Farewell Jack Baker (a.k.a Jack Oats)
Jack Baker was a great friend to the South Coast Writers Centre over many years. This friendship was expressed in many ways: through his dedication as a member and then a leader of both the SCWC Poetry Workshop & Poetry Appreciation groups, in his donation of the proceeds from the sale of his first poetry collection to SCWC, and by his keen attendance, readings and participation at events. He was also a good friend to SCWC’s Ngana Barangarai (Black Wallaby) program, and he travelled to Junee Correctional Centre with them as a tutor with the Dreaming Inside program in 2016.
In memory of Jack, we’d like to offer this wonderful essay about him by Judi Morison, and honour him as a writer through this poem from the preface of his final book, Stranded at Sunrise:
each caring moment
those precious days together
every shared sunrise
serendipity
amazing public health care
best mate, best loving
less energy for
standing, walking and swimming;
less socialising;
more time for cogitating,
sitting and poem-writing
no two days the same
head fizzy with energy
body’s slow decline
Brain beached
with pomes while it
registers niggles, pains;
charts the medi-go-round; tries to
mask doubts.
The Birdman Bard - Judi Morison
Silence meets my knock on the front door of a beachside home north of Wollongong. Then a glass door slides open at the end of the patio and a bespectacled face with greying beard appears.
‘G’day,’ says the seemingly surprised Jack Baker, a.k.a. Jack Oats, conservation biologist and author of the recently published poetry collection, Soaring. He’s wearing what could be bushwalking gear: khaki pants and fawn shirt, topped with a charcoal fleece vest sporting the logo of BirdLife, Australia’s largest bird conservation organisation.
‘Bonza!’ he replies to my greeting, ushering me into the study he shares with his partner Jean. ‘Welcome to shed number one.’ Talking Sheds is the title of Jack’s forthcoming volume so I’ve asked to visit his shed.
‘This is for all my science,’ he announces, opening a tall paper-filled cupboard. He has screwed a matching piece of timber onto an old school-desk base – a custom-built computer desk that slots into the space beside the glass door. From here he can observe the resident red wattlebird’s antics in the overhanging grevillea.
Ornithology volumes crowd bookcases and bird paraphernalia abounds: ceramics and pictures of birds, feathers and twitcher badges. A sea eagle mobile hangs from the ceiling.
Jack hands me a female form shaped from red cedar. ‘That’s my first carving.’ After he retired 11 years ago from managing the research group at National Parks and Wildlife Service NSW, Jack taught himself woodcarving. ‘That’s one I can do in a few hours,’ he says, swapping the woman for two mushrooms sprouting from what was once a block of banksia. ‘And this is Jean’s wand,’ he says, handing me a stick of twisted wood fit for a mature-aged fairy. ‘It has a panic button and Bluetooth,’ he adds, eyes twinkling behind metal-rimmed glasses. The tortured cane is so perfectly finished I almost believe him – until I spot the red shirt button and blue tooth-shape glued onto the timber.
Beyond the backyard of native trees, quirky art and raised vegetable beds, a covered area strung with Buddhist prayer flags leads to the door of Jack’s ‘second shed’. A 4WD squeezes into a space between cupboards, benches, shelves, loose drawers, stacked timber and wall-hung tools. It reminds me of my father’s garage: a place for everything and everything in its place.
‘Some of this storage was my Dad’s,’ Jack admits, adding that his boilermaker-turned-TAFE teacher father ‘had the philosophy that you can do anything.’
Jack darts around the garage, unearthing bits and pieces, and I recall his email signature: ‘Poetry – it’s a treasure hunt.’
‘This was left on a fence after roadworks at Barren Grounds Nature Reserve,’ he says, holding up an incongruous ‘End of Work’ sign. His trove also includes a plywood cut-out of a quoll, a block of native cypress his new electric axe is shaping into a parrot, a cache of local timbers, and a handful of almost-edible wooden mushrooms, whose cracks disappoint Jack. I find them naturalistic. An old radio, tucked behind WD40 and Castrol Motor Oil, provides classical music to accompany his labour.
Back inside, Jack makes us a cuppa and uses the toaster to warm up slices of Jean’s home-made fruit cake, breaking off to point out the kitchen window at a vine looped between the house and the side fence. ‘The wattlebird’s got her nest in there. You can’t see it. She’s hidden it right up the end this time because the koel found it last year.’
*
Many of Jack’s childhood memories are reconstructed. After a bout of viral meningitis at twenty-nine, he discovered his previously photographic memory ‘had been put back into the developing fluid.’ But he remembers growing up in Sydney’s Blacktown, with plenty of bush and freedom to ride his pushbike anywhere. ‘The only rule was “Home before dark”.’
When his father took teaching work in Fiji, Jack spent two years at Suva Grammar School before returning to Australia for the HSC. ‘I’m inherently lazy and always looking for a short-cut’, he confesses. Maths and Science ‘were the subjects that required the least amount of work’. His decision to teach was ‘sort of like a default, you know. Can’t do, teach. … I finished the HSC and Dad said gotta do Science at uni. Yeah, righto. No idea at all.’
For an Illawarra Grammar School Maths teacher who struggled through his first Science degree to end up a conservation biologist seems an unlikely shift. Jack good-humouredly retraces the circuitous route.
After five years at TIGS, when he became a husband and father, then a year in Brisbane, working in drug education with the Queensland Health Education Council, he moved back to Wollongong to teach Matriculation Maths at TAFE.
In his late thirties, he took a year’s leave without pay and set up in business as Jack Oats (Jack Of All TradeS), painting houses, lopping trees, concreting, carpentering and demolishing 100 or so storage units that didn’t fit the new wheelie bins. He also completed by correspondence a two-year TAFE Certificate course in Environmental Science, ‘in about a month’.
A few years later, Jack and his new partner Jean took a term off teaching and drove to Cape York. Jack jumps up and pulls from a bookcase Pizzey’s Field Guide to Birds in Australia, discovered in a bookstore in Lismore.
‘I didn’t know there were so many birds in Australia,’ he tells me. He was shocked when Jean suggested he buy it. ‘I said, “You’re joking. It’s twenty bucks!” which was a lot in 1986. And we weren’t all that flush for funds. But I bought it and that was the beginning’.
‘I might be a park ranger,’ Jack had said when Jean was offered a promotion to Moruya. ‘I think I quite like this environmental stuff.’ So he enrolled in his second Science degree, Bachelor of Applied Science and Environmental Analysis, through Charles Sturt University.
Then in 1988 Russell Hannah, long-time friend from Jack’s folk-singing days, bulldozed him into joining him at the Birds for Beginners course at Barren Grounds. Two years later Jack was running the course there for BirdLife Australia while he finished his bachelor’s degree and began a master’s at the University of Wollongong, where he made up his mind to do a PhD.
Ecotones and fire in the conservation of the endangered eastern bristlebird is Jack’s research topic. He was intrigued by the entrenched theory that ground parrot habitat needed to be burnt, he says, digging out of the cupboard graphs of habitat peaks and ground parrot population changes inconsistent with the theory. ‘I guess I was thinking that’s just lazy. Where’s the evidence for that?’
So why the bristlebird? A huge amount of research had been carried out on the ground parrot, he tells me, so ‘I just sort of fell into doing the bristlebird. I felt sorry for it. No-one had studied it and it was rapidly disappearing off the planet.’ He also questioned the theory that the bristlebird is ecotonal – inhabiting a region where two types of habitat meet – so ‘that became a chapter in my PhD too,’ he explains, swivelling in his chair to pull out his thesis and more graphs. ‘The “ecotones is bullshit” result got published in this international journal,’ he adds, plucking a copy of Ecology from the cupboard.
With his doctorate out of the way, Jack followed up on the ground parrot and fire theory. ‘The question of does the vegetation need to be burnt every ten years or whatever … in order to create a habitat for ground parrots – the answer to that question is “No”… That was after 20 years of my ground parrot study’.
Jack seems not unreasonably pleased with the results of his research. ‘So it was good. And the poor little bristlebird, when I started producing data showing … the longer you left the habitat unburnt, the more bristlebirds there were, I then convinced people in major areas where they were to protect them from fire. So one of the first things I did was I got the poor wretched things listed in the State and Commonwealth as endangered’.
Jack’s studies led to further research, by David Bain, who translocated fifty bristlebirds from one side of Jervis Bay to the other, establishing a second population. Jack leans in to give me a quick lesson in threatened species at this point, adding that after the successful Jervis Bay translocation, he carried out similar work.
‘Jean and I did that as a retirement project. We took fifty-one days to catch fifty bristlebirds, put them in a cage and sent them from Barren Grounds to Cataract,’ he says, indicating another graph.
*
So when did Jack discover poetry? ‘I met Jean in 1982,’ he says. ‘Jean reckons I never read a book till I met her. She’s a voracious reader. We had some Lawson.’ But earlier that year a mate teaching English at TAFE had introduced him to the poetry of Bruce Dawe. Jack bought his own copy, which he’s having trouble locating on the shelves: ‘Where are you, Bruce?’
As a young folk singer playing twelve-string guitar, Jack had also written a few parodies but ‘at some point about fifteen years ago my brain began to accommodate, first of all, stories as poems’. One of his definitions of poetry is still ‘a story with most of the words missing.’ By way of example, he snatches up Soaring and reads aloud, in full Ocker voice, ‘The train home’, before talking me through the commute from Hurstville to home, during which he’d overheard the story. ‘And then the next leap was after I retired and I’d got most of my science finished and written up, I began to write poems more seriously – take the time to write poems,’ he concludes.
Soaring features several different poetic forms, including frequent use of the sonnet. Jack likes the length, formal structure, rhythm and rhyme, and the variability of the sonnet, he says, but mostly ‘the Australianness of it … the thesis and anti-thesis. And there’s so much about the land of flooding rain and drought, the fact that the continent is so big, if you come up with something that fits Tasmania, it’s not going to fit Cape York, or Arnhem Land & the Mitchell Plateau. The fact that the people are often ironic so you’ve always got this double sense – there’s this surface level and there’s the counter to that … it seems to suit my version of Australia’.
I’m curious about Jack’s relationship with Ron Pretty, renowned Australian poet, publisher and teacher. Jack laughs as he confesses that when a friend suggested he should meet Pretty, his response had been, ‘Who’s that?’ But, following instructions, he borrowed Practical Poetics from the library and ‘went through it twice, did the whole thing like I was doing a poetry course.’ Not long after that, he met Ron and joined his monthly poetry workshop and poetry appreciation groups.
And the relationship today? ‘It started off very much as student and teacher,’ he says. ‘It became student and mentor. Then when he was sick and I was recovering from my heart surgery it became mateship … and since then, it’s a friendship, where poetry is the anchor but we’re very close in our philosophy of life.’
Jack compares Ron’s encouragement with that of his PhD supervisor, Rob Whelan, another of those ‘good mates you meet along the way.’ Rob’s attitude was ‘you had to look for what was worthwhile, work on that, and work with the writer to get the best out of what they had,’ Jack says. ‘Ron takes that approach. And of course the other approach is that negativity … this isn’t good enough, and this is crap, and being critical without being helpful’.
*
Jack’s getting fidgety. We’re short on time to get to Ron Pretty’s poetry workshop so I wind up with a quick question. What’s Jack’s favourite bird?
He hesitates, digs out the birders’ checklist of Australia’s more than 800 birds, then swivels, pointing out the window.
‘Here, look, quick!’ The red wattlebird has just flown down from the grevillea. ‘It’s another one of those moths,’ Jack explains. ‘Go on, take it to your babies,’ he tells her. ‘They collect about five or six of those in their mouth and sometimes they’ll grab one and one will escape and then they’ve got to recollect them all, hopefully,’ he says, then congratulates the bird: ‘You got that one, didn’t you!’
Backtracking, Jack recalls seeing a species new to him a few days ago, ‘which takes me to 625 Australian bird species I’ve identified, which isn’t lots as twitchers go, but for a person who doesn’t really twitch hard ... So I must admit my favourite bird is always the one I just saw. But I would have to say… there’s my sea eagle up there.’ He points to the mobile. ‘It’s not the favourite; it just embodies a lot of things.’
Later, I check my copy of Soaring and find it closes with Jack’s short poem, ‘Sea eagle’:
… serene in my place
floating on a coastal breeze
soaring above the angst
a calm strength of mind and wing
for now …