It has been an awesome week here in Australia --- I'm not sure I have the proper words to describe everything that's been happening, but I'll do my best.
Last Tuesday, July 21, all the philosophers of biology at ANU (and me) lit out for Dolphin Beach to attend PBDB 3: the third semi-quasi-annual Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach conference. (Historical note: Michael and I were at the first one, in 2006, which had about 10 people and four talks, along with snorkeling, walking along the beach, and general merry-making. See
here for pics.) The conference is held at
Easts Dolphin Beach Holiday Park in Moruya Heads, New South Wales. It's a really nice holiday park, with cabins of various sizes as well as camping/trailer park facilities. We booked up their "spa suite" to hold the talks in and a bunch of the smaller "villas" for our accommodation. It's hardly roughing it: All of the cabins have a gas range and an oven, which is more than I can say for our accommodations in Liversidge Court, as well as a regular bathroom with tub and shower, plastic chairs for sitting on the porch, eat-in kitchen, real glasses, and heated mattress pads. It's a great place to vacation, although I should note that the heated mattress pads are there only because it gets frickin' freezing at night and there's no other source of heat in the bedroom.
On Tuesday morning, we picked up two vans (Australians call them "people movers." How cute!) from the rental agency and departed Canberra around 9:30 to take the 2ish-hour drive down to the coast.
Here's our route:
On the way out of Canberra, we passed along one side of the airport, then through the suburb of Queanbeyan, which Michael insists on calling "queenie bean." I'm sure the locals won't mind. Just let's not have any bad jokes about Bungendore, shall we?
About halfway through the drive, we stopped in Braidwood, as per tradition, to have lunch at a really good pie shop. But wouldn't you know it --- the pie shop is closed on Tuesdays. (WTF? Closed on Tuesdays?) So we made do with some inferior pies from a bakery next door, which also happened to have some really good sourdough bread, so we bought a few loaves to have for breakfasts at the beach.
Philosophers at lunch:
Left to right, seated: back of my head, Arnon, Jo, Alkistis, Brett, Kelly, Rob, Kim. Standing: Matt, Wiebke, Kim2, Ellen.
This isn't everybody --- in addition to our two vans, there were several car-loads of people coming from Sydney and few other stragglers who met us as the beach, so this is just the core ANU-based group. Kim2 (center of the photo, in the back), so called to contrast with the original Kim, is part Native American, but he's been been living in New Zealand since he was a teenager. He's working on his masters' thesis with Kim1. I mention this because his thesis is on cognitive evolution, specifically the role of the narrative ability and storytelling and theory of mind in early hominid evolution. So, really, it's like we're the same person. Well, research-wise, anyway, if you swap "evolution" for "development." Cool.
Michael tells Santa...er, Kim what he wants for Christmas:
Braidwood also has a fantastic old-fashioned lolly shop called The Boiled Lolly, selling all manner of homemade gummy critters, peach slices, malt balls, chocolate-covered candied ginger, etc etc. It's indicative of the town, which feels a bit like the Old West, with one very wide, dusty street running through it and shops with big, creaky porches on either side. Except that the horse hitches have been replaced by parking meters.
Coming out of Braidwood, Michael took a turn at driving on the left side of the road. Don't worry, we all lived to tell the tale, and most of the pedestrians we passed escaped relatively unscathed. :) In all seriousness, he did a really good job and managed to keep mostly between the lines, even on quite windy mountain roads, and only hit one curb going around a roundabout. The real issue was that the location of the turn signal control and the windshield wiper control is reversed from where it is on cars in the States, so you can imagine the kind of confusion that causes when you're trying to change lanes.
Our next stop was the grocery store in Batemans Bay to stock up on food and other supplies (read: wine and beer) for the trip, then through the old mining town of Mogo, past Bimbimbie and finally to Moruya Heads.
This is where we stayed. If you click and drag the map, you can see a 360 degree rotation of the area, including the path down to the beach over the ridge on the left side of the road:
We were welcomed to the campsite by a very large, and very unafraid, kookaburra, the first that I've seen on this trip so far:
What a handsome guy! Kookaburras are the largest members of the kingfisher family, and, like all kingfishers, are carnivorous --- just look at that beak! This was demonstrated to us rather vividly when one of them caught a lizard in the flower patch outside of one of the cabins:
They stun/kill their prey before eating it by grabbing it in their beaks and whacking it on the ground repeatedly. This behavior becomes increasingly hilarious when they do the same thing to bits of bacon and hot dogs that they steal off the barbies.
After unpacking and settling in a bit, we took a walk across the road and down the path between the dunes to the beach. Dolphin Beach, to be precise. You might be thinking, as I have, that the place is called Dolphin Beach to lure in tourists, akin to what I'm sure are various Butterfly Coves and Fuzzy Animal Hotels and No Really We Have Mermaids Lagoons all around the world. But no. Dolphin Beach is called that because they actually have dolphins. There was a pod of five or six of them playing in the waves just off the beach when we got there, poking their fins out of the water and just cruising along. They were too difficult to photograph, unfortunately, because they were a bit far away and it was hard to predict when they would appear above the water, but we watched them for a while until they faded out of view. A few of the hardier members of our philosophical team (not me) even did a bit of swimming, although the water was truly frigid.
Unfortunately, all the fun had to come to a temporary halt at 4:30, when we all packed ourselves into the living room of Kim's spa suite to hear Matt and Stefan give talks. (Oh right...this is a conference. Yeah.) Matt did his bit about overheated claims of mindreading from cognitive neuroscience, and Stefan gave a talk on ecology. I didn't get as much out the session as the philosophers, obviously, but everything went really well. There was also the official unveiling of the t-shirt design for the conference:
I realize that this requires some explaining for the non-Australians in the audience, but I will save that for later so as not to drag this post out longer than it needs to be. (Too late...)
The sun was starting to go down as the talks wrapped up, so we all headed back to our own cabins to prep for dinner. Due to the number of people there (about 30), we had agreed that everyone would be responsible for bringing food for themselves or their cabin group, but that cooking and would be a communal affair. There were two gas-powered barbies just outside our cabin, next to a very long picnic table, and we made the most of it.
Kim demonstrates his carnivorous tendencies, with Stefan and Rob looking on:
Gal and Matt take care of the veggies:
View of the barbies from our porch:
I hope you can tell from this photo just how dark it is at night there. We got very lucky on the first night: The air was cold and absolutely crystal clear, and there was very little moonlight. After dinner, we all went walking out on the beach, and away from the lights of the holiday park, the stars were breathtakingly bright. Looking up from the beach, I could see the entire span of the Milky Way and even the two Magellanic Clouds of galaxies, like foggy smudges on the background of sky. Even in a planetarium, I've rarely seen the stars that bright and clear. It was barely possible to make out the constellations; I'm used to relying on the fact that constellations are made up of brightest stars in the sky, but even the Southern Cross was hardly different from all of the surrounding pinpricks of light. The exception was Jupiter, which was was very high and very bright, and it was even possible to pick out Mars because it looked genuinely red. Many people have said that looking at the stars makes them feel tiny and insignificant, but for some reason it wasn't like that. The stars felt like they were so close, almost close enough to touch, and so bright, like they were inviting me in and not pushing me away.
Mirroring the stars overhead, there was phosphorescent bacteria underfoot: Scrape the toe of your shoe through the sand, and you could see hundreds of glowing points, like the tail of a comet. It was in the sea, too, and the waves glowed blue as they crashed on the beach. A few brave souls (not me) went swimming in it, and they said that their movements through the water looked like they made millions of sparks.
Stefan and Kim2 lit a fire at the base of the sand dunes with some driftwood and eucalyptus branches, and we all huddled around to keep the chill away. The light and the smoke made the stars a little harder to see, but by this point I think everyone was so cold that we didn't care very much about that. We sat around until the fire burned down, talking and drinking and listening to Kim 2 recite his bush poetry. It felt ancient, like we were the first humans to huddle by a fire to keep warm and to listen to the crash of the waves and to see the vastness of the stars.
People had been drifting back to the cabins in twos and threes for a while, but Michael and I stayed out until it got too cold and smoky to handle the beach any more. We kicked sand over what remained of the fire and wandered back across the road to the cabins. And while we were chatting with some of the other conference-goers in the yard, we saw a pair of kangaroos! It looked like a mother and a baby, lurking just on the edge of the campsite and just out of the light, but as soon as we moved closer they hopped away. Come on, we just wanted a picture!
We hung out a bit more after that, but everyone was getting sleepy, so we decided to call it a night and headed off to our cabin. On the way back across the campground, we ran into Kim2 and decided to take one last walk on the beach to enjoy the stars. It was absolutely silent by this point --- the fire had gone out and everyone but us had gone to sleep. We could see the entire sky overhead, with just the ocean and the eucalyptus trees marking out the edge of the horizon, and the Southern Cross starting to set over the forest. After a very refreshing walk, we made it back to our cabin, where we checked the time for the first time since the talks had ended; it was 3:30 am. Couldn't have asked for a better night.
The next morning, Wednesday, we woke up around 9ish, feeling bright and refreshed (which is more than I can say for the rest of our fellow conference participants). Breakfast was a leisurely affair, as people tumbled out of cabins to share around bread and cheese and tangerines and such. Michael and I had bought some lovely Tasmanian Camembert that we contributed to the common pool.
Once everyone was reasonably awake and reasonably well-fed, we piled back into the cars and drove a little ways up the road to Shelly Beach.
Many people (not me) went snorkeling. I have to admit that I was slightly tempted to, but I've been completely spoiled by the coral in north Queensland. The water was really cold, necessitating a full wetsuit, and there was a very strong current, which not only made it hard to swim but which was chasing most of the larger wildlife away. Even the most gung-ho snorkelers only stayed out for 1/2 hour or so before joining the rest of us on the beach.
Michael and I took the opportunity to just enjoy the sun, walk along the beach, and peek into tide pools:
With fronds like these, who needs anemones? (Groan!)
Here are a few more pictures from Shelly Beach. First, Kim2, taking it easy for all of us sinners:
Kim and Rob, post-snorkel:
Patrick and his awesome tattoo:
Me on the rocks:
Alkistis and friend:
Arnon, after being buried in the sand:
Instead of taking the cars back to Dolphin Beach for lunch, a few of us walked around the point of the shoreline instead. It was a little rough going at times, since we needed to find a way from the slightly higher bluffs at Shelly down to the scrubby lower forest that surrounds Dolphin, and there wasn't really a trail. But there weren't any snakes either...at least none that we could see. :) Our timing for getting back was perfect, though, since as soon as we started walking along Dolphin Beach back to the campsite, we saw a dolphin surfing in the waves. It was really close to shore, too, and acting very human --- riding the crest of a wave almost until it crashed on the beach, and then swimming out to catch the next one. Amazing.
By this point, we were pretty worn out and hungry, so we had lunch and then retired to the shade of the cabin for a little rest before the next set of talks, which were called for 2:30. A number of us assembled at Kim's cabin for the talks, but Kim wasn't there. In fact, there were only about 5 of us there out of the 30 who should have been. Where is everyone? We checked a few cabins, but they seemed to be empty. By this point we started to suspect that we were either the victims of a cruel hoax or the new stars of a very bad horror movie. Well, at least we'd seen very bad horror movies and we knew what to do: split up and search the area. ("I'll be right baaaack!!") This preferably happens at night and in the dark and with a woeful lack of flashlights and the wind creaking in the branches for dramatic effect, but we only had the lovely afternoon sun. Of all the rotten luck...
Anyway, Rachael and I headed across the road to check whether anyone might have gone down to the beach. Hello, anyone there? Yes, in fact: Everyone was down at the beach and we soon saw why: Whales! There were two
southern right whales swimming, and possibly mating, just offshore at the far end of the beach. Whoa. The rest of the crew had gathered their field glasses and some had even grabbed their swimming gear and gone swimming out to get a closer look. (Obviously, not me.) Brett, in fact, had gotten such a close look that the local beach police had called him out of the water given him a ticket (!) for harassing the wildlife. Seriously? You can get a ticket for that? Okay, I get it, they're concerned that the whales feel safe enough to come back to this beach and keep on doing their natural, whale-y things, but really, who's in more danger from this encounter: a 100-ton whale or a 150-pound human? Really.
By this point, the rest of the stragglers had joined us on the beach and we watched the whales until they swam out of sight. I think it's safe to say that there's no other conference in the world that would delay a talk session because most of the conference participants were swimming with whales. But we finally did get to the last three talks, from Thomas, Patrick, and Brett, and we got a good photo of everyone posing with their official conference t-shirts. I'll post that as soon as I get a copy.
After the talks, we ran the usual grilling drill for dinner, with an unusual twist: Michael, despite 14 devoted years of vegetarianism, was convinced by the circumstances and some arguments about animal management to try a bit of grilled kangaroo. Here's how that went:
I think it's pretty clear that he's sticking with the vegetarianism thing. Perhaps more priceless than his reaction, though, is everyone else's reaction:
That's Joyce, PGS, Patrick, and Alkistis in genuine, unposed shock.
While we were putting the dinner things away in the cabins and trying to make sure that we ended up with approximately the same number of dishes and silverware that we started with, I spotted two kangaroos (live ones), hanging out behind the cabins. Michael and I quickly corralled Matt and Wiebke, UPenn students who were very keen on having the entirety of the Aussie experience, and went out to follow them with Michael's torch. The pair was definitely a female and her joey, probably the same ones we'd seen last night. They didn't seem particularly concerned that we were around, but wouldn't let us get too close before hopping away.
That night it wasn't nearly so clear; some clouds had rolled in during the afternoon and had not quite rolled away again, and there was also a good bit more humidity in the air. We lit another fire on the beach, and watched the phosphorescent waves roll in. A few people headed into the water to see what it was like to swim in it --- finally, yes me! Michael and I headed a little ways away from the campfire so everyone else couldn't see, and he rolled his jeans up while I disrobed a little more fully to get a better experience. Let me just say that it was worth every bit of the hypothermia risk and the sand in uncomfortable places. When I moved my legs through the water, it churned up the bacteria into millions of bright sparks. All of my movements left a trail that lasted behind me and that coated my body in the water like tiny, cold diamonds. The best part was to scoop the water up and toss it into the air and watch it fall back into the ocean like a comet or a shimmering firework. I hardly even felt cold after a while, possibly because bits of me had gone numb, but also because it was so incredibly exhilarating to feel all that cold water on my warm core, like an electric spark.
Even still, I didn't last very long before running out and back up the beach to the fire. There was still a strong current, and an extended night swim in that frigid ocean was not on the menu. The night didn't last nearly as long as the one before, since most people were worn out from the day (or still from the night before!) and since we had to leave early to get back to ANU.
Thursday morning involved lots of packing up, pathetic attempts to get sand out of our cabins, and silverware swapping so that we wouldn't be charged for missing utensils. The trip back to ANU was fairly uneventful, apart from a bit of rain and the occasional dead wombat on the side of the road. I've never actually seen a live one, probably because they're (a) very shy and (b) very stupid, hence tend to wander slowly onto roads and then freeze in the headlights. This is what happens in a country with no natural carnivorous predators.
On Thursday afternoon, Michael gave a colloquium talk to the philosophy department on his work on models, which went over very well, if I do say so myself. After the talk was the traditional pub-dinner-pub routine, and then we finally made it back to Liversidge.
Epilogue: For the next four or five days, I was finding sand everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. I can understand it on the hem of my shirt or on the soles of my shoes, but inside my jeans pockets? Inside? Really? Incongruously, there's also sand caught in the lining of my winter coat, which I was wearing on the beach to keep warm.
Postscript: As usual, Walt Whitman perfectly captures the spirit of how it feels to have an academic conference at the beach:
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
