Category Archives: Environment

The Non-Green Blues – A Song

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a song I wrote a few years ago called “The Non-Green Blues”.

It sums up my feeling on development and the urban sprawl that’s happening in Adelaide at the moment perfectly.

The Non-Green Blues
© Garth Dutton 2007

I’ve seen the future of Adelaide,
and that future’s non-green.
If Councils and Planners have their way,
it’ll be a different scene.
High-density housing without any room for trees.
That future’s unfolding and rapidly it seems.
But that’s not the future that I’d choose.
I’ve got a bad case of the non-green blues.

Some planners hate suburbia the way it is today.
They want to see us back in the village
from which our ancestors escaped.
But from my old apartment
there’s a view of birds and trees.
Just can’t help thinking
that’s the way it needs to be.
Non-green’s not a future that I’d choose
I’ve got a bad case of the non-green blues.

Help me, help me, help me do.
I need a cure for the non-green blues.
The ‘Greening of Adelaide’ used to be.
Won’t someone bring it back for me.

There are some suburbs of Adelaide
where people are growing old,
and when they die, their properties are sold.
Mostly to developers who bulldoze all that’s there.
Town houses, gravel and concrete
put me in despair.
That’s not a future that I’d choose.
I’ve got a bad case of the non-green blues.

Think I’ll become an activist
and contact my M.P.
Write letters to the Council
and ‘To the Editor’ straight from me.
And like George Orwell with his ‘1984’,
try to stop an emerging process
before it spreads some more.
Non-green’s not a future that I’d choose.
I’ve got a bad case of the non-green blues.

Non-green’s not a future that I’d choose.
I’ve got a bad case of the non-green blues.

Port Lincoln Bushfire

Posted on by
Reply

Port Lincoln Bushfire
© Garth Dutton, 2010

A few weeks ago 16 suburban houses were burnt is a bushfire at Port Lincoln. The town needs a strategy to stop something like that happening again. The fire swept from highly inflammable bushland into a suburb. Native street trees and native trees and shrubs in peoples gardens were simply an extension of the bushland in fire conditions.

I think a defensive barrier of fire-retardant trees needs to be planted around Port Lincoln. Many deciduous trees are fire-retardant, and many of the species of them which are used as street trees in Adelaide should do the job well as a barrier without the need for much watering. Cretan plane, Caucasian ash, Claret ash, oak and elm would be a start.

With such a fire-retardant barrier in place, people in the town would be able to enjoy their native gardens in safety. Port Lincoln could even have an autumn leaves festival.

The Heat And The Cold – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

This is one of my most recent poems, called “The Heat And The Cold”. It’s all about the changing conditions in Australia

The Heat And The Cold
© Garth Dutton, 2010

In Australia
climate change
is alive and well.

In the north
the tropical wet season
has moved further south
than usual
and has deluged
outback Queensland,
most of the Northern Territory
and the northern half of NSW.

In South Australia,
the desert climate
seems to have moved south,
causing repeated heatwaves.

But in the northern hemisphere
heavy winter snow set in
at about the time
of the Copenhagen Conference
in early December
and it is still snowing now
on the 9th January.
The nightly news
said Britain can expect no relief
for at least another week,
It is also now heavily snowing
in China.

We’ve got the extreme heat
and they’ve got the extreme cold.
In the boxing ring of the world,
the heat and cold
have retreated to their corners.

The Patawalonga Sandbar (The View From The French) – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

Here is another environmental poem from my book “The Apricot Tree”. I hope you enjoy it

The Patawalonga Sandbar (The View From The French)
© Garth Dutton, 2006

Où la mer rencontre
le lac Patawalonga
il y a une belle barre de sable.

Where the feminine sea meets
the masculine Patawalonga Lake
there is a beautiful sandbar.

But the sandbar had to go.
The rescue boat
couldn’t get out at low tide,
and yachts and fishing boats
couldn’t get back in
if the weather
suddenly changed for the worse
when the tide was low.

The Patawalonga sandbar
became South Australia’s
most intractable environmental problem.
No matter how many times it was dredged,
owing to ’longshore drift’,
it simply reformed.
The struggle went on for years.
Hundreds of engineering hours were spent
trying to design sand pumps
and sand by-pass systems…
The sandbar remained defiant.

I showed my poem
to a friend called Maureen Clifton.
She thought about it for a while, then said,
“Perhaps we should consider it
in terms of ‘environmental contraception’.
Possibly the ‘barrier method’ might work.”

So I sent my poem and her comments
to Brian Nadilo,
the then Mayor of Holdfast Bay.

He tabled them at the next Council Meeting.
Soon afterwards,
work began on building a ‘barrier island’
out in the sea
to the south of the Patawalonga.
And lo and behold,
a lovely new sandbar soon formed
between the beach
and the ‘barrier island’.
The Patawalonga sandbar was dredged
and didn’t re-form.
The sand had been given the chance
to be part of something better.

So the problem was fixed
easily,
permanently,
and at virtually no cost.
But if it hadn’t been for consideration
of the genders of the components,
they would still be trying to fix the problem
in terms of ‘longshore drift’,
sand pumps, and sand by-pass systems.

The War Is Over – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

This is a poem taken from a book of poems called “The Apricot Tree” that I launched back in 2008.
It’s called “The War Is Over”.

The War Is Over
© Garth Dutton, 2007.

The longest running war
in the history of the planet
has been the war
between incredibly ancient conifers
and the much more modern flowering plants.
It has been going on for at least
50 million years.

Conifers are wind-pollinated.
They have to be,
as they were on the land
for millions and millions of years
before insects emerged from the sea.
Flowering plants use insects or birds
for pollination,
and are a vast technical improvement
over conifers.
Conifers have been slowly losing the war
over all this time.
In the present day,
their natural range has been reduced to
swamps, isolated islands, mountain tops,
and the sub-Arctic.
Virtually everywhere
they have had to make the soil
too acidic for flowering plants to grow.
The acidification of the soil
was the last ditch defense
against extinction.

But in South Australia
the war’s over…
And has been for about 20years.

I can recall visiting
an area of re-growth forest
at Kuitpo.
My children called it,
“The place where kangaroos are.”
Pines were growing, just here and there,
in a mixed forest of eucalypt, wattle and casuarina.
In the air was the scent of all the trees in the forest,
including the pines.
The pines seemed to be just ordinary forest trees.
I realised I was standing in a whole new world.
The war was over.

About that time, too,
in National Park, Belair,
pines ‘went invasive’.
I could see in Angolan Afrikaans culture
what they were trying to do,
but I couldn’t translate it into English.
I have only now found the term I needed…
The pines were trying to ’become represented’
in that forest, that’s all.

But why did the war end?
I believe it was due to parrots and cockatoos.
They had discovered how to open pine cones
to extract the nutritious pine seeds,
which became an important part
of their annual diet.
Native trees eventually recognized this,
called off the war,
and invited pine trees to become a full part
of the forest community here.
The pines accepted the offer.
In mixed forests now they no longer
turn the soil acidic.
They have no need to,
as they are no longer under threat.

We have a problem…
How are we going to explain this
to people in the rest of the world?

Not The Lone Ranger, The Lone Environmentalist – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

This is an example of an autobiographical poem. It sums me up to a tee.

Not The Lone Ranger, The Lone Environmentalist
© Garth Dutton, 2009

Into the desert
of economic ruin
the Lakes drying out
and climate change
gallops the Lone Environmentalist.
Armed with perceptions,
a command of clear simple English,
and knowing appropriate bureaucrats
to whom to point out
each significant problem
and possible small scale solutions.

The Lone Environmentalist
tackles only small problems.
To think of the large ones
is too overwhelming.
So he breaks up the medium ones
into manageable chunks,
writes carefully crafted letters,
and waits for the action,
or possibly… the flak.

After a year of work
the Lone Environmentalist
is tired…
What did the Lone Ranger do
when he was tired?
T.V. movies don’t say.
They just take a commercial break.

So I take a holiday from writing letters,
and try to write some poetry instead.
I’ll do that this year.
Maybe next year
I could be an alien
seeing the Earth and its problems
for the first time.
An outside view
of what might be done.

Or maybe I could be
Secret Samurai…
Changing reality
with one mental sword stroke.
(Someone has to try.)

It occurs to me that
these flights of imagination
could make quite good stories.
Perhaps I should write them up.
I smile to myself.
Why even try?
I’ve already written them up
as a poem.

Hindmarsh Island – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

This is one of my earlier poems. Hindmarsh Island is a barren yet magically windswept piece of land off Goolwa, a town near the Coorong and the mouth of the great Murray River.

Hindmarsh Island
© Garth Dutton, 1986

The poet Adèle Kipping said,
on hearing of my destination.
“The island is full of wind-gnarled trees.
Each one would make a painting.”

Some time later, I went there again
on a rain-swept autumn day.
This time the trees seemed quite different.
They were etched on storm cloud grey.

Storm Boy Country – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

The poem Storm Boy Country was first published by Artstate Magazine in 2005.

The lakes were then in the beautiful condition depicted in the South Australian film Storm Boy, which was based on the novel by local author Colin Thiele. Sadly, things have changed.

Due to 3 years of severe drought in south-eastern Australia and over use of water for irrigation upstream, the Lakes are rapidly drying out exposing mudflats that turn acidic on contact with oxygen. The only way to stop that process may be to open the barrages and ‘let the sea in’.

That is wrong terminology…

What we would be doing would be to allow the Lakes ‘to revert to an estuarine environment’ like they were before the barrages were built. Already we have had our driest spring in many years so the drought looks like continuing for another year, so the likelihood of major inflow of fresh water from the River seems almost nil in the near future.

So sad…

Storm Boy Country
© Garth Dutton, 2008

(Written after seeing the South Australian film, “Storm Boy”)

The lakes and the Coorong
could break Prussian hearts.
Their minds are cast back
to the cold Baltic Sea.
To the ‘nehrungs’ and ‘haffs’
of the East Prussian coastline,
that World War 2
left divided in three.

NB: a ‘nehrung’ is a sand peninsula, and a ‘haff’ is the lake or lagoon behind it.

Downstream – A Poem

Posted on by
Reply

This is an environmental poem called “Downstream”. I was inspired to write this after seeing the ABC Television series “Heartlands”

Downstream
© Garth Dutton, 1998

Yellow afternoon light
invades a country school classroom
as the soils of  The Mallee
take flight from the plough.
Dams, bores & tanks,
stock troughs & windmills,
become eaten-out dust-scapes
at the first signs of drought.
It’s a long way back…
Sometimes, almost too far it seems.
The Murray’s salt channels
creep relentlessly onwards,
and in Adelaide we are living
downstream.

Blue Tongue Lizard – A Story

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a short piece I wrote as homework for the Kensington & Norwood Writers Group. It’s called “Blue Tongue Lizard”. Hope you like it.

Blue Tongue Lizard
© Garth Dutton, 2007

My garden is only a metre and a half wide and the length of my flat, yet it actually has wildlife in it.

On the 1st August I went out to my car to put on the new registration sticker and noticed a large and very sluggish blue tongue lizard coming out  of the wormwood bushes. It seemed that the day was warm and sunny enough for it to come out of hibernation for a while.

The lizard slowly crawled to a patch of the path that was darker coloured than the rest, so warmer, and flattened itself out to gain maximum sunshine on its cold body. I left it for an hour and went back outside. The lizard was still there, but had warmed up nicely and was now starting to get active.

It began rummaging through leaf litter left over from autumn, no doubt looking for its first intake of food for some time. Any insects would have done. That is what blue tongue lizards do… They semi- hibernate.

On cold cloudy days they sleep in their hiding places, but if there is some sun and the day is a warm one for winter, they’ll awake and look for a feed of slaters, earwigs or ants in leaf litter to top up their supply of vitamins to supplement their body fat reserves. In that, they are ahead of bears, who awake from the northern winter starved of vitamins.

The blue tongue lizard is right at the forefront of reptilian evolution, for they are now able to give birth to live young. So they have in fact caught up with mammals. And their young are like mallee fowl chicks. They can look after themselves from birth. Semi-hibernation means they can survive droughts and lean periods, whereas mammals often can’t, so they are much better adapted to Australian living conditions.

When I was married, my children had a baby blue tongue lizard as a pet for one winter. It was reasonably active in the warmth of the house, and particularly liked watching television. The words were obviously meaningless to it, but I’m sure it recognised the content as being mostly moving pictures of people. They are easily able to recognise one person from another.

I really like having one in my garden.