Three to see

Wild Australasia — BBC (2000). (DVD) “…one of the most comprehensive surveys of Australasia’s natural history ever filmed.”

The video above is not from the series…

This series is just superb! Nasty of me I know, but I don’t know how any fundamentalist Jew, Christian, or Muslim could watch this series and retain their belief in the literal inspiration of their holy books! Think about Australia and New Zealand, lands those old prophets knew nothing about, with a human history going back 40,000 years and more. No Adam, no Noah, no Abraham… All reaching back way before their alleged dates… Makes you think, that. I still regard myself very much as a Christian, by the way, but get more and more worried by the poverty of fundamentalism. The recent documentary on Compass said it all really. Not all fundamentalists are a threat to others, but too many are. This happens when you lock yourself into an impossible proposition, I suppose. Most Christian fundamentalists, perhaps fortunately, don’t really believe what they assert: in practice they ignore great tracts of the Bible, and so they should. Nothing directly to do with the DVD, any of this, but whenever I think of the natural history of this country I can’t help such reflections.

Friday Australian poem # 2: "The Poor, Poor Country" by John Shaw Neilson

“Largely untrained and only basically educated, Neilson became known as one of Australia’s finest lyric poets, who wrote a great deal about the natural world, and the beauty in it.” — Wikipedia

I selected this poem for my 1995 book From yellow earth to eucalypt: stories and poems from China and Australia (Longman). I paired it with a Chinese story from the Ewenki culture: “The Seven-tined Stag” by Wure’ertu which tells the story of a boy who lives in another “poor, poor country”.