Vale Jenny and John Barnett

Had just starting reading The Age this morning in my favourite cafe in North Fitzroy after dropping my son at school when I got a very sad call. Can't be confirmed due to the intensity of the fire, but it seems certain that two key members of the Mammal Survey Group of Victoria, Jenny and John Barnett, have died trying to escape Steels Creek. Not long after we came back to Victoria, my family and I went camping with them at Cape Liptrap and elsewhere. My daughter, then about 10, has very sharp eyes and a strong animal instinct. She found an owl pellet - a 'cough up' little ball of skin and fur. The Barnetts, making we new members feel at home, were immensely kind and knowledgeable. They gave years of volunteering and career work for the better understanding and protection of both wild and domestic animals. So many people have been touched, many disfigured, devastated by this hell of wildfires. So many animals and birds and plants lost too. We know of no worse peacetime disaster here. It's a huge wakeup call on climate change. In time, some healing will take place. New growth will, we hope, return. Nothing could make this catastrophe worthwhile. We are clutching at embers. But let's hope our sluggish leaders finally start to get the urgency of our world's need for protection from ourselves, and especially from the industries who have callously exploited our naive lack of safeguard regulations against pollution, and the governments who have ignorantly backed them at our great peril. Ignorance is razed. The climate change wolf is over the threshold. The meeting for a new lock may need to be brought forward.

Ball of confusion

They think 200+ dead in the rampant Victorian bushfires so far. This so eclipses anything in the Euro records of Oz. I am a member of the Mammal Survey Group of Vic and one member is beside himself due to not only losing his house but nearly also nearly his life - he was saved by a road block - but what's really freaking him out is a suspected extinction event of all local wildlife('It looks like an atomic bomb's gone off'). He's pleading for help to rescue animals, if anything can be found, round the Hume Plateau forest system, Mt Disappointment state forest and Wallaby Creek water catchment area and further east. But authorities warn of crime scenes, road blocks, unidentified remains and electrical wires blowing, bushfires that might reappear as walls of flame out of nowhere, flames walking with ten league boots. Embers, trees can fall from the sky at any time. I'm calling him back Friday, as arranged. But by then ... ?

Melbourne fries - 46.4 degrees C = 115.52 F

It's a new all-time temperature record today in Melbourne after the hottest January week last week with three days over 43. Andrew Bolt (Herald Sun climate change denier), check your brain. A day over 100 F used to be a one out of the box when I was a kid, but climate change is bearing down on us like the riders of the Apocalypse, beating all predictions with its speed. Many garden plants are toast. Instead of showers,we favour baths,with the kept water doled out to the garden. We dunk the dogs in this to keep them sane. Four major bushfires are out of control around the state with wild northerly winds ripping loose dead leaves and embers. Blogger's not letting me upload images again - seems to be a regular feature these days - so sit tight and I'll post some when I can.

xJen

Bon baby Bon

Walls of Melbourne

here ....

spill

did I tell you when the night runs over your body
your body and the night are inseparable
did I tell you
the night-flowering cactus opened finally
a single bud erupting high
above the bush

only when the moon is very full
only when the moon is very full

did I tell you that I’m thinking about the way
the top of your thigh at the back
plays violet music
as slowly as a leatherback hatchling emerges

did I tell you
did I tell you

did I tell you when your eyes come to me I am happy
we fall into each other our hands tangled in each other
our mouths and the joy is immediate and rigorous
like the slow triangulations of the moon flowering cactus
we rope ladder to the moon
making love together
together you say
this is what’s happening now

and this moon-flowering cactus
Queen of the Night
is a Cuban escapee
and only when the moon is very full
a violent bud enters the thrilling and
sudden spill of dark-shot light
the cradle spills
above the trees
a single bud erupts so high
in the midnight blueblack
only when the moon is very full
and it makes me long for you

and did I tell you that the scent
of this wham white gold fireworks burst outdoes even
waterlilies and the coming scent of rain
and this is what’s happening now
and the moon is very full

Roller Derby swings

Slay Belles Roller Derby queens at work

Tango8: Love and Food

OK here comes the media release ... promotion is just another thing I like to do for worthwhile and creative projects ... like I did for Artful Dodgers Studios recently ... AND THIS IS ONE!

A fresh new Australian comic anthology to savour
To be launched by Melbourne food legend Dur-e Dara at
Mr Wilkinson, 295 Lygon Street, East Brunswick
Wednesday December 17 at 7pm
SPECIAL LAUNCH PRICE $20

In sumptuous black and white, bumper comic book Tango8: Love and Food celebrates two of our greatest obsessions in sizzling style. The eighth issue of the giant Australian romance comics anthology Tango follows on where the provocative Tango7: Love and Sedition left off. This banquet of contemporary stories includes new work from talented graphic novelists Nicki Greenberg (The Great Gatsby, Allen & Unwin), Bruce Mutard (The Sacrifice, also Allen & Unwin) and Mandy Ord (Rooftops, published by Finlay Lloyd), whose great story on food and fatherly love will ring true for many.
Works from two brilliant cartoonists from The Age, Andrew Weldon and Oslo Davis, are among the 70 very different offerings. These vary from 1 to 18 pages in length, exploring the theme of 'love and food' in hilarious, romantic, creepy, nostalgic and heartfelt ways. Tango8: Love and Food’s 70 contributors mostly hail from Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney; four live in New Zealand.
The ongoing Tango project presents work by established and emerging comic book makers in annual collections from Melbourne-based Cardigan Comics. These are edited and published by Bernard Caleo, a fine comic writer and artist himself. Caleo’s collaboration with Angela Savage (For Natasha) is a highlight of Tango8: Love and Food, comparing piquant memories of red icy poles at the Brunswick Baths with the swooning joy of breast feeding. (Savage won the Victorian Premier’s Best Unpublished Manuscript by Emerging Author award in 2004 for her book Thai Died, published by Text Publishing in 2006 as Behind the Night Bazaar)
Tango8: Love and Food is a rollercoaster ride through the wealth of comic book talent in Australasia. At 242 pages of affordable comic book goodness it’s a great gift for foodies, comic lovers and those hard-to-buy-for teens, twenties and thirty-somethings - as well as the baby boomers who learned to read from Marvel and DC comics and achieved puberty poring over Robert Crumb and Zap!
Cardigan Comics has been kindly supported by Arts Victoria in the publication of Tango8: Love and Food. The trade paperback sized collection is available at book shops, comic book sellers and at http://www.cardigancomics.com/
For further information and interviews, contact: Publicist Jen Jewel Brown
Ph 0408 898 338 jenjewelbrown@fastmail.fm
Publisher Bernard Caleo Ph (03) 9497 8098 bernard@cardigancomics.com

Tango8: Love and Food

Aurora Australis

Barack Obama: President

Hail to the chief

A bran new dae ...


I cried with joy today. Thank you American voters. Now the world has a chance to live. I think today means that much. Quite apart from the searing journey of a nation forged in blackbirding, civil war and a black vote won 40 years back - pretty similar to in Australia when we decided our original inhabitants, around 60,000 years of environmentally sound prior habitation notwithstanding, were actually citizens who could be counted and vote. Just for a start. And there's a long, long road we'll travel, but ...

This is a new world.

From Times Online
November 5, 2008
Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott
The West Indies poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, writes exclusively for The Times to mark the election of Barack Obama as President
Derek Walcott Nobel prize winning West Indian poet

Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He divides his time between New York and the Caribbean


Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is

a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's

receding rim —

a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.