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Topic: Social Issues

Four And Twenty Black Birds Beaking A Pie

By Gareth Eastwood   2008-01-03

In South Australia you could be more likely to find a crow at a new McDonald's restaurant than on Old MacDonald's farm.

I've lived in Adelaide all my life and I've rarely heard the rasping, nerve-scraping cry of these annoying birds until a few years ago. For no apparent reason they began to appear in numbers, calling to each other from tree-tops around my neighborhood. I was quite mystified as to the reason for their city-side migration. My best theory was that drought in rural districts had forced them into the suburbs in search of food.

I've since learned the awful truth. Disgustingly, they have found a new, plentiful source of food. They are now thriving in large flocks around shopping centres with fast-food outlets. They don't have to try hard for a meal. It's conveniently strewn on the ground for them by mainly young people who eat what they want, then lazily throw both uneaten food and containers down right where they are. Often you will see discarded junk food on the ground when there is a rubbish bin just a few metres away.

Some of this junk food isn't even near the outlets. It's thrown on footpaths along suburban streets and can be seen in the middle of roads where someone has thrown it out of a car window. It seems some mothers have given birth to a litter of pigs, and litter is what they do.

Whatever happened to KESAB (Keep South Australia Beautiful)? Whatever happened to the put-it-in-a-bin campaign? Whatever happened to the realisation that littering in that fashion is environmentally destructive and encourages the breeding of rats and vermin?

I wonder just how many university students throw down their uneaten junk food in the street, then toddle off to lectures hoping to get high marks in areas such as hygeine, sociology and town planning? I wonder just how many of them profess to be ardent environmentalists, as students often are, but are quite happy to toss a half-eaten pizza along with it's box onto a footpath when a short walk is all that is required to place it in a bin.

How Australian politicians rubbished and derided Lee Kuan Yew's tight social controls in Singapore! Excessive and unnecessary, they cried. They may have crowed too soon about their own moral superiority compared to his. We don't want to see that style of government here, but many of us suspected in those days that he did in fact know some things that Australian politicians don't.

The next time you see junk food containers with half-eaten convenience 'meals' still in them, piggishly thrown on the ground you can guess what that is - that there is no worthwhile future in too little social control either.