The Tablelands

24 May
Alice Springs
Mostly Sunny, Mild

(step count to appear in later journal entry)

I know it's been a week, but I have had little chance to get nearby a computer with more than a minute or two to spare since then. We've covered a lot of ground.
We're at the point where the course is beginning to wind down, at least at this end. We are going to be picked up in a little over an hour for our trip to the Alice Springs airport for our flight back to Sydney. As usual, the mood has begun to settle in on the group that we've had a lot of adevntures, we've learned a lot, but it's time to go home. We'll do that soon enough.

If you plan on being in the Elmira area on Monday, May 30, you will have the chance to see what we've been doing. We will have a reception fo rthe course from 2pm to 4pm at Hamilton Hall. Light refreshments will be served. We expect to see posters and other presentations about bush tucker, bush medicine, the Sydney Opera House, everyday AUstralian life, sports, and other things. I plan on doing a poster about what Aborigines think about whitefellas. I hope to see you there.

Let me catch you up on what we've been doing. I'll try to keep everything in order, and I expect to be doing several of these over the next few days.

For our last day in tropical north Queensland, we began by driving down the coast to Innisfail to see the Australian Sugar Museum. From Brisbane to Cairns, we had traveled through cane field after cane field, and so understanding the sugar industry here seemed appropriate. Australia exports a lot of sugar, mostly to Asia. I have written before about how we Americans spend 'way too much money on sugar, and how I think you all should start complaining loudly about this. (Of course, the Aussies want to sell their sugar in the States at the current prices).

The cane fields are no longer burnt off in northern Queensland, although some burning takes place in the south, nearer Brisbane. The virtue of burning the field before harvest is that it drives out the vermin that sickens the canecutters, and reduces the amount of 'trash', the portion of the cane that is not useful to producing sugar. There's only a minimal amount of sugar lost, so this was considered a reasonable way to harvest in the past.

Of course, these day, we know that it's a pretty big source of pollution to burn off enormous cane fields, so avoiding it makes sense. With modern farming machinery, it's unecessary, and so is no longer done.

The industry seems to be in the process of retooling itself to be as environment friendly as possible. Every bit of the harvest and the harvesting byproducts that can be used finds some use, so the sugar factories produce very little waste. The trash from the harvest is used as fuel in the refining of the sugar and the other plant operations. The sludge at the end of the process, and the ash produced from burning the trash, is sold as fertilizer. Probably the only emission to worry about at the factory is the heat and some greenhouse gas.

Of course, there's a lot of runoff, though through tree and mangrove replanting, everyone hopes to stop, or at least minimize, that trend.

That leaves the cane toad, a horrible environmental disaster still unfolding. Cane toads were introduced to control the sugar cane beetle. They had no interest in the beetles, but would eat many other critters, outcompete the native species, and reproduce like crazy. They're poisonous, too; nothing in Australia can eat them -- even crocodiles can be killed if they eat too many. The cane toad is now found in every state except Western Australia, and is expected to be there eventually. There is no known way to stop them. Ouch!

After the sugar museum, we headed west into the Tablelands. Though in the tropics, the mountains shield this region, giving it a climate similar to the US midwest. It's thus an area that sees a lot of dairy production and other truck farming. There are bananas and papaya grown as well.

One of the most interesting attractions is the Curtain Fig tree. The strangler fig begins life as a small parasite plant high up in a tree, that sends a vine to the ground. Once the vine finds the ground and creates a root, the fig then sends out many more, and uses the host tree as support. This continues until the fig completely envelopes the host tree, which then dies. The process can take up to 1000 years to complete.

The Curtain Fig is an example of just how extensive this can be. It's huge! the size of an office building. It's the result of a fig at work, and a host tree falling over into a second tree, which in turn fell over into a third tree. There are, in fact., four trees involved in its creation. And it's not done, the Curtain Fig will continue to grow -- people will be coming to see a much larger one milenia from now.

Well, I must surrender this machine now. Watch for my next entry on Alice Spring.