Altogether I’ve spent about 3 years in Europe since 2002, but I’ve never been in one place to watch the whole transition from deep winter to spring before.

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks here in Berlin. From the first day of April the sun started shining and people started smiling. Then the most amazing thing happened, the horse chestnut tree (Rosskastaniene) in the courtyard (hof) began to change from branches with buds to a tree with leaves. Sure, trees get leaves every spring, but from my regular typing place by the kitchen window I finally could pay attention to the process.

Let me tell you something fascinating, trees burst into leaf from the bottom up.  Over three days I could effectively see the sap flowing up the trunk and along the branches.  From hour to hour different leaves had opened and I kinda forgot to take photos of the process because I kept on saying to my flatmate “Can you see that? It’s like a switch has been turned on or something!”

It was pretty exciting.

Here’s a photo from today, two weeks after the leaves unfurled:

The season actually appeared to burst from tree branch, bulb, seed and sun. I guess that’s why it’s called spring?

I needed to live in Europe before I understood that in my part of Australia, the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are Euro-centric ideas laid on top of a vastly different climate.  Even though it would make more sense to acknowledge traditional indigenous seasons, we persist in describing Australian weather with concepts that don’t adequately describe the actual seasonal patterns. I feel that one of the reasons discussions about climate change fail to influence people, is because a large part of the developed (and emitting) world’s population is semantically isolated from what is normal for their region.

Because of the ways in which language and culture are transmitted, the experience of being an Austrlian in Europe (and more specifically Britain) is that of normality: birds whistle familiar sounding melodies, trees are the shape of picture book trees and some houses are actually shaped like childrens’ generic house drawings. It may be ‘normal’ here, but however lovely Berlin in Spring may be, thinking about the contrasts makes me miss and desire the strange shapes, sounds and smells of South Australia, the experiences that I grew up in.

I think the black and white local magpies (Eltern) with their kleptomanic tendencies and dark blue flash of wing are quite beautiful, but there’s something about the sound of Australian magpies which makes up for their more violent tendency to swoop and attack while nesting [mp3].

by Dave – aka Emptybelly

The thing I most heartwrenchingly miss has always been the rainbow lorikeet, its swooping flash of colour as it flies through my favourite park and the chatter a flock of them make around dusk [the latter third of this mp3]. When I lived in Finland and made my garden wall, I painted a lorikeet to live in the plants.  If I could be reborn as an animal I’d be a lorikeet.

I had intended this to be more of a post about how marvellous the weather has been, rather than a meditation on climate, language, postcolonialism and the strange experience of being a European (Australian) “other” in Europe. Inevitably though, the feelings associated with new locations, travel and identity lead to a specific feeling of missing what is first known and familiar.

Since I’ve returned to Adelaide I’ve had opportunity to host a few guests as part of CouchSurfing, the program that introduced me to Sid, Ninnu, Ronja and a whole bunch of other lovely people. Regularly, conversation with my international visitors comes down to eating: favourite foods, traditional foods from their homelands and the difficulty of finding good bread while on the road. Just as it was when I was travelling overseas, I’m faced with the difficulty of defining what typical Australian food is.

There are the usual “Aussie Tucker” suspects of Vegemite, meat pies, pavlova, lamingtons, spag bog and Anzac biscuits. But in comparison to people who’ve come from most other countries (Canada and USA are probably the other exceptions) we can’t really identify distinct food cultures and rely instead on a few recipes and a salty, yeasty brand name. Our national identity is defined by events taking place during a little over two centuries of (primarily European) migration, and doesn’t really reflect a cohesive culture.

So I’ve thought and I’ve thought about this concept of food and national identity. Historically the French, the Italians, the Finns, the Spanish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians were not nations of people, they were many smaller regional and cultural groups who just happened to live within more recent borders. Migration, globalisation, the media, supermarkets, freezers and microwaves didn’t exist for thousands of years and so regional food cultures evolved out of eating seasonal, local foods.

Where people seem to have gone wrong in identifying Australian food culture is by looking for one food culture to rule them all rather than letting many smaller, localised food cultures emerge. Even the true food cultures of the Indigenous Australians seem to have been reduced down to a “bush tucker” of witchetty grubs and wattle seed, quandong, honey ants, lemon myrtle and kangaroo, ignoring the full spectrum of groups living on foods specific to the coast, rainforest, arid grasslands and bush.

Other people have probably come around to this idea before, but I’ve only just articulated this thought: As Australians we should be looking to our immediate bioregions as a way of identifying the seasonal foods which will then shape a plurality of culinary cultures. We should be taking pride in our local brands, environment and farmers, recognising the layers of food cultures, both indigenous and immigrated and working out what grows best where and when. Once we know what plants and animals are best suited to our local regions we can learn how to cook and eat the foods that make up our food culture.

Currently I can identify only one type of edible wild mushroom and teeny tiny native cherries, but part of my longer term garden plan is to plant a couple of areas with indigenous plants including those suitable for food. In the meantime I’ll be feeding my summer guests Vietnamese cold rolls with seasonal vegetables (some coming from my garden), suggesting they drink Coopers’ beers, Bickford cordials and local wines to be be followed by Haighs’ chocolates and local fruits.

Maybe in two hundred years my descendants will be able to say with more certainty what dishes make up the contemporary Tandanya bioregional food culture, but right now I’ll just have to play it by taste.

Over the last couple of years of drought, larger birds, more used to the Adelaide Hills and the outlying country areas have been moving into the leafy green/brown suburbs in search of water and food. Most importantly for this story, a beautiful kookaburra has moved into the trees surrounding my house.

A couple of times a day I’ll hear it laughing and lately it’s taken to perching on the mandarin tree or the main electricity wire coming from the street. I’ve finally had a chance to observe the brown and white patterns on its chest, the size of its massive beak, the helmet like crest on its head and the slight turquoise markings on the wing which mark it as a member of the kingfisher family of birds.

Today when I went outside for a break from style sheets and cms wrangling, I saw the most amazing thing. The kookaburra was surveying the yard from the wire and suddenly its entire stance changed, a ripple seemed to pass through its chest as it tensed up. A few more seconds passed and I followed the kookaburra’s line of sight down to the grass near the path – I couldn’t see anything…

And then, not as fast as I thought it would, the kookaburra gracefully drifted down to the path and picked something up in its beak. As the kookaburra whipped it’s head around, I saw the shine of a skink’s belly and heard the actual crunch of the little lizard being consumed.

“Wow”, I realised, “my kookaburra just caught its own food, and I got to watch!”

I’ve got an admission to make, one which doesn’t sit very well with my treehugging, car-free, bike and public transport loving persona:

I really like fast shiny new cars and cool old gas guzzling cars from the 50s, super polluting aeroplanes and even though the thought of ever riding one scares me half to death, big noisy motorbikes.

Apart from the obvious financial considerations to do with owning a car (registration, insurance, maintenance, parking, fuel etc) and the ethical and environmental issues involved with their domination of our society, the big reason why i don’t own a car is because I would drive far too much.

And I love flying, whether it be in light aircraft or a jumbo – there’s this fantastic unbelievable moment as you take off which makes my heart leap too – this big lump of metal is flying. Even just thinking about planes, such as the F-111s and F-18s that were being discussed on 4 Corners tonight, is pretty cool. My dad still owns his old Piper Comanche, so theoretically I could learn how to fly the plane we used to squeeze into for family holidays.

I am in awe of the engineering and power and design of vehicles, and that is why I try to avoid using them, as it prevents me from ever taking them for granted. When I do borrow a car for a day or two, or take an international flight and stay away from Australia for half a year at a time, I make sure that I am use those resources with as much respect as possible. But that isn’t to say that I won’t be enjoying my experience!

“Gunns will pay a base price of nearly $16 a tonne for native timber and $32 for plantation timber with additional costs for road access, transport and harvesting.”
via abc.net.au

Possibly the most fantastic and unexpected thing that happened at Aliese’s yesterday was that I discovered that her backyard is full of stinging nettles. Most people would balk at the idea of picking nettles for fun, but what I saw in front of me was not a painful plant, but wild produce ready to be gathered.

Earlier this winter I’d hopefully planted seeds primarily so I could use the nettles as a nitrogen rich green compost, but they didn’t grow very well, so I’ve been looking out for some wild plants to harvest from. I’d seen some nettle-like plants by the side of the road earlier in the week, but my tentative stroke of the leaves didn’t result in any stings – so yesterday I took a braver approach and put my hand flat onto the leaves which did confirm my suspicion that the plants were indeed nettles.

It’s not that painful. I figure that nettle stings are the discomfort equivalent of eating warhead lollies – some people are braver or have a higher tolerance than others – luckily for me the sting is bearable.

So I borrowed some rubber gloves (I’m not yet brave enough to enter a nettle patch with bare hands) and scissors and picked a bag full of prickly leaves, ready to be dried and made into tea.

What did seem really weird that it was just over a year ago, in Finland’s early summer that I helped Ninnu prepare nettles for tea. But temperature wise I figure that there’s not much difference between July in Australia and early June in Finland.

Now of course I’ve remembered that nettles can be added to soup (fresh and dried), risottos, pancakes and used as a hair tonic as well as being a tea for people and gardens.

Aliese, it looks like I’ll have to come over this weekend and do some “weeding” for you!

I suppose that by obsessively weeding I am procrastinating something. It’s true that I haven’t lodged my tax return from last financial year, and there are many other things I should be doing. Though weeding, and getting the garden growing productively are things that need to be done too, but probably not just right now.

There’s something so meditative about weeding. You get to focus on a task over and over again, searching for things which shouldn’t be where they are, isolating their stems from the good plants, pulling them out of the ground, shaking the dirt off and adding them to a rapidly increasing pile. It’s physically demanding work, so you get exercise and there’s that pleasant feeling of destroying something for a purpose.

Soursobs and buffalo grass. They were my obsession last week. But today as I weeded near the broadbeans, I decided it was time to tackle the aloe ciliaris which had taken over a nearby tree.

Weeding is chilling me out and it’s giving me a new found respect for the plants I am trying to destroy.

This climbing aloe is such a very clever plant. It primarily spreads by sending out runners. But it doesn’t just send out runners, it also propagates through stem cuttings, and one of the features of the aloe ciliaris is its segmented stem. So, as I pulled at stems that had woven their way through the tree , the segments and leaves fell apart, allowing plenty of opportunities for new plants to grow. The very act of removing the plant could give it more opportunity to spread!

Oh, and ivy. It spreads in a similar way, the leaves will come off as you pull it from the ground or walls, and you can’t add it to a compost pile straight away it as it will magically grow from your compost!

It turns out that the solution is to place such tough plants into black plastic bags, and to leave them in a sunny area area until the heat kills the plants and they properly begin rot, and then months later, add them to a compost pile.

So, more procrastination – it’s off to the store to buy weed killing plastic bags and some food for the ANZAC Day breakfast.

I’m no economist. I’m not a business person either. I’m just a modern day hippie who consumes and thinks about how she consumes. So, here are some thoughts about current responses to managing climate change:

Thought One:
Moving to more efficient and less polluting energy sources, adding in carbon dioxide emission taxes / trading etc will increase energy costs. I understand that increased energy costs will affect prices of everything leading to inflation and unemployment. But quite frankly, wouldn’t slightly increased energy costs help reduce energy use?

I don’t want to be harsh, but in general, people don’t seem to recognise how climate change will affect their future, they primarily care about how they will finance their futures. If mindlessly using electricity and gasoline has no immediate financial burden, consumers are unlikely to change their behaviour. Whereas, if energy were more expensive, wouldn’t consumers (both industrial and individual) be forced to use it more efficiently?

Thought Two:
Why on earth is the government not leading the momentum on increased standards for efficiency and reuse in design and manufacturing? For example, if there are requirements that by 2015 all white goods (fridges, washing machines, airconditioners etc) sold in Australia have to meet stringent efficiency requirements, won’t manufacturers produce such products leaving the consumers with no alternative but to just buy the device they prefer? And shouldn’t such standards require demonstration of closed loop recycling at the end of the product life time?

Thought Three:
Is it possible to blanket broadcast An Inconvenient Truth on all networks at once? Either people will watch the best demonstration of how f*&^%d we all are or they’ll switch off their TVs and spend time doing something else.