See me shave my head–support World's Greatest Shave

I'm taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World's Greatest Shave this year.

Do you want to see me shave my head? On Friday 13 March, I'm shaving my hair off.

My target is to raise $500 in 3 weeks – for the Leukaemia Foundation.

If I can get 50 people to donate $10 each, I can make my target! Please get your friends to donate too, and that will help me reach my target! But any amount – however small – can help me reach my target and support the Leukemia Foundation.

You can see my Profile Page on the World's Greatest Shave and donate online by making a secure online donation using your credit card. [note: the link to my profile/sponsorship page has been updated - see the update note below]

I'm doing this to honour my Dad's memory – before he died suddenly last December, Dad used to do the Leukemia Foundation door-knock appeal to help raise money. It was part of his way of dealing with his continuing grief at losing my older brother, Jeremy, to leukemia over 20 years ago (and his way to help out). Jeremy died after battling leukemia for nearly 18 months, aged 16. I was 11.

I've been meaning to do 'the Shave' for years now, but never got around to it. Now, my dad's example is spurring me on. This is also to honour Jeremy's memory.

See this all taken off!

On 13 February, my boss is going to shave my hair at work – I'm going to post a video of it online, so you can watch it here!

According to the Leukemia Foundation:

• Every hour of every day, at least one person in Australia is diagnosed with leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma.
• Every two hours, someone loses their life to blood cancer.

Please help me raise as much as I can for the Leukaemia Foundation. Their vital work provides patients with practical support during their long and tough treatment, as well as funding important research.

Come on, we can help! We can help find a cure, support those living with this disease, and support their families.

I will be providing updates on this blog, via Twitter, and on my Profile Page. You're also welcome to drop me a comment here on a message on my Profile Page at World's Greatest Shave to show your support. Thanks for your support!

PS: Would anyone like to knit/crochet me a beanie for the cold weather?

UPDATE: There's been a technical glitch in the site for my sponsorship page/profile this week, but the very helpful people at World's Greatest Shave have fixed it up by setting me up a new page. I've updated the link abve, so you can find me online an sponsor me and raise money for the Leukaemia Foundation. [updated 2.20pm Thursday 12 March 2009]

UPDATE 2: A big thank you to Lynn who has knitted me a gorgeous beanie/hat to keep me warm after I shave my hair on Friday 13 March 2009! [updated 2.25pm Thursday 12 March 2009]

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Would you try this yourself?

I think the third rule of blogging is that if you haven't had time or headspace to scrounge up a blog post for a week, then post a video. So here it is.

While clearing out my old archived emails, I found this great film clip that a colleague had sent me at work. The file was titled ‘What old people do for fun'. I have a chuckle each time I watch it. Besides the Simon and Garfunkle soundtrack, I especially love the cackling at the end…

Enjoy.



You can also find the .mpg file on my divshare site.

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Wordlessly or otherwise

I wish it were Wednesday, so that this post and photograph could be part of Wordless Wednesday, which I'm hoping to return to. But it's not, and I've just written some words. So there.

I'm quite taken with this photograph I took over the winter of the pigeons that congregate at this house's backyard every evening at around 4.30–5.00 pm. I assume they're being fed then, and they make quite a flurry of activity as they take off en masse, circle the house and surrounding area, and return to pick over whatever is left from their initial feeding frenzy. Sounds a bit like journalists, if you ask me.

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I have succumbed

And hence, I have succumbed to the lol-cats blog post.

It has been one of those weeks.

(Oh, and I've been very, very busy. Promise.)

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On the tram coming home from the city late this evening

There are a lot of tired people on the tram going home late from work. And still working. When do people ever let up?

Staring glassy-eyed into the middle distance, we are each lost to our own exhaustion, refusing to engage each other.

The ghostly back-lit screens beckon us, siren songs to the rocks of connectivity in every way but real. The full moon ignored till we briefly raise our heads to check we don't miss our stops.

After being 'on' all day, how much more can we smile and bob our heads at people who mean nothing to us?

When we can barely manage grunts and grimaces to our loved ones when we finally return home – if they are not already in bed.

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The stuff of stars and galaxies

I'm not sure what to make of this. Sometime today, the Large Hadron Collider will be turned on and particles will be sent hurtling at astonishing speeds to smash into each other, and this will either tell us something about the very stuff of stars and galaxies – and perhaps about the big bang – or blow a 27 km long hole in the Swiss-French border and suck half the Swiss Alps into a black hole and trigger the end of the world as we know it.

Either way, a whole bunch of scientists are getting very excited about it. According to the ABC's European correspondent, Raphael Epstein:

"By injecting concentrated beams of protons into the machine and watching them collide, scientists are striving to reveal more about the greatest event in history - the birth of the universe, the moment when everything we can see and measure, all the matter and electricity that makes up the stars and planets, was the size of a basketball, the scientists say."

Aldo Saavedr, a theoretical physicist from Sydney University who is one of thousands of scientists who helped develop this project, told the ABC:

"In terms of discovery it is [just as significant as a landing on the moon], because it's something we don't see [often,] you only discover one thing in a life time, in the lifetime of the universe."

Others, including a group who tried to use the courts to stop the collider being turned on today, think that it will spell the end of the world, or create black holes that will suck Europe into it, or create a portal allowing beings from another universe to invade ours.

Oh schmozzle. The old 'rip in the time-space continuum' thing.

Then again, you'd think the scientists would have learned their lesson when they let Tom Cruise land on Earth.

What I still can't get over is that it cost $9 billion to build the thing.

The image at the top was taken using the Hubble telescope, and is beautifully called 'Young Stars Sculpt Gas with Powerful Outflows in the Small Magellanic Cloud'. It is free off the Hubble website. The image below that is of the Large Hedron Collider.

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Manga Me

This is Manga Me. It is an image I created the other day using the great site Face Your Manga, where you can create an image of yourself from some template-like faces, features, colours and bits and pieces such as hair, glasses, clothes and eyes. It's a bit like using an Identikit.

I was inspired by a rash of Manga faces and avatars going around the Aussie blog-scene lately, and it's a bit of fun. Sophie Cunningham had a go, and Kirsty at Galaxy had a couple of goes, as it's not as easy as it first seems. Brisbane blogger Matthew Smith uses it for his Twitter profile.

Adelaide's Pavlov's Cat shares her (accidentally) younger and 'mature' manga versions, as well as her previous Simposonized self. A good reminder that this is not a new concept.

I'm using it as my current Twitter avatar.

It's not quite me, but the closest I could get. And, like Manga generally, it is spookily familiar, and yet somewhat idealized, verging on the ridiculous – a bit like the secret imaginary friend I never had.

As Kirsty at Galaxy pointed out to me, these make the perfect avatars for blogging and 'twittering': "It's you, but not so anyone could pick you out of a line-up".

Any other Manga-selves out there?

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Why did the chicken cross the road?

This morning I dragged my sorry ass out of bed at 4.10 am so that I could catch a train at 5.06 in the pitch dark. It was freezing.

It was so early, there were only seven of us on the platform catching the train into the city – only the second service of the day. I was off to join ABC 774 FM's Breakfast celebrations at Federation Square of the impending opening of the Beijing Olympics.

I won the opportunity to enjoy a Yum Cha breakfast as part of the Breakfast Show (with presenter Red Symonds and three dozen or so other listeners and such) by calling the radio station and offering to eat chickens feet (Yum Cha style) live on air during the feast and talk about it. I was pretty excited when they said yes. Having to be there at 5.30 am did put a bit of a dent in it though.

I normally enjoy eating chicken feet – it is quite the delicacy – but I knew that it would get the attention of queasy white-Australians, who still hold many aspects of Asian peoples' food in total horror, and get me a free lunch. Or breakfast.

For all their our pretenses to epicurean cosmopolitanism, Melbournians still prefer many aspects of Asian food, or for that matter many other cuisines, be sanitised for Anglo palletes. And white Australians still make fun of Chinese, (and Vietnamese) food, with not so veiled jokes about dogs, snakes, bulls 'pizzles' in Vietnamese noodle soup, and chicken feet.

And you know what? I milked it and got a free meal. Not unexpectedly, there were no chicken's feet on the menu for yum cha this morning, nor any sliced tripe with honey and ginger, or any sticky rice in lotus leaf parcels (I do draw the line at shark's fin, though). These are the kinds of things that Chinese families, and those assorted others who have had their culinary horizons opened beyond Melbourne's pretentions, usually enjoy about Cantonese style yum cha. Pity. Still, I enjoyed myself a lot, and the food was good. And I got to see, and meet, the people behind the voices I hear on air nearly every morning.

I wonder if 774 will offer witchetty grubs at a bush tucker feast next. Would you believe, I ate mangrove worms just the other day?

[Image (cc) by alasam]

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Luna Park, photography and a travel guide

I've just heard that my photograph of the famous smiling entrance to Luna Park in St Kilda, Melbourne, has been included in the latest edition of Schmap's online travel guide to Melbourne. The photograph is published on my creative commons license on flickr, which is where Schmap found it.

You can find the photo accompanying their entry on Luna Park and St Kilda generally, along with quite a few others.

This is not the first time one of my photos has been published (under my Creative Commons license), though the first time it has been published somewhere so prominent. And this is one of the rare occasions that the publisher has asked my permission to use my photograph, for which I've very grateful. Thanks, Schmap!

You know, the funny thing is, I took this photo nearly three years ago – before I did that photography course earlier this year, or started taking my photography a bit more seriously. And I have been less confident about publishing my photos on flickr or this blog since that course. It has a lot to do with having taken most of the photos for that course on film, but probably also more to do with feeling that I had to take 'good' photographs, and getting all angsty about what 'good' is.

Funny that.

I think I'm going to take more photos, and scan in some of my prints from last semester, and upload them to flickr. And perhaps go back to doing Wordless Wednesdays.

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Ten things I know now that I didn't ten years ago

Something or other jogged my memory tonight of a postcard a friend of mine sent me some 15-odd years ago when I was a Uni student.

It was an HIV/AIDS education postcard asking what was the leading cause of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS infections (in the world), with three (that I can remember) multiple choice answers to select from:

a) unprotected homos-xual s-x (sorry, don't want this blog to get blocked by any nanny-net filters)
b) unprotected hetros-xual s-x
c) intravenous drug-users sharing needles

After a little hesitation, I picked 'b', mainly because I thought it was a trick question designed to challenge my inner-homophobe, but also because I was sure I had learned somewhere that rates of HIV/AIDS infections were skyrocketing throughout all population groups in Asia and Africa, and that AIDS couldn't really be called the 'gay disease' anymore as it was known in the 80s. Remember, this 1992 or 1993 and such things were just filtering through into the awareness of Australians.

Of course, the answer 'b' was correct, but little did I realise the extent of the infection rates amongst the wider hetros-xual population (I don't remember the stats from the back of the postcard, but it was high). If I were asked this question today, I wouldn't hesitate with the same answer, as the devastation that AIDS has wrought throughout Africa has become so prevalent and has so entered our consciousness. If anything, I'm sure today's younger generation may think that AIDS is the 'African diseases', rather than the 'gay disease'.

But (and here is the point of this rather long introduction to the main purpose of this post) the key thing is this little memory, in that strange Proustian way, got me reflecting on the things that I know now that I didn't know 10 years ago, and wondering if I could list 10 of them.

If anything, this is as much a reflection of what I was ignorant of – or naive about – 10 years ago, as what I have learned in the intervening years, so bear with me if my naiveté is slipping. Here is what I came up with (and by no means is this exhaustive. I just wanted to see if I could list 10 things that stand out for me):

Ten things I know now that I didn't know 10 years ago

1. That the woman I was starting to date (10 years ago this month) - rather nonchalantly, but was somewhat smitten with – is the woman I still love and am spending my life with and raising children with.
   
   
2. That the earth's climate is drastically warming because of our greenhouse gas emissions, and this is leading to dangerous climate change and throwing our ecology out of balance.
   
   
3. That I don't want to be an anthropologist specialising in Southeast Asia's emerging working class, or a sociologist researching forms of working class resistance to capitalist control of work in Australia (despite 10 years ago having started a postgraduate research degree in the former and switching to the later).
   
   
4. That having children could be so bloody exhilirating, frustrating, difficult, rewarding and life-changing. Oh, and that your children will yell – loudly and repeatedly – for you from another room the way you did to your parents.
   
   
5. That Pauline Hanson and her brand of racism has become just a blip on the political landscape, and that her xenophobia and racism was so insidiously appropriated and institutionalised by John Howard's (now former) government.
   
   
6. That a geeky, spectacles-wearing, Chinese-speaking, former bureaucrat and diplomat can become Prime Minister of Australia.
   
   
7. That the Greens could become a successful (minor) political party that cares about social justice, rather than remaining a fringe, narrow-interest political lobby group/small, state-based party, and that the Democrats go down the gurgler.
   
   
8. That the internet has become so much more than a bunch of really boring, static web pages whose information is limited, out of date or somewhat suspect, or a collection of email-list discussion groups, or hand-crafted 'Home' pages with 'under construction' animated GIFs.
   
   
9. That I can be a writer and enjoy it, and break down some of my big hang-ups about writing and procrastination – albeit just. (Though I'm not getting paid for writing my own stuff, mind you.)
   
   
10. That water, rather than oil, could be shaping up as the key resource over which so much struggle, death and destruction could emerge – if we don't do something about how our industrialised and industrialising economies are destabilising the earth's climate and undermining our water security.
    

As I reflect further on this, I realise I can come up with many more than 10, and then I would struggle to pick my top ten (though some are clearly and obviously there). So I'm stopping while the going is good. Perhaps there'll be a part two. For a while, I also toyed with the idea of listing 10 things that I don't know now that I knew 10 years ago, but that started to do my head in so I gave up.

I am curious, what do you know now that you didn't know ten years ago? Drop me a comment, or write your own blog post (if you do the later, drop me a comment, please, to share a link to the post).

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This morning our car got towed – on purpose!

It is not everyday that you actually get your car towed on purpose! No, it didn't break down – our ever reliable Mazda 121 has served us very well this past few years – nor did we park it illegally, nor did we have an accident. For some reason, the fuel pump is gone.

The dodgy fuel ticker didn't didn't get picked up in the last tune up. It refused to start over the weekend, and on Sunday morning the RACV mechanic deduced that it was the fuel pump. He thumped the fuel tank and got it going, but when I tried to start the car later that afternoon, I had no luck – tank thumping and all.

This morning, we had to get the RACV to tow it to our mechanic down the road. I had to document the event, of course.

It struck me as a very delicate operation, as the tow-truck driver carefully manouvered the car into position, and carefully adjusted the steering as the car was winched onto the truck's tilted tray.


I was left in wonder at the feat of engineering involved as the hydraulics were left to effortlessly shift the tray of the truck back onto its horizontal position.

For the record, this is the first time our car has ever been towed. Hopefully, the mechanics will have it up and running in time to ferry the kids around later this week. Otherwise…

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Typeface bingo

I'm not a 'designer' by a long shot, but I do a lot of desktop publishing for my living and have tried to keep up my knowledge of typefaces as a matter of course. Inspired by jebni's twitter update, I decided to take up the typeface challenge at Rather Difficult Font Game.

The idea is to identify 34 randomly selected typefaces. It is difficult. Thankfully it is multiple choice, so a lot of intelligent guesswork was involved. My score (25) was within the average score of 24 out of 34, out of 4418 attempts worldwide to date.

The lesson of this little diversion is that I need to expand my use and familiarity with typefaces a little further, as it is so easy to get bogged down in using the same old fonts over and over again.

Have a go at the game, and tell me what you score.

[Image of artwork at Federation Square is mine.]

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"It's not just about whether to take an umbrella"

Sometime this week was World Meteorology Day. I say 'sometime' because the ABC News website's diary had it for today's calendar, while the World Meteorological Organizations' website has it listed for the 23rd. They celebrated it on the 25th. Go figure.

Either way, it got me thinking about the intricacies of forecasting the weather and appreciating the difficulties our homegrown weather bureau faces in forecasting Melbourne's weather, let alone Australia's. So spare a thought for those poor boffins who have to disembowel and read the entrails of some small dog, or other animal of choice, and observe the directions the Collins Street pigeons fly at sparrow's fart. And then get yelled at by us Melbournites when they don't warn us to take the umbrella out with us before the skies open up. This is for them:

[With apologies to Goscinny and Uderzo. The image is from their 1972 Asterix and the Soothsayer, and it immediately came to mind as I thought of the boffins.]

The Bureau of Meteorology celebrates its 100th birthday this year. They are using the opportunity to highlight the importance of weather forecasting to Australian community. The Bureau's Victorian director, Mark Williams, says "It's not just about whether to take an umbrella, but this is about livelihoods and about lives."

As we face the escalating and increasingly dangerous changes of global warming, the capacity to study and forecast the weather is becoming increasingly important.

Especially when we get caught in the rain without an umbrella.

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A feeling for sun, sand and a book

Sophie Cunningham's Sarsaparilla post on how the location and moment of reading a book can indelibly affect one's experience and memory of the book is fascinating. Her recollection of reading Johnathon Fanzen's The Connections in Sri Lanka is well worth reading, if not only for the great photo she took leaning out a train window!

I was inspired to share my fond memories of reading Peter Høeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow on the beach one hot summer holiday - 10 years ago! I so enjoyed that trip down memory lane that I'm sharing here what I wrote in the comments to her post.

The writing and the plot left a big impression on me, but the main memory is of the odd juxtaposition of reading a story set in the dead of Denmark’s winter, while enjoying the heat and sunshine of a Queensland beach holiday.

I had spent six months working as a temp in the public service in suburban Melbourne (and hardly the headspace to read anything decent). I was not long out of university and this had been my first full-time, 5-days-a-week job and I was desperately in need of a holiday. At the end of my contract I went up to Queensland to visit family.

I picked up a copy of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow at my sister’s house, and took it on my well deserved backpacker’s holiday to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast. So there I was caught up in what I thought was a ‘whodunit’ (it ended up with more layers than a trifle) set amongst the cold and dreariness of Denmark and the icy expanses of Greenland.

Meanwhile I was seeing sunspots from too much sun while lying on the beach reading, which made it hard to focus on the page at times, and feeling really hot while reading of ice and snow. That is my abiding memory of the time. I read about baking bananas with sugar and ground cinnamon to ward off the cold, and tracking footprints in snow, while feeling hot sand on my skin and cooling off in the surf, taking walks through lush, sub-tropical forest, and encountering rosellas, bush turkeys and other tropical birds, and lizards.

That experience of where and when I read the book has stayed with me as much as, if not more than, the book’s settings, characters and details, (I even experimented with baking bananas with cinnamon and sugar with mixed success that following autumn). I can’t think of any other ‘when and where’ of reading - in my experience - that can match it for me.

The photo above is one I took of a massive grass-tree at Noosa Hill during my last family holiday up in Queensland. I didn't have a camera with me on that Noosa holiday 10 years ago so I've no photos from then. No sun or sand, but you get the picture.

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Spirits of the times

My sons and I enjoyed the Chinese Lion Dance performance at the local cafe in my neighborhood shopping strip. A New Year's tradition practiced by Chinese communities throughout Asia, the lion dance is performed by dance troupes at businesses, homes and public places to bring good luck, prosperity and good fortune for the Lunar New Year, very important attributes for the Chinese.

The dancing was organised by the local council and traders to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, which is actually next weekend. It's one of those cultural community activities the council promotes to shore up their, and the neighbourhood's, multicultural credentials, but it also makes a lot of people happy – my boys and I included. (Sorry about the photos, they were the best I could do on my camera phone.)

The big loud drum and cymbals accompanying the dancing also help ward off evil spirits, as do the firecrackers, another ubiquitous feature of Lunar New Year celebrations by most Chinese communities in Asia, especially in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, at least before they were banned.

There were no firecrackers in this Australian celebration, but the lion – or rather its performers - did 'eat' the lettuce hung up by the cafe owners. It required the young man performing the tail to hoist up the young man performing the head so he could reach the lettuce (all the while maintaining the illusion that it was the lion eating the lettuce with its mouth) and scatter the shredded leaves around the cafe to spread good fortune.

Eating the lettuce also involved 'consuming' the envelope of money tied with it, payment for the dance troupe. There were some other pretty spectacular acrobatics on the part of the performers, including the young man performing the lion's head standing – at full height – on the tail performer's shoulders, and the young percussionists were giving a rousing performance, so they certainly deserved it!

Once finished at the cafe, the troupe slowly made its way up the street, performing at whichever business had arranged for them to do so - signaled by the lettuce suspended in the doorway, along with the envelope with payment of course. Interestingly, it was not only businesses owned and run by Chinese or Vietnamese traders who had hung out the lettuce to invite the lion, and so good fortune, and this is a pretty mixed multicultural neighbourhood.

I've seen lion dance performances in Melbourne's Chinatown in previous years' New Year festivities, so the fact the lion dance was performed in Australia was not itself noteworthy. I've also seen some spectacular lion dances with some incredible acrobatics and daring while growing up in Southeast Asia, so despite the energy and enthusiasm, this performance wasn't remarkable. Rather, it was the fact that the performers were a troupe of predominantly young Aussie men and women, and kids, from Central Victoria – Bendigo, in fact. And they were accompanied by their parents and other adults, so it was quite a community and family affair.

You don't really expect a bunch of white kids to be performing the Chinese lion dance to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck for the Chinese New Year, but somehow this seemed perfectly reasonable to me. As did the fact that the troupe was from Bendigo, which was a major centre of Chinese settlement in nineteenth century Victoria, especially during the gold-rush era. In fact, the Chinese museum in Bendigo housed one of the largest dragons – of the dragon dance variety – in the world.

It is quite encouraging to think that regional Australia can be in touch with its Asian heritage beyond the compulsory country Chinese restaurant and Chow Mein – and bring it to share in Melbourne, which is so usually so proud of its strong multicultural make-up! Hopefully this is a growing trend, and we'll see Australia waking up more to the Asian aspects of our heritage.

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Happy Holidays!

A belated Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate this holiday. As you can imagine, I've been a bit busy with the family celebrations, and enjoying being on leave on these warm summer days.

Then again, if I eat another mince tart, piece of fruit cake (which I made, BTW) or morsel of roast fowl, I'll explode.

Hopefully, regular blogging will resume – when I get sick of lying about reading the Best Australian Essays 2007, Best Australian Stories 2007 (Christmas presents from my partner Shelley) and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (lent to us by Shelley's mother). Or when my family get sick of me lying about reading (whichever comes first).

I've finished the first of Pullman's trilogy, from which the film The Golden Compass was adapted. I'm looking forward to seeing how they've treated for the big screen. If it gets any hotter, a darkened, air-conditioned cinema will offer inviting relief.

I hope you're enjoying this holiday season.

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Mangoes – or where have all the Bowens gone?

One of the joys that the warmer weather brings is mangoes. I've just eaten one of the nicest mangoes I've had in ages. It was large, fat, and firm-fleshed but juicy. It wasn't perfect - just a little over-ripe (my fault: I bought it last week and forgot about it in the fridge). But that wasn't so bad because the flavour more than compensated. And the smell – yum. Sorry, I've no photo of it to show you as I only thought to blog about when I was washing my hands after eating it.

So often I've found Australian mangoes at the markets that just don't have any smell – you think that's because it's under-ripe, so you take it home and wait and wait, but it doesn't ripen. Or rather, it goes soft – like it's bruised – and those black spots become black blotches – before its flavour really develops. However, besides a small black spot around the stem base, and that ever-so-slight fermented tinge of over-ripeness in one part, this mango didn't have any of those problems.

But the nicest thing about this mango is that it reminded me of Bowen mangoes – that quintessential Australian mango. When I first came to this country – over 15 years ago – mangoes and Bowens were one and the same. Now, you just can't seem to find that variety. Australian grocers, markets and supermarkets are flooded with cheap hybrids whose flavour and aroma can't hold a candle up to the Bowen.

Perhaps its complete bollocks. Maybe Bowens aren't as nice as I remember, and I'm just being sentimental about them because I can't find in the shops the variety of mango I identify most with summer and the arrival of tropical fruit in the south of Australia.

The things is, I didn't appreciate Bowen mangoes when I first came here. I had come from a country where mangoes were ubiquitous – well, almost as ubiquitous as they are in Brisbane or other parts of Southeast Queensland – and we had some of the best mangoes around. I believed that Australian mangoes couldn't touch those from home, so I turned my nose up at them. And baulked at the prices asked for them.

The same went for a whole range of tropical fruit – especially papaya, or pawpaw, as it was known here. To me, the papayas grown here smelled like vomit. In fact, these days many still do, and the only Australian-grown papayas I really enjoy are the organic red ones. But that's another story.

The mango I ate tonight also reminded me of what changed my mind about Australian grown mangoes – the lovely generosity of the president of the Student Association at Deakin University, in Geelong. That is where I spent my first year in Australia – studying for a Social Science degree that I went on to complete elsewhere – and I had a miserable, homesick, and terribly disorganised time for a lot of it.

Anyway, sometime late in the academic year, the Student Association president, a friendly, no-nonsense woman, who was a mature age student, and who had taken a number of us adrift overseas students under her wing, shared with me a mango from a box of beautiful Bowens that her brother had sent her from Darwin, where he lived. Well, at least I think they were Bowens.

Well, that one mango that she shared with me was a lovely, red-blushing, fat and juicy fruit. It had a rich aroma and flavour, and it blew me away to realise that Australia could grow tropical fruit so well.

It was also very generous of her to share that fruit with me – she obviously really enjoyed them, and she had her three young daughters at home to share the fruit with too, but she must have guessed that it would cheer homesick me up. This represented that lovely Australian generosity and hospitality that was beginning to thaw out my defensiveness and open me to this country. That, and the realisation that Australia could grow good mangoes. After that, whenever I visited relatives in Queensland, I would eagerly seek out Bowen mangoes.

The mango I ate tonight reminded me of that occasion, and generosity, and how I came to appreciate Australian mangoes and their heralding of summer.

It is just such a pity that Bowens are so had to come by in Melbourne nowadays.

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Seemed like a good idea at the time

Earlier this month, my family and I went to the Werribee Sewage Treatment plant's open day – to find out how the treat sewage, but mainly to catch a glimpse of the water birds that flock to the 'wetlands' and ponds there. I'm sure you may think it odd, but we found it fascinating. Would you believe that the place, especially Lake Borrie, is a significant habitat for something like 270 species of birds? Unfortunately, most of the birds had migrated north for the winter!

While on the coach tour, our guide pointed out the odd telegraph pole-like structures pictured above. No, it wasn't some art installation, though I wouldn't be surprised if it were. Researchers had found that the cormorants that flock to the area were in strife because the gum trees that were their usual perches were dying and collapsing. So they erected these new perches for the cormorants (being a threated species and all) – who flatly refused to use them.

I was struck by how this was a beautiful example of how what seemed like a good idea at the time, and plainly of good intentions, turned out to be absolutely useless – or just not used.

Do you know of any other examples of something well-meant and seeming like a good idea but didn't work as planned?

[Image is one of mine; apologies for its blurriness - it was taken from a moving bus. CC mark lawrence]

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