“And they came with their axes
They brought their knives and chainsaws too
And they cut down all that tall tall timber
Tall timber in the mountain dew.

Please, don’t cut down the tall timber
Let it grow tall straight and true
In this world we need tall tall timber
Tall timber like me and you.”

Excerpt from Tall Timber by Skyhooks.

Australia Day experience.

“The redgum and the kauri
The eucalypt and pine
The poets and the painters
The thinkers of the time.
Don’t cut down the timber or we’ll be forever poor
Don’t kill off our heroes or we’ll never win the war.
Now the sun’s so strong that it burns my eyes
The air’s so bad that I can’t breathe
The winter’s warmer, the summer’s hotter
I drive for miles and I don’t see trees.”

Except from Tall Timber by Skyhooks.

We three met and chatted for ages in the park, with an 81 year old poet yesterday. It was kind of singular because we were all holding free paper flags after an official Australia Day bbq breakfast and ceremony, also because he is a quintessential Australian character and tall, solid, square jawed, craggy like the mountains he roamed. They packed up around us and we were too enthralled by his stories to go home for hours. Like the one about the dog that used to “drove” cattle to their distant destination without a human, and how he made a memorial to it. Hubby was absorbing them all. It was good for my wide-eyed daughter, hanging off the back of her seated Dad’s neck.

Living history he is, a retired timber cutter, (using chainsaws), from the days before the big clearing machinery, when they used to camp out in the bush listening to the lyrebirds, cook on a camp fire and spare groups of trees for the koalas. He said a big tree would fall, and he’d bring people back to see the saplings sprouting up where it had disturbed the earth when it impacted. He would plane a stump and read Australian natural history to people in the rings of the tree – drought, bushfires. Now the koalas are endangered… So much fauna , flora and history knowledge he has, though not as much formal education as kids get today.

The day before, I read a short newspaper column hidden casually away on page 7 or something, re our two major supermarket chains sacking workers as they’ve built huge automated distribution centres (ie robots). My pet bugbear. Evidently trying to circumvent Amazon that officially launched here last year. I read that artificial intelligence is making hiring and firing decisions increasingly in business these days.

What are “they” doing to our world? It’s sheer, slow, suicide. Arrgghh. Bring back the careful, go around cutting, of everything. Fight the wholesale clearance!

Take it away Shirl…

Tall Timber-Skyhooks:

Lyrics of the song above:

http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Skyhooks:Tall_Timber

I can’t pull up last year’s Australia Day post about the bbq breakfast, because the child filter on my device won’t let me for some reason. You can find it on the 26-28 th of January 2018 on the old site, but here is the 2017 one on the same site, (dont be confused by my old username. )

http://anaussieintheworld.blogspot.com/2017/01/i-am-proud-australian.html

My 2017 post about the timber industry today in our area:

http://anaussieintheworld.blogspot.com/2017/01/timber.html