Just in from Latham, Canberra, my friend Jeff's insomniac notes on night life in
his suburban garden. Enjoy...
The witching hour has become quite creepy in Latham at this time of year: a
harvest moon, yellow and huge has now shrunk to a silvery, Emily D's disk of
snow with soundless dots. It is the perfect night for the amazing sound of
fruit bats' leathery wings as they come in for the neighbours figs. The
sound is more like rowing than flying. It the first time we have had them
this close.
They are huge and clumsy, even in the air, not like birds which can be odd
shapes and still fly with grace. Swans, for example, look silly on the
ground, seem naturally at home in the water and stretch themselves into long
darts to fly, their wings in proportion, somehow. I watched the bat's last
evening and could smell their piss-shitty coats; the smell of their roosts
in Hyde Park, Sydney. One was dragging itself around the tree like
Quasimodo, another, poised on the top of a fence like a beached seal, took
off when I appeared.
I don't dislike them, but they are dark strangers who come in the night.
Roxie (the free-to-a-good-home kelpie) watches them, cowering slightly and
wondering how these dogs could have learned to fly.
They are at the figs just now, though they make no noise while they feast.
You feel that they are there, the rushing noise of their slow-beating wings
eventually confirming suspicion as they make off for somebody else's garden.
Bats... how odd that they have come this far south. Probably the ozone
layer!
*******
Jeff teaches museumology students at the U of Canberra - a course called
Heritage Interpretation, abbreviated to 'heritage in turps'.
best from Max in Melbourne
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