Australia is a lot like home, but really different.

So, as I said in yesterday’s blog, the rabbit-plague solution Louis Pasteur proposed in hopes of winning a million-dollar prize didn’t work and his nephew didn’t wind up with Sarah Barnhart, either.  Worse yet, the rabbits kept rabbitting on.

Reports about the 150th anniversary year of the 25 bunnnies originally being set loose here are reminders of why Australian customs regulations are so tight.  From experience, actually from scores of bad experiences, Australians know the harm that can come from introduced species.

Another biological solution was proposed in 1919, a disease called myxomatosis.  After initial rejections of the whole idea, safety tests, and trials, the disease was introduced to the wild rabbit population in 1950.  Spread by mosquitoes and fleas, myxomatosis wiped out 99% of Australia’s wild rabbits in two years.

That is considered to be the world’s first successful biological control program of a mammalian pest.

Of course the remaining one percent of 600 million rabbits is still quite a few, and within a few years, both the disease and the rabbits changed enough so the rabbit problem began to grow again.

In 1995, rabbit haemorraghic disease virus (RHDV) was introduced and once again the rabbit population was reduced to low levels, although RHDV seems to be a better killer of rabbits living in arid areas than of those in high rainfall areas.

RHDV is considered only the second successful control of a mammalian pest in the world.  Plant species absent for nearly a century and a half are making a comeback in some parts of Australia now.  Feral foxes, dependent on rabbits, have diminished in number, too.

Rabbit numbers at one section of the Flinders Range of South Australia have been shown to be only 15% of their pre-RHDV population level, but we heard a scientist being interviewed on ABC radio recently saying that there are still enough rabbits around to derail plans for planting trees as part of a carbon-emissions control program.

A rabbit or two per square kilometer — a population that might go largely unnoticed by humans living in the area — would be enough to nibble off the tree seedlings, he said.  According to him, you can look at wild-tree populations in the outback and see trees that came out of the ground soon after the rabbit-free period of the 1950s and others that sprung up after 1995, but few or none in between.  Or since.

Of course, there are bunny defenders.  Getting rid of the rabbits hurt hunters (including professional rabbit hunters who were shrewd enough to report areas as being cleared of rabbits while they carefully left a few alive so they’d have more work later), rabbit-fur sellers, and hat makers who used rabbit fur.

Children, of course, worry about harm to the Easter Bunny, so Australia has a government-backed campaign promoting the Easter Bilby, a cute little native marsupial with a long nose, as a substitute that competes for the affections of Aussie young folk.  You can see guys in bilby suits on floats in parades and there are children’s’ books and films about the cute little bilbies.

That makes sense, in a way.  Rabbits destroy bilby habitat.

Even when we get rid of the bunnies, if we do, there’ll still be other feral invaders to worry about, including camels, starlings, and mosquito fish, red-eared slider tortoises, and something called “the yellow crazy ant.”

Not to mention, of course, the poisonous, ever-spreading cane toad which is moving steadily west across the tropical areas to our north, wrecking havoc as they go.  They even kill crocodiles.

The crocs have to eat them, of course, but these native critters seem willing to dine on most anything that moves.  Two were found alongside Brisbane-area highways recently (yikes!), hundreds of miles below their natural habitat’s southern limit.  Authorities speculated that they were pets that had been set free.

Pets! Who’d keep a croc as a pet?  And why?

Even if you could teach one to fetch…

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Today, as you probably heard because this topic gets covered everywhere, scientists announced that sex – copulation, actually — started here in Australia.

Three hundred and sixty five years ago.  In fish.

Until the discovery of embryonic fish fetuses in the fossilized remains of a “placoderm,” nobody thought the process of sperm combining with eggs inside a female body of any kind had begun so early in our evolutionary past.

So I expect to see, on Brisbane cars very soon, “We did it first!” bumper stickers.

Rampant sexual reproduction was a key element of an already well-know Aussie story, of course, the rabbit plague.

Radio programs are reminding us that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the introduction of rabbits to Australia.  No hip hip, and no hooray for that, of course.

A wealthy landowner, who wanted to be reminded of England and to have something to hunt, freed 25 on his property in the state of Victoria in 1859.   The eventual result: 600 million rabbits.

The story is actually interesting and involves some famous names.

Within a couple of decades of the landowner’s world-class mistake, the rabbit problem had become so bad that a prize of one million dollars was offered for a biological solution.  How much would that be in 2009 dollars?

I don’t know, but it was enough to get Louis Pasteur interested after his wife read about the contest in a French newspaper.  Having stumbled onto the fact that a chicken cholera he’d been studying also killed rabbits, he decided that his persistent problems with funding his research were over.  He sent a team led by a handsome young nephew to Australia with some vials of chicken cholera and instructions to stay until the prize was handed over.

Pasteur’s solution might have worked except for three problems.

1. Chickens, which people wanted to keep alive.

2. The cholera worked too fast on rabbits and would probably have killed out colonies before the disease could spread to other colonies of bunnies.

3. The Rabbit Commission, made up of contest judges from all the Australian states, included at least a couple of people with interests in barbed-wire companies.  That commission rejected, in 1889, all contest entries and recommended a law requiring barbed-wire fences for all rural properties.

Their decision eventually led to the ineffective rabbit-proof fence that we’ve all heard about, but the Rabbit Commission was the first official act of inter-state cooperation, so its creation may have furthered federation.

Pasteur’s nephew wasn’t a total waste, either.  He applied one of his uncle’s inventions to a problem the Victoria Bitters company was having, thereby making a success of VB beer.  And he had what was an evidently a torrid affair with a famous entertainer who happened to be touring Australia, Sarah Barnhart.

Meanwhile, the rabbits were also busy doing what comes naturally.  The amount of damage done to the plants and animals of the country, both in the wild and on grazing land, is conceded to be beyond estimate, but a recent official guess put annual damage from rabbits at $600 million to farmland and $200-300 million to the rest of the Australian environment.

TOMORROW: A second shot at the rabbits

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Victoria’s wildfires are being covered by the wire services internationally, so I feel no need to update you on this topic.  Our newspapers are still running sections devoted to stories from the aftermath of the disaster that took 181 lives or more south of us and the (less lethal but still devastating) flooding that is receding now to our north in tropical Queensland.  TV stations are still doing hour-long specials, too, and there are fundraisers all around for the victims.

We gave some money to the Red Cross for use in Victoria and bought groceries on Friday when both major grocery chains here were giving all their profits to that agency.  But now, as much as I hate to admit it, we are experiencing a bit of overload.  Perhaps it’s “compassion fatigue.”  After a while, you just don’t want to read, hear, or watch another tale of horror.

It has reminded me, though, how lucky we were on New Years Day in 2006 when we failed to get the message about a ban on hiking in a section of Blue Mountains woods because of wildfire danger.

As we wrote in our Moving to Australia book, Sydney’s airport reported it’s  hottest  News Years Day ever at 115 degrees Fahrenheit, and wildfires south of that city destroyed property, animal and at least two humans.  Many kilometers north, we had a great hike and were glad we hadn’t been told that the trails we hiked, over brushy peaks and down into wooded valleys, were empty for a good reason.

Having now seen what wildfires can do and how quickly they can move, I wouldn’t think of doing that again.  No blazes broke out anywhere near us that day, but, for the sake of a glorious hike, we took risks beyond calculation.

The lesson we take from this month’s disasters in Australia?  Relish ordinary life and be glad for food, shelter, family, and friends.

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Reading on-line and newspaper reports and then turning on the TV news here, you’d think Australia is a hell of a place to live.  And for many today, it surely must be.

To our south, wild fires are raging in three states after a record-breaking heat wave of more than a week.  To our north, floods “of Biblical proportions” won’t let up as the rainy season to beat all rainy seasons continues in the tropics.

This morning, we hear that 26 are known to be dead because of wildfires in three states and that at least one town, Marysville north of Melbourne, has been virtually burned out.  A telephone report from a resident sheltering in a fire station said another town’s central area (Kinglake) and his own home were in flames.

Making this disaster even worse, authorities believe that many of these wildfires were deliberately set and that firebugs are re-setting some of them.

Fortunately, it’s almost a 1000 miles from here to Adelaide, where some of the most intense urban heat has been and about 850 miles from here to Melbourne, which was scheduled to have its hottest February day ever yesterday, well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  A cool front has moved through, thankfully, and today’s highs in the region should be in the 70s F, similar to Brisbane’s “top.”

About 750 miles north of us, in Ingham, more rain fell last night and waters rose again to near the heights they’d reached a couple of days ago.  The place, like others, has been cut off and flooded for a week.

Our hearts go out to people in both regions, although we are almost envious of the flood area folks.  Having many reservoirs at less than half capacity and knowing farmers around here are hurting from lack of rain, southeast and southwest Queenslanders would be happy to take a part of what’s causing so much trouble for northeast Queensland.

But not all of it.  Some tropical places up north have had rain every day since January 1.  Some claim totals for this still-new year of nearly 1,000 millimeters or close to 40 inches.

In other areas in the tropics, inland from the coastlines, there is mostly joy with pastures flooded after years of hardly any rain and recently dry reservoirs now full to over-flowing.

Three more low-pressure systems are competing to dominate the coming week’s weather patterns.  May they take an unnatural course to our area and then head southwest to cool the embers.

So, everybody who thinks global warming is a myth, raise your hands.

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In yesterday’s blog, I said I expected to get a lot of sleep this morning.  But then I learned that the inauguration would be shown live here on free-to-air public television, ABC1, so I changed my mind. I set our alarm for three a.m. and crawled out of bed.

I’m glad I did.  I’m glad I could.  Half a world away, I was there, with most of you, watching as Barack Obama took the reigns and (to use a term common here) “farwelled” George Bush and company.

My experience did have a particularly Aussie flavor.  The editorial page of yesterday’s The Australian, a Murdock-owned paper, prominently displayed an article proclaiming Bush to be “a good President and a fine man.”  Just below that: a piece about “global warming alarmism.”  Who knows, maybe the last view will turn out to be right.

I applaud Obama for the inordinate respect he showed the man he has replaced and I applaud my home country for both the symbolism and reality of the transition of power we all just witnessed.  This is, for me, the highest and best meaning of “our flag is still there.”

My experience of these historic events had two Aussie touches.  The ABC1 announcer asked viewers here to stay tuned for a documentary on Obama’s life.  He called it a fine “doco,” pronounced “doc-o.”

And in a tree near our livingroom window, as the Bushes walked toward the helicopter that would take them away from the center of political power, a flock of kookaburras woke up and filled the air with their loud, manic, laughter-like calls.

It’s still dark here this Wednesday morning, but there’s light and there’s laughter in this world.

I’m going back to bed.  Maybe I’ll see the doco another time.

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The big day has arrived.  Here, anyway.

It’s about 3 a.m. on 20 January 2009 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Of course, it’s not quite noon in Washington, DC, and it’s a full 24 hours until Barack Obama becomes the 44th President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009.

As someone “back home” has said, “Don’t worry about the world ending today.  It’s already today in Australia.”  Getting a first look at this historic January 20, I can tell you that it seems to be a fine day, indeed.

If we were in the US, we’d be glued to a television set as I expect most Americans will be when the Bush debacle ends officially and Obama’s hard slog toward recovery begins.  If we still had cable, I’d probably set my alarm, get up at about this time tomorrow morning when it will already be 21 January here, and watch history being made.

As it is, our friend Lynn has invited us and others from the US to join her (and maybe her Australian husband, John) to witness from afar the swearing in ceremony via cable TV.

Surely this is one of the most important public events in any of our lives, but I guess I’ll catch the re-run Wednesday afternoon on ABC, Australian public television.  At the big moment, I expect to be asleep.

But I’ll be sleeping better because of knowing that a wonderful day has finally come.

Hooray for US.  Hooray for us.  Hooray for ALL of us.

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Reading recent news stories, a person could think I’m crazy when I praise drivers in Australia for being generally law-abiding and courteous.

In The Australian for Monday there’s a report of two cars that police clocked driving just over the 100kph (62 mph) speed limit near a town called Gatton, west of Brisbane.  Not unusual, of course, except that the second car was maintaining a steady distance from the one in front, a distance of three to four meters.

As my brother Ronald would be quick to point out, those cars were moving at a rate of about 28 meters (or 91 feet) per second, so the second car was not even one eye blink behind the first.

The driver, 31, claimed he was “slipstreaming” to save petrol.  Maybe he’d spent his last dime on beer.  He was charged with “drink-driving.”

That’s the term for it here in Australia.  Not “drunk driving” or “driving while under the influence,” but drink-driving.

Also west of Brisbane one night last year (I’m beginning to wonder about driving west of Brisbane), police found a 37-year-old woman sitting in her car in the middle of a highway with no lights on.

Technically, she could argue she wasn’t driving, I suppose, but she could hardly contest her blood alcohol level.  At 0.379, she was eight times over the limit.  Standing without help was a problem for her.

But it’s not just the youngsters in their 30s who astound police and the general public.  ABC (that’s Australian Broadcasting Corporation) just reported on-line that a man in Victoria [click to continue…]

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I didn’t keep my promise. I said I’d offer my brother Ronald’s five rules of safe driving “tomorrow,” and that “tomorrow” was yesterday.  I didn’t make it.  Midnight came too soon.

The day I’d promised to deliver “No-carnage driving” was also last year: 2008.  Now, here in Australia, we’re an hour into 2009.  As I was finishing up that blog, I could hear fireworks greeting the new year.

I could claim that it’s still 2008 in Texas, in the US, and in lots of places around the world.  It’s about 10 after 9 a.m. where Ronald and Mike and their families live. But I won’t.

Instead, I’ll just note that my last 2008 blog was my 100th one on this blog site.  My adviser on such matters, Kathy Hendershot-Hurd, says 100 is the minimum for blogging success and viability. So, okay, I guess I can claim I’m a blogger, now.

Happy New Year to you from a Texan who is at home far from home.  Drive safely.  — Bob

P.S. Having experienced more than an hour of it, I can tell you that 2009 looks like a fine year.  Granted, I haven’t read any news reports yet, but so far, so good.

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As promised, here are five practices that have kept my brother Ronald accident-free despite a long life of driving, in a Texas Department of Public Safety patrol car and as a private citizen:

Aim high in steering – The farther down the road you see while driving (and he’s talking about “seeing, not just looking”), the less likely you are to have a wreck, he says, adding “Be aware of what’s going on around you.”

Keep your eyes moving – Eye movement helps keep you from getting into a driving trance, the fixed stare of the driver whose mind is elsewhere while her/his ton of metal is moving at up to a 100 feet a second.  Eye movement makes drowsiness less likely, too, and makes it more likely you’ll frequently check your rear-view mirror.

Our dad taught Ronald that, I suspect, since I learned, as Daddy was teaching me to drive, that I should move my eyes constantly in a regular pattern: ahead, rear view mirror, right side, left side, speedometer, and ahead again.

Get the big picture – Practices one and two help you stay aware of what’s around you, but there’s more, including road conditions, weather, and any changes [click to continue…]

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