Current music:	'The Oasis / Judah Meets Balthazar' - Ben-Hur OST - Miklós Rózsa
Entry tags:	australian oasis, global warming, green lifestyle, social values, urban infill

Hanging on to our homely green oasis

The weekend the local government authority is allowing residents like us to put green waste on the verge for collection, and hopefully converting into some enormous pile of compost which will make some capitalistic opportunist wealthy.

Most of our stuff is ‘brown waste’ because it’s dried out over winter. The stuff is mainly palm fronds which we’ve accumulated over the past six months since the last collection. We’ve cut up and burned white a lot in our lounge room fireplace, but only on very cold days.

So yesterday we spent a few hours tidying up and trimming various plants for the disposal. Some of our palms are now too high to reach stuff we’d like to trim off. No matter. It’s only cosmetic. The high stuff will eventually drop off when it’s good and ready. When you look at our place via Google Earth it can be seen it’s become like an oasis. A bird, insect and froggy-friendly oasis.


The two structures with the cream corrugated steel roofs are our home

You can see that eight adjoining neighbours living in their little boxes made out of ticky-tacky pretty well have no gardens at all. Plants and trees have been the enemy of the urban infill phenomena. Vast acreages of bare, sterile brick paving radiating solar heat back into the atmosphere is now all the go in urban Western Australia. Not even ants or moss growing in the cracks are tolerated. We love both. There’ve been plenty of disingenuous real estate agents over the years who’ve wanted to do the same to our place.

When we first bought our house on its quarter acre block more than thirty years ago none of the surrounding buildings in the GE image existed. All our neighbours then lived in single houses on their own quarter acre blocks and enjoyed a completely different lifestyle. Most had trees, vegetable gardens and kept poultry. Importantly too there was a greater sense of neighbourliness. People used to actually poke their heads over the fence for a friendly chat.

Our place has changed too. It had to because we produced nine kids. As the family grew we renovated twice and put in a swimming pool. But when Jill and I first moved in, we were so poor we had to accept the loan of a refrigerator. We are still obliged to be careful with our spending. We think are well tuned to spotting a bargain, as was recently pointed out by my friend Kevin in his weblog.

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally.  An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!