At 5:40 a.m., a kookaburra’s dark laughter carried me out into a new week of running/walking in Townsville, this one with 10 intervals of 4 minutes of running alternated with 2 minutes of walking. On the Townsville Golf Club lawns, Australian white ibises foraged for breakfast, reminding me of a herd of black-faced sheep in a pasture. At Aplins Weir, water still skimmed over the top of the weir, but the boulders below were exposed and once more provided solid substrate for fishermen. Australian pelicans floated on the Ross River, and flocks of egrets hunted in tidal pools caught in grassy meadows that reminded me of prairie sloughs, the surrounding grassland decorated with streamers of flood-transported debris.

Back at home, I worked quietly at my writing for the morning and spent the entire afternoon listening to the ABC’s reporting of the Australian parliament addressing the issue of climate change and the related issues of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and employing alternative energy sources to fossil fuels. The speeches possessed a striking dignity, a determined purpose, and contained none of the mudslinging and childish pettiness so often heard in Canadian parliamentary debate. Opposing views were stated forthrightly, but without lambasting and malicious insult. “We’re in this together,” one of the speakers said. As I listened, I was incredibly impressed with this country’s commitment to the climate change issue. I could not imagine so many hours of passionate, elevated discussion on this topic occurring among the members of Stephen Harper’s government and Canada’s opposition parties.

However, that might be because Canada did not fly flags at half mast across the entire nation yesterday in remembrance of 173 Black Saturday bushfire victims who died last year when the very air ignited in the state of Victoria (see January 11 post, http://maginams.ca/2010/01/11/ ). And Canada did not today have to undertake a massive cleanup following violent storms that slammed down onto southeast and central Queensland on Saturday, pounding the Gold Coast with a record-breaking 360 millimetres or more of precipitation in the 24-hour period ending at 9 a.m. yesterday.¹ In this sun-scorched, storm-lashed country, the issue of climate change and the raw, destructive weather it deals out is right here, right now, and very much in everyone’s faces.

During my evening walk with Vilis, I noticed that the golf course grass had been cut today for the first time in weeks, so my ibis ‘sheep’ were feeding in a hayfield this evening rather than the meadow they fed in this morning. As we walked briskly past the golf course and through part of Bicentennial Park, a woman cycled past us with a toddler in a bike seat and a small dog trailing its leash as it followed. Farther on, a young father with a baby in a stroller passed us, as did a number of cyclists and young women and men running. Vilis commented quietly, “There sure is a difference between the people here and the ones we saw at the Civic Centre.” He was referring to the crowd at the musical Chess we saw at the Townsville Civic Theatre on Friday evening. “In what way?” I asked. “These are younger and fitter,” he responded. “There, a lot of women were overdressed and overweight. Or maybe they just looked overdressed because they were overweight.”

We’ve certainly seen residents of Townsville making good use of the river parks system and Castle Hill, which are dotted with grey posts bearing signs labeled with the 10,000 Steps Program footprint logo. This is a program the Townsville City Council implemented to encourage its residents to increase their daily activity to 10,000 steps of walking or the equivalent amount of physical exercise gained from other activities.² The overall aim of the program is to promote physical health and wellbeing.² According to Vilis’s observation, the program is working for those who use it.

References:

1. ABC News. Queensland storms turn deadly. Sunday, February 7, 2010, 8:27 a.m. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/07/2812365.htm; ABC News. Torrential rain wreaks havoc. Sunday, February 1, 2010, 1:28 p.m. Accessed 9-Feb-2010. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/07/2812460.htm;

2. Townsville City Council. 10,000 Steps: Physical Activity vs Physical Inactivity. © 2010 Townsville City Council. Accessed 8-Feb-2010. http://townsville.qld.gov.au/community/health/Pages/steps.aspx