Sunlight: another of Mother Nature's glorious gifts

“Full many a glorious morning have I seen the sun flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye”.  

The coming of the light (photo by Ian Kealley).

Sunlight has come up in three contexts in my life recently, giving me cause to think about how much I love this wonder of nature, and reminding me of how easily it can be taken for granted, or abused.

The first occasion was when I came across an article emanating from some bastion of academia in Britain. “Scientists”, it was reported, “were working on ways to dim the sun, so as to counter the imminent catastrophe of global warming”. I was so stunned by this that I read no further and did not get to the part where they explained how they were going to do it. Presumably by messing with the chemistry of the atmosphere, or by making permanent cloud cover. However, I did think back to when I was living in England, and how even in midsummer, the skies could be grey and overcast, and when the sun did come out it was weak and watery. Furthermore, I recalled (in Scotland in winter) how it was still pitch dark until mid-morning and then dark again by afternoon teatime, with only a faint glimmer of sunlight way down on the southern horizon at mid-day. The idea that “scientists” would want to make Britain gloomier by artificially dimming the sun, seems to me to be an idea that is classical “BB” (code for something “beyond belief” back when I worked in the bush).

The second occasion on which I brushed shoulders with sunlight occurred only a day or so later. It was a message from my Queensland mate Gary Bacon, passing on a circular email put out by a philosopher promoting good health for doddery old codgers (like me). The message read: “The six best doctors in the world are sunlight, rest, exercise, diet, self-confidence and friends”. I am lucky that all these doctors play a part in my life, and especially lucky to be able to count Gary among my friends. Like the others, he challenges my thinking, enriches my life and is always there to offer support and humour when needed.

What struck me most about this message was the priority given to the therapeutic value of sunlight. “How right they are” I thought, reflecting on how “sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy” (as John Denver put it), and on the power of sunlight to lift my spirits and make the world glitter and glisten.

From philosophy and geriatric health, I turn to the third recent instance of an interaction with sunshine. This concerns soap.  For some reason I had found myself musing over a memory from my childhood. My father was before his time in many ways, one of which being his active participation in the chores of housework. This he was happy to do, as it relieved my mother of having to commit to it full time, enabling her to pursue professional interests outside the home. One of Dad’s self-appointed tasks was the weekly wash, which he always did on Sunday morning. These were the days before washing machines, and washing was a lengthy and arduous process, especially for a family of six. The copper had to be filled, and a fire lit under it. The washing was sorted, with the whites being done first, and my football gear last. Dad would use a large carving knife to slice lumps of soap from a bar of Velvet or Sunlight soap into the copper, add the washing and then stir it around with a long frayed wooden rod, known as the copper stick. Later the various items would be rinsed (twice) in the troughs, put through a hand operated mangle, and hung out to dry on the clothesline. Did anything ever smell nicer or cleaner than sheets dried by the sun and the wind … and what about sun-dried flannel pyjamas, donned before bed on a winter night?

I had not seen or heard of Sunlight Soap for more than 70 years and I wondered whether you could still buy it. Within ten seconds, Google provided the answer; five minutes later Amazon had taken my order and charged my credit card; and a packet of Sunlight Soap, in a striking little box, was delivered to my front veranda two days later. Yes, you can still buy Sunlight Soap. What is more, it is made in Australia, is extremely easy to acquire, and dirt cheap (if you can apply that phrase to soap).

It also turned out to be superb soap. We no longer wash our clothes in a copper, instead using liquid soap in the washing machine, so our Sunlight Soap is used in the bathroom, including the shower, and it is sweet-smelling, soft, and durable. I have since bought two further packets, giving one of them to my son for his birthday. He thought it was a joke present until he used it, and then decided, as I have done, to use no other.

Taking sunshine for granted

To really appreciate sunlight, you have to go without it for a while or at least to experience it on dim (in real life, as opposed to academic aspiration). One of the great revelations in my life occurred about ten years ago when I had cataracts removed from both eyes. They had come on slowly and I had not realised what was happening, how gloomy and indistinct the world had gradually become. Then suddenly, when I discarded the dark glasses the day after the operation, the old world was there waiting for me, bright and glittering. Sunlight, I realised, has a colour – it is white, and the world it illuminates sparkles with a sharp clarity and brilliant colours. A day or two later when I was out for a walk on our property at Gwambygine in the early morning, I caught sight through the trees of the ranges to the west. The uplands were sunlit, and so clear I could almost count the leaves on the distant York gums. Had the poet William Wordsworth been with me at that moment I am sure he would have exclaimed “Earth has not anything to show more fair!”, and I would have agreed with him.

There is nothing special about this revelation. We have all read about the joy of people rescued after being trapped underground for days after a mine collapse, when at last they emerge, blinking, into the welcoming sunlight, or of those released from incarceration a windowless dungeon in the Chateaux D’if.  In one of my favourite country music performances, Johnny Cash sang to the convicts in Folsom Jail:

I hear the train a’coming; It’s rolling ‘round the bend,

And I ain’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when.

I’m stuck in Folsom Prison and time keeps draggin’ on.

But that train keeps rollin’ on, down to San Antone.

So yes, the revelation of rediscovering sunshine is nothing new. But it still seemed sensational when it happened to me, when I emerged from the gloom to a world I had not seen properly since I didn’t know when.

Furthermore, the revelation doesn’t have to be sudden and unexpected. It can steal up on you. I often remember with pleasure one of my great joys of when I was a young bloke, working in south-west forests, and occasionally with the opportunity just to pause and enjoy the fragrance and sounds of the bush and the interplay of sunlight and shadow. It is hard these days to “recapture that first fine careless rapture” of my youth, but I know it’s there waiting for me and will be there when I am ready to go down to the bush again.

Spotlit: sitting on a log in Big Brook Forest with my border collie Belle in about 1975, enjoying the light and shadows (photo by Cliff Winfield)

Dr Sunlight drives the world.

Setting aside the aesthetic and therapeutic roles, Dr Sunlight plays another critical role, that of driving two of the biological processes most essential for life on earth.

The first is the manufacture of Vitamin D (known as the “sunshine vitamin”) in the human body, without which our bone strength and immune system would collapse. Nobody had heard of the problem of Vitamin D deficiency when I was a kid (well, my father knew about it, but this was his job and passion). Back then, Australian kids were always out in the sun, usually in just a pair of shorts or bathers, rarely a hat, and never lathered with sunscreen lotion. By contrast, I see little kids these days in school playgrounds covered from the sun from top to toe. Unsurprisingly, I heard on the radio, many are starting to go down with Vitamin D deficiency and have to be fed dietary supplements. What a travesty modern life has become! Get the kids out in the sunshine, I say. No need to overdo it, but they need to make their own Vitamin D, not buy it at the supermarket.

And then there is photosynthesis, that other great product of sunshine. This mysterious process combines carbon dioxide from the air with chlorophyll in plant leaves, in the presence of sunshine, to manufacture starch and sugars, the food on which plants grow. Photosynthesis thus makes possible the world’s forests, crops, rose and vegie gardens, lawn tennis courts, prairies and tundra, indeed the world’s plant life … and all of the animal life that depends on it.

I first learned about photosynthesis in chemistry class at high school, and I still remember our teacher demonstrating a plant that had been grown in the dark. It had been given plenty of C02, and plenty of chlorophyll, but no sunlight. The result was a plant that was white, limp, and etiolated; in a word, it was as sick as a dog.  It was a memorable moment, one in which for the first time I really appreciated the beauty of life, and the dependence of this beauty on the world being bathed in sunshine.

High school science project: Water cress five days after germination, without and with sunlight

The manufacture of Vitamin D in the body and the chemical process of photosynthesis in plant leaves is going on around us all the time, mostly unremarked, the classic unsung heroes. Poor old CO2, on the other hand has been demonised as the cause of global warming, and whole governments are dedicated to getting rid of the stuff. It was a Vice President of the USA (I think) who said: “It’s not enough to reduce CO2 emissions – we have to eliminate it from the atmosphere”. Along with those who want to dim the sun, people who think like this need to go back to school and do some basic high school chemistry.

I love a sunburnt country.

The poet Dorothea McKellar wrote of Australia:

… I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of droughts and flooding rains ….

… and that first line has become part of our culture, our essence.

In fact, the greater part of Australia probably gets more sun than is ideal, too much of the good thing, resulting in a landscape that is definitely sunburned.

“Sometimes”, as Shakespeare said, “too hot the eye of heaven shines”.  This is certainly the case day after day in the Avon Valley during January and February, when the temperature in the shade nudges 40 before morning tea. I could laugh at this when I was young, simply bang on the broad-brimmed hat and get on with whatever needed to be done, out in the mid-day sun along with the mad dogs.  You learned a few tricks, of course, like leaving the fencing pliers under the tray of the ute when not in use, rather than lying in the sun, and putting a sugar bag over the steering wheel of the tractor when it is resting. But in my dotage, I have a different approach to a scorching day – I imitate the Bedouin, retreating to the shade and sitting it out, usually with the air conditioner ticking over, and reading one of Elmore Leonard’s westerns. Only after sunset do I move back outdoors.

Many years ago, I recall the thrill of the first time I owned a car with a heater/demister, and I wondered whether any greater luxury could ever be invented: warmth on the windscreen or the toes at the touch of a switch! Forty years later my car now has an air conditioner, allowing me to relax at the wheel in soft coolth on the hottest day. I now regard the car air conditioner as an even greater invention than the heater/demister. It is the perfect response to the trials of a scorching day in the Australian outback, or even worse, to a heatwave in the concrete jungle.

Sunlit forests

Growing up in Australia, and working in southwestern forests, I took our sunlit forests for granted. Even in the densest stands of trees, the sun is always striking through, dappling the forest floor. Ironically this is most obvious on a hot sunny day when you are seeking a bit of cool shade in which to eat your crib, and the crowns of the trees are simply not doing the job. It was all explained to me in my student days – it is another of nature’s survival tricks. When the temperature rises beyond a threshold, eucalyptus trees droop their leaves, so they hang vertically. This minimises evapotranspiration (water loss) by minimising the drying impact of the sun … but it also minimises the shading of the earth below, allowing the sunshine to strike through.

Karri forest near Pemberton, the sunlight streaming through and dappling the forest floor.

To really appreciate our sunlit forests, I had to leave Australia, which I did in the mid-1960s to live for a while in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.  Here I explored some of the world’s most wonderful forests, towering Douglas-fir, Sitka spruce, hemlock, redwood and western red cedar … they were spectacular and beautiful forests, but they were also dark, and even in midsummer the mountain forests could be gloomy with fog and drizzle. It was a dark green world where even the tree trunks could be covered with a permanent coating of dark green moss.

Sitka spruce on the Olympic peninsula in the Pacific Northwest: a beautiful but dark, green world

I loved these north American forests, but I missed the sunshine, and on some occasions, especially in winter, I felt almost claustrophobic. It was only when I ventured inland, east of the Cascade Mountains and into the open woodlands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine, that I felt more at home.

It was at that time that I most appreciated the famous remark by the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes. He was once visited by Alexander the Great who asked the elderly scholar whether there was anything he (Alexander) could do for him. “Yes” said Diogenes, “stand a little less in my sunshine”.

Shafts

Sunlight arrives in the Australian forest in different forms, sometimes with a brassy hammer blow, sometimes flittingly between clouds or rainshowers. It can operate as a bright spotlight, or as a gentle, bathing illumination. One of my favourite images is this wonderful 1930s photograph of a logging locomotive in the karri forest, the photographer having picked just the right instant to click the shutter, with the steam and the engine spotlit:

On grey, rainy days in the karri forest, when the forest is dripping, a wonderful phenomenon often occurs. All of sudden, as if clicked on with a switch, a great shaft of sunlight pierces the canopy high above. The shaft slants down, sparkling with raindrops and falls upon the bracken fern and wattles below like a spotlight at the theatre.  It is a great regret that I did not carry a camera with me in the bush those days (no mobile phone/cameras back then) and I was never able to record this lovely scene.

My friend Ian Bevege has come close, however, with this beautiful photograph of the eucalypt bush near his house at Lillypilly in NSW:

Looking at this charming scene, I am reminded of the words of some forgotten 18^th century English poet:

I care not, Fortune, what you me deny;

You cannot rob me of free Nature’s grace;

You cannot shut the windows of the sky

Though which Aurora shows her brightening face …

Putting the sunbeams away

Talking about this with the Everloving the other day, she reminded me of something completely different. “My Granny” Ellen said, “who had dozens of funny sayings, always used to refer to the clean and untouched cutlery or crockery left on the table when the meal was finished as ‘sunbeams’. Put the sunbeams away, she would say, to save on the washing-up”.  I looked it up in my Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms and found it defined as Granny used it, but it gave no derivation. Presumably it is based on the idea that saving on the washing-up provides a sunbeam of pleasure for the person with that irksome task. You never hear it these days.

Captured sunlight

Another of sunlight’s treasure is that it can be captured and stored. This occurs in many different ways, and we are surrounded by examples. Think of putting onto cold feet a pair of socks warmed in the sun; testing the stored strength of sunlight in a plank of hardwood timber; baking bread from flour made from wheat grain ripened under sunny skies; or recycling the heat of the sun stored, perhaps 200 years ago, in an old mallee root, now throbbing away in the lounge-room hearth.

Stored sunlight in an orange, ripening on one of my trees at Gwambygine.

Stored sunlight in a roadside wattle, enlivening a long drive on a winter’s day.

I have written elsewhere of the tree that warmed me five times: when I planted it, when I cut it down and split it up into firewood, when I sat by the fire it fed, and then when I planted the new tree to replace the old one. Sunshine plays a role in each phase, warming me as I work, and then again as I release its stored energy in the fire or from my perspiring muscles.

Celebrating sunshine

Poets, novelists and musicians have long celebrated sunlight. I would only need to say the line “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey” for just about anyone who heard me to burst into song and complete the lines: “You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away. It is a lament with which everyone who has loved can identify.

If I was going to pick my favourite, I suppose it would have to be Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong singing On the sunny side of the street in his gravelly, but supremely musical voice:

Grab your coat, and get your hat

Leave your worry on the doorstep

Just direct your feet

To the sunny side of the street …

… I used to walk in the shade

With those blues on parade

But I'm not afraid

This rover crossed over ..

It is a cheery encouragement to leave your worries behind you (in the shade) and look on the bright (and sunlit) side of life. This is never easy, but the sentiment is admirable, and I feel better just thinking about it, and better still listening to Satchmo sing it.

The dying of the light

Dylan Thomas urged his dying father not to accept his coming death but to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”.  I have never been sure about that. There are times to fight, but also times to accept death calmly and with dignity, even humour. Moreover, the dying of the light happens every day and is not something I rage against.  I love the sunset almost as much as I love the dawn; both can be beautiful and full of promise, one of rest, the other of sunshine (two of the six best doctors right there). But then again, I suppose it is easier to welcome the sunset when you are confident you will see the dawn the following morning.

The ranges to the west of our little property at Gwambygine are always the last thing we see before the daily dying of the light, and the scene is often serene, as captured here: 

The dying of the light: a Gwambygine sunset (photo by Vanessa Yoemans).

Perhaps this is as good a note as any to end these (mostly) sunny reflections … and to put away the sunbeams before I get on with the washing-up.