Ramblings
Bush Tucker Man is an utterly mesmerizing Australian TV series from the late 1980s that follows Les Hiddins as he travels through remote areas and demonstrates how to find bush tucker — forage wild foods — in inhospitable environments.
I find it remarkable in the respect and indebtedness Mr. Hiddins gives to the Aboriginal people of Australia, as well as the the understated editing. I can only imagine how frenetic and unnecessarily dramatic a contemporary version of this program would be.
Unfortunately, it seems only the first three episodes of the first season are available. Also, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation doesn’t allow video embedding, so you’ll have to follow the link:
Reading
- Putting Time In Perspective – It’s all too easy to become fixated and trapped by our myopic experience of time. This humorous and eye-opening exploration breaks down our regular human measurements and makes the vast spans of time slightly less abstract.
- ‘We Buried Him and Kept Walking’: Children Die as Somalis Flee Hunger (non-paywall) – Judge me harshly if you wish, but this exemplifies why I consider humans a failed species. We have been considered behaviourally modern humans for at least 40,000 years, and it is painfully evident we have learned nothing about caring for one another nor the biosphere which supports us and every other living creature.
- How Animals See Themselves (non-paywall) – “When animals become easier to film, it is no longer enough to simply film them; they must have stories“