Tales from the suburbs: Why new housing developments give me the blues.

New housing developments are strange places. They feel like the scene of a disaster that unfolded just moments before you got there. You have to look past the new houses and clean cul-de-sacs, the fresh paint on the streetlamps. Start with the trees. See the lone survivor from the forest now no more? Exposed and alone, the wind blows it out of shape. See the native flower, in amongst the grass? A natural relic from an obliterated habitat.

But these are not lifeless places—quite the opposite, in fact. There are all sorts of creatures wandering about, homeless trauma victims suddenly finding themselves on the edge of survival. It might be a koala up a power pole, where months earlier stood a red gum. It might be a brolga named Bruce, who wanders a floodplain now paved. Some animals do alright at first, like the kangaroos that are gifted with fresh lawns to graze, or the rainbow bee-eaters that enjoy the open space. It’s only later that their fortunes fade, when the landscape is given over to the cars and the pets.

At Agnes Water, I step out into the front yard of my weekend accommodation (am I part of the problem?) and hear an almighty yelping overhead: a noisy friarbird is in panicked pursuit of a crow that has something small in its beak. At a certain distance, the friarbird gives up and turns back towards an isolated moreton bay ash in the empty lot next door. I think that’s where it must have a nest, from which the crow has snatched a baby. I wonder how long ago it was that the ash was surrounded by other trees that afforded more protection. Does the friarbird remember this landscape as a woodland?

Inside my holiday rental is a large eastern striped skink that wanders from room to room. There are no hollow logs in this place anymore, but empty wardrobes and the space beneath the sofa suffice as lizard living quarters. I hope that future guests will be kind to it. I hope they see that it is just trying to live its life, the way we all are.

Comments

Suburb Guide: Lawnton

Fan-tailed cuckoos are most often seen on a low branch, keeping an eye-out for caterpillars below. Straddling the lush banks of the North Pine River, Lawnton is a suburb of Moreton Bay Regional Council steeped in history . Originally inhabited by the Turrbal people, the land would have been cloaked for many hundreds of thousands of years by a lowland rainforest ecosystem, featuring the hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) for which the river is named after. Unfortunately, the rich soils allowing the vegetation to thrive also made the place attractive to European settlers that wished to farm the land, leading to great conflict with the Indigenous inhabitants. This was eased temporarily by local pioneering figure Tom Petrie, who had lived with and forged a respectful relationship with the Turrbal people, including Dalaipi, leader of the North Pine tribe. By 1858, however, the Aboriginal people of the area were removed and sent to live in isolated reserves around South-east Queenslan

Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys

Book review Reed New Holland Publishing, 2002. It’s noon on a warm autumn day and I am driving south along Beaudesert Road towards the peripheral suburbs of Brisbane’s southside that remain largely a mystery to me. I have decided that not knowing the amphibian fauna inhabiting the suburb of Algester is a personal error that I simply must rectify. My favourite way to search for frogs is to go spotlighting on humid spring and summer nights, but I have left it a little late this year and doubt my chances at finding them now that the evenings have mercifully turned cooler. Instead, I am going to survey the local amphibian population in a way that is quite new to me, aided by a secret weapon sitting in the passenger seat next to me: Marion Anstis’s book, Tadpoles of South-eastern Australia: A Guide With Keys .

Wild Plants of Ipswich

I've never really taken much notice of plants until recently, regarding them usually as just the thing that a bird perches on while you're watching it. This week I decided it was time to change that attitude by trying my hand at plant identification in Denmark Hill Conservation Park, located in the centre of Ipswich. The park is just 11.5 hectares in size, but preserves a patch of bushland that acts as an 'island refuge' in a sea of suburbia. I did my best to focus on the trees and not be too distracted by birds or the resident Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) population, and came up with nine interesting trees and plants seen on the Water Tower Circuit.

Wild BNE

Search This Blog