Pass notes No 2,798: Locusts

Age: Mostly unborn. Appearance: Grasshoppers with attitude. I remember these from Sunday school, unless it was Gardeners' World. They were massacring some bloke's plants. Was his name Pharoah? According to the Old Testament, the Almighty sent swarms of locusts to encourage the ancient Egyptians to release their Israelite slaves. That was after the boils and the hail, and before the darkness and the death of the firstborn. It would take more than a few insects to make me do my own ironing. A few? They covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left: and there remained not any green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all the land of Egypt. You sounded just like God when you said that. But why are we talking about locusts now? They're back! Or rather, they're somewhere else! Not Britain? We haven't finished exterminating the moles yet. It's someone else's turn to be overrun by animals. John Brumby, premier of the Australian state of Victoria, is warning of a plague of "biblical proportions" when spring arrives and tens of billions of eggs hatch. Why should we believe him, given that he's a politician? Locusts can eat as much as their own weight in a day, and one swarm can cover hundreds of hectares. Farmers say £1.2bn is at stake. Are they blaming foreign imports as usual? Not this time. Unlike rabbits, camels and cane toads, these pests are as Australian as an ice-cold Foster's on the dunny. What are they going to do about it? Brumby has declared a "war on locusts". Four hundred staff are gearing up for the hatching period and 600,000 hectares of public land will be treated. And if that doesn't work? Perhaps he can ask Moses to have a word with God. It usually works. Do say: "We shall fight them at the barbies, we shall fight them on the cricket grounds . . ." Don't say: "Eurgh! Creepy-crawlies!"