Abandon All Hope, Ye Toad Who Enter Here

dante's pique

Mum is going through one of those phases where she wants to put a sign on the front gate that indicates we live there, presumably because the electoral roll lacks the gothic peri-urban sensibility she’s trying to create in the yard.

Just last week she took delivery of a rusted plough — rusted, not rustic — from a neighbour moving back south of the border. It looks like whatever is left of the Titanic’s anchor, bottom of the Atlantic version, and she considers it ornamental.

Fine, the garden is her domain and I do not interfere¹. But the sign! The sign was a problem if only because Mum asked me what the French word for ‘house’ was and I told her it was maison and then she showed me what she intended for the sign, based on the nickname given to her by friends.

Maison Mort

And I had to tell her that this actually meant house of death or, more accurately still I suppose, death house. And she looked at me and said: ‘Well we can’t have that.’

unfortunately she had already done the early design work

Except, perhaps, if the person reading the sign is a cane toad.

A cane toad will find no solace at the House of Mort. Indeed, they’d find precisely what it says on the tin. A more beneficent power might have included a warning, per Dante, that the invasive hoppers abandon all hope on entry.

There is none to be found.

Mum conducts her (good) frog census each night and dispatches any toad she finds in the arc of her torchlight sweep. She delivers them unto death itself, the angel Azrael in shuffling and squat human form.

The other night she ambled from the outside past the bathroom window as I brushed my teeth and declared that she had nabbed three of the pests.

‘It’s the three-toad sloth,’ I yelled as she receded into the night. I wondered from which direction she might emerge; and with what deadly accounting. A chill ran down my spine as I experienced a brief — a vanishingly brief — moment of commune with the soul of the toad and imagined the psychic dread they must feel to see mum emerge from the shadows. We’d been children once, toad brethren. We’d seen it.

Still, the cane toads must die.

The rain scarcely let up throughout December and we are experiencing what feels like plague proportions of them. At night, Mum will spot dozens and dozens of them in the yard. As she says, somewhat obviously but ominously nonetheless: ‘And those are just the ones I can see!’ She’s been freelancing on the toad disruption circuit for years, quite apart from the broader community effort through this year’s Great Cane Toad Bust which has been adopted by my hometown with a tabloid sense of gusto. In the main street of Boonah a novelty sized Toad-O-Meter was installed, almost cheery in its disposition.

Within two days it had to be replaced with one double the size because the townsfolk have lumpen coal hearts and a threatening rural efficiency.

At one of my favourite cafe haunts I overheard a customer ask the barista owner how many toads she had caught the night before.

‘We caught over a thousand and there were probably about 20 of us,’ she said. ‘And when you turned around there were always 10 more.’ As one commenter mused on one of the organiser’s social media pages: ‘We’re going to need a bigger Toad-O-Meter.’ Again. This feels a lot like a rail infrastructure project, I want to say. Just build the toad-o-meter you need the first time! We don’t have time for craft!

I am reminded of Don Watson’s observation that ‘defeat is the essence of Australian rural humour’². Specifically, I would add, the humour of the rural white man who thought they could beat back a natural world they didn’t understand. Still don’t fully understand. The cane toads, introduced to eat cane beetles and which also eat almost everything else in addition to being wildly toxic, are the perfect illustration of ‘nature mocking our intentions’.

Even as we carve thousands from their number, thousands more seem to take their place. It is a mitotic farce.

At the local supermarket, I ran into one of the women who is part of the splinter group Women Against Cane Toads (WACT, though I stress not whacked) and mentioned in passing that Mum had been counting bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums. The women go out every night during the official hunt to try and bag as many toads as they can and were always looking for more members, she said. Did Mum care to join them in their efforts? I wanted to explain that she was really more of a solitary apex predator; the Jason Statham of toad extermination. But I did not say this, because I could see the hope in her eyes. Instead, I simply joked that that would be unfair on the toads.

Later, at home, Mum sang out, her voice raised an octave: ‘Rick, what have you done!’

The toad-hunting women were now hunting her. Our Deb, the final boss of the great bust, strung from atop the Toad-O-Meter like a pinata in the form of a griffin, protecting her toad treasures that would fly from her body the moment she was WACT. She was added to a group chat — we Mortons have never done well in the group chat — and cajoled into sending her numbers across for the total. Asked to join the hunt that night, she politely declined.

When we came home from trivia on Wednesday night there was a truly dense green tree frog³ waiting for us by the front door. She was the size of a large fist, or thereabouts, and could have shattered a windshield if thrown from an overpass. A powerful calm radiated from her.

‘the path to wholeness is the longissima via, the longest way, my child’

I loved her immediately.

The frog’s presence, always such a wonderful sign in any ecosystem, was even more pointed this time around. Though her manner was delphic, I felt certain she had come to offer her encouragement and thanks; an envoy of peace and light at the House of Death.

On the last night of the toad bust, I’m told, the final tally ticked over 10,000 toads. Assuming an average size of 10cm⁴ per toad, that’s a full kilometre of pest removed from the local area.

Deb continues to hunt alone.

Observations

Moon Branding

The moon has been added to a list of threatened cultural historical sites, not because we might keep going there (we will) but because we’ve already been and left behind a shoeprint and some golf balls and a family portrait which now count as human history. In which case, may I interest the folk from the World Monument Fund in the Boonah Golf Club which meets the same criteria. And sure, I get it, but it’s also kind of funny. That said, the whole moon has been added to the list by the WMF and not just the sites already visited by humanity or affected by human space exploration (of which there are apparently 100 such sites). So suck it, Bond villains.

Just Really Love A Good Cloud

So here, have this impressive thunderhead I was photographing out to the northeast from Boonah on Friday evening as the lightning started pulsing through it.

World is Fukt

I have very little that I feel like saying about the first week-and-a-bit of Trump, other than I suspect it is worse than even it seems. One of the things a certain type of rightwinger has excelled at doing these past 10 or so years is making people who care about others, who care about good governance, about justice or even the rule of law doubt themselves when they have called out the gradual erosion of all of these things. They laugh and mock and ridicule and then go and do all the things others warned about, but later. They do it later. And by then they are ridiculing a new set of clear-eyed warnings. So when they do it now, believe your eyes and your ears. Believe, for example, the evidence that Elon Musk really was doing a Nazi salute. It fits with everything he has been doing now for years. And there will be much more said in coming months, by which point I personally might feel like writing about it even if the world likely doesn’t need to hear my thoughts, I want to leave this image of the Trump inner circle and their seething, puckered faces while a minister of the church, Episcopalian Bishop of Washington Right Rev Mariann Budde, asked him to have mercy as president on the most vulnerable. It was a very Christian call, as I’ve always understood it, and these were their faces.

JD Vance in particular looked as if he wanted to leap out of the pew and stop the address by any means available. These were their faces. And this is what Budde was saying:

Let me make one final plea, Mr President. Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives.

And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.

Have mercy, Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were once strangers in this land.

May God grant us all the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, speak the truth in love, and walk humbly with one another and our God, for the good of all the people of this nation and the world.

Those were their faces⁵. That is what she said.

1. Except to remark on the gnomes and their beady little eyes and how I wish they would disappear. I am afraid to remove them myself in case I disturb some ancient terror coiled like a spring beneath their toes.

2. ‘Defeat is the essence of Australian rural humour. It is nature mocking our intentions. Consider the kookaburra laughing at the selector with his axe or his wife going after blackfish for their tea. Rural humour is the solitary figure or the entire family - wrestling with the stump in the front paddock. Or the storm which one night blew the lavatory clean off the new schoolteacher's wife. It is Providence - unknowable, irascible, capricious Providence. In the Australian bush God was a satirist’. Watsonia, p. 129.

3. The Wikipedia page for the Australian green tree frog contains this excellent line to which I relate at a fundamental level: ‘The green tree frog screams when it is in danger to scare off its foe, and squeaks when it is touched’.

4. The largest cane toad ever discovered in Australia is believed to be a 25cm, 2.7kg monster nicknamed Toadzilla found in Far North Queensland in 2023. The photos are simply too disturbing to post.

5. Trump later posted on his knuckle-dragging social media site that: ‘She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart… apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology!’ The death threats started almost immediately. Whose tone, I wonder, is nastier?