Flugtag?

Saturday night we had been out in Newtown until late but I still managed to wake myself up at 9 am to get ready to go to the 1^st Annual Australian Flugtag. As far as I know, it’s some European (maybe Austrian?) event which basically involves people making flying boats. The goal is to create a contraption that when pushed off a ramp by the team will fly as far as possible before landing in the water. It has to have a pilot who sits in the plane/boat (which I’ll call a ploat) and the rest of the team is responsible for pushing it down the runway. Each team has to launch a homemade contraption, and before launch they have to present a 30 second dance. Teams get points for distance in the water, but also creativity. It was held at the Royal Botanic Gardens by the harbour, and the weather was cloudy, but that was probably a good thing considering it was outside, on water and lasted five hours. Jessie and I got up and out early and managed to score the very best spots, right on the edge of the water. There were many, many teams of silly people who very obviously do not have degrees in aeronautical engineering. There were teams that went with Australian themes like The Flaming Galahs, some went with randomness like the team that dressed its pilot as a sausage and their ploat as a bun, some went with well known themes such as Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner. Actually, that was probably the best one in terms of creativity. They had their pilot dressed as Wiley Coyote, then the ploat was a totally classic, bright red Acme rocket of dynamite. One of the team members was dressed exactly as Roadrunner. The little dance involved WC and RR running around the platform, while the remaining team members held up little signs that said “Beep beep” and “Ka-bloom!” Then Roadrunner ran down the platform and jumped into the bay while Wiley Coyote got on the rocket and was pushed down the platform after him. There are tons of great videos on my camera of this, and I’ll have to put them on YouTube, but when that will be I’m not sure. There were interviews with the teams after they got pulled out of the water and the medical team looked them over, these interviews were sometimes impossible to understand. I consider myself fluent in English, but this, this is not English. One guy’s way of saying he got a wedgie: “I got me’s jocks up me bum.” I swear, I cannot take these people seriously.

Afterwards we walked back to the bus stop through the Botanic Gardens. There were these big trees and tons of people looking up into them. I couldn’t figure out what was so impressive or interesting, besides these great big melon trees. I walked over to this woman and asked what we were all looking at and she said, “Why, the bats of course!” Excuse me? Come again? Say what? Sure enough, those massive melons were not melons, but bats. Big bats. Bats that have a wingspan of over three feet! They are called the grey-headed flying-fox, and are one of the largest species of bat in the world. They can weight up to a kilo (2.2 pounds) and have a wingspan of 1.5 meters. Now, isn’t there something about the human arm wingspan being equal to our height? That would mean that at my 1.53 meters, these bats would have the same wingspan as me. Seeing them hang there and adjust their wings and then take off through the trees made me a little uneasy at first. But after a half an hour standing there watching them (and some very closely), I actually began to kind of like them. Their faces do look like a fox, and while I might not call them cute, I didn’t exactly think they were creepy either. They chatter very loudly, but I’d thought it was just the birds (which are very colourful and a little too friendly, landing on your head and everything). Anyhow, they eat figs and not human blood and have become quite a nuisance in the Botanic Gardens, killing 13 trees and ruining another 25 of the oldest trees in the gardens. They have hired a consultant to figure out how to move them to another location without pissing off the bat-lovers. The species is endangered, so it’s not possible to just off them, but it’s hard to find another location for them since there are already two other bat colonies in Sydney, which apparently don’t have room for new bats. I guess back in 2002 in Melbourne the Victorian government and 200 volunteers moved a colony of 30,000 bats from Melbourne’s botanic gardens to a suburb. According to an article I’m reading they did it with noise: “’We had speakers mounted on four-wheel drive motorbikes driving around under the trees blaring out recorded industrial noises, we had people blowing whistles, beating drums, you name it,’ explains Mark Winfield from the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment. ‘We nudged them along the Yarra metre by metre, day by day through people’s backyards, through suburban cemeteries, other public gardens until we got them where we wanted them.’” It’s a $5000 AUD fine for anyone who harms them, so the consultant had better be careful!

There were also birds in the gardens, and my favourite bird here is called the Sacred Ibis. Google them and see what they look like – they are everywhere here. When I walk to work in the morning they are outside around the landscaping at the hospital enterance picking at the ground with those long beaks… it makes me feel like I’m getting a glimpse of something prehistoric. It’s like in Århus or in another city you have pigeons, well here you have the Ibis. I love it. They were walking around the gardens with the cockatoos, who also have a massive wingspan and are very noisy. Looking up and seeing parrots in the trees still surprises me, and reminds me of exactly what a weird island I’m currently residing on. I’m not sure if I’ve heard the laughing kookaburra yet. People say I have for sure, but I don’t know.