I used to be a fearless cut-and-thrust journalist with a finger on the pulse of technological change, but now I’m just an old pen pusher trawling the depths of the human soul for inspiration and a crack of light in the darkness.
No-one believes me, but writing is hard work.
I’ve tried digging trenches, feeding factory conveyor belts, carrying concrete and building verandahs, but I reckon there’s nothing as exhausting as crafting a punchy paragraph that can touch a heart or detonate a laugh.
So when a free language-processing tool called ChatGPT arrived late last year, I celebrated with an air-punch and yelled the bombastic opening line to Joseph Furphy’s magnum opus Such is Life.
“Unemployed at last!” begins the early Shepparton scribbler’s largely unread but much celebrated literary masterpiece.
I felt relieved I could finally hang up my pen, retire to my verandah, play guitar and talk to magpies for ever. A huge weight was lifted from my shoulders as it became apparent that an artificially intelligent chatbot would now take up the Herculean task of mining ordinary human life for seams of universal gold.
So I asked ChatGPT to write a few amusing opening lines on the subject of this week’s column: frogs in my swimming pool.
This is what it came up with:
“Summertime in the backyard is usually a time for barbecues, pool parties and soaking up the sun. But for one unsuspecting family, their peaceful backyard oasis was turned into a froggy frenzy when their swimming pool became invaded by an army of amphibians. The once crystal clear water was now a sea of green, with frogs jumping and splashing in every direction. It was a scene that would make Kermit the Frog green with envy, but for the homeowners, it was a hilarious and unexpected twist on the classic backyard pool day.”
Nothing wrong with that.
It’s told in a jolly Channel 7 newsreader voice and packed with serviceable, well-crafted sentences. It’s safe and familiar — like a 1970s Volvo. Unfortunately it’s also as dull as ditch water. It’s like reading cold porridge.
It doesn’t make any attempt to capture the bizarre fecundity of nature going bonkers after a flood.
The nightmare began as all nightmares do — seductively.
In the first week of January a few poor little lost frogs appeared stranded in the corner of my pool. I scooped them up gently in a small net and walked one hundred metres or so to put them back in their billabong home.
The next day the cheeky little blighters were back, so I repeated the gentle scooping and relocation.
Then it rained overnight.
In the morning, the pool surface was a moving carpet of thrusting brown bodies and limbs while the skimmer box revealed another boiling froth of amphibious life.
I used a large leaf scooper on a three-metre pole to remove them and take the mass of flipping, leaping, jumping things back to the billabong. It took four loads and 30 minutes to get the water looking something like a swimming pool again.
The next morning they were back, and the whole exhausting and slightly nauseating removal process began again.
Look, I like frogs, I really do.
They’re barometers of the changing environment. They’re cute and fascinating and friendly. Some of my best friends are pobblebonks.
But this was frogapocalypse.
Every night, hundreds of zombie frogs were leaving the safety of their little billabong and crawling to the promised sea of eternity.
Quite why they preferred the chemical soup of my swimming pool to the fresh water of their bush home is a mystery. Perhaps chlorine is as addictive to frogs as alcohol and sugar is to humans.
I think there were spotted marsh frogs, pobblebonks, common froglets and barking marsh frogs. I don’t really know because the numbers were just barking mad.
Endless familiarity was turning beauty and fascination to ugliness and contempt. Every day, I had a running conversation in my head as I scooped out broiling masses of ectoplasm — stop hopping and stop breeding, you idiots.
If I spotted Kermit I would have slapped his stupid head.
This continued for the next three weeks until these past few days the numbers began to subside.
But it’s not just frogs.
Along the way I have negotiated giant webs of orb and St Andrew’s cross spiders, swarms of dragonflies, fluttering clouds of butterflies, deafening flocks of cockies. Then there’s the wasp nests. Don’t get me started on wasp nests.
It seems the engine of nature is going into hyperdrive this summer.
Why is this happening? I don’t know.
I’ll ask my chatbot.