Month: September 2023

Modest Expectations – Smokin’ Joe on the Wing

Margaret Thatcher always prided herself on how little sleep she needed. She ended up demented. Likewise, her mate Ronald Reagan emulated her four-hour nightly repose. He too ended up demented. No, there is no evidence that their form of dementia is contagious.

I’ve been writing about sleep deprivation, especially among politicians, since I worked in the Canberra “hot house”.

Morpheus, god of dreams and nightmares

My article here was prompted by one I read in the AFR last month. The AFR reported inter alia in an article written by Sally Patten that Steven Lockley, an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, says: “For the past three or four decades, really, we’ve heard a lot from the exercise lobby and the nutrition lobby, which maybe gives the impression that [they are] more important than sleep.

“In my opinion, they are not. Sleep may be more important than both of those [exercise and nutrition]. If you don’t sleep well, your nutrition metabolism is impaired. If you’re fatigued, [exercise] is impaired. I think sleep needs to be raised in its importance across those three topics.

Whether anybody pays attention to this important statement is anybody’s guess, but personally I am not optimistic that it elicited any response.

Not having sleep seems to be a challenge for the ambitious in particular. There was a certain machismo about it. In the animal kingdom, there are a wide variety of sleep patterns – carnivores tend to sleep most of the day – the lion can sleep about 18 hours, whereas at the other end of the animal spectrum the giraffe is alleged to sleep for only 17 minutes per 24 hours.

In January 1964, a student deliberately went for 11 days and 25 minutes without sleep, as with blokes of his age, courting the limits of human endeavour – the award merely, as was this case, to end up as a line entry in the Guinness Book of Records. This was the last time this feat was recognised because it was deemed to be completely and idiotically unsafe.

The experiment attracted one William Dement, (yes, actual name) who was one of the early researchers into the effect of sleep deprivation. The sleep was shown to be interrupted by catnapping although the fellow seemed awake and totally unaware of this phenomenon; and it was notable that he did not use any medication apart from Coca-Cola during his marathon. There were no apparent sequelae, although in the immediate post-sleepless period, he had some difficulty in sleeping, and long term he suffered from insomnia.

I was unaware of this event when I started being interested in the pathology of going without sleep. My attention was initially attracted by the “tipping cat experiments” whereby cats were allowed to go to sleep and then tipped off the board. Very soon, you had a mad cat; and there was an unsourced report, which seems to be so sadistic and pointless, that keeping a cat awake for 15 days will kill it.

The problem is that the sleeplessness does not lead to any apparent immediate disability, especially if one has an isolated Parliament in a rural setting, full of sleepless people, where the sleeplessness is aggravated by the consumption of alcohol. The spectre of this nation being governed by people with little sleep often compounded by hangovers is a depressing scenario. After all, in the asylum, who is the maddest? Who decides?

Those Prime Ministers notorious for indulging themselves in waking up staff and public servants during the night in fits of whim are no different from the researchers who conducted the “tipping point” experiments, except that the researchers had independent approval for their action.

Disturbing people’s sleep, unless there is a disaster requiring immediate attention, sabotages the whole concept of good public administration.  The prospect of senior persons of power waking up their minions just to demonstrate their power is evidence that they are already damaged. Perhaps this is because of their chronic lack of sleep from too much plotting and scheming.

Moutardiers du Monde, Unir!

The Romans were the first to experiment with the preparation of mustard as a condiment. And by the 10th century the monks of St-Germain-des-Pres in Paris absorbed the mustard-making knowledge of Romans and began their own production.

First made in the 14th century, Dijon mustard does not have to be made in that region, provided it follows the formula that was first devised in 1856 by Jean Naigeon, a mustard maker from Dijon. Into smooth, brown seed mustard, verjuice—an acidic juice made from unripe grapes—was substituted for the common vinegar. That was his critical ingredient.

I asked my wife whether we were having difficulty getting Dijon mustard. She said no.  Why?  I said I had read that last year Europe was in the grip of a mustard shortage. It struck France hard because, believe it or not, the average French person consumes one kilo of mustard annually.  The amount that lies on the side of the plate was not calculated, save it to say that at the height of the crisis in mustard, it was not automatically added to a dish, whether, for example, as an element of mustard Gaston chicken or just left on the side of the plate.

I would have thought the mustard would have been grown around Dijon, and while that may have been case, it has been clearly insufficient. The reason for the mustard shortage lies far away in Canada, which provides 80 per cent of the brown-grain seeds (brassica juncea) needed for Dijon mustard. A devastating 2021 heat wave in the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, blamed on climate change, halved production and left French companies scrambling to secure seed supplies.

The centre for English mustard making is Norwich, where Colman’s mustard manages the classic English mustard, with its “hot” appellation. It is a mixture of yellow and brown mustard seed. While Colman’s always hovered as the acme of English mustard, Keen’s mustard powder was the condiment we grew up with, mixing it with water, put in its special pot on the table. Always with roast beef, my earliest memory of little yellow blobs swimming in gravy waiting for the late entry of Yorkshire pudding, my grandmother’s contribution to Sunday lunch, her overture before we could start eating.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted the supply of the yellow mustard seed, used in German mustard, which is very much the mustard used in USA with the classic hot dog in a roll. Turmeric is added to make it even more yellow. Both Russia and Ukraine are major producers of the yellow seed. Together with Canada and Nepal, they contribute over 70 per cent of the world production.

Where does Australia rate? Not one of the major players, I’m afraid.

In Australia, there is interest in mustard growing. It grows as an alternate crop to canola, but it is more drought resistant. The move is part of a succession/extension of the small, family-owned Yandilla Mustard enterprise at Wallendbeen in south-west NSW. Yandilla has grown into a venture producing 200 to 300 tonnes of mustard seed annually. By comparison, Canada produces 200,000 tonnes, with most coming from Saskatchewan.

In Australia, interest as far as can be ascertained, is in the brown and black mustard seed and also in growing giant red mustard, which is a very spicy Asian green, tasting like horseradish, and valued in a variety of Asian dishes – not part of the seedy diaspora.

So, there you are, the mustard story in a brimming moutardiere.

And bonne nouvelle by the end of this year, it is anticipated that the mustard shortage will be much improved. But just another testimony to climate alteration – not being able to cut the mustard.

Dwelling on Stable Circumstances

I have always been interested in housing policy, even before I ran a community health programme in Victoria. I have lived long enough to have experienced periods where it seemed that all forms of public housing were tried.

In looking back, I have noted how “slum clearance” has changed into “gentrification” of the inner suburbs. Slum clearance meant destroying many of the old working-class suburbs, built when Melbourne had expanded in its boom period of the nineteenth century. This housing stock was built at a time when Melbourne was unsewered, with a network of cobbled lanes for the convenience of the “nightmen”. Much of this housing stock had fallen into disrepair, a situation aggravated by the Great Depression.  It was a time when the growing middle class was building and buying into garden suburbs, where the blocks were large enough for such estates to develop integrity – “the quarter-acre block” became part of the language.

No longer was there the need for outside toilets and a network of cobbled lanes.  But in the inner suburbs these persisted. Worker cottages were often poorly maintained, where hygiene was lacking and poverty obvious. Vermin brought disease, and while a variety of public health measures was introduced, infant mortality remained relatively high and both acute infections like streptococcal pneumonia and chronic infections like tuberculosis were rife. Hence, these suburbs were ripe for renovation or replacement. The large concrete buildings were seen as the preferred solution.

The Holmesglen Factory, which had been geared to the construction of small arms during WWII, provided the industrial base for the prefabricated concrete which provided these 20 or 30 storey blocks of flats, to replace the slums. In retrospect, the question is how many of these houses would have been renovated if the Housing Commission had not acquired the land and built what soon became eyesores on the skyline of Melbourne.

Vertical slums

These public housing colossi were stark from the beginning, the homes now a vertical slum-in-the making. They did not break the culture of poverty, just concentrated it. Indeed, unless the residents are provided with accommodation that goes beyond the basic, then what hope is there for successful intervention in the cycle of poverty, poor housing and poor health.

Having inherited some money, I invested in inner suburban properties, and while they were habitable, there was always work to be done on leaking roofs. Before receiving this modest inheritance, I had been a tenant in the inner city near the hospital before buying a terrace house close to the University of Melbourne, the deposit paid out of profit gained from selling nickel shares. One of our tenancies had ended abruptly when the roof leaked so much that the staircase became a waterfall.

Having been a tenant, I tried to be a reasonable landlord. The first property became known as “the pot house” as I subsequently found out after the police raided it and took away a large crop of cannabis sativa growing in the back garden. That was one experience. The other was when the ‘beads and sandal” student renters lit the candles too close to a rack of flimsy garments and the top floor sustained some moderate damage from the subsequent fire. The investments were in stand-alone houses, which now 40 years later have nevertheless survived to become expensive properties.

The other trap which I have is to buy into blocks of flats where the body corporate is a “stacked deck”. In other words, the body corporate is set up in a way that the incoming buyer has no say. Getting into the fraught area of rental is not for the faint-hearted; and it is where altruism is scarce.

A sense of home was underpinned by aspects of the housing service, property quality and affordability which are potentially amenable to intervention by housing providers, both public and private. These findings raise questions about the extent to which social housing providers and the private rental market can meet the needs of vulnerable tenants – the raw side of gentrification.

Earlier, my father had bought a block of land covered in blackberries in the then outer suburb of Jordanville in the 1940s. Essentially, the area was rural and quiet until 1947 when Housing Commission, Victoria moved in and built street after street of concrete and brick houses and two storey flats. The young married couples with children who occupied these low-cost houses increased the local population six-fold between 1950 and 1956.

On one side of the then Bayview Road was a public housing estate which stretched back into Ashburton; on the other side the epitome of middle class status, the Riversdale Golf Club. Eventually, the houses were released so they became privately-owned homes.

The Housing Commission administered this building program. I remember one of the Commissioners, during a visit to the Commission in an attempt to find common ground as part of trying to form a liaison between community health and public housing. The discussions were pleasant but aimless, and as the discussion was coming to an end, this Commissioner offered us a whisky. It was 11 a.m. The Victorian Housing Commission lasted until 1984 before it was abolished.

The other housing programs that I encountered when I was running community health was the construction of public housing in small country townships. Again, these estates concentrated poverty and disadvantage, given that other areas of the public service tried to use these estates as dumping areas. Released from prison, given a rail ticket to one of the four corners of the State, ending up in colourfully titled places of public housing like the Bronx . While these estates were not universally bad, they still perpetuated that culture of poverty, and moreover, stigma.

I lived through the Whitlam era where the advocacy of regional centres, specifically constructed, was so important that a specific Federal Department was created. There were great expectations held for Monarto in South Australia, but in effect only Albury-Wodonga arose as the program’s legacy, through the creation of the suburbs of Thurgoona on the Albury side and Baranduda on the Wodonga. I used to attend meeting as a Victorian representative on one of the Committees, where we had pleasant lunches and where the wheels of change moved glacially.

Yet then there was diversity. There were public servants directly interested in housing people – not only developers looking for a quick quid. These became the dominant drivers of increased housing. Estates constructed were without much attention to the services, which the private sector left to the local authorities.  The neo-liberals may shudder but travelling around planned environments of which Canberra is the greatest example in Australia does have charm.

What have we got? A crop of huge houses consuming whole blocks of land in outer Melbourne suburbs with twee names like Cloverton and Caroline Springs, expanding into these monotonous estates resembling from above as a giant series of the Roman testudo, totally at odds with Australia’s climate. These are testimony to the rise of private housing unfettered by public surveillance.

Housing policy for so long in abeyance is now front and centre; but there has been a reluctance by Government to be involved rather than just devolving it to an essentially unregulated mess. I believe among the mass of data available the ability to identify what works is to trump ideology. From what I see we are a long way away from a solution, but one thing is for sure, masterly inactivity, otherwise known as laissez-faire, will not work.

She’ll be Apples

In January 2020, the Dunns Road bushfire burnt over 330,000 hectares of pine forests, orchards, and grazing country around Batlow in the New South Wales Snowy Mountains.

It destroyed around 20 homes and damaged hundreds more.  –  ABC June 2021.

Batlow and the surrounding countryside, which is famous for its apples, was hit by the severe bushfires which carved their way through southern NSW in 2020. The fact is that one does not associate orchards with fire  burning them up.  I kept a  report of the 2020 severe fires, which burnt many of the fruit trees. It was an uneven experience. For example, a major grower, Montague, had 75-hectares of apple orchards around Batlow, 206,000 trees producing a wide variety of apples. It experienced only minor damage, but nevertheless, the quality of the apples suffered. Other smaller growers experienced greater losses.

One grower summed up his plight by saying, “That the biggest issue would be the clean-up, and then making sure that we have got sufficient cash flow to get through until harvest in mid-February. It will begin with Gala apples, then go through until early May with Pink Lady.”

The Big Peeler

The sign of the future, the “Big Apple”, survived without any sign of scalding, as did the Big Peeler, which lies closer to the heart of Batlow.

One person was reported as saying as the bushfire threat was receding, but looking to the future, “This is really unprecedented territory.  It is just really difficult to comprehend reality. As much as I am looking forward to getting back up there, there is a certain amount of dread to what we might see.”

Yet, within a year, Batlow had rebounded and experienced a bumper harvest. This was helped by the drought lifting, which in itself had provided the favourable conditions for the revival of the orchards.

A lack of backpacker labour during the pandemic meant turning to innovative solutions to get through the season. Thus, for instance, one grower invested in two apple picking machines that can assist workers who would otherwise bear the load of carrying heavy sacks and climbing ladders. At $150,000 each, the machines have been a significant investment, but one that the orchard manager has said to be well worth the cost.

The destruction of the fires has been replaced by improved infrastructure, but twenty years ago there were 75 growers and now there are just twelve. Despite technological improvements as mentioned above, just to be an apple grower is increasingly unviable, and the lifeline to profitability is diversity.

The growth of the cider making industry in Batlow, with its festival that attracts large crowds, heralds a change in emphasis, and it might be said that when fire comes, in the reconstruction, the replacement orchard reflects trends in the popularity of apples and other fruit (cherries are being increasingly grown) and the products, particularly the fermented product – cider.

Around Batlow, attention is being paid to clearing the land and planting away from the pine plantation and other wooded areas.  From all reports, Australia is entering a period of low rainfall and hence drought. What is interesting to see is what has happened to a circumscribed industry and its associated population centre after the fires; and how quickly nature and human ingenuity given the right climate can not only regenerate the industry and the township but also maintain its new level of bushfire surveillance.

As one may say “she will be apples”. But not without the energetic efforts described above.

Tangier

Tangier to me was always that notorious flesh pot on the North African coast.

But there is another Tangier. It attracted my attention years ago when I learnt that many of the inhabitants had orange tonsils. Tangier is a small island in Chesapeake Bay, a 322 km long estuarine lake, increasingly salt water, which splits Virginia and Maryland. When taking the train between New York and Washington, one passes along its shore. Thus, this lake abuts the urban world.

Tangier Island

On the other hand, there is Tangier, an isolated small sliver of wetlands slowly sinking into the Bay, where the population has fallen to 500, where fishing, soft shell crabbing and oyster harvesting are the major industries, and where the people speak a Cornish American dialect, almost completely unintelligible to the average American.

Cornish families arrived progressively from 1678, when the Crocketts were one of first five to settle, (nearly all have the same few surnames Crockett, Pruitt, Thomas, Marshall, Charnock, Dise, Shores and Parks). Only the Crocketts are reliably known to be among the first five families that settled here.

Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a genetic disease, in this case it is characterised by the absence of HDL (high-density lipoproteins), the failure of not being able to make HDL. This results in esterified cholesterols being deposited in the reticulo-endothelial system, noticeably in the tonsils.

I have always been interested in these people who maintain their individuality, where the pressures to homogenise the society are compounded by the advances in communication.

There are lessons I’ve learnt from reading about a community that could be dismissed as a quaint relic without a voice in Virginian politics.

There is always resistance, but for the Tangier Island, it may come by trying to save an island where the highest point is only just over a metre above sea level. Otherwise, an isolated forgotten community inhabiting a piece of land slowly sinking in the Chesapeake Bay will be no more by 2037.

A shrinking community with a hereditary disease with a high morbidity, given that the deposition of the lipids is not restricted to the tonsils but also among other organs, in the coronary arteries of the heart.

There is no alcohol on the island with its strict Methodism. Visitors must observe the rules.

What price is America prepared to pay for its preservation?

It is always the dilemma of whether such small communities should be able to maintain a separate voice, when so many of the policy leaders lean towards a utilitarian approach. on their terms.

Mouse Whisper

Reading The Economist (Rodent edition)

If you want to learn a language just for fun, start with Swedish. If you want to rack up an impressive number, stay in Europe. But if you really want to impress, bulking up your brain to master Cantonese or Korean is the sign of the true linguistic Ironman (or woman).

 

Modest Expectations – Additional Problem

In 2004, when owing to accidental bipartisanship between then Opposition Leader Mark Latham and Howard, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was abolished.

This was written by Jon Altman. I was somewhat bemused by the comment in Crikey when they were listing interventions in Aboriginal Affairs by government, it seemed to draw upon this comment. When such an assertion is made, it should be complete. The action should not be divorced from the antics of Geoff Clark, ATSIC’s last Chair, which provided that unsympathetic political duo of Latham and Howard, natural bedfellows separated by Party allegiance, the excuse to close ATSIC down. Mention of Howard and Latham immediately engenders a reaction from the instinctive “YES” to such a decision. ATSIC was a Hawke initiative enacted in 1990 and, despite Howard reducing its funding when he came to power, would have survived if the Man from Framlingham had not manoeuvred himself into the role of ATSIC boss.

As The Conversation has recently reminded its readers, ATSIC’s primary roles were to formulate and monitor programs, develop policy proposals, advise the minister and coordinate activities at all levels of government. It spent Commonwealth government funds on specific programs, measured in terms of achieving social justice.

Sound familiar? There has been some discussion about the difference between ATSIC and the Voice – none of which is particularly convincing. There is no guarantee that the Voice will not end up like ATSIC, except if the referendum is passed it will be enshrined in the Australian Constitution. However, just because it is so enshrined, it does not mean that Government needs to do anything about it. For instance, the provision of dental benefits for Australians is enshrined in the Constitution, but no Government has ever addressed this power.

Mr Clark

But back to the embers of another time when an Aboriginal organisation had been assigned considerable responsibility and funding. The sparks still fly from once was a vibrant organisation. Ironically in this coming October when we have ben asked to vote on the Voice, Clark and members of his immediate family have been arraigned on over 300 charges of fraud, with the case set down in the Victorian County Court. They were first charged in 2019, and the basis for the charges stretches back years before 2004 when ATSIC was being trashed. Now why has Geoff Clark not been asked about the Voice?

He is an inconvenience, but he would not be the first or the last to be what the media call a “colourful personality”.

Was Ronald Dale Barassi the Greatest Australian Rules Footballer Ever?

Ron Barassi died this week at the age of 87.

I grew up playing Australian Rules football. The twelve elite football teams were part of the Victorian Football League.  In 1957, my club Essendon played extremely well in the second quarter of the second semi-final and won the game. It was unexpected given that Melbourne was highly favoured, having won the premiership in each of the previous two years. Thus, I, the optimist, went to the Grand Final, where Essendon were again facing Melbourne two weeks later in the Grand Final. I found myself behind the goals to which Melbourne were kicking in the first quarter.

The ball was bounced and was kicked towards the Melbourne goal. Suddenly, out of the pack Ron Barassi exploded, grabbed the ball, kicked the goal. In less than a minute, the Grand Final was over. Barassi went on to be best on ground, kicking five goals. Melbourne won by 61 points.

That was Barassi, the fearless, the impetuous, a football genius in a very good team, such as Melbourne which won six premierships between 1955 and 1964. The only time Melbourne lost unexpectedly was in 1958 when Barassi was brutally taken out of the game.

Barassi’s style of play presaged the change in the game which occurred with the introduction of the interchange. Coaching Carlton in winning the 1970 premiership over Collingwood he told his team to move the ball forward at all costs. This use of handball was an example of a Barassi masterclass. Interchange was eventually introduced in 1978, and handball execution is one of the main areas which separates the champion team from the lesser teams.

My other reminder of Barassi was very different. I used to drive the Hamilton Highway every other week. It was far different from the Princes Highway which also connected Geelong with the Western District of Victoria. It was essentially a speed track as mostly it passed through small townships, and in parts was very straight. The joy then was traffic on the Hamilton Highway was sparse, there were few trucks and police patrols were rare.

Lismore is a small township on the Western Plains about 100 kms from Geelong, where I would sometimes stop for a pie and coffee. Approaching the township from the west is an innocuous line of trees. In October 1976, Barassi was driving his blue Mercedes when he wrapped it around one of these trees, seriously injuring himself and his passenger, Neil Roberts, also a former champion footballer. Both eventually recovered, but Barassi lost his spleen, which meant that he had to take prophylactic antibiotics for the rest of his life.

Every time afterwards when I drove through Lismore I saw the tree remnant which remained. It served as a reminder of an episode where both Barassi and Roberts dodged the Fell Sergeant.

Even more so when it occurs to yourself. A major car accident on country roads is a test of the will to live, as I found out almost five years later when I wrapped myself around an electricity pole near Shepparton.

It is strange what you remember, when others have a closer association with a man who had the presence that would suck up the power in any gathering he joined. This is a special quality, which in turn made it difficult for him to have ever been anonymous – even if he ever would have wanted to be. 

Plied with Privilege

This week, Delta Air Lines announced sweeping changes to frequent-flier perks that will start in 2024. While the airline says its revamped system has “simplified” the SkyMiles program for repeat customers, it’s actually dealing a significant blow to the middle class of travellers, inciting outrage on social media and promises from some to quit flying Delta altogether.

In a Tuesday announcement, the Atlanta-based airline detailed how it would make it much more difficult to earn coveted Medallion status. Simultaneously, it plans to take away unlimited access for American Express cardholders to its Sky Club lounges, some of the swankiest in the United States.  Washington Post 16 September.

Essendon Airport

If you take a plane from Essendon Airport in Melbourne, it is as though you are vaulted back into a time when it was the major airport. It is still a place used by some of the small regional airlines.

There was no problem parking. It is free.

You would mill around as you do now. There is a café where you can buy coffee and a snack. The call for your flight. Paper ticket checked. You stroll out to the plane. There is no security.

That was how it was once in simpler times. Of course, plane travel then was relatively uncommon and comparatively expensive.

When I first joined Bill Snedden as his principal private secretary in 1973, Snedden had access to the airport manager’s office. This enabled him to make private phone conversations and shielded him from the “glad-handers”.  Lounges did not exist back then in the early seventies.

No lounge, but fashionable 70’s purple seats

There was no security then to negotiate. This was fortunate, for Snedden was notorious for being late. There was one occasion when I had to wrangle delaying the plane to Canberra until he arrived. Oh, for the good ol’ days, when the media cut you slack and there were no barriers to boarding, bar the ticket.

Snedden always flew Ansett until its demise. I became inured to travelling almost exclusively on the airline. I was surprised when I was invited in a friendly letter from Ron Eddington to join the Ansett equivalent of the Captain’s Club. I always thought it a case of mistaken identity, and my membership was withdrawn a few months before the airline went “bottoms up”. It was certainly convenient, and it was a time before the iPhone changed the dynamics in relation to ease of communication.

Once frequent flyer points became available in the 1980s, they were awarded to individuals, this privilege did not differentiate the payer, and employers made rules on a case by case by case. Membership gave access to lounge facilities, but airlines set up further special privileged areas to shield the Chosen. It was just a variation of the ancient differentiation between patricians and plebeians, although with a difference. The Frequent Flyer lounges became themselves differentiated depending on the frequency of flying – bronze-silver-gold-platinum hierarchy.

The reason for privacy which provided once a legitimate excuse back before the lounge proliferation was rendered obsolete with the advent of mobile phones. The lounge land lines were no longer required, and when one reflects on the whole matter of privacy, in these Captain’s Clubs with their concentration of the important, there are only so many corners for the conspiratorial phone exchanges.

Takes all types

The Qantas’ Captain’s Club is essentially a concierge service for the politicians and their ilk to send off their accompanying staffers to ensure that they would be at the front of the queue when there are “stuff-ups”, which became the Joyce signature contribution to airline travel.

Thus, the Captain’s Club members have endured minimal pain. While ensconced in their Lounge they gossiped over their single malt, in the Departure areas, the ordinary passengers milled around with minimal service, minimal information.

I just stopped flying, even though once the wheelchair arrived, “going to gate” had been well organised, but even in this service there were cracks.

Joyce knew precisely that everybody loves a “freebie”, especially if it projects an aura of exclusivity. He was not the only one, and once the Joyce brand of toxic leadership becomes a distant memory, the privileged Captain’s Club will resume transmission, perhaps a slate of those eligible, with a limited number of Captain’s pick. It should be acknowledged, that the new CEO cut her gold implants on determining who was on and who was not on the List. The List of those inducted into these Halls of Name should be published. But the single malt will remain, as will the sophistry of the reasons for the continuing existence of this pool of privilege. Unless Qantas takes the route of the American airlines and make itself even more unpopular.

Nevertheless, there is an important administrative dimension to the top-end exclusivity. At least, they have herded those with a sense of entitlement into the one space, and thus when there is a “stuff-up”, you do not have these individuals and their retinue running free around airports crying out how important they are and why they should be number one in the queue and thus potentially causing even more chaos.

Finally, as illustrative of those days when there were no lounges but there were still persons of entitlement, one of my colleagues told me that he was at the Delhi Airport as a staffer for a very important Head of a very important Government Department awaiting to be called to their flight when a Douglas DC-8 crashed short of the airport, killing 10 of 11 crew members, and 72 of 76 passengers. The Very Important Bureaucrat’s response: Bugger the crash, I need to get back to Australia.

The chaos thus had not deterred the Very Important Bureaucrat from ordering my mate to get him on a flight. The airport was closed, but Sense of Entitlement trumps everything, even if my mate could not even find a phone. 

The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS)

Having worked with and for the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS), I was somewhat surprised by the latest advertisement seeking contributions from the public. Depressingly all the images are of whitefellas being treated in what are unconvincing imagery. To spend a great deal of money to provide an aerial medical service to the outback stations and small settlements without any acknowledgement that one of the major communities which require the service RFDS is the Aboriginal community.

To show a service which is all-white at a time when there is a community debate on the place of Aboriginals in the future of the nation is also somewhat insensitive.  Then when you look up the search engine, RFDS was certainly linked to the Voice – but only because there are two TV programs of those names being produced by Channel 7.  One the normal bodice-tearing dramas where (a) the RFDS provides an action-packed background for the activities of over-sexed screen doctors and nurses and (b) the Voice is an all-aged vocal contest to see who can scream the loudest and a set of judges who speak in exclamation marks.

Data on the impact of providing health care for Aboriginal communities is incomplete. Quoting one data set, it showed that between July 2013 and December 2015, the RFDS conducted 75,763 aeromedical retrievals, equivalent to 83 aeromedical retrievals per day. Indigenous status was recorded for 62,528 patients. Of the 62,528 retrievals, 17,606 (28.2%) aeromedical retrievals were Aboriginal Australians from remote Australia.

When I first worked with the RFDS, many of the key performance indicators (KPI) were based on aircraft performance rather than health care. Under Clyde Thomson, then CEO Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia (SE Section) and for a crucial concurrent period Chair of the Broken Hill Hospital, the RFDS ran health care clinics at Wilcannia, a predominantly Aboriginal town on the Darling River 100 km to the east of Broken Hill. With the introduction of the Sydney University Department of Rural Health, Aboriginal health care became a very important component of RFDS health care.

Thus, 20 years later, here is an RFDS advertisement seeking donations, with ne’er a mention of its contribution to Aboriginal health care. As I said above, depressing.

Who would have thought it!

There are seven States which deliberately or inadvertently still have Confederate symbolism.  The most Confederate characteristic is the gaudily painted Cross of St Andrew. But there are others, such as the State of California, hardly a Southern Republican State, which have a different symbolism. Nevertheless, the symbolism is linked to the Confederacy. The challenge is whether anybody cares despite the exhortation at the end of this description.  Well, as long as the Cross of St Andrew is banished. In the case of California, it is that bear! Read on.

In June 1846, a couple dozen American men in what was then the Mexican region of Alta California took over an unarmed fort in Sonoma and raised a flag painted with a red star, a grizzly bear and the words “California Republic”. Some of them were maybe a bit drunk.

A few weeks later, a U.S. naval squadron showed up in Monterey, and its confused commanding officer raised the Stars and Stripes and claimed California for the United States. The “Bear Flaggers” lowered their banner, and four years and a war with Mexico later, California joined the Union as a free state, meaning slavery was banned. Decades later, in the early 20th century, a version of the Bear Flag became California’s state flag.

So what does all that have to do with the Confederacy? 

First, California might have been a free state on paper, but it wasn’t in practice. Many of its early American settlers were proslavery Southerners who brought enslaved people with them, and others enslaved the Indigenous people there, including most of the Bear Flaggers, according to historian Jean Pfaelzer in her recent book, “California, a Slave State”. Enslavers used slave labour in the gold mines, advertised slave auctions in newspapers and went to great lengths to conceal from their human chattel that they were actually legally free. Numerous records show California abolitionists purchasing enslaved people to grant them the freedom they were already supposed to have.

As the nation descended into civil war, Californians were fiercely split, and a number of communities flew the disused bear flag to express their support for secession and slavery. Some even proposed the Pacific states break off and form their own nation.

In 1911, the bear flag design became the official state flag, and once again the move was stained with racism, journalist Alex Abella wrote in a 2015 opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. The flag had been revived again by the Native Sons of the Golden West, a Whites-only fraternal group that pushed anti-Asian immigration laws and whose president wrote in 1920, “California was given by God to a white people, and with God’s strength we want to keep it as He gave it to us.” The lawmaker who introduced the flag legislation in 1911 was a member of the group, according to Abella, and proposed anti-Asian legislation in the same legislative session.

“It’s time California dump that flag,” Abella wrote. “Like the Confederate cross of St. Andrew, the Bear Flag is a symbol whose time has come and gone.”

Mouse Whisper

I got a free ride – tucked away in my straw nest in the Car. We went to Queensland, and I was able to catch up with my banana-bender relatives.

Then I saw them.

What were those long poles doing lining the highway at intervals? There were about 20 metres high and near the top had cross bars, which gave the impression of a very elongated Cross of Lorraine and short pieces of white pipe. Enquiries found that they were gliders’ poles to enable the sugar and squirrel gliders to cross the highway, and even if they don’t make the top they often land down the pole and scramble to the top. If the distance is too far to glide – thirty metres is taken as a benchmark – a box rope ladder is strung between the two poles, and thus the glider can climb across the remaining distance “unglided”. Got to watch out for the circling hawks and eagles though.

 

Modest Expectations – McKay Patten Tomkins 

Driving down the Hume Highway in the second week in September, it was a reminder to me that September the First is Wattle Day. Little recognised, it has been my preference for celebrating our nation as Australia Day. It is a symbol of renewal, as the wattle flowers, emerging from their nondescript greenery, in which their yellow flamboyance overpowers the landscape. Egg yellow, canary yellow, saffron, burnt yellow – the whole range of this primary colour dominates, and is with green our recognised country’s colours.

Yet there is the other colour that dominates the landscape but for a few weeks when it is overcome by the wattle efflorescence and that is the blue-green of the eucalyptus, that of the ubiquitous colour of the Blue Mountains seen from a distance.

Our flag, not midnight blue, yet represents the night sky where all other colour is lost in the darkness. The problem with the flag is the blot of the Union Jack – a symbol of how our country has been ripped off by the United Kingdom who sent what they thought as human effluent into a land which they soon viewed as locked into the Stone Age, under the name of New Holland.

Wattle Day converted to Australia Day would be just that stimulus to drive away the negativity in which, whether white fella or blackfella, we have been caught. Sure, celebrate 1 January as Federation Day, with all the mustiness that is projected on that day from the painting of the Duke of York opening Parliament, surrounded by a phalanx of triple-breasted elderly men, frozen in time, in the painting by Tom Roberts.

Consign the current Australia day to being a NSW Welcome to Whitefella Day. When you analyse 26 January, it is really New South Wales Foundation Day. When I was a child, Australia Day barely registered apart from signifying the end of the summer holidays and back to work, after a long weekend. January 26 may or may not have been incorporated in those long weekend dates. Australia Day itself was a very low key celebration.

But I am a revolutionary in regard to celebration. What with giving Chuck the boot, and substituting Matilda Day for that bizarre King’s Birthday celebration, when it is not his birthday. I have advocated that previously, but who is listening?

Overall, a better fit, but let’s face it, a holiday is a holiday – and for most Australians they wouldn’t care if the government established a holiday to celebrate The Drover’s Dog. Content would not matter. The business community would pluck a figure out of the air and say how much Australia would be losing in production, and for most Australians it would be just another day, while the media would beat it up showing dignitaries laying wreaths for the Unknown Dog or every bloody dog known being paraded as part of the endless media cycle to win the National Canine Cup. 

Biden – Why?

Trump’s probable path to actual victory is via a slender electoral vote majority, with less than a majority of the popular vote, quite possibly aided by a third-party drain on Biden’s votes. Trump might indeed arrive at his swearing-in on Jan. 20, 2025, having been convicted, still facing trial in other cases — or both. And he would owe his political survival to religious fundamentalists and right-wing nationalists, who would staff key positions in his government. 

When I read the above, the fact is that if the Democrats could produce a candidate rather than an octogenarian, who is a known plagiarist and hence a person so bereft of ideas but duplicitous enough to hijack other people’s ideas without attribution, then it is not surprising that Trump is still in the race. I do not believe that America is a land with a sizeable minority of fundamentalists and right wing nationalists enough to give Trump a second term if his opponent was not Biden.

Biden may still have his marbles, but it is the presentation.  His face is a mask. An engaging smile is offset by a pale face under a wispy white thatch and hooded eyes where, as he walks, he dodders. He tries hard to appear younger, but he is 80 and it is inconceivable that he could withstand the decapitation of America, the climate tempest which is intensifying and the madness of Vladimir Putin. And then there is his son, unfair as the accusations may be, Hunter Biden is being weaponised.

So, to Biden, I think you should look at yourself and in the mirror there is a selfish old man. You the man, who catapulted Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court by a sexist demolition of Anita Hill. Judgement appalling.  Has it improved?

Go, gracefully.

The problem is finding a Biden replacement at short notice. For all her good intentions, the Vice-president has not set world alight. But as I wrote in 2020, Amy Klobucher, Senator from Minnesota, was my personal choice. To which I now add Gretchen Widmer, the Governor of Michigan. Both would withstand the bluster of Trump, but I wonder whether America is ready for a woman President.

If they are, either of these women would make very good Presidents, but then I am a long way away – and perhaps too prejudiced, unable to abide Biden, but objective enough to believe this current President is just too old. That is the overwhelming problem given that it will soon be impossible to change. Thus, the choice of the Vice-Presidential candidate will be crucial, even if unfair perception of senility propagated by Trump does not render Biden prematurely dead.

Once upon a Time along the Dawson

Records of the Yiman mainly concern the Hornet Bank massacre which took place on 27 October 1857. The incident took at a site known as “Goongarry” which had been squatted by the Scottish immigrant Andrew Scott who had applied for a tender over this area of Yiman traditional land in late 1853. It has been assumed, on the basis of settler practice, that Scott had occupied this stretch of territory at least a year before that date.

Though Scott’s tender was approved four years later, he leased the property to a shipwright John Fraser in March 1854. Fraser died later that year of pneumonia, and the lease was continued by his wife, 5 sons and 4 daughters, who, disregarding Scott’s advice not to allow blacks anywhere near the holding, befriended the local Yiman, since they had experience earlier of friendly Aboriginal workers on various stations on the Darling Downs. The family also employed a tutor Mr. Neagle. According to the account of the sole survivor Sylvester Fraser who managed to hide after being skulled by a nulla nulla, they had been attacked either at dawn or according to other accounts just as the full moon rose, by roughly 100 tribesmen. The three oldest girls were raped before being killed – Wikipedia 

The Dawson River, confluent with the Upper Dawson River, is a waterway that runs through Jiman Country, where the infamous Hornet Bank Massacre took place in 1857. The marking of this historical event, the Hornet Bank Massacre, does not memorialise the deaths of hundreds of Jiman people but rather refers to the deaths of eleven settlers and one displaced Indigenous man who were occupying Jiman Country at that time without local permission. The word massacre in the title of this historicised event, all its capitalisation, attempts to silence the other story of murdered men, raped women, stolen children, poisoned dogs, and all the pain of the white violence that preceded and followed this inevitable confrontation.

Marcia Langton, one of this country’s most revered and respected scholars and activists, has Yiman sovereignty. She has spoken of the ‘horror stories’ carved into the recent generations of her ancestry and has taken her family to Yiman Country to see the graves of her executed ancestors. Her grandfather ‘belonged to the Yiman people’ and was born ‘on the banks of the Upper Dawson River. This is far too close for comfort. – Sue Pike University of Melbourne (Pike uses both Jiman and Yiman to describe the one mob)

The first excerpt above is easily accessed. It is the Wikipedia account.  The second is less public. Pike seems to epitomise some Aboriginal academics brushing over the Fraser family massacre. Other murders had taken place earlier by the Yiman; for instance, one Mr. McLaren of Isla and Waterton, as reported was “waddied” to death on Kinnoul, a property near Taroom on the Dawson River, in the winter of 1854.  Shepherds were often attacked, but no details were appended.

“Native Troopers”

Now Marcia Langton, the truth teller, is part Yiman, according to her often-stated affirmation of heritage. She has been saying her ancestors were massacred, but she does not identify the role of the native troopers in these massacres, which occurred over the next twenty-three years, until the Yiman culture was wiped out. The numbers are immaterial, the Yiman culture was destroyed.  But not without a fight, in the end unequal that it may have been.

Remnants of the Yiman did survive and in 1998, they filed an application with the National Native Title Tribunal (NNTT) for recognition of native title to an area of approximately 14,020 km2 about 75 kilometres north-east of Roma.

The case was concluded in 2016 when Mr Justice John Reeves of the Federal Court, sitting in Taroom, approved a consent decree. The judge said that the court order did not grant the Iman native title; instead, it recognised their pre-existing title; and their continuing connection to the land, despite its being 150 years since they were forced into hiding.

The Dawson River arises in the Carnarvon Range in Central Queensland, where there is a wall of images. Frankly, I felt uncomfortable walking along beside the wall, because I felt I was intruding on women’s business. I interpreted the images as a birth register of the local people whose land abutted that of the Yiman.

There were no custodians there when we visited some twenty years ago. The Dawson River flows into the Fitzroy River, containing a wide variety of fish, including barramundi and the occasional crocodile. The Dawson River is lined by Dawson palms which are found nowhere else. We passed through Taroom, but we could not remember seeing the memorial on the Leichhardt Highway to the Yiman. This is a rock where there are cuts to represent spear cuts and on the top of which is a replica of a grindstone for seeds.

And lest we forget, there is a small memorial to the Fraser Family alongside the Hornet Bank Rd near Taroom.

The next episode in this Aboriginal saga is the entry of David Marr, whose latest book is due to be published in early October, The Killing for Country. Apparently, David is horrified that his ancestors were involved in the killing of Aboriginals, but from the blurb, I’m not sure to which of the culprits he is referring. It will be interesting to see whether he ascribes to the Yiman as being a warrior tribe feared by other Aboriginals.

Looking over the sites where David Marr is visiting to promote his book, Taroom is not one of these. However, Forest Lodge, Bowral, and Eltham figure strongly – and of course, Maleny in Queensland. Says something about the constituency.

Remembering Theodore

When one mentions places like Taroom and the Dawson River, you need to also mention they are tucked away in Central Queensland, and for those living south of the Queensland border, they are in a virtually unknown but beautiful part of Australia when not beset by drought or flooding rain.

Theodore and Dawson River

There is Theodore downstream from Taroom. Theodore is described as a special place because with Dawson palms in the main street, the township is said to have the appearance of a tropical town even though it is well south of the Tropic of Capricorn.

Theodore is named after Ted Theodore, variously Queensland Premier and Federal Treasurer in the Scullin Government. He was involved in a number of murky dealings, in which his association with Jack Wren was a prominent feature.

Theodore was also linked with an irrigation project in the Dawson Valley which failed in the early 1920’s, nevertheless the reason for the existence of the township.

Bruce Chater

I have been to Theodore, the former redoubt of Dr Bruce Chater, when I visited him twenty years ago. Since that time the Dawson River had flooded Theodore in 2010, but the township seems to have recovered, albeit with a few scars.  Watching a documentary made ten years later that seemed to be the feeling.

The township of about 500 people had been totally evacuated, the first Queensland township for this ever to occur. The natural constriction of the river, coupled with Theodore being located where Castle Creek drains into the Dawson, means that there is a one per cent chance of the 2010 experience re-occurring each year.

It is unusual to have a doctor in a town that small, but Bruce was one of those traditional doctors who sustain the myth that a doctor can do anything, from emergency treatment, delivering babies and then looking after the child as he or she progresses through all the ages, so eloquently characterised by Shakespeare.

Bruce maintained his practice by judicious use of general practice registrars, and when I was there, two female medical students had just arrived. Bruce and his wife, Anne, ran a very efficient country practice and Bruce sold himself very well as the archetypical rural medical practitioner.

Queensland is the spiritual home of the rural doctors, and the impetus for a separate rural doctors’ association came from there and, coupled with the establishment of a medical school at Townsville located within James Cook University, gave rural medicine a substantial amount of intellectual capital, which inter alia led to the recognition of the rural medical generalist program.

While the main driver of this whole field of rural medicine can be attributed to the genius of Ian Wronski, it was important that there were exemplars of “country medical practice”; and undoubtedly Bruce Chater was one of these.

The problem Bruce Chater seems to have conquered is succession planning, having recruited his successor, Elizabeth Clarkson, who incidentally was born in the nearby town of Moura, and commenced as Bruce Chater’s replacement in 2021. Even so, Bruce stills seems to have a presence in the town.

I’m not sure whether this doctor who succeeds him will be prepared to sink thirty to forty years of her life into one small township, no matter how congenial the lifestyle. Bruce made an interesting comment that his practice was well served by having 2.5 full time equivalent (FTE) doctors; his ideal being three. Now that is what I call “congenial”.

Bruce has been always the optimist; he never bewailed the problems of rural practice. Being optimistic, talking up the value of his practice is a far better recruitment strategy than his peers, who always emphasised the inability of recruiting anyone – the “we’ll all be rooned” syndrome.

That is the bugbear of rural practice – maintaining continuity, avoiding the locum trap (in that the practice becomes so fragile as being only staffed by the “fly-in-fly-out” doctors); only countered with long term succession planning.

Thus, following the fate of the Theodore practice over the next decade will be fascinating.

Hoping it Pans Out

When you live with a debilitating bowel condition, you must cope with chronic pain and bouts of diarrhea among a plethora of physical symptoms. Then there’s the emotional afflictions, chief among them is what I call toilet anxiety.

I’ve had it since I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis a few years ago. Whenever I go to a new place, I must know right away where the nearest restroom is. Or worse, I avoid going out entirely for fear that a flare-up will surprise me on the road.

This above was cri de coeur of a correspondent in The Washington Post.

In the United States, public toilets are hard to find with only eight public toilets for every 100,000 people. But it varies widely from Wyoming which has 44 toilet facilities to Louisiana and Mississippi only one for 100,000. By contrast, Australia has 37 toilets for 100,000 people but, as I found out one day, that statistic means nothing when the public toilet is difficult to find, or below ground or up steep stairs – for a disabled person it may as well not be there. That is a perennial problem of old buildings, pre-dating the days before sewered toilets, when the toilet was an add-on in many of these buildings, and hence awkward to use for the disabled.

There have been innovations in making public toilets more user friendly, but setting time limits on their use is not conducive. Unfortunately, in our world of privileged Captain’s Clubs and the like, the requirement for public manifestations of these private facilities has received minimal attention, particularly in the urban setting. Try finding an accessible public toilet that does not require stairs in any city.

I remember needing to find a public toilet in a rural Alabama town. I eventually found one, but it was locked. I made it to McDonald’s who kindly allowed me to use their rest room but let me say it seemed not have been recently cleaned – like a year. The graffiti on the walls and door were as depressingly similar, as that found I suspect everywhere in this forgotten land of public responsibility around the world.

Time for this simple requirement for accessible toilets to be incorporated in national policy, and I’m serious.

Mouse Whisper

They were travelling along the Carnarvon Highway and said to be near the small township of Injune. The Highway was clear; night was approaching and they needed to get to Carnarvon Gorge where they staying. So she uncharacteristically accelerated beyond the 110 speed limit. Quite considerably as she recalled; and horror of horrors, up ahead was a policeman flagging her down. She feared the worst because the speed she was doing could attract harsh penalties. Slowing down, working through the excuses, she stopped.

The policeman appeared at the window. Not the slightest bit interested in her speed. Instead of the suspected speeding infringement notice, he just wanted to do an alcohol “breath test”. He was behind in fulfilling his monthly quota and was trying to catch up.

The policeman thanked her after the reading was recorded as negative. She drove off after thanking him too.

They reached Carnarvon Gorge just after dark, the signs of relief still on her face.

Carnarvon Gorge

Modest Expectations – William Randolph Hearst

Todd Sampson.  What a groovy folk hero with a cool propensity for those laconic T-shirts with “Meaning”. The boy who emerged from the poverty-tinged town of Sydney, a coal town on the tip of Canadian province, Nova Scotia. Born 53 years ago. Environmentalist, vegetarian, swinging from his own heroics, Sampson ran a major advertising agency which legitimised him appearing on the ABC “Gruen” show as a regular panellist. Given that the show likes to pillory those advertisers who demean business with dodgy advertising, I wondered why the program had never touched Qantas.

But then Todd Sampson, the avowed environmentalist has been a non-Executive Director of Qantas Board since 2015; that committed consumer advocate is a Member of the Qantas Remuneration Committee and a Member of the Audit Committee; sharp-eyed defender of public good is de facto Defender of the Qantas Business Practices.

Need I say more. Crikey has. It has labelled him “egregious”. I suppose that term has validity for a person who has over 200,000 shares in Qantas and an annual remuneration of close to $300,000 from the Irish ATM of the late, unlamented Alan Joyce.

Geoff Allen

I mentioned Geoff Allen in my blog earlier this year. I have not seen Geoff Allen for years but in the article that he wrote in the Australian Financial Review recently, I detected that the Geoff whom I knew when he and I were still young men, still burned bright.

Geoff Allen eventually ran a very successful consultant business, but while working for Bill Snedden when he was both Federal Treasurer and Leader of the Opposition, Geoff was keen to build up both his contacts and knowledge in policy development in politics.

In 1978, Bill Callaghan, director of the Australian Industries Development Association (AIDA) retired. He had been a close associate of “Black Jack” McEwen in the Department of Trade before taking on the role in 1968. He was succeeded by Geoff, who had been developing his profile in academia after he left Snedden in late 1973.

Geoff was always interested in the creation of a research/policy development area within the Federal Liberal party. The drivers were a group who had worked together at McKinsey’s and had gone on to be successful businessmen or Liberal Party apparatchiks. One of the McKinsey people was Rod Carnegie and he, John Elliot and Jim Carlton were strong supporters of the concept, and Geoff Allen played an important role in assuring Snedden’s support.

It was a characteristic of Allen in that he was true conservative, his smile concealed a ruthless streak and, in several instances, I witnessed how he protected Snedden. I was interested to read his article.

He did not mention his own direct involvement in the AIDA, which was essentially a foil for “McEwenism” and the whole question of sheltering business from overseas competition through tariff walls. But as Allen writes, without mentioning his hidden hand, the AIDA became more progressive, “pursuing a more open economy and a progressive policy agenda through pioneering research- based advocacy.” That in the proverbial nutshell is the Allen strategy.

Allen is critical of the current Secretariat being the public face of the Association, as it leads to polarisation, and a predictability of reactivity and defensiveness in response. He believes the office bearers of the time should be the face of BCA.  mentioning the early successes of the BCA, he sets out where he believes the BCA has drifted. The BCA’s early endeavour in enterprise bargaining and the introduction of a GST, to get the BCA to see the other side’s arguments can be attributed to Allen.  His journey with his Chair, Rod Carnegie to visit 80 CEOs was a very Geoff Allen tactic. The quality of “schmoozing” is vastly underrated unless, like both Carnegie and Allen, they were both very adept. Avoiding confrontation while progressing one’s agenda in the Australian political system which is built on an adversarial foundation is quite a skill.

Allen stepped down in 1988 and went on to form his own successful consulting firm, hiring on the way Vince Fitzgerald which added to the intellectual content of his firm. After he had left, Allen pointedly notes Keating excluded the BCA from any participation in the 2010 Vision summit. Rudd was equally incandescent, as Allen says. The perception that the BCA was too close, if not coincident, with the Liberal Party had destroyed its effectiveness as a broker.

Jennifer Westacott – hardly a Geoff Allen

Once grandees of the Liberal Party, as Allen identifies them, were vocal in advocating the BCA should be to the Party as the ACTU is to Labor, objectivity was lost.  I suspect knowing Allen, he did not see it that way, and it may have been one of the precipitating factors in Geoff setting up his own consultancy firm.

“In reality, the BCA has declared and meticulously maintained its aloofness from party politics”. Here Allen expresses his own philosophy which sits at odds, with the recent appointment of a Liberal Party hack to the position of CEO of BCA.

Allen is critical of the drift to the BCA adopting ideological approaches, and where vested interests overwhelm public interest. Allen’s concern is the climate change denialist position fostered by the fossil fuel industry is now the policy of the BCA. Evidence is tossed to the wind, but Geoff, what would you expect of a Board of which Alan Joyce is a member?

On the positive side, Geoff Allen is still heard and his article is clever and pointed as only Geoff can write.

IVF

Some weeks ago, The Economist had one of its special reports and this one was reviewing the current situation.  I wrote a letter to The Editor, and given I am a person from another age, and the publication has limited space for letters, it was unsurprisingly not printed.

What was important was that the review of IVF that I directed occurred in 1988, an early stage before commercialisation of the procedure inserted the significant profit motive. Once IVF was assessed to be a business opportunity then scientific objectivity was hard to find in a fog of public relations.

My letter started (sic):

In 1988, my group was asked to evaluate IVF in Australia by the Australian Government. At that time there were 18 clinics offering basically the same IVF. It was difficult to work out the level of success, which we measured as “live baby in the basket” – counted as “one” even if there were twins or triplets. It was a time when there was still that unfortunate “wow” factor of the octuplet, where unscrupulous doctors were inserting many eggs at the one time. Added to this we uncovered the practice of counting the so-called chemical pregnancies as representing a successful treatment.

Trying to find out the actual success rate was difficult but in the end we estimated 8.8 per cent. Not discussed openly was that the more unsuccessful treatment cycles a woman endured, the more mentally compromised she became. As the Economist article pointed out, there are now added procedures, such as egg harvesting and storage available, but female age and male infertility were and are still substantial barriers to a successful pregnancy.

The Economist article reported a study, by researchers at New York University (NYU), observed just 543 patients at one fertility clinic in New York. But their paper stands out because it followed real clinical outcomes for almost two decades, while most other studies are based on mathematical modelling. The researchers found that 39% of the women were able to have at least one baby using the eggs they had frozen, which may have involved multiple attempts over the 15-year period.

What is meant by multiple attempts?

It is an area where public policy is dictated by the “smiling baby syndrome”, significant pressure from lobbying-savvy individuals, the profitability for the venture capitalists, the asymmetry of information to potential parents and the egregious nature of the advertising. This is coupled with the questionable nature of some putative treatments that continue to stigmatise what is a procedure which, when I agreed to undertake the 1988 review, I came to with a positive attitude, but came away less so.

I finished the letter there, and from the time of this early review of ours onwards, I have maintained an interest. The problem is that there are more variations in IVF introduced over the subsequent decades. I found there were some troubling situations that had developed. From the earliest times, the profit motive was very strong within the services, despite protestations of the primacy of the public good.

The second was the proposition that one sperm, if picked correctly, could fertilise the ideal egg. To me this had the aroma of eugenics given how nature assures fertilisation. Further, where it was the men with infertility, many could not cope with themselves being “the culprit”. How this scenario has played out was barely discussed in that recent report

Yet, the recommendation that Australia consider IVF funding support for Indonesia at the same time supporting funding for family planning, was something else.

I have read that in the younger woman you get a 55 per cent success rate. What happens when you just plan for a natural birth, if that is a word still in use? What is that rate in the same person?

I’m sorry, but the figures overall still do not stand up. Perhaps somebody can stop the carousel and give a frank answer.

The Musical Cigarette Box

One of the major characteristics of our family’s failings is that we tend to be collectors, yet not hoarders.

For years, among the extensive bric-à-brac, my aunts had collected was a music box. But the music box was also a cigarette dispenser.

One pressed the button; the music box played one of its two tunes in its repertoire as the central area gracefully revolved, the bakelite doors opened revealing a cigarette holder behind each door. The box stayed open for enough time to take a cigarette before the doors clicked shut and the music finished.

My wife retrieved it as it was being thrown out after the last of the aunts died. She had been interested in its novelty nature when it had stood on the piano among all the other gewgaws. It is German, modest in its construction, made of varnished pine with six decorated bakelite doors to which the cigarette holders were attached on the inside.

I really had never paid much attention to it. To me it was a music box until it was pointed out that it served as a cigarette holder.  They became very fashionable in the 20’s and 30’s when women were being encouraged to smoke and when it was ascribed with a certain elegance. Some of the cigarette cases made in that era were superbly crafted.

But there were other indications of the societal acceptance of women smoking. For instance, the long individual cigarette holder became an accessory for women who wished to smoke without the brown grubbiness of the unfiltered cigarette on their refined porcelain fingers. Cigarette cases took on more feminine characteristics, delicately made of gold or silver by high-end manufacturers.

My mother apparently smoked Balkan Sobranies before I was born. These Sobranie cigarettes were then perfect for the refined women’s taste. The Balkan Sobranie was black with a gold tip. It was redolent of the Turkish cigarette although manufactured then in London. To me it was really the “all spice” version of a cigarette, but just as deadly as any other cigarette.

Nevertheless, in the years before WWII with women increasingly smoking, fug was fashionable; and one only needs to look at the films of the time to understand that my parents must have adapted to living in this mist of mortality.

And the music box played on.

Just a Jewish Cowgirl from Brooklyn

The following article which appeared recently in the Boston Globe was written by Noel Schaffer, a journalist who writes for the Boston Globe among other journals and papers. He is obviously interested in the music scene. This is a delightful piece, about a time I barely remember.  I do love her rendition of Route 66. Anyway, Mr Schaffer, I have lightly re-edited your piece and am grateful to be able to re-publish it in my blog.

The Bay State Barn Dance mentioned in the article is a live stage show reminiscent of The Grand Ol’ Opry and Nashville, Arkansas and the Ozarks and New Orleans and Louisiana blues. The Barn Dance is spruiked as “jam-packed with musical guests, comedy bits, old-timey sponsor announcements and surprises, all taking place on a full stage set!”

Started last year, the Barn Dance is staged in the Cabot Theatre in Beverley, a suburb of Boston. Described “as a North Shore treasure, a legacy of the visionary showmanship and architectural passion of the Ware Brothers”, it was opened for vaudeville and silent movies in 1920, and at the time was said to be “the most impressive auditorium of its size east of New York.” 

With that, on with Mr Schaffer’s article:

Mimi Roman

In 1954, a young country singer named Mimi Roman took to the stage of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and made her first record, backed by a dream team of session players that included guitarist Chet Atkins and producer/pianist Owen Bradley.

When it was done, Roman wrote all the musicians thank you notes. “I didn’t realize they got paid. I thought they had done it as a favour. Talk about the height of naivete!” laughs Roman, 89, speaking from her Connecticut home. But Roman could be excused for not knowing how Nashville worked: She was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn whose love of horses and cowboy songs led her to become one of the most unlikely country music attractions of the 1950s. Now Roman is making her first singing appearance in 40 years in Beverly, at an event celebrating the premiere of a documentary film about the 2022 Bay State Barn Dance.

Roman was born in 1934. Her mother was a Radio City Music Hall Rockette. Her stepfather ran a successful pickle business, which allowed Mimi to enjoy the horse stables that were plentiful in an era when Brooklyn still had some wide open spaces. “There was a bridle path so you could ride from Prospect Park to Coney Island,” says Roman, who also won rifle-shooting competitions.

Mimi, who used her stepfather’s last name Rothman, entered the Madison Square Garden rodeo queen contest twice but came up short. Hearing that a top MSG official was antisemitic, she dropped the “t” from her name, and promptly won the 1953 pageant. Within months, she appeared on TV shows hosted by Paul Whiteman and Arthur Godfrey.

Decca Records shortened her name to Roman and invented a fictitious backstory that she was born in California that survives to this day online. Roman would go home to New York between sessions and tours, where her showbiz peers, including Elvis Presley, would visit her.

“We would go on little dates to the movies. He was the sweetest guy, an absolute gentleman,” she remembers. Presley tried referring Roman to the management services of Colonel Tom Parker, an opportunity she is still glad she turned down.

Despite working with Patsy Cline’s producer, Owen Bradley, none of Roman’s excellent Decca sides became smashes — she thinks it was because the label didn’t offer DJs payola. But on the strength of her performances, she was tapped to join the Philip Morris Country Music Show, an 18-month barnstorming bus tour headlined by Carl Smith. The tobacco company, looking to generate good will after being criticized for making a donation to a civil rights organisation, offered free admission with proof of purchase of one of their products.

“I got on the bus and said, ‘I don’t want any Jew jokes,’ and they were good about it,” says Roman. Still, going from New York to the segregated South was a shock.

The early ‘60s saw Roman move from the country circuit to the Brill Building near Times Square, a music industry hub. She sang jingles for Sprite and Doublemint Gum, released pop records under the name Kitty Ford, recorded demos for songwriters Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach, and Carole King, and appeared onstage in “Bye Bye Birdie.”

Mimi Roman left the music business for real estate and hasn’t performed in 40 years.

She kept her hand as a radio DJ, a singer with a local band, and an extra in films including “Tootsie.” “One day I was singing and looked at the audience and I said, ‘I’d rather be down there than up here,’ and that was it.”

In recent years Roman discovered that her country records had an overseas following among rockabilly fans. The German label Bear Family reissued her Decca sides. Last year Joe Hopkins released a charming documentary about Roman and produced a pair of releases drawn largely from Roman’s own collection of acetates: “First of the Brooklyn Cowgirls,” a compilation of unreleased ‘50s tracks and radio and TV performances, and “Pussycat,” a collection of Kitty Ford sessions.

Word that Roman was living in New England reached promoter Beck Rustic, who was constructing an event to celebrate the premiere of a documentary about the Bay State Barn Dance, an Opry-style revue that was the centrepiece of last year’s final New England Shakeup rockabilly weekend. The film will screen on Friday at The Cabot in Beverly.

“I’m excited and still kind of dumbfounded that people want to hear me. It’s nothing I could have forecasted,” Roman says. “I’ll be there with my boots on. In fact, it’ll be the same pair of boots I last performed in. They still fit!”

Cowboy Caviar

Texas Caviar

This was one of the recipes from the Washington Post, which appeared in the last week. Also known as “Texas caviar”, the name attracts attention especially given the reprint of the Brooklyn cowgirl article above. “Brooklyn Cowgirl”! “Cowboy Caviar”! How exotic!

The following ingredients are those for this Yee-haw speciality:

  • 400 gms black beans, drained and rinsed
  • 400 gms pinto beans or 2 cans (800gms) if you want more beans, drained and rinsed
  • 400 gms corn, drained
  • 6-8 diced Roma tomatoes 
  • 1/2 large diced sweet onion
  • 2 diced avocados
  • 1 bunch fresh finely chopped coriander
  • juice of 3 limes
  • sea salt, to taste

Instructions

In a large bowl combine beans, corn, tomatoes, and onion. Fold in avocados and coriander to the bowl. Add a pinch of sea salt. Stir to combine.

Even a cooking klutz like myself could manage to prepare this dish where the “caviar” is black-eyed. 

Mouse Whisper

It is always informative to look back on a person’s career as was written then. The following appeared in the SMH, 17 years ago, in an interview with Alan Joyce.

His mathematical skills have been far more useful to his aviation career than a pilot’s licence. The Irish-born Joyce holds a master of science degree from Trinity College, Dublin, with a double major in physics and maths, which has proved invaluable when facing complex revenue management issues such as forecasting the percentage of no-shows on a particular route on a particular day (which allows the airline to over-sell seats by up to 3 per cent).

Given what we know now, one can imagine how Joyce honed such skills over time until such mathematical skills allegedly have become the basis of criminal behaviour. He would not be the first one who allegedly has taken that route, in his case ensuring that he has squeezed every last drop from the Qantas Lemon he has fashioned and the suckers he has cultivated and fertilised (also known as the Board but according to reliable sources to be re-labelled The Planks).

Modest Expectations – All aboard for Wakefield

I last had lunch with Tom Reeve and a few people at the Mixing Pot in Glebe about 16 years ago to thank him for all the support he had provided us in the consolidation of the Broken Hill University Department of Rural Health and his general interest and leadership in improving and maintaining health care.

Tom Reeve

The Mixing Pot has been closed for years and Tom Reeve died at the end of last week, just short of his centenary. Others are better qualified to write about his life, but the progression from being a doctor in the mining town of Collinsville in Queensland (about which he wrote) to be the leading thyroid  and oncology surgeon in NSW and Executive Officer of the Australian Cancer Society demonstrated the breadth of Tom Reeve’s experience and influence.

One memory I have of Tom and Ross Webster (then recently retired from the University of Melbourne but acting as part-time Director of Medical Services at the Broken Hill Hospital) was them sitting in the garden of the Menindee Hotel having a beer. It was in the mid 90s. This was before the hotel burnt down and therefore the backdrop was still the old hotel where Burke and Wills stayed on their journey up North.

Reeve and Webster made a different mark on Australia, when they worked together in Broken Hill for that all to0 brief a time.

There was one flower in that courtyard – a lone red hibiscus. Strange what you remember. As the hibiscus and all flowers are fragile, so is human life. The beauty of flowers, like the enjoyments of life, is fleeting. This quote with its link sums up that privilege of working with Tom. Fleeting – yes; but also so very substantial.

The Problem with having only one Joyce

My real worry in flying Qantas is that it is now an unsafe airline. An irrational fear, but it is embedded in my psyche.

I fuss over the number of frequent flyer points I have accumulated. At present I have over 700,000 points but I doubt the value of the Qantas program. I seem to be bombarded with emails wanting to sell me a whole raft of goods in which I have little interest. Yet try to use them for flights, especially business or first – squeezing through the eye of the needle by comparison would be a doddle.

I once preferred to fly British Airways and their customer service, including its rewards for loyalty program set a standard. I remember the rewards, a touch of luxury with a stay at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris and a weekend at Belltrees in the Hunter Valley. In those days, British Airways even offered an upgrade on Concorde. Days that have long vanished.

I had always travelled domestically with Ansett, and I found their service was very good. I travelled thousands of kilometres around Australia and abroad with Ansett, until it went broke, leaving me with over 600,000 unusable frequent flyer points. I switched to Qantas for domestic flights. I did not harbour any resentment for the Ansett loss.

What has happened?

Ansett collapsing was inconvenient and I had to build a new frequent flyer profile with Qantas, which I did, rapidly reaching platinum status. All this suggests that I wanted to be pampered. No, I just want efficiency and certainty. I have paid for flights with Qantas with that expectation.

The six years before the COVID-19 epidemic arrived, I developed a different insight. I contracted an auto-immune disease, which became chronic and with the chronicity I have become increasingly disabled.

This meant that every time I fly, I need a wheelchair. Distances in airports became just too great to walk. This has meant that for me to board a plane, assistance needed to be co-ordinated. I have experienced other airlines and other airports in a variety of countries as well as across Australia as a comparison.  Depending on other people to get you to and from the plane and the uncertainty that entails does not sit well in one’s psyche when the airline that you are used to coincidentally reduces the level of its services. Part of that is the policy of cramming more and more into economy class. Disabled people need more space not less. Qantas seems not to have given this much consideration.

Qantas has been run by a CEO whose culture is the budget airline reducing customer service, aggressive treatment of his workers, while he panders to his Board and the shareholders. To him, the plane is no better than a bus, but the cost of a ticket is anything but.

How will his legacy be judged – not now, but say in five years?

But there are even limits to Joyce, the Scrooge. He also has a touch of the Heeps, the sycophant. The Chairman’s Lounge system with an associated concierge service is a cheap way to pander to those persons of influence including, so it seems, their children. This has been a Joyce discretionary power, providing a perfumed screen shielding the politicians from the stench of Qantas’ decline in service for the masses. He can manipulate access to the flights using earned frequent flights for his coterie. It is all distasteful, but then the Australian bunyip aristocracy laps it up.

Maybe I am melodramatic, but the level of complacency and non-concern about the overall deterioration, even with the pitchforks at the gate clamouring for change, is mind blowing.

“Prime Minister, don’t you t’ink the livery on the plane advocating “yes” shows how well our airline is appropriately politically correct?”

Maybe. I’m afraid that what Joyce substitutes for an airline, is now a hollowed out advertising hoarding, and hardly a suitable vehicle for carrying passengers in comfort.

Stress and The Emergency Department

I spent nearly seven hours in the emergency department one day last week. I had an uncontrolled nosebleed for 36 hours. The bleeding would stop with pressure on the affected area, but then would start again once pressure removed.  I had stopped the anticoagulant immediately. Still, it takes time for the anti-coagulant effect to wear off.

I went to the emergency department at 11.30am and was home for the evening news at 7.00 pm. I had only gone to emergency department with one clear objective, to have an ENT specialist cauterise the nasal bleeding point as I had been bleeding since late Sunday evening. At times, as I have written above, I thought the bleeding had stopped since I had stopped taking my anti-coagulants and was applying considerable pressure as well as placing gauze plugs up into the nasal canal.

When I arrived the promptness of a nurse getting me a wheelchair and showing concern was interrupted by the receptionist clerk who seemed to have lost something, fussing around, while I sat in the wheelchair. All the time I was glad that the blood was not gushing out as it had been earlier. Eventually, he found what he was looking for and I was allowed to proceed. I passed through the first set of doors and was wheeled into what was labelled hilariously RAFT (Rapid Assessment of First Treatment).

It took me over three hours to see a doctor, and then in the meantime the nurse-driven protocols started annoying me. When I was shown to have high blood pressure – which was already known – I was given a tablet without any reference to my current drug regimen, nor was there any instruction about further treatment. Then another nurse bobbed up wanting to take a blood sample, which I worked out was an INR test, which has been shown to be useless for the “novel” oral anticoagulant measurement that I had been taking. I pointed that out, and the nurse beat his retreat.

The protocol enforcers were ever present and had to be beaten off. I came in with a nosebleed, and yet they wanted to take blood for various pathology tests, and fortunately I had the results of blood tests done a few days before. ECG. Why? Chest X-ray. Why?

I was told my refusal of blood tests (the results of which apparently would take two hours) would further delay any prospect of treatment. At that point I spat the dummy well and truly, and no blood test was taken. I had my complete pathology profile which had been obtained the previous week.

There was no questioning about whom my local doctor was – no sense of referral back to my local doctor. They seemed not to notice I had compression stockings and leaving me in a wheelchair for such a long period was not a good strategy. Fortunately I had a sheepskin, but even sitting on it there was still prolonged compression of my thighs. It was not optimal.

Eventually I was examined by an emergency physician and an emergency physician registrar, and they discovered a small, ulcerated nasal area anteriorly. However, they then admitted that they did not have the equipment to cauterise the area from where I was bleeding. Thus, I had to go up to the ENT outpatient clinic, where I waited for a further hour, the last patient for the day; a lonely sight sitting in the vast outpatient area. Why I could not have been sent there hours earlier is totally due to this protocol driven bulk handling of patients.

I remember when I was responsible for the Casualty aka Emergency Department at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, we reduced the waiting time to an average of fifteen minutes. It was before the advent of emergency physicians. Some of my colleagues have wondered about the long term value of having this intermediate specialty lengthening the time for patients being seen in order to justify it being a separate specialty rather than a salaried hospital practitioner with common sense.

The Emergency Department is stressful enough without having a person like myself being kept there because of the requirement to be examined by a doctor labelled “emergency physician”, when they didn’t have the equipment to treat me anyway. Simple common sense would have referred me direct to ENT outpatients, and saved hours waiting – but as I was reminded more than once, priority is determined on clinical need, notwithstanding most of those presenting can be quickly triaged out of the Emergency Department to a more appropriate clinical setting.

Here the ENT registrar was a young doctor training to be a specialist. She fixed me up in half an hour, to be reviewed in a week, when I can go directly to the ENT Outpatient Clinic without having to be checked through “The Hospital Customs”, once known again hilariously as the Emergency Department. She also prescribed me oxymetazoline HCL nasal spray to be used three times a day for five days.

Finally, after all this stress, I could not be discharged until I was given the “green light” by a clerk attached to the emergency department. Mercifully, the ENT registrar intervened so that she had permission to discharge me. Otherwise, as my wife observed, we would have to stage a prison break.

I was once a doctor, then I was listened to by government; now I am a customer with the added experience of being a patient to complement the knowledge I’ve built up in years of practice. Am I now listened to by the next generation of policy determiners?  No way – I’m just a mug emergency department statistic in a wheelchair, my knowledge of my medical condition not taken into consideration.

You see, when I ran the Emergency Department, I would have looked at the presenting complaint, and quickly confirmed the provisional diagnosis and sent the patient to the appropriate specialist unit or to be seen. I have never had any time for collecting patients.

Epistasis – An Addendum

There were ambulances parked outside the hospital. We had contemplated calling an ambulance at one stage when my nose bleed was particularly acute, and we were unable to bring it under control. In conversation with the paramedics, my wife found out that ambulance officers, including the paramedics, have no special training in stopping a nosebleed, apart by compression for up to 30 minutes. Let me say that compression for that length of time is difficult to sustain, as I found out when my nose was bleeding, seemingly uncontrollably.

Added to the fact that ambulance officers or emergency physicians are unable to staunch the blood except by pressure, it is appropriate for treatment of this condition to be reconsidered. I have since read the NSW Health sheet on nosebleed, and none of the protocol recommendations were used by those in the emergency department. I did it myself (well until eventually the emergency department registrar removed the gauze plug I had inserted).

I was bleeding anteriorly, but as I read on through the material on nose bleed, postnasal bleed may be a far more serious condition requiring specialist attention without delay. One can lose blood very quickly as the postnasal space is the terminus for a vascular plexus to which two arteries contribute.

Finally, it was also incidentally discovered that I have a deviated septum. I remember I sustained a heavy blow as a child boxing in an inter-house final. A deviated septum, means that one of your nasal airways is smaller than the other and more likely to bleed. You live and learn.

Truth-telling

Each year for more than 15 years now, we benchmark the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The point is, what will we do about this gap? Truth is important, but it must be followed by action. Identifying the problem is only a start. The next question is what do we do? And this is why we need a Voice. That’s why the Voice is our first priority. We must change the process to ensure governments and bureaucrats respond to the voices of ordinary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people who truly represent their communities from the grassroots up to the decision-makers in Canberra.

The Voice will be an authoritative representative body elected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It will be a committee, in a sense, an advisory committee, to make representations on behalf of First Nations peoples. No special legal powers to write or implement policy, but the moral power of representing the true Indigenous population of this country. Representation that is consistent. – Rachel Perkins.

Charlie Perkins

The fondest memory of many I had of her father, Charlie Perkins, was the time I was walking across King’s Hall during the dinner break, when Mick Young and Eric Walsh approached us and addressed Charlie: “You coming to dinner with us, Charlie?” It was an invitation designed to publicly humiliate me as I was pointedly excluded. Charlie turned to them and said quietly, “I’m going to dinner with Jack Best.” It was recognition the Aboriginal people were not unquestionably beholden to the Australian Labor Party. It was also recognition that, once he determined a course of action however trivial this gesture may appear, Charlie would follow through.

I knew Charlie at the height of his power. I believed he was too much constrained by the bureaucracy. He was too much of a free-flowing spirit.

Now we have his daughter on the “truth-telling” bandwagon. This is a Marcia Langton ploy to shut down discussion. Truth is what Marcia determines; whereas the stories incorporating the myths and legends belong to each tribe, as it was how they may be interpreted in terms of natural phenomena. We constantly hear that the Aboriginal people have been here for 60,000 years. Then there are thousands of years of silence broken by secondary sources and much speculation. No truth here.

Here, storytelling is important to fill the gap, especially where such tradition is in the main oral. But that is not truth. Truth is something that is accepted – such as the dark side involving the complicity of Aboriginal troopers in the massacre of other Aboriginals and the fact that Aboriginals collected Aboriginal skulls now being repatriated back to their ancestral burial grounds alongside the more commonly stated “truths” about whitefella actions. This is one of my aims – to remove the sense of whitefella guilt and expunge this insidious so-called “truth telling” as if “truth” only exists on one side of the ledger.

Once we admit that we all live an imperfect world, which will always remain so, then there will arise a Voice which, for a brief time, I shared with Charlie as we sat around a campfire outside Old Parliament House 40 years ago. Surely there are other examples that could give meaning to the Voice, as a call for mutual respect in which sins of the past are cleansed rather than weaponised.

My Favourite Gourd

One of my favourite reminders of times we spent in Maine near the Canadian border overlooking the Bay of Fundy is a gourd. My wife had bought it in Maine. I had always associated gourds as water containers that Mexicans lugged around the desert strapped to the sides of their burros.

Yet gourds were found growing all through the New England area from pre-historic times. The earliest gourd carving was found on an archaeological site in Maine and has been carbon-dated to 6,500 years ago.

As one authority has written, growing gourds may have been spread initially in conjunction with improvements in fishing techniques, with small gourds used primarily as net floats. In this scenario, gourd growing spread northward from the coastal plains of the Southeast into river valleys of the Midwest and Northeast as fishing became more significant. The growing of gourds was fully compatible with a fisher-gatherer-hunter lifestyle.

Gourds have been grown worldwide for thousands of years. They have little food value but their strong, hard-shelled fruit, in addition to being used as fishing floats, have been long prized as containers and musical instruments.

This lightweight “container crop” would have been particularly useful to human societies before the advent of pottery and settled village life and were grown before there was any systematic horticulture.

Thus, gourd harvesting was not an impetus for widespread horticulture nor did it necessarily trigger a transition to the Agricultural Revolution.

Women may have grown gourds, but the possible role of women in fishing activities as noted above is more ambiguous than is their role in gathering and eventually domesticating the food plants along the eastern seaboard of Northern America, well prior to white settlement.

Gourds being used for folk art has a long history in south-west USA among the Indian tribes such as the Apache, Hopi, Zuni and in Central and South America among Indian tribes, particularly those of Guatemala and Peru. But I had no idea that gourd carving occurred in Maine. Some of the carvers are the descendants of the local indigenous people.

The gourd my wife purchased has the patina of leather and is unexpectedly light. It is easy to see why the gourd was used as a bag. But our gourd with a narrow opening with a rim of pine needles would be an inconvenient vessel.

Pine needles are only one such decoration; porcupine needles are also used. The needles are usually baked in glycerine water (and dye, if colouring them) for four hours and then dried for 3-4 days. This preserves the needles from breaking.

Our gourd seems polished amber in colour with its circular walls etched with figures of prehistoric horses which seem to have been transferred from the cave paintings of Altamira.

Overall, a piece of art which attracts the eye, and carved in Maine!

Mouse Whisper

The F-16 offers Ukraine the ability to safely strike targets hundreds of km away, deep in Russian-controlled territory. That’s vital if any ground offensive is to succeed.

An American declaration about the refusal to send the latest F-16s to the Ukraine because they might fall into Russian hands is a ludicrous excuse. This implies that you would be using your worst equipment (or at least equipment no better than the inferior equipment of the other side) in all warfare. War is not fought that way, and we all know that.  Just imagine the RAF, in the Battle of Britain, saying that the boffins advocated they use Sopwith Camels instead of Spitfires for that same reason.

Really you American squirrels should stop treating us Australian mice as though we are drongos.

Australian speckled drongo named Barnaby