OK boys and girls, we’ve got a lot to cover today so you may want to take some notes. Some of this information may be on a little quiz later. Or not – I realize not everyone is as infatuated with the factual stuff that I am. But I can’t help it – it feeds me to the core.
Today we did a tourist thing again – we did a tour of the beaches around Sydney through an organization called Australian Eco Adventures, and Barry was our guide. He was probably a little older than us, I’d guess pushing 60, and we were the only ones on the tour. Unlike the Czech Republic, we were in a nice Toyota 4-runner with fuzzy seat covers.
I’ve noticed that a couple of times – there seems to be the same penchant for fuzzy seat covers that the US had circa 1985. I don’t know why – they aren’t any more attractive now than they were then. I suspect it’s because they’re cheap and easily replaced.
In any event, we drove out of the City and Barry gave us a running commentary. He says that Sydney is very decentralized, so there are as many people going to outlying “country towns” to work as there are coming into the center city. He said that a lot of government offices have been dispersed to outlying towns for that specific purpose.
Suburbs tend to be somewhat universal. There are high end ones and lower end ones, and they eb and flow. One difference, though, is that they have either train or bus service throughout all of these suburbs, so you aren’t isolated once you get out there.
Most of the terrain is steep rolling hills, which they call Bush Land. Most of what we were going through was a national park / forest preserve. After seeing it up close, though, it’s easy to see why the fires in Victoria couldn’t be contained. You’d have had to hack your way through it, and even then it would have been tough going. Most of the growth is low scrub that tends to grow in layers, making for thick going. If a fire started, you couldn’t have kept up with it.
A lot of the forest is Eucalyptus, of which there are over 700 varieties. They apparently are somewhat like cedar trees in a fire, in that the air can actually get hot enough as it goes up the hill to cause the oil in them to explode the trees, thereby throwing the fire further out. Like the forest fires in the western US, though, they’re necessary for rejuvenation. The Banksia Tree, of which there are hundreds of varieties, grow a seed pod that looks something like a walnut from the flower. The seeds can be dormant for 20 or 30 years until a fire comes along, causes the pod to explode and throw the seeds out.
Eucalyptus trees also come out with a special leaf just after a fire (sometimes within hours). Koala’s don’t like the taste of these, so they leave them alone to let the trees rejuvenate. Once the tree is re-established, these leaves turn “mature”, the lower ones fall off and the tree goes back to normal.
