October 2022 - The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Swansea

For the next two weeks, we are cruising the waters of Vietnam. Commencing in Ho Chi Minh City, we have just pulled out into the Saigon River as I write this continually changing blog. It is Tuesday just after seven am, four hours behind Sydney time, on a day when the Treasurer will empty his pot of gold or whatever over the Australian people. Past cranes, moored tramp steamers, the container barges, the tugboats, house boats and small craft, it is raining and for a working port, it is strangely silent. Clumps of water hyacinth, a skerrick of Mother Nature, defiantly float down the heavily industrialised river. We await the delivery of our breakfast. It is four hours to the sea.

Once Miss Saigon Now Don’t Miss Ho Chi Minh City

We landed in Ho Chi Minh City, which we all once knew as Saigon. Here in a city of about 10 million people, most seem to live on motor bikes and scooters. This is the inescapable impression one gets of this city as you drive from the airport. Gone are the days of wandering the city. My images are those of a man encased in a vehicle being driven hither and thither. The city I knew as Saigon shows little signs of what they call “The American War”. Our guide drives us past the War Remnants Museum where, we were told, the detritus of the War abandoned by the Americans as they retreated from Vietnam in 1975 is on show. To the people it is there to serve as a reminder; and it is in a distinct space away from the Military Museum, where the success of the Vietnamese people is remembered. Its forecourt is littered with planes, helicopters and tanks, mostly Russian. We did not go in.

My experience of the Vietnam War was examining those young men whose birthdays came up in the lottery, drafted if classified as medically fit. These young men were 19 years old; and now these ageing veterans are beset by the demons of having experienced war in a land that they hardly knew for a cause disgracefully misrepresented by the politicians of the time. I well remember the Federal election of 1966 when Harold Holt won in a landslide victory, interpreted then as a ringing endorsement of the War.

Unlike the Second World War, where Australia was threatened briefly with invasion, this was a War concocted by a few men, some of whom should have known better. It then descended into an obsession, a delusion, and the young people rebelled. After all, it was a war for the Americans to save face “by soundly defeating a third world country with third world socialist ideals with third rate communists like Ho Chi Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp”. How so very wrong were these assumptions. Lyndon Johnson found that out when he poured over 500,000 troops into battle with over 58,000 casualties. Australia, his “all-the-way” fellow traveller, committed 60,000 army, naval and air force personnel for 521 deaths and over 3,000 wounded.

For what? I am no longer the young doctor who examined conscripts, but someone being driven around a bustling metropolis. We stop at the Presidential Palace where a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates on 30 April 1975 effectively ending the War. Now the grounds are a place for families to walk around, children to play, and there is only one small reminder when a uniformed man officiously challenged my wife while she was photographing, but did not prevent her from doing so, once reassured she was not trying to evade payment for entry into the grounds by crashing the gate. He nevertheless made her stand behind a mythical white line he had drawn with his finger.

Being a young doctor in the 1960s, the money for recruit examination came in handy as I was living on a meagre post-graduate scholarship and had a family. It gave me a perspective on the young men who had been called up. Only once was I confronted by a young man in beard and the uniform of the Woodstock set. He refused to be examined; I and a young fellow doctor whom I knew well were left as the night went on trying to induce him to be examined. A bloody martyr. Save us the histrionics, I thought at the time.

There was no way we were going to pass him, but we stupidly thought we could save him from being arrested if he would consent to be examined. We watched and he watched back. Eventually, the other young doctor calmly explained that eventually we could just leave him and then what may happen would be beyond our control; we were not infringing on his rights any more than any other doctor except that we could not explicitly say anything to him about what we found. While he was in this room he was totally under our control; we just had a job to do – and the word repeated several times struck a chord.

It did not take us long to find a reason for failure to pass his medical examination. He had the loudest machinery murmur that either of us had ever heard, indicative of a septal defect in the heart. The only further requirement for us then was to ascertain whether he was symptomatic, which he wasn’t. As this was going on, the defiant demeanour had given way to the fearful request asking if anything was wrong. We could only respond to by saying he should go and see his local doctor as soon as possible. He did not have a local doctor – “only the sick had doctors” – we shrugged and told him to get dressed and find a doctor anyway; that was all.

Given the buggery he had caused, which just meant we got home about eleven in the evening, we had a wry laugh about it. Reflecting on that episode now from a distance in time, it was just an example of bureaucratic anomie we had to tolerate to get and maintain our employment; and rationalise that there were three groups of examining doctors – one looking to fail and one with the zeal to pass them. The third group who were those encased in their pure objectivity. Of course, you knew in which group my friend and I lay.

All these memories came back as we were driven around this city, where the French influence is still evident in the wide boulevards lined with tall resin trees. The Notre Dame Cathedral Basilica is encased in scaffolding and is temporarily closed. Yet you see it is derivative from the Paris Cathedral of the same name, except that the Saigon version is built of Toulouse bricks, which have retained their bright red colour even after so many years. The French were here in Indochina from 1858 until 1954 when its army was crushed at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, a defeat which should have alerted the Americans to the robust strategic combativeness of the North Vietnamese – and their courage.

Today is near the end of the rainy season, and while the hotel is ablaze with Singapore orchids and hydrangeas, the streets are beige and grey, there was frangipani in leaf but yet to flower. Shop fronts cluster – cafés, a motor bicycle repair shop, bánh mì outlets, craft shops. Then we drive into the street lined by the likes of Hermes, the flash Takashimaya and all the other suspects for the wealthy shopper.

We stayed at the Hyatt, an excellent hotel where the standard of Vietnamese cuisine raises the bar for their cousins in Australia. As I gaze around this spacious hotel with its people, obligingly going out their way to cater for me, I thought, how pointless the aptly renamed American War was. Unfortunately, there are those in power who cover their eyes and create memorials to those who so unnecessarily died or were so crippled not only physically but emotionally that they are the legacy for a fruitless war. Yet the raided bluster still goes on, even if the aim is the destruction of a War Memorial rather than Vietnam.

Medicare Lost

There are a number of elements in the Australian Health system which are both misunderstood and misrepresented. The 1946 Referendum granted the Federal Government the power of providing a financial benefit for medical, dental, pharmaceutical and hospital services. The benefit goes to the patient; it is not a fee charged by practitioner or institution. It is the amount of funding to be paid as a “benefit” to the patient for a particular item of medical service. A dental scheme has never been enacted.

In 1974, optometrists gained limited access to benefits on the grounds that they were deemed “medical”. It was a propitious time for that profession because of the number at that time who were members of parliament. It helps. The consequence of this generosity was the potential for this to cascade to every health professional being able to be deemed “medical”.

That has yet to happen, even though it is every central agency’s nightmare, given that Medicare is one of few expenditure line items not to be capped, although from afar, it is evident that capping is being undertaken by subterfuge. This generates its own problems for patients as the gaps between medical benefit and actual fee charged inevitably widens.

Finally, doctors are free to charge what they believe fair and reasonable. The Federal Government has no control over prices and incomes, last tested by the Referendum result at the end of 1973. The States do have the ability to fix prices, but in this day and age that would be politically suicidal – even if a Government tried to isolate one group of professionals.

When Medibank and Medicare were being brought into being, both Bill Hayden and Neil Blewett, as Ministers of the Crown were very knowledgeable and spoke the language of “health” fluently. So did Michael Wooldridge on the Coalition side later. All three were effective. From the commencement of my graduation in medicine at the end of 1963 to the present, there have been 22 Australian Health Ministers. Bill Hayden in fact was never Minister of Health, but as the Minister responsible for the introduction of Medibank, he may as well have been. Most of the others are in the same basket as is the current incumbent, Mark Butler. They neither speak “Health” nor know much about it. Thus, they are very susceptible to those influencers, whether these are in fact knowledgeable or not. Health has its fair share of the evangelical, the biased, the bigoted and the just plain stupid. Imagine you are standing in a marketplace where everybody is speaking a different language that you barely understand, but you are the newly appointed consul from Rome and everyone is speaking Arsacid Pahlavi.

All three mentioned above had very good bureaucratic backup; people knowledgeable and able to speak “Health.” The problem is that a Head of the Department over a 12 years’ reign who does not really understand her portfolio, save as being very good at keeping her Minister on side irrespective of party has been accompanied by the decline in the quality of health policy. This modus operandi essentially ensures that nothing of importance gets done; especially if you use the ruse of shuffling everybody every few months which is a recipe for destroying the corporate memory.

There are a number of bureaucrats who believe that bureaucratic management can be content free. The late John Paterson clearly believed this, but he was not alone. This theory does not work in health. Having been around longer than most in health policy and politics, I remember well the axiom that it takes 18 years for any reform to be sustained; and that is what has been lacking. John Deeble and Dick Scotton were working on the reform of medical financing from the mid 1960s, with important input into the influential Nimmo Inquiry in 1969. The culmination of their work was the passage of the Medicare legislation in 1983. That sounds about the expected time, and the scheme was successful. But over time, with the loss of these two especially, when dysfunctions in the ongoing implementation emerge, remedies are not found.

Corporate memory is shown to be in short supply. Since Medicare from the start provided the right balance between government funder, health provider and patient, it nevertheless was susceptible to gaming. First there were the State governments who, once the Federal Government allowed them access to Medicare payments, privatised a substantial amount of their services or, in the case of Victoria, just diverted health payments to other parts of the State budget. So, the first impediments were rogue State governments compounded by a weak Federal response.

The second element in maintaining stability which was very important were the periodic Inquiries into the Fees Schedule between the AMA and Government, the last being in 1984. The value of these Inquiries was that they made both sides produce data, however imperfect, instead of opinion. As such, these data could be examined objectively and a negotiated position agreed. After these Inquiries finished, which were essentially exercises in cost accounting, the consultancy which Robert Wilson and I were involved in looked at in depth into several of these exercises, quasi-inquiries between government and specific segments of the medical profession. There is no doubt that the Fees Inquiries were not conducted with the level of complexity now required in costing medical services and practice arrangements.

However, it is fair to say that costing radiation oncology practice in the 1980s approached this level of complexity. There were a number of lessons which still can be learned from this exercise. The first was that when the professional relativities were being developed, most of the radiation oncologists were employed in the public sector. Hence the only reference point to Medicare benefits was the salary they earned from the particular State-run facility.

The technical staff were salaried – the radiographers, the scientists and all the others essential for treatment. Capital expenditures by States was on machines – when funds were available new equipment would be purchased – with no thought given to amortising the cost of these facilities. At the same time technology was improving with development of linear accelerators, the most commonly used treatment machines, and there were calls for such machines to be funded.

Essentially then we had to construct a cost effective model, taking into account all of the above three elements for private radiation oncology practice, which we did in association with the Federal Department of Health, involving delineation of the professional, technical and capital components. Along the way, we determined that three linear accelerators were the most efficient deployment of facilities. There were subsequently a number of Inquiries into Radiation Oncology trying to disprove our findings. Eventually politics triumphed – single treatment machine facilities were installed with all the staffing problems that entailed and the Federal government allowed the States to have access to the capital component despite the costings being based on private facilities. This decision has bedevilled the health system ever since; not only States privatising but also “double-dipping”.

The other change has been the extensive corporatisation of medical practice with both Australian and in recent years international finance company owners, and since the sustainability of the business model is profit not patient outcome, then the gaming of Medicare items becomes an essential component underpinning such a model. Nothing has been done to change this effect on Medicare. As a consequence further Medicare funding is repatriated overseas.

Finally, there are the doctors themselves. Even among the medical profession before corporatisation, some had already embarked on determining the best methodology to game the system. Medical practice loses its credibility if the objectives are all financial. With seemingly endless differentiation of the specialties and the chopping and changing of item descriptors, the number of items expand and their descriptors have expanded. With volume comes complexity, and therefore some doctors have been known to employ people specifically to work out the optimal profitability by manipulating the value of various items of service, whilst maintaining the broad lines which the Health Department has established, such as for general practitioners the 80/20 rules (seeing more than 80 patients for 20 or more billing days a year) and more recently a similar rule for consultant physicians and paediatricians in relation to telehealth.

Extravagant lifestyle becomes one driver to charge well beyond the benefit. If there were regular Inquiries, it could focus everybody’s need to have an affordable health system. If the proceduralists have good results, then the patient is inclined to accept the cost. I suspect that is why some ophthalmologists are able to charge exorbitant fees – cataract removal and lens implant gives back eyesight, in skilled hands it is swift, with little fear of complication. Moreover, we only have two eyes so there is a limit on the number able to be done on the one person! Personal willingness to pay a premium has always been an important vector. For most ophthalmologists, attention to the items of service remains an important vector for profitable gaming if one believes the recent claim that injection for macular degeneration is being overused; and here there may be more than two bites at the cherry. This illustrates how narrow is the walkway between gaming and outright fraud.

Item descriptors are the basis of relativity, the different value of one specialty against the another. The relativities were set in the early 1970s when each of the then specialties was asked to value its professional expertise, but over time, changes in medical practice should have been factored into medical practice and altered these relativities. The benefit when conceived was set based on the professional component. It assumed the cost of the technical component would be paid by the hospital or facility where the operation takes place, which led in the 1980s to recognition of stand-alone day surgery centres. The problem of capital expenditure in terms of prostheses has never been satisfactorily sorted out, and if it is not absorbed into a global benefit for a particular item of service, it will continue in a limbo state of chaos.

Now that the Government intends to place consulting firms on a strict diet, the Department should beef up its expertise in medical knowledge and cost accounting by constructing a long term Medicare Branch directly responsible to the Minister, based on the model Robert Wilson and I conceived which was successful and transparent until the content-free big consulting firms took over.

The areas to be examined should expect the AMA to develop a similar expertise and be less concerned with vapid reactive media releases. However, it also needs to be recognised that with greater complexity in medicine one organisation can no longer claim expertise across the entire medical spectrum and therefore this process inevitably involves the assistance of specialist organisations.

Then the effects of the following can be objectively examined

(a) gaming, and when gaming becomes fraud

(b) corporatisation

(d) the structure of items and their descriptors to incorporate the three components

(e) the future of relativities

(f) the re-institution of regular Health Department – AMA Inquiries

I have also not included so-called aesthetic surgery – lifestyle masquerading as health. It requires a separate line item.

As an addendum, some may say that the recent MBS Review carried out some of these tasks and, with its latest hand-picked committee, it will deal with the relevant issues. However, I don’t see all the above issues on its agenda. The MBS Review was a massive undertaking that had many critics, especially in relation to the perception of hand-picked participants and pre-conceived outcomes.

The recent media attention on a PhD about the use of Medicare items and perceptions of overuse adds another dimension. I have yet to read the 400 or so pages of the thesis, but there is clearly disagreement about what conclusions were actually reached and their accuracy; the mainstream media, as always, does its bit of headline grabbing without too much concern for the nuance. Unhelpful when the rot is widespread and entrenched.

The Throwback

Just a thought about the antics of Vladimir Putin when I heard that many of the young educated, the basis of a middle class which Russia has always found difficult to maintain, have left the country. They are those who have the funds to do it, and in a country which is essentially socially corrupt, “who you know” is paramount to achieving one’s goal.

The fool Yeltsin, who facilitated the transition of Russia to a kleptocracy enabled a large number of the financially adept without any apparent morality to carve Russian resources up into fabulously wealthy satraps. Putin’s rise from being an obscure KGB agent showed the value of contacts, in fact becoming a form of padrone, and then realising the fallibility and foibles of Yeltsin, he nestled like a cuckoo, not making himself a large target in order to be underestimated by potential rivals as he threw them out of the nest.

Putin was a shrewd, intelligent man, who yet has always carried a mystical belief in Mother Russia. Whether Putin was religious or not, he recognised that in post-Communist Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church could be an ally. After all, while the Church looms large within the framework of Orthodoxy, Moscow is not numbered among the original five Patriarchies.

Feelings of inferiority drive most political behaviour and Putin is no different. The Russian Soviet Empire in which he was born had been stripped of its Asian states and most of its European hegemony. The disdain of the freed Baltic states would have infuriated him. Khrushchev, having ceded Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet in a fit of pique, meant Crimea also need to be recovered in this post-Soviet world.

Putin still had influence in two satellite European countries – Belarus and Ukraine. Elsewhere in the Caucasus and in its former Asian empire, it has been able to ensure that what Russia determines, these states will obey, and he showed what happens with disobedience when he defeated any Georgian aspirations in 2008 and carved pieces off the country to reinforce the point.

Putin repeated the process in Ukraine by occupying the Russian speaking border areas and carrying out a bloodless annexation of Crimea, in so doing humiliating Ukraine, sending elements of the Ukrainian navy based in Sebastopol packing, as Russia assumed control of the Black Sea naval base.

Now it is a different Ukraine, Putin’s corrupt Ukrainian marionettes having been banished by a young man – Zelensky, a true knight errant. And Ukraine has significant resources and a population of over 44 million people (cf Georgia 10 million).

Putin came to office over 30 years ago with all the novelty of youth unknown; now at 70 and over 30 years later, he exists in his braggadocio shell, which threatens and threatens. The problem is that his oligarch mates have not devised the business model for a nuclear war outcome by which they can loot without having to worry about radioactive caviar and vodka laced with just a tincture of polonium. After all, the latter has been favoured Putin method of eliminating his individual adversaries.

Toilets all at Sea

I recall the anecdote about Frank Lloyd Wright who once said to his son-in-law, Winston Peters; “Wes, sit down will you. You are ruining the scale of my architecture.” Frank Lloyd Wright was a small man, and Wes had been helping in the construction of this extraordinary house, Fallingwater, built over a creek. Whenever anybody mentions Wright’s name, Fallingwater is the first of his many buildings that people associate with him. Fallingwater is located at Bear Run near Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

I remember shaking Winston Peters’ hand, when we were serendipitously at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona at the same time as he was. Given that Wright built homes from the perspective of his short stature, with many of the low ceilings his houses could be described as “snug”. Winston Peters was lean and rangy. I was struck by his quiet manner and in the “old money” he was nearly six foot five inches tall. Wright was feisty. Peters was not, and he would have done what he was told and sat down.

The reason that I thought of that exchange is that it is probably best not to have airlines run by the vertically challenged. I have not travelled by air for some time, but my level of disability is gradually increasing, the price of increasing age. However, in the airplane toilets, you cannot swing a leprechaun – and manoeuvring in such a confined space, where I suspect that the partial pressure of oxygen is much compromised, I have great difficulty using a facility the size of a small wardrobe. The senior airline executives may find cleaning their backsides in an airline toilet a breeze. I do not. For the disabled of normal size in such a confined space, especially with doors that may open out on a very narrow passage space trying to orient oneself when using canes or crutches is a learned art. This problem has been aired recently in an international travel magazine by a wheelchair bound person who now, when about to travel on a plane, prepares by eating and drinking little in the 24 hours before the flight. Probably resembles the preparation regimen before a colonoscopy.

The danger of deprivation is dehydration, since the plane’s atmosphere desiccates the traveller, and therefore depriving oneself of fluids prior to flying is not very desirable. I just use a container discreetly, and my carer empties it. You must be able to adjust yourself and take your time; and have a very understanding carer.

There are rules about toilets depending on whether the plane has a single or double aisle; and all planes with a seating capacity of over 60 passengers are required to have a toilet. In these smaller planes, the level of difficulty is compounded; and I have been in some embarrassing positions in a Dash-8, where there is no water to wash your hands, and when the door is open, it blocks access to the cockpit and the toilet itself is constructed for a midget – and a small one at that.

I have been on long flights in small planes without toilets and have coped. Nevertheless, the convention of providing any receptacle requires knowing what it is like trying to empty your bladder when the plane is caught in even light turbulence. I am sure I am not the only one to have difficulties; but it is a topic which, like many in the shadows of disability, is not discussed very much – a taboo particularly in the board rooms of small people.

Mouse Whisper

A twitter more about men than mice.

A brilliant Merrie England twittertwist:

My son has lived through five chancellors, four home secretaries, three prime ministers and two monarchs. He’s four months old.

And as Larry the Cat would say, it’s just another new lodger at No. 10 …

Modest Expectations – The Beer Flows Again

Floods are inconvenient. It has meant that our car is marooned in Tasmania, contradicting my statement that we are physically confined to this island: before the extreme weather, it has been a beautiful Spring. In Wynyard, there were beds of tulips along its streets and on Table Cape nearby, there was a proliferation of tulips set out in long multicoloured rows. We purchased a pot with a ruby red tulip in full flower which was added to the cut rhododendrons and camellias already dotted around the house. The azaleas were coming into bloom at the back door. The silver wattle is in full bloom, a blaze of colour from the dining table.

The native waratahs are also in full flower. So is the pink heath; and the intersection of the native and exotic just reminded us of how beautiful October can be in Tasmania – even if one turns a blind eye to the uncontrolled spread of the yellow gorse curse on the road out of Zeehan. Beautiful at a distance; an evil thorny infiltrate close up.

Then the rain, as predicted, came and flooded among many other places in that part of the State, the Meander Valley, as it did six years ago. At that time the Huon valley in the south was also severely affected. Now in October 2022, the flooding has been concentrated in the Meander Valley to the west of Launceston, and the alongside coastal Latrobe area.

It had rained in Strahan where we were, but then it always rains there. The last week, it had been sunshine and barely any rain. But the rain was tossing down as much as 30 cm every 24 hours into Meander Valley settlements and other nearby townships. Flood mitigation works which had been promised after the last flood had not been commenced in the Meander Valley. Despite the Report following the last flood, which recommended inter alia “While it ‘may be’ that State and Local Government under-invests in flood mitigation, a lot more work is required to understand whether measures such as additional flood levees are appropriate.” – a very curious circumlocutory way of saying that nothing had been done. Such word calisthenics should never be part of a Report seeking urgent improvement on what had been shown to be the dire situation in 2016, only six years ago.

The word surreal is overused and often incorrectly used to describe extraordinary situations. After we were informed that the car ferry sailings had been cancelled indefinitely from Devonport to Melbourne, first because the flooded Mersey river has caused the ferry to float higher than the wharf which made it impossible for vehicles to board, not only cars, but trucks up to the size of B-doubles; and second because of the dangers posed by sunken boats as Devonport lies at the mouth of the Mersey River, which has been one of larger contributors to the flood.

Yet one piece of foresight has been the placement of the Bass Highway between Burnie and Launceston. At times, close to the pavement, we passed torrents of water, not just passive sheets of water, but swiftly flowing rivers broken up by wavelets which had broken their banks and the countryside, almost has far as the eye could see, was water engulfing fences and trees. On the edge of these areas, cattle had been unloaded to what was considered higher ground, and only in very small areas was there evidence of the flood ebbing – exposing the mud which will coat the landscape, whether field or town, for weeks.

And yet here was the Bass Highway, at no stage covered with water nor even any warning signs – all the way to Launceston and out to the airport, where we dropped our guest from America. Given she had committed herself to a nationwide tour the following week, it would have been very inconvenient if she had been unable to fly back to Sydney – hence the introductory sentence.

As for ourselves, the car ferry has resumed this week. We found satisfactory accommodation; we have friends in Hobart to leave the car with until we are able return sometime in mid-November. We are privileged because the privileged always have options. But those without have a forced sojourn in Devonport, and an unpleasant addition to the costs. That is the real problem of these new phenomena of extreme weather – little emergency accommodation – a worthy matter to be considered when considering regional grant programs and of more value to the community than subsidising, for instance, a paper mill in Tumut, which the billionaire owner was well able to afford, even without scattering a few canapés around a troop of generous politicians.

Meandering towards a Government Font

We have driven through the floods in northern Tasmania albeit along the Bass Highway as related above.

The following comment was written prior to the floods, but it illustrates a phenomenon not just restricted to this Council.

Sometimes one gets insights by casually reading an item in the local newspaper. A complaint has surfaced about money which had been allocated by the previous Federal Government through its regional grants program, namely $3.35 million allocated to the Meander Valley community “to contribute to the redevelopment of this area (Deloraine Racecourse)”.

This grant, allocated by the previous government, should be honoured by the Federal Government according to Senator Colbeck, who himself was once the Federal Minister for Sport. Senator Colbeck is reported as having said that “this is a commitment that has some standing over a matter of time and is not from before the last election, it goes back to 2019, and frankly the community doesn’t care who it comes from” and “we don’t want any mean and nasty politics where they could say ‘due to it being made by the opposition we’ll reconsider it or take it away’ and that the community has been planning on the basis of the commitment”.

Senator Colbeck has, in recent consultations with the Meander Valley mayor, discussed the impact of the potential cut in funding. He has called on the Labor Member for Lyons, Brian Mitchell, to “stand up” to the Government because the community is deserving of the funding.

The Deloraine racecourse has been closed since 2005 because it did not meet occupational health and safety requirements. The time-honoured Deloraine Cup was moved to various other racetracks. The Deloraine racecourse is located on the edge of Deloraine. The mayor has said “the funding would help the Council bring new life to one of Australia’s oldest existing racecourses by turning it into a regional-scale community space. I haven’t heard of anyone against these upgrades and there’s no real limit to what we can do here, we just need some dollars to get some facilities up”.

It so epitomises how much of the money was splashed around by the last Federal Government under vague generic titles. There is nothing in this report to say that they have any pressing need for it and in fact, being so close to town, presumably the land could have been subdivided to provide space for housing – even desperately needed social housing. However there is no mention of what the local council was prepared to use the money for, including in terms of any major development such as the words “community facilities” foreshadows.

Meander Valley Council extends from the edge of Launceston to The Grand Tiers, the wilderness area where the Walls of Jerusalem are located. The population of the whole area is about 20,000 and that of the township of Deloraine is 3,000. There are already ten recreation grounds in the Council area, but why worry about the odd $3m. May I suggest that giving $1,000 to each of the inhabitants would probably be just as valuable as funding a number of well-catered planning meetings coupled with interstate and overseas fact-finding missions determining what to do; and handing over to a “consultant” to provide the ultimate “pie in the sky” report for the Council. That would just about cover the $3.2m.

But my wife looked at me and said that I’m complicating the rationale and putting on my own devious spin on what was a few worthies wandering into the nearest political ATM with their request – they would like to renew the Deloraine racecourse and return the Deloraine Cup to its rightful place for the one day of the year, with numerous plaques acknowledging the works of these worthies place everywhere. However, for the sake of appearances better to have the application state “community facilities”

If the objective is achieved and the Cup returned for the one day of the year, where is the money to maintain this putative achievement – maintaining racecourses where the eponymous cup is the only reason to keep them going. By the way, why do those writ large on plaques need to confront the local populace with the cost to maintain such a little used facility?

Yet it is all a bit superfluous given what has happened in the past week. Anyway, that grant may be axed in the forthcoming budget, along with a number of other pending grants. I would have thought that any funding asked from a regional grants program would have been better used as part of flood mitigation, and viewed as same. But this is just using hindsight to criticise a worthy objective, my critics would say. The social, environmental and economic impacts of the 2016 floods in Tasmania were significant, affecting 20 local government areas with an estimated damages bill of $180 million. One bizarre comment from a mayor of another municipality was that one of the real problems was that the 2016 floods had come in darkness. Really, it should not matter of the time of the day in a well warned, well prepared community.

The Tasmanian Recovery Plan published in 2017 was strong on what had to be done to respond to flood rather than prevention of same. Mention was made of the Meander Dam opened in 2007, but that clearly has been insufficient to halt flooding.

The Tasmanian Ports Corporation has responsibility for the eleven Tasmanian ports (as well as the Devonport airport). After the 2016 flood, it has made progress in levelling the seabed at Devonport, and the ferry departure from Devonport now is scheduled three and a half days after its cancellation. In 2016, it took six days then, and people were reported as sleeping in their cars. I understand this is not the case this time.

The communities in the Mersey River catchment do not have that luxury for such an improved response. Maybe I am missing something, but a grants program at any level should have a utilitarian aim, while protecting the rights of the minority.

After this flood has ebbed and the communities have removed the mud and calculated the water damage, perhaps the next plan, in a timely response to this disaster, should include prevention in its title.

It is somewhat ironic to realise that the Latrobe Council next door to the Meander Valley Council has been working on its flood mitigation for six years, whereas Meander Valley has just commenced its flood mitigation works. A projected cost of $14m equally shared by the three tiers of government. As stated: This project will see the construction of levees around Latrobe’s south–western and southern perimeter as well as a flood gate structure (lower Kings Creek) and a peak–flow flood diverter on Kings Creek at Kings Park. The levee system is designed to prevent Mersey River and Kings Creek floodwaters from entering the town’s central business district and nearby residential areas during a significant flood event and provides a temporary water storage area for local runoff behind the walls until flood levels outside the walls reduce.

It sounds impressive, but it is still far away from completion. The cause of the delay? Determining the habitat of the central north burrowing crayfish. Here is certainly a case of protecting the rights of the minority.

Flooding – a personal reflection

My first experience of a flooded living area was in the 1960s where the top floor of the house in Parkville we were partially renting, suddenly showed the ravages of having a frugal owner. The roof began leaking during a particularly violent storm and the staircase became a waterfall. We left immediately in our sodden state. Fortunately it was in an early impecunious period and we had few belongings, but we did have a young child. “Negotiating Niagara holding onto a banister holding a baby with the other was no fun.” Her comments were an exercise in understatement.

The second occurred in the early 1980s in the cottage which we had purchased in Balmain. The cottage was on the side of a steep hill, as many of the suburbs surrounding the Harbour are. In the space of two years, there were two episodes of storms dumping in excess of 20 centimetres of rain over Sydney. Each time the house was flooded to somewhere close to a third of a metre. The major problem was that the water was not seeping under the doors, but coming up the drain in the bathroom like a fountain.

Sandbagging the back bedroom did not work, and we tried to move as much stuff as we could off the floor. Fortunately the bed was raised on a platform and was barely affected. The carpets were ruined as were some smaller items, which could not be recovered. On the second occasion we gave up and retired upstairs with a bottle of bourbon. Added to this, we had episodes of the office being flooded, due to its being the lowest lying office in a building built at the bottom of the conjunction of a number of streets and again, lacking any effective flood mitigation. Thus when I see people whose houses have been fully submerged – if not washed away – I just cannot understand how these people cope, especially when it has occurred on multiple occasions.

In one way my experience verges on the insignificant; but unless you have experienced the helplessness of not being able to prevent water coming into your existence, it is hard to comprehend. Whether Australia will wake up and insulate itself against natural catastrophe in the uniform way that our Federation has generally found itself able to do is yet to be seen. A national approach where the common good prevails would be a novelty, especially if not labelled “socialism” – a sure way to kill any community approach.

There are always going to be the foolhardy. Do we need to work out an index for the expected number of foolhardy people who will need scarce resources for their rescue or do you warn them that nothing can be done– that over a certain level personal responsibility allowed for “dickheads”, in that imagined World of “personal responsibility”, these people would be left to their own resources.

However, that does not occur, because the majority of the community are prepared respond to the foolhardy predicaments – to accept responsibility on behalf of the community in which we all have a place.

… Spare the Horses

Floodplain management is coordinated by Council’s Infrastructure Planning team within the Footpaths, Roads, Traffic and Stormwater Group. Inner West Council, and its predecessors, has been undertaking flood risk studies across the 9 primary catchments within its LGA since 2009 in accordance with the NSW Flood Prone Land Policy. The policy specifies a staged approach to the floodplain management process.

This is how my local Council is avoiding its obligations. How many Councils are guilty of such reassuring puffery telling its rate payers that it has done nothing of significance beyond endless planning?

Much has been made of the flood wall built by the Victorian Racing Club in 2007, when the then responsible planning Victorian State Minister overturned the bid by the City of Melbourne, and Maribyrnong and Moonee Valley councils, to block it.

The Maribyrnong River commences on Mount Macedon and wends its way 160 kms down to its mouth in Port Phillip Bay near Yarraville. The Flemington Racecourse, where 26 race meetings are held each year and which is home for 600 horses in the stables of 30 trainers was constructed on the Maribyrnong River flood plain.

The basic facts set out in Wikipedia about the racecourse itself are: … comprises 1.27 square kms of Crown Land. The course was originally leased to the Victoria Turf Club in 1848, which merged with the Victoria Jockey Club in 1864 to form the Victoria Racing Club. The first Melbourne Cup was run in 1861. In 1871 the Victoria Racing Club Act was passed, giving the VRC legal control over Flemington Racecourse.

In Melbourne, interfering with the Melbourne Cup is tantamount to interfering with Christmas. Nevertheless, this is not any solace to the 260 residents who were flooded by water allegedly banked up by the flood wall. Some insensitive comments from a former executive of the VRC did not help. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the wall went up in 2007, and government has not done anything about a flood mitigation program in the past fifteen years since the wall was built.

Australia’s problem is its addiction to gambling which is beyond going into any rehabilitation program while government needs the revenue to bolster its bottom line – a tax on those who can least afford it. Here the needs of flood mitigation collided with the gambling behemoth – one of the major contaminants within its “Victorian Catchment”.

This space will be interesting to follow since the recent disaster aggravated by the Racing Wall lies in Bill Shorten’s electorate, and his constituency not being in the champagne tents on the first Tuesday in November, may result in rectifying a situation which has been threatening ever since the VRC divorced itself by The Wall construction from its community.

So in the end, climate change makes so much of the “one in 50 years occurrences” predictions so much malarkey. Governments should hold their breath, forget Australia will have periods of apparent drought, but what is required is identification of places like Lismore which will flood repeatably and accept that the town is in the wrong place, and not depend on Sisyphus to determine our national policy.

Pounamu (Greenstone) – to a Full Memory

One of my most prized possessions in a mere made of pounamu. Pounamu is the Maori word for greenstone. Greenstone is nephrite jade. Jadeite, more common in Chinese ornamentation is a lighter green. The most basic difference between jadeite and nephrite, the two forms of jade, is that despite both being silicates, the minerals found in each are different. Jadeite is composed of silicates of aluminium and sodium, whereas nephrites are silicates of calcium and magnesium.

Pounamu is found in the South Island in deposits known to the indigenous people. On the wild spume-laden windy beach at Hokitika, I remember the pieces of pounamu in all its shades of deep green mingled with so much magnificent driftwood. The pounamu comes down the Hokitika river which rises in the Southern Alps and gets its turquoise colour from its glacial origin and the flakes of stone called “rock flour”. By the time it flows into the Tasman Sea, it is a muddy jade in colour. Pounamu is deep emerald, with slashes of green so dark, a casual observer would say it is black.

When I became President of the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine, one of my tasks was to convince the New Zealanders that I was serious about the New Zealand contribution; and recognise that New Zealanders were not Australians. The New Zealanders and Australians have superficial similarities with Australians in language and Anglo-Celtic colonisation.

The problem is that the similarities create the illusion of delusion unless confronted, which I did by actually asking to be educated rather than socialised into a different society. During my three years, I visited New Zealand at least twice a year, generally in February and August. I add I am not a skier, so the time in the wintry New Zealand was certainly not spent on the slopes. Early on, I had met John McLeod. He had been a public health physician with not inconsiderable presence. He was a Ngä Puhi, his iwi or Maori community being located in the very North of the North Island embracing Cape Reinga, the most northerly point where the deep blue Pacific Ocean meets the aquamarine Southern Ocean.

So, I was a pakeha, so what! Our friendship grew from there.

I asked whether he could get me a very good mere, which he did. The mere is a Maori weapon – a hand club, and he provided me with an elegant amokura made from the kawakawa (dark) variety of pounamu characterised by “black” flecks, which to me still have a green basis. To me it symbolises one person’s acceptance of an Australian trying to understand New Zealanders aspirations. It cemented the succession planning of John to succeed as President. Unfortunately, in 1994 John was killed in a head on collision in the North Island returning home from his bach. A terrible, terrible loss given that my successor undid much of what we had crafted in the first six years with Sue Morey being the inspirational first President.

At least having the mere, I have never forgotten John McLeod, and what could have been.

Mouse Whisper

Given all this flood talk, I could not help myself from joining in with a comment about the Noah malarkey. It does not take a genius to realise how scientifically impossible was an Ark containing a brace of every item of fauna. And as for the flood, some person who had too much time on his hands calculated the following:

There had to be 813,875,076 miles³ of rain for the biblical flood. To put that in perspective, the oceans have about 321,000,000 miles³ of water. All the water on earth only adds up to about 332,500,000 miles³. So for the biblical flood to have happened, the water on earth had to miraculously multiply by about 250%.

The people who believe literally in Noah and his Ark are the same people who believe in the Trump election win.

Modest Expectations – The Alamo

As I finish my blog we are marooned by devastating floods which have inundated north-west Tasmania as part of a rain bomb, which has been particularly acute over Victoria and Tasmania. We have our car, but the car ferry is indefinitely cancelled and we have to find our way back to Sydney before the end of next week. In my blog, I had a piece critical of the way a particular amount of money was proposed to be allocated to the local council. While the premise is unchanged, it would have been in poor taste to publish it, given the damage being done to countless settlements in the Meander Valley, making the grant in question seem a paltry sum. Now there is a very good reason to provide funding in the wake of the severest flooding the area has suffered.

“A Little Flu”

Today is the day that most of the final restrictions relating to COVID have been removed. The question remains as to how effective our reaction to the virus has been.

There seems to be only one person who is still listened to by those children of the business community – the politicians – on public health. He was present when the politicians did not know what to do in early 2020. His intervention at a time when the Federal Cabinet was consumed by an extreme anxiety, when one of their number, Dutton, returned from America with the Virus. It was a time before vaccines, and the hysteria was fomented by comparisons with the Spanish flu outbreak, when millions died worldwide.

The one thing which frightens politicians is a feeling of helplessness. One stratagem is to diminish the threat – “the little flu” of Brazil’s Bolsonaro; another is to wish it will go away – “the Munich response”. Another is to ignore it until it is too late – and believe that once there are signs of improvement, you no longer need expert advice.

The then new Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, had three important advantages. First, he was expert in public health; second, he had a calming influence while being shrewd enough to balance the plethora of opinion swirling around him to support the most politically acceptable course, while not abandoning all his principles.

Now, almost three years later, Kelly is still in his job and is now the expert face of a basically similar group of politicians, who are now advocating the populace take personal responsibility for its actions at a time when the pandemic is far from over. Such a course of action has enabled the various governments to abrogate their responsibility. The Pauline nuance has changed but he has maintained relevance – albeit by a thin thread.

When the Virus emerged, it was a time when social isolation and personal hygiene were the only strategies; even masks were not generally recommended. It soon became clear that this pandemic would be more than the false alarm generated by other exotic viral infections earlier in the 21^st century, which ended up self-contained. Then COVID came along.

When you reflect on the closure of borders and the situations then and now, there are marked changes in the decision makers. No longer is Brendan Murphy paraded as the face of a successful response; Minister Hunt is gone; and one of the major disruptive forces, Gladys Berejiklian, also. She presided over the most egregious breach of the COVID rules when the passengers were hastily disembarked from the Ruby Princess while 600 on board were infected and given the shenanigans which occurred with its sister ship, the Diamond Princess in Japan. It all foreshadowed the final outcome two years later – business eventually dismantling the safeguards and the elderly in particular bearing the brunt of the mantra of “personal responsibility”

I copped a great deal of criticism about the Ruby Princess fiasco by identifying the wrong target, and in particular being excessively critical of the Chief Health Officer, Kerry Chant. The problem in this world of modern bureaucracy, the minions take the blame. I prefer to look higher up the ladder to attribute blame. Moreover, Berejiklian with her “goodie two shoes” role, rather than accepting some of the blame, appeared in a front page article in the AFR coquettishly posing in virginal white suit, accompanying an article describing her as the saviour of Australia. No wonder that the other Premiers did not warm to her. The Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, aided by her eccentric chief medical officer who now has been buried away from the media as Governor, certainly came in conflict with Berijiklian.

Yet in a pre-vaccine era, with its program of severe lockdowns, with border closures, Australia (together with New Zealand) was seen as the best place in the World to be in controlling the Virus. It was draconian, and only a short term solution, although it was not seen in that light then.

But then, the success story began to fray. The seeds for this had been planted. From the onset, public health became the plaything of the media. The more public health experts could be seen as having different opinions, the more the media harvested spice. The problem is that organised health, and here I include The Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine, were not proactive in the early days when rules promoting certainty could have been set down.

A further problem, beside the antics of Berejiklian which alienated the other Premiers, was the reflex behaviour of a Prime Minister whose first reaction was to divide, seed doubts and, as became increasingly clear, substitute fiction for facts. Despite the cover of a National Cabinet, no long-term strategy was developed. At the heart of their thinking was that the pandemic would be self-limiting and that eventually it would die down. Then the government could declare success, which it did anyway, if somewhat prematurely.

The second mistake was the government’s choice of vaccines, one was a complete dud; the other adequate, but old technology. Then the deficiencies of a government which had heavily invested in social distancing, enforced by the police, became less and less enforceable.

At the same time there was a series of administrative blunders – delaying investment in the vaccines and then in the rapid tests. The development of mRNA vaccines seemed to blindside the government experts. The Premier of Victoria showed stratagems that worked – the first was that he fronted up every day to report and the second was the implicit transaction which traded level of vaccination with privileges. This could have formed the basis of a long term strategy, but the Virus inconveniently mutated.

Lockdowns had become very unpopular as they became synonymous with high-handed police crackdowns and infringement notices. Then the street protests started by a gaggle of trumpists, liberationists, anti-vaxxers, who recognised the increasing restlessness of the population, was fodder for street revolution.

The vaccines have come with boosters – and now the anti-virals. Influenza, having been absent during the lock-downs, re-emerged

However, the most difficult aspect of maintaining the message was the loss of interest – the daily reports, the interviews with the public experts, the sudden decline in concern which had been initially shown in the plight of nursing home residents; their upset relatives clustered outside the nursing homes being interviewed gradually lessened. Reporting daily became reporting weekly and monthly – and without media commentary, the community has drifted into convenient acceptance.

Restrictions have been removed, although the government has not dared to encourage people not to wear masks in health facilities or nursing homes, and popularity before public safety is found to lead to an easier life for a Premier. Probably this change of attitude was first exemplified by Perrotet when he became Premier. He gradually removed Kerry Chant from centre stage, and while some protested about this, she has become increasingly invisible. Brett Sutton in Victoria did not go as quietly, but now he has a Minister who refuses to release a report on public health until after the forthcoming elections. It is as though the Virus will agree to a truce until after the election. It is as ridiculous a decision as were those of one of her predecessors who unwisely waded into the Virus quagmire early and was politically extinguished. The Premier has not changed. He knows Popularity when he sees it, especially close to elections.

When Perrotet replaced Berejiklian as Premier, he quickly shifted the agenda to “personal responsibility” and the community applauded, as the restrictions were peeled away. Perrotet was popular with the other Premiers, unlike Berejiklian, and then Morrison was also gone. The Premiers have found the new Prime Minister a pliant ally in dismantling public health.

Yet those who say the pandemic is not over no longer have a platform in the conventional media. The AMA may reflexly protest about any lessening of restrictions, but there is no follow up. Even as distinguished a scientist as Brendan Crabb is forced to vent his concern on Twitter:

“Like many, I often get labelled a fearmonger. As we approach our fourth wave for 2022, shortly after our most lethal wave of the pandemic – on track for 25,000 deaths for the year and with a likely Long Covid toll of 500,000+ – what we’re seeing is actually worse that I thought.”

The Premier of Victoria allows his Health Minister to suppress an expert Report on the Virus until after the State election on November 26. If you think about this decision, it is outrageous – somebody with no health expertise rejecting advice for political gain. It is tantamount to same person in a different portfolio advocating doing nothing about a fire out of control until a political event has passed.

The stark message from Brendan Crabb is the pandemic is still out of control. Yet has Australia an adequate mechanism to reimpose restrictions should we need it? I shall continue to explore it in my next blog.

Getting Stoned

There are rocks; and then there are rocks. The “Rock” in Australia was associated before 1993 with Ayers Rock named after a colonial South Australian functionary, Henry Ayers; named now Uluru meaning “great pebble” in the local Anangu language for the sacred site. Uluru epitomises the Red Centre, especially at sunset. Even during the day, Uluru is red and walking around the perimeter one is faced with trabeculated inglenooks, where you can imagine that the local indigenous people would have found shelter. Walking around the periphery one gets the sense of sheer size of the rock which is magnified by the fact that it rises from a basically flat landscape. It is unsurprising that has spiritual significance

But there are other geological formations – I have visited a number of these “rocks” throughout Australia, like the nearby domed rocks once Mount Olga now renamed Kata Tjuta; the Devil’s Marbles or Karlu Karlu, near Tennant Creek; Hanging Rock, a mamelon perhaps with the Aboriginal name of Ngannelong near Melbourne; Mount Wudinna outside the town of the same name in South Australia; but most of all Mount Augustus in Western Australia.

Mount Augustus or Burringurrah is approximately 300 km east of Carnarvon. Its size dwarfs that of Uluru. Named after Augustus Charles Gregory, in an outburst of fraternal generosity by his brother Francis Gregory who, on 3 June 1858, during his exploratory journey through the Gascoyne Region, became the first European to climb it. It is difficult to reach.

Whereas Uluru is approximately nine kms around the base, it is about 43 kms to circumnavigate Mount Augustus. You need a vehicle to drive around it. Because of the landscape being more treed than that around Uluru it does not at first appear to have the same significance, yet when you get up close you realise how impressive it is.

When we were there, the local nurse volunteered to drive us around the rock – a hair raising trip as he obviously thought he was engaged in a single man rally. Eventually all things must come to an end. The car hit a large pothole, fortunately near the camp, which resulted in a burst tyre. The drive made such an impression on our pilot that he said: “I’ve flown in some pretty terrible conditions, but frankly your driving terrifies me more than any I’ve experienced as a pilot! The fact that this nurse’s tenure was able to be maintained at the remote site exemplifies the problem of finding sane, let alone suitably-trained health professionals in remote areas.

Unlike other places in the Review, the male elder greeted us with suspicion and a taciturnity that I interpreted as him wishing we would just go away and leave his settlement in peace. One of the women showed us her artworks, one of which we purchased. Visiting Mount Augustus was just part of the Rural Stocktake visits, which included visiting a number of remote settlements across the Nation.

I had already been involved in setting up a rural clinical school at Geraldton in Western Australia, which meant I had already travelled extensively in this region – north to Exmouth Gulf, east to Meekatharra and south to the small wheat belt communities, so the excursion to Mount Augustus, which I had heard about through my association with rural Western Australia was a deliberate inclusion.

However, it was very much fly-in-fly-out’, and thus one of the less satisfactory yet eye-opening visits I made during the six months of that Review. Nevertheless, people may talk about Uluru and its majesty, but Mount Augustus itself is something else.

For the record Uluru is a rock monolith consisting of a single rock (and sometimes called a land iceberg given most of its mass is below ground) while Mount Augustus is a monocline formed by a geological linear, strata dip in one direction between horizontal layers on each side; but to me, they are both just humongous, impressive rocks.

Dual in the Sun

I was intrigued by the following newspaper report recognising that the newly minted Nobel Laureate joined a select group.

In winning the award on Wednesday, Dr. Sharpless became only the fifth person to win two Nobels, having received the chemistry prize in 2001 for his work on chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions. The other two-time winners were Marie Curie, John Bardeen, Linus Pauling and Frederick Sanger.

I already knew about Marie Curie and Linus Pauling.

Together with Pierre, her husband, Madame Curie shared half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Henri Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in purifying radium.

Linus Pauling in my younger years always stood out as the bloke who flogged large doses of Vitamin C for the common cold. He was so wrong in relation to Vitamin C compared with his sure-footedness in his journey through the then new world of quantum mechanics for which he was awarded his first Nobel Prize for Chemistry. His second Nobel Prize was for Peace, awarded nine years later in 1963 for his unremitting opposition to nuclear war, in fact it was the same year the USA, Soviet Union and the United Kingdom signed the Limited Nuclear Test Treaty.

With a bit of prompting I did remember John Bardeen.

John Bardeen was a physicist and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics twice, both collaboratively. The first was in 1956 for the invention of the transistor; and the second in 1972 for the fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity.

His discoveries, albeit inventions, were probably as influential in the day to day life of the average citizen as any Nobel Prize winner in that field.

The transistor revolutionised the electronics industry, making possible the development of almost every modern electronic device from telephones to computers, and ushering in the Information Age.

Bardeen’s work in superconductivity eventuated in its application to nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and the more esoteric superconducting quantum circuits.

Frederick Sanger sequenced insulin for the first Nobel Prize, and then he came back for his second award for his developing methodology to sequence DNA. His first technique was soon replaced by technology developed by Pehr Edman which led to the development of the sequenator. Nevertheless, his technological discoveries in relation to DNA paved the way for the elucidation of the genome. I note that a number of his post graduate students have won Nobel Prizes, which suggest that he understood well the politics of the Nobel Prize, a consideration increasingly important in the quest for scientific recognition – and he lived a long life which sometimes helps.

Now the plaudits are there for Barry Sharpless for works in two fields of chemistry. With the exception of Pauling, these men and one woman won their prizes because of their supreme ability to navigate the laboratory. For many of us, the heroics of the discoverers – the navigators are on land and sea – were the achievements which are easy to understand. In the world of the unseen, it is more difficult to recognise these laboratory explorers.

To understand Sharpless’s first shared Nobel Prize, one must understand that molecules appear in two forms that mirror each other – just as our hands mirror each other, but are not superimposable. Such molecules are called chiral. In nature one of these forms is often dominant, so in our cells one of these mirror images of a molecule fits “like a glove”, in contrast to the other one which may even be harmful. Pharmaceutical products often consist of chiral molecules, and the difference between the two forms can be a matter of life and death, just to quote one source.

Sharpless developed molecules that can catalyse important reactions by oxidation techniques, while the other two scientists who shared the prize used hydrogenation – the end point being that only one of the two mirror image forms is produced. L-Dopamine used in the treatment of Parkinsonism is one example.

Now Sharpless has bobbed up with a share of the 2022 Nobel Prize for “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry”. I shudder – “click chemistry”? What next? Molecular shears? *

Then I searched around and read that “Click Chemistry” is a term that was introduced by Sharpless in 2001 to describe reactions that are high yielding, wide in scope, create only byproducts that can be removed without chromatography, are stereospecific, simple to perform, and can be conducted in easily removable or benign solvents. He has been one busy scientist; get one Nobel Prize and 21 years later, the second – and all due to judicious use of copper catalysts.

I would suggest that it would be difficult to win two prizes in Clinical Physiology and Medicine; and well nigh impossible in Literature.

However, the International Committee of the Red Cross has won the Peace Prize three times (1917, 1944 and 1963), and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize two times (1954 and 1981).

And as for the Economics Prize, a second award? Probably not, unless it is extended to soothsayers and bookmakers as is widely tipped in the hedges of New York and Zurich.

But jesting aside, the more you read about these five individuals especially if one has been an observer of the field of research, the more these people interest, because they all have extensive biographies, which tell the reader all but paradoxically also nothing at all.

An * from Prince Lachlan

Yes, I do know about molecular shears or scissors. They are useful in ensuring a good “heir-cut”, aren’t they?

Like a Nail Drawn Across a Blackboard

There are two responses, which are more punctuation marks akin to the full stop.

“We are taking the matter seriously” reminds me of the judge putting on the black cap before pronouncing the death sentence. Once you hear the words or read them, you know nothing will be done to rectify the particular mess being contemplated by those who have uttered the words. The finality of a death sentence. How few times have the utterers of such words been held to account and asked after a few months to wax lyrical on how they have taken the matter. Seriously?

The other response is the exhortation “to take personal responsibility”. It is the mantra for governments to shed responsibility. To use this as a substitute for government intervention, there is almost an element of reproach in people to fail to reach some hypothetical level, where abide the gods of Macquarie Street.

It is all very well to take personal responsibility if one has all the information to make the appropriate choice. Yet distribution of information is not symmetrical throughout the community; and has been made worse by the accession of the Trumps of the world who are unconcerned with evidence to base decision making on, but deliberately contaminate the Information Well with falsehoods.

Mark Humphries, whose comedic talents often exposes politician foibles, wrote inter alia at a time when Morrison was the Prime Minister. It says it all.

After nearly two years of the Prime Minister informing us that various issues were “a matter for the states”, is it any wonder that our Premier (NSW) would embrace this spirit of buck-passing in determining that the issue of mask-wearing should be a matter for the individual? What a thrill to be able to tell our grandchildren that we were there to witness the birth of the next big thing in political theory: trickle-down responsibility. It went about as well as trickle-down economics.”

There are many more public relations mediated responses, but these two will do for the moment. They are bad enough.

Mouse Whisper

Due to sensibilities … I have been asked to relate the following comment directed towards the current United Kingdom Government.

“Now that the ringmaster has left the circus in England, the lions are eating the clowns”.

Can I make the point, that “titmus” derives from a bird not one of ours?

Modest Expectation – Dear Green Places

This past week, the world has witnessed Earth based scientist intervention through The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft colliding with the asteroid Dimorphos, with the intent to change the asteroid’s orbit. The objective was achieved, in so far as it hit the target.

The 572kg DART spacecraft collided with the estimated 5bn kg asteroid Dimorphos at 22, 530 km/hr about 11million kms from Earth. The spacecraft hit about 17m from the asteroid’s centre. It will take about two months to find out whether the Dimorphos orbit has been altered as a result of this collision.

Yet at the same time the World has been powerless to counter the growth of hurricanes and just watches, as we did last week, the destruction caused to a number of American cities in Florida in particular.

Then there are earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, all of which we can predict, but unlike eclipses, which we can predict to the minute, natural disasters have a wide variance.

The recently retired climate adviser to President Biden has been reported as saying:

So we’ve worked for the past year with experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey and our own Office of Science and Technology Policy to put together the Climate Mapping For Resilience and Adaptation web portal. You can go down to the census tract and look forward. That’s particularly salient, by the way, at a time when under the bipartisan infrastructure law, we’re going to be investing over a trillion dollars in new infrastructure. Let’s make sure that communities know what the risks are and so the infrastructure can be designed in a way that will withstand what we’re seeing in Florida right now.

He uses the word resilience because climate change must be met with continuity of government policy. You can collect all the information but for instance if you are unable to snuff out a nascent hurricane or move its direction so it blows itself out without affecting life or property, then how will we cope with climate change, where more and more the extreme today is the norm of tomorrow.

Meanwhile, there are suggestions to counter hurricanes (typhoons or cyclones) – (a) a set of giant tubes sucking the warm surface water down, or (b) a set of giant wind turbines to guard the shore and in so doing disrupting the hurricane with their vanes. The problem is the number required. One estimate is 78,000 in the Gulf of Mexico. I’m not sure the good burghers of the Florida condominiums would enjoy the view of a turbine forest. But you never know. They could be painted different colours to looking like candy. Yet indicative of the required density, as there are only 15,000 wind turbines in the most populated North Sea, it may resemble a clutter of so many “windmills in your mind” enough to blow the Floridian auricles.

The Lowana Cottage

Nearly 20 years ago, we purchased a beautiful custom-built pole house in Strahan. Strahan had grown as a fishing port located on Macquarie Harbour, a deceptively large stretch of water, with a narrow entrance with dangerous tidal currents called Hell’s Gate. The harbour water is the colour of tea, because of the tannin eluted from button grass which covers the peat bogs. Generally it rains most days of the year on the West Coast, so tannin being washed into the harbour over eons has permanently coloured the water.

However, this is the story about a small, corrugated iron cottage. It was situated on Lowana Road at its eponymous whistle stop location which is, in the local Aboriginal language, the word for “girl”.

Across the road was the King River, with its sulphur stained stony and sandy shores to a river still contaminated by the tailings from the Mount Lyell mines.

Once a railway ran past the cottage taking ore from Queenstown where the mining operations were transported to Strahan where it was shipped out. On its journey back to Queenstown, the train was back-loaded with coal and coke, stores and equipment and food, as well as providing passenger services for mine employees who elected to commute, while living in the seaside “resort” of Strahan.

The Abt Railway had been constructed to transport the ore across the Rinadeena Saddle, a very challenging climb and therefore on a 3’6” gauge this was a distinct German-patented rack and pinion railway named after the Swiss engineer, Carl Abt, who had added his name because he had improved the original rack and pinion mechanism. The engines had been built and shipped out from Glasgow.

Thus, with its compact green steam engine it would toot as it passed the cottage on its way up to the wharf at Regatta Point where the King River entered the Harbour. At Lowana, there was a crossing with a sign saying to beware of the train. Here there is also a gap in the bush through which the King River could be seen. Over the course of the past 20 years rehabilitation of the shore vegetation has begun, and the reeds and sedge have begun to grow, masking the sulphuric pollution. Yet it is estimated that the River will take hundreds of years to be cleansed.

The cottage would have witnessed the Abt engine hauling the copper ore filled trucks to the port. Meanwhile over the course of the mine operations 100 million tons of copper tailings flowed down the King River

It was a neat cottage. It has stood on its own. People rented it, and a large pink rhododendron grows in the front garden, partially obscuring the front of the cottage. There are camellias round the back of the house. There are clumps of a lily of the valley. Arum lilies intrude along the drive. This exotic patch is framed by man ferns, and the papery melaleuca. Behind the forest thickens with blackwood and unfortunately blackberries have infested the native vegetation.

After 1963, the railway was no more. Transport of ore by rail was rendered uneconomical and the rail was torn up and a road constructed. Thus, when we passed the cottage we would follow a narrow unmade road around the river’s edge until it reached Teepookana, where a steel truss bridge spanned the King River. The red-coloured bridge over the river had fallen into decay by the time we first ventured to Strahan. We were advised not to take any vehicle onto the Bridge, but the view of the river was spectacular there, but there was no way right across unless you wanted to swing on a girder. However, you could still climb on the Teepookana plateau, which we did one day, seeking the Huon pine which was supposed to be growing there. The problem was we climbed up the sandy track through scrub, mostly heath and melaleuca. Eventually, with not a Huon pine in sight, we gave up and went back to the car.

We had gone the wrong way. We should have gone down from the plateau to the river, not up to the ridge. Later we found the clump of pines with their tell-tale bare branches poking up from the distinctive foliage. Much of this pine had been cut down in the century before. The Huon pine still grows in the forest, but in much reduced circumstances. This pine only grows on the West Coast and while the wood is beautiful, the trees themselves are like the dowager duchess, all fronds and gnarled with bare branches betraying old age.

Then after nearly 40 years, the proposal came to reconstruct the railway as a tourist attraction. The road was closed beyond Lowana, and the whole railway was rebuilt from Queenstown to Strahan along the original route. It took four years to rebuild and was re-opened in 2002. Remembering riding on one of the earliest trips, open to the winter cold and rain before the installation of window panes in the carriages, it was quite an experience going back and forth.

The railway has been plagued by maintenance gremlins – need to replace sleepers, the maintenance of the rolling stock, a landslide. Today, the railway is split in two travel sectors. It is now called the Wilderness Railway. The steam train runs from Queenstown only as far as a station called Dubbil Barril; the diesel motor runs from Strahan to Dubbil Barril. But who knows when the line will open again for through travel. Meanwhile, each train turns around.

People still live along the line, but the road now ends at Lowana, where the railway line, having replaced the road, vanishes into the rain forest. Further back on the road, there is a house alongside the railway line – and close by where pastures which extend to the edge of hilly tropical forest, where the blackwood take over. Once there was a small herd of belted Galloway cattle with their distinctive magpie colour. Over the years, the animal husbandry has diversified, the Galloways have gone and the acreage, now with its collection of animals, advertises farm stays.

However, the cottage now lies empty. The last inhabitant, a nurse who brought the cottage back to life, has long gone and no one has lived there since. The front door is off its hinges; and all the window panes have been broken. Now, the bush is slowly encroaching on the once carefully-tended garden of the once equally well-cared for cottage, but it is Spring and the rhododendron and camellias are in full flower. But for how long. Will they remain defiant against the encroaching forest?

The Old Man and The Key

From the time I read The Old Man and the Sea I have always been a fan of Ernest Hemingway. Over the years, I have tracked Hemingway in a sort of a way. Maybe we both liked the same places. I know that in the suburb of Oak Park in Illinois, where he was born in 1899, I tripped on the broken pavement and left my facial imprint on the grass verge. Parenthetically, Oak Park has the highest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, some of which were either recently constructed or were built at the time of Hemingway’s birth. Frank Lloyd Wright architecture has always been another of our interests as in general has been the Chicago School, which also spawned Walter Burley Griffin (but not his creative spouse and avatar, Marion Mahony).

However, over the past few years my attention had been diverted from my episodic Hemingway Trail.

My memory of Hemingway was rekindled by a recent article in NYT. Key West was one of the places where Hemingway lived for a time. In fact, the house still retained the Hemingway association through the persistence of his six toed cats. I remember they were everywhere when we visited Key West some years ago.

Following the Hemingway Trail can also involve a Bar crawl, and the particular Hemingway watering spot in Key West was Sloppy Joes, owned by Betty and Telly Otto Bruce, and known to his friends as Toby. Toby Bruce was part of Hemingway’s inner circle, not only as his right-hand man, also sometime chauffeur and as a competent mechanic. One would expect that Hemingway, the bar fly, would not leave his mark without a signature drink – in this case it was a daiquiri concocted by Toby.

However, the gist of the NYT article was that in 1939, after his second marriage crumbled, Hemingway left his belongings in the storeroom of Sloppy Joe’s. He never returned to collect them. As the NYT reported: after Hemingway’s death, his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, went through the material, packed up what she wanted, and gave the rest to the Bruces.

This trove then spent decades uncatalogued in cardboard boxes and ammunition storage containers, surviving both hurricanes and floods.

Eventually, Betty and Toby’s son, Benjamin “Dink” Bruce and a local historian, Brewster Chamberlin, began creating an inventory of the haul in consultation with the Hemingway scholar Sandra Spanier, who rejoices in the title of The Pennsylvania State University, University Park General Editor, The Hemingway Letters Project.

It was here, amid bullfighting tickets, cheques, newspaper clippings and letters from his lawyer, family members and friends like the writer John Dos Passos and artists Joan Miró and Waldo Peirce, (whose portrait of Hemingway appeared on a 1937 cover of Time) that they discovered a stained brown notebook. Inside was Hemingway’s first known short story, about a fictional trip to Ireland, written when he was 10 years old.

I was tempted to say – so what? What is it about Hemingway that fascinates. This was a man who wrestled with his demons before eventually shooting himself with a double barrelled shotgun. Hardly the death of the Hero, with brain and bone fragments splattered across the room. Left unrecognisable in death at 61 years.

I stood at the bollard at the end of Key West gazing out over the Caribbean, facing a fiery vermillion sunset. So, confronting its belligerent beauty thinking that Cuba was just across the horizon where The Old Man fished. I hoped then to see Cuba one day. This I did a decade later, but I never saw The Old Man.

Waratahs

My favourite flower is the State emblem of NSW, the waratah (Telopea speciosissima). The waratahs, with the distinctive florets is only available in limited amounts as a cut stem in October. Generally red, white waratahs sometimes appear on the market. Each stem is not cheap, but with appropriate handling they might last two weeks in a vase. Sadly, every time we have tried to grow them in the garden, we have been unsuccessful

In Tasmania, we had noted at various times along the Murchison Highway or on the Belvoir road west of the Cradle Mountain turnoff, clumps of the Tasmanian waratahs, (Telopea truncata). They are more of a bush with less florets than their NSW cousins. Normally, we do not come to Tasmania in early Spring, but three years ago we decided to plant some Tasmanian waratahs at Strahan – they died, probably not enough water and not enough TLC given the plants were little more than seedlings.

We then bought a number of more mature plants, which were hybrids. They were much more robust and are thriving. However, when you drive around Strahan at this time of the year, the Tasmanian waratahs are no longer shrubs, they are more trees smothered as they are in Tasmanian waratahs.

They are a wonderful sight and it took years before we recognised the addresses where the telopea are located because, when they stop flowering, they become just background lush green foliage. And I must admit until relatively recently I had never thought of waratahs being part of the Strahan streetscape. There had been none on our property, but there now are. It changes the perspective.

You wonder whether there is another industry for this town. After all, Tasmania is famous for its flowers – lavender, tulips, and not forgetting the delicate mauve of the opium poppy flower. Why not a market in Waratahs of the telopea truncata persuasion?

Mouse Whisper

Have you ever thought of this?

Newspapers are dispensing with cartoons and very few have cartoon mice depicted as heroes unlike films. In fact, newspapers have never been partial to mice cartoons.

In contrast, in films mice are almost always portrayed in a positive light, as opposed to cats that are very often antagonistic and villainous. As I was reminded, we have Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Pixie and Dixie, Jerry from Tom and Jerry, Speedy Gonzales (and Slowpoke Rodriguez), Mighty Mouse, Danger Mouse, and the Great Mouse Detective to name only a few of the characters.