Back in April, I posted the donation link on behalf of my friends Lina and Thomas Bauer from Dundee Park (Mission Beach, Queensland, Australia) a request to support their initial recovery work in Lina's home village Savulotu (Ra Province, Viti Levu, Fiji). The village was wiped out by a category 5 tropical cyclone earlier this year. Thanks to those who supported Lina's work. Please now find her file of what has been done so far by clicking here.
Butterflies
Yesterday I visited the 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. Amazing pictures. Wildlife photography today is far more than "only" documentary. On the lawn of the museum, they installed a butterfly house, which reminded me of the one in the making at Dundee Park, Mission Beach (Australia). This is the forth time, I came across butterflies. First of course, like every boy in the countryside, I had a little collection of species which I caught back in the fields in the Westerwald and pinned them to a wall. Then I got quite interest in tropical butterflies, when living on Lamma Island in the South China Sea (see the photo gallery below). Earlier this year, we helped a bit our friends Thomas and Lina Baur in Dundee Park with moving earth inside their butterfly house under construction. It was amazing for me to learn, how picky butterflies are on plants for feeding and breeding, and I realized how important floral diversity really is for them. I was frequently told by Chinese silk producers that this is a big problem on the Chinese part of the Silk Road, where the mulberry trees are cut down and there is a shortage of feed for silk worms now. Instead the farmers grow nuts.
Butterfly house on the lawn of the National History Museum in London
Butterfly house in the making at Dundee Park, Mission Beach, Queensland, Australia
The few butterfly shots below are taken on Lamma Island in 2008 - 2011.
Hanging around in Cairns
Flying Fox, or Fruit Bat (Pteropus) hanging around in the trees in Cairns.
We decided to drive to Cairns a few days early, as there was the potential that Cyclone Nathan makes landfall where it would either flood or blow away our road. Luckily non of this happened and the storm hit about 100 km North of Cairns (strange to think that way, because lucky for us means bad luck for somebody else). But one thing is sure: we are happy, it did not flood Thomas' and Lina's new Butterly House in El Arish (Australia). Now we are having more time ein Cairns than planned and the city is quite a sleepy one: get a haircut at the night market, go for a swim in the lagoon. The reef is not that easy to reach and waters are still rough from the storm. Cairns is an "old" sugar town, and quite nice. There are free barbecues along the sea side. Eating is important in Cairns. Should you consider to go and swim in any of the natural waters here, you might end up as a meal for a salt water crocodile.
All flights are up and running again, so that tomorrow we can leave on time via Sydney to New Zealand.
Gold Coast Days
If you give me a map and ask where "the comfort zone" lies geographically, I would point at the Gold Coast: perfect temperature, blue sky, the ocean at the door step, excellent food. Life is easy and people are very friendly. I was teaching on Sunday a preparation lecture for an upcoming China Field Trip at Bond University, which is headed by Keith Duncan. Thereafter we had an excellent seafood dinner with view on the surprising skyline of Surfer's Paradise. While teaching Australian students about China, I actually learn a lot about Australia. There are a few more guest lectures and chats with the faculty colleagues coming this week. And then we already pack up and travel North. Time flies.
Visiting Bond University (Gold Coast)
Arrived at Australia's Gold Coast - not for holidays, but as a guest lecturer at the Business School of Bond University. It seems mind boggling to pass by places like Surfer's Paradise on the bus to head for an academic institution. But then really it appears: a small but very fine University under a stunning blue sky. The first thing I noticed was that the library is on weekdays open until 1 am. For those of you who stereotype Bond with surfing and barbecue: does 1 am in the library sound like vacation?
I had a very nice welcome by faculty and students on campus yesterday and gave my first guest lecture in the class of Lars Isaksson. Today I spent with preparing more and meeting students. Excellent environment and excellent people.
Australia: "The Bottom of the Empire"
In his first voyage Captain James Cook approached Terra Australis from the South, traveled along the East Coast, facing severe encounters with the Great Barrier Reef, then via Timor and today’s Indonesia crossing the Indian Ocean towards the Cape of Good Hope. All along this way, he left his traces naming islands, mountains and rivers - some of them mirroring the despair of the journey after hitting reefs in shallow water, loosing men to pests and accidents. Cook married Elizabeth Batts in 1734, but was more than half of his married life at sea until he died in Hawaii in 1779 in a fight with local inhabitants. Another famous journey was the conquest of the HMS Pandora in the aftermath of the Mutiny on the Bounty during the so-called Breadfruit Expedition. It is amazing how much effort the Royal Navy put into the aftermath expedition to capture and punish the mutineers who were caught in Tahiti and chained and looked in a box cell on board called “Pandora’s box”. Crossing Torres Strait, the Pandora hit the Great Barrier Reef on August 29th 1791. All efforts to drop ballast, like water, food and canons could not safe the ship and it sank the day after. In the last minute the prisoner’s cell was opened. The survivors sailed in rescue boats towards Timor, where they arrived on September 16th. The name ‘Terra Australis’ was coined by Captain Matthew Flinders commanding the HMS Investigator and who published ‘A Voyage to Terra Australis’ in 1814. Flinders was an amazing navigator and his idea of putting iron bars beside the magnetic compass to compensate deviations caused by the ship, became the ‘Flinders bars’. Returning to England in poor health, he died on July 19th 1814, aged 40. His son William Matthew Flinders Petrie became archeologist and Egyptologist.
During my studies of Geosciences at The University of Cologne, I had to specialize on a continent for an important exam. Back then I picked Antarctica for several reasons: 1) it is one of the last frontiers, 2) I was expecting mining exploration activities and a professional outlook there, 3) it is rough, 4) there are no people there (at that time I was a bit introverted - today, I like people if they appear in small bursts and then disappear again). During my exam preparations, I also came across Sir John Franklin, who was mentored by Flinders and crossed later into Antarctic waters and later was given command of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in his 1845 Northwest Passage journey, which became Franklin’s last expedition. An interesting insight into this character is the fascinating novel “The Discovery of Slowness” by Sten Nadolny. I liked this book at that time, because is discovers slowness as a positive principle in fast times, and narrates through the eyes of a very slow protagonist, who never wastes time, because he knows his handicap which he managed to turn into an asset.
The largest island of Terra Australis became Australia. As a British Colony, it was referred to ‘The Bottom of the Empire’ and served as a resource and also for deportations and imprisonment of convicts. Independence came gradually, but even still today Australia is a Constitutional Monarchy under the English Queen Elizabeth II.
Australia is a vast country. A rich and lush nature of the Eastern Coastal regions is contrasted by an ‘empty’ centre behind the ‘Dividing Range’. Sitting in my rented Toyota, I had to realize that driving from Cairns to Darwin through the Outback is a similar stretch than driving from Sweden to North Africa. With the difference that some roads require 4WD and you have to carry extra water and fuel. How much Australia is vonourable to nature, I realized when seeing the damage the last Cyclone and the floods caused in the region around Mission Beach, where a friend runs the Dundee Park Academy which provides education in Rainforest Ecology and Tourism on the premises of a former crocodile park.
Pioneering spirit outside the cities of Australia is still necessary. There are basically no “jobs” unless you create them yourselves. A large amount of workforce is provided by backpackers and young people who tour the country in a “working holiday” for about 6-12 months. I am pretty sure, that if I would have travelled Australia at that age, I would not have come back. It is too much the “Country where everything is possible” if you want to try out things and work hard and like to be outdoors. You might think: What do Australians have to do with work hard? Well, on the first sight it is hard to spot the difference between being “laid back” and being “lazy”. Of course every place has many different characters. But one difference between being lazy and laid back, which I observed in Australia, is that people do not have to pretend to be busy. When the job is done, they go fishing. And if the job is done at 2 pm, then they go fishing at 2 pm. That’s not lazy. Sitting on one of the world’s largest mining continents and selling commodities to China, seems to have a major impact on the self confidence: “No worries mate”. On the other hand you can sell your commodities only once and the attempt of the former prime minister to levy a heavy tax on mining was intelligent, but finally fueled kicking him out of office with party tricks. The winner of the intrigues was the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. And when you listen to what she has to say, you feel that Australia still has a long way to go to arrive in anything close to a “knowledge based economy”. But I encountered most Australians as very friendly people: kind, helpful, reliable. It seems a society in which mutual help was essential for survival and it shaped at least the rural culture very much. And I really enjoyed the “no bullshit” attitude.
What was a surprise for me was today’s situation of the Aborigines. Even in the co-managed Kakadu National Park most Rangers are white. The only presence of Aborigines is hanging around the car park of the local supermarket, in some cases recovering from a hangover or working on the next one. It must be a political deadlock between paralyzing welfare and bad conscious of the white man for historical suppression and cruelty. If the will for a different life does not come from the Aborigines themselves, then every effort to improve their situation will be seen as threat to their culture. It is still a sad story.
