The Sounds of Spring
The sounds of spring are everywhere. The trouble is that other sounds drown them out. Outside Parliament House, each week, we have hundreds of protesters about this or that, shouting, chanting, booing and demonstrating. The early hours of the morning when I am supposed to be sleeping in the city, are always shattered by the sounds of sirens and horns from ambulance, police and fire vehicles driving to some emergency. I always pray when I hear those sounds, for the emergency personnel who are speeding to the crisis, for the victim of whatever has occurred, and for all those who work while our city sleeps.
On the other hand, at my home at that early morning hour I cannot hear any emergency vehicles. Even the planes going overhead are so high they are silent, nothing more than another light like a satellite going by overhead. The silence is broken soon.
My train pulls out of the station at 7am sharp. I have two and a half hours of hearing people snoring, talking loudly or on their mobile phones about the most personal of issues. Then there are fifty ipods going with the muffled thump of some dreadful music. When I return home late at night, the same noises fill the carriage. But as soon as I get home, I am met with the sounds of spring.
The sounds of spring are much more preferable.
During the day, there is the constant buzz of bees on the wattles, the flowers and the fruit blossoms. The parrots are always talking to their young having just brought them out of their breeding boxes high up in our gum trees. Three families of King parrots have bred this year, and half a dozen chattering lorikeets. The corellas and the cockatoos are squawking to draw attention to their new bright whites, and coloured crests.
The wild ducks on the dam are parading their offspring. One pair have six youngsters, and last week I found them all on a dozen fine lettuce heads the pride of our elevated vegetable boxes, enjoying a take-away salad dinner. What was left has been now pulled out, and a dozen new young lettuce are in their place, but now with some netting over them. The teal have their new young, but they are happy walking about the dam. The wood pigeons are showing off their young, and at the same time showing the signs of getting pregnant again. Our ducks and chooks are being proud parents, and we have a dozen duck eggs about to hatch under a very attentive mother. The kookaburras have hatched their young in the tops of our tallest eucalypts, and they are dive-bombing looking for any ground level movement of any lizard or worm. They are the first to greet each dawn and the last to say goodbye to the sun each day. As the moon rises, the two tawny owls let us know they are awake, calling to each other from opposite sides of our small acreage. These are the sounds of spring we love.
But then comes Saturday morning. Motor mowers reducing the levels of the green lawns, whipper snippers, trimmers, hedge clippers, and leaf blowers, join the Saturday morning cacophony. But I would not exchange even them for the anticipated sounds of the V8 cars racing at Olympic Park if the Government gets its way. Surely, no member of the CDP could support the Government’s plan to allow motor racing at Olympic Park.
My favourite sounds of spring? Rain on the veranda roof over night. The Hallelujah Chorus from a thousand frogs that follow. The crickets the next night. The running water from the fountain into the fishpond, splashing oxygen into the water. And the low thunder of the new potatoes that we planted two months ago as they push their way up and out into the Spring air.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.