The beginning
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Wallaby Creek,
Australia
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
*Backdated-I will have access to the internet once a week from now on, for approximately 30 minutes, so I will probably post every 5th or 6th entry, which may not make a lot of sense, but we'll see how it goes..."
Day 8 (1st at Wallaby Creek)
What an amazing place I am to spend the next 3 ½ months of my life! We packed my gear into the car and headed toward Brisbane at quarter of nine. An hour and a half later we were having coffee and rock cakes at the home of Neil's parents, Celia and Jasper. Afterwards, having added Jasper as a passenger, and with only a brief stopover along the way for lunch in the tiny town of Beaudesert (which is oddly verdant, despite its name) we drove the remaining two and a half hours to Wallaby Creek, New South Wales being entertained by Jasper's storytelling.
Jasper used to work as a train conductor for 46 years on the Queensland State Railway. He recalled that once, on a stop in Beaudesert, he went into the store to get some bread and a few groceries to take home after his shift. It just so happened that on this particular day he happened to be pulling a circus train, and just as he was walking up the ramp toward the tracks, an elephant that had been allowed to walk around in a nearby pen reached through the fence with its trunk, and in one motion smacked Jasper full in the chest, knocking him down, and deftly nabbed and made off with the bread. To this day Jasper Ross is probably one of the relatively small number of people in the world who can say they were ever mugged by an elephant.
From Brisbane the road to Wallaby Creek in Tooloom National Park leads through curvy hillside roads, through cattle-grazed valleys, and on up into tall alpine gum forest. During the latter section of the trip, having rolled down the windows due to a nonfunctioning AC, we could hear the trees around thickly laced with the eerily liquid calls of bell birds. (This ubiquitous clamor from the eastern bell miner bird would become a constant nuisance that one eventually learned to tune out.) The gum trees stretching 150 feet over our heads, put with the sheer cliff-crowned peaks arching over the canopy further off, and this weird, oddly mechanical bird chorus combined to make an awfully impressive introduction to the so-called "Bush country" of Australia. More was to come.
As we passed through the tiny town of Urbenville, complete with an ENTIRE post office and a WHOLE general store, Jasper started describing the turns we were about to take before our navigation computer chimed in with a lovely female voice, "Turn left in...two hundred...meters," but never seemed to come out in time with "look out for wallaby roadkill in...three...meters." I think I never appreciated the amazing coincidence of my being here until the moment we pulled on to the dirt road that would lead us to the cabin where I would be studying the satin bowerbird for the next 3 ½ months and Jasper said, "Just there on the left is where the farm was."
Imagine the circumstances that had to arise in order for this to happen. My uncle, a native Australian, met my Aunt, of Huntsville, Alabama, while backpacking in Austria (a fact which confused my geographic understanding of the world from an early age). They would marry, live in DC for a while, then move to Birmingham, AL. Then, twenty-five years after leaving Australia, Neil would move his family back to his continental home, and within months I would not only apply to, but accept a research position that happens to study a birds on the one parcel of fram land of the incredibly immense number of such parcels on the very cattle-oriented continent of Australia where Neil's father used to help on his cousin's dairy as a teenager. It just boggles the mind. Maybe even scrabbles it, just a little.
So anyway, after a brief showdown with a group of curious calves and their dubious mothers on a bridge crossing the creek, we saw our first kangaroo picturesquely bounding across a grassy slope just as we pulled in to the cabin. It could really be more accurately described as a dilapidated shack, with exactly three glass windows (the others had been screened in or boarded up), a creaky, hole-filled floor, and an apparent marsupial mouse mascot (it had just ransacked five cordial jugs in the kitchen the night before, putting holes in every one, and making them slowly leak their contents all over the place.) I was suddenly a bit lonesome for my previous garage-in-the-beach house accommodations.
Abe, who worked last year on the project, and is now a co-leader with the grad student, Linda Cendes, came out and greeted us at the road. Grabbing my things, we hopped the barbed wire fence and we entered the cabin. There I met Erin and Stephanie, two other assistants like me, who had arrived a few days previous. Linda was currently fetching another, Brendan, in Warwick, and two more would eventually arrive the following week, making a happy family of 8. Inside the cabin, there were a few bunks, some benches, a couple work tables, a propane powered camp stove, and surprisingly, a gas powered fridge. Outside the cabin, a rain catcher provides us with drinking water, and there is an outhouse and two shower stalls fpr stringing up solar showers. (A solar shower is a dark-colored plastic bag with a hose that holds creek water and can be heated if left out in the sun all day.) Abe then took us across the creek and within a hundred feet there was a bower. According to Abe it was well-constructed, especially given it is so early in the season (mating won't really get going till November.) It had been decorated quite caringly with strands pulled from a blue nylon tarp, along with some blue rosella feathers and some white snail shells for variety. (Blue is, of course, the preferred color of satin bowerbirds for ornamenting their bowers. Bowers in this case are two-walled straw structures used to impress females, though in other bowerbird specie4s they can take a ring or hut form. As a human comparison, bowers are often equated to a bachelor's pad, wherein a male constantly attends to his structure and its color scheme with meticulous attention in hopes that a female will notice and be impressed. In the case of the bowerbird, it pays off to be a good homemaker, since one male usually fathers the majority of the young in a given breeding season. *For more info on bowers and bowerbirds, click here: Bowerbirds
In any case, after looking at the bower (the male did not make an appearance) Neil and Jasper had to haul back to Brisbane. About five minutes afterwards, the project leader and a grad student at the University of Maryland, Linda Cendes, drove up in a four wheel drive vehicle, having retrieved Brendan from the bus station in Warwick. After some brief introductions Linda was quick to inform me that due to lots of equipment on the bunkbeds, Brendan and I would be sleeping outside in the horse pen (which encircles the cabin as well, and is home to a friendly young stud called Trump). She also warned us, almost in the same breath, about the dangers of snakes. Namely the red-bellied black snake and the eastern brown. Though not usually life-threatening if treated quickly, the bite of the diurnal and relatively well-demeanored red-bellied black snake is strong enough to rank it in the top 20 most poisonous in the world. The brown, which is nocturnal, hangs around water, and is very aggressive, is ranked number 16. Bottom line: don't go down to the creek at night.
So, as I sat talking with the others in the kitchen/dining room/study, looking out the front screen windows to see kangaroos grazing on the hillside, kookaburras alighting in a eucalypt treetop and begin their ridiculous cacophonic cackle, I think I finally realized I am in Australia. It's simply amazing. Now, after a meager supper of mashed potatoes and sausage, and being called away from a storytelling session with Abe and Linda to see a mother possum with a baby clutching to her back waddling over to eat scraps from our dinner plates, and looking up to see a dark black sky, split by the gray cauliflower swath of the Milky Way and a number and variety of stars I scarcely imagined existed, I feel a deep satisfaction that is only beginning to settle in over me. This is a wondrously vital place that I truly cannot wait to explore!
