Rainbow lorikeets

Finding wisdom and love from these beautiful birds

The rainbow lorikeets are in my apple tree. Looking at me with their beaks full. Being nonchalantly messy with chewed pieces of apple falling to the ground -presumably others pieces swallowed!

I’ve just arrived home from a fortnight in Indonesia ( some work, some holiday) which included seeing lots of beautiful birds, but none as beautiful as these.

My son John netted a part of the tree for me while I was away, but not as much as I had planned to do.

I could have had a bumper crop of apples this year.

I had the netting, as I had bought up big on netting for my apricot tree. I was determined to save my apricot crop this year from Queensland Fruit Fly. QFF destroyed them last year. Unexpectedly. I hadn’t realised that QFF was as widespread in Melbourne as it is, until they struck.

So I netted about two thirds of the apricot tree this year, with great success. Almost all the crop inside the nets was saved. But pretty much every apricot outside the netting was infested. The birds got them at least. Apricots with extra protein.

I had planned to relocate the nets to the apple tree after the apricots were ripe. (The birds and the fruit bats and the possums had already made big inroads into the apples by then, but it seemed over the top to buy even more nets.)

But I ran out of time. Harvesting the apricots was the last job I ticked off from my to-do list the night before I went away. I removed the nets in the process, but didn’t get to shifting the nets to the apple.

John did his best a few days later, netting about half the Granny Smiths. It’s a triple grafted tree and the branches with the Grannys are the most vigorous part of the tree. I’ve been diligently pruning it over the last few years to try and get a more even growth amongst the three types.

Unfortunately the best crop of Golden Delicious I’ve known, and the Jonathans which had come along well too have all been enjoyed by the non-human creatures we share this space with - not even waiting until they were ripe of course!

So I sit here and watch a pair of beautiful birds getting stuck into yet more apples and feel conflicted.

It’s complicated as it is every year.

Many years I’m so busy that I don’t even get around to thinking I’ll be able to harvest any apples. I accept that the birds, the possums and the fruit bats will be the beneficiaries.

But this year I had intent. I’m basking in having had an honourable harvest of apricots and success in deterring the fruit flies.

I knew what could have been possible.

This year I’m trying to do less, to not be so busy and to have more time in my garden.

But even here, the rainbow lorikeets are playing with me - reminding me that even in my garden, it’s not black and white, not easy to sit with ‘just doing less’.

There are no metrics, no set rules to say ‘this is how much you can do, this is how much you should contribute’, when the world is on fire and Trump is a madman and the Genocide in Gaza continues ( as well of course the locking up of our First Nations kids, the violence and persecution and killings in Sudan, Tibet, West Papua, Kashmir… so much injustice in the world!…)

And the fruit fly are in the apricots and the birds will take well beyond the honourable amount if you give them half a chance!

I’ve finished in the Senate but as I said to my friends on my 65th birthday, I’m not the retiring type. I didn’t calibrate very well how much to take on in 2025. I’m determined to do better and do less in 2026! But it’s hard to decide how much is enough. To contribute to the extent that looks after me as well as the planet and its people. To know and to feel in my heart that self care is movement care. That what I can do is enough. Whether that be in my garden or in the world beyond.

I know I cannot singlehandedly save the planet and all the humans and creatures that live here. That is the stuff of delusion.

More pertinently though, I also know that even when working as part of the most well functioning supportive movements of people, supported by and inspired by and feeling joy in nature, there are limits to what I personally can do.

Yet I find it hard to accept that what I do is enough. To feel in my heart that my contributions are part of a web of people’s contributions, now, in the future and in the past and know that it’s the sum of these contributions where the transformative power lies.

( I know too that there are many people who are put off from contributing by the opposite perception - who also don’t have that sense of their contributions being part of an interconnected web, so they don’t think it’s worth doing anything.)

Creating this connection, this solidarity is fundamentally important to achieving the changes we want to see in the world. So people like me contribute the goldilocks amount that is right for them and don’t burn out, and others feel the power of doing their bit, even if it’s just a tiny contribution.

And so I can look at the rainbow lorikeets and smile, and love them and know they love me back.