Swimming to the Moon Page 2

  Before all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could react, Superman tore across the arena, cape flying in the wind, and put Humpty together again. Luckily, this Superman’s alter ego was the local hospital’s mild-mannered emergency-department doctor, Martin Chase.

  You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s different in the country.

  TAYLAH AND TIA MARIA

  The scene: A country village coffee shop the other day. At the next table a young mother sits with her small son and daughter. The girl is whingeing. Her mother says: ‘Stop grizzling Kahlua, or I’ll take you home.’

  Me (silently to self ): ‘That child is named after a brand of liqueur!’ I’m instantly eager to find out the little boy’s name. I hazard a guess: Bailey. Their mother soon obliges: ‘Bailey, stop kicking her!’ Yes!

  The young mother is pregnant. Will it be Tia Maria or Marnier this time? Maybe Cointreau? It could be worse, I think, having read recently of twin babies called Benson and Hedges. In New Zealand, the official registrar has had to step in and prevent parents giving their children such beguiling names as Demon, Satan, Back Seat, and Bus Shelter No. 21.

  Having lived in three different regions over the past decade, I’ve noticed major differences in children’s names in each place. Parents’ class and occupations came into it, but so did geography, celebrity and fashion. And it seemed a small step in the name department – perhaps it always is – from cool hipness to totally bogan.

  At Paddington Primary in Sydney, my son’s classmates were called solid old names such as William, Harry, Liam, Tom, Jack, Louis, Patrick, Alexander, Charlie and Luke. Note the entry of the Royal family into the list, and the correct spelling. No Kristaphas or Dannyls here. Their names say ‘My father is a professional person and my mother plays tennis. I live in a nice terrace house and after Grade Six, I’ll be going to Cranbrook.’

  On the NSW Central Coast, home of the white ute and busy, high-earning tradesmen, most children seemed to be named Taylor or Tyler. Well, the boys were Taylor or Tyler. The girls were called Taelah, Tayla, Taylah, Taylar, Tayluh, Tyla, Tylah, Tyler, or T’Lah. When you called out, ‘Hey, Taylor!’ half the playground turned around. There were also several boys – and black Rottweilers – called Tyson.

  Then we moved to the Byron Bay hinterland, centre of the nation’s most imaginative children’s names. This was expected, of course, of a region where adult sea- and-tree-changers called Beverley and Alan become Lotus Blossom and Zeus. My son’s classmates here – not a Taylah to be seen – included Aladdin, River Bear, Foam, Wave, Storm, Fox, Cassius and Cato.

  At least they were all spelled correctly. In Lismore, only half an hour away, young parents – even the married ones – prefer old names, but insist on an original twist. In the Northern Star’s weekly page of new baby photos I’ve spotted unsuspecting tots named Abbergale, Achillies, Aleczander, Antwonet, Exavier, Eyezach, Ondray, Oskah and Harysyn. Also a Charasmatique and a Charnel (named, unwittingly I presume, after a house of death).

  In the last decade, ignorant, flashy, misspelled and/or bogan names have acquired the same capacity to irritate as misplaced apostrophes or the eternal ‘aitch’ versus ‘haitch’ battle. The Web now has collections of actual contemporary names that celebrate favourite national pastimes like grog and cars – and which might even have had an influence on the conception. Apart from Kahlua and Bailey, there are Australian kids running around out there right now called Bacardee, Chardonnay, Shiraz, Jack Daniel and Tequila Sunrise.

  There are children named Brock Peter, Monaro Brock, Cortina, Holden, Falcon, Mersaydees, Porscha and Jaguar. There are little Australian boys growing up called Stalin, Khe San, Viper, Khyber, Stealth, Speed, Tomahawk, Trek, Rogue, Drifter-Cash and Dirtee; and girls named Diammond-Sparckle, Dakota (also Dakoda, Dakota-Phoenix and Dhakota-Desiray), Refinement, Luscious, Sundeigh and Sierra-Leonie.

  If you are a boy called Jackson you might be confused with others called Jacsyn, Jakson, Jakksyn, Jaxon, Jaxson, Jaxxon, Jaxxsen or Jaqson. And pity the little girl named simply Michaela. Current versions of this name include Micaela, Micaylah, Makayla, Macaela, Mackaylah, Mikhayla, Michela, Mikaela, Mikayla, Mikella and Michaella.

  In 2012 the following Australian children’s names were officially registered more than once: Hurricane, J’Adore, Couture, Burger, Google, Hippo and Tron. But step aside, Hurricane, Tron, Diammond-Sparckle and Khyber. (And poor, unfortunate Hippo – good luck at school!) Make way for Pablo Picasso. His full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Crispiniano de la Santisima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso.

  SITTING BACKWARDS ON CHAIRS

  I love movie clichés that signify male earnestness. My old favourite is the one where the hero (a cop, a reporter, a private eye, a youthful defence attorney) is in a serious conference, and he can only nut out the problem in hand by spinning a chair around and sitting on it backwards.

  If he’s an artistic or cerebral type (novelist, high-school English teacher, architect), he’s still permitted to straddle a chair backwards to try to resolve the dilemma, but only if he’s young and feisty and wearing a corduroy jacket. Interestingly, serious professional men in films – doctors, judges, politicians, professors – always sit on chairs the right way around. As, in my experience, do all men discussing problems in real life.

  (It’s important in a serious-problem conference that only one man – a Tom Cruise type – sits on his chair backwards. If the other three or four earnest men in the meeting followed his lead and sat on their chairs backwards as well, it would look silly.)

  Now sitting-on-chairs-backwards for physical chaps and corduroy jackets for arty fellows have been joined on my personal cliché list by writer-characters in the twenty-first century continuing to use only manual typewriters. Apparently no modern novelist, playwright or screenwriter has yet discovered the computer, although I’m betting that the screenwriters who write these particular scripts sentimentalising their old Olympia SM9s do so on their up-to-the-minute Macs.

  If they’re not actual writers, however, but computer nerds, these characters get favoured treatment unknown to us real-life technology sufferers. The lucky movie computer user never has to resort to a daylong, soul-destroying phone conversation with the Philippines. Their word processors never display cursors and they don’t have to use the space bar. They never make typing mistakes and all monitors display really big letters.

  They gain access to the high-tech computers of NASA, the FBI or the CIA by simply typing access all secret files on any keyboard. Similarly, they can infect the computer of a vital government institution by typing upload virus. A hacker can get into the world’s most sensitive computer and guess the secret password in two tries.

  Complicated calculations and loading of huge amounts of data can be accomplished in three seconds, although people typing away on a computer will then turn it off without saving the data. All computers are connected; the hero/heroine can access the information on the villain’s desktop computer, even if it’s turned off. And no matter what kind of computer disk it is, it will be readable by any system they put it into.

  Few movie scenes are more clichéd, however, than those to do with cars. My favourite (one especially beloved by exhausted travellers just off a plane at night at Perth’s international airport) is the ease with which anyone can get a cab. Unless they’re in dire peril, of course, whereupon no taxi can be found.

  Interestingly, movie cab passengers don’t pay the drivers at all, or they have the exact money. (The same is true in restaurants, where the male diner – never a credit-card user – puts the right handful of notes on the table before striding purposefully out.)

  Drivers in a city always get to park right outside their destination. Their cars are never locked. No one fumbles for their keys; they jump right in and start up because they’ve left them in the ignition. Even convertibles with their tops down, in Los Angeles, are still there hours later. No one ever runs out of petrol; stolen car
s especially get great gas mileage.

  Despite their drivers’ presumed driving prowess, police cars in chases suffer far more dramatic damage than any other vehicle. We never get to see the death and injury toll of the policemen involved, nor does it matter. The only car-chase victims to suffer as much damage are poor Mr Papadopoulos and Mr Martinez, who are used to having their fruit carts smashed by cars speeding along the footpath.

  The cliché to end all others though occurs in James Bond films. As always, Bond eventually breaks into the island/cave/industrial complex of the villain. Jerry Seinfeld puts it best: ‘Ah, Mr Bond, welcome, come in. Let me show you my entire evil plan, and then put you in a death machine that doesn’t work.’

  PRICKLES

  Picking the spikes out of our bare feet the other day, my daughter and I decided that when we were running the world – and had already eliminated fleas, paralysis ticks, mosquitoes and Adam Sandler – we’d give doublegees the thumbs down as well.

  Growing up in Western Australia meant that you made the acquaintance of doublegees – the spiny Emex – early in life: as soon as you could walk. Later, if you moved around this extremely prickly country of ours, your feet soon met another painful plant, the bindii, as well.

  We decided that we’d definitely annihilate the bindii (or caltrop) too. Its four spikes weren’t as thick as the three in a doublegee, but it had insidiously popped up in our lawn and the fine spines were harder to remove from the foot: tweezers were needed.

  Suddenly recalling a Perth childhood of compulsory bare feet and never-ending doublegees, I turned to the nation’s prickle authorities – Weeds Australia, the WA Agriculture Department, and the Department of the Environment – for more precise information. Well, I’ve rarely spent a more fascinating hour. I knew we had plenty of feral plants thriving in our wide, brown, trusting landscape: I didn’t realise there were so many foreigners; that they were so evilly bent on our destruction; and that they had such imaginative and flamboyant names.

  The doublegee is a herb that immigrated from South Africa and its name is derived from the Afrikaans dubbeltjie or dubeltge, meaning devil’s thorn. Its spiny fruits are also known as bullhead, cat’s head, king devil, goathead, three-cornered jack, inkuzane, prickly jack, Tanner’s curse, and Cape spinach, because its young leaves were eaten like spinach in South Africa. It’s also often confused with the bindii, which originated in the Mediterranean.

  I hardly have to tell West Australians what a doublegee looks, or feels, like. But did you know that it was introduced to WA as a salad vegetable around 1830? And then also came here in supplies of hay. It was rife in South Australia by 1840, NSW and Victoria by 1883, and Queensland by 1911.

  Spread by car, truck and aeroplane tyres, shoe soles, containers and waterways, the erstwhile salad vegetable is now a major weed that contaminates grain across Australia, including one million hectares of pasture and 500,000 hectares of crops in WA. It’s estimated to cost producers $40 million a year.

  Surprising as it may seem, there’s clearly not enough South Africans in WA to eat up their doublegee salads and keep its numbers down. To combat it, scientists tried a few reluctant weevil varieties before releasing the red apion weevil that also finds it quite tasty. Unfortunately it’s a very slow eater. An introduced aphid, a native sawfly and a couple of diseases enjoy it as well, but mice and cockatoos are a better bet, eating thirty per cent of doublegee seed in the field.

  Things are confusing enough in the weed world. Botanists really let their heads go when they named the mother-in-law’s tongue, mother-of-millions, the devil’s claw, the mouse-ear hawkweed, the skeleton weed and the witch weed. But not only do doublegees and bindiis share some menacing common names, bindii has numerous species, all with interesting sinister names like devil’s eyelashes and puncture vine.

  One type of bindii common throughout Australia – Tribulus terrestris – with thorns like thumb tacks, is even reported in its original site, southern Africa, to be smeared with toxic sap and used as murder weapons.

  It also has another claimed use, and as soon as I mention it, gangs of muscle men and dodgy footballers will doubtless helpfully eradicate the weed by ranging across the nation, consuming vast quantities of it.

  Some body builders use extract of Tribulus terrestris as post-cycle therapy or ‘PCT’. After using steroids, they take it, believing it will restore the body’s natural testosterone levels, improve male sexual performance and build muscle. Indian and Chinese medicines regard it as a tonic.

  Apparently some studies indicated that it enhanced sexual behaviour in rabbits, mice and Belgians. However, gym junkies be warned. Further studies showed that it failed to demonstrate either strength-enhancing properties or increased testosterone levels. And sheep that ate it got limb paresis, otherwise known as the staggers, and couldn’t mount.

  SPARROWS

  I’ve been reminded lately of the feverish excitement of the Great Perth Sparrow Panic of my childhood. But this time we actually have been taken over by invasive foreign birds: in this case, Indian mynas.

  Mynas are noisy, aggressive pests, and now’s the middle of their breeding season on the east coast. They breed profusely, and force native birds and their eggs from their nests, resulting in the sad and abrupt decrease in the numbers of our nationally adored rosellas and lorikeets.

  They’re another cane-toad story. Introduced by nineteenth century scientists to control locust plagues, the Indian myna immediately bred so prolifically and behaved so pugnaciously in urban environments that C. J. Dennis aptly described it as a ‘town larrikin’.

  Recently it has made a sea change and invaded the countryside. It’s accused of causing human health problems, and posing such a disease threat that it’s listed on the World Conservation Union’s one hundred worst invasive species on the planet.

  But we’re heartened by a successful front in the myna wars. Since 2006 the Canberra Indian Myna Action Group (CIMAG) has ‘implemented an effective control scheme’, based on large-scale trapping by volunteers. The Action Group has recorded 60,000 myna ‘captures’ in the ACT since 2006, reducing the myna’s presence there from third most common bird species to twentieth by 2012. Native birds are returning to the capital – even the spangled drongo, not spotted there for decades.

  As you read this, my district’s weekly trapping party of amateur conservationists is also gallantly setting forth with nets and traps to try to limit our local mynas’ thousands of numbers. At last count, their 2014 catch score was seventeen.

  This Indian myna activity reminded me of the morning a Sparrow Ranger burst into our Perth backyard with a shotgun. There’d been an alleged sparrow sighting in our neighbourhood and you couldn’t be too careful.

  Sparrow Rangers were allowed to enter your property and fire away. All they had to do was show their ID and say, ‘Official business. I’m hunting sparrows,’ and you had to gratefully step aside. My mother was hanging clothes on the line. She laughed and said, ‘I don’t want a gun here in the garden, thank you.’

  The State Government declared that WA was the last place on earth except for the North and South poles where the sparrow hadn’t gained a foothold, and they wanted to keep it that way. Sparrows were top of the Agriculture Protection Board’s Vermin List, an official menace to agriculture, and to household eaves and gutters, where they nested, and they had to be shot on sight.

  Once the media became stirred up over the ‘outbreak’, ‘sightings’ flooded in from all over the state. The ‘outbreak’ became an ‘invasion’. The Government offered rewards to people who shot sparrows, and dead native birds piled up in the offices of the Agriculture Protection Board: thrushes, cuckoo shrikes, grey whistlers, finches, flycatchers, shrike-tits, robins, willy-wagtails, robins, honeyeaters, fantails and swifts. But no sparrows.

  The sparrow plague was proving difficult to illustrate. The West Australian ran two news photographs of a Mr Healy of East Fremantle. In the first photograph he was sternly pointing at an em
pty tree where he thought he’d seen a sparrow the day before. Mr Healy said he’d observed the sparrow in the tree for seven minutes ‘before it flew off in a southerly direction’. In the second photograph Mr Healy was pictured pointing in a southerly direction.

  A lesser body would have called it quits. But the Agriculture Protection Board saw the continued total absence of sparrows as proof of the birds’ shiftiness, as well as their danger to agriculture and domestic guttering.

  The Great Sparrow Panic lasted six months. One dead sparrow was found in a sealed car packing case which had arrived from England. The Sparrow Rangers never saw one live sparrow.

  By the way, the Indian myna is brownish and white, yellow-billed, noisy and belligerent, with loud, scolding, chattering notes, and about 250 millimetres long. It’s an omnivorous feeder and builds messy nests in your shed and under your eaves. It struts around, squabbling with others over food scraps. Goodness, wasn’t that one I just saw in your garden?

  SPITTING

  Two adjoining tables in a Subiaco coffee shop the other day: at one table sit two stylish teenage girls; at the other is a mother and her small son. The boy has chocolate foam from his babyccino on his cheeks. His mother spits on a tissue and wipes one cheek; spits again and cleans the other cheek. The teenagers, aghast, burst into giggles.

  ‘She actually spat on him!’ says one girl. ‘Gross!’ agrees the other. The mother reddens, looks bewildered, then angry, gathers up the child and leaves the shop, muttering. The teenagers are still shaking their heads in disgust.