Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Bats

At the little farming settlement of Stuart's Brook, in the upper Hunter 
Valley, there is a long-abandoned gold mine, right beside the road. 
Consisting of a single shaft driven straight into the bank, it goes for 
perhaps 15 metres or so and then stops.

The tunnel is just tall enough and wide enough for a person to walk along 
bent over`. Near the end, where it is darkest, a colony of sleek little 
grey-black bats lives on the roof and walls, flying out at night to catch 
insects.

They look like an army of mice bivouacked for the night (or in their case, 
day), each wrapped in his or her cloak (wings). They are charming, and it 
is good to see this old man-made horizontal hole in the ground serving such 
a useful purpose.

It is some years since I was at Stuart's Brook, but just recently, at the 
Flora Festival near Gosford, I picked up an interesting brochure on bats, 
produced by the Flying Fox Information and Conservation Network. It was 
dated 1997, but its information had not dated.

Did you know that a quarter of all mammal species worldwide are bats? There 
are over 900 of them.

More importantly, the little insectivorous bats (microchiroptera) that flit 
around barely noticed at night consume up to 40 percent of their body 
weight in insects nightly. They are nature's non-chemical controller of 
insect populations.

According to the brochure, "a single little brown bat can catch 600 
mosquitoes in one hour". The millions of bats that emerge every evening 
from the Bracken Cave in Texas consume 250 tons of insects before dawn.

The other type of bat in Australia is the flying fox (megachiroptera), of 
which we have four species. Contrary to what fruit growers like to tell 
you, these large furry bats live mainly on nectar, pollen and native 
fruits.

According to the brochure, "many commercial hardwood timber trees rely on 
flying foxes to transport their pollen and fruits". It also points out that 
"most eucalypts open their flowers after sunset with the maximum amount of 
nectar being produced at night".

Unfortunately, as forests are cleared and replaced by farms, the flying 
foxes must find nourishment where they can: orchards are a logical and 
natural replacement for native food sources.

Flying foxes actually play a vital role in the regeneration of native 
forests, moving the pollen and seeds of some 40 eucalypts and 66 other 
native plants many kilometres from the parent tree and thus maintaining the 
diversity and health of our forests.

Last year there was furore over a Queensland fruit grower who rigged up 
some sort of electrified mesh and killed thousands of flying foxes 
attempting to dine on his property.

But, as the brochure observes, "the health and long-term survival of our 
already fragmented and rapidly diminishing native forests depends on the 
conservation of flying-fox habitat".

Mind you, in Queensland, they have of late been engaging in a scandalous 
and ecologically disastrous program of clearing native forest on a vast 
scale, so conserving flying foxes with an eye to the long term survival of 
our native forests would seem to be a low priority for both state and 
federal governments.

In a drought-prone continent, under threat of large-scale desertification, 
the elimination of forests (with their tendency to encourage precipitation) 
is one of the more shortsighted of our agricultural practices, along with 
the introduction of water-intensive crops like rice and cotton.

* * *

Rare talents
I have remarked on more than one occasion on the poverty of Australian 
scriptwriting for films and TV. Australians can write high-quality, 
sophisticated scripts displaying wit and intelligence, as well as a 
graceful mastery of the language and the medium. But not very often.

And the Australian Writers' Guild agrees with me. The Guild held its annual 
Awards ceremony, the Awgies, on September 6 in Melbourne.

In four of the categories, only one script was felt to be of an adequate 
standard to be nominated by the judges. These categories included the 
prestigious original feature film script, where only Rolf de Heer's The 
Tracker was included.

The Awgies have high standards, attempting to recognise "works of creative 
innovation". This puts them out on limb in Australia, where awards 
ceremonies usually follow the US formula of equating commercial success or 
popularity with excellence.

Actually, since the Awgies acknowledge works that "advance the art and 
craft of writing", they also rise to a higher level as the general standard 
rises. The higher the general standard, the better writing must be in order 
to be judged "fresh and innovative".

There was some complaining apparently about the Awgies' judges sticking to 
such a high standard, but as Guild President Ian David told reporters, such 
rumblings of discontent are "perennial — part of the territory".

It is to be hoped the Australian Writers' Guild continues to maintain its 
standards, for the quality of writing for stage and screen, radio and 
television will not be improved by lowering the bar at which writers aim.