Lyle Passes Away

My father passed away this morning.
Salisbury House rang at 6.00am, we assumed it was them when the phone rang, thinking someone had called in sick and they wanted Lib to work. A night staff girl named Joy asked for me so I then knew straight away without her saying that he'd gone. I last saw him on Thursday, he was very weak and could hardly talk. I felt it was the last time I would see him.
Joy said he passed away peacefully in his sleep. I don't have time to write more, I have some commitments.

Salvatore Mazzarella

A couple of weeks ago during my blogging hiatus when I couldn't find time to sit at the computer, I bumped into Sam on my morning walk. I've known Sam and his wife Josie for some years. I met them when I used to visit my old mate Ida who lived in the same street. They sometimes walked past while I picked in Ida's garden, and we'd talk. At their invitation, I picked loquat foliage in their backyard more than once before loquat lost popularity as foliage for what reason I don't know.
On the morning of our recent meeting in the main street, Sam, who has always given me a big wave when he sees me, crossed the road to say hello. He had a big smile on his friendly round face and I knew he was on for a yarn. I asked him what year it was that he migrated to Australia from Sicily, having heard a little of his story before. He told me it was 22 July 1963 when he was 20 years old. He talked with enthusiasm, speaking rapidly, his accent thicker the faster he talked, making it hard to catch all he was saying. Several times I stopped him to ask him to repeat things and place names, but I still struggled.
Sam, or Salvatore, came by boat which sailed from the port of Messina in Sicily. There was much poverty and unemployment and many young men were leaving. He first lived in Brunswick with his brother, who had migrated a year earlier, and his first job was in a nearby brickworks. His brother had a girlfriend, a girl from the same town in Sicily, Solarino. When Sam arrived, his brother was embroiled in a fued with the family of his girlfriend, most of whom were back in Sicily, over certain things that supposedly happened or were said in Sicily before the young ones migrated. Sam didn't go into detail but the girl's family would not sanction the relationship. Sam advised his brother that he had no option but to go back to Sicily and straighten things out. Family matters run deep in Sicily. Sam's brother went home hoping to put things right.
After a while, Sam's brother sent him a letter saying he'd smoothed things over with his girl's family and he asked Sam to find her and explain it to her. The girl had moved to Geelong where she lived with her sister, so on a weekend Sam rode his pushbike from Brunswick to Geelong, found the house where the girl lived, and took up a vigil until she left the house and walked down the street. He stopped her, saying he had a letter from his brother, so they went to a nearby park and read the letter, in which Sam's brother explained how the rift had been healed and he wanted her to go back to Sicily and marry him. She did.
Sam left the brickworks and started working in a bricklaying team around the inner Melbourne suburbs. He was paid well and enjoyed the work but had a disagreement with his boss. He was tired of doing all the labouring carting the mortar up ladders and the brickies would often spill mud on him. He wanted a turn at the top but they wouldn't agree so he quit. Someone told him there was work on a potato farm at Mirboo Nth.
One day at Mirboo Nth. at the place he was now working, a bloke came in a truck to pick up spuds. Sam got talking to him. It was Joe Firrito who had his girlfriend with him. Joe Firrito at the time was working for Joe Bussaca at Gembrook and Sam, quite taken by the attractive Vera, asked him did she have a sister. Joe replied that she did, and said Sam should come to Gembrook to meet her.
Sam borrowed his boss's ute one Sunday and though not having a license he drove to Gembrook. Vera's sister's name was Gay, but she was hooked up with Bart Fialla, whom she later married.
My ears pricked hearing these familiar names. Our little dog 'Snowy' came from the Firrito farm some five and a half years ago and since then I've always talked to Vera about 'Snowy' and more recently about her footballing son Micheal, who plays for the Kangaroos in the AFL. Joe Busacca is the father of my accountant and Gay Fialla, for a number of years, was proprietor of 'Faidell' pizza shop which is soon to reopen. I've worked in my accountant's parents garden over some years and also pick bay foliage now and again at Bart and Gay Fialla's.
Sam was told there was work on Mr. Universe's farm at Gembrook. Vera and Gay's father grew spuds and at some time in his life previously he actually was Mr. Universe of body building fame. Sam moved to Gembrook where he met Josie, who was born in Australia but whose father came from Solarino in Sicily, Sam's hometown. He'd come to Australia after WW1 and moved from Kooweerup/ Mirboo Nth. to Gembrook as did Joe Busacca's family and others. To round off, Josie's mother is Joe Busacca's wife's sister. I found all this interesting, as I knew all the people individually, but was unaware of the historic connection and even that Vera and Gay were sisters.
I asked Sam had he been back to Sicily. He replied that he had a number of times, the last being 2005. His father died in 1991 and he went back for the funeral. His father was a soldier in the Italian army when Sam was born early in 1943, and he'd fought in the Spanish civil war before that. Life was tough in the depression of the thirties and there was big money on offer to join Franco.
I said to Sam his dad was lucky to survive the wars and he agreed, saying that WW2 was very bad in Italy. After Italy surrendered the Germans tried to kill everyone. Then there was hardly any food for a long time.
I told Sam if I get to the Greek islands I'll do a detour to Sicily and visit his brother. He said by all means go to Sicily, it's not a big trip from there on a big ferry, but don't worry about visiting his brother.
"ThattalittlashitahaslotsamoneybuttawontacummatoAustralia,hesanottabinabackasincahealeftain1963."

The Queen

I'll bet your thinking, because of the beekeeping flavour of this blog, that I'm going to write about queen bees. One day, yes. Not today.
Last Wednesday, the day after our Dandenong court and shopping day, Lib and I left for a short holiday at Lakes Entrance. After a busy morning during which I picked green pittosporum at home, camellia at Keith Smith's, vallotta lillies at Huite's and cherry laurel at Sunset, and took this full vanload of booty to the farm, we finally got away at 3.00pm. Lib had been on leave from work since the previous Friday and had planned to go to Lakes on the Sunday, but she came down with a severe head and chest cold so she delayed leaving till after the court case, when I was to have followed her down.
I'd picked a stack of flax and camellia on the Monday and on the weekend done two gardening jobs (I usually do these late in the week), caught up on the honey extracting (the flow has wound down), and deadheaded the lavender and agapanthas at Nobelius Park. With 4 days of planning and preparation, and having the court case out the way, I was relishing the prospect of a break. Lib drove, she was fresh and I was tired. I tried reading but fell asleep. We bought take away pizza for tea on the way through town and I crashed to bed soon after at 8.00pm, and didn't wake till 9.00am the next day ( except of course for my obligatory 4.30 am trip to the toilet to empty the ageing bladder).
We decided to go to Cape Conran on Thursday, about an hour and a quarter's drive east of Lakes, as it has lovely isolated beaches and rockpools, and the weather forecast for Friday and the weekend wasn't good. It was hot at West Cape beach where we had a picnic lunch and I tried in vain to read my current book, 'Abu Nidal, The World's Most Notorious Terrorist', hiding from the scorching sun in the shade of the beach umbrella, only to fall asleep, then be woken by the sun as the umbrella moved in a gust of wind.
Later we moved to East Cape beach where at last an easterly breeze and the shade of a large rock allowed me comfort enough to get my teeth into the book. It was written in 1992 by Patrick Seale well before 9/11 and Osama bin Laden but it details the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict and much of the politics of the Middle East fom 1948-1990. An interesting book. Notable is the similarity in policy of Israel in 1969 to that of the 'Coalition of the Willing' today, that of "active self defense", which means seeking out and destroying targets before or in case they attack. To quote, "Such state terror, aimed at liquidating Israel's enemies, was a good deal more destructive than the disastrous strategy of haphazard terror pursued by the guerillas, although it did not always find its mark." Further, after a widespread terror campaign in the early 70's under the banner of Black September- "in the dirty war that followed, both Israel and its opponents, abandoning all restraint, resorted repeatedly to murder." I haven't finished the book yet but it examines the claim that Abu Nidal was manipulated by Israeli intelligence. I'm up to the early 1980's when he moved his operation to Syria after being expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein, where he'd prospered for eight years.
On the Friday it rained. We went to the pictures for the afternoon matinee in a converted squash court and saw 'The Queen'. We loved it. It was the first time I'd seen a movie in a theatre for ten years, we talked about the characters and the storyline on and off for the rest of our trip. I guess seeing that we remember the public emotion in that week after Lady Di's death made it interesting to see what went on behind the scenes in the British heirarchy, and to glimpse the life of the Royals. The beautiful stag at Balmoral, its hunt, the wounding, the resulting stalking and 'finishing off' seemed a powerful metaphor for what happened to Princess Di.

Forgive Us Our Trespasser

I'm almost a week late with this post, for reasons which will unfold. In fact it's two weeks since I last posted and it has been frustrating, but it's good to be blogging again.
Importantly for my family, the saga of the midnight school incident, which began as the 'Weekend Police Drama' in May 2006, was finally concluded last Tuesday, 13 March, 2007. The police, by way of the prosecutor, at the hearing which was listed for 'contest mention' at the Dandenong Magistrate's court, dropped the charge of burglary (which had grown out of the charge of trespass with intent to steal), and offered Gordon a Diversion Plan on the charge of trespass. We agreed to the Diversion on trespass. This took less than two minutes in a discussion in court 2. We then waited 40 mins. for the court co-ordinator to call us for interview and paperwork which he would present to a magistrate for approval. We then waited 90 minutes to be called before the magistrate who read through the Diversion Order. We were finished.
It's over. We have to drop in a money order made out to Visy Care Centre to the value of $150 by the 4 June. They wouldn't take cash there and then, it has to be a money order or bank cheque. Of course the whole thing was a waste of everyone's time and money. Ever since the original charges were laid last November we had tried to negotiate with the police to accept the trespass and have the 'intent to steal' dropped but nothing doing, we had go along with the mindless, grinding, inflexible system which drew the thing out. Either that or plead guilty to burglary. The lesson I learnt is how easy it is for the vulnerable in society to be walked over. When I think about the circumstances it's a complete lack of understanding that the matter was proceeded with at all. Gord has pleaded guilty to trespass and it's on his police record. So be it, no big deal, he was trespassing. Really he wasn't full bottle on the concept of trespass. It was probably a hard lesson he had to learn as he grew older and had more freedom, such as owning a car and being able to drive where he pleases day or night. He'd never put a foot wrong before and hasn't since and I'm sure he won't in the future. His lesson has been that there are consequences to actions and this includes being somewhere at the wrong time. I'm sure the lesson was learnt the night of his apprehension and interview, and has been reinforced by the the stress he's endured over the last 5 months from the time he first received the summons to the final conlusion.
It was 1.00pm when we left the Magistrate's court so we luched at the Dandenong Plaza and did some clothes shopping afterwards.

Honeydew

In the quiet calm of the early morning last week I noticed a humming sound from above, similar to the noise you hear when bees are working trees in flower. The messmates and peppermints on our place are not flowering, the messmates finishing by the end of February, and the peppermints, which flowered last November, don't attract bees anyway. Wasps, I thought. Perhaps feeding on the leaf insects, as I'd concluded they were doing at other times when I'd watched them working at the white lerps on the eucy leaves. But the noise was loud, surely there aren't that many wasps around.
(On the subject of wasps, I have to correct to a prediction I made last winter. I noted that there were no queen wasps in our winter firewood. There's usually three or four of them in every barrow load and I concluded that the sudden cold snap last April hard on the heels of a prolonged March heatwave stopped the issue of queen wasps in the autumn to start next seasons nests. I predicted few European wasps this season. I was wrong. The dry winter and warm stable spring weather, with abundant nectar flows resulting in the wonderful honey crop, must have been good for overwintering wasp nests. There are many now. Maybe the queens left in the early spring and have now built up big nests with the suitable conditions. I've destroyed seven recently but as soon as I started extracting honey last Saturday they were finding a way into the shed.)
The next morning, Saturday, as I sat on the steps that join the split levels of our house to put my socks on, I could hear the humming outside through the fly wire door, the glass slider having been left open as it was a warm night. Surprised by this, I stopped my walk more than once under trees in the street, looking up into the foliage. Against the backdrop of the whitish early morning sky, large numbers, thousands, of flying insects were easily seen moving busily to and from and around the leaves of the messmates and peppermints. This was heavy bee activity and the hum/buzz was loud. As I watched, bellbirds were also busy working in the foliage. I counted 16 in one tree.
When I returned fom my walk, nearly an hour later, the insect activity had reduced and was minimal. The bellbirds were still busy. The bellbirds live only in an area around and fairly close to our house. A couple of hundred metres up Quinn Rd., there are no bellbirds and few messmates and peppermints. Nor was there humming of the bees and wasps. That's the great thing about walking ritually. You observe. You listen. You focus on the moment. One foot follows the other in faith, while the mind and the heart opens to the present and the senses. Like a hunter gatherer absorbed in the moment, there's a connecting feeling to all you see; the lie of the land, people, trees, birds, insects, horses, dogs, even the town. Only the walk and what you see and think matters. All else is suspended.
I'm believing that for the first hour of daylight my bees are working the secretions of insects, exuded during the night and not yet evaporated or dissipated by the heat of the day or the wind.

This morning I researched. I quote my old textbook, 'The Hive and The Honey Bee', a Nth American book.
"HONEYDEW- This is a sweet liquid excreted by homopterous insects, principally plant lice(aphids) and scale insects, feeding on plants. It is frequently gathered and stored by bees and is generally considered inferior to honey in flavour and quality. It may often be found on leaves of such trees as oak, beech, poplar, ash, elm, hickory, maple, tulip, willow, linden, and fruit trees as well as fir, cedar, and spruce. The amount of honeydew collected will depend on the availability of nectar, which is generally preferred by the bees."

It would seem that as the day warms and flowers show nectar the bees move on. Now, why is the humming in the trees only in the vicinity of our house and the bellbird population? Again I did some research, this time with the help of Google.

"CULL TAKES TOLL OF BELLBIRDS, TO SAVE THE FOREST.
December 4, 2006
For Rob High the tinkling of bellbirds is the noise of the forest being killed. The far South Coast resort operator is midway through the state's first large scale bellbird culling program, having gained approval to remove between 2000 and 3000 of the small birds which have invaded his 300 hectare property near Merimbula.
Bellbirds have been implicated in the death of swathes of forest between Victoria and Queensland. Some estimates put the area under threat at up to 2.5 million hectares of native forest in NSW alone.
No one knows exactly why such large areas of forest are dying or how the birds may be involved - it is primarily a case of guilt by association.
But it seems clear the bellbirds displace other species and then disturb the delicate balance of the insects that live on eucalypts, said consultant ecologist, Dr. Jim Shields.
The birds are caught in mist nets and then killed, with the approval of the RSPCA, using carbon dioxide gas. Mr High said based on wages and cost of equipment, each bird has cost him about $10 to catch.
It is also difficult to pinpoint why bellbird and insect numbers increase in the first place, said Paul Meek, an ecologist with the Government's inter-agency bell miner associated dieback working group. About the only certainty is that the presence of excessive numbers of bellbirds is an indicator that something is wrong with the ecosystem."

Other sources suggest bellbirds 'farm' insects. Their aggressive territorial nature drives away other insect eating birds, causing a population explosion of the insects. Eventually trees die, which is what's happening on our block and nearby. We lose a few every year, peppermints seem most susceptible. It provides firewood, and the bees get a dawn feed of honeydew. I miss the other small birds though. Apparently pardalotes, in particuliar, are great for controlling tree insects, but are displaced by bellbirds. Maybe the European wasp, being carniverous, is of some use after all, helping, even slightly, to reduce numbers of tree insects.

March at Last

I'm glad to see the end of February. As I walked this morning, officially the first of autumn, a fog rolled in, then out again as quickly as it came. The morning had a peaceful feel to it. I saw Chas, the retired carpenter who packs up every winter and goes to Evan's Head on the NSW central coast, on his walk, picking up litter in J.A.C.Russell park near the station. He yelled a greeting to another walker heading up the main road towards the school. The other man, also a 'regular', I think is an R.S.L. man named Borg. He gives me a nod if we pass but I have not yet had a conversation with him. He has grey, wavy, brush back hair and a trimmed beard, a serious look, and usually one long sock pulled up and one down. The lady driver of the postal van gave me big wave. She likes 'Snowy'.
This was my second trip up the street this morning, having taken Robbie up in the car earlier to catch the 6.10am bus. He's started his biotechnology degree at Monash Uni. and had to leave early every day so far this week. He's looking into finding shared accomodation somewhere down near the campus to save all the travel time. After dropping him off I saw Eileen walking up the main road in the dark. She walks earlier than me usually.
The last day of summer was not pleasant. We had 2mm of rain in the gauge in the morning which dampened things, but gave rise to dreadful humidity when the sun came out. I had an order for trailing ivy which took me back to Julian and Marg Dyer's garden where I'd picked camellia the previous day. Julian, a long time potato farmer who works these days with Bruce Ure, always has a good handle on the weather forecast, and had told me there was a good possibility of rain, saying there was talk of big rain in East Gippsland, maybe up to 150mm. It did happen there but we were on the edge of the rain band. Julian was home for lunch and said they'd harvested 40 bins of potatoes in the morning and after lunch he had to go and move three irrigators. "Got to be done", he said.
We talked dams and water and pumps. He said their crop this year was as good as they could expect, given that they'd had a pump break down in early December just when we had those 40C. days and the spuds sat there and copped it when they needed water. They had to pour concrete for a pump base well down a gully, the only way to get it down was on sheets of iron, a hell of a job. They installed a new 100hp. electric pump which puts out 1000 litres of water every 45 seconds (as I remember the conversation) and the spuds grew alright once they got water on them but they're a bit gnarly. Some of their dams are pumped dry now so they need good rain.
I told Julian that we didn't use more than 2 megalitres of our 14 meg. allocation at our little farm last year because our dam wasn't big enough, and we aren't allowed to divert water from November to April. A ban was on from September this year because stream flows were so low. He said we should get a twenty ton excavator into the creek and build a a bigger dam. I explained that we don't own the land on the other side so he suggested we make an arrangement with our neighbour, so I then explained that when old Bob Jones died he left his land to the State Gov't to be kept in tact till the last of his horses died. The Burnley Horticultural College has an annexe there and the last horse died years ago. I heard recently that Burnley was looking to have 8 one acre blocks subdivided off along the creek.
Julian responded saying we're going to see big changes. He said there's blokes in the Sth. Austalian mallee growing crops of 3-4,000 acres of spuds. "We can't compete with that."
"Where do they get water?" It was a silly question.
"Artesian", he said, his eyes fixed on mine stoically.