By Ed Thexton

THE great thing about travel is that it gives you air to reflect on your life at home, experience the unexpected and, if in Japan, to experience the first world done differently (no crime, no grime).  One such place on our way to the venerable Mt Fuji back in April was the Hakone Open Air Museum in the small tourist town of Gora where we came across the Picasso Exhibition Hall, two storeys of paintings, sculptures and ceramic works in addition to photos of the artist at various points during his life.  The other was a cat shop. Visualise an armada of waving paws, devoted to all thing cat.  The Japanese clearly love their cats.

It was here that my brain, free from the trivialities of home life, was let out to roam.  Triggered by the surprise juxtaposition of Picasso’s high art and cat crap, I reflected on the Jekyll and Hyde duality of Felis catus, the domestic moggy.

By Ed Thexton
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I’M A country kid whose youth was spent on the Woori Yallock Creek at Yellingbo that is the last holdout of the helmeted honeyeater.  Little did I know my local creek was a rare exception, its floral and faunal riches absent from most creeks of agricultural Victoria. 

By chance I now find myself in Inverloch on the Ayr Creek.  More a much-altered drainage line than creek really.  But no matter how humble, it’s our creek.  Thirty minutes ago I was in it, pulling out weeds and contemplating this writing.  I’m 65 this birthday so the flower of youth is wilted, helped no doubt by the bee that thought fit to sacrifice its life for the benefit of my skull. I mused over what the hell I was doing with my holed gumboot in the effluent of Inverloch.  ​

Really, I was gardening.  Extracting one plant, in this case wandering trad (formerly known to many of us as wandering Jew), a native of Brazil, to create opportunity for others.  I thought of the artificiality of our reductionist approach to education, of how forestry, agriculture and horticulture are siloed when in their true essence they are all just forms of applied interventionist ecology.  Creek rehabilitation is interventionist ecology too. ​

By Ed Thexton
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INVERLOCH has a new resident and it’s coming to The Glade.  It’s like having an elephant in your lounge room.  Magnificent, it sits where it likes, and everybody must live around it for the extent of its long life.
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Last week Bass Coast Shire councillors followed the recommendations of their planners and approved Lido Place, a three-storey development proposed for 2-4 The Esplanade, the old Inverloch Marine site. Lido Place has 42 apartments and two retail spaces.  It will cover about a quarter of a hectare and share a wall with the Bunurong Environment Centre, home to the South Gippsland Conservation Centre.   

Half an hour after declaring a climate emergency, our councillors voted to proceed with a $2 million concrete path alongside a beach that’s receded 40 metres in six years. 

By Ed Thexton

ON WEDNESDAY, August 21, I went to my first council meeting.  Like most of those in the gallery, I was there for two matters: first, the declaring of a climate emergency for Bass Coast Shire; and second, the less globally connected issue of the Surf Parade Inverloch path.​