Strange Notations From a Laborious Life

 I am a bit under the weather today so in order to lighten myself up and make a mundane blog entry more interesting I thought I would include a “photo of the day” of myself on the banks of the Yarra River, taken a couple of months ago. I suppose this post could be considered a continuation of my last effort as the photos of Captain Cook’s Cottage in my last entry were taken on the same trip to Melbourne albeit on a different day.

 The photo was taken almost adjacent to the National Tennis Centre which is across the road from where I am standing. The burnished hue of the Yarra is evident as it flows ever onward towards the skyline of Melbourne and through the heart of the city, on to Southbank and into the Tasman sea via the Docklands.

 The Yarra of course was here long before any European set foot on this continent and it will hopefully be here after we have burnt and plundered and pillaged everything we can pilfer from the country. The reign of humans on this earth must end one day surely?

  I have finished the book on the First Fleet which I described myself as reading in my last entry and I guess it has made me a little sad and melancholy. Not so much because the foundation of our nation was laid by those convict steps upon the shore at Port Jackson but more that an ancient land and an ancient people were degraded by that act, and their world which had hitherto been isolated and uncontaminated came crashing down around their ears.

 I am proud of my country and my Anglo/Celtic heritage and take the good with the bad when it comes to our history but reading the accounts of first contact between aborigines fishing in what became known as the Georges River near Botany Bay and members of the First Fleet are quite profound and have had quite an impact on me. From that day on the lives of those native people were changed forever as an unstoppable wraith came down upon them. It must have been a bewildering time for them as they watched the land at Sydney Cove which had known only the wind and rain and calls of the native fauna since time began suddenly echoed to the sounds of an alien invasion. The beautiful wooded cove which was claimed for Britain on January 26 1788 is now but a distant memory and what remains is a concrete jungle, albeit an attractive one yet I can’t help feel that something has been lost as a result of the European footprint on this land.

 That is the history of the world of course, one wave of people overrunning another and even today you only have to walk down the street to see the changing demographic of the society which was founded here in 1788 and I wonder if all that we hold dear as a nation will one day be swept away just as aboriginal culture was all those years ago.

 But, on this beautiful spring day in the capital of this great nation, I will enjoy what God has given me and forget about the complexities of the past. Life awaits and I don’t want to miss it.

 Have a great day.