Two chance encounters caused me some worry recently.
Last week, walking along an unfamiliar street, I saw a woman struggling with one of her rubbish bins. It was the yellow-lidded one – recyclables.
I crossed the road and, when she accepted my offer of help, I wheeled the bin out to the curb. I was not surprised she’d been having trouble. Her recycling was extraordinarily heavy, bottles probably.
That’s what usually tips mine over the acceptable scale and has me worrying that one day the mechanism on the truck will give up half way and the evidence of a fortnight’s modest tippling will be distributed loudly and in thousands of gleaming shards all over the meticulously shaved nature strips of the near neighbours.
She thanked me graciously and I said, ‘No worries’ and then added brilliantly, ‘Lovely day.’ She agreed. Like the Ancient Mariner who just could not shut up once he’d buttonholed the Wedding Guest, I said, ‘Yes, so much better than those forty degree days.’
‘Ah,’ she said, seeming suddenly galvanised, ‘but we haven’t had any of those.’
Until then she’d been politely affable, doing the right thing by the bloke who’d helped her with the bins, but suddenly there was a glint in her eye and a jutting set to the line of her jaw.
Call me paranoid if you like, but as I walked away, affecting a nonchalant strolling gait, I knew, I just knew, that she was a climate change denier and was daring me to argue the point. Had I hesitated one more moment, I would have been regaled with statistics about the mild coastal summer and other utterly benign climatological phenomena. Which is why, being convinced about climate change and taking a line from the Wedding Guest, I waved and left ‘like one that hath been stunned/And is of sense bereft’.
The second encounter was with an elderly pedestrian. As we drew closer to each other, I saw that, despite the early summer warmth, she was wearing a heavy coat, something like a Drizabone, with the hood bunched up around her neck. And she wasn’t out for a pleasant stroll. In one hand she carried a thick wooden stick; and in the other a flame-blackened saucepan which – as if to allay what must have been my increasingly obvious puzzlement – she placed on her head.
‘Have to visit Dorrie,’ she said, a bit short of breath. ‘Just a few doors down – but the plovers are coming.’
Now all was revealed. I’d seen a couple of plovers a few moments earlier, and I knew from walking around these streets that there were lots of Spur-Winged Plovers nesting and defending their often ludicrously visible domains. ‘Defending’ is putting it mildly. These birds are truculent, aggressive and noisy. If you trespass on their patch, they will create a constant and menacing orchestration of threats, flighty lunges, flappings and dartings though, like magpies, they can seem to retreat, then line you up from two hundred metres away and spear back at you, steepling away at the last second, executing a nonchalant stall and floating to earth still combative and fightable.
On the ground, with their busy, silly-looking walk, and their apparent preference at times for stiff-legged running rather than graceful flight, they are unimpressive – but bossy, overbearing, not to be laughed at. They are not loveable and many people would like to see them obliterated – not just endangered but wiped out. Though I scarcely spoke a dozen words to her, I’m pretty sure the woman in the big coat, with her stick and saucepan was not remotely a plover lover.
What struck me about both these otherwise entirely disparate and in their individual ways trivial encounters was that, as things stand nowadays with us Australians, they were both political. ‘Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes … is it politically reprehensible?’ asks George Orwell in ‘Some thoughts on the Common Toad’. Well, not wicked but increasingly difficult. A belief in the processes and dire possibilities of climate change as opposed to its denial divides the national polity. In a world where scientific advances are proceeding with laser-like speed, there is no Australian Federal Ministry of Science. Coal, we are told, will be our future but also our nemesis. The Tasmanian government is seeking to unstitch massive forest heritage agreements. The President of the US alerts us to the grave dangers threatening the Great Barrier Reef and is then rebuked by senior government figures for doing so.
‘I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes [and] butterflies’ says Orwell – and the unlovable plover, we might add – ‘one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.’
What is interesting about this opinion is that, despite its eminent humanity and common sense, it sounds uncharacteristically trite and just a little forlorn in a country that is officially turning its face away from the claims, processes and vulnerabilities of the natural world.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.
Image: Wikimedia Commons