Monthly Archives: August 2014

My Art

A Word of Caution!

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I am an amateur blogger trying to write and build my Blog/website all by myself. If you see the face of my blog changing and doing weird things, I am up to no good – that is, fiddling around with the look of the blog and trying to find my way through it. I am lost too.

I want to show my words to you in the best presentation I can make. I became a premium member today and suddenly I have too many options and found too many things mean the same thing. I also found that I keep ‘hiding’ posts or putting them in more than one category. It has taken me a few hours and my neck is too sore to continue. I had some feedback that my work is not in order so I have decided to ‘fix’ it.

At present, the best way to read my stories is to scroll down.

 

 

 

Living, Nature and Climate Change, Stories

Re-cycled Birthing Suites

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Photo_0EAF98DF-F286-2068-7B58-294B7B7174D2-2

 

This morning, I heard scratching noises and thought of snakes. We get a few snakes and since we are almost on the end of winter, it is time to come out of hibernation. My friend Heather at work lives in the western suburbs of Brisbane, Australia like me. Heather said she and husband Gary found a python on their dining table when they got home last week.  My family lives about 15 minutes away from Heather so snakes have been on my mind.

The scratching noises seemed to only come from one place, unlike snakes which move and travel  fairly quickly. I followed the sound outside to our flood lights and found a Butcherbird. She was re-arranging one of two nests outside my son’s bedroom. The nests are on our floodlights so they are at least 15 feet off the ground. I smiled, feeling good about this nesting effort because this would be the third time the magpies used these nests. They had cleverly positioned the nests away from everything, including snakes.

The twig nests have been sitting on those lights for almost two years since the first two magpies build them. They served almost like a magpie birthing suite.

I had thought the Butcherbirds would be territorial and build their nests new. The previous Butcherbird babies live in the yard. They sit on the verandah rail and sing their hearts out for food. While we live in an rural suburb, and there are still a lot of trees they could build their nests on, these birds preferred the existing nests. I was curious about these nests being re-used so I Googled to see if it was normal for Butcherbird to re-cycle nests. Here is a link I found that did not have much information on the re-cycled nests but provides an in-dept information on the bird’s life.

http://www.wildlifeqld.com.au/bird-conflicts/butcherbird.html

While searching, I also spotted something similar with re-cycling and crows. Similar in the sense of using what they can find to make their nests. This made me more curious about birdlife and how they adapt to the way we humans live and destroy many of their natural habitation. I also wondered about how much we really understand about the re-cycling and controlling our wastes.

In Japan, crows have taken nesting to a somewhat artistic and highly intelligent way of using wire clothes hangers to build strong nests. It could also be a case of doing the best with what is on hand.

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Picture by Goetz Kluge

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/04/city-crows-build-nests-out-of-coat.html

 

 

 

Culture and Heritage, Living, Stories

The Garma Festival

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I missed the Garma Festival last week from August 1-4.

Garma is one of the most colourful and vibrant festivals in the world. I cannot explain Garma better than what I found on their website.

The ancient sound of the Yidaki (didjeridu) is a call to all people to come together in unity; to gather for the sharing of knowledge and culture; to learn from and listen to one another. Each August, the Yidaki call announces the start of Garma, the largest and most vibrant annual celebration of Yolngu (Aboriginal people of north east Arnhem Land) culture.

 

Garma is Australia’s most significant Indigenous event, and a model for self-determination, reconciliation, Indigenous knowledge sharing, transfer and exchange. Garma  is a colourful event with a greater, deeper purpose. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians experience and are directly involved in a spectacular yet substantive display of cultural practice and cross-cultural learning.
Garma incorporates visual art, ancient storytelling, dance – including the famous nightly Bunggul – and music, as well as other important forums and education and training programs relevant to cultural tourism, craft, governance and youth leadership.
It aims:

  • To provide contemporary environments and programs for the practice, preservation, maintenance and presentation of traditional knowledge systems and cultural traditions and practices, especially Bunggul (traditional dance), Manikay (song), Miny’ tji (art) and ceremony.
  • To share knowledge and culture, thereby fostering greater understanding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
  • To develop economic opportunities for Yolngu through education, training, employment, enterprise and remote Indigenous community development.

Garma is presented by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, a not-for-profit Aboriginal corporation with tax- deductible status, and all Garma entry fees and other revenues go to the programs and projects of the Foundation.

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Life, Stories, Women

Internet Trolls in the Real World

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Interesting story about Internet Trolls by Blogger Diary of Genial Black Man

Trevor's avatarDiary of a Genial Black Man

internet troll Courtesy of mrwgifs.com

Have you ever read an internet article and dreaded the comment section that followed? Those poorly-spelled, hate-filled glimpses into the dark recesses of the human soul–complete with racist, sexist, xenophobic, and religious-based attacks on anyone and/or anything that is considered different? Those people are out in the world among the rational, and they are as frightening as their defense of Ghostbusters as a male-only endeavor. I recently had an unfortunate experience with such a piece of human waste.

I write for a local sketch comedy group, and the new season has brought fresh blood for the writer’s pool. One of those eager beavers was a tall, glasses-wearing oaf of a young man, and he quickly made his presence known with his mouth: while the head writer caught people up on new business and the meeting’s outline, the kid interrupted several times with random nonsense as well as calls to read his…

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Life, Living, Stories

Thank you!

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I write to you – genuine readers of this blog. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I just logged back into my Blog and saw the ‘stats’. It warms me to see you are still reading the blog even when I have written very little in the past two months. I owe you. Your commitment shows that I am doing something important and it inspires me to keep writing and, try to write better stories.

I apologise for the long delay in bringing you new stories. Things have happened in my life. However, I am truly honoured you hung on. I did write a little about my life while I was away and I will share some of these stories this month.

When I had been in Adelaide over a week ago to surprise my childhood and closest friend Ann Stanley for her 50th birthday, her son Kolohie asked me about one of my stories he had read. ‘Kolo’ wanted to know more about the story which I posted on this blog. I told him a bit more but I was really pleased. It was a story that was significant to his life too because his mother was also there in Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea) and we were working together at the time the body of the young man was found on Ranuguri Hill.

Another recent highlight for me was a visit to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia to interview Jim, (James Sinclair) an author of 32 books about his life and his continuing involvement in Papua New Guinea.  An amazing man Jim lived his dream based on one of his heroes in his stories as a ‘kiap’ in Papua New Guinea. What Jim did not realise then was that dream got him hooked on a country that he never got out of his system. Jim is working on two more books. I will be posting some of my Sunshine Coast visit and interview with Jim here.

My absence from this blog was a result of recent personal attacks on Facebook. I share my blog on Facebook and use Facebook to stay in communication with my family and friends. After a few years and a previous threat last year, I was threatened and blackmailed. I tried to contact Facebook but it became apparent that after you sign up – it is a one-way traffic. It seemed that all the security and the settings you could possibly use to protect yourself are merely a bunch of buttons you press on your key-board and nothing more. I have copies of what FB write back to me several times, one of their comments was to contact my attacker and ask him nicely to remove the threat.  The matter is being handled by police and experts.

I had made my last post on Facebook in that first week of July to not have a FB presence. I was very touched to get offers to help from many family, friends and other people I knew around the world.  I had written to many to explain the reason.

How crazy is it to be in the virtual world? There are always risks involved when you are in public eye.  What you do for the good is never taken into account when there is some low-life with a sick ulterior motive. You always know deep inside you, you know you are never safe. It takes a real incident to truly understand how vulnerable you are. It takes years to become visible and seconds to become invisible. It is not just terrorists with guns that will get us. Our security, dignity, privacy and that basic human right is always ripe for manipulation, distortion and exploitation. All in the name of our virtual world.

I listened to Hack, a Triple J Australian radio programme I respect as I was coming home from work and the discussion was on the public say on ‘metadata’ and how the Abbott government is talking about collecting and keeping all our data. (see link here) http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/what-is-metadata-and-should-you-worry-if-yours-is-stored-by-law-20140806-100zae.html

Well, that metadata thing is worrying. I guess we have to decide if it is acceptable that information/images about us can be collected with or without our permission and used by someone else. In the end – would be really have any say or even have the power to control it?

On a lighter note, our creative writing class began again after Isabel had a break, and two of us from our class, Bill Heather and myself tried to write screenplays with Henry Tefay. I don’t think I was really good at it. I loved it though. The pictures were all in my head, but the challenge was to make it a film. I have been working on a screenplay and feel a lot more confident but it may be a year before I can get it read by an expert. Henry teaches this class on Monday nights at Kenmore and Isabel’s class is now on Tuesdays.

The Creative Writing group with Isabel has resumed.  We read, write and learn by talking and sharing our stories. It’s fun!

The core of our small writing group meet after our Tuesday night classes in a Seven Eleven down the road. It is the only place that opens after 9pm. We drink cheap coffee or hot chocolate and talk about our writing projects. We squeeze our seats, milk crates, in a narrow passage behind the freezers that hold ice-cream. The Seven Eleven customers give us funny looks over the freezers as they drop in to get their conveniences. The kind store owner gave us milk crates to sit for the past two terms.

Over my last three terms with the Creative Writing group (this being my fourth), I have learnt a lot from these wonderful people and our teacher Isabel D’Avila Winter. Thank you Gavin, Bill, Judy, Kat and now we have Pam joining the ‘crate squatters’.