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.

No Second Chance – A Short Story

No Second Chance
© Garth Dutton, 2009

The only time they ever saw each other was at a kindergarten playgroup. Each brought their own small child. Attraction grew over a period of time, though it was rarely expressed by more than an acknowledgement of each other by eyes, and the hint of a fleeting smile.

They spoke in soft silences, under the ever watchful eyes of others. Occasionally they had brief conversations before their children recognised the threat to their own individual affection and attention. Then it would be children dragging adults separate ways to swings or painting, any kind of separate activities.

Each week, they left the meaningful silences of the kindergarten for the hostile silences of other relationships. This went on for some time…

He acknowledged that she was having a difficult time of things, and she thought it helpful to say that he had courage to bring his child to the playgroup, for by doing so, he was openly advertising that he was not employed.

The relationship between them thereafter became progressively strained. She was bitter that an expected offer was not forthcoming, and began, step by step, to distance herself from him.

He felt her draw back, and at first he could not understand why. It came to him, painfully and slowly, that his entire approach had been wrong. He thought he had done all the right things, but now he saw that wasn’t so.

To show that he found her attractive had been a step forward on his part. She had acknowledged that she too was attracted. Almost against his will, he had taken a second step forward, for at all times he was with her all his best qualities had been on display. It remained for her to assess him, and decide if she was interested in taking the relationship further. The relationship had stalled, for as he waited for her to take that second step, she waited on him to take another step forward.

For a moment he pretended he was someone else. How then would he have proceeded? His painful enlightenment began. Attraction, then he would have to frame some very positive verbal offer. But he saw that if such an offer was angrily rejected, his whole position bringing his child there would be under threat. In any case, his financial circumstances ruled out most offers he could think of. But he saw it would have to be done.

The next week, when they came to playgroup, she could see he was visibly trying to frame an offer to her. She was surprised. It seemed so out of character, almost false. All of a sudden, the colour drained from her face. For the first time she realised that what had been going on between them was as visible to the adults present as it was to the children, and always had been. She thought of how well he treated her and realised that by doing so he was making an offer anyway. She simply hadn’t recognised it as such.

She made herself a cup of coffee, then took her child out to the sandpit to play. She talked with other mothers, but her mind was elsewhere. It came to her that she would need to respond with some word of gesture or the relationship would be at an end. To just take his hand for a moment, a quick kiss, or a whispered “I love you,” would be enough, and the relationship would progress rapidly to consummation.

She avoided contact with him, while she battled with herself about what to do. Sadly she came to realise hat her background had won. There was no way she could bring herself to take the necessary step, no matter how much she wanted to. In her culture, the man had to take the lead all the way.

As the session finished, they had eye contact. She shook her head almost imperceptibly, but with such finality, that he realised there could be no second chance. She could never go there again, so poured her heart out to the Director of the kindergarten, who arranged for her child to be enrolled in another kindergarten in nearby suburb.

He went home broken-hearted and tried to rationalise that both their circumstances were such that nothing had been possible anyway. That night, he watched the evening T.V. news. There were local items and some for overseas, including one from his homeland. And in his heart he was there, not here.

Tags: author, garth dutton, Prose, short story, story

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

Not The Lone Ranger, The Lone Environmentalist – A Poem

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.

Tags: Environment, garth dutton, poem, poet, Poetry

Hindmarsh Island – A Poem

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.

Tags: coorong, garth dutton, goolwa, hindmarsh island, poem, poet, Poetry, river murray

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

Library – A Short Story

Here is a romantic short story with a nice twist at the end of it called “Library”, I hope you like it.

Library
© Garth Dutton, 2000

Jim was busily working on the Internet at the local library, when a soft female voice said to him, “Hi! The girl behind the counter tells me you’re a poet, too.”

“Yes! “ he replied. “I do write some.” He finished the sentence he was writing and glanced up. A woman dressed in T-shirt, jeans and sandals was standing there. He thought her blonde hair looked a bit untidy, but then he remembered it was a warm, but very windy spring day outside.

“Do you write yourself?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Though I haven’t had many poems published yet. Since my divorce last year, I’ve decided to become a writer. I’m starting with poetry, but I soon hope to be writing short stories and articles as well. I also have a vague idea for a novel.”

At this point, Jim became aware of the passing of time. He’d had more incoming emails than expected today, and quite a few of them needed a reply. His hour on the computer was already half gone. But she didn’t move, and seemed to want to talk on…

“My name is Janet, by the way,” she said.

“I’m Jim,” he replied. “I’m divorced and working at becoming a writer, too. I also write songs. I have a microphone and amplifier set-up and I mostly play around the scene at folk clubs, barbeques and parties. Some are paying jobs, some aren’t, but I have to get known somehow. I do a mixture of ‘covers’ and my own material.”

“I’ve never tried writing a song,” said Janet. “I think it would be difficult, as I don’t play guitar at all. I was taught piano as a child, but that was all classical stuff and written notes.”

“Maybe you should try singing one of your own poems unaccompanied, as a beginning,” suggested Jim. “That’s how I started writing my own songs. I really like the Canadian songwriter, Joni Mitchell, as her songs sound just as great sung or recited. A pity about all the unusual tunings she uses on guitar, though. I do a few of her songs unaccompanied, as I only know standard tuning.”

He was painfully aware that his time on the computer was rapidly slipping away. There was no way now that he would get through all his remaining email replies.

Janet noticed his impatience, : Sorry,” she said, sadly. “I’m interrupting you, aren’t I?  And just when you’re very busy.”

A thought came to him that the girl behind the counter had been doing some matchmaking. He smiled at the thought, and Janet thought he was smiling at her. She smiled back. “Whoops!” he said silently to himself.

A good idea occurred to him. “I’m playing a few songs at a friend’s birthday party on Friday evening. It’s just an informal backyard show. Would you like to come along?”

“Certainly!” she replied. “And can I bring my children as well?”

Tags: author, garth dutton, Prose, short story, Writing

A Brazilian Joke About God

This was told to me by a Brazilian backpacker. Thought I’d share this with you.

I told the ‘joke’ to my ex-wife, who is Australian. She said, “Brazil and Australia must have a lot in common. That could so easily be an ‘Australian joke’”.

A Brazilian Joke About God

When He contemplated creating the world, God decided that every new land would have a complete balance of good and bad points, because if any place had too many good points, everyone would go and live there. To appraise His work He created a special team of angels.

The first land He created was Europe. He gave it high snow-capped mountains in the Alps, the Carpathians and the Pyrenees. He gave it mighty rivers, the Rhine, the Volga, the Vistula and the Danube. He created mighty oak and pine forests, and some of the richest fertile plains in the world. He lined the Mediterranean Coast with magnificent beaches.

They were the good points.

Now He started with the bad points. He created lots of ethnic groups, all speaking different languages. Then He created political boundaries that didn’t coincide with ethnic boundaries, causing century after century of wars over border provinces. Most countries had endless problems of rebellions by ethnic minorities within their borders.

Then He stopped. The angels appraised His work and were satisfied. Europe had at least as many bad points as good, so was in complete balance.

The next land God chose to create was America. He gave it magnificent mountains in the Appalachians and the Rockies. He gave it vast prairies. He gave it the Great Lakes, and the mighty Mississippi River. He gave California a wonderful climate, and created the pristine wilderness of the Everglades. Then He decided that was enough good points.

Now He started on the bad ones.

California was ripped by the mighty San Andreas fault that caused terrible earthquakes every few years. The Mississippi River was subject to frequent devastating floods. Cold air from the north collided with warm moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico to form storm cells with terrible tornados. The Gulf Coast would be lashed by frequent hurricanes. In the scenic North West, He created a series of huge snow-capped volcanoes, that are potentially the most violently explosive in the world. Mt. St. Helens would show what a volcano like that could do to a forested area. Nearer the coast millions of people would live in the danger zones before they knew the volcanoes were so dangerous.

And there He stopped. The angels appraised His work and again were completely satisfied. America’s bad points balanced out the good ones perfectly.

Next God chose to create Brazil, so He created the world’s mightiest river, The Amazon. Then He created the Amazon rain forest (the lungs of the planet), and gave it the world’s greatest biodiversity. Then He created the beautiful harbour of Rio de Janeiro, then the Iguazu Falls. The list of good points went on and on. Eventually He stopped, and said, “ I’ll create Australia next.”

The angels were horrified. God said, “What’s the problem?” The angels conferred, then their spokesperson said. “This new land Brazil is totally out of balance. No matter how long we look at it we can only define good points. It simply has no bad points.”

God just smiled, then said, “Just wait till you see some of the governments Brazil’s going to have…”

Was my ex-wife talking about the beauty of Australia or our systems of government? Hmmm, I wonder.

Tags: america, australia, brazil, garth dutton, god, joke, Writing

What Future For Iraq – A Poem

Here is another piece to stimulate thought.

What Future For Iraq
By Garth Dutton

The famous Czech novelist
Milan Kundera said that
events succeed each other
so quickly these days
people soon forget…

Forgotten now is the Iraq Hostage Crisis
that preceded the first Gulf War.
As soon as the last hostage was released,
forty days & nights
of saturation bombing began.

Forgotten too
is the hotshot American pilot
who ‘blew away’ the leading British tanks
as they swept unopposed through the desert
in an arc towards the Euphrates,
intending to cut off the entire Iraqi army in Kuwait.
Instead of achieving
the greatest tactical victory in military history,
the British Army ‘downed tools’
at even the concept of ‘friendly fire’,
so allowing the entire Republican Guard
to escape with all their tanks.
Saddam Hussein remained in power
till overthrown twelve years later
in the second Gulf War.
A war that is still going on in November 2008.

And do you remember the Iran/Iraq war?
Iraq still stands
between the Mullahs of Tehran
and Mecca, the holiest place in Islam.
The Mullahs regard the Saudi Royal Family
as one of the most corrupt regimes
the world has ever known,
and it is charge of Mecca.
An Iranian student at high school here
once said to me,
“Iran’s Shi’ites have the clergy,
so they should run Mecca.”

In Iraq at the moment,
relations between Shi’ites and Sunnis
are rather like relations were
between Protestant and Catholic
in Northern Ireland
till quite recent times.

Is there no end to the turmoil in Iraq?

Is there no end indeed…

Tags: garth dutton, iraq, poem, Poetry