Month: December 2022

Modest Expectations – Timor Leste

Timor Leste

Normally I just make an association with the number of the blog with the title, and let the reader deduce the association. But I have had to alter the title of this blog from Tonga to Timor Leste with the fall of Liechtenstein, to accommodate the number 197. Why? Because in the latest FIFA rankings issued on 22 December, Liechtenstein have fallen two places in the rankings, where San Marino rounds out the 211 ranked nations.  As a result, Tonga and Timor Leste have moved up one place each in the rankings.

Following the recent World Cup, Australia and Morocco have made the greatest advances up the ranks, each rising 11 places. Morocco is now at 11 and Australia 27. Canada and Qatar fell the furthest, each cascading down 12 places to 53rd and 62nd respectively. Wales slumped to 28th, registering a fall of nine spots. Denmark has fallen eight spots to 18th position and Serbia is down eight spots to 29th.

Brazil still heads the rankings with Argentina second and France third, with Belgium plummeting to fourth.

Ceduna 2002

We met a few people once in Ceduna like Jay Pasachoff whose death, at 79 years of age on November 20th, was reported in an obituary in a recent Economist (December 10-16th). In Ceduna there was a total eclipse of the sun in 2002, and the Allens and the Best-Sargeants decided to venture across to view it. Like much of which we did together, it was a spur of the moment decision. When we had done the same for the Sydney Olympics, we bought the original package, which included tickets for the Opening Ceremony. That spur of the moment decision was timely; the proposed trip to Ceduna was not.

The immediate problem of getting to Ceduna was solved by our flying to Adelaide and getting a lift with the Allens who drove over from Melbourne and picked us up at the airport. There were 780 kilometres still to drive. We senza Allens had previously been to Ceduna on a memorable occasion when my wife injured herself on the way to the airport and by the time she had arrived to meet me in Adelaide (I had been in Whyalla) she was unable to walk, but that can wait for another blog .

However, on this occasion we went the inland route through both the townships of Wudinna (where there is a mini-Uluru, Mount Wudinna) and Kimba (where the Big Galah glowers down upon the traveller). The second problem which had faced us was there was no accommodation in either Ceduna or Streaky Bay.  We should have anticipated that, given that Ceduna itself is isolated except for the Aboriginal communities in the West and Streaky Bay in the East. Any other accommodation was over 100 kilometres away and only in a caravan park. Fortunately, I knew some of the Prideaux family and I contacted one of the elders whom I prefer not to name for cultural reasons, and she said they had an empty Aboriginal owned house in Ceduna. Yes, she said we could have it for the week. Given how difficult accommodation was, it was a Godsend to be able to rent such a three bed-roomed house in the centre of town.

As a side comment, if one wants to get the freshest King George whiting, Ceduna certainly was the place, when we were there.

Like many small, isolated settlements, Ceduna has its own distinctive culture. One often finds Pitjantjatjara people in Ceduna. They roam around the Great Victoria Desert, which lies between Ceduna and their settlements in the far North of South Australia, in settlements such as Ernabella and Fregon. Aboriginal people can be reticent, but ask them what mob they are from and they‘ll open up.

The eclipse had lured a number of them across the desert; their traditions had bequeathed the landmarks so they can go safely from one place to another, where we white fellas would only see stone and sand and spinifex. Research studies have revealed that “Pitjantjatjara communities would project sacred stones at the eclipsing Sun whilst chanting a particular song—always with success. The act of casting magical stones at the Sun strengthened the medicine man’s status in the community since he was always successful in bringing the Sun back from the darkness, averting the evil and saving the people.”

The Aboriginal medicine men were often very shrewd, and before modern science knew that this was a natural phenomenon upon which to base their illusionary magical powers. It is amazing what was once seen as a mystical expression of a higher power, whatever called, can now be as precisely calculated as what will happen tomorrow to us cannot. This particular eclipse was thus slated for 4th December 2002, and expected to start between 6.38 pm and 6.45 pm on that day. The total eclipse would last for 32 seconds, the longest time in any of the places across Australia. We duly went down to the beach, the clouds cleared, donned our eclipse glasses and settled down to watch the spectacle. I had been in Melbourne on October 23, 1976 when the city was plunged into that eerie light of the solar eclipse, but since I was in a built up area without any protection for my eyes I did not see the eclipse directly.

At Ceduna, it was different. Once the eclipse came, it was as in all the textbook descriptions but being there experiencing the passage, the penumbra, the diamond effect of the sun reappearing, it was all so worthwhile. Thirty-two seconds of a light which is described as “eerie” is that of a special dimness, so hard to define if you have never experienced it. If there had not been some whooping, it would have been silent – a silence most fauna respect. Then the eclipse was over, the sun emerged.  We did not get up and immediately fold our deck chairs. We just kept looking out to sea.

Jack Pascachoff was, for 50 years until his death, the Professor of Astronomy at Williams College Massachusetts and director of its Hopkins Observatory. To him “the perfect alignment, in solemn darkness, of the celestial bodies that mean most to us” gave a primal thrill that was indescribable. As a self-styled “umbraphile”, a shadow-lover, his greatest joy was to stand in that brief darkness cast by the shadow of the Moon”.  His College is ranked as top in national liberal arts across the USA, and is located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires and is one of the oldest colleges in the country. The school was originally a men’s college; women were first admitted in 1971 – almost all students are resident.

Pascachoff had observed 75 eclipses, and we met some of these eclipse devotees in Ceduna – but do not remember Pascachoff among the crowd. These people travelled from one eclipse site to the next, which at that time was Chile, I heard one of them say. Well, as I say, some people collect teddy bears, and others obsessively try and visit every State in the USA.

In reading the obituary, I loved the anecdote of an eclipse in Manitoba, when he was shocked by the drivers who just turned on their headlights and kept moving. As one would say, takes all types…

He enthused his students and “an even better eclipse was forecast for 2024, with totality from Mexico to the Canadian Maritimes. He wanted everyone to observe it. As for him, he was already plotting hotel reservations in Sinaloa, the place with the best view.”  Maybe now his view will be unique.

De-Hoarding

I am in “the throwing out” phase of my life. While not pathological, I tend to keep correspondence I should have turfed out years ago. But there is a certain nostalgia for my several careers. For instance, I moved out of clinical and laboratory research at the end of 1971. Some of my co-authors went back to the own countries.  I had corresponded with them while we finished collaborative work, and then I moved on. I kept the reprints, and I wondered what had become of them in the intervening years. I found out one was deregistered over 20 years ago for falsifying consent forms for his clinical research; and the other has been showered with honours as an eminent professor clinician. Their notoriety is recorded on Google, and for better or for worse these two research chums had not just faded away without leaving any trail.

Vivian Bullwinkel

The problem when you throw out correspondence, I am walking with ghosts. Not all the old correspondence went into the wastepaper basket. For instance, there are some very friendly correspondence. In 1988, I wrote a book for the Bicentenary entitled “Portraits in Australian Health”, one of whom came from interviewing Vivian Statham who, as Vivian Bullwinkel, survived the Bangka Island massacre where all her fellow nurses were gunned down by the Japanese in 1942, and she survived wounded but able to nurse herself back to a state where she was able to spend the rest of the war as a prisoner of war tending to other POWs.

Initially she had declined to be interviewed, but relented. Even in her interview, at least at the start, her husband was present and she was a little wary throughout, but after I sent her a copy of the book I was very pleasantly surprised by her letter in reply in which she thanked me and praised the content and the style. Such letters are what encourages one to live another day

Given that life is a cascade interrupted by changes of direction, I have met a great many people, and so many have contributed to my tiers of paper. One can kid oneself that they are archives; really it is underlying vanity that some person will want to write one’s biography in the future – as if one’s life provides a unique insight worthy of such.

With the help of three of my grandchildren, we emptied out two large storerooms, and then this evacuation ground to a halt. Obviously word of the experience had gone down the line and emptying dusty storerooms was not for them, even if it was their grandfather’s so-called heritage. At one stage, no 2-grandchild asked point-blank why I was keeping all this stuff. The problem is that there are regulations which insist on records being kept for a varying number of years, and when you are working, it is easier to store more than less. But for a perspicacious teenager, that was a lame excuse.

I wish I had written a diary from whenever. The blog is a useful piece of technology which pen and paper, and scrawled notes, and annotated files could never be. However, I had the foresight to at least have a set of “Personal” files, but even that has been in a chaotic state because filing is always a problem when you live an itinerant life.  I hope to have sufficient time at least to catalogue the stuff which provides a useful legacy. Nevertheless, as I say a diary would have helped, although imagine 60 years of compulsively written diary. Would have spent less time in the non-members bar. Maybe.

The Essential Breakfast

If there were no other meal in the day, I would always choose breakfast.

I was musing about this because in the morning when all the various rituals I have to follow – the ablutions, the tablets, the skin medications, the compression stockings – have finished, then breakfast comes along. It is a time of enjoyment as my wife is a very good provider. While she has a routine with variety of either mushrooms on toast, or bacon sandwich, or muesli, or boiled eggs, or scrambled eggs, or avocado and tomato on toast, or omelette.  Welsh rarebit is reserved for St David’s Day.

My favourite is the poached eggs that she conjures. Long ago these eggs were cooked in those soulless metal poachers, which produced those semi-lunar firm, maybe eminently edible – but essentially breakfast via the tradesmen’s entrance.

My wife’s poached eggs are sublime. In Italian, poached eggs are called uova camicia, literally eggs in a shirt. The shirt analogy gives an impression of a free-flowing white tail floating in the hot spring water. These are not the poached eggs, neat compact white nuggets, uova in canovaccio , highly professional but in the end  lacking the abandon of my wife’s expertise.

So much enthusiasm for an ordinary chook’s egg – not from the araucaria with their blue eggs; or duck eggs with their rich yellow yolks or speckled quail eggs.

She also makes a mean uova strapazzate – such a demonstrative word for scrambled eggs. The Italians say it so well.

But back to the start. My original introduction to breakfast as a child emerging from infancy was porridge. One of my earliest memories was the sight of porridge bubbling away on the wood-fired stove of my aunt who had married into a Scottish clan. I always remember her gentle boiling of the oats, which she stirred in milk and water, clockwise. Counter-clockwise was considered unlucky. I was always intrigued when my aunt added salt to the porridge and yet before we ate it, we smothered it with brown sugar. I learnt that for hot liquid you ate from the edge where it was cooler. I remember there was always a sprinkle of wheat-harts on the top, to keep us all regular, the meaning of which I did not understand at the time.

Years later, I learnt that porridge was stirred with a spurtle, a round rod with a smooth surface which prevents the oats from adhering as one stirs and thus preventing the porridge from clumping together. These spurtles were turned from Huon pine and form an unusual present for my Scottish friends – cheaper than whisky. Today, I rarely have porridge; and except for Weet-bix we never ate the products which the Seventh Day Adventists through John Kellogg and his disciple Edward Halsey had foisted onto the Australian breakfast menu. On my mother’s rather lengthy list of proscribed people were Adventists. There was one cereal exception and that was rice bubbles with their characteristic “snap, crackle, pop”, which I, the kid, insisted on pouring the milk over to elicit the sound. The actual consumption was very much a secondary phenomenon.

I always want tea in the morning and, as varieties of tea multiplied, I have settled on Earl Grey tea as the preferred one. A minor point was that my mother insisted on never having Bushell’s tea in the house; never knew why.  At the same time during the War, coffee was very difficult to obtain, and chicory was the substitute. I remember Turban essence!

Countries where tea does not form part of the normal breakfast, I suppose I tolerate, except when the tea is made with the water not boiling. After my mother died, my father had Mrs Ruff come in and cook our breakfast which was invariably fried eggs and bacon every weekday morning. As you would imagine, this is not now my favourite breakfast even when it is offered “sunnyside up.”

I suppose university, when I barely woke up before lectures, was a time I ate very little breakfast and where instant coffee was de rigeur. It was a time when I first became acquainted with Italian style coffee – the cappuccino and the long black. Breakfast was always rushed, a piece of fruit, a piece of toast. and not enjoyable, unless the marmalade was special. Otherwise, Vegemite abounded; or in my early years it was Marmite.

And of course there was one fad, which became a stable on the breakfast table, and which mostly I avoided especially when I was dieting – and that was orange juice. “OJ” is calorie packed and moreover I sympathise with the American writer who commented: “Scientists still don’t know exactly why orange juice and toothpaste combine to create a taste somewhere between sauerkraut and battery acid, but the suspicion is it has something to do with sodium lauryl sulphate, the primary ingredient in toothpaste’s cleansing agents.”

Then for ten years in later life I used to live for part of the week in a motel in the Victorian town of Cobram where I was working. My breakfast invariably was a plate of sausages, and these sausages were the best breakfast sausages I had ever tasted. For the first time in years I had time to read the paper and have a meal I really enjoyed, day after day.

There have been memorable breakfasts. One was in a hotel on the island of Guernsey, where the boiled eggs were just “runny” right in which to dip “the soldier toast”. The other was at the Randolph Hotel looking out on the Oxford streetscape and tucking into a plate of kippers.  Then I have also written a poem about the time we had breakfast on the Moonie River among the coolabah trees, which is soon to be published. The Moonie flows by the settlement of Flinton, where we were staying at the time, in Southern Queensland near the NSW border, before emptying into the Barwon River near St George.

Nevertheless, overriding every breakfast is the perfect cup of tea. I unfortunately have the propensity of not drinking mine until it has passed its prime. There is a point when tea is sublime, but you have to know the point when you have drunk of it.

One way of Putting It 

Thus it is with a feeling of guarded optimism that we, as a nation, reach the end of this disturbing year and, thankfully, enter the holiday season. The festivities are somewhat subdued this year, as inflation forces consumers to cut back; according to the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Conifer Statistics, the Median Household Christmas Tree Height (MHCTH), which last year was “LeBron James,” currently stands at “Danny DeVito.” – Boston Globe.

Mouse Whisper

With acknowledgement to Mr A.B. Paterson:

CHRISTMAS AMONG THE AZERI

(or if we had no Joyce in the matter?)

On the outer Baku where the churches are few,

And men of religion ride donkey,

On a tarmac never cross’d ‘cept by folk that are lost,

One Alan Joe Joyce has a shonky.

For our pocket Ulysses the last verse goes something like this…

And Joey Joyce has been made an AC

And the one thing he hates more than sin is

To be asked by the folk who think him a flea,

When oh, when will he bloody well finis’ 

 

A Courageous New Year to you All from Me and The Mouse

Baku International Airport

Modest Expectations – Ted Greatorex

For a couple of years in the 1980s, we spent Christmas at the Savoy Hotel in a suite which enabled us to look straight down the Thames and Christmas  lunch was in the Savoy Grill.  One of the offspring who had taken a year off to fence in Paris and Budapest (he was actually based in the latter but had a great many contacts in the stylishly named Racing club in Paris) came over to London to have lunch with us. The food was excellent; the wine flowed; the jollification found him taking off his jacket.  The Christmas cracker, suitably extravagant, yielded a parachuting man. Never mind that the son draped the parachute, to which a tiny figurine was attached, on his head so that the figurine was dangling over his nose. One of the waiters sidled up to him and murmured: “It appears that Sir’s jacket has slipped from Sir’s shoulders. Perhaps I could help Sir to put Sir’s jacket back on.”

Ah, the good old days, when Mr Pickwick stalked the land, but the offspring did not reply to the waiter “You jest, good sir. Be of good cheer.” He obeyed and put on his jacket, and Grill etiquette was restored. The parachute remained on his head for the duration.

Yuletide Greetings Everyone.

Ernie Toshack

Ernie Toshack

When I see Scott Boland bowl, with his very understated approach behind a line of more famous fast bowlers, I was reminded of Ernie Toshack, whose nickname was the “Black Prince”. He was born in Cobar and during WW11 worked in the munitions factory at Lithgow. When he was not working, he tried his hand at cricket. The man who became a member of Bradman’s Invincibles in 1948, started in the Marrickville 4th in 1941.  He was initially rejected by Petersham. His progression during the war years to his first test, being against New Zealand in 1946 at the age of 32, was spectacular. Even given that the number playing competitive cricket would have been thinned by the War, nevertheless his progression to Test status was impressive. In fact he had only two years at Test level, before chronic arthritis in his knees forced his retirement. Lindwall, Miller, and perhaps Bill Johnston were the fast bowlers our generation venerates, but Toshack?  He was no batsman and therefore it was his bowling for which he was selected.

He was a left arm medium pace bowler who was very accurate. It is said Bradman would walk down the pitch and put a sixpence on the pitch, point to it and say to Ernie that was where he wanted him to put the ball. Ernie would respond, which made him not only a very economical bowler but also underrated because he lacked an explosive delivery.

Toshack had an exotic genealogy. He was not of Aboriginal descent as Boland is. It is said that his ancestor was John Randall, believed to be originally a slave from the United States and a soldier who fought for the British in the American War of Independence. He arrived in Sydney with the First Fleet in January 1788. Skilled in musket use, Randall was soon employed as a hunter, sourcing wild game for the British officers.

Scott Boland

The comparison between Boland and Toshack: they both had no whitefella heritage – one Aboriginal; the other in the parlance of our time, Afro-American. They were both very accurate medium fast bowlers, often but not always first change, came to Test cricket late – and their progression was unheralded, but their first test against England was memorable. In the first test against England in Brisbane in 1946, Toshack took 6/59; not quite the 6/7 that Boland claimed in his first test in Melbourne in 2021.

When you look at them more closely, there was not that close a comparison; I cannot see Boland affecting a bowler hat and a furled umbrella that the “Black Prince” would wear and carry.  Nevertheless, when I first saw the understated Boland coming into bowl, I did think of Toshack.

Look good in a Suit

This response was prompted by the belated response to the antics of Shane Fitzsimmons, whose professional life was fenestrated by his leadership in time of disaster. This is the man who has been NSW Person of the year, and who this year at the CWA Conference said:

“I was broken during the fire season when we lost people. It was very challenging on some days: hoping for moisture, but all we got was lightning and more fires. But I was inspired by the tenacity of all the fire workers, by the tenacity of communities, by the outpouring of love and kindness of people in communities.

“My way of coping is talking openly to others about how I’m feeling,”

His speech is the type of avoidance that failure bestows upon its author. Read carefully and see no admission of accountability. This is a guy who has a formula for survival, which in the end was not enough. He was sacked last week from an organisation that did not have what its name implied – Resilience NSW.

But then he was not on his Pat Malone. Nevertheless, that is not an excuse for appointing people because they rise to the top in what are as closed an order as the Trappist monks, just different regalia.

We coined shorthand for the incompetent in high places: “looks good in a suit”.

However, let’s get to the mists of youth, a time of socialisation and when the young me became very sceptical of braid and the inherent sense of self-importance it brings.

My time in cadets at school introduced to me to a uniformed service.  Being a cadet was important in my rebel socialisation. Membership of the cadet corps was virtually compulsory when I was at school, and I distinguished myself with being one of the few who went through the three years without being promoted, although I was entitled to crossed flags on my sleeves to signify that I had passed some test for the signal corps. My mate, who also was never promoted, not only had crossed flags but also crossed rifles on his sleeve to signify that he was a crack shot in the shooting team. It was a time when the school had a rifle range on the top floor of a then new building.

Perhaps it was our bringing alcohol into the cadet camp and having a brawl with senior NCOs who, in our other life, were just fellow students but with chevrons on their sleeve that gave them power in the environment of a cadet camp. Thus, when the fight broke out, I was rebelling against authority, and the fight was all the more vicious, terminated when I was hit by the butt of a rifle that night.  I learnt to cop it, leave the dispute in the tent and not to complain. Any friendship I may have had within the class where there was no rank ended there and then.

Against that personal background, when I was President of the University of Melbourne Student Representative Council, I was faced with confrontation with the head of the Melbourne and Metropolitan Fire Brigade. It was the end of first term and the engineers and commerce students were having their annual “marbles match” on the lawn outside the Union building. The lawn was once a lake and therefore it took little rain to turn it into mud. The ‘marbles match” quickly degenerated, as it always did, into a form of the Eton wall game with all the combatants covered in mud. I never knew what the aim was, but I had a bird’s eye view from the SRC office.

The “mud match” was cracking on, and there was much student activity, when the inevitable happened. Somebody broke the fire alarm in the Union, and before long, with bells ringing, the fire cart arrived driving through the milling mob in front of the Union, where it stopped. Before the firemen could get out of their vehicle, some idiot student dumped a bucket of mud over them.

A few of us immediately went down, two of those accompanying me later became very senior judges – one of the Supreme Court and one of the Federal Court. With that amount of student firepower we were able to quieten the mob and isolate some very angry firemen covered in mud, issue an apology and offer to pay for the cleaning.

The University was a very different place, being the only one then in Victoria. Thus, it was very much a place of privilege and very much left to govern itself. At no stage did I remember police being on campus in response to any student activity, and such was the case here.  A delegation, led by myself, later in the afternoon went down to Eastern Hill, where the firemen bosses were located. We were ushered in and the elderly fire chief was there glowering, surrounded by his lieutenants, all of whom affected a mixture of disdain and anger. There was no holding back as we were dressed down by this choleric elderly fire chief in his full braid. Any effort to apologise and to offer to pay for any damage was lost in a shouted invective, where top hat versus cloth cap confrontation was not far from the surface.

The newspapers were there to photograph us as we left the premises, and the incident was splashed across the front page of The Age. I do not remember being criticised by the Vice-Chancellor, with whom I met on a regular basis. It was my first introduction to a non-military uniformed service, but even at a young age I was not impressed by this braided bully, a standover merchant. OK, there are dopey students who do dopey things, but his response was completely over the top.

I was only 20, and at that age, we all move on, even if there was a post-riot hiccough, which was not related to the meeting with the fire chief. Several decades later, I was asked to review the NSW Ambulance Service. It was a time when what I knew as “ambulance driver” when I first graduated, was translating to a more professional workforce where the driver connotation had been transposed to “ambulance officer”. No longer the stretcher bearer, but a service where a cohort of newly-minted “paramedics” was being trained.

The problem was that the training was internal, there was no reciprocity between the States, and one of the teachers was reputed to have a baseball bat as allegedly one of his teaching aids. Then, within the NSW Ambulance Service, there was the “Brotherhood” – membership of which was said to be important for promotion. What was fact was that the Service had more levels of rank than the British Army. Trying to reform entrenched uniformed essential services is very difficult, even if the heads of the services are what you might call “look good in a suit”. They had risen through the services, knew all the buttons not only to polish but also to press to rid themselves of outside recommendations.

In this case, as with the hapless Fitzsimmons, it was the powers that wanted change. In our case reviewing the ambulance service, we avoided our recommendations being debated in the media. The most significant recommendation apart from reduction in the number of ranks, was to establish university-based paramedic training courses, which then led to reciprocity across the States – and at that time in the NSW Ambulance Service, an improved standard in leadership was implemented, and the ranks collapsed into a fewer number where competence trumped time in the service.

The NSW government has made a very definite and welcome decision to abolish Fitzsimmon’s empire.  No worry, he’ll still look good in a suit with all those medals he gleaned as he floated to the top.

The New Health

The central objective of insurance – the removal of uncertainty – cannot be achieved through a cash reimbursement scheme unless the fees against which the benefits are paid are also predictable – R.B. Scotton 1969. 

The common misapprehension about the Australian health system, whether it be called Medibank or Medicare, is that it sets the fees for doctors, because that is how the Federal Government intervention is interpreted. 

The Grattan Institute is at it again. The Australian health system is built around providing a patient benefit for medical services, which are provided by doctors who are working in private practice. The Grattan Institute has a solution, so simple that the media can understand. I for one am bemused by the comment that “GPs should be able to choose a new funding model that supports team care and enables them to spend more time on complex cases, by combining appointment fees with a flexible budget for each patient based on their level of need.” Compare this confused thinking with succinctness of the late Dick Scotton above.

The Constitutional Amendment in 1946 enabled the Federal government to provide medical, dental, hospital and pharmaceutical benefits. No government has taken the opportunity to set up a universal dental system, (and that deserves a separate discussion), hospital benefits which are not at present available, instead the Federal government provides funding for the States, but the area of Federal-State relations unfortunately has become one area of significant double-dipping. The whole area of State-Commonwealth relations has been very fraught; the answer to double-dipping has been to look the other way and not proscribe this scam. Much of this playground developed in Victoria when Kennett was Premier.

Pharmaceutical benefits provide subsidised drugs on a schedule of benefits. That is the invariable, that is if the government sets a benefit it needs to provide a list of value of benefits. This has also been an area where special pleading for very expensive drugs has the form of a lottery, where who you know is of as much importance as proven efficacy of the drug.

Then there are medical benefits, which are the core of the health system, whether it be the initial Earle Page iteration or the post-Nimmo Inquiry, Medibank or Medicare, the architects of which were the late John Deeble and Dick Scotton.

The core of these later proposals was universality. Every Australian was entitled to free care – medical and hospital care; and for pensioners and other poor people identified, free drugs provided they were on a benefit schedule or made available through a hospital pharmacy. The government set a tax levy to cover the cost of Medicare.

When there is an open funding model coupled with changes in the technology to improve the efficiency, if these are not appropriately monitored, as has occurred, then the result can mean the funding model is now completely out of whack.

Any system which pays on the basis of benefits has a major subjective element. If you base it on the fair and reasonable fee that a medical practitioner charges, the value of the benefit is dependent on the particular segment of the profession being as objective as can be in the value of the treatment. In the initial establishment of the benefits, the ophthalmologists based their “fair and reasonable fee” on the highest charging colleague in the country, which produced an exaggerated benefit. This was 1971 and with time any improvement in technology that improved throughput made the benefit more lucrative. Nevertheless, it did not prevent most ophthalmologists currently charging far more than the patient benefit.

Despite an increasingly elaborate medical benefits schedule, a doctor can charge what he or she likes as long as it can said to be “fair and reasonable”. The benefits schedule was also constructed to provide a small incentive for bulk billing, for which swiftness and surety of government payments was the reward. The Schedule benefit for general practitioners has encouraged turnover and episodic treatment, and therefore the Schedule has become an object for gaming. This applies particularly to all consultations, pathology and imaging.

Procedural medicine is divided into diagnostic and curative/palliative. At the outset the benefits schedule was also constructed for professional services. One of the consequences of the increasing differentiation of medicine is the increase in the number of procedures which, in turn, has led to the increase in the size and complexity of the Schedule list, and consequently tracking benefits against the fees charged requires collection of data.

Yet an immense amount of time is spent determining the value of procedures, using varying levels of evidence, as if each item has a unique fee. That may be correct, but the government is concerned with providing a range of patient benefits commensurate with what the item of service is worth.

Once the benefits and the fees for procedures were more or less aligned, but that has changed. Over time there has been dislocation of the fee charged from the patient benefit accepted as full payment by the proceduralist.  Those who cannot afford the added impost end up on a public health care waiting list. Added to this, the payment for prostheses has never been properly codified for benefit payment.  There are resultant anomalies. Dressings for chronic skin infection are not covered by benefits – either Medicare or private health. The whole benefit for this area has never been satisfactorily confronted, while the number of prostheses continually increases.

Once general practices, imaging and pathology services were Australian owned – essentially cottage industries – but the profitability did not go unnoticed by business and gradually the multinationals have bought up the practices.  Medicare funding thus is allegedly ending up in offshore funds. In other words, the Medicare system is providing a means exported profits. These hedge funds and other financial vehicles do not invest to lose money. In other words, Australian government funding is providing sustenance to those “altruistic entities” located in the Cayman Islands and its ilk.

The system needs re-structuring.  Recently yet there has been a seemingly endless review headed by Bruce Robinson, which seems to have become arcane groups of specialists debating the equivalent of angels on pinheads. It was supposed to review the health system and hopefully repair the system. Like so many of the reviews since Nimmo and after the last AMA-Government Inquiry in 1984, money is funnelled into the big consultancy firms, many of which are peopled by former public servants, for little result in terms of improved health care.

The central agency nightmare is if the Benefits system is extended to the whole raft of health professionals, other than those as specified in the constitutional amendment. However, a “weasel clause” came in 1974 with the extension of a limited patient benefit to optometry, by “deeming optometry services medical”. The inclusion of health professionals since then has been based on them being undertaken under “medical supervision”.

These professions wish to have independent access to items that generate patient Medicare benefits, and many would object to the “deemed medical” rubric as infringing on each individual skill set. However, to my mind any such benefit systems could be challenged on constitutional grounds. The community indignation which would ensue would likely be such that a resultant constitutional amendment put to referendum would be overwhelmingly passed and the resultant floodgate of expenditure would provide the Federal government with potentially massive expenditure – and headache.

There are exclusions from Medicare benefits – in other words, government can exclude procedures or anything they deem ineligible, as has been done with most cosmetic surgery. Limitations on the number of courses of IVF treatment are imposed. This can be a blunt object, and with every inclusion or exclusion there inevitably are grey areas – and controversy.

My view, after many years of being involved with Medicare, is that the construction of the benefits list is all important, and patient benefits need to be clearly differentiated for the purpose of calculation into four components. The three traditional components are professional, technical and capital, to which I would add the educational component to boost the value of the benefit for consultative medicine. Technical and capital component can be calculated based on actual cost, providing that the ratio between actual use and capacity does not allow windfall gain. Professional is how much a person’s skill and time taken are calculated. Educational component takes into account concomitant teaching occurring when the doctor is consulting and has been the basis of a submission I made to government some years ago. Then, instead of valuing each individual item of service, the government could consider providing the benefits on the basis of bands: one for episodic treatment for acute cases and second, courses of treatment for the chronically ill.

Patients’ benefits can be set either based on episodes, (predominantly acute – e.g. appendicectomy) or courses of treatment (predominantly chronic e.g. radiotherapy for cancer), or a mixture of both ( e.g general practitioner attendances). This would enable the schedule to be collapsed in a range of benefits, based on the above considerations. It is a pity that the AMA no longer has expertise in this area, because this was the basis of the AMA / Government Inquiries where neither the AMA nor the Department was asleep at the wheel.

Because of the indifferent quality of the Health Ministers since Michael Wooldridge, with surprisingly the possible exception of Tony Abbot, the Health Department has little desire to be involved in health financing – at least seriously – and increasingly finds itself at the mercy of the financial strictures of the “central agencies” – so very little changes unfortunately and thus neglecting the truism incorporated in Dick Scotton’s prescient words over 50 years ago.

A reminder of what I wrote in my blog

As I write this blog on Easter Sunday, maybe Albanese will start to rise to the task; and the proposal for an Integrity Commission is a very good place for him to start.

One thing he should remember is to pick on the topic where the Government is vulnerable and then hammer it. Add a pinch of climate change and the country being held to ransom by the very wealthy “oligarchs”, whose wealth has been tied up in fossil fuels, and the formula becomes stronger. However, whether Albanese can dispense this prescription will unfold over the next little while.

The problem with “over a next little while” is it is as long as a piece of string – as short as a piece string for that matter.

The Big Island

One great advantage Albanese has is, in one word, Dutton, completely unelectable outside Queensland. A second great advantage is the former Prime Minister, who should relinquish his electorate of Cook and this time have a long holiday evangelising outside Australia, under volcanoes reminding him of his fire and brimstone Pentecostalism. Hawaii – the Big Island would be a good start.

Mouse Whisper

A civilised community exists on a basis of trust.

When you destroy that trust, then in the end you believe in nobody. You are in a dark forest inhabited by the symbols of demons or warlocks or any of the representations of Beelzebub, because they are the enemy – and you alone are the symbol of purity. What has happened to America is a man with artificial golden mane, golden face, golden geegaws (unsurprising given from ancient times religious icons are smothered in gold) burst upon a country, already conspiracy ripened by the pastors of the Second Coming and satanic interpretations of the Book of Revelations. Coupled this with those playing in the shadow isolation of video violence and how can anybody trust anybody. In the end the one supreme person who did not trust, who never trusted the law, did not understand impartiality reigns supreme with all the bodies whom he/she/it did not trust littered all around.

On that cheerful note…

Happy Christmas from Mousehole.

Mousehole Christmas

Modest Expectations – Spices in the Sanskrit

Periodically, you read about someone or someones who has been to every country in the world, which means they have been to about 195 countries. Then what?

Phileas Fogg

In another context, I had that feeling when I visited Alaska. This was the fiftieth and last State of the US that I visited. I had also visited Puerto Rico. The rules about visit legitimacy was that you stay overnight or have a sit down meal in the State. COVID-19 has made it difficult. I remember Stephen Fry travelled through all the US States in 2007 and 2008. Although it seemed an exercise in continuous Phileas Foggery, his trip was broken into two segments because he had fractured his arm badly, which required stabilisation by inserting ten screws, and the reason there “being a break” between the two segments.

The history of my involvement was that when I found one day by counting off the States I had visited, it came to 35. This had been helped by the Australian Medical Association, my employer at the time, sending me on a field trip to the USA in November 1982, and I criss-crossed the country. The point was that I stayed in various places assigned by my US hosts for a number of days rather than it being just a whistlestop tour.

Roanoke Rapids, NC

One place I stayed for several days was Roanoke Rapids in one of the poorest areas of North Carolina near the Virginian border. This was tobacco growing country. When I visited there in 1982, Michael Gilstrap had recently been appointed chief executive to clean up the hospital, since it was evident from only a superficial look at the records, that the hospital’s clinical standards were appalling. We got on very well. As I was departing, having to drive back to Raleigh to catch a plane, he said he hoped I could come back for a pig-pickin’. I think we communicated once or twice. He retired in 2005 from the hospital there. I never went back for that pig pickin’.

But back to the main thread. After I reached 35 states, I made the decision to go for the “big five-o”. Fortunately, at the time, we had friends living in Denver, which was a useful launching pad for the prairie and mountain States, which have all contributed to my wellspring of anecdotes. Many of my visits were made before Trump. It is so sad to see how destructive his influence has been, since a sober USA is a crucial bulwark for this planet’s survival.

By the way, I have been to 93 countries – less than halfway. Give it a C+?

A Missive from Massachusetts

I found this following article from the Boston Globe such that if you have not seen it, it emphasises how abundant is the smog of misinformation, which continues to pile up. After all, despite the trolls of Big Business, there have been inroads into cigarette smoking. So, if the community has the will to diminish the amount of carbon in its lungs through the reduction of cigarette smoking, why can’t it achieve the same with atmosphere?

Boston was in the national spotlight last week as Prince William and Princess Kate travelled to the city. They were in town for Friday’s glitzy Earthshot Prize ceremony, where William’s foundation awarded cash prizes to five companies deemed to have hatched innovative climate solutions.

It was perhaps the most star-studded climate event in Boston’s history. A-listers like David Beckham and Shailene Woodley attended, and pop star Billie Eilish performed remotely. Can all that celebrity really drum up support for the climate fight? That’s the question Globe reporter Sabrina Shankman explored in a piece last week.

Prince William said he chose to host the glamorous Earthshot event in Boston partly because it’s a climate leader. “Your universities, research centres, and vibrant startup scene make you a global leader in science, innovation, and boundless ambition,” he said.

Of course, there’s still much work ahead on the climate front in Boston and Massachusetts. How it gets done will depend in large part on what technologies officials choose to adopt.

A blockbuster story examined a peer-reviewed paper from University of Massachusetts Lowell researchers that touted the benefits of one emergent technology, green hydrogen.

The authors said the state should consider adopting the fuel, using it to heat homes and fuel appliances. But the research was partially funded by gas interests — something the authors failed to disclose.

Making matters even more complicated, recommendations similar to the authors’ wound up in a bill before the Legislature, suggesting that the study could influence state policy despite many experts’ concerns about green hydrogen.

The story shows that the path to meeting renewable electricity targets will likely entail many fights over what should count as “clean” energy.

Another highly controversial energy source: biomass, or fuels derived from wood products and other plant material.

Biomass was eligible for state clean energy subsidies in Massachusetts for years. But the tides have changed for the energy source, in large part because of pushback from advocates, as well as research that shows it can be even more polluting than coal.

In August, officials agreed to strip renewable subsidies from biomass. And last week, the state dealt a blow to a bitterly contested proposal to build a biomass power plant in Springfield, upholding a decision to revoke a key permit from the facility. Technically, the plant could still get built, but that seems unlikely.

As they celebrate that decision, environmental justice groups are criticizing another one: A state body granted the utility Eversource permission to circumvent permits needed to build a highly contentious electrical substation in East Boston. Substations, which convert high-voltage electricity to a lower voltage so it can be distributed to homes, are an essential part of the grid. But opponents say this one is unnecessary and have criticized  Eversource’s plan to build it in a flood-prone area across from a playground.

As the state pursues its goal of rapidly slashing carbon emissions from energy, we’re sure to see more fights over where to place new infrastructure.

Makes one depressed! But that is democracy at work.

Malta – The one that did not get away

The year was 2007. One of the places where we were accidental tourists was Malta. Flying from Tripoli in Libya by Air Malta meant that one way or another we could not avoid Malta. Not that it was a real consideration, as we had booked well in advance to visit the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum in Valetta.

Hypogeum

We had received the intelligence that if we wanted to visit the Hypogeum (“underground” in Greek), we had to book well in advance as only 80 could visit each day. One of the reasons for its survival is that for thousands of years, it was sealed off from the outside world, and the internal humid atmosphere was conducive for its survival, at least until it was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, when there was a move to construct new buildings above it on the same site. Fortunately the Hypogeum was saved, but the early preservation of artefacts in particular was not very good. One of its functions was to be a cemetery, and the upper level which is just below the ground surface seems to be dedicated to housing the dead.

Other experts suggest that there may have been an oracle with a dedicated chamber – the acoustics of the chamber were not demonstrated but apparently the sounds are extraordinary, specially if you were the oracle and had learnt how to maximise the sounds.  An oracle positioned so that her voice became a sonic boom would define “sacred”.

The Hypogeum is the most complete known neolithic temple with its roof intact. Being underground one enters the temple via a door in a normal suburban Valetta Street. It is not that the temple appears that huge and you can view the middle chamber from a platform. However, this level seems compact as most of the important structures are visible – including the holies of holies, which resembles a sanctuary and although unseen, steps go down to the lower level. The modest entrance and the fact that the visitor can only have a  view limited and  be able not wander freely through the three levels belie how extensive it is.

Since our visit, there have been improvements made, courtesy of a grant from Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein to improve climate control. After the experience of Lascaux and other caves where there is evidence of neolithic life, especially where there is vulnerable artwork and where people were once allowed unfettered access, a change in societal attitudes has occurred. Preservation has become the number one priority.

Misrah Ghar il-Kbir

Malta has a number of mysterious prehistoric artefacts. One we walked around in a field outside Valetta is known informally as Clapham Junction (Misrah Ghar il-Kbir) because the intersecting nature of the “cart ruts”, called that because of their resemblance to tracks left by cart.  It’s not known for certain how or why they were made. These clearly man-made ruts are dual channels, parallel grooves etched into the limestone bedrock of the islands. The channels, generally shallow, measure between eight to 15 cms deep, but some can be as deep as 60 cms. The width between the tracks extends up to 140 cms, but they are not uniform in all instances. It is very symbolic of Malta being  crossroads in the ebb and flow of the Greco-Roman world.

The island has thus been a microcosm of civilisation movements because of its position in the Mediterranean Sea. The island was a staging post for the various groups of Christian adventurers whose aim was to free the Holy Land from Islam. Many of these groups moved with the support of the Church of Rome, the Knights Templar were pervasive across Europe. One of these orders which claims continuity with the Knights Hospitaller, a chivalric order that was founded about 1099 by the Blessed Gerard in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, is the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

The Order has not only persisted but also has observer status at the United Nations. It has no lands and has a polyglot mixture of people with titles dripping with noble escutcheons. In 1998, a treaty was signed between Malta and the Order granting the upper part of Fort St Angelo, including the Grand Master’s House and the Chapel of St Anne, to the Order with limited extraterritoriality. The Order also has access to two residences in the Vatican.

This treaty was ratified on 1 November 2001. The agreement has a duration of 99 years. The Maltese Government can terminate it at any time after 50 years. In terms of the agreement, the flag of Malta is to be flown together with the flag of the Order in a prominent position over St Angelo. No asylum may be granted by the Order and generally the Maltese courts have full jurisdiction and Maltese law applies.

This is the quirky nature of Malta, with its distinctive Cross that relates to another Order, that of the Hospitallers, who ruled Malta between 1530 and 1798. Malta was always susceptible to invasion, but its resilience during WW11 against the Germans had it awarded the George Cross, which is a simple silver cross, unlike the Maltese Cross. It is the George Cross which is on the country’s flag, not the Maltese Cross. Malta was a British Crown Colony from 1813 and 1964 when the country achieved independence.

I asked my wife what she remembered about Malta. She laughed and said being in hotel lounge overlooking the Mediterranean, and me waxing lyrical over a cucumber infused martini.

In fact, we did a great deal of walking around the capital of Valetta and its harbour. There were the esplanades, reminder of the South of France and the narrow, shaded streets reminiscent of North Africa and the open squares which were reminders of Italy. It is picturesque – ecco, the views of the harbour which once housed the British navy and this mediaeval city despite its savage Axis bombing  during WW11, reducing parts to rubble is a place to be viewed.

St John’s Cathedral, Valetta

St John’s Cathedral sticks in my mind. The ornate walls, the stunning frescoes – all contribute. But what makes it more than another ornate ecclesiastical masterpiece is the floor of the cathedral. The marble slabs are highly decorated, depicting the coats of arms of each of the knights buried beneath. I know of no other cathedral floor which has such rich inscriptions laid in among the designs. The floor is a polychromatic tableau and yet I remember walking on them with a sense of discomfort. The other sight which stopped me was when I came across the Caravaggio painting which depicted the Beheading of St John the Baptist. Once I became accustomed to the sombre colours of the painting, apart from the blood, it was as gruesome a painting as I have experienced. But this was apparently Caravaggio’s style – to shock. The painting achieves that, and with the ornate beauty of the cathedral, it gave me the creeps – a true example of the Fleurs de Mal, the Baudelaire thesis that at the heart of beauty is evil.

In support somewhat of this Baudelaire observation, in 1607 Caravaggio had sought refuge in Valletta, after beating a man to death in Rome; the Knights of Malta welcomed and knighted him, in return for some paintings—the Beheading of St John the Baptist being one of two which hang in the cathedral.

In the end, for whatever the experience, Malta is unforgettable.

The Martyrdom of Violet Coco

Deanna “Violet” Coco, an Australian climate activist who blocked traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge for 25 minutes in April, was sentenced to 15 months in prison on December 2. She won’t be eligible for parole for at least 8 months.

This is how it has been succinctly reported in the overseas media.

This conviction has polarised Australia. The NSW Premier dropped his mask of charm. “If protesters want to put our way of life at risk they should have the book thrown at them and that’s pleasing to see,” he told reporters.  The NSW Government recently passed legislation to make unauthorised protesting liable to up to $22,000 in fines and two years in gaol.

In fact Coco did also receive a $2,500 fine for setting off a flare from the roof of her vehicle, which was blocking the traffic.

I have two responses.

From afar, I side strongly with those who believe that her sentence was draconian, and the legislation unnecessary. Close to the action, if I was caught in the resultant traffic logjam, I would have “unspooled” and no punishment could have been enough for the Coco.

Fortunately, the rational overrides the irrational.  But does it?

My perspective of protests is nevertheless prejudiced by the nature of the cause driving the protestors. For instance, I have no time for the anti-vaxxers and their conspiracy nonsense. Therefore, my first reaction is for these protesting to be locked up.

The right to protest should be maintained, even though, as in case of Coco, she caused inconvenience. Even if the anti-Coco mob resort to accusations of putting the community at risk by halting traffic, the penalty should be commensurate.  In the case of Violet Coco, when compared with the wrist slapping received by the anti-vaxxer conspirators, it is completely over the top.

One of the characteristics of democracy is the right to non-violent protest. Inconvenience is no reason for such a response as meted out to Ms Coco. She may have been an activist in the Fireproof group, but the members are not the violent cowardly thugs that wish to replace democracy by a murderous replica of Nazi Germany whose only aim is to eliminate anybody who wishes to disagree with them, plus a wide array of people of different colour or belief.

The problem is our law enforcement agencies have enough individuals sympathetic with these people to target the Cocos but not the insurrectionist thugs. The current authoritarian bullies who rammed an elderly Danny Lim into a tiled floor, protected by their uniforms, have had their names suppressed. Not arraigned immediately, charged and placed in custody. There is no question of what they did. It was recorded on camera and yet the dissembling by a police force with a substantial basket of dirty linen and over the past fifteen years recruitment to the force of persons with convictions goes on. The police force that nearly killed Danny Lim are the police force that arrested Ms Coco.

The right wing terrorists still stalk the streets, bailed, but can you tell me any of their names? Well, two of them are Desmond Liddington and Maxwell Ferrer. They invaded the home of a left wing activist  in November 2021. Mr Liddington also has come to attention since, having rammed a police car in November this year, and is being held without bail. Will his sentence for invasion of this home merit a sentence commensurate with him ramming a police car?  They are just two examples, but all their accomplices should be named in Parliament, and their faces grace every police station in the State, even those in uniform to remind us of those who have been employed to protect the Australian democracy have violated that trust.  In this way, it reminds all, that climate activists are on the sunny side of the Australian culture.

Release Ms Coco immediately. In fact, between writing and publication of the blog, that has occurred conditionally. She has been bailed.

As the United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said on April 5 this year: “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” 

A set of useful tips?

This is an excerpt edited from The Washington Post:

Jessica Halem adores hotels. And loves to sleep. Unfortunately, the two are often at odds. 

As someone with a careful sleep-hygiene routine who must slumber “in complete darkness,” Halem finds herself on the offence during hotel stays. There are tiny lights in the TV and smoke detector to deal with. Gaps in the curtains. Alarm clocks, microwaves, refrigerators, air conditioners. Many devices in hotel rooms emit blue light, which has a more potent impact on sleep than red or amber lights.

“Everything that could possibly be needed … has a light on it, and it’s shining in your eye,” said Halem, 50, an LGBTQ+ health-care expert from Philadelphia. “I can see the lights through my closed eyelids; I know I’m not alone.”

She is not. 

Halem has a host of solutions in her tool kit. She brings circular felt stickers — the kind that go on the bottom of furniture — to place over lights, which sometimes involves standing on a bed or chair. 

If she can’t turn off an alarm clock, she’ll rip it out of the wall and put it in the closet. She unplugs microwaves and uses the hanger {to hold the curtains shut} trick on the curtains. Sometimes she even tapes curtains to the wall. Multiple eye masks come with her on trips.

She also wouldn’t mind having conversations with “whoever is in charge of the television set that has a red light that doesn’t turn off,” the smoke detector engineers who decided that a green light should indicate the devices are in working order and maybe federal health officials.

“Perhaps the National Institute of Health should get involved,” she said. “There should be some sort of announcement … light leakage is a problem, we shouldn’t have it while we’re sleeping. 

Mouse Whisper

“All my life I’ve tried to use music to bring people together. Yet it saddens me to see how misinformation is now being used to divide our world. I’ve decided to no longer use Twitter, given their recent change in policy which will allow misinformation to flourish unchecked.”

Sir Elton John, if you missed it, announced the above last week on Twitter. He is not known to make such a political statement, and while the Musk tried to crawl to him to come back, others have not been that kind to Sir Elton. The nastiness has not altered his resolve.

Modest Expectations – Southern Sudan

In 2006, my younger son and I went to Munich to see Australia play Brazil at football. It was World Cup time.  I still have the scarf. As I remarked to the chap sitting next to me in the stadium, it would probably be the first and only time that I would be watching Australia play Brazil in anything. Australia was in a navy blue strip; the Brazilians the traditional yellow and blue. The similarity of our colours threw a golden ring around the field. Brazil was too good for us (2-0), but it was a competitive match just in the same way the recent encounter with Argentina was. Soccer or football (as it’s more universally called) was to us Australians very much a fringe sport, basically imported after the war to Australia, initially clubs being formed around particular migrant groups.

Australia had imported rugby and cricket from England and was playing test matches against them in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But not football. Football was a working class sport; a winter niche filled in Australia by Australian Rules football and Rugby League. The latter was also a sport of the coal mining areas in Northern England. Then there was Rugby Union, the sport of the public schools in England and predominantly NSW and Queensland. Not much room for football in schools.

In 1956, at the Melbourne Olympic Games, Australia fielded a team when there were only eleven teams. Australia reached the quarter finals after beating Japan, only to be comprehensively beaten by India in the quarter final. The Soviet Union won the gold medal. On either side of the Olympic Games in 1954 and 1958 saw West Germany and Brazil win the World Cup; neither bothered to send teams to Australia. In 2000, as host nation for the Olympics, Australia received a free pass, but this was a genuine test among modified national sides. The Cameroons won; Australia came 15th.

I was in a taxi in New York when I learnt that Australia had qualified for the round of 16 for the 2006 Cup, when Australia later lost unluckily to Italy which then went on to win the title. However, this was a “golden” team with plenty of players in the top flight European leagues and their coach was one of the acclaimed Dutch coaches, Guus Hiddink – a very talented gun for hire but not in any way close to being an Australian by adoption, despite the media hype.

Graham Arnold, the current Australian coach is a knock-about Australian, who fits within the description of a typical “Aussie bloke”.   His zone? An abusive father; mother who dies of cancer when he’s 20; lives in straitened circumstances as a teenager, soccer journeyman who has pushed his innate abilities to its limits; underestimated; a chip on his shoulder compounded by his rumpled appearance. Moreover, he drinks at the Sackville Hotel in Rozelle (renamed for the Cup Sacky-roos), which I know well also. Rozelle – now gentrified – a long way from his childhood yet with identifiable parts to which he could relate, like  his Sackville patron mates.

He has been around a long time, spent a lot of time playing second violin. Where does the Australian Football team go from here, after this run of magic – does Arnold know when the trail of gossamer ends? Next year, when the Woman’s World Cup will be played out in the Antipodes it may go a long way towards answering that question.

Pity about Argentina.

Chenozem, indeed

I sent an e-mail to a friend in Sweden after Australia beat Denmark, commenting this win was like Sweden beating Australia at cricket.

In response, after congratulating the Australian achievement, he mused over the state of Northern Europe – “Weather impacts will be great, we suffer high energy bills and Ukranians freeze and buy simple wood ovens to compensate. Last week a full foot of heavy snow fell here, resulting in fallen trees and much shovelling. The area is littered with fallen fir branches.”

I sent him a poem entitled Black Soil, which I have written about the Russian Invasion of Ukraine and which will be published as part of an anthology in the New Year.

BLACK SOIL


Saffron the sun emergent

Caerulean a sky beginning to dawn

Trees wintry tracery on the light

A flag limp in a flowerpot

Blood dripping in the terracotta


Black soil 


A footprint; a lonely shoe

A carved track; a burnt out tank

A sunflower once tall; now bent 

Sap dripping from its torn stem

But still life lives in this sap
 

Black soil
 

Once a feathery highway

Of fun and laughter

Where children ran 

Where parents chided 

Where bicycles slowed and 

Everyone as sunflowers were waving in the gentle breeze.


Black soil


Now mud 

Where chilled men and women lie

Twisted and burnt

In tatters and shreds

In graves 

In plastic body bags

Alone with company
 

Black soil

 
A way beside a church

Where once Putin prayed 

Where Oligarchs prayed

Where a Muscovite Prayed

A Patriarch with heavy braid

Prayed

To God


Black soiled.

My friend’s response was brief:

“Chenozem” indeed.

Chernozem

Well, here was an unfamiliar word, which I found out is derived from the Russian word for “black soil”. Nearly a quarter of the world’s most fertile soil, known as chernozem, is located in Ukraine.Chernozem is black soil -rich in organic matter made up of decomposed plants – “humus” in fact. I live and try to learn.

Who suggested this?

Under the Higher Education Loans Program, commonly known as HECS, the government covers the cost of students’ contributions until such a time as they earn a minimum salary of $48,361 and repayments of one per cent a year kick in. Repayments are staggered to $141,848, at which point graduates repay at a rate of ten per cent through the Australian Tax Office.

While the loans are indexed to CPI, no interest is paid on them. Legislation passed in the Federal Parliament this month will wipe more than $70,000 from university debt accrued by doctors and nurse practitioners who spend three years working and living in a rural or remote area after they graduate. The policy will apply to students enrolled from January 1 this year and is designed to attract an estimated 850 additional doctors and nurse practitioners to hard-to-staff areas. In the AFR, the education editor stated this initiative to encourage graduate medicos to go bush is unlikely to achieve its aims. She went on to say experts believe is unlikely to succeed. Dozens of attempts over the past 40 years to influence student course choice by lowering tuition fees have largely failed.

I would agree.

I was involved directly in the national establishment of university departments of rural health, rural clinical schools, regional university medical schools (James Cook University and later Deakin) and in Victoria the Murray to Mountains Program directed at training interns totally in rural areas of Victoria. All were successful, at the time I retired to join the ranks of the aged and infirm. So, what the hell is going on.

Money is one incentive, but not in isolation.

The problem with attracting doctors to rural practice is that it is not about money, it is about providing the right non-monetary incentives and from the latest initiatives, it looks as though the Government has learnt nothing.

I have seen what does not work. It is somewhat depressing when you devise policies that have been shown to work and you see in your retirement 20 years later the policy jesters and theory purveyors without field experience write their formulaic repetition of what does not work, and which I discarded long ago.

One of the initiatives that did not work was providing funding to retain doctors in the country, just as bursary systems don’t work if there are no linked career prospects. The idea that you dragoon recent graduates to work in the country for two years is not only bad policy it is damaging to medical practice across Australia.

My view, which was vindicated, was that if you present an opportunity for medical students to train in rural areas, not just a brief “holiday” visit, but a full-time living and learning experience with committed staff co-ordinated by a director of clinical training, good outcomes are achieved. The student is in effect being socialised into rural practice. It has been said that if one grows up in the country, one is liable to go back there for a career – as long as your memories are positive. When the rural clinical schools were first funded, there was considerable resistance until those who went through the program found they both enjoyed themselves and learnt the important skills to enable a doctor to resuscitate a patient and look after that patient until they are transferred, get better under your watch or die – all up significant clinical experience.

The problem with training in the rural areas is that it is completely foreign to most of the deans of medicine and their ilk who have grown up on a diet of research with an elitist view of teaching hospital training as the only legitimate pathway. To them, training in the country is second class. These people unfortunately have the ear of government because research laboratories are embroidered with toys to suck in the politicians who have no idea of what they are seeing but are glitzy. Medical education should be primarily about developing the majority of students to work as medical practitioners from the day they graduate, not research scientists. Rural clinical schools were funded independently from the Department of Health not Education to protect the funding from being “skimmed” by the universities for administrative costs.

As I have written extensively, certain matters must be satisfied for rural practice to succeed, and the overall assumption is that time as a rural general practitioner should be around five years. Social dislocation, professional isolation, community tolerance and over all succession planning. In explanation, social dislocation recognises that one’s partner needs to be accommodated and, in the longer term, factor in the education of the offspring. Professional isolation recognises that single person practice without a backup program is undesirable. Community tolerance means that in a rural community one sacrifices the anonymity of the big city and the level of social acceptance not only by the community at large but also by fellow professionals is essential for a good experience.

The simple fact is there is need for a system that can provide long term solution; succession planning is an integral part of the policy.

The Murray to the Mountains Intern Training Program showed clearly that by the end of the intern year, the doctors were capable of independent practice, able to handle emergencies and having had the benefit of an ongoing comprehensive professional development program – organised for maximum attendance of the interns and where feedback was actively encouraged. The appointment of a Director of Clinical Training able to co-ordinate the professional education component and provide a degree of pastoral care is important. For a successful program, dumping young doctors in rural areas of which they know little is doomed to failure. Then there will be the cohort who seek exemption or release from the program, often by way of legal action, and the program will be quietly dumped without fanfare.

This is a precis. As I have said, mine is the perspective of somebody who spent 30 years involved in rural health policy development, not flying a desk in Canberra but working in the field, and seeing what worked. Needless to say, I had my fair share of unproductive policy cul-de-sacs.

From an economist’s point of view, Richard Holden has been reported as saying “Writing off student debt for doctors who practice in the bush is an unfair and inefficient use of taxpayer dollars that amounts to bus drivers subsidising wealthy kids to get medical degrees.” Professor Holden went on to say that the decision to wipe out student debt for doctors and highly trained nurses was inefficient, unfair and would shift the cost of educating rich kids who become doctors onto the working poor.

Students from rich families tend to be over-represented in medical programs because of the established link between wealth and academic performance, particularly on the Australian Tertiary Academic Rank. They also can pay off HECS and thus exchange of compulsory rural placement is not much of an incentive.

As further reported in the AFR, Andrew Norton, a higher education policy expert from Australian National University, said the repayment of debt would turn into a bureaucratic nightmare as the Australian Taxation Office and education departments try to sort out the debts of about 850 graduates if the target is reached. The US-based think tank, The Brookings Institute, recently described student loan forgiveness as “regressive whether measured by income, education or wealth. Student debt is concentrated among high-wealth households and loan forgiveness is regressive whether measured by income, educational attainment or wealth.” That position was backed up by a recent Productivity Commission report. The October report was disdainful of free places in TAFEs and universities, saying such policies come at a huge cost to taxpayers, which is largely borne by people who don’t directly benefit from them.

Overall, dreadful policy, which will go nowhere – but who will ever say so? 

Who do you think you are?

Halima Begum, director of Runnymede, a race equality think tank, said: “The courtier in question was born in the 1930s and is the product of a time and place defined by British imperialism. However, this does not excuse racism, whether or not it occurs inside the king’s London home.”

As background, Begum has been the boss of this Trust since 2020, itself set up in 1968. She represents “the organisation across national and international forums and has led major research, development and policy programmes spanning education, equality, human rights, public health, the environment and post-conflict reconstruction”. It is best for it to wallow in its self-defined worthiness. Great Britain is the home to so many of these worthy organisations.

There is something vaguely offensive in her italicised statement heading the article. I suppose because I am nearly 83, I find some woman who runs one of those worthy organisations dismissing us as the product of own time, as though that has any particular meaning, patronising. I was born into a Commonwealth Dominion that may have been defined by British imperialism, even though we followed Great Britain into a destructive WW11. In fact, looking at her background enmeshed in Bengali heritage with a tough early life to understand, I suppose I should cut her some slack, but reading it slowly suggests some degree of the very thing she has committed herself to eliminate – racism.

HRH and Lady Susan Hussey

Yet, the object of this contumely is an easy target. Lady Susan Hussey, the aggressive confidant of the late Queen, served as her enforcer. I just imagine the late Queen asking her to deal with “those difficult hussies” and then her unappreciated way of dealing with Princess Diana and more recently the Duchess of Sussex. Once her patron was gone, then it was only a matter of time before Lady Hussey with all her hoar frost would follow. The exchange with an equally aggressive black woman with an African themed persona who took umbrage at being asked where she was from, certainly made the most of the exchange

Unfortunately, one could deduce from this report that all people born in 1930s should shut up and drink their cocoa. One of the ways I have always learnt is to ask people about themselves. After all, that is what makes you interesting. The taxi driver from Bangladesh is amazed that I even know where Bangladesh is and then tells me he comes from a hilly area there and dispels in my mind that the country is totally deltaic and floats around in the Bay of Bengal. He tells me about his family, but before he can produce the family photos, we have reached home – and I have learnt about a middle-aged man who I’ll probably never see again – but I was enriched by the conversation.

Perhaps Lady Hussey looking at the Ms Fulani expressed herself insensitively, but then if I pranced into a garden party dressed as a harlequin in a fur coat and Roman galea and an 83 year old woman asked where I was really from, then perhaps I might understand if she repeated the question, confused by my heterogeneous garb. But as reported, seven times! I think not.

In any event, the nobility knows when the execution block beckons, and this fifth daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave descended from the union of James 11 and his mistress, Arabella Churchill has played the game and stepped down. I’m sure the crocodile tears have been mopped up.

Ms Fulani

Ngozi Fulani, born Marlene Headley, has a scalp in Lady Hussey and publicity for her charity – for the moment.  “Ngozi” is “skin” in Swahili, the lingua franca of the East Africans, but Fulani are a West African people. As I wrote above, a heterogeneous lady. I just hope that these publicity hounds don’t use the elderly, less able to cope, as targets for confected outrage. One problem is having written the above I’m likely to find Nigel Farage on the same side as myself.

Mouse Whisper

Since it is round ball and hands off time, some majestic trivia:

King Charles is a Burnley supporter. Camilla undisclosed, possibly Plumpton Athletic.

His mother, clue is the only team she ever hosted at Buck House was Arsenal. His father – rumour hath it he supported Leeds.

Prince William very Aston Villa, whereas wife Kate supports Chelsea. Prince Harry is Arsenal.  Duchess of Sussex? Not stated.

And Princess Diana?  Philadelphia Eagles.

Philadelphia Eagles

 

 

 

Modest Expectations – Abraham Lincoln

BA Santamaria

I remember when the Victorian Labor Party made Labor unelectable at a Federal level, because in the Split in the early 1950s it had spawned the Democratic Labor Party, the Bob Santamaria neo-Falangist spin off. This laic outpost of Roman Catholicism, masquerading as an anti-Communist movement was very much a simulacrum of Franco and his Falangist Party but with an Irish twist. After all, De Valera then the Taoiseach of Republic of Ireland expressed condolence on the death of “the Fuehrer and Chancellor of the German Reich” to the German ambassador, Herr Eduard Hempelt.

The then Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, was very much cut of the same cloth as De Valera. Santamaria and Mannix played interference against the Victorian Labor party over several decades. I grew up in a very anti-Santa household; but I never worked out where my father cast his first preference. However, I was pleased to be part of the 1974 Federal election, which effectively destroyed the DLP in Federal Parliament. This has never been recorded as one of Billy Snedden’s achievements.

Given Whitlam, in one of his impetuous moods, had precipitated the 1974 election with the appointment of Vince Gair, the DLP Queensland Senator, to the Australian Ambassadorship to Ireland, the DLP influence did persist. For instance the DLP was, for years afterwards, influential in the Victorian public service and in some of the health funds, among conservative sections of the medical workforce.

Nevertheless, like wisteria the DLP proved difficult to totally exterminate. Brian Harradine, expelled from the Tasmanian Labor Party, became a serial pest as Tasmanian Senator. As recorded in Wikipedia, he opposed abortion, embryonic stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and pornography. He secured a ministerial veto on importation of the abortifacient RU486 and a prohibition on Australian overseas aid financing family planning that included abortion advice. I was an observer when he blocked John Funder’s appointment to head the National Health & Medical Council because of Funder’s liberal views as a practising Roman Catholic.

After Harradine’s passing it could be said the DLP mantle was passed on to Tony Abbot, who was found out in the top job and then rejected by the electorate, a significant reaction. Notwithstanding its religious association, the DLP has persisted longer than most other parties.

In the post electoral defeat discussions, the fixation more on young people and gender balance as the cause for the Liberal Party’s defeat hides the problem of attracting people of ability. This dearth of ability is compounded when there is a claque of people who had been egged on by a nonagenarian New York dweller.

It is notable that in the wash up of the Victorian Election, the National Party has increased its representation, admittedly from a low base. Of those elected to the Legislative Assembly in 2022, four are women.

But governments are won in the metropolitan areas.

Guy Rundle, writing in Crikey has not minced his words: “When the party was a collection of social castes, a mutual legitimacy was recognised. That’s in Menzies’ “Forgotten People” speech, if Liberals bothered to read it rather than just namecheck it. Menzies is not stirring up the “forgotten people” to represent themselves — God forbid — but offering that his upper social class will represent them. The whole act of naming someone as “forgotten” is an act of othering. People don’t forget themselves. Someone forgets them. And offers to remember them.

That’s the place the Credlins, Krogers, etc, are all trapped in, private school graduates all. They simply assume that the “forgotten” will consent to be represented by a class whose fortunes, manners and basic comportment in life they do not share. But the secular social frameworks that once created a Liberal world — progress associations, church congregations — are gone, and in their place are churches called things like Rock Breakers or Awesome Love Ministry or whatever.

A former Premier, Ted Baillieu, a scion of that Menzies’ upper social class, the day after the election was blunt “We need young people, we need change. We’ve got upper house members who could resign this week and be replaced. We had people representing us on the television last night who are all of the past. I’m of the past. Get rid of us!”

The reminder of those times is Jeffrey Kennett who, as Liberal Premier, turned incivility into an art form while bouncing around the mental health of the community. The problem with Kennett is that he is very much of the “macho past”, and most people are sick of his rudeness and lack of sensitivity. “Get rid of us” could not aptly apply to anyone but him.

Then there is that description of the Young Liberals from years ago by Patrick Morgan, who defined them as “ninety-five per cent misfits led by five per cent of lawyers”.  The difference is that they are no longer young.

Having identified the unelectable, then it is a question of what to do beyond a purge.

I had just become involved when, for a short period, the Liberal party showed an interest in policy, and there was a push backed by some of the most prominent business leaders at the time to set up a policy unit. It was a fortunate time when Whitlam came to power for such an initiative. Ideas were bubbling over everywhere. It was a very proactive period, and the advisers on both sides were men and a few women in their thirties, more interested in policy development than just playing games of “gotcha.” Thus, the students of a decade earlier were a prominent component in this policy surge.

I came from that generation of the politically active at university where the various student unions around the nation were at the centre of policy activity, and while there were clubs with affiliations to political parties, they had no direct influence in running student union elections. The medical students voted me in, not my political affiliation.

What happened was that the various faculties produced students with political aspirations; and the views reflected their socialisation through their disciplines – I, the President, was a medical student; the Vice President, law; the Secretary, architecture; the Treasurer, engineering; and the member of the executive responsible for club and societies a social studies student. She was the sole female.  Decisions were not influenced by ideology or grifting. I suppose we just wanted to do what was best for our constituency.

As I found out, in the real life of politics if you want to challenge the duopoly of Capital and Labour which fits so neatly into the adversarial nature of our political setup, you need infrastructure and money – and singlemindedness. In other words, the greatest difficulty to establish a third force is to convince sufficient people to provide the party infrastructure or, more importantly, the associated funding – and not to give up.

Splinter parties on the right have a guaranteed stream from the far reaches of capitalist freebooters; splinter parties in the far left do not. Where the Greens fit is interesting. I believe they have a shifting base now that climate change is being taken seriously, and they have lost their anarchic and syndicalist core. Thus, on the political spectrum it is hard to place them – one moment beads and sandals; the next, serious climate change warriors. Nevertheless, they represent an important political force that could be better harnessed.

Generally, donor whim determines the eventual fate of small parties, and the level of commitment can be titrated against hatred of the political establishment, dependent on individual interests which eventually wane or die – or are absorbed by one or other of the two major Parties.

The major complicating factor has been the entry into politics of groups professing to be religious. The Roman Catholic Church has been a dab hand at it – after all, the Bishop of Rome had a temporal role in ruling the Papal States over many centuries.

The religious groups thrive because for one they are untaxed, and in moving into politics they are being indirectly subsidised by the taxpayers. It was something Santamaria realised decades before when taking part in the intra-party brawl to gain control of the Labor Party.

Santamaria may have shown the way for interweaving religion into temporal power, as the current infiltration into the ossified Liberal party branch system by the so-called “religious right” has done. The rise of the Pentecostals and all their fellow glossolalia mates as a political force attest to this. Policy is not high on the Pentecostal agenda; it is there pre-ordained in Scripture; the way they interpret the Bible. We, the taxpayers subsidise them, whether we like it or not.

From the Liberal Party’s point of view there has been the emergence of a number of successful women whose concerns mimic much of what should be a liberal social agenda which, to me, was a no brainer. After all, Keating as Federal Treasurer adopted most of the neoliberal economic agenda, but Australia is now in the grip of cartels and government corruption which defeats the free market concept every time. Nevertheless, most of these so-called Teals would be economically conservative.

What is left is the unalloyed hatred of those who oppose you, the centrist, the very forms of power madness. Andrews is far from centrist (to me his level of hatreds do mimic those of Keating) and is accused of being dictatorial, but by whom? Among his opposition, there are others who appear equally power mad, but unlike Andrews, they also appear mentally unhinged. That is the problem of the Liberal Party. They have megaphones, which spew out the same unbelievable propaganda, and in so doing tip this megaphony into figures of ridicule. The characters have got nothing else; their notoriety is so self-addictive.

Once you challenge this thesis, then eventually it will crumble. You just must have the staying power, and my view is that by broadening your appeal you move to that mythical centre of politics at the same time realising that this centre is like the magnetic pole, it moves around.

Being centrist means being attacked from both sides, and therefore it is useful to have supporters with money and influence gained from a competent, intelligent, honest pool – and not prone to drinking too much or/and boorish behaviour.

Inevitably Andrews will stumble over his own hubris, his “castles in the sky” will prove unattainable, the thinness of talent in long term government will become palpable as the sycophantic rise to the top in those in swaddling clothes of ministerial privilege. However, in the next few years his Opposition must be Credible not Credlin.  And remember getting rid of wisteria means constant pruning once you deem it a weed and not just a seductive drooping bloom.

I tried nearly 50 years ago. I admitted failure when I moved out of Melbourne at the end of 1979 and moreover failed to get pre-selection. If I had my time again, I believe I know what to adjust in the Victorian Liberal Party, and I am not one to believe that History is bunk.

Amelia and Amy

Even flying feels all too 20th century, though millions of us take to the air as casually as we board a bus or train. We wait in nondescript boarding lounges, walk down metal tunnels and lever ourselves into the narrow seats of a small cinema, where we watch Hollywood films on a low-definition screen while unsmiling staff push trays on to our laps bearing an assortment of inedible foods that we are not expected to eat.

Before take-off the cabin crew perform a strange folkloric rite that involves synchronised arm movements and warnings of fire and our possible immersion in water, all presumably part of an appeasement ritual whose origins lie back in the pre-history of the propeller age. The ceremony, like the transubstantiation of the host, has no meaning for us but is kept alive by the airlines to foster a sense of tradition.

After a few hours we leave the cinema and make our way through another steel tunnel into an identical airport in the suburb of a more or less identical city. We may have flown thousands of miles but none of us has seen the outside of the aircraft, and could not even say it if had two, three or four engines. All this is called air travel.

What a beautifully encapsulated description, even though the folkloric is now increasingly presented as a travel log with the same repeated instructions woven on film rather than demonstrated by bored flight attendants in the repeated cabin safety cavort.

This was written in 2005 as part of a book review by J. G Ballard, the prolific writer, in The Guardian four years before he died. The book in question was “The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western imagination 1920-1950”. The thesis of this book was WWII took the magic out of aviation, converting it from an art form into an industry. Maybe so, and the book review was very well written, but not sufficiently enticing for me to buy this book, a two-part series by Robert Wohl, an American historian.

As good as the view was, this is not the reason I kept the cutting of this book review.

Amelia Earhart & Amy Johnson in 1933

What focussed my attention was a photograph of two women determinedly striding towards the camera. The woman on the right in belted bell bottom trousers was Amelia Earhart. The woman on the left in a striped jumpsuit is Amy Johnson. Both of them were household names as women pilots whose exploits were part of the expansion of flight with all its inherent dangers. This photo was taken in 1933 at the height of their fame. Amy Johnson had flown to Australia solo in 1930; Amelia Earhart across the Atlantic solo two years later.

Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on 5 January 1939. Amy Johnson’s plane crashed into the Thames estuary on 5 January 1941, exactly two years later, possibly a victim of “friendly fire”. Neither body was ever recovered. Films were made of their respective lives – Amelia with Hilary Swank in the leading role as Earhart; Amy Johnson has been the subject of documentaries.

But sometimes the photo tells it all, it just radiates their respective presences.

Jotting from the Cathedral

I have written during my life a number of fragments – an immediate urge to pen an observation after seeing something that interested me; and then being distracted and moving on before writing anything more. Therefore, the description was often a couple of paragraphs. Yet if I had not jotted it down, I doubt whether I would have remembered any of the detail. Would it have mattered? Probably not.

Yet you can judge my jotting which begins, “September in San Francisco”.  I had not written down the year, but it was probably 1982. For a time between the seventies and nineties I used to visit a friend who lived in Berkeley. She had a spare bed, and I periodically stayed there. In the wake of its notoriety San Francisco, and Berkeley in particular, presented a mixed picture. It was not just a refuge for flower people, it was a university town, but it was also a place where there was a strong industrial presence.

Grace Cathedral

The sun had shone, but in the late afternoon, the wind had sprung up. The wedding party emerging from Grace Cathedral emerged at this time, the ceremony having started sometime in the afternoon.  Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal Cathedral was spectacular because it was large and was close to Nob Hill, the salubrious part of San Francisco. I remembered this as the only time I went there. Earlier in the day I had gone to the Chapel of the Nativity and it was at the time the Eucharist service.

The deacon, intoning the names for whom prayers were being said, included two Terrys, one Kent, and several Peters. I could recognise only two women in the long list of names of men. Only Christian names; not like the Anzac Day services at School when only surnames were read out in alphabetical order of those who “had fallen” in the World Wars. Only when there were two with the same surname were initials added to the surnames being read out. The Snowball family lost more than one of their sons; it also signified that this recitation was nearing its end. The name has ever since stuck in my memory.

But now in San Francisco, we had clasped one another’s hands and stood around the altar while the priest, whose sermon was short, intense and delivered without interruption, handed out the white wafers and the deacon the wine. The wine was white and sweet. Then I went back to holding hands with a young man on one side and an older man on the other side until all the Sacrament had been dispensed and the benediction given.

Then, it was over. Some genuflected. My acknowledgement to God was a stiff nod of the head as I stepped backwards; and I realised that nobody had instructed me whether it was the right time to cross myself.

I wondered why I had written “delivered without interruption”, and why I had hung around the Cathedral. It was not something I normally did. In any event, I never went back to the Cathedral.

Here my fragment finished. September 1982 was the first time the term AIDS was used, rather than the “gay plague”.

Travelling South

I found another those unfinished operas on a piece of  The Atlanta Colony Square Hotel writing paper.  I had started to write about the previous couple of days in California. I had written this note in 1987, just after I had been to Monterey.

I first saw “Monterey Pop” a decade earlier in 1968. “Monterey Pop” was the filmed recollection of that 1967 Pop Festival, where, among others, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendricks burst into view. There was “Pearl” as Janis Joplin was known, belting out songs with that raw emotion. As I write, I still feel sorry about Pearl, even though she had been dead for 17 years.

I still had a grainy video of those magical three days. My generation, with its long hair, beads, quasi-Indian clobber (or none at all) with protestations of free love smiled at the camera and played and adored and had an experience which transcended all at the concert, while Vietnam played on. The acid in my pen was hardly concealed as a different form of acid was likewise at the Festival.

I visited Monterey 20 years later. I never went looking for the paddock where the Festival was held. As I wrote, Monterey itself had been fascinating. On this occasion, I wrote that we headed for Cannery Row. We had left early to beat the rush. It was a Saturday in April, and a clear beautiful day. Even so to clear Oakland travelling south it took time to drive through the industrial development which lined the Bay. We avoided many of the bridges and eventually reached the hills and the redwoods.  Once we passed through these, we found we were driving through fields of artichokes, the globe fruit poking through the barbed leaves. After all, it is a relative of the thistle fields without fences. Castroville – it was peak artichoke season.  I bought a T-shirt featuring a globe artichoke.

The last sentence of this excerpt was my comment that we were in strawberry country – the strawberries in the basket were the size…that was the end. The size of what? Here I ended – not even a definition of size. It is a pity because I was cataloguing a trip through the countryside, not then affected by drought. Few talked about climate change in the 1980s. California was then the limitless American Cornucopia.

I never reached writing about Monterey itself in this fragment, but Monterey has always been a favourite destination of mine. I had written about it previously. It had kept its heritage in the streetscape; it has paid tribute to being, if not the birthplace of marine biology, a significant contributor through the work of Ed Ricketts, a close friend of John Steinbeck.  The Hewlett-Packard three-storied aquarium at the end of Cannery Row attests to the richness of the heritage stimulated by this relationship.

Cannery Row was lined by sardine factories, and when I was a regular visitor there in the eighties and nineties, they were closed because there was a ban on fishing. That ban was lifted for a short period in this century but was reimposed in 2015 and never again lifted.

Sea otters

The other reason to come to Monterey is the sea otters that are the vaudeville artists of the sea. However, the sea otters are the bellwether for the health of the environment of The Bay with its kelp forest and the crustacea which are so important in their sea diet.

There was a Monterey Pop Festival on the fiftieth anniversary in 2017.  The goal of this celebration is to memorialize Monterey Pop’s importance, legacy and lasting impact on contemporary culture with live music performances, unique experiential activations, historic memorabilia and art installations. What pompous claptrap, but the Pop festival went ahead as a well-sanitised three-day tribute to the 1967 version – but a buttoned down, mannered version. Monterey has a regular jazz festival that exists in a cerebrally cultural outpost. Monterey 1967 was unique, even though Woodstock two years later may be better remembered, Monterey set the scene. Nothing will diminish its importance.

As for the fertile Monterey valley, what had happened to Castroville since that trip. Horror stories began emerging in the ‘90s. One grower in Castroville recognised that if the aquifers dipped below sea level, ocean water would continue to creep into their wells and eventually destroy them.

But extensive improvements to the local wastewater treatment plant have made highly treated effluent safe to use on crops. The saltwater intrusion slowed, and the crops recovered. Since using reclaimed water on crops in the northern stretch of the Salinas Valley two decades ago, the movement to raise the water levels of aquifers has spread throughout the county.

In the local media, Sean Pezzini, a fourth-generation artichoke farmer in Castroville, said growers in North Monterey County remain vigilant about the saltwater invasion. But, he said, artichoke farmers have little to complain about these days when it comes to water, despite drought and forest fires. Yet in the past decade the amount of acreage devoted to artichokes has almost halved and the value of the crops diminished by almost 20 per cent. It is unclear whether the nationwide popularity of the artichoke has changed.

This area supplies all artichokes in USA; the major growers of artichokes are within Italy and retain considerable popularity. In the context of the Monterey Valley, artichoke is also a minor crop. By contrast, strawberry crops are valued at close to one billion dollars and have increased in value without much increase in acreage from about 700 million dollars. Obviously, a realisation that the climate was changing without explicitly acknowledging it.

As I finish writing this piece, I realise how long it has been since I spent any substantial time in this part of California. But writing made me realise how much I saw, how little I have written, but how much I loved this area and how much I would like to visit Monterey and the Valley once more time.

Mouse Whisper

“If nothing else I am a technologist and I can make technology go fast. If we do not try bold moves, how will we make great improvements?” I always recognise the smell of Musk. It can be very unpleasant.