A letter to Canada about Australia

I sort of stuffed up a lttle with this letter, writing way over my audience's head. My partner's cousin had a school project where she had to ask someone from another country to describe that countries geography. I thought the cousin was about 16, but she was actually only 8! I wrote this in October - November 2004.

Dear L____

G'day from Australia, the smallest and driest continent, the biggest island - I'm Josh, N____'s partner. I read your letter and liked the idea, so decided to respond. I've travelled a fair amount around Australia, though not yet to West Australia or Tasmania. My partner and I met while at University in Wollongong. In a funny way, it is a good example of most of the populated areas of Australia.

Wollongong sits along a mostly flat strip of land about three kilometres in width, between the Pacific Ocean and an escarpment that forms part of the great dividing range(1). It relies on fishing, farming, the steel works and the university in the main, as well as the assorted occupations required in a city.

One spring morning, on top of Hospital Hill, while the mist rolled in slow motion waterfalls from the escarpment that stretches away to the north, and the flares from the industrial hell of Port Kembla to the south lit the twilight sky in shades of yellow, orange, blue and pink, I found a wallaby(2), lured into the town by the new buds and flowers in gardens, struck dead by a car or ambulance, in the gutter outside Emergency.

Further away to the south is Macquarie Pass, once a logging track that is the main route up to the Southern Highlands, where N____'s parents live. It is a lovely road that wends its way through subtropical rainforests, mosses and waterfalls. There are a number of rainforests in Australia, all the way down the east coast, in wet pockets between the dry sclerophyll(3) woodlands. In Tasmania, the island state south of the mainland, the climate is much wetter, and they have the oldest plant in the world; a type of cycad or holly - I forget how old it is, 43 000 to 120 000 years, but the remains of its own leaves are partially fossilised around is base.

My mum's farm is in C_________, also on the Southern Highlands, about three hours drive from Sydney. It is a lamb and potatoes region, though my mum farms goats and has heavy horses. At the moment the whole south east of Australia is in drought, and although the rolling hills around C________ that stretch to the horizon are as green as the fields of Ireland right now, it is all a lie. There haven't been enough winter and spring rains to properly soak the soil or fill the dams, and when Summer comes the fields will turn brown and bare. When you walk in them clouds of dust puff up around your ankles.

In times past, due to the application of European agricultural techniques, which aren't suited to Australian soils or climate, the farmers used to lose a lot of topsoil to wind and also rain(4) erosion. In the 1980's a giant dust cloud covered Melbourne. This is mainly under control now, it is illegal to log along creeks and rivers, but the big problem these days it that due to the removal of so many trees for pasture and crops, the water table has risen in many places. This is a problem, especially in Western Australia, because the water is very salty, a legacy of the continent's past when there were inland seas, and the salt ends up coming to the surface where it clogs up the soil and basically destroys any chance of anything growing there. This is a nation-wide disaster in waiting.

Another is the overall way that Australians use water. We waste a lot of it, using drinking water in toilets, for example. Things are starting to change a bit now though, but only due to impending calamity; Sydney is due to run out of water in two years if the drought doesn't break- some towns are already trucking in water. Under much of the country there are acquifers, including the Great Artesian Basin. There are many bores that for many years have been bringing these subterranean waters to the surface, at a greater rate than they can be filled, a slow process that takes thousands of years. In many areas the bores are no longer attended- when I was twelve on a trip around the country, we found an oasis in the desert, an abandonded train station where steaming hot water gushed from a broken pipe. Most of the water, of course, evaporates. Another oasis was a meteorite crater. Because most of the rock had been fused at the bottom by the heat and force of the impact, it made a bowl where water would collect- not enough to see, but enough for the plants. Where there are plants, there are birds, reptiles and marsupials- the desert hopping mouse never has to drink in its life, it can make its own water in the chemical reactions in its stomach from the carbohydrates it eats.

It is very hot in the deserts, a different type of heat to the coasts' because the air is so dry. It doesn't really even feel that hot, though the beads of sweat that run as fast as a tap should warn you that it is. It can be very dangerous. People used to die (different now with mobile phones) if they ran out of petrol in the outback and didn't have heaps of water. The distances are huge: on that trip when I was a boy we did 9 000 kms in three weeks.

When you think of deserts you probabaly think of the Sahara, all sand and death, but our deserts aren't like that. In the Northern Territory, around Uluru and Kata Tjuka (Ayers Rock and The Olgas) the sands are a rusty red, and it is hot and dry, but life abounds; there are allocasaurinas, eucalypts, wattles(5), many more species of trees and bushes, and of course, spinefex(6). Even in Sturt's Stoney Desert, the remnants of an ancient sea bed, where pebbles and dust stretch to the horizon,and it seemed that here was a death place, I saw galahs, emus, kites, kangaroos and of course, spinefex (though not many or much).

Outside of the perenially wet pockets the plants have to be tough to survive. Most have leaves with very few stomata(7) and thick layers of wax to avoid water loss. Eucalypts actually angle their leaves through the day so that they present a sidewards (the thinnest) profile to the sun. It is very dry and hot, but also our soils are particularly poor in their quality. This is because Australia is a very old continent. The lack of tectonic activity for millions of years has seen our mountains eroded down to stumps- look up Mount Warning on the web; our highest peak in the Snowy Mountains, Mt Kosciusko, is only 2230 metres. It always snows in the Snowies, but it is practically the only place where it does(8).

Because our soils are so poor, and differ from mineral content from area to area, t makes it difficult for one species to dominate, so we have a wonderful biodiversity amongst our plantlife. Eucalypts create a huge amount of oil impregnated bark and leaf wastes, that in our hot and dry conditions will carry a fire with ease across a landscape. They burn well, and like it because it kills competitors and makes nutrients available again in the form of ash. Eucalypts have special epicormic buds, just below the surface of the bark, that burst out when a fire has passed through, feathering their trunks and branches in fresh growth, gentle reds at first that change to the distinctive blue-grey-green of an adult leaf. Many other plant's seeds, like wattles and banksias, actually rely on a fire scorching them to germinate.

When Captain Cook first arrived, he described the landscape as being open woodlands; grass beneath a fairly continuous canopy of Eucalypts. This was because the Aboriginals(9) used fire to farm. They would ensure that the undergrowth and waste never built up too much, smothering the grasses that the kangaroos liked to eat. They burnt the land in little patches, always. Captain Cook reported the smoke of many fires the way along the coast(10).

You might see on the news now and again we have huge bushfires every few years; houses are burnt, people die, huge areas laid waste. Many native animals that survive the fires die of stavation afterwards because the fires have burnt everything for as far as they can travel. This is due to the land being improperly managed, as we no longer follow the procedures the Aboiginals utilised.

There are a few reasons why Australia is so dry. One is due to it being situated along the Tropic of Capricorn; there are corresponding deserts in Chile. This is something to do with the cold of Antartica meeting up with the heat of the equator. Deserts also lie along the Tropic of Cancer. The reason we get droughts in cycles (for the south east cost at least) is due to a Pacific Ocean current called El Nino, which oscillates the rain back and forth between South America and Australia. With Global Warming, the current is becoming erratic, which has dire implications. The North of Australia is monsoonal, so they are usually drought struck through winter and flooded in summer, while Tasmania's climate shares that of New Zealand- similar again to England's. I don't really know much about West Australia's except it is much drier than the East Coast but roughly corresponds, and South Australia's is also very dry. At the moment the drought there is killing the sorts of trees that normally survive.

We get cyclones across the north of Australia sometimes, in 1973 our territory capital Darwin was destroyed by one. When I was four, holidaying in Queensland, we got stranded by the accompanying floods. Because I had chicken pox, and the authorities didn't want an epidemic, my family was given separate quarters from the rest of the refugees, in a stilted hut amongst the tall dark trunks of eucalypts that doubled their length in the ankle deep waters at their base.

In Sydney, our winters are mild- 14C is a cold day. Spring is characterised for me by cold winds that slip through your jumper while the sun warms your face and a deep blue sky. Summers are hot, and so still and muggy it's like swimming in mud, you wish you could cut the air with a knife. On days like these we long for the Southerly Buster, those cool winds from Antartica. On the beach in Summer you can see them coming- a cloud that looks like a rolled up carpet. When it hits, pandemonium! The golden white sands so hot underfoot sting your legs, beach umbrellas soar sixty metres or more, and everyone scuttles towel clad for safety. Autumn doesn't really exist except for the imported deciduous trees: at some indefinable point, summer just becomes winter.

So- to finish, Australia is a continent, so we have all sorts of climates and terrains, but mainly we cluster along the arable strip of our coastlines, fighting to survive the droughts and attendant bushfires, that, with Global Warming, are to become more prevalent and longer, especially in the south eastern corner of Australia where the bulk of our population lives. Next time you drink a glass of the water that abounds in your country, think how precious it is to people, plants and animals on the other side of the world.

yours sincerely

Josh Avila

ps. Sydney's topography is essentially a slanted plateau sloping to the ocean- this means we just allow our stormwater and sewage to go to waste, taking the path of least resistanace to the sea. This topography is also responsible for Sydney's summer conditions- inversion layers blanket the city (cold air sitting on top of warm air, like thermoclines in water)

(1)An ancient mountain chain that blocks the rain clouds from getting inland.

(2)Like a small kangaroo

(3)Any woody plant with leathery leaves retaining water.

(4)When it does rain it pours. In 1998 in Wollongong we had 400mm of rain in 24hrs, most of it falling in one. There were flash floods and two people died.

(5)One species, the Golden Wattle, is our national flower. It is now a weed in many areas because it has been planted outside it's natural range.

(6)A very important spiky native grass, whose clumps form microclimates that give shelter to many small marsupials and also form the basis of the diet of termites, whose role in the ecosystem is critical.

(7)Very small holes that allow the plant to 'breathe' in Carbon Dioxide and 'exhale' oxygen and water vapour. These littleholes actually pull the water up from the ground through a process called transpiration.

(8)There is a very big dam in the Snowy Mountains that was built largely by migrants in the 1950's when Australia had a 'populate or perish' policy, driven by fear of 'the Yellow Peril' of Asia, also reflected in its 'White Australia' policy. World War two saw huge numbers of Europeans displaced, and many came to Australia. The value of migration began to be seen, my parents arrived in the sixties as 'Ten Pound Poms.' By the 1980's we, with Canada, had the best record for immigration and a resultant vibrant multi-cultural society (in the cities at least). Also by then Australia had begun to revise its opinion of how the Aboriginals were treated through history. It is true to say that the English came here and made war on them with guns, germs and alcohol, destroying their culture, stealing their land, then their languages and children.
The cultural progression has been halted in recent years, and the ugly spectre of racism has gained under the aegis of our Prime Minister, whose government has provided adequate financial management for the economy at the cost of our health, education and morality. His small minded stance and divisive politics that trade on fear and greed has seen refugees denied lawful entry, children imprisoned, the denial of Aboriginal history and landrights, a continued debasement of the environment, involvement in an illegal war and an alliance so tightly knit with the USA that we have become a non-voting American state and a resultant terrorist target, to name a few.
We have a lot of myths in Australia about 'a fair go' and 'Aussie battlers' and 'independence of spirit and disrespect for authority,' but that's all nonsense. This nation has always been about criminals, convicts and sheep. The brittle and grasping attitude of our PM could well be a relectin of the country; facile, we cling to the coast the way around, our interior shied away from, even in name, the outback.

(9)The Aboriginal tribe that inhabited the Sydney region were called the Eora. Try to find out about the wars fought between the colony and Pemulway. It will be hard, because they tried to cover up all evidence of conflict.

(10)A lot of my information comes from a book called 'The Future Eaters,' by Dr Tim Flannery. It is very easy to read and well worth finding.