Visit to Brisbane

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Hello,

Long time since I wrote something but nothing special happened and I had not had time to make pictures. I just arrived back at “home” from a 1 week visit to Brisbane. There was a PhD student who had to do her confirmation (a defence before they can start their 2nd year) and since her work deals with the wood anatomy of Avicennia and since it was a good opportunity for me to have a look at the possibilities in Brisbane, Catherine Lovelock of UQ (University of Queensland) asked me to be in the ‘jury’ (it is not really a big deal) and come over and so I did.

First impression of Brisbane (Brisbie for the locals): BIG and the skyline is impressive at moments with of these huge Skyscrapers and modern bridges. The Brisbane river cris-crosses through the city and gives it a friendly impression though. Also really tropical with clear blue sky, huge fruit bats at night (they fly like birds and I would not have thought about bats if not told so) and houses where you have to become friends with ants The old houses are beautiful, wooden with verandas in front and colourful shops announcing home-made pies, coffee (they are really addicted to it and if you do not take milk they wonder if you come from the same planet),…give it a sunny appearance as in the states name “the sunshine state” (on the number plates of the cars).

The uni looks modern with a red-black-white furniture inside and from the outside a modern architecture, lakes and palms. Cath was impressing (just like Marilyn): runs several projects, is brimming of ideas, does lots of fieldwork and next to it she has a nice husband and great kids. She lived in Washington, Panama, LA, Canberra and now in Brisbane. Being submerged in this life for a week, in combination with being surrounded with her students which have pretty impressive projects too, I became bit depressed and stressed at the same time. All researchers that I have met so far are both successful in their career and in their private life. I know that you should not look at what others have and you do not but sometimes it is too striking to look away. The thing that most worried/s me is my aim. What am I doing? Why? Especially since when I asked Allistar (one of the researchers that went with us on the fieldwork) for his aim he just said: they gave me a grant for it, so I will do ‘something’. That is why he was putting up dendrometers of 600$ each on trees he did not even know, because he ‘thought’ they could react to the ground water (they were measuring this too). I was so upset and it made me reflect about my own work/life too. I want to be useful and what am I doing, studying trees! I am here now for more than 2 months and have still no work plan. It is as if my ideas are finished or in each case not good enough anymore, worth a study. I started hesitating about my post-doc, the direction of my life, everyhting BUT…

things can change quickly and after a good sleep (after waking up the whole week at 5am for the fieldwork!) and some time for myself (last night I stayed at Grace college while I stayed at Cath’s place the other nights), I have started scribbling ideas down on paper. I could print Nico’s mail (I mailed him with my worries) in the Qantas club lounge (John, Cath’s husband had a flight to Cairns at the same time and I could sneak in with him) and read it during the flight back and the beautiful sky, the sun and his encouragement gave me again some power to go on. While waiting on the bus from the airport to Canberra city, I just thought about some more possible experiments, so maybe I will come up with something. We will see, I will take holiday since Goele is coming to visit me from Dec 8-28 (thanks Goele!) and during the evenings I will try to set up my research plan. I hate being unprepared and the fact that the dates of fieldwork are already planned but the work not makes me quite stressed. I do not understand how they manage but it seems they plan nothing in advance, they just go and do ‘something’ and miraculously they always end up with fantastic papers. If that’s what ‘real’ researchers are than I am certainly not a born-researcher. I need to have everything on paper, prepared in my head and practically before starting. But it seems that here, I have to let me float on the waves and see what happens.

To end with some stories from the fieldwork. I did not do anything, I just joined them to see some sites and get an impression of what I could do there. Doing fieldwork here is very different from the fieldwork I was used to in Kenya. We did now three sites and for all of them you needed a boat. I did not do it myself but I watched carefully, so now I know (kind of) how to get a boat from and on a trailer which is behind a 4-wheel-drive. Interesting. It is a bit boring since it are sometimes long ways by boat before going into the mangroves but that learned me that having a huge coast full of mangroves also has disadvantages. None of the forests were the similar as what I saw before, that was already very useful to know. It did not give me ideas right away but it did created questions like “Are mangroves special?” (they are often mixed here with terrestrials species), “Why is it merely Avicennia growing here?”, “Why does the Avicennia marina here looks different from the one in Kenya?”, “What’s the consequence?”, …

I need some time to think about this. And in the mean time I will exercise my floating on the waves (for those who do not know me so well: I am a ‘list-person’). I will put it on my to-do-list for the holidays

Now I go home quickly, also at UQ there were everywhere of these emergency poles and stickers in the toilets with “sexual harassment is a crime”. Although I always felt safe until now, it makes me feel not at ease at dark.

Nele

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