November 2022 - The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectation – Jens Christensen Harboe

I have an admission to make.

On one of the secondary TV channels during each weekday, films generally British studios’ productions from the 40s and 50s are shown before an endless parade of American Tawdry aka Murder She Wrote with the wonderful Anglo-American actress Angela Lansbury as J.B. Fletcher, the American writer who has the unique ability to always be a “busybody without portfolio” wherever there is a corpse. Murder She Wrote became standard American TV Sunday night fare for a decade in the 80s and 90s.

Before I diverge onto a discussion about this slice of American life, which runs on formulaic lines, one never knows what film will be run in the afternoon slot. Most of these films are very dated and for that matter very formulaic. These were films from childhood. The “Carry On” and “St Trinian’s” movies are hangovers from the double meaning seaside postcards, in themselves a product of vaudeville comedy. Nevertheless, the film one day last week was a classic – The Captain’s Paradise. It was set against a background of Gibraltar and Tangier.

Alec Guinness is captain of a passenger ferry which plies between Gibraltar and Tangier. The film is one of his best; it has aged well. Besides, once Destination Gibraltar was top of my “bucket list” to visit.

The film thus reminded me of the times when the one place in the World that I wanted to see was the Rock of Gibraltar. It always appeared in the photographs taken by my older relatives who as young adults were making the obligatory working holiday in Great Britain. After all, World War II was over, the “old country” beckoned and jobs were easy to obtain there. For my relatives the only way to go was by ship. The number of ebony elephants on the mantelpieces of suburbia attested to memorabilia from the first overseas port of call – Colombo. Here these young Australians on their post-election venture were being introduced to our neighbouring continent which the then White Australia policy had made a pariah.

In the six weeks ship journey, the ship would berth in Colombo, Aden, Suez and Gibraltar before the last dash across the Bay of Biscay to Southampton… “civilisation” at last reached. Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 changed all that. However, it did not alter my resolve to get to see the Rock. For years, while Franco was in power, apart from ship, the only way to Gibraltar was by air. After Franco’s death, delayed until 1982, the border was open for pedestrians and then for cars from 1986.

Gibraltar has always been an armed camp and harbour from the time it was ceded to Great Britain by Spain in 1713. Despite agitation from Spain, it has remained in British hands since. The Gibraltarians are probably the greatest bunch of loyalists to the British Crown together with the Protestant Northern Irish.

As you drive through southern Spain towards Gibraltar the signs are small and infrequent. The Rock is hidden, you begin to think. Eventually when you negotiate these roads, the border appears. The Rock suddenly looms. It is impressive. Limestone, an irregular pyramid, it rises 420 metres from the sea; it is smaller than Uluru, which is shaped more like an upturned ark, and of sandstone, which is brilliantly suffused with ochre red at sunset. The Rock just looms.

Initially we were held up from going over the border, by an airliner taking off. Cars have to cross the runways to reach Gibraltar itself. At the time, we had spent some time in Southern Spain, with all the exotic surroundings of Granada, Cordoba and Seville.

Gibraltar, as my wife surmised, lacked such Iberian romance. It was just like a British holiday camp. The food was definitely substandard British fare; no tapas here. No traditional Gibraltarian food either. The hotel lounge was littered with men in sharp suits or contrived t-shirt informality doing business. It could be anywhere in provincial England. One small highlight was being able to gaze down from our room’s balcony into the deep blue sea – just a vertical drop and waves far below languidly breaking on rock underpinning the hotel.

There were the sights. The panorama view from the peak and along the way of the Mediterranean looking over to Northern Africa is a spectacular view, particularly when the sun shines. Below is that spectacular view of Sea meeting Ocean, and the continuing movement of ships everywhere. This is a busy sea road.

Yes, seeing the Rock for the first time fulfilled my long term wish, but unlike visits to the Spanish cities, the British seemed to have spent their time building defences – a warren of tunnels and cannon pointing towards the sea; and of naval facilities. The Rock is the attraction; but moving around the Rock means being annoyed by troops of Barbary apes. Being unique to Europe, these nuisances have free range and tourists are magnets to annoy.

Yes, you wander around, and the gardens are sub-tropical pretty, the centre of town picturesque and there is photo of me exiting a traditional red British Tardis – but in the end, what is Gibraltarian culture, but the Rock.

In retrospect would the Rock have been Number One on my bucket list of what to see? Probably not, but nobody can consult the Retrospect. So, as my Italian friend would say “Chissa!”

There is always a Clare Castle – The Hotels I mean.

Clare Castle Hotels can be found all around Australia. I remember one in Carlton when I was a medical student at the University of Melbourne. The food was simple but great, and we crammed into the downstairs dining room at the time of the NeoBarbaric age when the Wowsers ruled. At dinner, alcohol was served from bottles we had bought, wrapped in brown paper bags . “(Alcohol) bought into a hotel” – said slowly, compounds the idiocy of that Victorian period.

At the same time, along the passage beside the dining room and up the stairs there was the patter of migrant men in the main coming and going ceaselessly. They weren’t carrying brown paper bags, and we concluded that they were not the local chapter of the Temperance Union.

This week I came across an essay I wrote about the South Australian town, Kapunda, some years ago when I was trying to find more about my great grandfather, Michael Egan. I have previously written about the short period he spent in Kapunda when he first arrived with his family in 1849 on the “Cheapside”.

We are Egans from Co Clare. Kapunda has a Clare Castle pub. Here in Kapunda was the first commercial mine in Australia. Copper was mined here, and from the start, Welsh miners specially recruited for their skill in smelting were the first to work the mine. They were followed by Cornish, German and Irish immigrants, one of whom was Michael Egan.

The Kapunda bosses were Anglo-Irish – Bagot, Blood and Dutton, although Dutton did not last long and sold his shares and left. In the case of nearby Burra, its rich copper lode was discovered by a shepherd but the beneficiaries were the fortunate “Snobs”, early investors in the South Australian Mining Association who made fabulous profits on their investments, and if they did not retreat with their money to England became the backbone of the Adelaide Club.

The success of the mines was shown by miners’ pay being up to £2 a week. Tents gave way to two-roomed cottages built from stone and mud. Some were wattle and daub. There were no verandas. Walls were whitewashed to reflect the heat. Roofs were shingle or thatch. The one window aperture often had a bag of whitewash hanging over it.

When Michael Egan arrived, he would have seen the copper ore being bagged in hundredweights (cwt) lots for despatch to Port Adelaide. To guide the drays laden with ore, a furrowed track had been driven into the ground between Kapunda and Gawler, 30 kms to the South.

Meanwhile the brackish Light River needed to be pumped from the shafts. This water was turned to advantage in washing the ore, enabling the ore to be tamped down prior to it being sent in the first years for smelting in Wales. Eventually smelting facilities were built close to the mines. By that time Michael and his brood had decamped to Victoria. He probably listened to the sirens of “gold” emanating from the discovery in Ballarat in 1851. As was written, “The sudden cries of ‘Gold’ from the fields in Victoria brought everything to a grinding halt. Workers downed tools and rushed to the Victorian diggings.” Michael Egan was one of these, and the “Kapunda mines would have been deserted had four miners been left to prevent the mine from flooding.” I suspect the writer was being somewhat melodramatic.

These mines lasted until 1871, but other copper mines opened up and today the Roxby Downs mine is second only to Mount Isa in its copper output.

At the time of the Kapunda discovery, it should be remembered South Australia was broke. Drought had prevailed, and the Goyder line was more than a decade away calculated to define what land below the line was viable for agriculture and above the line what was not. Burra, close to Kapunda, was also a copper mining township. Even though Burra was settled after Kapunda for a short period it was in fact the largest inland town in Australia.

I do remember Kapunda for its embroidery, but we passed on buying the antimacassers and doilies. Burra I remember somewhat differently. It was late on a Saturday morning and for some reason I drifted into the Saltbush store in Burra. It was not long after the business had started. Two women farmers had decided on a career extension into making clothing and creating a fashion outlet in Burra. I saw a pair of moleskins, but they needed alteration. I looked at my watch; it was almost closing time and we were not coming back this way. No worries, said Elspeth, one of the Saltbush founders, she would make the alterations immediately if we could wait. Astonished by the service, we did. Very impressive, and we shopped there when we could, for years after.

Life is Peachy

Over ten years being associated with orchards in the Goulburn Valley made one well aware that after cherries and apricots, the first available Spring fruit was followed quickly by peaches and nectarines and then after Christmas, with berries, came pears and a long tail of various types of apples – and over time there was a shift in the popularity of various types. Peaches were no exception. The prime production of peaches was of the deep yellow clingstone variety which were good for canning, but as fresh eating fruit not as good as the freestone variety. The clingstone although juicy, had skin often difficult to remove. Clingstone peaches are the staple for canned peaches but freestone peaches are becoming more popular. The problem with peaches, which look so attractive, is that such attraction is very ephemeral. Fresh peaches have short shelf life without refrigeration, and it was rare to find them being sold on the roadside.

Many years ago, I remember driving the road through the Araluen Valley which runs across the Great Dividing Range from Braidwood to Moruya on the South Coast. The road, especially the last part, was unmade and very rough, and it was here we caught sight of a neglected peach orchard. My companion told me it was the best climate in the World to grow peaches. There was a dilapidated shack on the property which had an overgrown peach orchard. There was a fading sign with a contact phone number and somewhat surprisingly a price – $7,500 for the lot. Even though I did not have that money readily available, and it was a time when I could least afford it, my enthusiasm was unbounded. When she asked me who would help me clear the property, plant new trees, restore the house, I looked at her. She shook her head; the dream evaporated.

How different from Georgia, where a new book extolling the peach and its place in American folklore, has just been published and an edited review is republished below. How different from here in Australia where the peach is hardly royalty. Georgia is even the Peach State, and Atlanta’s famous street name is widely known due its mention in Gone with the Wind, which introduced the city and its most famous street to popular culture.

During peach season, Georgia’s roads are dotted with farm stands selling fresh peaches. Year-round, tourist traps sell mugs, hats, shirts and even snow globes with peaches on them. At the beginning of the Georgia peach boom, one of Atlanta’s major roads was renamed Peachtree Street. But despite its associations with perfectly pink-orange peaches, “The Peach State” of Georgia is neither the biggest peach producing state (that honour goes to California) nor are peaches its biggest crop.

So why is it that Georgia peaches are so iconic? The answer, like so much of Southern history, has a lot to do with slavery — specifically, its end and a need for the South to rebrand itself. Yet, as historian William Thomas Okie writes in his book The Georgia Peach, the fruit may be sweet but the industry in the South was formed on the same culture of white supremacy as cotton and other slave-tended crops.

Peaches, which are native to Asia, have been growing haphazardly in the United States since they were brought over by Europeans in the 17th century. But it wasn’t until the latter half of the 1800s that aspiring horticulturists began to try and grow the peach as an orchard crop. In 1856, a Belgian father-and-son pair, Louis and Prosper Berckmans, purchased a plot of orchard land in Augusta, Ga., that would come to be known as Fruitland. Their intention was to demonstrate that fruit and ornamental plants could become just as important an industry in the South as cotton, which was ruining the soil with its intensive planting.

Horticulture slowly became accepted as a gentleman’s pursuit. But it wasn’t until the end of the Civil War and the abolishment of slavery that the sudden availability of labour gave peaches the perfect opening. After the war, “fruit growing, which to the cotton planter was a secondary matter, [became] one of great solicitude to the farmer,” Prosper Berckmans wrote in 1876. By the 1880s, Fruitland had grown so large and essential that it mailed 25,000 catalogues every year to horticulturists in the United States and abroad.

Freedmen now needed year-round employment, and the labour requirements of the peach season — tree trimming and harvest — fit perfectly with the time of year when cotton was slow. Though the story of the post-bellum South is often one of industrialization and urbanization, it was also a time of redefining what agriculture would mean without the reliance iof enslaved labour by the plantation owners.

“Cotton had all these associations with poverty and slavery,” says Okie, an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

The peach had none of that baggage.

While King Cotton was still an important part of the Southern economy, town councils began sponsoring peach festivals and spreading marketing materials that sung the praises of Georgia-bred peaches like the famous Elberta Peaches.

“Tellingly,” Okie writes, “the only role mentioned for Black southerners in the great Georgia Peach Carnival was as members of the opening procession’s ‘Watermelon Brigade’ ” — about 100 African-Americans who marched with the racially laden fruit balanced on their heads.

Gentleman farmers saw fruit cultivation as something particularly refined and European, and a craze for all things “oriental” gave peaches an even greater allure. This cultured crop fit in with the narrative white Southerners were eager to tell about themselves after the Civil War. “Growing peaches for market required expertise that seemed unnecessary with corn and cotton, which any dirt farmer could grow,” Okie writes. To succeed, peach farmers had to be able to access horticultural literature and the latest scientific findings. Both required literacy, as well as a certain level of education that was still out of reach for many newly freed men and women.

Before peaches became an important crop, they hung low on branches throughout the South and landowners who saw them as without value were happy to give them freely to slaves. But once peaches were part of the agricultural economy, they became off limits to all but those who could afford them. By the end of the 1800s, Okie writes, a landowner who caught three black children pilfering little more than a handful of peaches charged the father of one $21 for three peaches, threatening the children with a chain gang if he caught them in his orchard again. A labourer working in a city at that time made less than $1.50 per day on average, making it likely that, for a black family in the South, those three peaches amounted to roughly a full month’s wages. What was once freely available to African-American became “a white fruit,” Okie says.

In addition to the cost of the trees and horticultural education, it took three or four years of expenses without income before trees would reliably produce fruit. Peaches required so much capital to grow that few African-Americans could afford to start their own orchard. When women were referred to admiringly as “Georgia peaches,” it was a reflection of their light, rosy skin more than the State. (In an act of reclamation, a black gospel singer born in 1899 as Clara Hudman would go on to use the stage name “Georgia Peach.”)

For better or worse, Okie’s book explains, peaches have become the story of the New South and its environment as much as cotton represents the Old.

The Changing of the MudGuard

“I understand that part of my passion, my job, relates to things I am not a fan of. I am traveling the world, racing cars, burning resources. It is something I cannot look away from, and once you see these things, once you are aware, I don’t think you can really unsee.”

This is part of what Sebastian Vettel is reported to have said in the NYT on the eve of his retirement. Like his contemporary Daniel Ricciardo, he has had a number of lean years since his halcyon days of winning the F1 drivers championship. Ricciardo never reached these heights and instead of graceful retirement, he has opted for the humiliation of demotion to reserve driver.

I believe Formula One motor racing is a blight on modern culture. It is a pollutant, while the so-called “petrol heads” come out to watch very fast vehicles go round and round the same circuit for a couple of hours, polluting the environment with noise and carbon. The concept of being a racing driver retains a certain romantic cachet. Racing drivers are no longer the languid blazerati as epitomised by Stirling Moss and his ilk.

Motor car racing has traded faster and faster vehicles with more and more refinement of the safety features for generally compact, incredibly fit men, with superior reflexes. As one authority has said, a F1 driver needs superior reflexes to respond to sudden changes. An average Formula 1 driver reacts in 100 milliseconds (ms) while the reaction rate of an ordinary person is 300 ms. Drivers always train their reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and peripheral vision. These skills are developed using a special reaction board, where the goal is to hit as many randomly lit lights as possible when they are illuminated.

Thus, men now in their mid-30s begin to lose their sharpness; the current champion driver Max Verstappen is 24 years old. Vettel in his retirement, whether confected or not, recognises that he has been a pollutant, a very wealthy pollutant, but nonetheless a pampered pollutant. He has voiced his concern for the environment, one of the factors he says that has definitely played a role in his decision to retire, seeing the world changing and seeing the future in a very threatened position for everyone, including as yet unborn generations. He is seeking redemption with a variety of projects such as a bee hotel in his native Austria and a public visit to the Amazon at the time of the recent Brazilian Grand Prix as part of his path to atonement.

All very noble, but excuse my scepticism but it sounds as though his retirement is enshrouded in a mist of public relation puffery, rose petals and eidelweiss. Alpine meadows and the uplands far from the madding black exhaust puffery around the streets of Melbourne. Oh, by the way the government expending “environment indulgences” just looks on and forgets to count the cost. And here amid the freebies, nobody there seems to be retiring – voluntarily.

Mouse Whisper

Twitter is showing the true definition of the unexpected consequence, or is it just an extension of Rob Brydon’s long running TV program: “Would I Lie to You?”

A former employee of Twitter twittered:

“I was laid off from Twitter this afternoon. I was in charge of managing badge access to Twitter offices. Elon has just called me and asked if I could come back to help him regain access to HQ as they shut off all badges and accidentally locked themselves out.”

Modest Expectations – An Atlanta Fruit Tree?

Reflecting on our experience on a ship where there were around 300 crew and passengers, before we boarded, we all had a supervised RAT (Rapid Antigen Test) in Vietnam, as I previously reported. Everyone initially needed a negative test to be cleared to board, although that requirement has now been abandoned. When one of the crew was detected positive, he or she was isolated and the rest of the crew were masked for the whole time. It was interesting that the only member of the crew who had difficulty maintaining his mask was the maître d’, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Peter Dutton, even down to the abruptness in manner and the stoop. He was Belgian, quite an uncanny resemblance!

But the large “plague boats” are back, with all the protestations that all has changed – or has it? Now, this is the Majestic Princess not the Ruby Princess. Same problem? The Majestic Princess, which berthed recently in Sydney, was carrying 4,000 passengers and crew and about one in seven contracted COVID. Very similar number of infected compared with the Ruby Princess. The cruise information states:

If you opt for the former {RAT}, all you have to do is take a photo of the negative RAT result displayed next to a government-issued photo ID, such as your driver’s licence or passport, as well as a clock showing the time the test was completed. This could be a wall clock, mobile phone screen or a wrist watch. Once you have the photo, make sure you have it stored and ready to show upon request at the terminal.

Prefer a pre-departure PCR test? You’ll receive a text message from the relevant laboratory or health authority and all you have to do is show it on request before you board the ship. Spot checks will be carried out in all cruise terminals across the country. Fail to produce proof of a negative Covid-19 test result and you will have to undertake a RAT before entering the terminal. Test positive and you will be denied boarding.

This “advice” in its laissez-faire form suggests that chances are that probably nobody will bother you, and we accept with a straight face that everyone will be uniform in taking appropriate personal responsibility to have the test. When the Ruby Princess passengers in 2020 were disembarked so surprisingly quickly, my blogs at the time expressed my disbelief at what I believed was an unforgivable breach of public health requirements that had been facilitated by Government, with components of both Federal and NSW State shirking responsibility. It was a time when social isolation, contact tracing and hand hygiene were the only weapons against the pandemic. At that time there was neither vaccine nor test, let alone anti-viral drugs and there was no offical support for mask wearing.

Then, the rules were based around lockdown to facilitate social isolation, hotel quarantine and international and state border closures. These no longer apply since the Premier highjacked the public health agenda for advocacy of personal responsibility. It is no longer mandatory for NSW residents who test positive for COVID-19 to self-isolate. However, NSW Health strongly recommends those who are sick or who have tested positive to stay home until their symptoms end and do not visit people in aged care, disability care or hospital for at least seven days. The Chief Health Officer appears occasionally to exhort, but effectively she is muzzled.

Quarantine is unequivocally a Federal responsibility but the then Prime Minister Morrison, in his normal response to anything difficult, took the route of “divide and rule”, which meant that a chance to have a uniform national policy was lost.

Now the cruise liners are back, and despite the community having better tools to combat the Virus, these Carnival Cruises seem not to have learnt anything much. There they were, the ambulances today lined up to take away the sickest (two identified), and the others were packed off home with masks and a recommendation that they isolate themselves and avoid public transport. There seemed no consideration as to how these persons were actually going to get home. In fact, it is reported that the infected mingled with the non-infected as they disembarked. As someone commented, good time to avoid the trains north. Now where were the public health and quarantine officers to supervise the disembarkation. Once one goes down the gangplank most cruise companies divest themselves of all responsibility. The terminology is somewhat cloying as “passengers” have become ship “guests”.

Putting this disaster into perspective, NSW reported 19,800 new COVID-19 cases last week. Question is, at what order of magnitude would we find the real number since positive RATs are no longer reported – 10, 20, 50, 100, 500?

The unofficial Government apologist, Deakin University Epidemiology Chair, Professor Catherine Bennett, said it was likely that only a fraction of the 800 cruise cases would have been detected had they been onshore, dismissing any notion the outbreak will have an impact on the State’s case numbers. In other words, she was saying that 19,800 was an underestimate, as contact tracing and positive case reporting have long gone. But fearlessly she did place an estimate: “We are probably only counting 10 per cent of cases at the moment,” Bennett said. “Not only that, but the ones we are really unlikely to be testing are those asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases”. An immediate comment. How does she come to a figure of 10 per cent, which suggests that there were 200,000 cases last week in NSW? Further, mild and asymptomatic cases can lead to long COVID; no infection is trivial!

“These cases [on the ship] have been detected through mandatory testing, and now they are being masked up and told to be careful. This is a known, small risk in a sea of the largely unknown.” If you read the conditions, it is difficult to claim it is mandatory if you do not police it. Were they sure that nobody was harbouring the Virus when they boarded – the Virus does need a vector – and it seems no attempt is made to try and work out that problem. The ship was going to be deep cleaned, whatever that means in terms of its effect on numbers. Presumably the ship was “deep cleaned” before the recent trip – problem is, are the passengers and crew deep cleaned as well?

Then another expert weighed in. Associate Professor James Trauer, a respiratory consultant physician who is the Head of Epidemiological Modelling in Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine, agreed with her.

“I don’t think it’s anything to panic about for the rest of Sydney … it will be a drop in the ocean, really,” he said.

He then goes on to counter the “ocean drop” argument by saying “the main concern would be if those on the cruise, who are generally older, go on to visit vulnerable people, such as aged care residents, while infectious.” But mate, they should be at home until they are COVID-negative, and by the way was everyone on the cruise given COVID testing kits when they left the ship?

These comments were drawn by the SMH from two academic bystanders – from interstate. Why them? Where was the NSW government response? Where are you, Dr Chant?

Who is Reprehensible, Gentlemen?

The Cipher Bureau was shuttered in 1929, shortly after the arrival of Henry Stimson as the new (US) Secretary of State. Apparently, Stimson thought this type of surveillance was unethical, and he issued what is perhaps one of the best foreign policy statements ever:

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

I thought of the above when Australia was recently consumed with indignation with the Optus followed by Medibank hacks. How dare they?

Russia has shown that it can invade Australia without putting a foot in the country. We constantly expose ourselves to retaliation from those who see us as a small bellicose nation that will go to war now at the drop of an American Flag – where once waving the Union Jack elicited a similar knee jerk response.

Sure, Putin is an evil bastard, but he knows what he knows and that is fighting dirty. He poisons his opponents; he has strangled the opposition, but he has developed a cyber apparatus which has shown Australia to be full of hicks. Just as the Japanese, with their sophisticated Zeros, that shot down the aged Australian Wirraways over Darwin in 1942 had emphasised our technological lag. How dare they have superior technology without telling us, protested the Colonel Blimps over their Scotch and water.

Again, we find Australia has been flailing around. I would suggest respectfully that it is equally reprehensible that the management of these companies is not investing in the appropriate defences to combat an attack from these Russian legions. The Russians are doing what is their job, however distasteful. The idea that we are going to expose them, pursue them and bring them to justice is certainly a challenge for a Federal Police Force, which has never shown itself to have the capacity in so many fields, in so many instances. What are they going to do now in response? Bomb the Kremlin. Shirtfront Putin. What does “we shall hack the hackers” actually mean?

The hackers may systematically try to hack each health fund in turn; perhaps also Medicare. This obsessive Government needs to keep identified information from being vulnerable and raises the question of whether we need such a vast amount of identified information.

What is more dangerous is if de-identified information is thrown away in this affronted panic. Such information is vital for understanding the health of the population – if anybody cared for such evidence-based facts over their opinionated biases and conspiracy theories, which have characterised the Plague Years, if not before.

But then our governments always have difficultly distinguishing between baby and bath water.

Where is the John?

An alert from The Washington Post:

A new powerhouse is emerging in the U.S. Senate — but this one has nothing to do with politics.

In January, exactly 10 percent of all U.S. senators — ahem, 10 out of 100 — will be named John or Jon. Sen-elect John Fetterman (D-Pa.) will be the latest addition to the John/Jon phenomenon, which was noted on Wednesday by Grace Segers, who covers Congress and politics for the New Republic journal.

It doesn’t help that 11 members of the House are also named John. The Senate’s John/Jon ranks include members of both parties. Even though it is a common name for American men, it is still overrepresented among the senators.

Come January, the number of Johns and Jons in the Senate will surpass the current number of Hispanic and Black senators. In the last century, fewer than 5 per cent of babies have been named John, according to the Social Security Administration. Census data from 2020 shows that Latinos make up nearly 19 percent of the population and Black people about 12 percent.

The Social Security Administration tracked the most popular names for births in the last 100 years. John was ranked No. 3 with more than 4.4 million babies given the name, behind James and Robert.

Ian Hamilton. Who?

Ian Hamilton died on October 3 this year. I read about his death in The Economist. He was 97. He was a different hacker from those above, but his hacking of the Stone of Scone prompted outrage in the British Press at the time causing even the English border with Scotland to be closed. Hamilton was the ringleader in a band of young Scottish Nationalists who hacked the Stone of Scone from its place in Westminster Abbey – and took it back to Scotland. I remember reading about it in 1950 as a ten year old. In the affronted accounts of the robbery, the stone hackers were accused of treason.

The Economist obituarian sets the scene (sic): As treasures went, this one was no beauty. It was an oblong block of red sandstone, 26 inches long by 16.7 wide by 10.5 deep, rough-hewn and chisel-pocked. One face was incised with a crude cross, and two iron rings on chains were set into the ends. By young Ian Hamilton’s estimate—for he had borrowed book after book on it from the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, where he was studying law at the university—it weighed four hundredweight: in fact it weighed 336lb, or 152 kilos. It was also crammed tightly under the ancient wooden coronation chair of the kings and queens of England in Westminster Abbey. All this made it difficult to abscond with. But that was what he meant to do.

It took a number of attempts to hack the stone from its resting place during which time the Stone broke in two. The Stone had been ripped from its place in Scone Abbey in 1296 by Edward 1 and although there was a promise to return it, nothing was done and the Stone remained under the Coronation Chair. According to Scottish Nationalists like Hamilton the stone should have long since been returned.

Led by Ian Hamilton, then a young Scottish law student at the University of Glasgow, with three other fellow law students he took the Stone from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve 1950. The Stone broke in two, and they hid the pieces before taking them to the ruined Abbey of Arbroath, where they lifted them onto the altar, covered the pieces with the Scottish flag and left them there.

After four months, the Stone was discovered and the two pieces were joined together and then returned to Westminster Abbey. Hamilton and his crew were prosecuted but then withdrawn. Eventually the Stone was returned to Scotland in 1996, with the proviso that it be returned for any coronation of a British monarch.

In many ways, this act – symbolic of his Scottish nationalism – was what he was always associated with in life; and now remembered in his obituary. His career as a lawyer brought a certain further notoriety. What he did, in the words of the obituary writer: [In] 1953 he was already famous as a second petitioner in a landmark case, MacCormick v Lord Advocate, over whether Queen Elizabeth II should be plain “Queen Elizabeth” in Scotland. The first Elizabeth, after all, had never ruled there”. He lost the case but nevertheless exposed deficiencies in the Act of Union of 1707.

A film was made of the exploit; he was known as “the Stone Man”; he was revered by the Scottish Nationalist Party although he was never elected to parliamentary office. The Economist rarely if ever publishes an obituary about insubstantial figures even if, in the vast majority of cases, nobody outside has heard of the Stone of Scone – “no it’s ‘scoon’ you heathen!”

The Economist did not get it wrong this time either. Ian was quite a hacker!

Mouse Whisper

Monaco has three national animals – wood mouse being one of them. The other are the hedgehog and the rabbit. I suppose that they are the appropriate size to fit into such a micro-country. But where is the wood in Monaco? There are ten parks and gardens in Monaco, although I doubt whether these omnivore relatives of mine would be welcome in some of them, even though they do wear the national insignia – red and white. Beware, the Monaco and Indonesian flags are very much the same, although some would say, the Indonesian flag is more a scarlet red than that of Monaco.

As a piece of associated trivia did you know that at the 1936 Olympic Games, Haiti and Liechtenstein paraded with same flag? These have since been modified to create what is now a marked difference. Incidentally, Haiti’s only athlete in 1936 pulled out with injury, and the Liechtenstein team came nowhere in athletics, road racing and shooting.

Liechtenstein has in fact won 10 Olympic medals in Alpine skiing; none in the summer Olympics; whereas Haiti has won two – a bronze in 1924 for shooting and a silver in 1928 in the men’s long jump. During this time, Haiti coincidentally was occupied by the American military.

Chubby, my Haitian twisted tooth mouse, once told me all about the mix up with the flags, confirmed by my other Liechtenstein relative, Saffron, the yellow necked mouse – and you know when we mice get together, we do talk about the “miceties” of life.

Modest Expectation – Andorra

The pollution index in Ha Noi as we drove around the city in an electric car last week was 5. Melbourne and Sydney were 1 and 2 respectively on that day. Only Kolkata in India was higher at level 6.

Vietnam is in a state of construction. Heritage listing does not seem to be a word much used in this city. Driving from Ha Long to Ha Noi is an example. Driving down the long esplanade along Ha Long Bay, to the left are the long sandy beaches and beach umbrellas and beyond, the Bay is littered with Nature’s limestone obelisks. On the right was a wasteland boarded up waiting for the next multi-storied building, the condominium development of which dog beachfronts all over the world, especially when the sand seems to be endless and the sun shines benignly as it does generally in October and November in northern Vietnam.

I had heard that Graham Greene had written The Quiet American in the Metropole Hotel in Ha Noi where he had a dedicated suite on the second floor. The Quiet American, which has been twice filmed, is said to have presaged the American War. I said casually some time before that I would like to stay there, but when we arrived there from Ha Long, it was very much a snapshot of Vietnam on its way to becoming yet another “Asian powerhouse”. The Bamboo Bar beside the swimming pool exemplified what life in Ha Noi in the period of French occupation may have been like. Here Graham Greene, as he wrote, would have had by his side his signature cocktail – gin, Italian sweet Vermouth and cassis – a Negroni without the Campari. For my part, I ordered one and was surprised to see it was served with raspberry sorbet which one tipped into the drink à la affogato. This accompanied my steak tartare rather than any novel in progress.

Hotel restaurants exist to recreate the theme of past privilege within a cocoon of luxury; where celebrity nudged shoulders with other colonials – and where life shone through an air of colonial insouciance – the Bamboo Bar as one of these inglenooks. As you move to the infinity pool through a tropical garden surrounded by the brilliantly white hotel building, it is easy to imagine this as once an oasis to get away from swirling hoi-polloi in the streets. Now, rather than colonial expats there are tourists and local citizens. Business deals are being done in this relaxed atmosphere. The French colonial rulers have long since gone.

Ha Noi inter alia is a religious jumble of pagodas, Confucian temples and Christian churches. The cathedral is grey, concrete on granite, a hint of the grisaille in appearance of its façade, with apologies to Notre Dame. Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum is pointed out to us as we drive – a place of secular homage.

The hotel is on the edge of the Old Quarter, with its narrow streets, the most spectacular of which is Train Street, where trains pass along within touching distance of the dwellings and the now closed cafes. In many of the promotional pictures, tourists are seen walking the railway line. No longer, after we were told a tourist was killed by a train, which effectively gave reason for access to the street to be closed to tourists. The Old Quarter is what one would expect in an Asian city, and even though the government is clearing swathes of it, it still survives with the distinctively curled tiled roofs, the plethora of shop signage designating its cheek by jowl activity, the narrowness of the façades, often three-storied, like the “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” three-tiered levels as found in English town houses. Houses and workshops are crammed together. There is Silk Street, yes complete with worms; and lantern street; specialty streets abound.

By contrast outside the Old Quarter, there are the wide boulevards, and the old colonial buildings here have been converted into government buildings – the government is in session and the National Assembly Building is an off white cube – the exterior walls are clad with vertical slats. Circles and squares – all with symbolic significance. There are 400 parliamentarians – we are stopped as two uniformed motor cyclists with sirens blaring sweep past followed by a bus carrying politicians off to lunch; no separate limousines here.

We pass the house which General Giap owned. The large property is surrounded by high walls. Through the gates we can see several jeeps. Giap died in 2013 but his family still owns the property. But I thought, what about the jeeps?

To be frank, Ha Noi was a series of glimpses, except when the time when we were parked while my wife walked around, the passing parade was of a bustling live society, and the police have a low profile as the people go about their daily life. It seems that the Vietnamese are an industrious lot, generally friendly, willing to help and if there is widespread poverty it is hidden. Shoes are said to signify the prosperity of the country. The Vietnamese are well shod.

Just before we went back to the hotel, we had the signature drink created by Nguyen Van Giang, the head chef at the Metropole Hotel, just after WWII. Our guide darted into a nondescript building, down a passage, and emerged with two egg coffees – espresso coffee with this mixture of egg yolk, condensed milk and vanilla whipped and placed on top. My wife’s response; she bought two egg coffee cups and we await the first egg coffee on home soil.

Responding to my glimpse of Vietnam, in the end I ask myself about the American War – why? why? Then I think of Ukraine, “today’s Vietnam” – and that common modern day nemesis, Lyndon Baines Putin.

“Hanoi Jane” – Burden and Stigma

One of the people who had, for a period, intruded her celebrity status on my life – although there would never have been an opportunity for our paths to cross – has been Jane Fonda. We are about the same age, and both lost our mother when we were young and, whether it had any connection, Fonda has confessed to growing up with low self-esteem. I read that her father was demanding; and I remember one of my father’s sayings was “What are you doing that for, John?”

There were three films she made early on her career which still stick in my mind. They were:

“Barefoot in the Park”

“Klute”

“Julia.”

All are remembered for different reasons. The first was fantasy, but it was easy as a newly married couple, as we were, to identify with a feisty couple in the movie adapted from the long running Neil Simon Broadway play. Robert Redford was the stage male lead, and Jane Fonda was the female lead – the trials and tribulations of the newly-married couple, girl and boy in love; girl and boy divorcing; girl and boy reconciliation, and the glorious sunset. I saw this film before I had ever been to the New York. New York that Woody Allen knew so well; it is a great backdrop to comedy where interpersonal tension is being played out. There is a certain brittleness in all these comedies, and Jane Fonda character epitomised this. However, what attracted me at that time in New York was the ride through Central Park in a horse drawn carriage. It is kitsch, pure kitsch – but watching the film it seemed to be something I wanted to do with my then wife.

When we did go to New York in 1971, we stayed at The Plaza Hotel. Outside were the drivers with their horses and carriages. The area exuded the pungent smell of horse excrement and to get to the carriage one had to pick one’s way through it to get to a carriage. The allusion was gone.

Klute was a great film. We saw it in San Francisco in 1971. I always found Jane Fonda edgy, with her voice just too well articulated as if she was constantly self-conscious. In many ways, she would have been perfect to play Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. This edginess was absorbed into her role as a prostitute being stalked. It was at this point in the film when the serial killer was about to strike, that we got up and hurried towards to the exit. There was a murmur around as we ran up the aisle – to the effect of “what the hell are they doing leaving at the climax of the movie?”. I had looked at my watch. We had a plane to catch to Australia. In those days, there was no security and boarding just was a matter of turning up and presenting your ticket and passport. We were travelling light as our baggage had gone missing somewhere between Frankfurt and Stockholm. In the end, we just assumed that Donald Sutherland, as the gumshoe Klute, had rescued her. The reaction to our exit was unexpected – you would think at such a point in the film nobody would have noticed us leaving, much less comment.

In between those two films was her marriage to Roger Vadim, and his attempt to turn her into another Bardot; but whereas Bardot was sensuous, Fonda was hardly a sex-kitten. Her approach was a bit like the school librarian doing porn, but by the time of Klute she had lost the “Vadim cute”, and become the anti-War activist. Both she and Joan Baez were photographed in Ha Noi. She earned the nickname “Hanoi Jane”, because of the ill-judged picture of her, wearing a helmet, behind a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. The activist label fitted Joan Baez more comfortably, as her protest against injustice and war always seemed to have a deeper commitment. After all, Fonda married Tom Hayden, well-known as a foremost anti-War activist, and they stayed married for 17 years from 1973, until Hayden called it quits.

The third film “Julia” was a complete tour de force. Jane Fonda here played Lillian Hellman, the American playwright. The Julia story formed part of her memoir “Pentimento”. Vanessa Redgrave played Julia, the Jewish German student in this filmed nightmare of Germany in the 1930s. Irrespective of whether it was only the product of a fertile mind, the film was so harrowing in its depiction of life in Nazi Germany that whether it was total fiction or not was irrelevant in depicting such a spectacle of horror. If there was any doubt about the quality of Fonda’s acting ability, this film dispelled it.

Jane Fonda after her marriage to Hayden ended in divorce in 1990 married Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, and I lost interest in following her career. In fact, the only times I seemed to remember – but remembered vividly – were those three films, and her antics during the “American War”. In film work, she was also in “Cat Ballou” and then in “Coming Home”, a film about the aftermath of the War; and then “On Golden Pond”, which played out a role with film and real life coinciding in the relationship between a father and his estranged daughter. Katherine Hepburn played a prominent role in the film since it needed such an actress with presence as she had. It was a tribute by Jane to her father, who died the year after the release of the film, in 1982. None of these made the same impact as the three other films I mentioned above.

Jane Fonda remains on the Vietnamese screens in the garb of the anti-War heroine who visited Vietnam and was photographed behind a weapon designed to shoot down American planes. Never mind, that the installation was there to protect Ha Noi from the destruction being wrought by American aircraft – Ha Noi was carpet bombed, certain sections of Americans who were traumatised by the War exercise their God-given right to abuse her, even spit on her face with tobacco juice. She has apologised for her Ha Noi appearance, said she was sorry…

When his and Fonda’s son married, Hayden concluded his toast to the couple and reportedly introduced Fonda by saying, “We know how Jane always becomes the part she’s playing. Hopefully, that won’t be the case in our son’s marriage!”

Maybe, that interlude when I selected Fonda films was to reinforce my view of a certain other lady. I don’t know. Funny thing to think about leaning over a writing desk reaching for my mouse in a posh hotel in Ha Noi.

Requiem for a Neo-Liberal

CNN National House USA Mid-term Exit Poll

R +13 65+

R +11 45-64

D +2 30-44

D +28 18-29

I remember lying on this lawn watching the kites leisurely drifting overhead in the thermals against a clear blue sky. Broome in July of that year was a leisurely place, when I had the opportunity to try and absorb “The Road to Serfdom”, Hayek’s classic treatise underpinning of neo-liberalism. It was a time in the late 1970s.

Hayek bangs on about freedom. “The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognised before.”

Hayek, all in one sentence – authoritarian, paternalistic, elitist. His book is an attack on democracy cloaked in academic jargon, I thought at the time, as I rolled over and watched the drifting birds. He offered no structure to replace democracy. Yet it took time to show neoliberalism to be an illusion, reaching its apogee in Donald Trump. In the meantime, be “vewy, vewy, vewy” afraid since Elmer Fudd is “vewy, vewy, vewy” likely to run for President in 2024.

But perhaps I never could distinguish between Hayek and the Beach Boys in “Serfing USA”. From this latest USA poll it seems that the younger generation, as the figures indicate, at last are replacing the “E” with a “U”.

Surfing is a more more shared relevant experience to the younger generations than serfdom under an old man with an addiction to fifty shades of yellow.

It is about time that politics is less about Me but more about You, the community. What! Idealism building to a crest? Not a red or blue wave, just in these perilous times the wave vanquishes that authoritarian madness that we have to tolerate with people like Trump, Putin and every other ruler who attempts to assuage his deep feelings of self-loathing by transferring these dark recesses of their collective minds to the destruction of the World.

V’loutlandish

There we were on the South China Sea, and since the sea was a little rough, and balance is already a problem, I started to do some channel surfing. And there it was, unexpectedly, the 2022 Melbourne Cup being shown in real time. What other horse race would be shown on a French ship in Vietnamese waters. Not an Everest; nor a Kosciusko; not even a Wycheproof. Despite the huge amount of money which this guy V’landys seems to be able to fling on horse races for the benefit of Arab sheikhs and other deserving racing nobility, such as Lloyd Williams and the Waterhouses and their ilk. V’landys has, as far as I know, not arranged for his wonderful collection of highland flings to be shown in the South China Sea. And do not I think he would care a damn if they were ever shown – probably not.

Nevertheless, the Melbourne Cup remains still the icon borne aloft in the minds of the small men and normal sized women who are named jockeys, and the men and women who are called trainers – and of course the Innocents, the owners, people inured to throwing their money down the equine toilet, as though it were tossing three coins into the Trevi Fountain in Rome. As they sang in the eponymous song: “Make it mine”, as they wished, tossing their money away.

Democracy at Work

Excerpt from Boston Globe

After a tumultuous summer during which his company temporarily lost its liquor and entertainment licenses after fights broke out at the venue and on the Block Island Ferry, Ballard’s Beach Resort owner Steven Filippi may have lost his unopposed bid for a town council seat.

The businessman, who was on the ballot (unopposed), received just 92 votes, while more than 1,050 people wrote-in alternative candidates. The three candidates with the most votes will win the three open seats on the Block Island* Town Council, which also serves as the island’s licensing board.

*Block Island is an island in the U.S. state of Rhode Island located in Block Island Sound 14 km south of the mainland and 23 km east of Montauk Point, Long Island, New York, named after Dutch explorer Adriaen Block. Population 1410.

Mouse Whisper

I had just come back from visiting my bush relatives, the Marsh Yellows, and was nibbling on a piece of Roquefort Grand Premier Bleu, when I heard him say to nobody in particular, “Well, fancy that, born on the same day, same year as Tom Hayden, the prominent anti-war activist. Married to Jane Fonda for 17 years. You know it is a fact of life, there are two times when you are unique – the moment you are born and the moment of death. Even though it is only for a femtosecond, you are the youngest person on the planet. Now that is one for the curriculum vitae of everybody – “I once was the youngest person on the planet”.

Tom and Mouse Meister, sharing a common 1939 birthday with Betty on the cover of Life.

Modest Expectations – Song of Joy

We are sailing on Le Lapérouse, one of Ponant’s cruise ships, which is on an eight day cruise up the Vietnamese coast, commencing from Ho Chi Minh City. The weather reflects the fact that it is still the rainy season. This Ponant ship was constructed in two parts by VARD, one of the major global designers and shipbuilders of specialised vessels. Headquartered in Ålesund in Norway and with approximately 8,000 employees, VARD operates seven shipbuilding facilities, three in Norway, two in Romania, one in Brazil and one in Vietnam. VARD also develops power and automation systems, deck handling equipment, vessel accommodation, and provides design and engineering services to the global maritime industry.

The hull was constructed in the Romanian city of Tulcea, which is the major settlement on the edge of the Danube Delta, but the ship was outfitted in Norway, and the Scandinavian influence is shown in the clean lines and the light airy fittings which seem to be beech or pine. The trip between Tulcea, through the Danube Delta (predominantly Romania but including the Ukraine and Moldova) to Norway takes three weeks and it was towed by tugboat the whole way. It must be an interesting journey these days to enter the Black Sea towing a partially finished ship. Unless you have been there, you do not appreciate the Delta’s immense size, and stopping off on one the many settlements in the Delta, as I had done on a previous trip down the lower Danube, I learnt that the villagers spoke Ukrainian not Romanian. There is much cultural intermingling.

The ship, as its name suggests, is determinedly French, although curiously it is registered in Mata’Utu, the largest settlement in the Wallis and Futuna Islands, a French territory north of Fiji and west of Samoa.

On the bow of the boat, flutters the Breton flag – nine alternating black and white stripes in the upper left canton of which, in serried rows, there are what look like eleven scarecrows – not the stated description impenetrable in my heraldic illiteracy. The captain of the ship is a Breton.

Before we embarked, we all had to be tested for COVID-19 in Vietnam. I might add it cost around $22 for two of us, whereas when we were tested earlier in the year prior to going to New Zealand, it cost in the region of $120 from one of those “cut-price” pharmacies. Thus, all the passengers who boarded the ship were RAT negative, but on the first day one of the crew was reported to have tested COVID positive and from then on, all the crew wore masks. There were no more positives reported.

The food is mostly French, the wine is French, the chefs are French, the waiters are mostly Filipinos or Indonesian and the sommelier comes from Djibouti. The service is superb, but still there are gangplanks to be negotiated, and tours are for those who can walk over uneven streets and for three nights, there was weather, with “pitching and rolling” in a three metre swell. Nature is there to test not cuddle one. Fortunately, the typhoon in the Philippines was tracking away, but we were still left with strong winds from the north.

Nevertheless, the two cabins for disabled passengers have been outfitted well, with quasi-timber floors, not tiles which are notoriously slippery, irrespective of the vigour of the boat movement. The cabin is spacious, and the shower space has been cleverly designed to accommodate a wheelchair, but not so large that the ambulatory disabled cannot grasp a hand rail.

The passengers are mainly French; there is a smattering of Americans, 18 Russians – and about seven Australians, including a retired nurse from Canberra, who classifies herself a seasoned Ponant traveller having been on four cruises including this one, although this one was more courtesy of an enforced COVID confinement on the previous cruise resulting in credited days on a future cruise.

The large cruise ships have emerged from a period where they were seen as villains in the spread of COVID-19 and that there was something squalid about this form of leisure – the love boat, excessive drinking, a casino and theme park on the water with variety shows, games and boorishness admixed into some forced jolliness.

Ponant is none of these. Perhaps the price deters some and these boats have much smaller numbers of passengers and promises of French chic, personalised service, no herd-driven demand to participate in onboard activities, sensible flexibility in the rules and exotic locations. To what was promised: I would say “yes” to the first four.

The problem with the places where this ship berthed is that they were working ports, and to see the historic and natural sites one had to go well away from the dock for whole day excursions. Perhaps some time in the future Vietnam will have more “cruise ship docks” given the country is looking to develop this area of tourism, together with the massive resort developments taking place along the coastline with its palm fringed beaches. Vietnam has been a preferred holiday destination for both Russians and Chinese tourists, and while the Chinese have developed their own casino resorts they are probably empty at present while China remains effectively locked down. Nevertheless, the long bus excursions from cruise boats would still remain.

I contemplated several and paid for the Ha Long boat excursion, but in the end I suspected the boat transfers may prove too difficult and didn’t go – reports of unstable portable steps more suited to giants and small, rocking boats confirmed it was the right choice. No doubt the huge limestone rocks which dot the Ha Long Bay justify recognition by UNESCO as one of its spectacular World Heritage sites, but not if venturing to see them is more ordeal than being able to appreciate their uniqueness. Fortunately, the view from the “main channel” when you enter the Bay provides sufficient exposure.

To me the challenge was to take a cruise to compensate for several cancelled because of The Virus in 2020. In the intervening two years my level of disability has increased so choice of cabin and activities requires planning.

Among the 94 cabins there were two for the disabled. As I said above, they are so well appointed that they should serve as models for all ships setting aside space for the disabled, so different from the airlines.

However, let me be frank and it may be my own experience, but Asia does not yet do disability well. That is not to say that people do not try and be unfailingly helpful, but they are untrained and nobody in many cases has thought about access nor the needs for showers, toilets and beds to be disabled-friendly. Rooms provided with rails, nonslip floors, chairs – firm enough so that one can get up unaided – a feature that equally applies to the bed.

This is increasingly going to be a challenge to the tourist industry as the number of not only wheelchair bound, but the ambulatory disabled increase – a very fertile ground for the entrepreneur prepared to challenge this whole area of Aids to Daily Living, even on holiday.

Fraser and the Fishing Boats

Fraser was right to claim successive governments did not withstand similar pressures as he had experienced, but he sees these as pressures of hostile and xenophobic anti-refugee community sentiment: the long-term agenda of immigration officials was of greater weight in Australian politics, expressing itself as an insistence on governments and Immigration Ministers. The “mandarins at the border” did not abandon the templates they had developed, and eventually they found future governments who would progressively implement their agenda. During 2010, former Prime Minister John Howard’s Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock would boast about ‘his’ “interlocking suite of measures”.. Philip Ruddock was referring to policies he brought to the Parliament; yet another view might argue he merely claimed for himself the proposals first tabled at Fraser’s 1979 Cabinet meetings.

(From James Smit, “Malcolm Fraser’s response to ‘commercial’ refugee voyages” p 103)

Colourful Vietnamese fishing boats ply their trade along the coast. They are the same vessels that sailed with refugees to Australia. Seeing them, I was reminded of the first time I went to Broome. I had booked into the Mangrove Motel which was located on a sandy knoll and from my window I looked onto a forest of mangroves and beyond out to that distinctive azure sea which is the Indian Ocean. The difference between low and high tides can be much as 10 metres. Perched in the mangroves was a beached Vietnamese fishing boat. It was 1979. Over the years whenever I returned the boat was more decayed until there was only a remnant of the keel left.

Yet despite the conclusion reached in a review of Fraser’s contribution, between 1975 and 1982 when he was Prime Minister, 60,000 Vietnamese came to Australia, but only 2,000 who came were identified as “boat people” or “queue jumpers”, as Minister McPhee called them at the time. Most of the refugees came from South Vietnam, some were opponents of the incoming communist regime or had worked for the foreign forces. Those fleeing in the fishing boats still had to negotiate the Indonesian and Philippines archipelago, where they were attacked by pirates, the women raped, and all those on the boat including children murdered. Those who did reach Australia were allowed to stay and were not inhumanely towed out to sea.

The acceptance of these Vietnamese owed much to Whitlam’s ditching of the “White Australia” policy, which had underpinned much of our community attitudes, particularly to non-Europeans, since settlement in 1788.

The end of the 1970s found Vietnam still in turmoil; the concurrent rise of the Khmer Rouge and their Killing fields in Cambodia just aggravated the strife in Indochina in the aftermath of the “American War”. Arising from the criminality of the use of carpet bombing, napalm on villagers, inhumanity spread like fertilizer over the Indochinese countryside. Retribution was often brutal. Yet in Australia, with a blind eye to what was happening in the World, Government has maintained a policy of obstruction of those trying to reach their perceived safe haven, Australia, unless “they played the game”.

The use of the term “queue-jumpers” exemplified this response akin to “chaps, play the game.” Despite all, Australia has a vibrant Vietnamese population, the older generation having given way to a generation born in Australia.

Just like the election of 1966, the conservative party in Australia has been unerring in pushing the “yellow peril” button when in electoral strife. John Howard was, to me, the epitome of the curate’s egg, hard boiled. The various exercises under his stewardship designed to prevent asylum seekers coming by boat, demonised the people smugglers, and then imprisoned those trying to escape conflict. Their crime? “Not playing the game” was added to the charge sheet.

It was an expensive solution. One source has it that in 2021 the annual cost, per person, to the Australian government of detaining and/or processing refugees and asylum seekers was estimated as follows: almost A$3.4m to hold someone offshore in Nauru or Papua New Guinea; A$362,000 to hold someone in detention in Australia. The deal struck between Cambodia and Australia to take refugees, which was brokered by Morrison, then Immigration Minister, in 2014, ended four years later after the Cambodian government had pocketed A$40m for ten asylum seekers, only one of whom stayed in Cambodia. He was last heard of in 2019 without assistance, a Muslim in a Buddhist country, no access to Cambodian citizenship and forgotten by Australia.

It is easy to tolerate inhumanity when you are shielded from its excesses. The demon is the people smuggler, and so it goes, there is something morally wrong in endeavouring to use whatever means at hand to reach Australia. However, given that Australia was up to doing questionable deals in response to getting rid of asylum seekers at great cost, it would have made more sense to locate an immigration department presence on one of the Indonesian islands and cut the middleman out. Then, perhaps the public disgrace where the Tamil family were treated so appallingly could have been avoided.

At several stages, given that we have an apartment in what was Frydenberg‘s electorate, I contemplated a hunger strike, but given my general health, it would have been futile, but then standing up for something you believe in is essentially an exercise in futility.

I always think of the IRA soldier, Bobby Sands, who died in 1981 aged 27 in the Maze prison, maybe an urban terrorist but a man who believed passionately in a cause for which he was prepared to die. After all, the litany of beatified persons, who died for their belief, forms one of the Christian Church’s traditions. Their images are cast across Christendom and they live on as labels of churches, cathedrals and basilicas. Plus, you have a particular day in the calendar where people may worship your hallowed name.

But not Bobby Sands. Misguided … depends on whose perspective – a person who faced his own mortality, but yet has no church in his name. I could not do what he did, with the walls of rationalisation I had constructed to reassure myself.

Anyway, the Tamil family are now happily ensconced back in Biloela, and my gesture perhaps would just have been recorded on a sheet of newspaper in the recycling bin.

Cosmetic or Not

Typically reserved for the rich and famous, cosmetic surgery was, and still is, desired by many women and men, regardless of financial constraints. In today’s world with numerous financing options available, it becomes just a matter of “what would you like to do first?”

I grew up in an era when plastic surgeons were highly respected. The advances they had made during the World Wars in fact defined the specialty. By definition a plastic surgeon needs to be very skilful, and given the level of disfigurement of some of the war casualties, the surgeons had to be patient, knowing where they were going with each procedure – facing challenges which were then thought insurmountable. Through experience the surgeons improved the outcomes for their patients while also gradually defining the specialty.

Sir Benjamin Rank was the doyen and because of him and his team, Melbourne became respected worldwide as a centre for plastic surgery. I was fortunate in many ways to have known so many of these highly skilled surgeons; one I classified as a friend, another two were in my year of medicine, one made an outstanding contribution in determining the blood supplies to skin and underlying tissue of various parts of the body; the second combined plastic surgery with ophthalmology, a sub-specialty which, even now, is increasingly directed towards improving appearance rather than correcting deformity and extirpation of tumours.

I had a bad car accident in 1981 and among my myriad injuries was one where my chin struck the steering wheel. It had previously been shown when I had any dental work that my bone is very dense. When my chin struck the steering wheel, I sustained a cruciform lesion, suggesting my tissue between steering wheel and jaw imploded. My jaw was not fractured, so although sore, no wiring was required, but my chin was damaged far beyond just stitching up a complicated laceration. It needed plastic surgery. The tissue which had sagged around my jaw line had to be fixed. Multiple operations and bandaging to help to hold the repaired tissue followed. Meticulous it was; now what remains is a meandering scar on my chin, hardly visible. But it is 41 years since the accident and cosmetically it has stood the test of time.

Thus, cosmetic surgery is not standalone expertise, conjured up without regard to the rules of mainstream plastic surgery. Why these so-called aesthetic surgeons, essentially general practitioners who have created their own tribe, are allowed to practice is probably due to the fact that much of the work lies outside Medicare.

The other myth that these aesthetic surgeons hide behind is that any medically qualified practitioner should be able to undertake the practice of medicine. Is that a full stop? It may have been so, even at the time I graduated, since it was assumed that as a student we were exposed to all aspects of medical practice – here was the leap of logic – and thus were competent. That mantra of see one; do one; teach one …

It was a fallacy then and it is a fallacy now. It is appalling that Mark Ashton was harassed by the Health Department after he blew the whistle on the shonky practices, which passed as “cosmetic surgery”. Plastic surgery is all about outcomes. Cosmetic results – yes important, but in the hands of a competent surgeon what would you otherwise expect? At the simplest level this may be just removing a tumour from the skin. However, it is vital to remove all the tumour otherwise more surgery will be required to determine the tumour edge. A competent surgeon gets this right first time to avoid trauma to the patient and additional cost – to either the patient or the taxpayer (and this depends on the results of pathology and whether the lesion proves malignant or not). In my case once, the plastic surgeon did not get the edge, but he was quick to realise that he had not done so, and the additional operation was done efficiently with an excellent result- it has not recurred in 30 years.

I‘m very much a believer that all plastic surgery should be under one set of best practice rules. Those cosmetic surgeons who have learnt the practice involved in creating a temporary illusion that the ageing process can be combatted should abide by the same standards that I would expect from a plastic surgeon undertaking lifesaving rather than lifestyle operations. To me it is so obvious. The dark side of this area of surgery was caught on camera, where the supposed surgeons were engaging in disgusting antics, while performing liposuction. Unbelievable.

The area has been subject to multiple investigations by the media, but the prime response has been the lawyers threatening a class action. However, what of the government and organised medicine? Most of these cosmetic cowboys join the Australia Medical Association knowing how loath it is to criticise its constituency – or rather to call for a total revamping of the regulating and disciplining agencies.

The scandal of the raid on Professor Ashton shortly after the 60 Minutes TV exposé, by Federal Government regulators, made me think of dark corridors or coffee bars where scuttlebutt is devised, and shock-horror – money can change hands.

If I were Government, I would initiate an investigation into how the raid came about, and just who was the whistleblower. Or was there one?

In the meantime, I would bring the whole practice of plastic surgery including cosmetic surgery under the one regulating body, offer the chair of such a body to Mark Ashton for five years, together with staff including a panel of qualified plastic surgeons to review the competence of all those practising and generally fix this appalling mess. If this means obtaining the Kabuki doll appearance has to be carved out in another country, so be it.

I wonder what Sir Benjamin Rank would have done; but then we live in different times. That does not mean Australia should be inflicted with a class of people – that of incompetent practitioners – in their case laughingly called cosmetic surgeons, should be able to display their incompetence and general disregard for their patients and leave it to the reputable area of the Australian health system to repair. Furthermore, those cosmetic surgeons who are providing competent, quality procedures should welcome such a move.

A good story

The following report appeared this week in the Boston Globe. Why it is a good story is evident, and I realised how little I know. But this article I’m glad I read.

Explorers Bradford Washburn and Robert Bates travelled to the remote Yukon wilderness in 1937 to climb Mount Lucania, but a month of bad weather that preceded their trip had left the Walsh Glacier, the starting point of their expedition, covered in “fathomless” slush and “cut to ribbons by dozens of new crevasses.”

The poor conditions made it impossible to get a flight off the glacier after their climb, so the men hiked more than 100 miles to safety, shedding supplies that would have been too heavy to carry. It was one of the more remarkable survival stories of the past century.

Nestled in the cache they left behind were cameras that Washburn, a renowned photographer, had planned to retrieve a year later but never did.

Instead, a seven-person expedition team recovered the cameras in August, 85 years later and more than 12 miles from where they had been left. The team of explorers announced their discovery last week.

Washburn, who died in 2007, would become one of the world’s top mountaineers, in addition to his work as one of its foremost cartographers. In Boston, he would be known as the man who built the Museum of Science into one of the premier institutions in New England.

The explorers found a portion of one of Washburn’s aerial shutter cameras, a Fairchild F-8. They also recovered two motion-picture cameras with the film loaded, a DeVry “Lunchbox” camera model, and a Bell & Howell Eyemo 71, as well as mountaineering equipment.

Conservators at Parks Canada, which oversees national parks in Canada, are treating the cameras to see if any images can be recovered.

The idea to recover the cameras came from Griffin Post, a professional skier who had learned about the cache while reading a 2002 book about the explorers’ harrowing journey, “Escape from Lucania” by David Roberts.

Post read Washburn’s journals, enlisted the help of scientists, and this year led two expeditions to the glacier in Kluane National Park and Reserve in the northwest corner of Canada in search of the cameras.

“You do all this research, you have all this science-based reasoning, and you think it’s totally possible: We’re going to go in there and look in this certain area, and it’s going to be there,” Post said Saturday. “And then the first time you actually see the valley of the Walsh Glacier and how massive it is and how many crevasses there are, how rugged the terrain is, your heart kind of sinks and you’re kind of like, no way, there’s just so much terrain.”

To find the items, the team enlisted Dorota Medrzycka, a glaciologist who interpreted maps and historical observations of the glacier’s flow to determine where the cache might be. But she could only provide estimates, and the group spent days searching the glacier.

“It would take us the whole day to walk 10 kilometers up glacier and come back to camp,” Medrzycka said. “And going up, there was quite a bit of crevasses, so there was a lot of zigzagging to try to find spots to jump over them.”

The group could not simply return to the spot where Washburn and Bates had left the cameras, because the glacier’s flow had changed the landscape.

Glaciers move at a constant speed from one year to the next, but not the Walsh Glacier, Medrzycka said. Unlike most, it is a surging glacier, which means that every few decades it moves more quickly for a period of a year or two.

In a normal year, the Walsh Glacier typically flows less than 1 meter per day. During the surge, it moves more than 10 meters, or about 32 feet, per day. Since the 1930s, there have been two surges.

Toward the end of the team’s weeklong trip in August, Medrzycka noticed two anomalies in the pattern of the ice, which she guessed had been caused by the surges, and was able to calculate a new estimate about where the items might be.

The revised estimate ended up sending the team to the items the next day.

“Knowing that the educated guess I made actually paid off and was right, it’s a very incredible feeling,” Medrzycka said.

Her findings also provided a new data point about the glacier that will be helpful for researchers.

“We can now better understand the change in the dynamics on Walsh Glacier and potentially be able to better predict how this specific glacier might change in the future,” Medrzycka said.

Whether the surging was tied to climate change was unclear, she said.

Climbers Bradford Washburn (right) and Robert N.H. Bates near the summit of Mount Lucania around July 1937. Until their summiting, Lucania had been the highest unscaled peak in North America.

“This irregular flow, that means that they are not behaving like other glaciers in the region,” Medrzycka said. “It’s difficult to say how much of what happens on Walsh Glacier is related to anything climatic or if it’s just internal behaviour.

The team was backed by Teton Gravity Research, a company that creates media showcasing extreme sports and plans to release a film about the item recovery.

Post said that though it seemed unlikely, he was cautiously optimistic that researchers would be able to recover images from the cameras.

“It was so unlikely to find the cache in the first place after 85 years,” he said. “Yes, it’s unlikely that some of that film is salvageable — but maybe it is.”

Mouse Whisper

The Italians have a phrase “come un ghiro” as in “ho dormito come un ghiro” – I slept like a dormouse, meaning I slept well, which is not surprising given that our dormouse cousins spend up to six months in hibernation. Like the T-Model Ford which could be any colour as long as it was black, dormice are any colour as long as it is Hazel; unless they are of the edible dormouse variety which was a delicacy favoured by the Romans and still persists as a delicacy among the countryfolk of Croatia and Slovenia, where their fat little bodies cooked are supposed to rival squirrel in their greasiness.

Oh, and you can tell a dormouse from a rat because the dormouse has a furry tail whereas the rat has a scaly tail. Just thought you’d like to know, if you’re looking to put one in your teapot to cook and mistaking cousin rat for one of them … just joking.