Month: June 2023

Modest Expectations – Jeppe Bruun

Blair Comley PSM

Here we go again. The Federal Government has appointed Blair Comley PSM, “an economist and former special advisor with PwC” as the new Secretary of the Department of Health and Aged Care.  As was reported in that announcement, the writer added “there is no escaping the spectre of that consultancy”.  

His five-year term commences on 17 July. My concern is that, at a time when the health sector is in turmoil, a person with no experience in health has been appointed. Not that the previous incumbent has left much of a legacy and he was medically qualified, but he did achieve acclaim for his “sure hands” in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak.   At least he knew the language – Health. I am one of those who do not subscribe to the notion that once a manager, the language of management overrides everything – no matter the expertise or subject matter.

I have worked my entire career in the health sector and had a business partner who was originally a transport economist and cost accountant, but who gradually developed a fluency in “health”, albeit with an accent and a limited health vocabulary. But he could negotiate his way around in the language and knew when he was being deceived by fancy “med-speak”.

What I find somewhat interesting is that in his curriculum vitae, as published, Mr Comley is vague about his age. I know that some people are sensitive about their age, but it always has a reason. What is Mr Comley’s?

He is impeccably qualified. Comley holds a first-class Honours degree in Economics and is a Master of Economics from Monash University. He holds a Graduate Diploma in Legal Studies from the Australian National University.  He spent time in Treasury and three years in the OECD. Comley seems to have attracted the attention of the Labor Party and worked for the Rudd-Gillard Government, first as Secretary of the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency from 2011 and then for a short time at Resources, Energy and Tourism – appointed secretary in February 2013. He was thus well on his way to “Mandarin-hood” before, with two other Department Heads, he was sacked by Abbot on the first day Abbot took over as Prime Minister in September of that year.

It was at this time he moved to PricewaterhouseCoopers as a consultant in April 2014, a special advisor to the company’s Canberra economics and policy team. The then NSW State Premier, Mike Baird, later appointed him as the Secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet in 1914, where he lasted for three years before he was off again onto the consultant carousel, this time with Ernst & Young as Director and Partner at EY Port Jackson Partners, a strategy-focused consultancy advising leaders of business and government – in other words – a lobbyist.

In January 2012 Mr Comley was awarded a Public Service Medal for “outstanding public service in the development of public policy, particularly in the areas of carbon pricing and emissions trading, tax policy design and debt management”.  But not Health!

“Mr Comley has a wealth of experience and a record of proven leadership navigating complex issues,” Mr Butler said. We’ll see. He still has potential spins on KPMG and Deloitte; to which he may say, “Come back in five years.” I prefer not, but on reflection the Australian Health system has survived the likes of Jane Halton.  The problem is that these top health bureaucrats know the streets of Geneva better than those of Alice Springs. So, Mr Comley you certainly have a challenge for someone who is 53 years old (verified from another source).

One obvious question. How would you handle a national public health emergency – say Ebola or some other haemorrhagic contagion, Mr Comley? Whom would you trust?

My Little Orange Lamborghini

One of my favourite film opening sequences is that featured in “The Italian Job”. This was the thriller-comedy featuring Michael Caine and Noel Coward as leaders of a band of robbers intending to steal a large amount of gold bullion in a Turin heist.

The opening sequence features an orange Lamborghini Miura being driven up the winding Great Bernard Pass. The pass links the Aosta Valley region of north-western Italy and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. The opening scene features Rossano Brazzi at the wheel, fag in mouth and wearing fashionable sunglasses – Ford Mustang Renauld Spectaculars. The sunglasses were specifically designed for driving, with the curved sides to stop wind coming through.

Belying the wistful opening song “On a day like today” sung by Matt Monro, the opening scene ends with the Lamborghini crashing into a front end loader hidden in the tunnel and not only that, there is also a shot of the sun glasses lying on the road being ground under a Mafia heel. Such gratuitous destruction, but as the publicists of the film said, the Miura tipped over the mountainside had already been destroyed in a previous accident in the Middle East – where else?

Oh, what a relief. I must say the fuss surrounding this car, with its numbered chassis #3586, was surprisingly lost for 50 years after its appearance in the 1969 film. When the car reappeared, it needed restoration and now resides with its owner in Liechtenstein, with a value of about US$5m.

It was the first supercar with a rear mid-engine and two-seat layout, something which other supercars have followed as a mantra ever since. Introduced in 1966, the Miura remained in production until 1973. In different forms a total of 764 were manufactured. All came powered by the 3.9-liter V12 although Lamborghini could coax out different power from different versions of the car. It was also the fastest production car of its time.  While Fiat is synonymous with Turin; Lamborghini are manufactured in a small town near Bologna – Sant’Agata Bolognese – in Emilio-Romana.

I sound like a Top Gear presenter. I must stop this adulation. Yet I do remember staying in London next to a Lamborghini dealer, with these low-slung cars spilling out into the narrow street during the day seemingly immune from parking tickets. Watching them being driven hither and yon, it seemed by those driving these vehicles you needed training as a contortionist – all seemed to be athletic young men replete with what the French call “quincaillerie”.

Likewise, the signature sunglasses have been revived, available online for around AUD2,100.

Brazzi’s cameo appearance must be akin to the brief appearance of Janet Leigh in just surviving the opening credits of “Psycho”.

Yes, Turin is an impressive city, being the capital of Piedmont and once the seat of the Savoyard royalty.  Thus, it has the air of a city of typical oppressive majesty, with the long colonnaded shopping centres where you can drink coffee, quaff a white Piedmontese wine and eat agnolotti while watching the Torinese walk past. However, more spectacular was sipping Negronis on the roof of the gardens with an admittedly interrupted view of the Alps, clinging to the far horizon as a spectacular backdrop to the intervening city buildings.

Turin is a sedate city, not the frenetic scene in what was a very entertaining film, and there is no doubt that Turin is one of those Northern Italian cities which is known, at least for a long time, by the Mini Cooper car chase through its streets, the colonnades perfect for the car stunts. The classic pursuit through the sewers was not actually filmed in Turin but in England. Obviously in the traffic gridlock scenes, the Torinese seemed to be enjoying themselves; but even if you paid me, I would not have been one of that crowd. I totally unspool if caught in traffic jams, let alone that crazy gridlock with a crescendo of car horns as depicted in the film.

The most disappointing aspect of Turin is the acclaimed Shroud. We admittedly arrived late at the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, and there it was, a piece of linen cloth with its head of a bearded bloke, very much the conventional depiction of Christ as an emaciated hollowed soul. We could not really get near it, and the fact that it is behind layers of bullet proof glass does not help either.  I consoled myself that at least I had seen it but then what had I seen?  The remains of a mediaeval hair shirt cut into the shape of a linen shroud – and why shroud? That is somewhat pejorative to say the least. Could just have been the forerunner of those T-shirts with Che Guevara’s image printed on the front.

Pyne for the Asking

Reading this hard-headed article about the French Defence forces, which appeared in a recent issue of The Economist, inter alia it made me compare the French determination with the apparent waywardness of our defence forces, the procurement of materials seemingly left to an array of consultants linked to US defence contractors, but without any apparent expertise in the field. Being Minister for Defence in Australia seems however to be a prerequisite for growing mushrooms; the experience of being one being invaluable in what will ever be known as your Pynestry. If one thinks about Pyne, that grinning visage profiting from just being an average politician, a guy who had never had a real job before entering Parliament at the age of 25. Now one must not be envious! After all, maybe Maurie Pyne will live long enough to receive his appropriate reward, once the AUKUS shill is properly exposed.

Meanwhile, the French have got on with the job. The lesson being very simple is to have a co-ordinated Defence Force with modern communications, just in time – not at a time decades hence when Planet Earth may be a charred remnant, with the Barrow-on-Furness submarine facility long since decommissioned without building any nuclear submarines for us.

Paradoxically, however, France has scaled back the acquisition of some extra kit. The air force will get 48 fewer new Rafale fighter jets than previously planned, and 15 fewer a400m transport aircraft; the army will get 497 fewer Griffon and Jaguar armoured vehicles. “Because we are trying to do everything at the same time, we are sprinkling rather than defining priorities,” said Hélène Conway-Mouret, a Socialist senator on the armed-forces committee.

Bastille Day

The new budget, retorts the general, “takes us in the right direction”, even if its full effects will not be felt until 2030. He argues that critics of the plan have failed to understand the importance of capable forces rather than sizeable ones. The number of tanks, ships and planes is not growing as fast as it might, he insists, precisely because of the priority given to “coherence”. “It’s important that if you buy a tank, you have men trained on it, who have ammunition to train and spare parts to go in the field with it.” There is no point, General Burkhard says, in having “an army that is ready to parade on Bastille Day, but is not ready to go to war.”

Vancouver

I note that Vancouver is listed as the sixth most liveable city and, given the subjective nature of such assessments, where both Sydney and Melbourne are listed above in The Economist tabulation, I nevertheless would not argue. In fact one afternoon in Vancouver I defined my experience as the closest I had ever had for ultimate “bliss” – sitting outside in the summer sun consuming a meal of Coho salmon.

Stanley Park totem pole

Vancouver has Stanley Park, the large parkland which abuts the harbour, and from where it is a jogger’s delight, running long the seawall, past a collection of the long totem poles characteristic of the Indian tribes of the Pacific North-west. One sight which remains is that of being there in April, when the cherry blossoms were in full flower, their generous pink blooms adding to the beauty that was then Canada.

There are always small moments that stick in one’s memory. I stopped after a wind sprint just outside a bower, where a young woman was sitting. I had turned away, when she asked me to take her photograph. As I turned around she had stood up and was offering me her camera. I thought what a strange request to ask a total stranger to take a photograph – just of herself. I complied; she thanked me and went back to her seat; I ran off and never saw her again. Given that the iPhone has made the “selfie” an integral part of normal social interchange, with the capacity to store any scrap of life seemingly almost unlimited, it is one of the examples of social mores trailing the technology. So different from when I had taken that photo perhaps forty years ago.

Now the picture of Canada (see below) is that of forest fires, of drought, waterways and dams dried up. Over the years, I have been to all the border provinces of Canada, except Saskatchewan. I once spent twelve hours at Calgary airport, waiting for a delayed plane and thus left to have a lot of time to become acquainted with the collection of artifacts hung on its walls at that time.

That was the time I took the train from Vancouver to Banff, thence to Calgary where I was to visit the Foothills Medical Centre. This was at a time when I was supposed to be an expert in quality assurance and had just started the first journal, The Australian Clinical Review, which gave me a brief period of international acknowledgement, including for the then CEO of this large hospital.

Of course, I stayed at the Railway Hotel in Banff, one of the faux-chateaux mixed with a touch of the Balmoral, which were built along the Canadian Pacific Railway, looking impressive against the background of snow covered mountains. Staying in hotels like this is very dependent on the room you can afford, but when young and the hotel is relatively affordable, one chases the experience. And I must say I have always gone for the experience – and North America has many of these Grand Hotels, some of which have been renovated or, as was the case when I was in Banff, in the process of renovation.

Now who was Vancouver, his name given to this sixth most liveable World city, and to the nearby Island where the Provincial capital, Victoria is located.

George Vancouver

George Vancouver is associated with exploration of the Pacific Nor-West. He was born nearly thirty years after Cook and served as midshipman and junior officer on some of Cook’s voyages. Vancouver was later asked to chart that coast and also drive the Spanish potential conquistadors from the area. He was successful enough to earn the acclaim and hence much being named after him. Ironically the sister city of Portland across the Columbia River in Washington state is named after him, but he failed to detect either the Columbia or Frasier River, something I doubt the meticulous Cook would have missed. As a piece of trivia, there is a freshwater lake near Albany in Western Australia named for him. In 1791, Captain George Vancouver, on his way to America, came to the southern shore of Western Australia, named King George Sound ensuring that all the Australian continent remained British. Where he landed, he saw nothing he thought of any consequence, and after a short stay sailed eastward intending to hug the coastline,  but was foiled by the wind shifts. He would not be the last sea salt to believe there was nothing here in Australia.

Cactus on Uluru?

As an Arrernte woman who watched the Labor party apologise for the policies which led to the stolen generations only to deny compensation, or who saw them continue the Northern Territory intervention under another name and demonise entire communities with their “rivers of grog” claims, my trust is gone. – Celeste Liddle in The Guardian

It is not often I change my mind in mid-blog to delay one of my blogs, but Monday this week provided a couple of blows to the campaign to achieve a “yes” vote. I would not say it was exactly cactus, but it certainly needs to be changed radically.

The first salvo came from George Brandis. Now George is one of those conservative Queensland lawyers, once perhaps a form of social liberal but who long since has blotted his copybook with the smudges of entitlement, such is his love of huge bookcases funded by the taxpayer and a comfortable residence in the middle of London, again at our expense. I was surprised to find myself mostly agreeing with his opinion piece in the SMH, setting out seven reasons that the referendum will fail. Apart from insulting the people telling them that they dumb red-necks if as individuals they do not vote yes, with the attendant “moral bullying”, the proponents of the “yes” vote as Brandis wrote: … need to remember it’s not about personalities … The public will see right through cute attempts to make this a popularity contest … They know it is a serious proposal for important constitutional change and expect it to be treated accordingly – not as a political Punch and Judy show.

Here I do question Brandis. Advocacy depends on personalities, but if you choose the wrong advocates then you will surely lose. As testimony to that, Megan Davis is wheeled out in Australian Story as one of the front line academics to prosecute the “Yes” case. Her mother is white; her father who has long since decamped, was an Aboriginal fettler. He is notably absent and it is clear that Megan grew up in a whitefella world, where her mother, a high school teacher, was her guiding spirit.

In her 2010 bio, Megan Davis spends time identifying her Aboriginal blood lines while admitting to South Sea Islander heritage. In the recognition of Aboriginality, it is ironic the heritage of the group descendent from the kanakas “press-ganged” predominantly from the then New Hebrides to work the Queensland sugar cane fields is largely ignored by the other indigenous groups. The biggest population live around Mackay and have their own identity including a flag.

But what is revealing is that despite her heritage, how little time she has spent as an Aboriginal woman. She has grown up as a white woman, who has used her Aboriginality as a means of developing her career, not as one who knows anything about the diversity which is both the strength and the curse of the Aboriginal race. In the Australian Story panegyric, her only link seems to be Uluru through the declaratory Statement, and the fiction that Uluru is the natural heart of the Nation. Why Uluru? Why not Mount Augustus or Mount Wudina or Carnarvon Gorge or the Mitchell Plateau?

After all, Uluru is not her Land. It is Anangu, but conveniently a tourist resort able to be isolated in beautiful photographic layouts. It is also where the Southern skies can be visualised with minimal light pollution.

In Australian Story, it was revealed that she since the age of 12 has walked around carrying a copy of The Australian Constitution. If she was not an Aboriginal person of importance, I would have thought how weird.

Then I read that early CV (sic) in her own write: We grew up mostly in Hervey Bay … I went to school at Star of the Sea, Hervey Bay and St Josephs Tobruk Memorial school in Beenleigh for primary school and then Trinity College, Beenleigh for secondary school. I studied a Bachelor of Arts and Law at the University of Queensland, where I majored in Australian History. For those three years, I lived on campus at Duchesne College, which was the women’s Catholic residential college in St Lucia. During my penultimate year of Law, I started research for the Principal Legal Officer at the Foundation for Aboriginal Islander Research Action (‘FAIRA’) in Brisbane. It was there that I started doing research into the international legal regime, looking specifically at the intellectual property rights of Indigenous peoples. Immediately after law school I was accepted into the United Nations Fellowship in Geneva. In fact, I sat my tax and evidence law exams in Geneva not long after I arrived.

As I watched her parading through Australian Story, this woman since 2010 the recipient of more academic kudos, it is clear that the strategy is to promote women with Aboriginal Heritage, women who have been loaded with academic gowning, part of an urban elite with a theoretical grasp of Aboriginal affairs. In the half an hour Australian Story journey with this strangely passive woman who loves an accusatory oratory platform, I thought why is she being given this platform. Why promote her?  She does not seem to connect with the wider Aboriginal diaspora. As Brandis has noted, the whole debate has lost transparency.

Thus, Uluru which seems to be the only Indigenous handle that Davis plus her apparently tight relationship with the genuine Aboriginal activist, Pat Anderson, makes me wonder who is driving the “Yes” case. I wish the motives of those are understandable – or as Brandis has called it a need for “transparency”.

Mouse Whisper

Overheard outside the Mouse residence. Our mouse had one of his friends over for cheese and crackers.

Resident mouse:   In English it is a bat, pure and simple, but for the Germanic and Nordic languages, the bat is translated as variations of “flying mouse”. In the Romantic languages, only the French choose to insult us further by calling a bat – “a bald mouse”. Really, even the Romanians, the natural home of the bat the Romanian word for bat is liliac which gave rise to that famous Dracula Song – “I’ll gather liliacs”.

Joking aside, it was the Romans who had the best word for “bat” – “vespertilio”, they having observed that bats come out in the evening, but we mice do not fly, I bet you have never heard of a saying – “like a mouse flying out of hell” or “having flying mice in the belfry”.

Visiting Mouse:  Sorry, mate, I know you are very clever, a polymouse indeed! Yet, there is another word in English for bat. It Is uncommon, but it is there – flittermouse. You can put it into your Whisper, my flying mouse mate. But you can’t silence it.

Modest Expectations – Ernst not Sebastian

But if you want my quick take on it, it’s this: Whether Trump is wolfing down Big Macs on the Mar-a-Lago golf course or bargaining for bootlegged tanning lotion in prison, he will be the GOP nominee. Don’t give into magical thinking and never stop the fight to beat him at the ballot box. First, the trial itself. It’s happening in Miami. A hotbed of Trump voters, MAGA radicals, skells (tramps), boat-paraders, and people terrified of dead communists and imaginary communism. (By the way, I love Miami, I really do. But I’ve got to call this place how I see it.) Rick Wilson June 2023.

Mar-a-Lago – bought by Trump in 1985 at more than 62,000 square feet, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, 12 fireplaces, three bomb shelters, and a 29-foot-long marble top dining table, the house is extravagant to say the least. It is the 22nd largest house in the US – the White House comes in 33rd place. – Not Alternative Fact

In response to Rick Wilson’s “By the way”, I thought I would write about my time in Miami at a time when Trump was still a two-bit grifter. Nor when Miami was the warlock’s crucible.

I have passed through Miami more than once – even taken a Concorde flight out of there to New York on my way to London. However, this occasion was the one time we had time to do some sightseeing. We had just come back from Cuba in an unmarked Delta airline plane – nevertheless a commercial fight. As the flight attendant said to us at the time, Delta flew to Havana every day. On arrival in Miami, having been duly warned that if we had any Cuban rum or cigars in our luggage, it would most likely be confiscated, we found that there was no-one from customs on the gate barring our way into Miami. In any event, we don’t smoke, and we had enough mojitos in Cuba to last a lifetime.

17th Street

This time we had decided to go on to New York by train, stopping off in Savannah. In the meantime, we went for a stroll along 17th Street downtown, the weather being perfect, to see some of Miami. We had lunch at one of those places where the food is barbecued rib, the drink is beer or bourbon, and the music is loud and country. More Texas than Miami, but Miami is cosmopolitan, a shelter against the winter for the aged, a playground for the rich and a refuge for the colourful.

As we walked down towards Miami Beach, we stopped by the Cadet Hotel emblazoned with Clark Gable memorabilia, remembering the time he was there as an instructor of the recent inductees in the air force. The year was 1942, and he was still mourning the loss of his wife, Carole Lombard, who had been killed the year before in a plane crash.

Gable and Lombard

Gable went on to serve for most of WWII, seeing action in Europe.  As we looked in on the reception area of the Hotel, there is no doubt that Gable had a charisma, which belied the fact that he had had all his teeth extracted and his leading ladies had to be inoculated against a cloud of halitosis. Still, I remember that film “It Happened One Night” which starred Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and that it was the first of only three films which have won the five Oscars – best film, best director, best actor, best actress, best screenplay.

Clark Gable has always had a place in the lexicon of my memories because I saw the film “Soldier of Fortune” when I was in Hong Kong in 1956, the film itself being an adventure story of Gable playing the title role opposite Susan Hayward in a story where Gable rescues her screen husband, Gene Barry from the clutches of the Chinese Communists. I most remember the scene at the top of the Peak in Hong Kong where Gable is expressing ruggedly his love for Hayward. Imagine my chagrin to find out that Hayward remained in Hollywood the whole time the picture was filmed, and Gable was romanticising a Hayward double – her screen sosia.

Looking at the photograph of Gable, his distinctive expression walks the line between sagacity and salacity, but I was not the first to gaze. Judy Garland sang to his photograph in Broadway Melody – “You made me Love You”. Well, not that I sang, I might add; and my wife has never liked him. This is a slightly troublesome matter since Judy was only 15 when she recorded the song. But the teenage crush has history, and I would have preferred Grace Kelly, the first choice for the “Soldier of Fortune” heroine, but which she declined. Then I had only just turned 17 and Grace Kelly was 25 years old.

But let’s continue walking.

We stopped off on the lawns outside the Frank Gehry designed New World Centre where we listened to the New World Symphony rehearsing and the music being piped outside to those of us who stopped to listen. We did not expect to be listening to a piece of old world music in a beach resort not famed for its cultural attainment.

Well, back to reality. By that I mean Miami Beach – a wide strip of sand lined by fenced-off villas where the rich, the famous, the colourful and the pyrites reside. There is something foreboding about high walls, with palm trees and the white stuccoed storied homes poking their heads above the parapets. In the distance is the sea, a pale blue ribbon cast against an equally azure sky, with a wisp of cloud interrupting the blue.

Beguiling. Well, yes, but really depends on when one visits.

Here in Miami the 1926 Great Hurricane left its calling card, precipitating the end of the Florida land boom and the start of The Great Depression three years early. Miami was wiped out and it is salutary to think that a comparable hurricane today would leave little change out of US$250 billion. Despite Miami being recognised as one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to experience hurricanes, the only other one which has been classified as severe and centred on Miami was Cyclone King in October 1950, which caused severe damage but not comparable with that of 1926.

In recognition, the University of Miami has adopted Hurricanes as its nickname for all its sporting teams, but the touch I like the most is that the mascot is an ibis named Sebastian, since the ibis is the first bird to leave when a hurricane is imminent and the first to return after the hurricane has passed.

I wonder what the status of the ibis population is at Mar-a-Lago these days.

The famous Miami ibis

Antwerp

I have been to Antwerp twice, once in the early seventies when we were travelling through Europe and the United States, the first time, my then wife had been back to Europe from which she had come – from a British displaced persons camp in Carinthian Austria. Arriving in Australia she was unable to speak English but, as I found fluent in Slovenian and German with an Austrian accent. A medical graduate and PhD in pharmacology, she had her research papers accepted for several conference presentations, whereas I scored zero. No matter; it just meant I could track along without having to give a paper to a half empty theatre or back room. I remember that we went to Antwerp that trip, and it was somewhat comical walking through the Munich airport, past all the big planes, down the stairs, across the tarmac to the DC-3 – our air chariot dwarfed on all sides by its younger siblings.

My strange memory of that visit was having walked around a sculpture garden with all the shapes and forms representative of the interpretative impenetrability of some of this modern sculpture, I escaped from the park by climbing through a fence onto a major thoroughfare. Having been sensitised to the bizarreness of the display, the utilitarian throughway structures were replaced by my surreal vision of them.  The street with all its tubular forms, interlacing overhead wires, lights changing like giant eyes – all the street architecture which we normally ignore or accept had, to me, become the workshop of the absurd. I hasten to add I don’t do drugs, nor had I been drinking.

I had spent several hours accustoming myself to these sculptural forms, and when I emerged onto the streets, it seemed to me just an extension of what I had been looking at. It was a sensation that I’ve never had since. I do not have the imagination to concoct the vision of the great architects, but I understand the meaning of “surreal”. After all, we may be induced to say something is “surreal” when it is just something that one has never experienced; whereas surreal is a departure in a different sensory experience. I remember looking at the overhead tram wires and the stanchions and thought what if these had been placed in the garden, dimensions changed or left as stark forms amid the wooded lawns where the rail lines would lead nowhere – a phantom silvery transport system hidden under a cascade of blue leaves. Then I shook my head and followed the tram line back to our hotel to find out how my wife had gone with her presentation.

An okapi in Antwerp

The second time, my second wife and I ended up in Antwerp, because we were travelling to Cambridge. Qatar Airways had a “special return flight” from Sydney to Brussels. Having a few days to spare, we went to Antwerp by train. We stayed across the railway square in the Blu Astrid Hotel. What made this foray worthwhile was that the Antwerp Zoo was close to the railway station. The Antwerp Zoo has probably the largest number of okapi in captivity as part of a breeding program. The okapi is the only known relative of the giraffe and its natural habitat is the Congo jungle. Given that the Congo was colonised by the Belgians, it is not surprising that the first okapis were brought to Belgium. There were five or six okapis in what I thought was a generous enclosure. The total area of the Zoo is 10 hectares. However, zoos will always be imperfect, as animals are for all intents incarcerated so that we humans can stare at them.

The okapi, much smaller than its relative giraffe, was first discovered in 1901. It has a striking appearance, being almost burgundy in colour with striped legs. It’s also worthy of study, because its long term future may depend on its ability to breed in captivity. The female okapi is said to be choosey in her choice of mate, and there is not much choice in a zoo.

My wife does not much like zoos and having watched the okapi pacing around in a stressed manner, that was enough for her. She had spent a decade photographing wildlife in Africa, and hardly needed to visit an urban zoo. Okapi were an exception; she was not likely to see one in the wild unless she wandered through the Ituri Rain Forest in the Congo.

However, she does like flamingos, which we had seen in the wild, both in the south of France and in the salt pans of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Caribbean flamingos near the entrance of the zoo, attracted attention because of the noise and their vivid vermillion in colour – they seemed chatty enough.

The printing workshop

Of other places in Antwerp, The Plantin-Moretus is a unique museum that celebrates the history of European printing through the 16th century workshop and home of the city’s most celebrated printer, Christophe Plantin, which he bequeathed to his son-in-law, Jan Moretus. They printed books and maps – the cartography section being very impressive. There is a copy of the Gutenberg Bible lodged here, together with a collection of material tracing the evolution of printing up to the 19th century when innovations were introduced as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution which rendered the printing work obsolete. Looking at ancient printing presses and some of their products is to marvel at how such a collection has survived in area where bombardment, siege, and troop movements would all seem to mitigate against the existence of such an exquisite place.

I suppose we could have sought out the Diamond district where it has been near the main square since the Middle Ages. Antwerp, through its Jewish population, developed some innovative ways in cutting and polishing of all grades of diamonds. It survived two World Wars. In WWI the Germans captured Antwerp early and held the city for the duration. While there was some hesitation in deporting Jews in WWII to preserve the expertise in diamond cutting, eventually a substantial number of the Jewish population were killed in the various concentration camps, and thus compromising Antwerp’s future.

The Sinjoren, as those who live in Antwerp are nicknamed, are certainly resilient.

I found it amazing that Antwerp was able to hold the Olympic Games less than two years after the Armistice, but given the survival instincts of the population, why should anybody be surprised. Australia was represented at the Games. The flagbearer, George Parker, born in Leichhardt, died in Five Dock, seems to have spent his life walking. At the Antwerp games, he finished second in the 3,000 m walk, beaten by an Italian. The only other Australian medals were awarded in swimming – a silver and a bronze.

And my lasting impression? Workers eating this green food with chips and mayonnaise. This is palint ‘n groen – eels served with a green sauce made with fresh river herbs and wild leaf vegetables, chervil, sorrel, spinach, watercress and wild garlic leaves. Tasted it – not too bad.

Pride comes before a Fall saith Solomon

When I was undertaking the National Rural Stocktake in 1999, I found it frustrating to arrive at a desert destination to find no-one there.  I had to accept that the Aboriginal people spend a substantial amount of their time on “Sorry Business”, which took them away and thus they would be unavailable because one of their number had died. Travelling around Aboriginal communities, I often found a great amount of argument, dispute, aggression – and when I was confronted with stories about harassment and violence, I had to make a decision. Namely, I was not there to deal with the problems of the individual Aboriginal person, unfortunate as that may have been. That deserved a review of its own, and although I made incidental comments, my prime aim was to prosecute the case for developing clinical and public health education facilities in the bush, which occurred with funding allocated in the 2000 Federal Budget.

I was brought up in a whitefella world where Aboriginal people were labelled as “stone age” and hence patronised as if they should be kept in an ethnological zoo. It is not surprising therefore that the bulk of whitefellas just did not know how to communicate with Aboriginal people. At the outset I had not appreciated that being taciturn with whitefellas belied a highly complex system of communication, where verbal was only one of the means. Being able to communicate, whitefella to blackfella is a privilege, as I found out.

As background, I had become aware of the level of discrimination from a young age. It had been coated by kind paternalism. For example, when I was a child in the time of the “picaninny”, I received the Church Missionary Society news from the Roper River Mission in then far off Arnhem Land. The growth of missions, both secular and religious only served to emphasise the separation of the Aboriginals from their Land, which did not become recognised until Aboriginal artistic skill with all its complexity became recognised by whitefellas. When I had gone to Alice Springs in 1951, I came back with a large shield, which languished in the storeroom, because every time I picked it up, my hands were covered with red ochre. Over the years as I collected more Aboriginal artifacts, I began to celebrate the diversity, but not without making errors in walking the line of what was taboo and what not.

Martin Luther King

Afro-American emancipation grew out the 1960s’ cry for emancipation led by Martin Luther King and Malcom X and then the black Panthers, injecting an edgy defiance challenging the comfortable world of middle-class America. At the same time, until he was assassinated, King tried to persuade. His was an evolutionary approach, to which he harnessed public opinion for recognition.

Aboriginal advocacy grew alongside. Recognition of Aboriginal identity grew, dispatching the equivalent of “Uncle Tom” as contempt of the so-called the Aboriginal “coconut” – brown on the outside, white on the inside.  Aggression has been the watchword, mixed with a litany of Aboriginal grievances such as the stolen generation and life expectancy being continually drilled into us whitefellas, some of whom have succumbed to guilt, preferring to give in; other whitefellas in power have just employed passive resistance. Rather than mollifying the aggressors, the level of J’accuse by the voluble few has increased with bombastic Noel Pearson as one of the leading Accusers.

From Whitlam onwards, governments sought to increase funding and opportunities for Aboriginal people, despite the opposition of some of the parliamentarians. As I have said, symbolism and metaphor are simple; real action is not. I was around at the time of the first aboriginal medical graduates. I saw many of the Aboriginal medical services (AMS) which arose from the Congress model in Alice Springs, and I looked for change. Many of the AMS were clearly dysfunctional, mainly because there was no continuity in the treatment objectives. Congress has been operating since 1975 and it has had a substantial amount of funding. It has had its vociferous defenders, given it has been the oldest Aboriginal Health Service. However, stripping away the “blah-blah” apologia, what has it actually accomplished?

It is a serious question when there is this push for an ephemeral Voice, as though there is a pot of gold at the end of the Indigenous Larynx. I see the ability of the Aboriginal people to contribute and shape our destiny, but I’m afraid I’ll not accept the pompous sullen uninformed Voice of a few Aboriginal people.  Some people who should know better are attempting to gain cheap political acclaim, without thinking through what outcome is expected and what it means for the many Aboriginal people who won’t be part of the Voice. The Voice does not have a powerful Champion who can coherently unite an increasingly divided nation. Linda Burney is not that champion; unfortunately, she lacks the intellectual firepower, and those who spring to her defence further weaken her, only serving to exaggerate her deficiencies.

Narenda Jacobs

I would prefer Narelda Jacobs and Pat Anderson; but the male Aboriginal able to communicate with those tending to Vote “No” – the critical cohort I believe – should be a Rugby player in Queensland and an Australian Rules player in the West. But perhaps if the women’s football team is triumphant, Sam Kerr will trump every male.

When I undertook the Rural Stocktake, I tried to identify examples of what worked in relation to Aboriginal health, but such success could never be long term because of the harsh reality of the eventual failure to provide a plan for succession. It is not unexpected because so much of Aboriginal success depends on charismatic leadership, which does not necessarily translate to a long term success and is eventually swept under the sands of failure.

I well remember the activities of Geoff Clark and the fate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which he chaired. This fiasco has not come into the conversation about the Voice, even though Geoff Clark was never short of a word. In the end at a time in Australia when funding is short, homelessness is on the rise and where poverty has increased, to see affluent, mostly university-affiliated sections of the Aboriginal community continually meeting in a non-wintry part of the country and complaining about their lot, begins to grate. The Mayor of Broken Hill may not be the most subtle of individuals but in explaining why the Council would not in future pay for “welcome to country” or smoking ceremonies by Aboriginal elders made it clear when questioned responded: “Why should he pay for welcoming people to his Land.”

Grievances are met with counter grievance. As someone said, looking at the Aboriginal flag and the Australian flag flying alongside each other on the Harbour Bridge, why? The same person sees the Aboriginal flag as a sign of division and the Australian flag as an embarrassing relic – both to be replaced by a single flag for everyone in the country.  Personally, I believe the Aboriginal flag should be the Australian flag rather than the colonial relic. But to me whose ancestors have occupied the country as part of the Celtic diaspora, the Eureka flag flown first by the Ballarat miners during their 1854 insurrection also epitomises that Australia is my Land – and let nobody forget that. I too have a Voice. That is precious privilege of Democracy.

Brisbane – The Novel

Having won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book prize, and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, as well as having been short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize, Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer.

I was thumbing through a recent issue of the NYRB and came across a review by the above author. The book was entitled Brisbane. Given that Brisbane and Russian literature are not ready companions, I read the review. On reading this, it seemed to be just an extension of my perspective of Russian literature, telling the Russian story where Death is an ever-present metronome of the various degrees of misery and cruelty which pockmark the whole literary Russian Treasury of the mysteries of life. These mysteries have always been palpable in the Russian Orthodox liturgy, and in its extraordinary church music, where it soars from the depths to the heights. Terra ad caelium.

Why is this novel called Brisbane? It is about Gleb Vanovsky, a celebrated Russian guitarist who, at the age of fifty, is diagnosed with Parkinsonism which not only inhibits his ability to play the guitar but also ultimately will kill him. He has a biographer named Sergei Nesterov who, offering to write his biography, sets about establishing this dual perception of Vanovsky’s early life from each of Vanovsky’s and Nesterov’s perceptions. The second part of the novel details what has happened since his diagnosis. It seems from reading that it is a novel about various interpretations of the meaning of life.

And what of the Brisbane allusion? Apparently Vanoksky’s mother was enamoured by the image of Brisbane as a subtropical Utopia and had an Australian male correspondent, who said she should come. Unfortunately, she was killed on the way to the airport by some thugs. So Russian!

Ah, the Russian tome called Brisbane.  The author was born in Kyiv but has spent most of his life in Russia.

Premier Palaszczuk with her Polish heritage should be indeed interested in such a view of Brisbane as Utopia. But watch out going to a Russian airport.

Mouse Whisper

My mäusemaister has this obsession whence Melania Trump has gone. She seems to have vanished to Europe – no longer the lady hand in hand with the Trump.  The prominent Irish author Fintan O’Toole, in a recent response to criticism of an article of his appearing in NYRB, has suggested that Cohen, the lawyer and once Trump confidant but who has now decamped from his side to be a pigeon with a stool, is one reason for the disappearance. He was told by Trump to pay Stormy Daniels and tell Melania that the payment was made to avert Daniels’ “fake story” about Trump himself.

As Trump was reported to have said, paying Daniels off was far cheaper than a divorce settlement, as Trump wanted his wife to be mollified. O’Toole opens up another front on the besieged Trump – the circus of a potential divorce. He is probably only saved by Melania not wanting her laundry aired, well at least not before it is appropriately washed.

Modest Expectations – Oh Tannenbaum! Wow!

Françoise Gilot

Pablo Picasso died in 1973. Françoise Gilot was probably the most well known of his wives and lovers. She was 40 years younger than Picasso. She has just died. In her obituary, which variously appeared in the New York Times and Boston Globe, it was noted she was a very good painter in her own right. Given the excoriating reviews of the Hannah Gadsby curated Pablo-matic, currently at the Brooklyn Museum, there seems to be an increasing concentration on Picasso the Misogynist rather than Picasso the Painter. Picasso was famously quoted as saying that there were two kinds of women: goddesses or doormats. He was appalling to women – to those with whom he slept, or those with whom he tried to sleep. Given the times, Gadsby has her following, even if the art critics seem to be universally panning the exhibition which runs until October.

My view? When Gadsby does something comparable to the painting of Guernica, then I may take her seriously.

Meanwhile, an excerpt from the obituary of Françoise Gilot:

Françoise Gilot, an accomplished painter whose art was eclipsed by her long and stormy romantic relationship with a much older Pablo Picasso, and who alone among his many mistresses walked out on him, died Tuesday at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 101.

“You imagine people will be interested in you?” Ms. Gilot quoted a surprised Picasso as saying after she told him that she was leaving him. “They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life touched mine so intimately.”

But unlike his two wives and other mistresses, Ms. Gilot rebuilt her life after she ended the relationship, in 1953, almost a decade after it had begun despite an age difference of 40 years. She continued painting and exhibiting her work and wrote books.

In 1970, she married Jonas Salk, the American medical researcher who developed the first safe polio vaccine. Still, it was for her romance with Picasso that the public knew her best, particularly after her memoir, “Life with Picasso,” written with Carlton Lake, was published in 1964. It became an international bestseller and so infuriated Picasso that he broke off all contact with Ms. Gilot and their two children, Claude and Paloma Picasso.

Ms. Gilot’s frank and often sympathetic account of their relationship — she dedicated the book “to Pablo” — provided much of the material for the 1996 Merchant-Ivory movie, “Surviving Picasso,” in which she was played by Natascha McElhone, with Anthony Hopkins as Picasso.

If Ms. Gilot’s book sold well, so has her art. With her work in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, her paintings fetched increasingly higher prices well into her later years.

Paloma à la Guitare

Gilot showed herself to be an artist who did not need to live within the penumbra of Picasso. Her painting of her daughter, Paloma (Paloma à la Guitare) fetched US$1.3M in 2021.

How does that affect one’s appreciation of each of their extraordinary artistic talent? Or “should”? Picasso’s portrait of Françoise Gilot was anticipated to reach US$12.8m.

Caravaggio was a murderer. His paintings hang in cathedrals.

Closer to home, I have a couple of Dennis Nona works.

Do we need to grade the size of the stone we throw at the past – and the present?

Guernica

When I researched the bombing, I read stories of a number of Guernica victims who appeared at hospitals with strange symptoms: Their hands were mutilated. The injuries weren’t from bombing of burning, but from their insistence on digging barehanded through jagged rubble — until the flesh tore from their bones — in the single-minded attempt to save their loved ones. Dave Boling

Dave Boling is an American sports journalist, not a person noted for historical novels. His motivation for writing the book was rooted in his marriage to a woman of Basque heritage, her grandparents having come from Biscay, (the Basque province now known in official documents as Bizkaia) to herd sheep in the mountains of Wyoming, Nevada, Idaho and California. He has said that his in-laws introduced him to the pleasures of spicy Basque food and red wine and tried to teach him their folk dances. They also indoctrinated him about their strong familial allegiances and their long history of oppression. It is hard to not to have sympathy for the Basques but that has been tempered by the assassination and bombings perpetuated by ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) between 1959 and 2018. Its goal was gaining independence for the Spanish Basques by any means.

The actual destruction of the Basque village of Guernica is the central point of a novel which essentially follows the fortunes of a Basque family which settled in Guernica. I agree with the review in the Independent:

The intended heartiness of the rustic idyll generates a sense of ominous calm. It explodes halfway through this saga, in the Luftwaffe’s experiment, at Franco’s invitation, of carpet-bombing the town and strafing survivors with machine guns. Children fused together, mothers crushed under rubble, old men incinerated – the horror is amplified by the hideous cynicism of attacking a civilian population.

Still, I found it hard to read, probably because I thought that it would concentrate on the destruction of Guernica, but this was a novel of inevitability, thus replacing any sense of premonition of what is to befall the family.

I have been to Bilbao, the capital of the Biscay province, several times and always visited that spectacular Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum. The 3.4 metre floral “Westie”, called Puppy, was installed in 1997 and stands as sentinel to the building. I had thought Guernica would end up here, but I have seen it in three locations. During the Franco period, it was in New York. I remember seeing this painting there for the first time. However, I am confused because if you had asked me where I saw it in New York, I would have sworn it was the Guggenheim Museum, but in fact it was in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Later I saw the painting again in the Prado and then in its final placement in the Sofia Reina, where it lives in solitary splendour.

Picasso’s epic painting, where his intertwined black and white images define the chaotic cruelty of war, is one of the few paintings that I can sit and look at it for more than any other image, with the exception perhaps of the whole mosaic tableau which lines the walls of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. There is so much to see in Picasso’s Guernica, which embraces premeditated carnage, the futility of which is the natural corollary of cruelty. Some may say that the Nazis, the Falangists, the Italian Fascists were just a clinical experiment in war, but the end product was so appalling in its results – a danse chaotique. Guernica died; but the Basques live on.

Barcelona

Rambla comes from the Arabic word ramla or رمل which means sand and refers to the sandy deposit which would gather in the bed of the stream where the street now exists. 

Barcelona, located in Catalonia, is one of the edgiest cities in the world that I have visited, both well before the 1992 Olympic Games and after. Catalonia always wants to free itself from Castilian Spain, its citizens having a separate language and flag. It was in this city where Picasso found his artistic limbs. He had been born in Malaga and his family moved to Barcelona in 1895. In Barcelona, Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers who met at the café Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats,”) styled after the Chat Noir [“Black Cat”] in Paris. Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition of more than 50 portraits here in February 1900.

La Sagrada Familia

It was strange to think that the building of La Sagrada Familia had already been in construction for 17 years at that time.

When I first went to Barcelona in the late 1980’s, preparation for the Olympic Games was well underway. By contrast there seemed to be no sign of activity on the Sagrada site. Rubble was strewn around the base of the unfinished cathedral and high chain wire fence prevented access. Yet I marvelled both at the extent of this unfinished building and how much there was still to do, given it had been over a century since work started. I had seen the plan with that giant spire, which I understood at the time they did not know how to build. Still, this first visit to Barcelona was the first of several during which time the whole process accelerated. At the same time Gaudi became increasingly well known and La Sagrada Familia became a magnet for tourists. Since then, there have emerged entry fees and the camera and iPhone toting queues.

I’ve not been there for years but the last time I was there, the interiors were almost complete, and it was estimated that La Sagrada would be finished in 2028, although there were still a number of spires to be constructed. The reds, blues, yellows and greens of the glass defined the mood of the interior and the early morning was a good time to feel the clarity of the filtered morning sun rays, a burst of golden colour, in the vast nave and chancel.

I am not much of a fan of the Gaudi Park Güell, commissioned by a wealthy textile manufacturer, which demonstrates many of Gaudi’s signature architectural devices, including catenary arches and tessellated finishes. Gaudi’s land of strange shapes and figurines jar, despite the fact that it is very cleverly constructed on the side of a hill, where the terraced pathways invite you to walk and look.

Casa Batiló

Nevertheless, there is one special Gaudi building – the Casa Batiló – in the centre of Barcelona. To me, like the best of Gaudi, it seems to have been lifted from another world and plonked into a conventional streetscape, such that the other buildings fade, and all you see is the Gaudi building. All the shapes have fancy architectural names, but from the outside, the Casa Batiló is a mottled tapestry with a variety of openings indicating a door or window. Inside, the rooms need to accommodate those adventurous shapes, and the blue theme is evident in the Noble room. Gaudi is confronting and to me, a building like the cathedral or indeed Casa Batiló, is to be fascinated by the mind that could design such an edifice. I wonder whether it may have provided some inspiration for Picasso. It is extremely problematical whether Gaudi ever met Picasso. They moved in very different circles.

I have been attracted to Barcelona because of George Orwell’s book written about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia. This is one of the most evocative pieces about a War when democracy died along with the Republic. Catalonia was not only Republican but where the black flag of the Anarchists also flew aloft. Like Guernica, Barcelona was bombed in 1936 by the Italians, with considerable loss of life. I found it ironic that the Barcelona Olympic Games, some 60 years later, was stage managed by Juan Antonio Samaranch who, although a Catalan, was an avowed Fascist functionary during the Franco regime, as well as being a supernumerary in Opus Dei.

The first time I stayed in Barcelona was in an old hotel on Las Ramblas, the central thoroughfare of Barcelona where the city action takes place. I had been warned that I had to watch out for pickpockets. My first encounter of Las Ramblas, as I turned the corner, was of a young man running straight at me being pursued by a couple of policemen. He swerved away and then disappeared up an alleyway being closely pursued.

Then there was a young woman walking by, talking intently into her mobile phone, except that the mobile phone would not be invented for another 20 years. However, her hand imitated the future so well, even contributing to the mime with one finger acting as the antenna.

The old wharf area still existed beyond the statue of Christopher Columbus and there was a clutter of unpretentious places to eat – hardly classifiable as restaurants. Here I was introduced to suquet de peix. This is a Catalan fish stew with fish – probably monkfish – squid, prawns and mussels. Since I don’t much like monkfish, I have never placed it on my memorable fish list. All this disappeared with the Olympic Games, with the creation of a marina and modern waterside restaurants connected by a footbridge to Las Ramblas and where, at night, there was now a spectacular run of fish restaurants.

Las Ramblas, with its market and its liveliness, has a strong connection to Miro. There is a museum dedicated to Miro, but the most striking link to him is the mosaic on Las Ramblas. You really only get a good view of it when there are few people around, and we used to go down the thoroughfare in the early morning and stop for a cup of coffee and a view of Miro on the way back.

If there was anything of importance happening in Barcelona, well wait long enough on Las Ramblas and something memorable will happen. We happened to be in Barcelona on one sunny day in 2009, when a double decker bus with an open deck rolled by, crammed with exultant footballers covered in the blue and garnet colours of the Barcelona Football Club. I remember recognising a young Lionel Messi, and the street crowd going wild. I had never been in person to witness a latter-day Triumph.

Since our last visit the Catalan push for independence has been a political thorn for Madrid, deeply embedded despite extravagant attempts to remove it. Las Ramblas has seen plenty of action by a protesting population in these last years.

As for Picasso, there is a museum where some of his vast output of paintings and drawings hang. In addition, as with any person who spent significant time in the place where ideas and skills were formed, there is a trail that one can follow. I have done such a trail in Paris, following the footsteps of Hemingway, but not here in Barcelona (until I started writing this blog my central interest in Picasso was Guernica). Let this interest rest with something Picasso said about Barcelona in 1936. “Barcelona the beautiful and wise, where I left so many things hanging on the altar of happiness…”, but not Guernica!

Not Pablo

I hesitated to add this scatological piece, but it does have a certain relevance to all that has gone before in this thematic blog. Boys’ schools have always been places where teachers, especially those who have been part of the furniture for many years, earn nicknames. One of the most well-known was the teacher who always seem to cock his head, perhaps he had a wry neck. Boys never worried in the past about such minor matters as disability. He was known as Isaiah, because “one eye was higher than the other”.

Dogger Banks, now surrounded by wind farms

We had a teacher called Grenness, and naturally earned the epithet of “mossy”. Then there were names that fitted together, such as Banks called “dogger” or Giles called “spudda”, which may now seem to be somewhat arcane. Then there were names based on appearance – monkey, bullfrog, mousey, bulldog contracted to bully; predilection – pansy; idiosyncratic – toss, johnny, sponge, shovel; or just behavioural – witness the English teacher with the moniker “Picasso”. Enough said.

I, Consultant

Just after I started as a medical administrator at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in 1971, I was introduced to Peter Davenport, a former RN lieutenant commander, who had become a consultant for PA Management. This firm had been employed to improve the efficiency of the way the hospital should function. PA Management had attracted attention by the way it had reformed the Sydney Hospital, at a time when there were questions being raised about the future of that hospital, given there was a surfeit of inner city hospitals. The oldest, the Sydney Hospital, was located close to Parliament House, but otherwise it had a fading catchment area.

I came to the Hospital just after Davenport had started this consultancy, using participative management techniques. Unlike the consultants who come in and charge an exorbitant fee to observe, Davenport actually immersed himself in the job. The first area that he addressed was the operating theatre complex. The key to participative management is to get the leaders, at that time inevitably the medical specialists, and induce them to surrender some of their individuality to work in a participative model, rather than just issuing orders. It was a change, and I came into this world where there was emphasis on doing better.

Participative management, to work, needs to have the support of the most influential – in this case Sir Benjamin Rank and Dr Jock Frew, a formidable duo, who had served during World War II and knew all about hierarchal management. This was much loved by all uniform services, and that included the medical staff of teaching hospitals. The then Medical Superintendent, John Yeatman, assigned me to work with the consultant. Davenport and I were then in our early 30s and hit it off very early. The upshot was that we were perceived as achieving the objectives, which were agreed across the various departments, in addition to the operating theatres.

Therefore, I had a positive view of consultants, and a decade later when I had completed five years as Deputy Secretary-General of the Australian Medical Association (AMA), I set up a consultancy firm, Diagnosis, with a transport economist I had known for years, Dr Robert Wilson. He was also a particularly good cost accountant as well as having one of the most rounded and perspicacious brains I’ve ever encountered. When I was with the AMA we had worked together on its submission to a Federally-funded review of the health care system in 1980.

Initially it was hard going attracting work, especially as I was debarred from getting any work from my previous employer. It took some time for us to be recognised as the form of consultancy whereby we were flogging our knowledge and skills in navigating a system, where I have always said that, to be truly useful, one must be fluent in the language of health. Beginning in the late 80s public servants, already pensioned off well remunerated, were recruited by the big accounting firms ignorant in health but able to manipulate numbers. These public servants often had an incomplete knowledge of health but one that was serviceable for about two years. The sophistication of the recruitment process was ramped up, together with the fees charged to government. As my ancestor would say, tell me pray where any of these consultancies yielded anything of value when addressing the structure of the health system, whereas I can point to areas where Diagnosis did influence the outcomes in a positive manner.

Elton Mayo at the Harvard Business School

On occasions I did use the skills engendered working with Peter Davenport and elements of neurolinguistics I’d gleaned without any formal training.  I remembered one of the famous conclusions of the Australian sociologist, Elton Mayo, who made his mark in the 1920s with his work in the Hawthorne Chicago plant of the Western Electric Company. He noted that output of work is a function of work satisfaction, “which turns upon the informal pattern of the work group”.

However, it seems that today being a consultant with the highest remuneration package relies on who you know rather than what you may provide for change and, laughably, the cost efficiency of the project. The basic work is done by the graduate serfs, who know how to write basic English and regurgitate the ruminants which are increasingly available on artificial intelligence without having any real effect on the outcome. The ultimate greater sin is to recommend at great cost what has not worked in the past.

Meanwhile, the consultancy firms pillage the gravy train as it proceeds along with its impedimenta of ex-politicians and ex-public servants, who have spun through the revolving door into this Wonderland where the gravy is golden.

Q.E.D. as Euclid would say.

Mouse Whisper

For me to quote a Cat is Something!

Larry the Cat, Guardian and Chief Mouser (ugh), No 10 Downing Street:

“I’m pleased that Boris Johnson’s resignation will give him time to see more of his children, possibly even all of them.”

Modest Expectations – Oxen Rest

Pick up your palliasse on boarding …

I thought I would relate a story from India when we were about to board the train from New Delhi to Himachal Pradesh. It was a cold winter’s night, and my wife pointed out a puppy shivering on the platform. It had been a difficult night for her, because we had been assigned what was called “first class” but in fact the compartment involved palliasses and drunken fellow travellers. My wife in all innocence had boarded the train, and suddenly found that this was far removed from our interpretation of “first class”. She was lucky to escape, and by a mixture of aggression and cajolery, I was able to change our tickets to sleeper class. This was the actual first class, and one of the advantages was that this carriage had a carriage attendant. Because of the need for the change in our ticketing, we were among the last to board the train.

My wife mentioned to the carriage attendant that there had been a “poor little dog freezing on the platform” (it was, after all, midwinter and 3.00 am), and I had gone into the normal over-reaction of a doctor, “don’t touch the dog, rabies … blah, blah, blah”. Oblivious to my warning, she pointed it out to the carriage attendant. We then went to our compartment. The train was pulling out from the station, and my wife scanned the platform. The puppy was not there; she hoped it had scampered off to find a warmer place.

The journey was well underway when the carriage attendant appeared and beckoned us to come to his den at the end of the carriage. There, nestling on a blanket in a box, was the little dog. The carriage attendant had heeded my wife’s implicit wish and rescued the little dog.

The “Kalka Mail” from Howrah to Kalka, via Delhi

But that was not all, some days later, when we were returning from Himachal Pradesh, we boarded the train for New Delhi. Same carriage. Same smiling carriage attendant. Same little dog, still in his comfortable box. He was one of the most well travelled dogs – having been to Kolkata and back. He still seemed very happy. He did not have rabies. On reflection, I was the one who had been frothing at the mouth. My wife had authored an example of the goodness of some our fellow humans. It is a nice story to start off this blog. 

Blind in One Eye, Horatio. You are Kidding Me!

“China is the largest trade partner of a long and growing list of countries. Very few have the wealth and natural resources that protected Australia, the “lucky” country. Even so, many are studying the lessons of Australia’s escape from China’s grip”. The Economist 27 May

It may be strange heading for this observation, which takes its inspiration from Donald Horne’s inspired observation about Australia as “the lucky country”. This succinct note at the end of an article entitled “Lucky for Some” conceals a resource rich Australia, which is rotting under a mixture of hedonism, hypocrisy, and just plain greed.

This long, drawn-out, high risk defamation case brought by Roberts-Smith strikes at the cabal which has been allowed to get away with massive expenditure on a War Memorial. Against this the Brereton Report  has found evidence of 39 murders of civilians and prisoners by (or at the instruction of) members of the Australian special forces. The full Report findings have yet to be to be released.

War Memorial, under re-construction

Coupled with unnecessarily expensive alteration to an already ugly building, the Canberra War Memorial should instead be modest in keeping with remembering the dead but not glorifying war – and certainly not turning it into a defence force theme park funded by us mug taxpayers. Given the extravagant eulogising of Roberts-Smith in the War Memorial display, the protected defence force officer species has now given the Parliament a headache.

Anybody lost in war games is an unnecessary life lost. Australia, like most countries, rationalises loss of life and the attendant destruction in a quasi-religious model where remembrance and grief are locked together with a sprinkle of selflessness, heroism and a fizz of “mateship”. It is a curious brew which has also underpinned this relentless pursuit of the original Olympic ideal in warpaint – higher, faster, stronger – essentially an expression of the male hormone overlay of civilisation; without the recently added Olympic ideal of “together”, a concession to the need to contain an aggressive interpretation of the three exhortations.

The Chair of the Council of the War Memorial is Kim Beasley. I generally agree with Paul Keating’s assessment of people, but I have always wondered why he had a high regard for the current Chair, while others considered him as a militaristic boofhead nicknamed “Bomber Beazley” when he was Minister of Defence.

The problem is that the ill-considered action of the ageing Kerry Stokes in bankrolling Roberts-Smith’s defamation action has exposed the underbelly of warfare. Over the years, politicians on both sides of politics become enthralled with the toys of war, egged on by senior officers who have learned the art of “obsequious control” over their political masters, whatever their persuasion. Greeting visiting overseas dignitaries with rows of soldiers or archaically-dressed soldiers on horses; gun carriages for the dead monarch – what is it all about? A population being groomed for war?

It is interesting how many of the senior officers have done a stint in the United States, where inevitably they would have been flattered, if not groomed into the world of expensive weapons labelled “born in the USA”.

I remember as a young boy when I was present at some of the family afternoon “soirees”, being brought along by my father as an appendage. Here were the blokes who had been to the war and may have been wrestling with their demons – and now were drinking too much Scotch and regaling one another with wartime anecdotes. They would mention unpopular officers allegedly where the troops shot them in the back when out on the patrol; but they generally reserved their disdain for coloured people in all their derogatory verbiage. I remember one anecdote which was of no consequence except it happened while this particular bloke was serving on New Ireland and could not contain his hilarity when he told the gathering about this native who happened to be sitting under a coconut tree when a coconut had fallen on his head, splitting it open. He could not stop laughing, until the next dark anecdote.

I was socialised with a diet of Boy’s Own heroics.  Yet as a small boy I witnessed that many who served and witnessed war at close quarters never talked about it. I had never experienced the horrors of a war where the civilian population was the target, where the most vulnerable were targeted – genocide was a term yet to be firmly established in the vocabulary. I then had never heard of Guernica, where Germany and her allies wiped out the civilian population, a technique they were busily perfecting in preparation for World subjugation, that in fact had been first trialled in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) between 1904 and 1908. We were socialised in believing that war was a test of manhood, almost a jolly affair offering the then rare opportunity for an overseas trip and where atrocities are airbrushed away.

I have lived with a succession of wars, some having more or less effect on my way of life – but the older I have got the more I have marvelled at the underlying bullying aspect of war. Murder the defenceless to win the war. I am not a pacifist, but once my country has gone to war, it always seemed at the sound of a distant drum, the more the casualties mount up, ultimately for nothing.

Stored for future exhibitions, perhaps

There is no Memorial to the Unknown Child or Mother … only to the Unknown Soldier – in brackets, male. The toys and their sophistication and cost increases.  The industry attracts a species of vermin who call themselves “consultant” – only because they have been previously participants – officers, bureaucrats, politicians, once on the inside but with their heads now in the money trough, occasionally raising their heads to vomit the privileged information gleaned over the years. Years of “schmoozing”, networking, social engagements, bribery have oiled the world of the “defence consultant”. Contracts are handed out, contracts are padded, and up to this point it has been a cosy atmosphere.

But now the Roberts-Smith ill-fated defamation case has blown a hole in this closed world of privilege. The politicians on each side do not know what to do. So many of them, still unashamed, raise their heads out of the trough. Their mates still in positions of influence, those with perspicacity do not want the whole closely-knit world to unravel, yet they know that they cannot initiate many more cover-ups. Not that they will not try.

The litany of misdemeanours of the ruling elite, both Labor and Coalition, as epitomised by the mutual giggling display of Marles and Pyne, illustrates a festering political garbage dump, the stench of which will not be quenched by any diversionary nosegay. What this country needs is a cathartic dose of the Cromwells.

Montana Skies

In 1999 I went to the University of Washington. Although based in Seattle at the time, it also provided medical teaching to undergraduates based, in addition to Washington State, in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, hence the name WWAMI. As I intended visiting Montana in the late Spring of 2005, I asked Dawn De Witt, who had been recruited as the Dean of the Rural Clinical School and Professor and Foundation Chair of Rural Medical Education based in Shepparton (to give her full title) for advice as to where I should go. I had first met Dawn when she was an academic specialist physician at the University of Washington in Seattle. She had a deep interest in education and she was approached by the then Dean of Medicine, Richard Larkins, at the University of Melbourne to take the post. She also had a special attachment to Montana as she had honeymooned there in the Glacier National Park in the far North of the State and spreading across the border into British Columbia.

When I undertook my exploration of the feasibility of rural clinical schools in Australia in 1999, following Seattle I had visited the campuses in Spokane and in Pullman, just across the border from the Idaho campus in Moscow (pronounced mos-COW). Idaho is a State in two parts. There is a well-forested area north of the divide where the coastal rain falls, while the southern part of Idaho is a dry altiplano where Boise, the capital, is located. Idaho was far less wealthy than Washington, and this difference was reflected in the two campuses.

I had wanted then to go to Montana, but ran out of time. Alaska was a long way away and Montana and Wyoming could wait. Montana was visited six years later.  By that time the rural clinical program in Australia was in full swing.

On Dawn’s recommendation, one of the local doctors, Ted Scofield, invited us to stay in the small town of Livingston, close to Yosemite and to its massive backdrop of the Rockies. After all, Montana is the land where the wide glacier-cut valleys do in fact reach for for the sky. I realise that beauty can indeed be muted, in shadows cast, grasslands understated – mostly a wide emptiness.

On arrival we were whisked away to watch his daughter play softball against a team in the neighbouring township of Tall Timbers. Tall Timbers, we were informed, had a champion softball team, as they proved that afternoon. Tall Timbers had achieved its brief period of fame when Robert Redford played the lead role in the film Horse Whisperer, which was filmed there.

Livingston remains a series of images of what I had imagined would be a grasslands town, windswept as one would expect of town lying at 1,400 metres above sea level. The buildings dating back to the late nineteenth century were close to the Yellowstone River, which actually ran through the Scofield property where we stayed. At one stage, we tried to have a picnic on the Yellowstone River, but we were defeated by the mosquitos, which were both very large and very assiduous, if that is a euphemism for bloodthirsty.

The looming “Crazies”

The property overlooked the dramatic Crazies, the Crazy Mountains.  Spanning a distance of 32 kms from the Yellowstone River to the pinnacle of Crazy Peak, the terrain rises more than 2,100 metres. The reason for the name of the mountains is obscure; it may be their position. They seemed not to be where the mountains should be, as they lie separate from the Rockies themselves. Nevertheless, the scenery waking up in the morning was in a word – “different”. OK – breathtaking!

Ted was one of the WWAMI teachers, but at that time there were no students in the practice. Nevertheless, we undertook a number of ward rounds at the hospital. He had completed his undergraduate degree at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, then went on to graduate from medical school at Saint Louis in 1979. Given that the population is around 8,000 Livingston seemed to have very adequate medical facilities, but as I have since found out, the area is very popular with many prominent actors and moneyed people who had properties around the town. There is a word to describe those rural areas that do not have a problem recruiting doctors –“resources rich”. Useful to be near ski resorts and in the case of Ted Scofield, hunting. Ted was a keen hunter and his house was festooned with trophies, and on our last morning, we had homemade elk sausages for breakfast.

Breakfast

The Scofields and their children and mother were “Wee Frees”. This segment of the Presbyterian Church traces its roots to 1843 and the struggle of the Scottish church to remain “free” from State interference. In fact they live at the extreme end of the evangelical Protestants, and predictably are against the cultural reforms of same-sex marriage and access to abortion, believing the literal interpretation of the Bible. As we were guests, we steered clear of any discussion, but took part in their mealtime, where everybody held hands while Ted said grace before each meal. Not quite Little House on the Prairie, but where piety is mixed with blood sports. It was a time when Bush was President and the Iraqi war was in full swing, but again not a topic for discussion given that we soon realised that our beliefs were very far apart

They were very hospitable. For instance, they were teetotal, but stocked low alcohol beer which they offered us. We gave a presentation on Australia to the health centre and hospital staff – a slide show centred on a recitation of Dorothea McKellar’s poem “My Country”. It seemed to be well received; they had little knowledge of Australia and our own open spaces.

We did not talk much about teaching because on the ward rounds he was very much the conventional doctor, where teaching was not an easy fit. The traditional country rural medical practitioner is a solitary person, used to treating patients without question. In one instance, I did question the treatment, and he took it in good grace, demonstrating to me more flexibility than I had observed up to that time.

In the end, I do not know what I thought. As I write this reflection, I realise that I learnt more than if I had been involved in conflict. Far apart we may have been in belief, I learnt more than I thought in my sojourn in Livingston without only saying “Dr Scofield, I presume.”

Laura Vall

When I was learning Brazilian Portuguese, one of the more relaxing and attractive ways learning this form of Portuguese was to watch a bossa nova video performed by NOVA, whose lead singer was Laura Vall.

Laura Vall

NOVA’s tagline is Born in Brazil, Made in LA. Laura Vall is from Barcelona but moved to LA. Here she had set up this Group with Mike Papagni, a bossa nova and jazz quartet, back in 2011. The quartet with her as the vocalist are David Irelan (guitar), Thomas Hjorth (bass), and Mike Papagni (drums). Since then, they’ve been performing around Los Angeles and I found them and her on YouTube. The signature bossa nova song is The Girl from Ipanema, written in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim with lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. The singer generally associated with the song was Astrud Gilberto. The Sinatra interpretation is well-known, admittedly at odds with the original lyrics it nevertheless has a certain charm, given he was singing alongside Jobim, the latter accompanying him in Brazilian Portuguese.

In the Portuguese version, the lyrics employ two words for girl, while the title uses “garota” a third word for girl but not used in the song itself. The girl from Ipanema is variously “menina” or “moça”.  When I watch her singing the song she was the epitome of all of these plus an element of the vagabond in English – in Portuguese it has a more direct meaning shorn of the street-wise imputation that it has in English.

Whether singing with microphone as her only prop or when shaking a ganza, Vall’s movements are minimal yet sensuous, her voice clarion clear, her voice with a touch of defiance, if not ferocity. Her Brazilian Portuguese is impeccable. To me she is also a beautiful woman. Her accompanying musicians are understated but a perfect backdrop, yet all playing against unspectacular background room – no flashy cut aways to Ipanema beach or elsewhere. Just a beautiful singer in a Los Angeles studio with a great backing trio. The ongoing encouragement to continue learning Portuguese – admittedly now with little practical reason, except to keep the brain active – and listening to Laura Vall.

She is a worthy successor to Astrud Gilberto, who died this week.

Astrud Gilberto

The Withered Spring

All over Eastern Massachusetts it’s the same story, with azaleas, forsythia, rhododendrons, and their colleagues underperforming. Where there should be flowers and joy, we have mere leaves, bare stems — and self-doubt.

The disappointing spring bloom is all the more painful because it comes against a backdrop of climate change — not the fault of any one gardener, but rather the collective action of the human species.

Last summer’s drought, the historic arctic blast in early February, the wild swings in temperature — they’re all contributing to the lacklustre Spring.

An eloquent observation in The Boston Globe, which imparts the same message that Rachel Carson made almost two generations ago when she wrote of a countryside before the chemical onslaught, including the now banned DDT.

Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them.

Rachel Carson wrote these words in 1962. How goes the ingenuity of us humans to escape the disasters we create?

Mouse Whisper

Ever thought about the three blind mice? The “three blind mice” were the Oxford Martyrs, all Bishops and supporters of the short-lived Queen, Lady Jane Grey. (The Liz Truss nine-day monarch equivalent). Their names were Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, accused of plotting against the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII. They were tried for heresy in 1555.

Before they were burned at the stake, Latimer was heard to say: Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Strange how “play the man” now has such a different connotation.

 

Modest Expectations – Leicester City

This disturbing commentary is taken from a media release from the Lincoln Project, a virulent anti-Trump Republican-leaning group. In their own write:

Our job at The Lincoln Project – and the task for all of us in the pro-democracy movement – is to give President Biden air cover. Not split the vote. We know exactly who we have to target to reinforce the pro-democracy message. We did it in 2020 and we won 17 races with it in 2022.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Below is a sample of the media releases with which the Lincoln Project is bombarding the potentially “swing” voters. To me, it is reality wrapped up in a scare campaign. Not sure that Biden can go the distance; he needs a better Vice-President. I’m a big fan of Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan. She has withstood threats to her life by the Trump riff-raff and has both the intellectual capacity and toughness to be President. And she would come with the tag of being “under-rated”. Huge plus, especially when you are dealing with such an exploitive narcissist as Trump. By the way, where is Melania – and for that matter young Barron?

Fascinating and completely disturbing media release from the Lincoln Project:

Putin just listed 500 new targets for Russian sanctions. In short, it’s his enemies list, a collection of people who Putin wants the world to know he personally despises. 

But here’s where it gets scary. Some of the names listed are at the top of Trump’s enemies list too.

  1. Letitia James, the New York state attorney general who is suing Trump for fraud. 
  2. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State and recipient of Trump’s “perfect call.”
  3. Michael Myrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot MAGA martyr Ashli Babbitt. 

What do those people have to do with Russian foreign policy? They haven’t been vocal commentators on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They have no expertise or role in US-Russian relations. 

The only conceivable explanation is that Putin is sending a loud and clear message to Trump: Your enemies are mine and I want to see you back in The White House in 2024.

Putin’s clear message got me thinking about the ad campaign we ran last year. It was a hard- hitting and critical message that reminded voters that the party of Reagan is now the party of Putin. That’s why MAGA Republicans are so desperate to cut off aid to Ukraine. It’s why Trump has openly praised the murderous dictator in the past. And that reason is why Putin and Trump share the same exact enemies list.

There is a dangerous connection between MAGA and Putin’s authoritarian regime. It truly can’t be overstated, and I can assure you that we’ll continue to work to remind voters of this fact. 

Ceviche

Ceviche is one of my favourite fish dishes. I have always associated it with Brazil, but it is actually Peruvian.

I had my best ceviche one morning in Manaus, under what turned out to be strained circumstances for which I was to blame – ultimately. We had flown into Manaus from Sao Paulo late the night before. Manaus, located on the Amazon River approximately the same distance to the Peru border as it is to the mouth of the Amazon River, is the only place where there is bridge over the Amazon, linking it to Iranduba on the other side. In 2010, Brazil built a two-mile-long cable-stayed bridge connecting the two cities. Except that technically it does not cross the main course of the Amazon; it crosses the Rio Negro, the Amazon’s largest tributary.

Manaus is so isolated that there is only one viable road link, as told to us in 2019 – and that was to Venezuela about 3,000 kms away. There had been a road to Rhodonia, but that road was now impassable.

Just a “small” pirarucu

The fish which was used in the ceviche that morning was a white fish. I wasn’t familiar with the fish, but the marinade was very well balanced, subtle, yet where lime juice predominated. The fish was the pirarucu, the biggest freshwater fish in the world, a carnivorous lover of catfish and known to leap out of the water to take an unsuspecting small bird. The flesh is somewhat like cod to taste and, in each carcass, there is a great amount of flesh, given the fish is three metres long and 220 kilograms in weight.  There was a stuffed specimen strung up in the market in Manaus – very impressive, just to press the point.

My memorable meetings with fish have always been associated with another matter completely extraneous to consumption. For instance, my most well remembered Dover sole meal, where the fish covered the whole plate, was served to me in a Cambridge hotel overlooking the Backs. While we were having this meal, Stephen Hawking was wheeled by.

In this case in Manaus, it was as I reached into my pocket searching for my wallet, to discover it was not there. Here in mid-morning having had this brunch of fish, I immediately froze. My room was not far away. I went back and searched – no sign. My companion then did her own search. The staff were notified; they came and turned the room upside down. Still no wallet. At this point I was staring down a difficult path, given we had to board the riverboat mid-afternoon.

I had brought a raft of papers to look over while I had the time. I turned over the pages and there, in the middle of the pages was the wallet. My companion and the hotel staff on the surface were very forgiving; underneath their collective mood would have been different.

The fish meal was very good, and I turned my face to the tropical garden. The tropical plants are not judgemental, good when one is totally embarrassed.

Narendra Modi

Ship breaking in Gujurat, home of Mr Modi
Not Gujurat …

In 1978, Modi received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the School of Open Learning (SOL) at the University of Delhi, graduating with a third class honour. Five years later, in 1983, he received a Master of Arts degree in political science from Gujarat University, graduating with a first class as an external distance learning student. There is a controversy surrounding his educational qualification. SOL said it did not have any data of students who received a BA degree in 1978. Jayantibhai Patel, a former political science professor of Gujarat University, claimed that the subjects listed in Modi’s MA degree were not offered by the university when Modi was studying there.Wikipedia

Probably even a couple of years ago, most Australians would not be able to name the Indian Prime Minister, but no more. Our Prime Minister has been complicit in raising Modi’s profile by accompanying him on the Modi vahana on that strange trip around the ground on the opening day of the fourth cricket Test in Ahmedabad. One could be bemused by the two countries entering into a defence pact. I cannot imagine Australian forces patrolling the India-Chinese border or assisting in the suppression of Kashmiri’s democratic right to vote with the potential of confrontation with Pakistan.

Albanese realises that although Indian prosperity is continually rising, creating potential markets for Australian trade, there are two areas where India has a visual effect on the everyday Australian. One is obviously cricket, where the Indian premier League (IPL) provides Australian cricketers and, by association, international cricket a financial lifeline. Cricket without India would have difficulty surviving in its current form. Secondly, more importantly for Albanese, is the Indian diaspora in Australia. There are about 750,000 Indians born in India who are living overwhelmingly (70 per cent) in Victoria and New South Wales. Over 17 per cent of those living in the seat of Parramatta, where Harris Park has become the signature suburb for the diaspora, are Indian born.

While Modi was travelling overseas, culminating in the visit to Australia, his party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was roundly beaten in the Karnataka State elections. As reported by The Economist, Modi addressed 19 public rallies and six road shows in Karnataka, which has had an average annual growth rate of eight per cent over the decade. In the end, this State of 68 million people was the only southern state under BJP control, and now it has lost heavily, retaining only 66 seats in an Assembly of 225 seats. The National Party had won an absolute majority; the Gandhis were back in power.

Modi had come up through Gujarat politics, a person born into one of the lower castes (the oil-burners), whereas the Congress Party Gandhis are brahmins, not necessarily popular among their fellow brahmins, but with that ultimate illusion of a “born-to-rule” caste.

Modi is a tiny figure, but his big head gives the impression of a bigger man. To govern such a sprawling diverse country for nearly a decade is remarkable. Many of his moves reflect an authoritarian personality, like so many of our leaders. Why do so many of them have to embellish their academic performance, as Modi has done. Perhaps, it just validates the thesis of social scientist Harold Lasswell that most politicians proceed from a basis of insecurity and low self-esteem. Therefore, without getting too much into the land of psycho-politics, tiny men in politics with an underlying inferiority complex can be a dangerous package.

Nevertheless, the smart money is transferring its interest from China to India. China is being left to the politicians and the public servants to salvage what they can from the selective bans on certain Australian produce. How that turns out will be carefully watched by those who have maintained a “watching brief” on mainland China. The Chinese fixation about Taiwan and the unpredictable gaoling of overseas nationals makes even the experienced China hands very wary.

Kerala

Although India is notoriously protectionist, with its potential market of over one billion, it is attractive. Try buying an imported bottle of wine – or spirits for that matter – in India and marvel at the cost.  Currently, somewhat at odds with the calls to reduce fossil fuel exports, coal is the major Australian export, and the controversial entry of India into mining in Australia has been its response. At present with the flush of Modi-Albanese interactions, who knows where it will ultimately lead. One outcome for certain is that there will be more Indians migrating to Australia. The reverse? Well, I could live happily in Kerala for most of the year.

The Economist, having reported the loss of Karnataka by the BJP, says it may be a fillip for the once all-conquering Congress Party; yet the gains were stated as being at the expense of a third party, the Janata Dal (Secular). At the end of its report, The Economist stated: “there is nothing here to augur defeat for Mr Modi and his party in next year’s election.” In other words, Australia will have to live with Modi, who is 72 – young in this modern world of geriatric leaders.

As indicated above and elsewhere, I love India, especially the South. I first went to India when it was barely on the radar, with the prejudices and misconception of India on show. It was a time when there were fewer than 50,000 individuals born in India but living in Australia. After the initial culture shock on arrival, India just continues to confound a Westerner like myself with its sheer beauty. You need not mention anything more than the Taj Mahal, but of course there is much more and there is enormous diversity. India imposes on the uninitiated not only by having so many people always in one’s personal space but also by the distinctive smell. This reflects not only the human factor but also inter alia the number of wandering cattle and the number of aromatic spices floating around in the urban atmosphere.

I have written about my fascination with India in my blog two years ago. It remains. It is just there is always a price in getting too close to a dictator, real and would be. It is the dilemma Australia faces, given the difficult relationship we will always have with China. Still, our country must build its resilience and no matter the country, we should be wary of alliances, which need to be thought through, especially when positioning ourselves in a bilateral Pact, a Triad (rhyming with raucous), a Quad or even rowing a Quinquereme in troubled South Pacific seas. It is not just an album of photo opportunities.

Hero of the Western World?

“I think the Liberals did unprecedented things in vilifying me, on things that were baseless, which they knew. First, we had that lowbrow Staley for years wandering around attacking me, saying I was one of the richest men in public life, that I was only in public life to enrich myself. I can only say of him: twisted in body, twisted in mind. And he was aided and abetted by Howard, who should have known better, who does know better …” Paul Keating in 2000 as reported in SMH.

There is this photograph of the Melbourne Scotch College crew of 1957. No. 3 is Andrew Peacock; no. 6 is Anthony Staley and the Stroke was Neil Courtney. All are now dead. Peacock and Staley were rivals, even at school, vying to be the Captain of School. In the end it was Neil Courtney, also a gifted musician, who was chosen. This I knew because my father worked with his father, although I cannot recollect whether we ever met. I am not sure what he did later, apart from the fact that he died about six years ago and he rowed while at the University of Melbourne. Otherwise, the records readily available to me about him are silent.

In my generation Scotch College in Melbourne produced a great number of prominent politicians, culminating in what the Italian call un uomo di sbalzi d’umore, Jeffrey Kennett as the Victorian Premier. Returning to the crew, which came second in the Head-of-the-River that year, Andrew Peacock went on to graduate in law, and never hid his political aspirations. Part of his inheritance (the born-to-rule complex) was gaining Menzies’ seat of Kooyong, having made a splash at the previous election by challenging the high-profile, left wing Jim Cairns.

Peacock lost. But his profile as the next generation leader was cemented. Peacock never received the opprobrium of being a young Australian, just too old to be included in the Vietnam draft lottery, not to serve despite his schoolboy militarism. The 1966 election cemented the Liberal Party, with Andrew Peacock having been elected in a byelection seven months before, his foot firmly planted on the political accelerator. He was well liked but, in the end, he just tired of the relentless back-stabbing antics and went elsewhere.

His rival, Anthony Staley, first came to my notice through some of my religious friends, when they mentioned this guy whose mission was to dedicate his life to being a pastor in the Presbyterian Church. He undertook a law degree at the University of Melbourne and followed me as the President of the Student Representative Council in 1961. Whereas Peacock’s first wife was the daughter of a Liberal Party politician, Staley’s first wife was the daughter of the University’s Vice-Chancellor – the first of five.

I saw Staley from time to time in the 1960s, especially when I started a Master of Arts in political science part-time at the University when he was lecturer there. I remember one day we were talking on a street in Melbourne when there was an anti-Vietnam demonstration being held. We were on the fringes and the crowd started moving towards us.  I looked around. Staley was gone. I stayed. I was a bit surprised as I thought Staley had expressed great reservations about our involvement in the War.

The aim of becoming a pastor was soon tossed out of his career pathway. He was elected to Parliament at the 1970 Chisholm by-election, following the death of Wilfrid Kent Hughes. He was the Member for this electorate from 1970 to 1980 and was a low level Minister for the Capital Territory and then Minister for Post and Telecommunications until his retirement from Parliament. Thus, the two rowers of 1957 may have been reunited in the same Liberal Party boat but Staley never reached the Ministerial heights that Peacock achieved.

Staley clung to the leader, whoever that person was – but had an air of treachery, which was admired by his fellow fixers. It is a pity that being shady and duplicitous is so admired by some in the media claque. He switched from Snedden to Fraser in the period when the 1974 election intervened, and the robust Liberal Party stability of 1973 was replaced by the rise of the Party “bottom-feeders”.

Staley became the National President of the Liberal Party long after I had lost contact with him, but he apparently used his position to undermine Hewson, create the straw man Downer, before culminating his life’s work in the election of Howard who had been written off at the start of the decade. The Liberal Party Gepetto had triumphed no less!

There was one occasion in the 1990s when he and I were at some dinner where he was seated next to my wife, who had never met him before. She found his frank comments to her about his sexual exploits somewhat unusual – but then she just dismissed them as the pathetic ramblings of an ageing man with five wives on his curriculum vitae.

The problem with all these shenanigans, the stage for the ultimate progression of the Liberal Party was within the “ecology” of the Melbourne Club, where the ultimate strength of the Party lay and where they forgot about the branches. These provided the foot soldiers, ignored until they were mustered to help at election time. The cigar chomping Staley showed his contempt at one party conference by railroading a motion through to shore up the then Downer leadership. The problem is the branches in the face of a Party, whose seigneurs ignored them, enabled the rise of a different mob. This noblesse oblige just turned some party branch members into a rebellious mob, who still had the power to preselect candidates. This shift occurred during the Staley years, and how much was due to his actions others may wish to comment. The legacy of Staley with his expertise in palace intrigue may be his posthumous gift to the current leader, the hapless John Pessuto.

Mouse Whisper

I dislike the connotations of a plague of mice. This just goes against the grain.

John Wheats, our Poet Laureate, has written an ode. Wheats can never resist making rye comments.

Oats to a Threshing Churn

Now Barley Charlie

Spooning deepest darkest Congee

So to forage in the Porridge

makes one cruel eating the Gruel

where one hits the hominy Grits

or ends up with teeth and sorghums
Barley Charlie 1964