A bit of a different post this week. Not so much as ‘what’s going on’ but more of a ‘what weird stuff they get up to in Australia’. As I think I wrote once, the country is quite familiar as they speak English and culturally are quite “western”. But at the same time there are things that I find quite different despite the country feeling so familiar. It might also just be that climate and nature is so different here than what we have in Norway that they kind of have to do things differently as well. One of the things they do (at least in Melbourne) is plant at lot of trees along the road. Indeed, I saw a sign about how a new road construction was planting trees due to the fact that they had to remove trees while constructing the road. So not only did they plant new trees for the ones they removed, but also planted extra trees just because. It’s clear that they like their trees. And who can blame them? When the sun is out it gets really hot, even now that we are technically in winter. So a bit of shade is in many ways the best way to deal with that strong sun.
What about the power lines?
Now, planting trees is great and all, but there is a lot of infrastructure that has to coexist with the trees that you put in the ground. One of those things are power lines. Like most places in the word, power is fed to houses via power lines. But when the street outside your house is covered in tress, how does the power get through? Well, you just grow the tree around the wire. This is where it gets interesting. If you have planted a tree under a power line then it will eventually grow into the wires. So, someone has to keep an eye on the tree and eventually come back and make sure it doesn’t actually get entangled in wires. It is clear that this is someones job as there are hundreds of trees in just our neighborhood where the tree has been forced to grow outwards instead of up. I’ll add some pictures below to show what I’m talking about. Again, this is clearly somebody’s job as trees don’t grow in this way naturally and the trees not directly below the power line look like normal trees. So who’s job is it to watch the trees and decide when they need to be forced around the power line? Do they have a schedule and drive around checking on new trees that need to be manipulated? All the logistics that go into this is baffling to me. I mean, you could just not have trees under where the power line runs. For most streets that just means a smaller section of trees on just one side of the road. Because there are of course trees on both sides of the road. A short section with only trees on one side wouldn’t really make anyone’s life that much worse. And if you really wanted the shade I guess you could still grow a tree in your own yard if you wanted to. It just seems like a lot of effort to go through for some shade. But then again that is what makes Australians so similar, yet different. They really like their shade. And if that means someone has the job of getting trees to grow around power lines, then that is what they’ll do.
