull paddock who couldn’t even contemplate the world outside his bounds but occasionally one of my fresh heifers who had been reared on a much more liberal regime, would get into his paddock when their hormones say all systems go. Male calves are fixed up not long after they are born. I have an instrument that I applied to the young calf and although it is almost totally painless in its application they always struggle and resist strongly. This can turns it into quite a wrestle before I always eventually win. On rare occasions, the application hasn’t taken and has had to have been reapplied especially if there has been much too much toing and froing and lack of cooperation. Once applied, their lives are much more contented and satisfying but again gratitude isn’t shown to us humans for successfully managing their lives. As an animal, the cow is a very immature creature. They are happiest in a herd where they just wander around and generally think nothing other than eating grass. For sport they seem to take pleasure in butting away their friends from any particular tasty mouthful of grass. If they find themselves on their own, they immediately become self conscious and aware of their massive psychological inadequacies, become hysteric and bellow uncontrollably until mania and fear allows them to find the herd and they calm down again.
Why the cow is so close to mental instability I don’t know but I know from observation that they are very poor sleepers. They only seem to doze lightly even at night and so I suspect that they suffer from sleep apneoa [depravation] and its destructive psychological effect.
There have been many occasions when humans, children, in particular have reared an apparently cute calf with much loving care and attention and yet they always grow into something non cooperative and belligerent so much so that it is impossible for anyone that knows the situation to love an adult cow. They do not return the love that has been invested in them. A dog recognizes in us humans something greater than itself. We successfully manages a dog’s potentially disorganised lives which they appreciate and so worship us with their faithfulness becoming man’s best friend. There is totally no comparison between the two of them. The cow becomes arrogantly aloof and stupid and also hates the dog as being a sell out to the animal kingdom and its unholy close relationship with us humans while it sees itself as being true to its animal heritage.
The cow particularly hates the dog’s smile and seeing this makes the cow feel sick yet the cow knows that it has a most fragile personality. If it wasn’t for us humans managing their lives, they wouldn’t even be here. A cow looks at a human and thinks, boring old you disturbing our lives again. I admit that it is at a price but we keep it a guarded secret and the price they pay. A cow can live to 20 years and even 30 years is possible but a dairy cow is kept working until she is about 10 years old and a beef steer is kept until 4 years. What they don’t know they can’t worry about. I once had an animal that had 4 collapsed hoofs and so it couldn’t compete with the rest of the herd who bullied it,[note the word and its derivation] and took advantage of its crippled condition. I then delivered it personally on the back of my utility to the local processing plant. An easier word to use than the more direct and unsavory alternative word. I dropped him at the back door as told to do so and I could just look in and see the one way conveyor belt and I admit things looked a bit grim. I then went around to the front door and walked into the pleasant air conditioned office with the pretty girls and their smiling faces and were asked simple questions as to where my address was and where I wanted the cheque posted to.
Yes, I fortunately felt happy again and left with in an untroubled frame of mind. The cheque duly arrived and was happily banked. Passing a butcher’s shop and seeing all those big strong animals now cut into small pieces and put on display is apparently appealing to some but to me it is strangely macabre. Wives go in and choose a steak which they closely inspect for the slightest blemish to select the one the seems the most appetising. Some butcher’s shops even have photographs of big fat steers on one side and on the other, the result of him being cut into small pieces.
Yes it is all explained there. Maybe there is a reason why the cloven hoof is the symbol of the devil? Why have I written this article. As I have previously mentioned, I’m a small time beef producer and I personally wish to thank all the people who purchase and consume beef. To me beef seems very expensive and I personally don’t buy it myself because I don’t get much satisfaction from eating meat but meat eaters support me and my idyllic life style because of the price they pay and the money I receive. Yes I admit it, I suffer from the curse of vegetarism. The Achille’s heel of the beef industry. The so called moral high ground. How can I justify these apparently divergent views? To me, the cow must be a divinely approved joke. How else could it all pass by with out scrutiny or even notice? The cow in its previous incarnation somewhere else, another planet, another time and circumstance, must have been humans who were excessively lazy and indolent and so this is their ordained punishment. Yes I can accept this and maybe even a sober lesson for us. We punish them so relentlessly and it all seems to be ordaned from above and I go along with it all so willingly and my conscience is amazingly and happily clear.
What a grateful convenience! And What’s Even More! I suppose that it must have started when I got the idea as a child to plant and grow trees. After completing my university studies and from a zero base, I saved enough to purchase my run down farm, in cash. I then started planting trees in the thousands. I looked after these plants and nurtured them to grow. They eventually grew into large and tall trees. I’ve then cut some of them down and one was even over 120 feet tall. Quite an excitement in itself! I’ve then snug the logs back to the house with the tractor. Here I’ve loaded the logs onto the back of my vehicle and hauled them to the local sawmill. I’ve then had the logs sawn into boards which I’ve carted back home again. Here the timber has been used both internally and externally. Some of the outside boards have rotted away with time and have been replaced. These decayed pieces have been cut to length and used as firewood in the wood stove to cook my dinner. The ash from this wood has been used to sprinkle on some seedling that I’m growing and a rare cycle has been completed. How many people can claim to have done all of that and what is even more, there is still enough left of me to still enjoy life!!
Oh yes! My reward so far is in being philosophical and my Religion of Good Ideas. I’ve spent much of my life in growing these trees and so far I’ve made very little money from it. I’d like to think that the prospects are good but so far as I’ve said earlier, my rewards are philosophical, probably though the greatest reward of all. I have a life most conductive for introspection. A most wonderful and comfortable house, the profound satisfaction of watching my trees restore health to the hillsides and a parade of interesting and inspirational visitors who are usually lulled into a relaxed complacency by me and my arcadian paradise. It has been okay for me to write of their confessions and experiences and now I have to make some confessions myself. The essay “Snakes” has actually three parts. The third is called, “Snakes as Metaphor”.
Snakes as Metaphor. Snakes seem to have played a symbolic or even totem part in my life. Here is the sequence of events. This farm that I've owned for over 30 years I was told by my neighbour only came on to the market when the previous owner’s elder son died tragically from snake bite. It must have been the bite from a taipan. Looking back, I find this a most poignant symbol and I can’t even state the obvious. I also walk around my farm daily knowing that these snakes are all around although obviously they are not too common. At the moment I'm building an attic in the pyramid shaped space of the roof and I'm sharing the space with a carpet snake who is there most days. [Yes today as well!]
When I was a child of about 5 years of age, I recall sitting in the long grass well behind the house and reaching out with my hand behind me and feeling this smooth and slippery thing slither between my fingers. When I was 9 years old, the news came through by telephone of the sudden and distressing death of my grandfather who I was very close to. I can recall what I was doing at the time as even then I thought it a bit unusual. I was lying on the sofa in the lounge rereading a letter I'd just written to him before posting telling him of a snake I'd seen a few days earlier swimming in the creek. Even at his young age, I'd play in the creek some distance from the house on my own. I'd written that I'd seen this taipan.
This I confess now was a deliberate error, in fact quite untrue, made for effect because I'm quite certain now and then, that it would have been a black snake.. A taipan had recently been killed in our back yard which had even made the local news because it was as far south as they had been discovered at the time. As a young adult, I'm swimming naked with a group of friends as is the custom here when simultaneously I bump into a snake while swimming in the deep at the same moment a young lady dives down and grabs my penis and gives it a playful tug. A bump into a snake while swimming in a rather murky and overgrown water hole is an unjustified and harmless phobia. Even as a child, I would occasionally find myself in the creek at the same time as a snake, something that I didn't like at all especially when the currents were strong.
To have my penis pulled even in jest is an archetypal arresting moment and to have this happen at the same time as I bump into this snake is a bit strange. As a mature adult, I have a lady friend who sometimes visits and although we are platonic in our relationship, we occasionally go for naked walks together. On this occasion, we walk to the hut, about 10 minutes away. On entering the hut, there at eye height, is the head of a brown tree snake hanging down from the ceiling [collar tie actually] and spewing out some white stuff. It takes no notice of us at all and continues with what it is doing. We are transfixed and our bodies move closer together and touch in shock and comfort in the presence of this strange event.
I have an art book which has a whole chapter devoted to women and their affinity with animals. Naturally there are several paintings of naked females being entwined by snakes and one of these paintings is titled, "Sensuality". In the 30 years that I've lived here, only once has ever a snake been found in or more correctly on, any bed. The only time that it occurred was when a lady was visiting who was a student of tantra yoga. Yes, this was infact, Meiko who I’ve written about earlier, and it was found in her bed and bedroom. At the time though, she and I were studying and sleeping together in my bed and her bedroom was her dressing room. She had made quite a study of tantra and told me that she hadn’t had the opportunity to put any of it into practice. She asked me directly one morning would I help her with her trantic studies? Naturally I agreed. She said that I would need to be very disciplined. She after all worked in a zen monastery. For her and by implication me, it wasn’t sex as commonly understood but meditation and study and I was strictly told to speak about it only in this way. For her it was meditation, study, and pleasure, for me it was discipline, meditation, study, work, and pleasure in that order. She said that she was an initiate of her monastery and that me, because of my lessons from her, I would be expected to help educate and enlighten anyone I was given the opportunity with. She was of an abstract nature and always looked to the symbolic meaning of things but she wasn't used to something like this and was even shocked and perplexed. I tried to reassure her by saying that it was just bad luck and that it never happened before but I don't think that she believed me. Yes, I appreciated the lessons and took the study and discipline very seriously.
These stories are all 100% true. Yes, as my teacher above, I'm also even shocked and perplexed. The only thing is that I don't think that it is just luck and nor did she naturally. It is Fate, with a capital 'F'. The path of life is more mysterious and real than we dare to imagine. Well, here is a summary of my lessons.
Can the Energy of Sex Save the Planet? Planet Earth seems to be in a bad way with excessive consumption and humans deeply alienated from the natural world. The question I ask is whether there is anything in the natural world that has a greater power than crass materialism and is even needed to overcome our destructive orgy of consumerism. I believe that sex is more powerful that this and if understood could lead in a positive way to the saving of the planet. Sex, I believe is an energy not understood so I will try and explain things by analogy with food which is easier to understand. Food may keep me alive but I have never eaten just to keep me alive. I may have been hunger on occasions and have eaten but I have almost always eaten food that I have enjoyed. Babies may have been made by sex but most sex if not all consensual sex is indulged in for some sort of pleasure. Hundreds of years ago food in Europe was terrible but by mental analysis problems have been solved and now food of all types is readily available to allow pleasure in eating and good health. Maybe certain rules need to be followed but it has lead to the great benefit of society. At the moment sex seems to be a potentially dangerous and often destructive force. To try and study this very emotive subject, I make several suggestions. First and foremost, the realm of sex is under female rule and nothing can progress without their approval. This is an inalienable biological fact. If fact the history of the violation of this right is so bad that even now many females don’t feel comfortable dealing with the subject and some institutions, especially religious, even exist now which actively suppress this right. In the male/female interactions, where ever the line is drawn in the degree of flirting, seduction, and intimacy, this must be fully respected. Any male who knows anything about the subject knows that to give the female pleasure is also his greatest pleasure. May I also add, that this can be a challenging task. For females to even find men desirable, they must be heroes, in the broadest understanding of the word. That is, socially competent, intelligent, compassionate and healthy. Females likewise need to have correct value judgement and not to find such things as the possession of a red sports car sexy. Evolution and social evolution progress and it seems to me that sex is undergoing scrutiny in society and everything is up for negotiation.
Evolution on the planet has brought about by means we don’t understand, life, consciousness, civilisation, and so is asking for an understanding of sex too much to expect. Sex is a powerful energy which needs analysis but we also need to develop our personalities to handle successfully this force. It seems that where women and sex are most suppressed, that is where the world is the most violent and even the most ecologically devastated. Is it possible that an understanding of sex could lead to a harmonious planet? The opposite poles of electricity, positive and negative, are potentially very dangerous but once understood have brought much benefit. Socially, can the opposite poles of maleness and femaleness be likewise harnessed for similar benefit? For example if female orgasms are good, maybe male orgasms are bad? If a science or an ethos of sex was established and agreed upon, it would need to be taught by those that know to their students. Could the potentially dangerous unbridled energy of young males be constructively initiated by older females to social good?
This is even now a taboo topic. I certainly don’t have the answer but somehow the natural world needs to find a positive solution to the self destructive hell that we are making for ourselves. Dogism is the study of the psychology of dogs and their relationship with humans. Dogs love their good masters and mistresses and that they love them more that they love other dogs. Many humans likewise love their pet dog more than they love other humans. This maybe a bit tragic but it is true. This love is trans species and even trans kingdom and has to be exceptional. It can only come about because the dog has the ability to recognize in humans something that is greater than itself. Some how the dog acknowledges this difference and so appears to worship its master, those that treat it well and love it in return. Dogs have made a study of humans and know well much of our behavior particularly where the dog has an interest. It knows that food is found in the fridge and that the car is for driving in to have fun. I believe that a dog could be taught to drive a car. The controls would be attached to its nose, leaning forwards is to go faster, and to pull back is to go slower and to stop. Left and right turns are obvious. Unfortunately though, the dog could never be taught how to fix the car. It would be just too difficult, and well beyond their limit of understanding.
As humans we can experience something similar. With our healthy mind, we can sometimes look at our bodies and be struck by its beauty and complexity and our total inability to repair it when it goes wrong. If a dog could write a treatise on what it is like to be a human, a dog could write an interesting story but I believe that it would be basically in great error. It wouldn't mention things such as money and going to work every day, and it would not understand why we don't sit down and eat all the contents of the fridge straight away and why we don't have parties all day every day. The point I wish to make is that a dog, a member of the third kingdom and humans most devoted follower, would just produce a load of junk when writing about us, the members of the forth kingdom.
The analogy that I draw is that us humans often write treatises on the next kingdom above us, the fifth. Just as the dog cannot ever understand the human kingdom, likewise we fundamentally cannot understand the next kingdom beyond us. I suspect that mostly what is written is just a heap of junk and also basically misses the point. I use the dog/human relationship to give us just a hint as to what the next kingdom may be like. The word I like best is labyrinth but I could also add complicated and paradoxical.
How I use this kind of thinking is looking at how us humans as members of the forth kingdom, treat members of the third. We have dominion over them and so we can take their lives if we have a so called good reason, such as they are needed for eating or if they are a nuisance.
We cannot needlessly cause them harm by being cruel and so there is an organisation called the RSPCA (The Royal Society for the Protection of Animals) to protect them. Two kingdoms below us, and we can do what ever we like. There is no organisation called the RSPCP (plants instead of animals). We just cannot conceive of it. I'm sure the same rules apply to us. The next kingdom above can do what they like to us humans provided they obey certain rules. These rules we vaguely know of as The Laws of Karma, but we don't really understand them at all. I continue the analogy to two kingdoms above us, the way I put it is that they can do what ever they like to us, they don't even need to "fill out the forms".
If we treat members of the third kingdom badly, particularly dogs, how then can we complain about the cruelty that Fate sometimes deals out to us? If we treat them well, then we at least can claim that we also deserve to be treated likewise. It seems a good safe life policy to treat all beings with maximum kindness, and hopefully Fate will look kindly to us as well.
A dog's devotion is a wonderful thing but do we really want it. My dog is devoted to me but more importantly I try and teach her to be a "good" and clever dog, to be almost as clever as me, a human. Likewise, when humans meet a representative from upstairs, what is the first thing that they do? They devote themselves to this person. What a dumb thing to do. They should learn to be as clever as the one they acknowledge as greater than themselves.
Therefore one of life's requirements is to always be as clever as possible in all situations. A dog, if it has been a good and faithful dog, hopefully it will be promoted into the human kingdom in its next life. I conject that a dogs first life as a humans is made up of fast cars, pretty girls, beer and football or the female equivalent. A simple life of raw unbridled fun and why not?
I also have some other applications for dogism . It can't help but be noticed that many humans make unsatisfactory parents. It would seem a much better idea if child making could be allocated to those that have somehow proved themselves competent at parenting. Why not allocate those that wish to make a baby, a puppy dog. They could practice parenting it and after a certain time the puppy could be given some psychological, intelligence and physical tests and if the pup passes all three and is a well rounded pup, the couple would then be allowed to make a baby. If the pup fails, they would have to make some improvements before they can be allowed to make a human baby, a much more challenging assignment.
Another application of dogism, is as proof of character. If I ever meet someone and I wish to prove that I'm of good character, I just bring my dog with me. Humans are notoriously deceptive and so when you meet some one, you just never know whether they are of good character or not. Humans can always pretend for a short time to be nice and it is difficult to tell this falsehood from the reality. If you have you dog with you, the stranger can see very quickly what the dog's character is because humans have the ability to read easily a dog's character just as they can read ours. A dog is not deceptive because what you see is what you get. If the dog looks nice, then it is most likely that it has come this way because it has been well treated by its master who as a consequence is also very likely to be nice. This is a general rule but it is no guarantee because humans can also be twisted and treat dogs nicely but not other humans but that would certainly be the exception. I would still use this knowledge as a guide to someone's character.
The Kingdom of the Mind. This is where our life is really lived out and physical world events are really just a consequence of the issues played out here. It is common knowledge that the mind is more powerful than our physical plane existence. Its power is show in many ways but most powerfully by being the source of inspiration.
Science and mathematics set up problems and sometimes these problems may be solved by an inspirational thought. We commonly don’t appreciate the marvel of this since something new has been created. It is transcendental and is actually magical. I’d like to think that just as inspirations can solve scientific problems, it also can occur in our personal lives as well. An issue arises, we think about it and we may receive a thought or an insight as to a solution which then hopefully allows our life to progress successfully and smoothly.
Thinking is beyond doubt our most powerful asset and sets us apart from the animals. We are born and start to experience things. As we get older, we start to think ahead and plan for the future. We have thoughts as to what may be possible and feel even obligated to attempt to bring them into fulfillment. As we mature, the process becomes more refined. We now make a plan for our life’s direction and much effort goes into how to bring this about in small ways and large. This puts us right into the mental world with its own apparent set of rules.
This essay is a conjecture on what these rules might be. My personal approach to life is as a giant game of chess. There is the strain between where we are in life now, and what our aspirations are and what talents we have to bring them about. We also have to factor in how lucky we may feel in the situation.
Although mental types of people don’t like to admit it, luck is an important factor and one which I am not comfortable dealing with but I think that it needs to be admitted that nothing can be achieved without luck.
To me, thinking is the key to my very existence. All issues are approached by thinking and in the hope that the most serendipitous solution will eventuate. This process of thinking I don’t understand at all. It seems to me to be just holding the topic in my mind and waiting for what ever thoughts seem to randomly enter. Sometimes an issue seems more important and I think with more tension but it doesn’t necessarily bring about better thoughts.
There is also contemplation which to me seems a more free ranging process. Meditation is another process which can be either holding just the one thought in ones mind or like general meditation and keeping the mind open and noting what ever enters. The processes seems passive and to be waiting for the incoming inspiration which may or may not arrive Another technique is to stop thinking altogether and to occupy ones mind with trivia such as a hobby and the looked for inspiration or thought may arrive by surprise.
To sleep on an issue is another technique and as well to note ones thoughts and feelings in the morning. A dream may even come as a solution. [This was how the sewing machine was invented]. I also take pleasure in the hypnogogic world of the reverie when dozing off in a heat induced torpor with my midday nap. Life is hot in the tropics. Heat dulls the conscious brain but opens it for other possibilities.
As I become older, every nuance becomes more important to me. Even as I may be distracted by a trifle, I may in this distraction receive the needed inspiration.
Other words that imply the variety of the mental process are imaging, praying, wishing, and invoking and I suppose that they should be applied in different situations for different results. High grade thoughts are called an inspiration, thoughts that can go either way as being a bad thought or a good thought are called a more neutral, thought, as time will tell as to their veracity. A negative thought one would say was being deluded or even just wrong thinking. I have been thinking about this phenomena and trying to understand the process.
My conclusion is that this mental world is like another kingdom above us. It is one that we just have only the barest toe hold in to. It is a world we almost totally don’t understand. The best way that I can think of understanding the concept is by analogy. The example that I give is that it is parallel to the dog, a member of the animal kingdom living in the human world. A dog is our most faithful follower and loves our human world but how much does a dog really understand? I would say very little. A dog loves to go for a ride in the car but what does the dog know about mechanics and the rules of the road? A dog also knows nothing of the key cornerstones of civilisation. If a dog wrote a treatise on being a human, it would very largely miss the point. Us humans feel comfortable in the human kingdom but only just touch upon this mental world and its apparently fickle processes.
Life is a dangerous process which we should approach with care or I would say, with thoughtful awareness, as mistakes can have a high price tag as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To understand this mental world and how it works I believe to be fundamentally important to our human lives. Just one inspirational thought can motivate us for the rest of our lives.
An invention may save lifetimes of drudgery for millions. Inspiration is also the mark of a genius. This mental world must surely have rules which if used correctly should make our lives more effective. I’d like to think that this mental world is like a physical world landscape. We live in our personal location of what we known and there is a boundary beyond us to what we don’t know, the unknown. To push back the unknown is difficult. It is very easy to live with in the known and to give parts of it a new and important name and pretend that we are discovering something new. Expanding the mental terrain is usually most difficult. I suppose some live in the mountains and others live on the flats and in swamps.
Another example I can give. If humans are a kingdom, and the mental world is a kingdom above us. It would explain the difference we feel between other humans. Just as the kingdoms below us are very broad, so our human kingdom is like wise very broad.
We may all look more or less the same but there is a world of difference in our consciousness and our mental position. Some humans have basically an animal consciousness while others are much more refined and have an access to this inspirational world.
Mozart for example was asked as to where his inspiration came from? He admitted that it came from outside him and in the form of inspiration. He could hear the music from start to finish and could write it out without mistakes from start to finish.
Civilisation is in a very delicate state since many humans are basically animal in their consciousness while others who have a toe hold into mentality are generally not treated well by the other group. Another analogy that I like is that how we treat the kingdoms below us. I again draw a paralleled as to how the kingdoms above us treat us. The problem is that we don’t have the mental grasp to take in its awe but live in a simplified physical plane version of it.
What better alternatives are there? Life, looking to the future, seems to be a network of possibilities. To recognise an issue, to think about it, to then receive a thought, from whence we know not, inspired or ordinary, to then certify this thought in our concrete brain as being a good idea, or the best we can think of, then requires one to act upon it. A certified bad thought we naturally leave alone. This is the natural process of a considered life. Acting upon it, we hope that good luck will follow. Luck, I’m sure isn’t the correct world because if we knew the workings of this mental landscape, we would realize that cause and effect operate here as well. Humans at least have a word for the fickleness of luck which sometimes is called, the Laws of Karma. Here at least there is a word for a process we don’t understand.
Surely one of the most human characteristics of all is this process of thinking. Surely if the process could be successfully mastered, our lives would flow more smoothly. Looking ahead, we see many possibilities, we act upon them and events transpire. We look in the past and see the path way of our life and can see the developing theme that thoughts and luck have provided us with. Inspiration solves problems in science, is it possible that inspirational can solve problems in our personal lives as well. To me, that is the ultimate challenge, to understanding the workings of this mental world. To map out this mental terrain and the means of successfully traversing it. The physical world upon analysis is anomalous anyway. The problem of time, future, past and the now and the problem of matter, in its quintessence, and space and its boundaries and yet the whole world is only conceived in our brains and consciousness anyway. Consciousness in matter is also another major problem. I believe that the more real world that we inhabit is this mental world.
The next question is whether once we have received a thought as to what is possible, is it then possible that our thoughts can actually bring about the event. What I call, weird things certainly happen in my life and I would dearly love to think that somehow I am also at least in part, and maybe even more so, the maker of my own destiny. We crave good times, adventure and excitement and this surely is the better learning process but there is also learning in yes, deadly dull boredom. Can our mind successfully navigate the perils of life? I’d like to think so.
My story of progression from naive social incompetent to a degree of maturity seems to have evolved a story with a theme that maybe has come about with the assistance of thinking, and contemplation and what I describe as a toe hold into that Kingdom of the Mind. A couple of extra stories I've written and maybe I could add them if more were needed.
Tirthas. I’m one who is always on the lookout for new words to add to my vocabulary to explain the psychology of being a tree planter with the associated wait together with the inspiring transformation of the landacape. I came across the word "tirthas", which literally means a crossing over, a place where it is easy to pass into other dimensions and where weird things can happen. My neighbour visited recently with his daughter who is studying journalism and her fiance studying photography. They came to take some photos so I couldn’t help but mention this word. The father’s comment was, "I suppose that you mean here?", to which I immediately replied, "Yes" . With that he immediately walked home.
Matt then commences to photograph me in the old house with its heirlooms and my collection of bend pieces of wood. We then go outside and the cows pay us a visit. Britta then exclaims, "Look at that cow [steer], he has a stick sticking out of him!" Upon inspection, I see that he has a stick sticking out of his penis [sheath]. Horror and incredulity is my responce having never seen or heard of anything like this before. I say that we must immediately put him in the yards and do something about his problem. This we do immediately. I then explain to Britta, who is quite a spirited young lady, that she has to pull on the rope of the head bail while I convince the steer that he has no other option. After a few attempts, Britta who looked quite a picture in her bright red dress,was able to hold the rope steady while I secured it shut.
All the while, Matt is outside the yards photographing the unfolding drama. I then go to the end where the problem is and remove the stick. This stick was an incredible 23 inchew long and only 6 inches was protruding. Undoubtedly a severe psychological drama for the young steer but one that doesn’t seem to have caused him any lasting harm. We then pat him on the head reassuring him of our best interest for him before letting him go to join the rest of the herd.
A few days later, I telephoned Matt and Britta saying that that was an unusual sequence of events and I’d be interested in the photos to add to my collection of weird things. Matt’s reply was, "Guess what, the camera wasn’t working and there are no viable photos!".
Ho hum! I suppose that that it just adds to the weirdness and unpredictibality of life. Let me mention the word again. It is tirthas. It comes from Hindi and is often associated with sacred places. I do have some more evidence but that will have to be for other stories.
Altered States. Working in my young timber plantations is quite a challenge because of the dense growth of lantana, the steepness, the broken gullies, the washouts, and the boulders. Occasionally, in this very constricted situation, I might come across the further complication of a wasp nest. This is something that I must always be on the lookout for because the consequences are exceedingly unpleasant. Usually I see the nest first and and all is okay. Sometimes though, I bump the nest and all the wasps fly out at me. Only one response is possible and that is to freeze and not move a muscle. They will still fly out aggressively but hopefully won’t sting as they bump into me. To try to flee or to brush them away is quite impossible anyway and even dangerous because the theory and it is controversal and I believe in it, is that wasps only attack moving targets. I can even prove it with some lucky breaks. This time though, I wasn’t so lucky as I was commited to the move that cut off the branch that held their nest with the brush hook and they all came out at me and I was stung about 5 times about the face. To be stung by these insects is an extreme experience and fills one with pain. It also seems to have an unnerving psychological effect as well as one suffers anguish and becomes full of dread and extreme hatred for them. On this day, I just slowly moved away and kept working and ignored the pain and loathing. This time though, my heart started to pound faster and faster, I started perspiring and became weaker and weaker. I then decide that I’d better walk back to the house. I didn’t go far before all I could do was to lie down and let it pass. All I could do was to lie flat on my back and try and to relax with my heart beating so fiercly that I wondered if it would jump out of its socket. I felt now that I’d entered an altered state called, approaching death and all I can do was to just lie here and take it. I know that it would be rare for a healthy person to die this way but what can I do about it? After a few minutes of this I can gradually feel life returning into my body again and I eventually sit up. I remember the perspiration running off my forehead and dripping onto my trousers and I am still alive!! I then gradually get up and walk slowly back to the house. This was an intense experience and I wouldn’t want to repeat it.
I still believe my theory though. If one upsets a wasp nest, freeze. They will not attack a stationary target and dangerous situations can be averted. I also have had lucky escapes. It may require an act of will but really there is no choice.

Post Script.

A friend of mine did a painting of the hut. When a Chinese friend of mine saw it, she was so struck by it that she wrote this about it in mandarin, her native tongue. We then translated it into english and here is the transcript.

“Bob invited me to visit Kerry. He told me that she is an artist and that she had done a painting for him in return for a few days’ work. We entered into Kerry’s little house. She then went into her storeroom to retrieve this painting which was wrapped for protection. Kerry then stood in the corner of the lounge and unwrapped the painting. I then looked at it seeing each brush stroke of colour and after a few seconds, I comprehended what I was looking at and stood back in shock revealing a painting of Bob’s hut.
Something that I knew and recognized almost immediately. I could not speak, my heart, eyes, mouth and even my feet were caught and enchanted and I was transfixed. I dared not move closer for fear of being drawn into the vortex of the painting. It was so shocking as if I had actually entered into the hut and its precinct. I had walked pass this hut on many occasions and now in this moment, I felt that I was actually drawn back there. For me, Kerry’s paintings and especially this one have an allure that draws me away from the mundane world and into the spell of these creative works of art.”

I can vouch that this is a very striking painting. I hope that it will soon be hanging in my lounge.

I do also have some more strange stories of disorienation about the hut but I think that I need to be discreet in what I tell to save my credibility. If someone has a genuine interest, maybe I could say something in private.



Contact: Bob Whitworth
ADD: 100 Deserio Rd, Cedar Pocket QLD Australia, 4570.
PH: 07 54866147
E-mail: forest@spiderweb.com.au