Just when you didn’t need ‘em, 4-5 drones in the last few days, all adults apart from the chap tutoring his less than captivated young boy. The first few sightings among the birdlife you wondered what in the blazing Jesu. Around the creek mainly they appeared and along the mangroves by the wetlands. Could in fact have been five in the last two days alone. The hand-held devices presumably operated both the flight and gave exclusive video of the captured terrain—the muddy water, grasses, the sand & plastic litter. Foot long telescopic lenses were even more common, every second day, usually targeting the birds out on the rocks and in the water. Retirees in the latter case; younger men former. Sometimes wives stood off a-way, patiently allowing the enthusiasm of greybeard husbands. This older cohort were not golfing enthusiasts; that group practised tee shots around in the field behind the fishing village, fathers and older sons sometimes together, concentrated over the balls at their feet. One chap brought a vacuum device in order to avoid unnecessary bending to pick up the strewn balls. (The golfers, if not every single droner & all the photographers, fitted the local equivalent of the MAGA crowd. You could bet your bottom dollar.) On the dock at the village the mystery was eventually solved of the industrial-like churning from the horizon. The light southerlies that arrived on shore carried nothing like the force apparent further out on the water. It took a landlubber three and more weeks for the penny to eventually drop. That was not wind in question out there, laddie. That there was the waves, dude. Wave power. Duh! Yesterday a squadron of pelicans were sunning themselves on a sandbank opposite the fishing hut at the end, more than a dozen bunched close in place, where they had never been found previously. For some reason the break of tractor tyres fifty meters out did not agree with the birdies just then. Willing them to take flight in formation over the half hour on the old wooden bench dockside proved fruitless. That would have been something. Would have made the trigger happy lense guys cry missing their chance. In recent time the naked human eye had gotten lazy, or blind. In the cities, shiny new sports cars captured attention, architectural novelty & advertising billboards. Pretty women in the flesh were nothing compared to the sites; porno afflicted walkin’ the streets, impervious to the meatworld. There was every indication a return to normality—even Covid normality—would proceed as if nothing had really happened. The Premier was planning a re-start of the various events that gave the city it’s identity—concerts on the grass at the Myer Music Bowl,10k lucky punters allowed attendance for the running of the Melbourne Cup, early in the NY the AU Open at the tennis centre, with chefs flown in for the upscale dining. Photographers had been plentiful on the Equator; not drones so much, not even in techno-crazed Singapura, where security was always a concern. In the broiling heat sports were a hard sell and the Muslims at least less captivated by the spectaculars. Odd how the various religious observances—Buddhist & Hindu too—could be sorely missed by a kaffir.
Melbourne, Oct 2021
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