Billabongs

bil·la·bong  (bl-bông, -bng)

n. Australian

1. A dead-end channel extending from the main stream of a river. 2. A streambed filled with water only in the rainy season. 

3. A stagnant pool or backwater.

From Wiradhuri (Aboriginal language of southeast Australia) bilaba, watercourse filled only after rain.

I was about six years old when I first heard of a billabong. It was in 'Dot and the Kangaroo', a story about a little girl lost in the outback, who gets adopted by a motley crew of marsupials. It obviously made a strong enough impression on me to trigger a phase of acute Australophilia. 

Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18891/18891-h/18891-h.htm

Of course, when you're six, the idea of little lost girls, let alone fabulous beasts, living in a bizarre upside-down land directly under your feet was thoroughly compelling. I spent a whole day excavating the vegetable patch so the kangaroos could escape their improbable existence on the underbelly of the Earth and play with me in the prosaic reality of a muddy north Kent garden. Luckily, the story didn't mention funnelweb spiders, or I might have been more circumspect about creating a such a potentially disastrous portal.

OK, this is a trapdoor spider not a funnelweb. But, of course, you just need to
take one look it to realise it's also going to be found in Australia! 

Anyway, after wandering around for hours in the thorny wilderness, Dot comes across a kindly kangaroo. The maternal marsupial must have been Skippy's great-grandmother, because before you could say didgeridoo, she was chewing Dot's ear off about her little lost joey. 

She promptly pops the frightened foundling in her pouch and hops down to the nearest billabong. As with waterholes the world over, it's party central. The incredulous infant, high on hallucinogenic berries, is introduced to a parade of weird and wonderful creatures, each with a tragic tale to tell about their treatment at the hands of humans. 

If you ignore the antiquated anthropomorphism and the casual peppering of colonial racism, it's actually a great story about the uneasy relationships between humans and other animals. But enough about Dot...   

It was to be nearly thirty years before I saw my own billabong. Or, despite my best excavatory efforts, a kangaroo. Instead of Dot's bouncy chaperone, I had Google Maps to guide me. But it was still a serendipitous discovery - I certainly wasn't expecting to find a billabong sandwiched between a jungle gym and a golf green!

Wilson Reserve is hardly the unforgiving outback. In fact, it's a charming little oasis on the banks of the Yarra not too far from my scruffy suburb of (de)Preston. But it's home to a fair dinkum billabong that, at some point before Melbourne became a metropolis of four million people, would have seemed quite familiar to Dot and her four-legged friends. There were no chattering kookaburras or playful platypuses (-podes? -pi?). But the ripples from a dabbling duck were forming fractal patterns from the reflections of the silver-trunked eucalypts on the inky surface.

Here are some of the photos I took. I made them portrait, to create a sense of falling water or running paint. Earlier that day, I'd been at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, home of Australian Impressionism, so that also had a strong influence on how I responded to my bush-fringed oasis. 

These four are my favourites, but you can check out the rest here.

The Bayeux Tapestry

Every Englishman knows which year the Normans invaded. But I'm sure far fewer know the actual date. After all, we're talking about an event that happened nearly 1000 years ago, so what's a day here or there? 

The Battle of Hastings, 14 October 1066

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know the fateful day fell on September 28 - two days (and 946 years) before my birthday. The place Duke William landed - Pevensey, not Hastings as many people imagine - is not far from where I was born and grew up. Very handy for school trips!

The pesky Normans arrive at Pevensey, 28 September 1066

Even though it happened nearly 1000 years ago, 1066 is indelibly etched on our national consciousness. I suspect a lot of it stems from a lingering resentment about those pesky Frenchies getting one over us. Even though the Normans were as much Viking as French and nearly all of us will have a Norman ancestor or three lurking somewhere down the family tree. I suspect the disconcerting ginger patch in my beard is the ghost of some distant Norman antecedent. And I'm pretty sure our family nose is. I'd like to think it was a nobleman, but no doubt it was just a grubby soldier getting his end away with some poor Anglo-Saxon wench.

The thing I find most remarkable about the Norman Conquest (and its fascinating lead-up) is the way it was all captured in glorious, panoramic technicolor on the Bayeux Tapestry. It's an extraordinary artifact - a hand-stitched account of the key events in the lead up to Duke William's invasion that's nearly 70 metres long and in almost pristine condition. 

Edward the Confessor send Harold, Earl of Wessex, to Normandy

The Tapestry's tale begins in 1064 with the aging English king Edward sending the Earl of Wessex - Harold Godwinson - to Normandy. Common myth still has it that his mission was to confer the crown of England on the Norman Duke William when Edward died, and swear fealty. But neither the Tapestry nor our knowledge of contemporary kingmaking protocol support this. Either way, the mission didn't go according to plan, and Harold ended up being held hostage by the Normans.

Harold swears an oath to William over a casket of holy relics

Somewhere along the line, Harold ends up swearing allegiance to the Norman Duke William and, importantly, his claim to the English throne when Edward died. Silly boy! Soon after his return to Blighty, Edward died and, as the most powerful nobleman in England, Harry ended up bagging the crown. In all the excitement, he forgot his sacred promise to William. But while Harry was busy measuring the curtains in Winchester, on the other side of the Channel William was choking on his onions.

King Harold is crowned

As every good schoolboy will remember, it is at this point that the Tapestry preempts Harry's foolishness. For no sooner had the crown been placed on the young king's head than an omen of doom shot across the sky. It's Halley's comet, on one of its rare visits to the Earth's atmosphere. And, in those suspicious times, a dreadful portent of things to come. At the bottom right of the panel, a fleet of ghostly ships seem to warn of the impending invasion.

The appearance of Halley's comet soon after
was a bad omen

You see, with his heady combination of Continental excitability and the Viking fondness for berserking, William was a poor choice of person to piss off. Within the year he'd rustled up an army and set sail for Sussex. As we now know from Wikipedia, he landed on a deserted beach at Pevensey on 28 September and made his way to nearby Hastings, where he set about building a castle. Harry, meanwhile, was at he other end of the country fighting another would-be contender for the throne, Harald with an 'a'.

William builds a castle at hastings

On hearing of William's invasion, Harry hightailed it back down south. They met at a field (now the town of Battle) just outside Hastings - William's army fresh and well-positioned, Harry's somewhat disheveled and disadvantaged. The tired Englishmen, fighting on foot, were no match for the mounted Normans. 

The mounted Norman soldiers make mincemeat of the English
at the Battle of Hastings

The second to last panel of the Tapestry is probably the most memorable. I'm sure things are rather different nowadays, but when I was a young whippersnapper, the goriest thing I'd seen by the age of nine (when you generally get on to the Normans) was poor King Harold getting an arrow in the eye. 

The money shot: Good King Harry gets it in the eye

SPOILER ALERT: Rather disappointingly, I just found out today that the arrow was only added in the 18th century (albeit in the place of something far older that may have been a lance). According to Wiki, it was common medieval iconography that a perjurer was to die with a weapon through the eye. So, the tapestry might be said to emphasize William's rightful claim to the throne by depicting Harold as an oath breaker. Whether he actually died in this way remains a mystery and is much debated.

The Sea Monkey Diaries: Day Seven

10 good reasons why Sea Monkeys are worthy of the Wunderkammer: 

1. They are born with one eye, and then grow two more
2. They have been taken into outer space
3. They can tolerate salinity of up to 250 g/L (around the same as that of the Dead Sea)
4. They breathe through their 11 pairs of feet
5. Mating can last for days at a time
6. Females can reproduce asexually (a phenomenon known as parthenogenesis)
7. Even more interestingly, it is meiotic parthenogenesis, the only form of asexual reproduction that permits the continuous production of advantageous combinations of genes
8. If a pregnant Sea-Monkey dies with viable ovoviviparous eggs (where eggs hatch inside the mother) the embryo Sea-Monkeys will still continue to develop until they are born alive (a rare phenomenon known as necroviviparity 
9. Male Sea Monkeys don't have testicles
10. A group of Sea-Monkeys is called a "squall.

For more fun facts about Sea Monkeys, visit:

• Sea Monkeys Rule
• Fun Sea Monkey Facts by Lisa Chinn
• www.seamonkeyworship.com

The Sea Monkey Diaries: Day Three

Danny and I are now the proud parents of at least two baby Sea Monkeys! They're so ridiculously small that I missed my 8am meeting desperately trying to differentiate 'offspring' from 'food'.

Anyway, given that it's almost certainly the closest either of us will ever get to fatherhood, we're celebrating (with cheap Pinot and canned cassoulet!)



More photos to come. Ha! Finally a chance to take my revenge on all the ultrasound scans and goggle-eyed baby pics my breeder friends have subjected me to over the years :-p

The Sea Monkey Diaries: Day Two

Well, yesterday's packet-ripping action was a hard act to follow, but I actually think today's Sea Monkey fun was even more exciting...

To recap, we have "founded the colony" and purified the water to create a happy home for our new pets. Today we get to add the sachet labelled "Instant Live Eggs".

"Instant Live Eggs" AKA "Brine Shrimp Cysts"

Sea Monkey engineer Harold von Braunhunt was never one to shun an attractive euphemism. And who could blame him - even the least entrepreneurial among us would appreciate that you're far less likely to sell a schoolboy a packet of "Brine Shrimp Cysts" than "Instant Live Eggs"!

Brine shrimps are one of the few invertebrates able to enter a state of suspended animation in which the metabolic processes of the cell are slowed down and the cell ceases all activities like feeding and locomotion. This process - called encystment - enables the shrimp to survive for long periods in unfavourable environmental conditions, such as when its salt pan homes completely dry out. When the encysted shrimp finds itself back in a happy place, the cyst wall breaks down by a process known as excystation.

Coming up...

We now have three or four nail-biting days where we can't do much more than sit back and wait as our brave new world unfolds. Keep following, folks!

The Sea Monkey Diaries: Day One

Yesterday, Danny found an unopened Sea Monkey set I gave him last christmas. To be honest, I think it got forgotten in the excitement of snorkeling among far larger sea-beasts of the Poor Knights Islands. Anyway, whatever the reason, we decided the time had come to awaken our sleeping Sea Monkeys... 

What the #@$& are Sea Monkeys?

Well, for a start they're not monkeys. Which is rather obvious, but still highly disappointing. They're also in no way marine. Which makes the whole Sea Monkey thing something of a sham. Yet they've been a popular toy for kids (of all ages) since the 1950s and no-one really seems to mind that they're actually a rather grotesque and practically microscopic shrimp that spends the entirety of its brief existence swimming around in extremely salty puddles!

Brine shrimp (Artemia monica)
from Mono Lake ©djpmapleferryman

The scientific name for the Sea Monkey is Artemia nyos. The nyos part is an acronym of New York Ocean Science. You see, Sea Monkeys are not only a registered trademark - they're a completely artificial breed! They were created by American Harold von Braunhut in 1957, in the middle of a nationwide craze for ant farms. 

Day One: Creating A Happy Home

Like great big kids with god-complexes, we set about bringing our little underwater kingdom to life. Day one is spent "colony building", i.e filling the tank with tepid water, and adding the 'water purifier' (which actually includes Sea Monkey eggs and food too). Tomorrow, we add the "Instant Life Eggs". I'm almost too excited to sleep! 

If you just can't wait for the next installment, you can spoil the surprise by visiting the Official Sea Monkey Website.

 

In a word: Hibernaculum

hi·ber·nac·u·lum

[hahy-ber-nak-yuh-luhm] noun, plural hi·ber·nac·u·la  [-luh]

  1. a protective case or covering, especially for winter, as of an animal or a plant bud.

2. winter quarters, as of a hibernating animal.

A snake hibernaculum in London
via www.wired.com

I've often wished I were a hibernating creature. OK, never a snake to be fair. But certainly a bear or a beaver or some beast that can justifiably hide away and sleep for three or four months every year. I have even planned my perfect hibernaculum. It would be womb-like and well-stocked with midnight snacks. At the centre would be a vast bed; a cozy sea of cushions and pillows and blankets. It would have elements of a Bedouin tent or a yurt. There would certainly be lanterns; each emitting a warm, red light. But only when I wanted. You see, despite the hibernaculum's superficial primitiveness it would, of course, be magically-programmed to respond to my every need.

Once enveloped in the carefree embrace of this nest, the outside world would effectively cease to exist. Lotophagus-like, I would slumber in blissful ignorance until such time as I was bored. Then I would throw the windows of my hibernaculum open, and let in the sounds and smells of spring. 

Yes yes, hardly the true ursine experience. And I should probably never try heroin...

A bear emerging from its hibernaculum
via http://rinklyrimes.blogspot.co.nz/

Anyway, escapist fantasies aside, for many creatures enforced hibernation is the only way to see out the winter. And more often than not, it is a far from solitary experience. Take the red-sided garter snake, which hibernates in a great seething ball. One colony, in Manitoba, is estimated to be 30,000-strong!

©Olivier Blaise

At the other end of the cuteness scale, Alpine marmots spend up to nine months in hibernation. That's too much time in bed even for me!

Via thelocal.de

Anyway, all this talk of hibernacula is making me sleepy...