Toxic Shock

 

Trip 9: Perth to Brisbane to Gilgunia to Dubbo to Sydney to Perth

Purpose: Approvals Pathway and Reconnaissance Survey

Total Distance Travelled: 8,294 km

Distance Travelled Year to Date:  32,367 km

According to Lennox Archibald, MD, PhD, of the College of Medicine, University of Florida, bathrooms in restaurants, resorts, hospitals, and even libraries are crawling with bugs that can cause everything from diarrhoea to wound infections. He and his team did not have to look too far to recover samples loaded with staph, which can cause everything from boils to antibiotic-resistant infections, E. coli and even Enterococcus, which is a faecal bug that can cause urinary tract infections and wound infections. The worst part is that these nasties were all cultured from samples taken on supposedly clean dry surfaces. These were not surfaces that people had rubbed their ‘bits’ on. 

So what about the good old hot, wet and moldy communal shower? What secret treasures has that in store? US researchers have found that shower heads are “breeding grounds for bacteria which, the second the water is turned on, belch out all over the person that thinks they are actually getting clean. A common little beast is Mycobacterium avium, which can cause respiratory infections in people with a weak immune system or chronic respiratory disease. There are up to 28 other taxa crawling around in there waiting to be jet propelled into your life.

I have showered in some pretty spectacular places and by spectacular I don’t mean El Questro Stations spectacular. I mean cable ties and ‘Tek’ screws out in the breeze spectacular. I often share my bathroom experience with the local wildlife. 

 

But I think the most offensive thing I have ever encountered in an outback bathroom was that which I had to endure only just recently on a project in central NSW. The clash between the wall paint and the shower curtain was obscene. It was hard to take, so much so I could not hold the camera steady! The photo does not do it justice. I think the artist for the walls and roof was obviously a St Kilda supporter and I am sure that the shower curtain was a Ken Done special from his Little Mermaid era. It was very nouveau oceanica.

 

Other than that, no complaints. No diseases or infections. Just mental scarring that will take some time to fix.

 

 

Do You See What I See?

Trip 8: Perth to Koolan Island

Purpose: Annual Weed Monitoring

Total Distance Traveled: 3768 km

Distance Traveled Year to Date:  24,073 km

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I believe that is completely true. It is true of art and architecture. It is true of the human form and it is most certainly true with respect to the natural world. Until my Honours year at UWA, I had always imagined that everyone was predisposed to love nature and the natural world. I thought that everyone must experience nature or be regularly exposed to the natural world for their own well-being and to ensure the maintenance of ‘sense of self’. But this is not at all the case. 

In March 2000, I attended a lecture at the University of Western Australia that was being delivered by an architect. He was one of those nouveau, trendy, clean yet crusty looking lecturers; you know the type. Tweed jacket, canvas patches on the elbows. Scarf and a little man bag. But what a lecture! 16 years on I still remember it like it was yesterday. 

He questioned the value of the natural world in the context of our own well-being. Does a child that grows up among the skyscrapers in Hong Kong appreciate life any less just because he or she may never have experienced the natural world? That child may still witness beauty but it will be the beauty of an artificial landscape rather than a natural one. A mountain range at sunset is beautiful but then so is a city skyline at sunset so is a child exposed to former any better than the child only exposed to the latter? What is the true value of nature and is it really worth preserving when the built landscape can be just as beautiful and have a greater functional value to us as humans. 

Now imagine how blurry the lines get when you start to consider the individual elements of a natural setting and their intrinsic value on ones well-being. How deprived is a child that never witness wildlife in a natural setting and, further to that, how deprived is a child that only experiences feral fauna in a manicured landscape. Is the child that grows up with Central Park as their wilderness any worse off than the child that grows up in the rural south-west of Western Australia? 

When all is said and done a fox is cute with its pointy ears and a big fluffy tail and camels are cool because they are so very significant, big and clumsy. But both are feral and they are not a part of our natural landscape. In fact, every single individual should be culled. Unfortunately we are obliged to love them less simply because they are not a native. Whether they beautiful or not, we should not value them in the same way that we should value a brush-tailed phascogale or a massive male western Red Kangaroo. What a shame. 

Consider the picture below. A tropical vine thicket framing a sheer cliff face of ironstone in the Kimberley of Western Australia. Beautiful isn’t it. But look a little closer. The gorgeous tropical vine is the noxious weed passion vine which is ubiquitous and devastating the wetter micro clines of the tropical savannah. The cliff is an abandoned iron ore mine pit hanging wall. Not so pretty anymore is it? Or is it?