Garth Dutton

How The Adelaide Ecosystem Works In The Present Day – Article #1

The “Greening of Adelaide” policy carried out for about 20 years in Adelaide was so successful it transformed the city and suburbs into an ecosystem.

I think Adelaide would be the home of more birds than any other city in the world. This is due to the sheer number of trees and the very sensible decision to keep easily repairable overhead wires. It is a city the is very bird friendly due to the large number of flowering street trees that provide plentiful nectar for honeyeaters.

A wide range of wildlife now co-exists with people here. Many suburbs have possums, and an increasing number have resident koalas. Blue tongue lizards now inhabit most gardens. Brown snakes are plentiful in many outer suburbs, a blessing for people who keep chooks, as the problem of rats and mice going after chook feed ceases to exist.

One year after marital separation, my ex-wife phoned me and said she had found a crushed eggshell in the cook house. She was very pleased the Permaculture System she lived in was now complete as it had it’s own resident predator, a brown snake.

A crushed eggshell was found about once very six weeks, and as she put it, “To survive there indefinitely, all it needed was access to a ‘ground dwelling bird’s egg’ to be available to tide it over when it temporarily reduced the supply of mice too far.”

In addition the ‘Greening of Adelaide’ has made Adelaide the most fire retardant piece of real estate in Australia.

Some years ago, my wife Lynette, my daughters Helena and Nicola, and I asked a question. “We see around us a vibrant beautiful living ecosystem. How does it all work here and now in the present day? “. I think we were the only family here who was even interested.

Everyone else was still studying how it all worked in 1836, and still are…

So I am going to write a series of articles about our observations and conclusions. I’ll start by saying that the Adelaide Ecosystem is a ‘miracle of adaptation’.

Few of the imported plants that have found a niche here play a role that bears even the remotest resemblance to the niche and roles they were in in their original environment.

Let’s finish the opening article by talking about soursobs.

Thanks to the soursobs, Adelaide would be the only city in the world that is full of seasonal wildflowers. They are in bloom at the moment and looking beautiful. Tourists love them, but sadly many Australian people regard them as wild flowers, and hate them as foreign because they weren’t here in 1836. I think the tourists are right.

The next article will discuss deciduous trees.

A Problem With Australian English

Seeing that today is Australia Day I thought I’d put in this article about the use of converting adjectives to nouns in our Australian version of English.

A Problem With Australian English
© Garth Dutton 2009

I have been living in Australia for quite a long time, but Australian English I find to be ‘beyond me’. I have no hope of getting a complete mental picture of the language, because in it a range of adjectives have become nouns.

The only other time I know of this happening is in the field of vicious political and ethic propaganda.

I speak Portuguese English, and in it nationalities can only ever be adjectives. For example, she is Italian, he is Brazilian etc. But in Australian English the equivalent terms are nouns, she is an Italian and he is a Brazilian.

And there the problem lies… In a singular noun you can only ever have one mental picture, and there is no such thing as a single mental picture of someone Italian or Brazilian. Yet Australian people appear to have one.

For a single picture of someone Italian, who would they choose? Someone with black hair and olive skin from Sicily, or someone with blonde hair and blue eyes from Trieste? And who do they see as ‘a Brazilian’? Pele, who is of black Angolan descent, or Ayrton Da Silva Senna, who was of mixed Portuguese and American Indian Descent?

Try as I may, I can find no answer, but I still can’t believe Australians see all nationalities as stereotypes.

I can think of some historical examples where adjectives have become nouns. In the first half of ‘Mein Kampf’, Hitler calls Jewish people ‘Jewish’, which is an adjective. Then he changed his mind and used the term ‘a Jew’ instead. As he now had a noun with only a single mental picture to work with, he created the most vicious ethnic stereotype in the history of propaganda.

The result of the change from adjective to noun was six million dead.

The First World War would have been over at the Christmas Truce in 1914 if the soldiers in all the armies had had their way. Generals and politicians wanted the war to go on and chose propaganda as their weapon to make sure it was fought to its conclusion. So they used the term ‘ a Hun’ to describe the average German soldier in saturation propaganda.

The war went on till 1918 and only ended when the constant barrage of hate propaganda caused German Army morale to collapse.

In the late 1940’s in America, Senator Joseph McCarthy took the adjective ‘red’ and turned it into a noun ‘a Red’. He had one mental picture to work with, so he created a vicious political stereotype of a Communist.

It turned into a ‘witch-hunt’ and many thousands of innocent people were persecuted and imprisoned. But there is one used by Australians of nationalities as nouns that has become dangerous.

Zimbabwe is a multi ethnic nation like Malaysia. There are two quite different black ethnic groups who live there, Shona and Matabele, and a white ethnic group who have no choice but to call themselves ’Zimbabwean’, because Robert Mugabe took away the only other name they had for themselves when he changed the country’s  name from Rhodesia.

The country fought Britain over independence for 14 years, under the rule of white leader Ian Smith, and his black successor Bishop Muzorewa and Australian visitors still insist on calling white people there ’British settlers’. Sadly they have no choice…

They have the term ’a Zimbabwean’ in their vocab and so can have only a single picture, and that’s of someone black. And what do black people on the rest of the continent think of white Zimbabweans?

Ever since Ian Smith declared unilateral independence in 11 November 1965, successive generations of them have gone to work for some years in other African countries, doing essential skilled work for local wages.

Britain has an appalling image in Africa due to the rapacious practices and exploitation  there by British big business. There couldn’t be a more insulting term than to call white Zimbabweans, “British settlers”.

I believe this tragedy for Australian English came about, because of the ‘oath of allegiance’ all primary school children had to take in the 1950’s. They had to salute the flag, then say aloud “I am an Australian.”

At my school, not one immigrant child would say it, because to all of them “Australian’ was an adjective, not a noun. But for the Aussie kids, they went on to call other nationalities by nouns as well.

We don’t want to lose Australian English, because, as a vehicle for rhyming poetry it is in a class all of its own. The only course of action I see available is a major education campaign in newspapers and in schools. Let’s hope the political will is there to do it.

Tags: article, australia, australian, english, zimbabwe

Adelaide Songwriter (Career One)

One of my favourite songs is “Summer Of 69″ by Canadian songwriter Bryan Adams. Read on and you’ll find out why.

Adelaide Songwriter (Career One)
© Garth Dutton, 2008.

I began playing guitar in January 1969, and soon learned enough chords and songs to play and sing at parties, barbeques and beach picnics. About mid-year I discovered the Catacombs Coffee Lounge at Hackney, which had folk evenings, and soon became a regular performer there. I used songs by Donovan, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles, Tom Paxton, Gordon Lightfoot and Bob Dylan.

Early in 1970, I went to Africa as a backpacker. I took my guitar with me and used to play in pubs to earn some money as I went along. Often, after I had sung some of the songs I knew, Afrikaner people there would ask me if I could accompany them for some of their songs. I was usually able to sort out the chords needed quite quickly, and a good sing along would follow. They usually ‘put round the hat’ to give me some money to help me on my travels, and I often got an offer of somewhere to sleep for the night. I enjoyed the lifestyle.

In June that year, I was in Lourenço Marques in Mozambique, and managed to get a short term job in the Department of Tourism and Propaganda. One of the Portuguese girls in the office taught me how to write poetry in the local dialect of English to help me to speak Portuguese correctly. I soon learned to write my own songs, as well as publishable quality poetry. My first song was about the city I was in. I wrote it first as a poem, when I was across the harbour on the beach. I was used to singing Joni Mitchell songs unaccompanied, due to the obscure guitar tunings she used on her records, so I worked out a tune for the new song unaccompanied.

I didn’t get back to the backpackers’ hostel till a few hours later, and when I did, I picked up my guitar and worked out which chords would be needed for an accompaniment. To my surprise, I found that the chord sequences that fitted were quite unlike any other song in my repertoire. So my first song set up a methodology that I have used for every other song I have written since. Lyrics first, then melody unaccompanied, and at a later stage put a chorded accompaniment to it on guitar or keyboard. So far every song has been a unique creation. I decided to write up my entire trip as songs and poetry. I had another rule. I tried to make every song readable as a poem, singable as a song and also just be used as a piece of music. Most times I succeeded. I wrote about 20 songs in Africa, and another 20 in England, when I went there later in the year.

I met a South African girl on the boat to England who was a singer. Her name was Shirley Lucas. We sang some songs together at parties on board and we were offered a number of spots singing with the ship’s band. We continued to see each other when we were in London, and soon became a popular duo on the folk circuit. She had a vocal range that was far wider than mine, and some of the songs I wrote for her to sing are now ;long forgotten as I didn’t have the vocal range to sing them myself. Paul Simon had the same problem with a famous song he wrote called “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” He is unable to sing it himself, as it is far beyond his vocal range in parts. He wrote it specifically for Art Garfunkel’s exceptionally wide vocal range, and it was a big hit.

Her voice was so good, that I lost confidence in my own singing. One night at a folk club, a patron asked me to sing a song. I said I had nothing prepared. He said, “Well, write a new one to sing yourself, and sing it here next Friday night.” So I wrote a song called  ‘Accompanist’. It is a very honest song about the breakdown of the relationship between Shirley and myself that was happening at the time. It goes like this…

“London town snowflakes are falling/ and in my heart the highway’s calling/ to Johannesburg for there’s someone there who’d want me/ from the letters she writes, I know she has a place in her heart for me./ But tonight you’ll sing, I’ll play guitar/ and it’ll still feel good for still friends we are./ At some pub down town, smoky atmosphere/ and your lovely voice soft and sweet and clear./ Everyone just stops and listens./ Then I’ll take you home/ but there’ll be no after/ beyond the coffee cups and the talk and laughter./ You’re afraid to walk late at night from the station/ and your company is a gift and consolation/ for loneliness is London’s desolation./ But we’ll be alright when we see the morning/ picture post card white in clear bright dawning./ Cold dark night, clear bright morning./ Cold dark night, clear bright morning.”

I sang the song the following week, and the audience was shocked. They thought we were just a happily married South African couple. A male fan who had a car offered Shirley a lift home, and a female fan took me back to her place for the night, and that was the end of our duo.

I came back to Adelaide at the end of February 1971 to continue with the University course I had dropped out of at the end of 1969, as my lack of qualifications were a major impediment to getting well-paid employment overseas. Some friends from a traveller’s club were also musicians, so we formed a group called ‘Folkwyze’. It was a multicultural group. Bob, on banjo and guitar was Australian, Marianne on vocals was Dutch, Ken on harmonica, guitar and vocals was Welsh, and I was English-born but had adopted Mozambican Portuguese culture as an adult. I was the only songwriter in the group, so we did a fairly standard folk repertoire of the time, plus a few of my songs for good measure. We sang regularly at the Catacombs till it closed a few years later.

I married in November 1974, and the commitments of marriage and children meant I became less active as a performer. I did, however, still try to pursue a career as a songwriter by making two LP records, a self-titled album in 1976 and an album called “Sea and Highway” in 1980. Both failed for different reasons. The first just wasn’t done well enough. The cover wasn’t up to scratch, and the folk musicians who backed me were unwilling to do more than one of two ‘takes’ of a song for fear it would lose spontaneity.
It turned out to be unsellable, and I lost all the money I had put into it. There was only one record press in Australia at the time and their minimum production run was 1,000 copies, so the financial loss was considerable. My wife Lynette thought the money would have been much better spent helping to pay off the mortgage. The failure of this record and the second one were a major cause of our eventual divorce in 1994.

I had enough of my own songs to record three LP’s. One for an ‘African set’, one for an ‘English set’, and one for an ‘Australian set’. Regrettably, I chose to record in chronological order for in 1980 the Anti-Apartheid Movement was at the height of their power. Everyone who worked on the project wanted to get ongoing work out of it. My wife Lynette designed an absolutely beautiful cover that was a work of art in itself. (She hoped to get work in LP cover design.) Dave Barry hoped to get a lot more work for his mobile recording studio. All the musicians who played on it wanted to get well paid session work. The mixer to whom we took the final master tapes did his best to give us a great soundscape. We all needed it to be a success…

But it was not to be. Whoever mixed from master tapes to vinyl in Sydney made a complete hash of the job. The main rhythm instrument was 12 string guitar, and on the master tape it was a solid driving force. On the vinyl it was ‘thin and wiry’. A bitter disappointment. It was obvious that the engineer in Sydney was quite unfamiliar with 12 string guitar music and also with the genre of the songs. Record pressing was a monopoly in Australia at the time so there was nothing we could do about it. I lost all faith in vinyl after that. I was overjoyed when it was finally replaced by CD’s, because that brought local control over final product.

Paul Simon caused a huge furore when he released his landmark album “Graceland” in 1986, because he had recorded it in South Africa. He had the stature to withstand the storm. I didn’t…and had to withdraw all copies from sale. Anti-Apartheid activists seemed to have a particular ire for my wife for designing such a beautiful cover for an album about a white person’s travel in Southern Africa. I got the message and gave up performing altogether for the rest of our marriage. We separated in 1991, so I became an active member of SCALA (Songwriters, Composers and Lyricists Association) and began a new career as a songwriter.

Tags: adelaide, bob dylan, bryan adams, garth dutton, joni mitchell, scala, songwriter, the beatles

The Blue Tongue Lizard Diet – Report One

The Blue Tongue Lizard Diet.
(Defeating Permanent Weight Gain Caused By Psychiatric Drugs.)
By Garth Dutton.

Report One.

I was first classified as suffering from a mental illness in mid-1995. The diagnosis was ‘garbage’. I had just released my first book of poems called “A Day In Melbourne”, and I showed it to a psychiatrist. Simple as that. In the previous November, I had managed to write 42 poems in one day, that was all it took.

I had reached Melbourne by overnight bus from Adelaide at 8.00 am, and I had all day to spare before I attended an ‘alternative economics’ conference in the evening at Melbourne University. So I decided to see some of the parts of Melbourne I hadn’t seen before. I also decided to try and write some poems called ‘A Day in Melbourne’ as it might sell well there if I wrote enough for a book of them.

So I went by train to Frankston and wrote a series of poems about what there was at various stations and occasionally what there was to see between stations. It was easy. All the poems were short and the first drafts came out perfectly.

I did snatches of Zen meditation now and again to keep a calm relaxed focus when I was observing, and then writing down. Whilst having morning tea in a café at Frankston, I decided to combine all the short poems written on the train into a long narrative poem that is ‘episodic’. I had a full hour and a half in Frankston so I had time to walk to the beach, where I wrote a few more poems.

I then caught the train back to Melbourne and set out on another journey to Belgrave at the south of the Dandenongs, then up and over that range by bus coming out at Lilydale on the northern line, and then back to Melbourne by train late in the afternoon.

As the number of poems written grew I decided to try to write 42, as I had just finished reading The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the week before. In that book 42 was the answer to ‘life, the universe and everything.’ Once I had set the goal I managed to achieve it without difficulty, as everything I had seen on my journeys was new and interesting, and the conference was very good indeed. So had plenty to write about.

No-one in Adelaide had any interest in a book about Melbourne, but it did do quite well there.

With the book I made one catastrophic mistake I am still paying for. I showed a copy of my newly published book to a psychiatrist I had to see once every six months to keep my Public Service pension going. I showed it to him because I was proud of it, and I explained in full about how I had written it.

To my horror, he didn’t believe a word I said. He flicked through the book without actually reading a single poem, then announced,

“It is inconceivable that anyone could write 42 poems in one day unless they were on a ‘manic high’. Bi-polar disorder. Mental illness!”

He put me into a psychiatric hospital, where I was forcibly put onto Lithium Carbonate. I had been 75 kgs for twenty years till then, but on that drug I went up to 106 kgs in 18 months. As of 30th April 2008 I still weighed 106 kgs, and the prospects of ever finding a partner for the rest of my life seemed zero.

All sorts of diets and even a ‘gutbusters’ course had failed.

I decided to use my own way of reducing the weight, based on the annual slow but steady weight loss of the blue tongue lizard, my totem animal in Australia. They semi-hibernate for some of the year in Adelaide’s climate. I decided to do the same.

The results so far have been very good. My G.P. Dr. Dianne Walker is supervising my diet and I got the following information on my weight loss from her on 4th November 2008.

30/4/08 – 106 kgs
6/6/08 – 103 kgs
16/7/08 – 100 kgs
13/8/08 – 99 kgs
10/10/08 – 95 kgs
4/11/08 – 93 kgs

Weight loss so far = 13 kgs in six months.

The diet works! Yippee! More reports will follow. I am now working on my first ‘diet book’. I have 18 kgs of weight loss to go to get back to 75 kgs. At the present rate I should make it in 8 or 9 months. Then I’ll publish my‘diet book’.

So many people are affected by permanent weight gain caused by psychiatric drugs that it should be a best seller.

Tags: Diet, garth dutton, melbourne, mental illness

Some Thoughts On Spelling

Here is an article on “Spelling in English”. Let me know what you think.

Some Thoughts On Spelling
© Garth Dutton,2008

English is supposed to be one of the most difficult languages in which to spell. For every spelling rule that can be defined, there seem to be dozens of ‘exceptions.’ Also, some words that sound the same are deliberately spelt differently to differentiate them in text, e.g. hair and her, bare and bear, stare and stir, son and sun. Sometimes an ‘e’ is at the end of a word simply to make it look like English.(e.g. ‘house’.)

The real problem with spelling in English is the sheer amount of words of foreign origin in the language. Portuguese has the same problem. The reason for the high number of foreign words is identical in both languages, namely that during the Age of Exploration and Colonialism, both English and Portuguese sailors, explorers and colonial officials thought it ridiculous to invent new names for new things they came across when they already had a name in some local language. Everywhere they went they adopted local names for things, thereby becoming the two finest ‘trade languages’ the world has known. (English also gained many French words due to the Norman invasion, and in science there are many words of Latin and Ancient Greek origin as Classical Studies was the main education for the elite for centuries.)

But different solutions were found to cope with the foreign words. In English, foreign words that came into the language kept their original foreign language spelling. For example, ‘cheque’ has to be spelt that way in English because that is the way it is spelt in French, from whence it came. ‘Kindergarten’ has to be spelt that way because it came into English from German.

The principal that ‘foreign words keep their original foreign language spelling’ means that if the origin of the word is known, then spelling in English becomes quite logical. In addition, by studying the spelling, scholars have been able to trace the origin of virtually every word in the vast vocabulary of English… A staggering feat… But the price of that solution was that it has meant everyday spelling in English is a nightmare if you don’t know the origin of the words.

The Portuguese chose a different solution. They incorporated foreign words phonetically into the language. This means that every foreign word incorporated into Portuguese over the centuries fully obeys Portuguese spelling rules. But it also means that there is usually no way of telling the origin of the word, unless there is some historical record of it being adopted, or the reason for the adoption of the word can be worked out logically. Portuguese is a Latin-based language in which there is only a choice of masculine or feminine for nouns and adjectives. However, for the large number of foreign words in the language, the word ending is only the sound that the word had in the foreign language it came from. This has reduced the question of the gender of words to purely a matter of grammar. This makes Portuguese quite incomprehensible to speakers of other Latin-based languages where the genders of words continue to have real meaning.

There is an additional complication in that a considerable number of adopted foreign words are non gender specific. For example, ‘bebé’ which comes from ‘baby’ in English, and ‘criança’ was a Brazilian Indian word that means exactly the same as ‘child’ in English. (‘Child’ wasn’t adopted as it didn’t sound like a Portuguese word. ‘Criança’ did, so was adopted instead as soon as they came across it.)

But ‘bebé’ is grammatically masculine, and ‘criança’ is grammatically feminine. Try explaining that to someone Italian or Spanish. In fact, both words are of foreign origin and both are non gender specific. This means that Portuguese is an easy language to learn if you are an English speaker, but a difficult one to learn if you speak another Latin language. In the whole of French there is only one non gender specific term, and that is the expression ‘il n’y a personne’, which means ‘there is no-one there’. There is no way of telling whether the person who is not there is a man or a woman.

The French and the Spanish, however, kept their languages pure, and invented new words in their own languages for new things they came across in the colonial era. A different path to that taken by the English and Portuguese. But both paths had drastic effects on the peoples being governed. English and Portuguese displaced many local languages in their colonies, and in the French and Spanish empires, the ruling elites shared no common vocab at all with the peoples being governed, who still spoke local languages.

A possible way to learn English spelling quickly would be to take a list of commonly  used words and learn them divided into categories based on their origin. My daughter Helena couldn’t spell at primary school because, try as she may, she was unable to define the principles of spelling in English. So she had no starting point. If she knew a word had four letters, she might just as well put down ’cmpz’. That was my diagnosis as an experienced Learning Assistance Program tutor at her school. But the school rejected my diagnosis, and treated her for dyslexia instead.

Things didn’t change till she got to first year high school at Unley. I was doing teaching practice at Cabra College and I met a South African visiting teacher there. He was in Australia to find out how multiculturalism worked in Australian Schools as Apartheid was ending in South Africa. He had done a term in the State school system and was now doing a term in the private school system. I had learned Angolan dialect of Afrikaans when I was living in the Angolan Portuguese Community in Cape Town, so we talked together in Afrikaans. I then told him about Helena’s spelling problem. He asked me why I hadn’t applied for ESL help, as Afrikaans was a language spoken at home. I said I no longer had much spoken fluency in the language, as I was out of touch with speakers of it and there was no Afrikaans reading material available here either.(He thought it ridiculous that every bit of the great expertise of English as a Second Language teachers is totally unavailable to English-speaking students here who have problems with spelling in English.)

I said I had told Helena that Angolan Portuguese people had a different concept of race than Afrikaner people. When the Portuguese came to Angola 500 years ago they wondered why the native people’s skin was so black. It is impossible to get sunburnt in a rain forest, so the sun couldn’t have been to blame. They eventually put it down to the severity of the problem of predation by leopards in Angola’s forests. Over time, only the darkest skinned people survived. A black person could sleep anywhere in the forest at night and be completely invisible to even a leopard. An environmental adaptation…
However, in Afrikaner people’s creationist religion, all races of people were created by God at the Creation with a unique range of skills and talents. That’s why they didn’t believe in mixing races. It was said to be interfering with God’s work. He said getting ESL should be no problem

He suggested that I also teach her the differences in meaning of some simple terms, such as ‘Cape Town‘ and ‘Kaapstad‘, and ‘Table Mountain‘ and ‘Tafelberg‘.So I did. Cape Town means it is the capital of Cape Province, but the ‘kaap’ referred to in Kaapstad is the geographical feature of the Cape of Good Hope. ‘Stad’ means ‘city’. The frequent bad weather at the cape itself was the main reason the city was there, as it is the nearest safe harbour where ships could wait for good weather. In Afrikaans the cape and the city form a ‘unit‘, so Kaapstad is one word. Table Mountain in English means that, even if you’d never seen it, you would still know more or less what it looked like, flat topped. But the only way you would ever find out what the term ‘Tafelberg’ means in Afrikaans would be to see the mountain itself, or to see a picture of it, because the flat top is only part of the mountain. ‘Tafelberg’ means that mountain and no other, and includes all aspects of it. Yet both these terms look like literal translations. The problem of there being two words in English and a single compound word as its equivalent in Afrikaans never goes away. It is much easier to learn Afrikaans as I did, using the principal I was taught of ‘ one word = one idea = one mental picture’, and put the English aside.

The South African teacher advised trying Helena out on spelling in Afrikaans, as spelling in that language is phonetic, and there is no c, q, x, or z in Afrikaans words to complicate spelling. (These letters are in the Afrikaans alphabet for use in non-Afrikaner people’s names.) He said if she is truly dyslexic, the Afrikaans alphabet would be as meaningless to her as the English one. So I gave my copy of ‘Teach yourself Afrikaans’ to Helena and my ex-wife Lynette to work through the phonetics of spelling in the language and to gain some vocabulary. Then I wrote to Unley High School and applied for ESL help for Helena. I explained that we may well be the only household in Australia where Angolan dialect of Afrikaans was spoken, but that was not a problem, as the component of Portuguese ideas in the dialect form a link to English that is lacking in the standard South African Afrikaans. ESL help was granted immediately. The ESL teachers there had some experience with Malay and Indonesian speaking students, whose languages also had a phonetic alphabet and spelling.

From then on, I have only a sketchy idea of what happened, because Lynette and I were recently separated. I heard of Helena’s progress about third hand. But as far as I was able to piece things together, it went as follows… Helena became literate in Afrikaans in a few days. She was then able to adapt the Afrikaans alphabet to spell out words phonetically in English. She was allowed to do a do a first draft in that fashion, and was then able to give the draft to any student in the class to simply correct the spelling. Her grammar and syntax were found to be excellent.

She was put under the supervision of the teacher of German, who told her that German is quite phonetic too, because it contains hardly any words of foreign origin. The teacher explained about words of foreign origin in English keeping their original foreign language spelling. At last, Helena had found the principle she needed to completely understand spelling in English. A breakthrough… The teacher bought her a dictionary that gave the origin of words, and they put commonly used words into categories based on origin. From then on, Helena made rapid progress with spelling in English.

I knew John Griffin, the head of English at the school, as he is a poet who reads at Friendly Street Poets venue, as I do. At the end of the year, I asked John how Helena was going with English at school. He said sadly, “Why on earth did you ever go to Angola?” I replied, “Because I wanted to ride on the Benguela Railway, one of the world’s great railway journeys.” He sighed and said, “Fair enough…” So we left the topic at that. I realized the problem wasn’t her progress in English, but the state Angola was in at the time. Virtually all of the white population had left in 1975 as soon as the first Cuban soldiers landed. They weren’t prepared to even attempt to live under the rule of people of Spanish descent. Civil war had raged since 1975 and the country was now littered with millions of land mines. Western big business was supporting the Marxist government in Luanda against the democratic opposition UNITA, whose their acronym stood for Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The multicultural teachers at the school must have been in despair. Helena still uses a spellcheck occasionally, just in case…

Tags: english, garth dutton, language, portuguese, Writing

“Old Growth Forest” Is A Flawed Term

As mentioned in my first post, some things I write can be read as controversial and confrontational to some. This next article is no exception. It’s my hope that it raises a few questions which lead to a lot of answers.

“Old Growth Forest” Is A Flawed Term
© Garth Dutton B.A. Hons. (Geography), 2007

I have an Honours Degree in Geography from the University of Adelaide. In theoretical and computer ‘models’ of the environment used in Geography, every piece of terminology used must give an exact, and correct, mental picture. The use of even one piece of inappropriate terminology can give a completely false picture of reality.

I believe the term ‘old growth forest’, as it is currently used, to be a particularly inappropriate piece of terminology, because in Australia we actually have such a thing as a genuine old growth forest, namely a Mallee forest that has been continuously grazed by sheep over a long period of time.

In such a forest, there are no young trees at all, as all the seedlings have been eaten by sheep. All the trees are old, and eventually the forest will simply die of old age.

But the term ‘old growth forest’ is currently used to describe a ‘full age range’ forest, which is only ‘old’ in the sense that it has been on a particular site for a long time, perhaps for millennia. Such a forest contains everything from mature trees many hundreds of years old to day old seedlings, and the forest has been there for a long time because it is continually renewing itself. It also contains its full compliment of all the birds, animals and insects that live there.

It follows that a forest that has been selectively logged of its mature trees is a ‘reduced age range forest’, and re-growth or a plantation is a ‘single age range forest’. And an ‘old growth forest’ is like the grazed Mallee forest referred to earlier.

The Canadian environmentalist, Dr. David Suzuki, said to me in a letter a couple of years ago, that the problem is that the term “old growth forest’ is currently being used inappropriately, but its present usage is so entrenched in the literature and psyche of both science and the environmental movement that it seems unchangeable.

He is trying to get a better term ‘ancient forest’ adopted in Canada, with some success.

In its present usage, the term ‘old growth forest’ has given paper producers, and loggers worldwide, a quite ‘false picture’ of what they are actually doing. They say they are cutting down ‘old forests’ and will in time replace them with ‘new forests’.

What they are actually doing is cutting down ‘full age range forests’ and replacing them, if at all, with ‘single age range forests’. And they seem to see no difference between a living tree and its dead remains in a woodchip, because they regard both as inanimate.

Someone has got to get the terminology changed, or the cutting down of the world’s forests will be unstoppable.

Tags: ancient forest, david suzuki, Environment, garth dutton, old growth forest