Posts by Joe Wylie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Here I sit in a coffin full of shit
As she knits guillotines for the epileptic fit
That killed meToy Love / Chris Knox, Good Old Joe
-
Whereas people are evacuated of... well, that's when you need your portaloo.
Just quoting my neighbour, Jolisa. Around here, we tend to be as sloppy as the local substrate with our usage & abusage. As it happened, the earth already smote our laxity by voiding its bowels upon our little linguistic Sodom 'n Gomorrah.
-
Avonside is munted, basically.
Just got back from the Warehouse with a bag of candles to find the power on. Hallelujah. Civil defence called while I was out to ask if I wanted to be evacuated. Life will be good once the portaloos and water show up.
-
I must admit, I cant think of a good reason WHY tui would imitate extinct species...
Wonder what kind of call they were imitating? Some species that share the same environment seem to use co-operative calls that sound similar to human ears, such as the predator alarm calls of the tui's Australian relative the noisy miner and the completely unrelated rainbow lorikeet. There are distinct calls for predator-in-the-air and predator-on-the-ground, shared and mutually understood by both species.
. . . what happened to our terrestrial mammals?
Thomas Brunner = one dog?
-
Not disputing yours - or Flannery's - point, Chris. It's a common misconception, even among Australians (the kind that think Nullarbor is an aboriginal word) that there are no placentals in Oz, full stop. A lot of Flannery's work has been with native rodents, especially in Papua-Niugini. Only other thing I'd question is your mention of native placental mammal species extinctions in Australia. Apart from small rodents I'm not aware of any.
-
. . . placental mammals, present in the fossil record of Australia, had all gone extinct, out-competed over evolutionary time by more energy-efficient marsupials with their small but well-adapted brains.
Not true. Australia has over 50 long-established species of native murid rodent, and around 75 bat species.
Also the non-placental/marsupial distinction is a bit fuzzy. Most bandicoots have a placenta at some stage of pregnancy. Who knows, over time they could evolve to become a form of pakeha. -
Long as we don't start getting out the calipers & measuring skulls :)
-
Shadbolt is the only Pakeha writer who has engaged with this (that I know about)
Does Tim Flannery's being Australian disqualify him as a Pakeha?
-
Geez Joe
While I don't doubt Shadbolt's expertise re. NZ history, I'm perfectly capable of recognising overwrought and portentous for its own sake. It was everywhere when I was growing up, and much of it was Shadbolt's 'official' wordsmithery. Good on him, it was the state-sanctioned style of the day, there wasn't a lot of such work about, and he had to turn a buck.
That's why Trotter's such a goddam dinosaur, still puffing on in the overpadded manner that was all the go four decades ago.
-
Maurice Shadbolt, The Shell Guide to New Zealand, 1968.
If I'd been asked to take a blind guess who wrote that I'd have gone for Chris Trotter.