Haveachat with Les Shipp

by Les Shipp

predators. The journey from Canada to Mexico is made each year as they holiday in the warmth of Mexico. All the cleared land in Canada has diminished their numbers but they are still an awesome sight when they congregate.

  They are not a very big butterfly but they are a beautiful orange colour with black markings on their wings and when they land the whole tree looks like it has turned into a moving mass of colour. What happens to them after their holiday I’m not sure, perhaps it is only their offspring that returns to Canada. If that is the case then that in itself is a source of wonder, how do they know the way? And what inspires them to make such a hazardous journey? There must be something really important to them which inspires them to make the journey.

  Another mystery to me is what inspires someone to spend years of their life studying these insects and traveling thousands of miles to do so. For me I would admire them and let them get on with their life without any interference from me, barking or not they can do very well without me.

  I HAVN’T HAD AS MUCH FUN SINCE

  What a fun day it was, Tamworth’s bi-centenary celebrations. It started off with a huge cavalcade of floats through the main street of the city. It would have taken the parade a couple of hours to pass through the centre of town. There were floats from all walks of life and the one I was attached to was from the Tamworth musical society. The society’s float was a semi-trailer and it had some of the members singing and dancing on top with a contingent following behind on foot doing their own thing. I was part of the foot contingent and I was dressed as an American Indian, head feathers and all, doing war dance along the way. My display down the main street didn’t go down well on the home front but it was a lot of fun.

  The day didn’t end there as the musical society put on a massive concert that evening in the town hall with many individual acts, like the barbershop quartet, which I was part of. The concert was made up of popular songs, folk songs and songs from musicals. There was standing room only in the town hall and we had many ovations. I put my heart into it and had a great fun time.

  We had a repeat performance of the concert the next night in the large Workers Club auditorium. One of the singers was a nun who wasn’t sure about entering a club so I had to escort her past those dreadful one arm bandits and the bars. The audience was mainly made up of dignitaries from the Tamworth council and those from surrounding councils and across to the coast. It was a resounding success, partly perhaps as it was a dinner affair with lots of drink taken and we had more standing ovations.

  That wasn’t the end of the show as one of the councillors was from Port Macquarie on the coast and he requested we take the performance to his town the next weekend which we did to more success. We had a lot of fun but I was glad of a rest when it was all over. It was as much fun as I had ever had at one time.

  NATURAL SELECTION.

  It is what has made us what we are and all the creatures and plants on the planet are derived from. It is a very clever way of the survival of the species.

  Charles Darwin who was way ahead of his time, studied species throughout the world and came up with ideas that landed him in hot water a lot of the time. It was easier for the learned men to stick with the idea that we were all created in seven days and it was sacrilegious to question that.

  He not only had his view of the natural selection but he also had proof that he had collected throughout his travels. It took him many years to be believed and some of the important men of the time were intent on destroying his findings.

  You can see for yourself a new evolution starting. It is my view that perhaps in another century or two, if we don’t kill ourselves off first, we will all look alike, no black or white, slanty eyes or otherwise. With natural selection it won’t matter if we don’t marry someone from our own breed. Look at Tiger Woods and his Swedish blond ex-wife, and that was a dramatic step out from the norm. Even the Chinese and the Japanese, who are very race conscious are stepping out from the barriers.

  When you see a white aboriginal firmly claiming to be one of their black brothers, the natural selection here has got out of hand for them. I think it won’t be until we are all one that we might have a chance for peace.

  We blame human intervention on a lot of disasters but they were happening long before we evolved, like the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. I know humans killed and ate woolly mammoths but there wouldn’t have been enough humans around at the time to upset the natural selection of them. The world had changed and their time had come, just as it is for creatures of later years. I know and agree that we should help endangered species, but is it out of our hands.

  The human species is about the only one that has multiplied at an alarming rate but the learned men are doing their best to halt all this by instigating wars.

  I have noticed during my long life that some people are getting bigger and taller. Is this part of the natural selection plan or is it that they are better fed?

  NEW YEARS SOLUTION.

  Betty and Bill had been engaged for five years and Betty was wondering if in the New Year Bill would make some sort of a move as she was getting tired of waiting.

  She knew there would be compromises to be made as she lived in Sydney and Bill lived in Melbourne. They both had good jobs in their respective cities and it was going to be a challenge to see who was going to give up what they had and move to the other city.

  Betty had a thriving fashion business in Sydney and Bill had a successful import-export business in Melbourne. They visited each other as often as their busy lives allowed but both thought their business was more important than the others, so that was the reason for their long engagement. They really wanted to be together so they tried to work out a solution to their dilemma.

  Betty put a manager on for a trial period and moved down to Melbourne to see how it would work out. She was anxious and fretful all the time she was down there and could see it wasn’t going to work, especially as the manager she put on wasn’t as efficient as she herself was.

  In the meantime Bill had met up with an old friend from university who was looking for a manager’s job. Bill decided to give him a go and employed him to manage his firm but unlike Betty he stayed with him for several months to help him settle in. He was now free to move up to Sydney to be with Betty and with all the modern communications it worked out very well. Bill liked working in Betty’s fashion business and they decided to call their new line, New Year’s solution.

  I hope my new year’s solution works out as well as theirs as I find I no longer have enough control over my hands to write long hand and this is my first attempt to write a story straight into the computer. I am thankful I finished my autobiography before this happened.

  LIGHTNING NEVER STRIKES TWICE.

  Lightning is something that has always fascinated me. Out on the western plains of New South Wales the storms were spectacular and very frequent during the summer months. There is really no reason why lightning doesn’t strike twice except when it does strike it usually destroys whatever it has hit so therefore it hasn’t anything to come back for.

  The house I lived in was the only object above ground in that great open plain so it was often targeted by lightning. I was standing gazing out of an open window watching the lightning dance around one day and I had a knife in my hand. There was a high wire fence just out from the house and as I watched, the lightning struck the fence and danced along it. Even though I was used to these displays, I did get a shock and the knife I held in my hand was never to be seen again even though I searched high and low for it.

  The storms out there could be violent at times. I was chafing hay in the haystack one day and didn’t notice an angry blue-green cloud rolling across the plain. By the time I did notice it there was a boiling mass of wind and lightning barrelling down on me. It was too late for me to make a run for it so I huddled down behind a stack of hay bales. When it hit it was like a bomb going off and I virtually hung on to the ground. When it was over there was just me and a few bales of hay left
, the hay shed itself had completely disappeared. I was lucky that day, I was too insignificant for the storm to bother about.

  Some years later, also on the open plains, a drover passed by our house and called in for a chat. I envied his free lifestyle even though he would be sleeping under the stars. It had been a nice day but towards evening a wild electrical storm blew up and scared the drover’s cattle who dispersed. The drover rode into the night trying to gather them together. He didn’t notice that a large tree had been struck by lightning and had fallen across the power lines. He rode straight into the fallen wires in the dark. His horse was killed instantly and he was badly burnt. Some months later he died from his injuries so I guess you could say that lightning does strike twice even though it might be in a different way.

  SEND IN THE CLOWNS.

  This is the title of a song from a musical that I was privileged to see some years ago. In this production the story was acted out by a young man who had Down syndrome and it was so beautifully done I doubt if there was a dry eye in the audience by the end of it. He seemed to depict all the sorrow and loss that the song was about. It is doubtful if an able bodied person could have presented the song with such feeling and sadness.

  The song was about a