Tribe

I look at this very recent photo and I want to scream. I can't believe this is happening. This is 5000 year old peat in a designated biodiversity hotspot wilderness and our so-called 'authorities' are burning it DELIBERATELY, REPEATEDLY and SYSTEMATICALLY.

This issue is threatening to subsume my life. If I'm not at meetings alongside PhD scientists, ex-senate members, statisticians, environmental scientists, strategists and generally concerned members of the public - I'm at the computer creating logos and setting up websites for the group that is fighting this good fight. I'm out of my depth. I'm not a scientist but I am a valued member of the team because I have the communication, digital and design skills to take the campaign to a wider audience. 

I avoid groups, committees and meetings but in amongst these people - with whom there have already been 'artistic' differences - I feel as though I have found my tribe. 

Photo: From Prescribed Burns? Facebook page

Aussie Birds

 Some lovely pics of Aussie birds - just because they are beautiful and unique. This is a Pink Robin and is native to south eastern Australia. Pretty damn cute.

These are Red-tailed Cockatoos. Three just like these have been making a racket and a mess snacking on eucalyptus at our place recently.

Aboriginal man Ymntji Regan from the Prescribed Burns? Facebook group I belong to said this about them:

'Partners for Life ! a fragile existence. The female totally dependent on the male. Whilst nesting he brings her and the newly hatched food back to Hollow that she uses every year. She never leaves the nest. If there is a fire he will not return to the nest, mostly because of the Danger Element. Sadly she will die with the young if not by the fire but starvation. If he dies and she lives - she will never breed again with another male.

Our Navigators and guides off The Corridors - our connection to the Songlines'.

Finishing off with some more fluffy cuties. We see these little guys, or their close relatives, on our bush block every day when they swoop in to grab a feed and disappear back into the dense scrub.

Photo credits:

Pink Robin - Deepak Karra

Red-tailed Cockatoos - photographer or illustrator unknown. Supplied by Ymntji Regan from Prescribed Burns?

Splendid Fairy Wrens - Raelene Smith, RJS Photographs

Learning Curve

As people grappled with the restrictions and realities of COVID some unusual partnerships were born and many inspired projects began. Right at the start of the lockdown I answered a callout on the local online Facebook bulletin board for an illustrator to collaborate on a kid's book. The author was unpublished and so was I, so I figured we could join forces and get published together. This meant the gig was unpaid, but it was agreed I would receive half of the profits, which was very generous in principle. I was going to get a contract drawn up to ensure that part of the deal was locked in but we never got that far.

As you might be able to see from the following images, I can spend hours and hours creating individual elements and working out how best to illustrate just one scene, then spend more time rearranging elements on a page to get the best composition. The retro plane took me ages - I went down a few blind alleys before I got close to what the author wanted.

I 'drew' heavily on my own childhood - the boy looks like an animated version of my red-headed brother as a kid, and the house is a state owned fibro-asbestos dwelling typical of the time. The Hills Hoist clothesline is iconic Aussie backyard paraphernalia. I seem to remember the author wasn't sure about the little girl swinging from it, but as he was Scottish, he wouldn't have known that this was a common activity in the 60s which of course, I participated in (and got in trouble for). The back yard is also typical - generous blocks of land, with a couple of trees if you were lucky, and an expanse of lawn on which cricket and footie (Aussie rules football) were played.

Each element can be a lot of fun to design and create. Me renaming the 'Spludge gun' the 'Spludge-atron' is the kind of fun serendipitous thing that can happen during a collaboration. 

Characters can be tricky because they have to represent what the author sees when he writes about them. The brief for both characters was pretty specific but there was room for me to have some input which is really how it should work if you want the best result. I can appreciate it must be difficult for an author to 'hand over' their characters to the illustrator - they are probably rarely going to look exactly as they see them in their mind's-eye.

The author and I communicated well at first. He liked my style and I thought the story and the characters were interesting enough for me to translate into some nice illustrations. Things broke down a bit when I realised he didn't understand he needed to provide me with a finished story. I did a couple of mockups, like the first image above, to show that the text had to be finalised before I could work out what went where,  how many pages were going to be illustrated, which parts of the text I was going to illustrate and how they would be placed on the pages. 

COVID lockdown ended and the author got back to what he loves doing best - jazz singing. He apologised and agreed to rewrite the story in a format I could interpret as an illustrator. I left him with it but have heard nothing for about a year. I doubt I ever will.

Collaborations are often difficult, especially when there are 2 creatives working together. I think we did really well and I'm very glad I went through the process. I learnt a lot.

Images: Concept by story author, James Flynn. Illustrations by blog author trading as 'Mad Fish Designs'.

Hot Off The Press

I'm currently finishing off a new logo design for FaBWA. There was some controversy over the last one. It's impossible working for a committee - too many clients and people rarely agree. But this one above looks like being the final, or something very close to it. 

The one below was criticised for looking like a 'Disney character' and yeh, so what's the problem with that? The idea wasn't mine - I was given a photocollage of a small marsupial Mardo (Antechinus) jumping through a ring of fire. The quality of the image was very bad and I wasn't able to see any detail, so I designed this little guy.

There are a lot of PhD-type doctors in the group and I suspect some are worried about their academic credentials being associated with Disneyland. I think they need to get over themselves, but I also recognise my tastes are a bit 'out there' so redid the logo according to what I would have initially designed, if I had been asked.

Originally I volunteered my graphic design services to help FaBWA but the workload blew out so they accessed some funding and offered to pay me. I was a bit ambivalent but in the end, after they asked several times to send them an invoice, I charged them less than half of what my time would normally be worth. Of course going from volunteer to professional means the relationship has also changed, hence my capitulation and the new logo. 

I think the new logo is a great compromise.

Images: Author. Original designs, digitally created.

Stranger Than Fiction

'Mumford's works share a common concern with the ways that modern life as a whole, although providing possibilities for broader expression and development, simultaneously subverts those possibilities and actually ends up tending toward a diminution of purpose. He shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos released a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into The Myth of the Machine, the title he used for his two-volume late work.'

'Internationally renowned for his writings on cities, architecture, technology, literature, and modern life, Lewis Mumford was called "the last of the great humanists" by Malcolm Cowley. His contributions to literary criticism....mark him as one of the most original voices of the twentieth-century.'

Looks like Mr Mumford made some insightful observations about modern life.

Lewis Mumford, 'A Brief Biography'

Keep on Truckin'

 I'm back at work this week and we'll see how that goes. I always have one foot out the door but I still need the job and feel a sense of responsibility to my students. If I left, the art program would probably shut down altogether. For many years they didn't have one because they couldn't find or keep an art lecturer. The job requires a particular combination of resilience, knowledge, cultural sensitivity and the ability to administer large doses of tough love.

It's reassuring to know that somewhere in the world emus are doing what they've been doing for millennia.

Photo: Christian Spencer

Epic Fail: Edited

 

This is a 'prescribed burn', the name of which would almost be amusing if the results weren't so tragic. Prescribed for what? Against what? Fear. This is a hot burn, carried out in summer - the 'prescribed' antidote for a collective fear that has taken hold of many, maybe the majority, of Australians. The expression of this fear is a type of psychological transference, not onto an individual, but onto the bush we claim to love so much. Fear of nature, fear of the wild, fear of chaos, fear of death. The antidote to being burnt in a wildfire is to burn the hell out of the country. 'Baby' and 'bathwater' spring to mind*.

Edit: In view of a reader's comments re the veracity of content, I have substituted the photo of burnt kangaroos on Kangaroo Island (as a result of wildfire) with this screen shot of a video posted on the Prescribed Burns? Facebook page by Nancy Jones on the 26 January 2021. This karda has had its back right foot burnt off. I have included Nancy's comments to provide context and validate the photo. I have also provided a link to the page so you can check the 2 videos for yourself - the screenshot is poor quality: 

'It appears Mersea forest was ignited last week and was the unattributed cause of the smoke warnings last week. The ignition was not listed on the site. So while fire fighters were dealing with lightening fires they were igniting this. I went today to see the damage. Found two injured giant lizards. One had a foot burned off. The other was having a hard time moving. This is not right . And to disguise it by putting up it was not being ignited when it was gives me great concern about why was it covered up?'

The PB? group has since ascertained that this fire was in fact a reignition by DBCA and we have email proof of that below. The author of the email was Michael Chan from DBCA:

Below is a map of the Walpole Wilderness. I Photoshopped it to better represent the truth. The tiny areas circled in green are the ONLY areas in this BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT, WORLD HERITAGE WILDERNESS that are protected from prescribed burning. That means the areas in orange can, and are, being burnt. Some of these include 6000 year old peat. This is irreplaceable. But the department responsible has continued to light fires in pockets of these peat grounds during summer. They edge burn around the perimeter, then drop incendiary fire bombs into the centre. If they find a pocket unburnt, they burn that too, which is counter to best practice where burning is carried out in a mosaic pattern (as Aboriginal people did) to maintain habitat and provide places for wildlife to escape. This department is intent on burning as much of the vegetation in some of these blocks as they can. FaBWA has email proof from the department themselves that they are lighting fires in summer, since 17 November to be precise. (Edit: See video of 2 injured kardas (racehorse goannas) - one with a back leg burnt off - limping along a bush track. There is no food for them to eat so they will probably, mercifully, die). 

Edit: One reader thought that the chart above was misleading, so I have provided the original below. Make up your own mind about the visual message this is sending, and whether the original map is actually the one misrepresenting the reality of the situation i.e. marking the areas in red seems to suggest these are the only areas being burnt, when in FACT, the remainder can, and IS being systematically burnt. And we have evidence of that too. THIS IS WILDERNESS FFS!!!!!! 

A WILDERNESS BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT.

And if you think I am using red deliberately, you'd be right.

If you think there is a note of impassioned frustration in my words you are correct. I am outraged. It's why I offered my graphic design services free to the recently formed FaBWA group (Fire & Biodiversity WA). This is madness. While we continue to argue about climate change policy in this stupid country, our forests and animals are burning and, because of the added effects of climate change, they are unlikely to return.

Our 'leaders' have failed us. Australia is one of the most vulnerable continents in a world facing radical climate change. We can't hold global warming to 1.5 degrees, which is already having a devastating effect. We are now looking at 2 degrees warming which will have catastrophic outcomes. This is what we are facing - this WILL be our future. 

Laura Tingle of the ABC's 7.30 report did a 5 minute interview with Dr Will Steffen - he's REALLY worried about this, and everyone else should be too.

'LAURA TINGLE: Finally, what would Australia look like with temperatures that were 3-degrees higher than they are now?

WILL STEFFEN: A 3-degree world is a pretty frightening one when you actually start looking at it in any detail.

Extreme heat would be beyond anything we're experiencing now. A lot of what we call "extreme heat" - between 35 and 40 - might be considered a cool day during a summer with a 3-degree temperature rise.

The Great Barrier Reef would be gone.

Forests would probably burn as soon as they grow back. In fact, we probably wouldn't have many forests - they would be converted to savannahs or grasslands.

The drought - the drying trend we're experiencing in the south-west and the south-east in our major agricultural zones - is very likely to be much more severe and that means we may become a food importer rather than exporter. It'll be really tough to grow the food that we need.

When you think about it, this is a world where you can actually plausibly say a collapse scenario could not be ruled out. This is going to be a really, really tough world just to live in, let alone survive in any sort of reasonable sense'.

Photo credits:

Bart Lebbing, FaBWA

Video screenshot taken from one of 2 videos posted by Nancy Jones on 26 January, 2021 on Prescribed Burns? Facebook page

Screen shot from a pdf of an email written by Michael Chan of DBCA to Karyn O'Connor in response to her queries about ongoing fires in the Walpole Wilderness over summer. Full pdf of exchange available on request.

Map - unsure of source, could be WAFA - WA Forest Alliance or DBCA. I have Photoshopped the top one to show that 95% of this wilderness hotspot has been approved for prescribed burns.

* 'Throwing the baby out with the bathwater' - when counter-productive actions deliver an undesired outcome.