Into the Bush

By Jared Delahaye

Greetings all, Jared here to continue reporting on this Australian adventure.  We've just wrapped up our first official week of classes.  This Friday our lectures were done by a biologist who discussed the flora and fauna of the country.  Because of the natural environment of Australia, notably its extended geographic isolation and areas of arid climate, evolution has favored a unique set of both plants and animals.  The platypus and echidna, for example, are two creatures that fall into a subset of mammals endemic to the country.  This subset is the monotremes, characterized by the fact that they lay eggs as opposed to all other mammals which have live births.  Similarly, many marsupials, like kangaroos and wombats, thrive exclusively here as well.  Following this broad overview, the professor touched on some of her current work involving plant-herbivore interactions.  For example, one study looked at how possums change their diet when provided with different combinations of cineole, the main toxin in eucalyptus leaves.  The animals ate the best when provided with a combination of a cineole-containing food as well as another food with a different toxin.  I hope the inclusion of personal research as applied to the lecture topics continues because it was interesting to get an idea for what the professors here work on outside of teaching.  As a biology major, I felt the most in my element in terms of subject matter for these lectures.  With the wide variety of majors represented on this trip I think everyone will be weaving in and out of their academic comfort zones as should be the case for the liberal arts.


Following the lecture we took a trip to the zoo, an appropriate experience to complement the morning in the classroom.  We traveled shortly on a ferry from the harbor which was great.  The weather was ideal: warm and clear skies, both of which put the surrounding city on display perfectly.  It also opened up a more dynamic, postcard-friendly view of the Sydney Opera House.  Once we arrived at the zoo we rode a gondola to the top entrance and began to explore.  Obviously the native animals were a must-see, but I was able to spend some time with giraffes, lions, and elephants to name a few.  The coolest part of the Australian critters was an area where kangaroos, emus and koalas were out of cages and moving about on and around a circular footpath.  I had never been so close to zoo animals, let alone kangaroos, so it was definitely unique.  

Part of the group on a ferry to the zoo

Dick getting his learn on at the koala display

View of Sydney from the top of the zoo

Two red kangaroos chilling in the open area

In the evening we attended another Sydney Story, mentioned in the previous blog post by Dick. This particular story was by a folk artist who is currently doing historical research about different neighborhoods in Sydney.  He combined photographs, amusing songs and other information gathered to create palpable, humorous representations of King's Cross, the red light district, as well as other areas. 

The next day we headed west to the Blue Mountains joined by Howard, an environmental scientist who narrated our journey with a plethora of knowledge that has still yet to run out.  As much as I have enjoyed exploring Sydney thus far, I was quite excited to get away into the wild bush.  Our first stop was a botanical garden where we were guided through some of the larger native Australian flora.  It was interesting to learn about how nearly all of the trees and bushes have some sort of specific adaptation to survive in the dry climate.  Our guide Allen shared an anecdote about one such tree, the bottle tree, presumably named for its wide, thick trunk.  The aboriginals took advantage of the tree by drilling a hole in the trunk to extract some of the water, but the later white settlers would hack at the same type of tree until water literally gushed out.  The former technique did little to affect the tree's survival while the latter was much more destructive, effectively killing it.  Even beyond this view into land use practices, I felt this was a simple way to represent the overall differences between the Aboriginals and British settlers as is becoming ever more apparent through our lectures thus far.

Following the botanical garden we continued on to Scenic World, a tourist attraction perched on the edge of multiple national parks coming together in a huge forested valley.  The area of the parks makes up to 3 million acres, prompting U.S. State size comparisons, Alabama in this case, which have come up a surprising amount of times so far.  I guess it's to be expected when the locals see the attempts at mental conversions from metric to feet.  We took a small enclosed trolley on railroad tracks downhill to get farther into the basin.  It was a short but intense ride filled with Indian Jones music (seriously) and a peak descent angle of just over 50 degrees, which felt nearly vertically and quickly explained why the seats were so reclined.  There was a beautiful overlook at the bottom of the trolley that I feel comfortable describing as breathtaking.  It was my first look at the expansive wilderness that makes up so much of the country.  Howard guided us on a short walk around the basin as well as one final jaunt down a separate walking path, passing along knowledge about the trees and other plants throughout.

The view of the basin from the bottom of the trolley

We finally arrived at our accommodations: Jemby Rinjah, a series of large, rustic cabins connected by wooden walkways early in the evening where we enjoyed a catered meal of fish and chips.  Having been warned that this is to be the best accommodations on the trip and tired as I am from the days of traveling and hiking, I'm taking this opportunity to sign off.

-All photos courtesy of Allison Perry