After the cool change this afternoon, I went for a walk upstream along the Maribyrnong River from Solomon’s Ford.

About 2km up from the ford, a kangaroo hopped across the path and into the long grass just in front of me.

Sadly, it was so quick that I did not have time to get the video out on the phone and record it.

Actually, I don’t think it was a kangaroo. Apparently the type of hopping marsupial which inhabits the upper reaches of the Maribyrnong are swamp wallabies. And this was a rather small and dark cousin of Skippy.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a wallaby in Avondale Heights. I last saw one 15 years ago in Grimes Flat.

I’m not sure whether it counts officially as lucky, but I do feel very lucky to have seen the wallaby.

The phrase “Land of the Long Weekend” was coined by the late conservative Melbourne psychologist and sociology commentator Ronald Conway, as the title of a book he published in 1976.

I have not read that book, but I consider, just like Donald Horne’s 1963 classic The Lucky Country, the phrase itself has passed into Australian conceptual memory as an expression to be dredged up from time to time, devoid of its original meaning, by people who want to make a point (whether or not the point is connected to what the author originally meant).

In appropriating that phrase from Mr Conway, I am at risk of using it ignorantly in a way estranged from whatever he wrote in his book. However, unlike the industrial relations commentators of the 1990s who sought to use it to argue in favour of less public holidays and longer working weeks, I want to use it simply as a segue into a discussion on Australia Day.

We have a lot of public holidays in Australia, which are leveraged into either long weekends, or, if the day falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, into a four day weekend. This is part of our way of life, and something which I think is pretty much sacrosanct in a country as wealthy as ours. In Victoria alone, there are 11 public holidays (not counting those like Easter Sunday which fall on the weekend).

One of those, which is rather contentious at the moment, is the 26th of January, currently known as Australia Day but which previously was known in various guises as Settlement Day and Foundation Day.

This day is the one which marks the anniversary of the landing of the First Fleet in 1788, and which is called Invasion Day by indigenous Australians and many other Australians.

I am a patriotic Australian, but I also believe in respecting the feelings of other people, particularly fellow Australians. And perhaps, as I get older, I get more progressive about some things. Hence, much as I strongly believe, for hedonistic reasons, that we need a public holiday at this time of year, and for patriotic reasons that we need to have an inclusive national day, I am now sympathetic to the idea of moving the date of Australia Day.

This is probably going to happen organically, and I think that PM Scott Morrison’s campaign to try and rebrand Australia Day as an inclusive event is bound for failure for as long as it falls on 26 January. Too many people (including me) now feel that it is hurtful to the indigenous original inhabitants.

But the whole idea of promoting 26 January is a fairly recent thing. Older friends tell me that it was the Fraser Government in the 1970s who really first sought to promote it, because the real national holiday, Anzac Day, was not really inclusive of all the post war migrants who had not served or were descended from those who had served in the two world wars in the Australian forces.

I am not impressed, despite being a very conservative person, with some of the populist dog whistling which has gone on in recent years about the sanctity of Australia Day. WA Senator Dean Smith proposed, a year or two ago, a private member’s bill requiring a popular referendum or plebiscite before the date could be changed. Well and good for Senator Smith (who is mostly a good bloke) to become a born again populist. But I do remember that he very firmly argued against the idea of a plebiscite on same sex marriage not long before that because the federal parliament should not seek to abdicate its responsibility to make laws.

So, as I have said, there is at least a twofold problem. One is to find a decent reason to have a public holiday in late January or early February because this is something we are used to having. The second is to have a more inclusive national day. And perhaps a third is to mark a day for national reconciliation with the indigenous inhabitants.

And being me, born and raised in The Land Of The Long Weekend, my solution is a threefold one, that is, replace Australia Day with three public holidays.

Taking late January or early February first, we could either make the final day of the Australian Open a public holiday (in Melbourne we already have 2 public holidays to mark sporting events), or we could celebrate Lunar New Year, which happens around now. [As close to 2 million Australians are now of Chinese or Vietnamese ancestry, Lunar New Year might be a worthwhile alternative public holiday at this time of year.]

Alternatively, 13 February, which is the anniversary of the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, could serve perfectly for both the need for a summer holiday and indigenous reconciliation.

Then there is the idea of when we should celebrate Australia Day?

My personal choice is 8 August, the date of the Battle of Amiens in 1918, when the five divisions of the Australian Corps, under the command of General Monash (along with various other forces also placed under the command of this unique Australian), broke through the German lines at the start of the final offensive which led to the defeat of Germany 3 months later. General Ludendorff (who, contrary to what is shown in the first Wonder Woman movie, lived into the 1930s and got up to lots more mischief) called that day the ‘Black Day of the German army’. Hence we could call 8 August either Amiens Day or Schwartzertag, the day when Australia first took a significant step on the world stage as a young nation.

Or there is 9 May, which is the anniversary of the 1901 opening of the first parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. That day, marking the birth of a progressive and inclusive democracy which preserves one of the freest nations on the planet, could be considered more inclusive than 26 January.

For a day for national reconciliation with the indigenous original inhabitants, 13 February, as indicated above, does tick two important boxes. But 27 May, which is the anniversary of the 1967 referendum which gave aborigines the full rights of citizenship finally, is probably a very worthy day to be considered.

Australia is a very rich country. We can afford to have several more public holidays. Moving Australia Day, either to a day significant to reconciliation with the original inhabitants, or to a day significant to a stride in the development of the Commonwealth, would be a worthy step to take. Having a day to mark either of these themes separately is something that we should consider.

Aside from my occasional fix of AFL, I am not really that interested in sport, although I wish I had bothered to watch the Indian test team win against the odds in the final batting session of the fourth test today.

Reading on my news feed stories about how many of the tennis players and their entourages, in town for the Australian Open, are now not just in quarantine, but lockdown due to covid tests, does not really perturb me.

After all, tennis is not a sport which I particularly enjoy watching, and whilst the Australian Open is the most significant tennis tournament in both the Indo-Pacific region and the Southern Hemisphere, I do not think, during this time of Plague, that a disastrous or sub-standard tournament, or even a cancellation, is going to make all that much difference to the long term standing of that tournament in future years.

Nor do I have too much sympathy for those players and their companions, stuck in their rooms. I assume they have access to Netflix? Or perhaps they could catch up on their reading? When I travel, I usually carry a bag of books to keep me amused on the plane or the train (there is little countryside to admire in Italy when the train is hurtling through a long mountain tunnel at 240kmh) or when resting in the hotel (I do like spending time resting in my hotel with the door locked and my feet up).

But we have to wonder what sort of sporting events we are going to have between now and the end of 2022, given that I believe that the covid plague is going to keep us off balance for at least that long.

The Australian F1 GP has already been postponed, and I am going to wonder as to whether that event is ever going to happen in Melbourne again. There are many oil rich countries in time zones friendlier to the US and European TV audiences who would love to bid for it, and who would be more attractive to the masters of Formula One.

And then we have the 2020 Olympics. They were deferred until this July, which is only 6 months away. With 96 million cases of covid worldwide and over 2 million deaths just at this moment, I am skeptical about the Olympics going ahead. As Tom Clancy proposed in his late 1990s techno thriller Rainbow Six, an Olympics can be the perfect super spreader event for a pandemic.

But perhaps I am being naive. The Olympics are not about a live crowd anymore, they are there for the TV audience. Of course, if they go ahead in front of empty stadia, the Japanese government will be rather peeved – I would assume billions have gone into building state of the art facilities that are not even going to be sat in once before the tumbleweeds start ghosting through.

Much as I only think the summer Olympics count, we also have the Winter Olympics to contend with too, next year. They are scheduled for February 2022 in Beijing, one of the most popular cities in the world right now, with the most popular political leaders (well, 74 million more people voted for Trump than they did for Xi).

Will the Winter Olympics go ahead, and if so, will anyone bother to attend? I personally think that this is a good time for the rest of the world to do a Moscow 1980 or a Los Angeles 1984 style boycott, in order to acknowledge the laudable human rights record of the PRC government and the biosecurity lapses which are likely to have caused the covid to escape from a Wuhan laboratory 14 months ago.

But that is not the only event at risk. The 2022 Commonwealth Games (which I wish were still called the Empire Games) are due to be held in Birmingham in July next year. With the UK currently ‘enjoying’ a wave of especially contagious covid, does anyone really think that the Commonwealth Games can go ahead in 18 months’ time?

And then, to round out 2022, the Soccer World Cup is due to be played in Qatar in November-December. If I remember correctly, there were a lot of irregularities regarding Qatar’s campaign to be awarded the tournament by FIFA. And more recently there was that unfortunate incident where misogynist clowns (not to call them airport police) arranged for female Australian passengers to be removed from their flights at Qatar’s airport and subjected to illegal mass gynaecological examinations. I already dislike soccer enough that I rejoice when the Socceroos get eliminated, but to have a tournament in Qatar?

Of course, the bright side to a tournament in Qatar is that it is well on the way to achieving herd immunity against covid. In a population of 2.8 Million, there are 147,500 covid cases (ie one in every 19 people so far, which compares slightly better than the one in every 14 people in the USA). Given the World Cup is in 22 1/2 months, there is plenty of time for everyone in Qatar to get and get over the covid by November 2022. If so, I can then still cheer on England (yes I am funny that way) as they attempt to replicate the spirit of ’66.

As I said at the start of this entry, I am not really interested in sport. But if you are, you are likely to have some lean lean lean times in front of you in the next two years.

In the mid 1980s, a little known cult known (in as original a way as possible) as the Jesus Christians decided on a major publicity stunt. They announced that several of their members were to prove their faith in the Lord by walking across the Nullarbor without supplies.

For those of my readers in mainland China, or in that wasteland of ignorance of geography which is the USA, the Nullarbor Plain is a flat, treeless expanse which straddles the eastern portion of southern Western Australia and the western portion of South Australia for, perhaps, a thousand miles. [To be honest, I have no real idea when it stops and starts, but most of my fellow Australians are under the general impression that it covers most of the land mass between Perth and Adelaide.]

Most people were under the impression that this was suicidal, but these acolytes made it across successfully, mostly because the occasional driver would stop and give them food and water out of kindness for their fellow humans.

The writer Jon Ronson has written at least one very interesting article in the intervening years about the Jesus Christians, which perhaps has added to their fame more than that walk across the Nullarbor.

As it was, a few years later I was to briefly work with one of the people who had walked across the Nullarbor. I found this out many years later when I read something about the walk – it was not something he used to talk about. He did not strike me as particularly unbalanced at the time we worked together, although I did find him a little quirky (but that is a pot and kettle thing, to be honest). He decided that the conformity of office life was not for him and he departed a couple of years later.

I was thinking about this today when I was reading my feed on MeWe, my half abandoned social media account which crashed on me 18 months ago. I recently discovered that MeWe is a haven for conspiracy theorists of all sorts, so I decided to give MeWe another go, just for laughs.

Given that there is a large number of people in the world who suffer from mental illness, and many others who suffer from substance abuse, and many others who might not suffer from either, but still believe in matters which are not exactly rational, there are all sorts of bizarre things that people believe.

Like, did you know that 8% of Americans believe that Elvis is still alive? That sounds pretty wacky to me.

Of course, right now, we have QAnon being really topical. QAnon seems to be all about how Donald Trump is leading a secret fight against a Satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals who really rule the world.

People actually believe this stuff.

But some do not, and I found someone who does not believe it on MeWe this morning. This person has been studying QAnon’s revelations in detail and has become disillusioned. He writes:

‘Q lies about vaccines not all being bad, lies that a plane hitting the pentagon 9/11, lies that aliens exist in fake outer space, and tells you to believe the globe while making a SPACE FORCE with ‘GUARDIANS’ for the fake alien invasion, and go research flat earth.’

I cannot make this stuff up! If for no other reason, that, as you would see from reading this blog, I am able to write in a clear and coherent manner, with few grammatical or other errors.

This writer goes on to warn us that:

. all vaccines are bad

. the Earth is flat with a firmament dome

. aliens are fake and made in cloning labs

. UFOs are from stolen Tesla tech (I assume he means the physicist and not the electric car company)

. they are about to fake the alien invasion

. a plane did not hit the pentagon – it was a cruise missile.

Evidence was provided to the MeWe poster by God when he popped the song Masquerade from Phantom of the Opera into his head. He concludes: ‘Q is not of God and will not save you from New World Order. Only Jesus can save you from New World Order. TURN TO HIM!‘

Hmmm….

So, what this chap is really letting us know is that compared to the 9/11 Truthers, the Anti-Vaxxers, and the Flat Earthers, QAnon actually seems relatively reasonable – although ONLY in comparison to those three former groups.

I guess the jury is still out on whether QAnon is acceptable to Obama Birthers, or to people who believe in the Roswell crash etc.

But I probably should not laugh about these bizarre matters at the moment. The same sort of people who are waiting for Elvis to reappear or for the second coming of Jesus are the same sort of people with a hard wired eschatological outlook who are going to believe the ideas of QAnon or that vaccinations are dangerous or that 5G causes COVID or that the US election was not fair and free (for the record, I believe it was a fair and free election).

In the USA right now, there are people praying for Trump to declare martial law the way that General Flynn has suggested he can do to remain in power, or waiting for the Insurrection Act to be invoked. I read idiotic posts where people are asking whether Trump remains President as well or simply remains Commander in Chief after he invokes such powers. Good grief!

I was hoping, when the internet became ubiquitous, that people would become smarter. Instead, the computing power in your phone (which is more than what sent man to the moon) is no longer being used to post cat videos or to have arguments with strangers, it is being used to foster a new crazy kind of stupid.

The first Sinclair Lewis novel I read, probably most aptly, was ‘Can’t Happen Here’. It is a dark and pessimistic story about a populist demagogue, probably based in part on Huey Long, who turns himself from US President to Fascist Dictator.

It was one of his later novels, written in the 1930s, where issues in his own life collided with the darkness of world events. Critics have contended that Sinclair Lewis probably was drunk whilst he wrote the second half of that novel.

Drunk or not, the themes in that novel are similar to what he raised in his earlier, greater, novels, Arrowsmith, Main Street, and (my personal favourite) Babbit. That is, that the American Dream can very easily be turned into a nightmare.

At age 27, when I read it, I was quite disturbed about it. My undergrad studies of US history and politics (enough points to add up to a full semester’s worth of full time study) were still recent enough that I was familiar with a lot of the underlying personalities and events which Lewis was basing his work on.

You wonder sometimes whether books like that are warning, prophecy, or merely the posturings of an embittered old man.

Another Sinclair, Upton Sinclair, writing a generation earlier in The Jungle, painted an even bleaker picture of America, as seen through the eyes of an Eastern European migrant, whose family and innocence are corrupted through the depravity of American capitalism and Tammany style machine politics.

Which is to say that it would be naive, when looking at what happened on 6 January in the Capitol Building in the USA, to think that there have not been issues in the Republic for a long time.

Corrupt politics, in the form of Tammany Hall and similar machines, has existed since at least post-civil war. Demagogues have used cheap populism to seek power since at least the 1890s.

And as for riots and civil disobedience? The 1960s included very much of that, let alone the past year’s BLM and Antifa protests – which could only be described as non-violent by either the naive or the dishonest.

What is unprecedented in the events of 6 January is that the holder of the highest office in that land, the US president, was actively inciting his mob of supporters to march on the Capitol. Mussolini did something like that in 1923, in order to seize power in Italy. The ancient Romans had a problem along those lines for the last century of their Republic, and that did not end well for their constitution.

It would be interesting to know what was going through the mind of President Trump? Was he hoping that his mob would intimidate the Congress into voting to throw out the results of a legitimate election, based on insane conspiracy theories circulating online as the primary evidence? Or was he regretting that he did not take the advice of General Flynn, his disgraced former advisor, who was openly advocating the declaration of martial law in order to conduct fresh and ‘free’ elections?

The insanity and sheer idiocy of this past week, and of many of the participants, is something best seen, if at all, in a tinpot third world dictatorship. Seeing it at the heart of the USA, historically the global champion of democracy and freedom since the last days of the First World War, is disturbing.

This is particularly the case because there are some countries out there which are large, powerful, and definitely anti-democratic. Russia is authoritarian and interested in expanding its hegemony. China is both communist and aggressive, showing more of the latter than it has in six hundred years. The USA is needed as a bulwark for the rest of the world against those potential hostile powers. The USA’s nuclear umbrella is what has kept us safe from invasion for a very long time.

Early last year, I wrote in this blog that I had chosen to adopt the NFL’s perpetual underachiever, the Cleveland Browns, as my NFL team. After all, as a lifetime supporter of the Footscray Football Club (aka Western Bulldogs), I find underdog teams quite endearing.

Well, perhaps my decision to adopt them has proven lucky, as the Browns are in the NFL playoffs (what Americans call the finals series) for the first time in many years. On Sunday, they play the Pittsburg Steelers in the first week of the playoffs.

I wish them well. Hopefully they can emulate my beloved AFL team’s miracle run in 2016 and win their way through to the Super Bowl. If they do that, I might consider buying a Browns hat or t-shirt or jersey and make my support more tangible.

As a small child, my parents took me each year to have my photo taken with the Santa enthroned in the (now long gone) Forges of Footscray department store.

I suspect it (like my baptism, first communion and confirmation) were things that were more for my parents’ benefit than for me – a photo of your toddler with Santa is one of those things a parent wants to cherish.

Adults are not really interested in having photos taken with Santa. After all, Santa is not real – he is probably some poor bloke who is rather down on his luck and wanting to supplement his pension by wearing a red suit and white beard (I try not to be too cynical like the people who suspect Santas are all just winos). And the myth of Santa Claus has more to do with a clever late 19th century Coca Cola advertising campaign anyway.

But whilst children are regularly, photographed with the supposedly famous and powerful figure of Santa Claus, Grown ups are also interested in having their photos taken with supposedly famous and powerful figures. Like politicians, current and former, for example.

And Grown ups are prepared to pay far more for the privilege.

Take businessman and former veteran of the Peoples Liberation Army Huifeng ‘Haha’ Liu for example. He has spent at least $21,125 in buying his photo opportunities to pose with former Liberal Prime Ministers John “Santa” Howard and Tony “Elf” Abbott, and with federal Liberal MPs Michael “Elf” Sukkar and Gladys “Mrs Santa” Liu (no relation, I think).

The two following links discuss him if you want further details:

https://www.clownworldau.com/story/huifeng-haha-liu/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-04/asio-red-flags-liberal-donor-over-foreign-interference-risks/13018938

OK… now that you have chuckled over the Clown World blog and pondered the serious article in the ABC Newsfeed, you know that ASIO see this former member of Communist China’s armed forces as a threat to Australia’s national security for some reason or other.

Comrade ‘Haha’ is obviously no laughing matter.

There are two things about this chap which I find troubling.

The first is his creation (with the encouragement of such people as Gladys Liu and various misguided government officials) of the Australian Emergency Assistance Association Inc (AEAAI), an organisation funded by the Communist Chinese government through its consulate, which has 50,000 contacts in Australia on WeChat and a claimed 1000 ‘volunteers’ ready to rush at a moment’s notice to the side of any ethnically Chinese who is the victim of a crime (whether they are a PRC citizen or an Australian of Chinese descent) to provide assistance and to report back to the Chinese Consulate (just ‘in case’ these people need consular assistance).

As you might notice from the ABC article above, people are concerned that this is a way in which the Chinese Consulate is gathering information on the Chinese diaspora for other purposes.

In August last year, I did discuss, elsewhere in this blog, that the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, at Article 55.1, places ‘a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of the State’ on Consular missions. It appears to me that, with the tacit complicity of those domestic officials who have supported the AEAAI, that through this organisation, the network of PRC consulates in Australia is overstepping their boundaries.

Secondly, this chap has a habit of making quite generous donations to the Liberal Party. Whether he was an Army officer or ‘other rank’ during his time of military service, the Peoples Liberation Army is not open to people who are politically unreliable in the eyes of the Communist Regime. Service in the PLA is highly coveted. Either he is a Communist Party member or at the very least very committed to the Communist Party’s agenda.

Yet the Liberal Party has, supposedly, a history of opposition to Socialist and Communist ideology, and a philosophical basis grounded in liberal philosophy (ie the rights of the individual). So why are we seeing them give Comrade Haha the time of day, let alone accepting donations and having him pose for photos with senior Liberal luminaries?

There have been significant problems unearthed in the media in recent years about how the Liberals operate. This is not the first time that Liberal politicians or ex-politicians have been somewhat compromised in their quest for donor monies. Take the ‘lobsters with mobsters’ scandal which embarrassed then Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy in mid 2017. Or the various reports regarding irregularities allegedly involving various officials and MPs in the recruitment of new members en masse from various church groups and other sources – the type of activity commonly referred to as ‘branch staking’.

The Liberals need to clean up their act. Instead of pursuing donations from foreign non-citizen communists and their sympathisers who are trying to curry favour and influence with elected officials, they need to focus on listening to ordinary Australians (ie Menzies’ ‘The Forgotten People’) who are not multi-millionaires with tens of thousands of dollars to donate, but who otherwise will support ideas which promote individual liberty and feel a sense of genuine patriotism to the Australian nation.

Obviously, with a very small parliamentary majority, the Liberal party will not kick out any of its MPs – that is a degree of political suicide any government will see as one step too far (dethroning Prime Ministers is as far as it goes). But some things, such as loyalty to the nation and the integrity of our democracy, mean that perhaps our major political parties need to start booting out those MPs, former MPs, and lobbyists who are too closely aligned to foreign interests.

So, we might say ‘Haha’, but I don’t think anyone is laughing. This is all something which is very serious.

A lot of memes have been sent to me over the past few days marking the end of the old year and the start of the new year.

Most of them farewell 2020 with some profanities of some sort – I will not repeat them because, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, swearing gives people an excuse not to listen to you (or to read you, although I have very few actual readers on this blog).

Which got me thinking as to what the next orbit around the sun formally known as Anno Domini 2021 has got in store for us.

When the covid first invaded our consciousness in January last year, one of the many names it had (and yes, it seems to have had as many names as Aragorn son of Arathorn or The Phantom) was the Novel Coronavirus.

I’m not sure about you, but for me, the novelty of the pandemic and its cause has definitely worn off.

Novelty aside, 2021 still has a coronavirus literally plaguing us, just as 2020 did. In fact, I think this year could be worse.

Let’s look at some numbers:

. as of today, there are approximately 85 million recorded cases of covid worldwide

. the number of cases is doubling every 72 days

. the fatality rate is currently approximately 2.2%

. vaccinations in the USA are occurring at 200,000 people per day – as a double shot, at this rate, it would take 10 years to vaccinate the USA alone.

So, taking a hard look at the reality that these numbers mean (maths was always one of my stronger subjects in school), the number of covid cases could very possibly double 5 times over the course of 2021, meaning 32 times as many cases as we have now. That would mean an approximate 2.7 billion cases by the end of 2021 worldwide, and almost 60 million more covid related deaths.

This is not some sort of eschatological crisis (I have not changed my views from what I wrote last January). It is simply mathematical reality as to what is quite possible, and the realisation that countries like the USA need, if they were to try and get the covid under control within the next year, they need to vaccinate at a daily rate ten times higher than they currently are.

If Australia were to start vaccinating immediately (and I am glad we are waiting to see how things go in the USA and UK first), we would need to vaccinate 150,000 people per day to get it done by the end of 2021.

And that would be assuming that most people are going to be reasonable about vaccinations. We live in an era where vaccinations are now seen skeptically by a large part of the population. [As an aside, the refusal of militant islamic fundamentalists in certain remote pockets of the world to permit vaccinations has prevented the elimination of polio, which is now making a comeback. So if there is skepticism around polio vaccinations amongst some not particularly reasonable people, imagine what the reaction will be to a covid vaccine.]

Hence, I am rather cautious as to what to expect in 2021. I am still maintaining a large stash of toilet paper, which I am replenishing with regular visits to the supermarket, and I will not be too surprised if I continue to spend a large proportion of my working hours this year seated at my dining table in front of my laptop.

I just hope that is the worst that I see this year. We all are worried about the people we care about succumbing to this plague.

You can probably surmise that I am a fan of Tolkien.

Nature-wise, 2020 has been a good year for sighting native animals in my street. I saw a kookaburra across the road in August, and in autumn I sighted an owl in my gum tree on two separate nights. There have been various sightings of marbled geckos, mostly around the BBQ.

And on the weekend, I spotted a lizard, probably a blue tongue, darting into the pile of wood propped up against one side of my house (a recently dismantled fence which I am keeping for BBQ fuel).

It is gratifying that, even as suburbia grows further and further out, there are still native animals in the confines of my backyard.

Is it too much to wish for a koala to take up residence in my gum tree?