‘The Serendipity of Distance’ was NOT a crafted speech delivered “on a cold and wet [WINTER¹] afternoon in March 1984 by Professor Geoffrey Blainey, Faculty of Arts dean at the University of Melbourne, Chairman of the Australia-China Council and former head of the Australia Council to [1,000] Rotarians assembled in the Capitol Theatre” @ Warnambool in the federated state of Victoria, Australia, eep

‘At last it was there. It had stopped right out of cover into a break between the reeds. Raising a finger to warn her, he passed the field glasses.

‘By that clump of reeds,’ he whispered, ‘at ten o’clock.’

‘She took the glasses, drew herself up with some difficulty, and looke. She gave a little gasp that filled out and became a sigh, a soft ‘Ooooh’.

‘What is it?’

‘She sat back and lowered her glasses to her lap.

‘ ‘Jim,’ she said, ‘it’s a dunlin. You couldn’t miss it. They used to come in thousands back home, all along the shore and in the marshes. Common as starlings.’

‘He took the glasses and sared at the rare creatures he had [never set eyes on before] laid eyes on until yesterday that was as common as a starling.

‘ ‘Dunlin,’ he said.

And immediately on his lips it sounded different, and it wasn’t just the vowel. She could have laughed outright at the newness of the old word now it had arrived on this side of the globe, at its difference in his mouth and hers.

‘ ‘But here,’ he said.

‘He raised the glasses again.

‘ ‘It doesn’t occur.’

‘But it was there just the same, moving easily about and quite unconscious that it had broken some barrier that [MIGHT HAVE BEEN LAID DOWN A MILLION YEARS AGO], in the Pleiocene, when the ice came and the birds found ways out and since then had kept to the same ways. Only this bird hadn’t.

‘ ‘Where does it come from?’

‘ ‘Sweden. The Baltic. Iceland. Looks like another refugee.

‘He knew that word now. Just a few months after he had first heard it, it was common, you saw it in the papers every day ..

‘..the frame of the lens being also in some way magical, a boundary it would find it difficult to cross. He was sweating with the effort, drawing sharp breaths. At last, after a long time, he didn’t know how long, he laid the glasses regretfully aside and found Miss Harcourt regarding him with a smile. ..

‘I was the first to see it,’ he told her, I must be, or someone would have left a record. Miss Harcourt, we’ve discovered something!’

Enjoie-enjoie-enjoie ‘Monkeys with Keypads’ people.

John

Raison Drive (how we Nobel Prize for PHYSICS type-people enjoy our address, whhooppeee)

Littlehampton SA 5250

OveR

We Auss-ies have been Bushed by Location Scale Scope Dimension and utterly bewildered concerning our personal identities since late Feb 1606\ Jan 26 1770 but We-shall-probably-sort It-all-out @ the Death, OK

¹ the writer is not at all poking fun at historically stupid and ecologically ignorant usages which contradict 10,000 years of reliable, predictable, human-food-supplies-secure and radically/ critically immunologically Bio-organic-protective weather systems fact but what one southern Australian people (Yuhn-dalap SWWA – Leeuwin-Naturaliste Coastal Park) coastal region people – called mah-kara, first winter rains – but March is the (increasingly with man-made global heating Weather-systems moving with the rotation of the Earth eastward across the Indian Ocean at the say 30 – 35 degrees south of the equator band of latitude) hotter and drier mid-month of autumn (Fall) in our Old-people’s country