Modest Expectations – 530 miles and What do you Get?

Good Friday is the day of the year when my belief overrides my scientific logic and training.

An Abbey Homage

William Butler Yeats died in 1939, 337 days before I was born. I have had a contemplative regard for Yeats, who interpreted the magic of Ireland, to which only those with Irish heritage can relate. I recently acquired a commemoration number of The Arrow which was published in the Summer of that year, with a price of one shilling (in today’s terms approximately £2.60). It was the occasional publication of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and “occasional” was the watchword. The last Arrow had been published 30 years earlier. So Irish, but explicable in that Yeats had edited all five of them.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

Yeats was the last surviving founder of The Abbey Theatre, which he had set up with Edward Martyn and Augusta, Lady Gregory (she was referred to as the greatest Irish woman of letters) in 1904. Married to an Anglo-Irish baronet, Lady Gregory’s home, Coole Park in Co Galway, gave its name to this nest of Irish nationalism and advocacy of the Irish language and folklore. Edward Martyn was the fervent President of Sein Fein, but neither Lady Gregory nor Yeats was Roman Catholic.

This slim panegyric is beautifully written by 12 contributors. There are illustrations by five artists including Yeats’ younger brother, Jack Butler Yeats (Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland’s first medallist at the Olympic Games in the wake of the creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats’ painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming). There is a facsimile scrawl of a Yeats letter, which one needs an expert to decipher. Among the advertisements in the publication there is one for “the collected and definitive edition of the works of W.B. Yeats – the Coole Edition priced at sixteen guineas (now £1,350) in eleven volumes”.

Each of the writers deserves a separate section of my blog to themselves and some of the language used to praise Yeats would seem somewhat out of place in today’s world. I will restrict myself to a quote from Oliver Gogarty, the Irish doctor, writer, bon vivant who was Joyce’s model for Buck Mulligan. He wrote about Yeats: “I thought of his ancestry from Cornwall where the names Yeats, Gates and Keats are originally one and where there is Phoenician blood with all the magic of the men who brought strange knowledge from the bright strand of the East to the Shadowy Waters of the far West – men who gave Merlin to King Mark and Yeats to humanity.

Such imagery.

Maud Gonne

On a rainy miserable day I visited Yeats’ grave in St Columba’s graveyard in Drumcliffe in Co Sligo. Unfortunately he was initially buried in France and was not reinterred until 1948. The problem was that in the intervening period the French cemetery was dug up and the bones jumbled, so at best a Hybrid Yeats lies there. But his wife, George, resides alongside him.  She was the woman he married when he was 52 and she 25. She was a remarkable counterpoint to match the Yeats’ genius and assisted him to get over his lifelong unrequited passion for the fiery Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne.

WB and George Yeats

Together, George and the Hybrid Yeats lie:

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,   

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago; a church stands near,

By the road an ancient Cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase,   

On limestone quarried near the spot   

By his command these words are cut:

 

Cast a cold eye   

             On life, on death.   

               Horseman, pass by!

        

And now I have read this remarkable issue of The Arrow, where the horseman can dismount and pause for a moment. In so many ways, Yeats was the Voice. 

Clearer Yet One Day Shall Ring The Song Our Land Shall Sing

Vlinoe Hakkila, Speaker of the Diet, broadcast the proclamation in the name of the government and said that “we believe the civilized world … will not leave us to fight alone against an enemy more numerous than ourselves.”

“To all the peoples of the world!” said Mr Hakkila. “The Finnish people, who always have tried to work with all other nations, have founded their future on their peaceful work. Today they are the victims of brutal aggression from their eastern neighbour without having given any cause for this aggression. 

“We have no choice. This struggle has been forced upon us. The people of Finland fight for their independence, their freedom and their homes. We are defending our fatherland, our democratic regime, our religion, our homes and all that civilized peoples hold sacred.

“So far we are fighting alone against an enemy that threatens to invade our soil, although it is in reality a struggle for all that humanity holds most precious.

“We have given proof that we wanted to do all we could in this struggle, but we believe the civilized world, which has given us testimony of its great sympathy, will not leave us to fight alone against an enemy more numerous than ourselves.”

The New York Times provides what it describes as a Time Machine whereby you can tap into any day and find what was reported on the particular day, and this occasion “the tap” was the date of my birth on eleventh day December 1939 when the conflict between Finland and Russia attracted the front page headlines. Later that article mentions that General Mannerheim, who had defeated the “Bolseviki” in 1918, was assuming command of the forces. Eventually, the Russians defeated the Finns and, in two land grabs, took substantial parts of Finland into the Soviet Union including the second largest city, Vyborg. The problem the Finns had at that time was allying to Nazi Germany, and certainly General Mannerheim fostered that link. In fact, at the end of WWI, the Finns had endeavoured to strike a separate treaty with Germany well before the Armistice.

Now the situation is very different. For a period in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Finns and the Russians lived in a symbiotic relationship. Finland had been ceded to Russia from Sweden in 1809, due to the Russians victory in its war with Sweden. Nevertheless, there remains within Finland a large number of Finns with Swedish heritage. The Grand Duchy of Finland was created under the rule of the Russian tsars, but with the advent of the Communist takeover of Russia, Finland in the ensuring chaos declared independence in 1917, a year before the Mannerhein-led victory mentioned above.  Its independence was confirmed under the Treaty of Versailles.

The Mannerheim Line was built from 1931 onwards as the Finnish defence on the Karelian isthmus facing what was then the Russian city of Leningrad. This was the obstacle the Russians had to overcome when the war broke out on 30 November 1939. The NYT headlines reflected the sparring phase. Because Finland was perceived to be close to Germany, they ultimately received no support from the Western allies, so that the Russians were eventually able to win. Once the Russians brought in heavy artillery that was that; the early superiority of the Finnish infantry, especially in the snow, was neutralised.

In visiting St Petersburg (reverting from Leningrad), one realises just how close the Finnish border is. Nevertheless, even though we were on the Finnish train, crossing the border from Finland into Russia, as we did in more friendly times, it still meant we had to endure the Russian border police with their Siberian smiles.

Finnish Russian border

Times are different in 2023. Finland has completely abandoned the neutrality status that it took as part of the price it paid after its defeat in order to maintain its independence, albeit presiding over a depleted territory. The Finnish/Russian border is now closed. The Russians now have a 1,340 km hostile border with this newest member of NATO. Before Putin’s bellicosity became the driving Russian force, I knew a public health specialist who was undertaking population health research in Karelia, a region which embraces both countries. She was able to freely cross the border to undertake her research project. But now? I suspect the snowshoe is on a different foot. Or more colloquially: a strong will takes you through the grey stone – Luja tahto vie läpi harmaan kiven.  One Voice of Finland!

Galarrwuy Yunupingu

In 1988, the Australian Institute of Political Science held a dinner to celebrate the Bicentenary of Arthur Philip’s landing in Sydney Harbour to commence the colonisation of Australia as one of the red daubs painted on the map of the world. The British were voracious colonisers. Australia Day has not always been celebrated on 26 January. It was first celebrated on 30 July in 1915 and it wasn’t until 1935 that all Australian states and territories used the name “Australia Day” to mark 26 January. It was in 1994 that 26 January became a national public holiday.

The problem with a national day, and we ensured that the Dinner was not on any particular day connected with vicarious symbolism, is that it has been really settlement day, and that of NSW. After all, the Constitution acknowledges that Australia is a Federation, and each of the States has its own unique settlement day. This is what separates our acknowledgement of the Day from that of India, whose Republic Day falls on January 26 also. It was the day in 1947 when the Indian Republic was proclaimed – our nominal birth as the Australian Federation occurred on 1 January 1901. That is an inconvenient date for celebration as it would be overwhelmed by the New Year festivities, unless stage managed – with the probability that would be perceived as “faking it”. After all, the day of Federation is depicted as a starch-ridden affair with a British monarch-in-waiting as the centrepiece of a ghostly diorama of elderly men in frock coats. Hardly the image that would grab the future nation – the spectacle with loosened apron strings but still in the downstairs scullery of the British Empire. Hence January 26 is what was determined as National Day, and 1988, the Bicentennial Year. There was yet for us to feel the fevered crescendo of that date be renamed Invasion Day.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu

Hence, when the Australian Institute of Political Science determined to celebrate the Bicentenary with a dinner at the University of Sydney, it needed to have distinguished speakers who reflected our heritage. One was the then Governor-General, Ninian Stephens and the other Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who turned up in a not-to-be-forgotten powder blue suit. He was still a young man. He had the charisma; he said little but gave a powerful speech. Galarrwuy was not one for small talk.

Gondwanaland, then at the height of their fame, provided the music, and my lasting memory of Galarrwuy was he “jamming” on the didgeridoo with Charlie McMahon.  Charlie had founded the band seven years earlier.  Later in the year, as recounted elsewhere,  Gondwanaland performed at the Tomita Sound Cloud in Sydney – Hymn to Mankind, a AUD$3 million light and sound opera spectacular held on Sydney Harbour as part of the Australian Bicentennial celebrations. The concert attracted an audience of over 120,000, then an Australian record for a live music event. Recently there have been media reports about the remarkable Charlie McMahon, especially in relation to the emergence of the Pintupi nine; his exploits have been reported in my early blogs.

I never met Galarrwuy again, and during my rural travels, I have only once visited Arnhem Land, apart from my visit with Bill Snedden to Kakadu in 1973. I’ve never been to the Garma Festival. When I was undertaking my Rural Stocktake in 1999, that was the first year of Garma and has been described as being no more than a barbecue for the local mob. It has grown from that time.  Galarrwuy was smart – he was able to extract money from Rio Tinto, which he was able to distribute to his talented extended family. Eventually he succumbed to that array of diseases to which Aboriginal people are prone. He received, as with Charlie Perkins, a kidney transplant. Even when it was evident that he had multiple co-morbidities and was increasingly succumbing to them, he never lost his relevance and ruled with majesty, which entailed Australians from the Prime Minister down to show homage to him. They came to him; not him to them. Maybe that is the Voice – an Aboriginal monarch.

A Cough or a Voice?

As I listened to the Prime Minister, with his trademark snarl, in defending the Voice against the Dutton-Ley decision I wondered how many Australians have read the Uluru – Statement from the Heart. I assume this statement may be considered as Day One of the progression towards the referendum to give recognition to the Aboriginal people in the Constitution. It was a ceremonial clearing of the Throat. Having read it, and wondering how many others have read it, it is a most underwhelming document. The only substantive objective I gleaned to begin to understand the motivation is the following with one assumption crashing against the next:

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.  

To me, if you strip away the reasons and do not succumb to the blame games, and the background theme that “it’s everybody else’s fault”, it seems that too many whitefellas have not paid much attention and have not understood how to communicate meaningfully with Aboriginal people. Therefore, they (both whitefella and blackfella) become swept up in the slogans, without considering how to set priorities which the previous and ongoing funding has failed to deliver.

I have always marvelled at the fact that, for such a long period, Aboriginal people divided into its various mobs have roamed this continent, for so long mostly undisturbed, although there is no doubt that there have been periodic incursions.

Trading with the macassars

There were Macassars from Sulawesi in search of trepang and sea cucumbers in the waters to the north of Australia. Then there is the presence of Machado Joseph disease in Aboriginal people on Groote Eylandt off Northern Australia. This is a neurodegenerative disease which originated in the Azores and has a Portuguese genetic signature.

While Dutch ships were wrecked on the Western Australian coast, with the Batavia attracting the most attention, I believe the fate of the survivors of the Zuytdorp, presumably destined to live with Aboriginal people, must have left some genetic imprint. None of the Zuytdorp complement survived to return to Batavia to tell what actually happened to the survivors.

But the one single event which has always intrigued me was the Mahogany ship story, whether it was a Portuguese caravel stranded on Killarney beach near the Victorian township of Port Fairy. No one can find any trace of it now and it seems to be the stuff of legend, including the claims of the mahogany being used in local buildings – the question of Portuguese adventurism remains.

Nevertheless, in large part the Aborigines lived alone for eons, developing their unique culture that we whitefellas did our best to eliminate – euphemistically called assimilation with an overlay of the policies which led to the “stolen generation”.

They lived for generations as a pure outpost of H. sapiens, the modern human race of which we all are members, which had seemingly emerged from the Rift Valley in Africa. As Rebecca Wragg Sykes has written, H. sapiens encounter with Neanderthals nearly led to H. sapiens extinction about 70,000 years ago.  H. sapiens reaching Australia was made feasible by the land bridges. It’s noteworthy that some of aboriginal lore refers to the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. Sykes made the assertion that the genetic makeup of the Australian Aboriginal show traces of the Neanderthal race, unsurprising given how far this H. sapiens offshoot travelled across the globe, only to be isolated by the end of the Ice Age.

This was a unique people who lived for those eons without the wheel, without bows and arrows and, despite the assertion to the contrary, never embraced the Agrarian Revolution. Yet they were close to the Indonesian Archipelago and the Melanesian Island of New Guinea, where the people did have “gardens” and bows and arrows, and where the Torres Strait islanders seem a mix of many people from the South Pacific. The Aboriginal people live close by on Horn Island; the Torres Strait Islanders are different.

The Aboriginal people had an intricate oral tradition and intergenerational transmission as the way the culture survives. One of the difficulties is that western H. sapiens has long abandoned the oral pathway; and where the Aboriginal people lore has been transcribed, it has been done by whitefellas with the co-operation of each of the local mobs.  But so much remains a matter of conjecture.

Recognising the aboriginals by throwing money at them has not worked if you believe that the only substantive matter in the Statement of the Heart is the rate of incarceration. Aboriginal culture is under threat because education and the whole pressure of social media, television and even substance abuse is homogenising Aboriginality. There is no one First Nation in Australia; there is a huge number of strands, of a folk lore, of customs, men’s and women’s business – and frankly I do not know what to believe in terms of what is heritage and what now is confected. How can I? I’m not Aboriginal and, by their own admission, many Aboriginal people themselves have lost contact with their heritage. The one realisation I have through my contact over the years with each Aboriginal mob, is that each has its own traditions – just look at the art and other cultural expression.

If the Voice is to have any impact, it must not be a Whine – and the preservation of Aboriginal culture, with a basis in the elder inheritance of the lore. This must be combined with lifting the Aboriginal people out of the conditions we consigned them to in the past 200 odd years. This oral culture is all very fragile, and prone to self-serving distortion. Because what does Voice mean? Nobody can articulate it – except to enshrine Aboriginality in the Constitution. If that statutory recognition does that, then that will be an achievement. But if it is a cynical political manoeuvre to settle old scores, to try and exacerbate white guilt or to give a small cabal of Aboriginal politicians an enhanced platform and heaven help us, delusions of grandeur, well then what is the point? It will not bring about the change that Australia wants.

Prime Minister, you have cleared the Throat, now let’s see how melodious is the Voice. It is up to you. Otherwise, it is in danger of being overwhelmed by the Noise.

Mouse  Bipartite Whisper

Part 1:

In her recent book “Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love Death and Art” – Rebecca Wragg Sykes has written:

Moreover, despite disbursing populations obviously spreading all the way into Australia by 65ka – adapting to arid deserts and wet mountain forests even an ocean crossing to Indonesia – there is no clear sign of H.sapiens in central or western Europe until 20,000 years later. Perhaps that land was already taken, and the Neanderthals were successful enough, at least for a while, to prevent others coming in.

Part 2:

A recent article in the New York Review of Books, entitled “Finland’s turn to the West” shares an interesting fact:

I guess you know that Finns invented the Molotov cocktail, which was named after Stalin’s foreign minister Vyascheslav Molotov and used by Finnish troops to deadly effect against Soviet tanks during the Winter War( 1939-41).”

Presumably they are now hatching up a Lavrov cocktail to match that attributed to his predecessor – stirred not shaken?

 

 

 

 

Modest Expectations – Shot to Pieces

A union hack, part time actor and superannuation call taker beat a Brunswick barrister for a federal seat. 

Mary Doyle, Member for Aston

This nasty tweet about the new member for Aston, Mary Doyle, hides an inconvenient truth. One can postulate that when Mary Doyle was pre-selected in 2022 to stand against the then incumbent, Alan Tudge, the seat of Aston would have been considered a safe Liberal seat. In 2019, after preferences, Tudge had won 60 per cent of the vote. In 2022, with Mary Doyle now the Labor candidate, a swing of 7.3 per cent was achieved. Then, with Mary Doyle again as the Labor candidate in this 2023 byelection following the resignation of Tudge, she increased her vote not only winning the byelection but also winning the first byelection for the incumbent government since 1920. In the person-in-the-street parlance: “Mary, you’re a legend!”

Nevertheless, the unpleasant Twitter comment has a grain of truth given that nastiness and arrogance occurs on both sides of the political spectrum. When she was first pre-selected, she was probably awarded the pre-selection on the basis that it was an unwinnable seat. Mary Doyle has become the accidental winner, an ordinary person, a loyal servant of the Labor party who had left school early and whose life epitomises the battle for the vast bulk of Australians wanting to survive. “Ordinary” is not to disparage, but she seems to be a true representative of the people, not an apparatchik coddled through the processes which seem to determine the current batch of successful political aspirants. She seems to be a well-balanced, optimistic person despite her various travails. I hope she does well and retains the “ordinariness” that so often is lacking in the rarefied Canberra atmosphere.

Borough or Burrow?

It was a cold morning when we entered the PikNik café on the Queenscliff Road. It had once been a service station; franchised Golden Fleece, which had fallen on hard times. The Golden Fleece brand in addition no longer exists.

It had been converted into a place where rugged-up local tradies and dog walkers came for their morning shot of caffeine. We had just come off the car ferry, which berthed at Geelong at a time which coincided with the middle of peak road traffic to Melbourne.  We had thus arranged to meet a friend, who now lived in Queenscliff, for breakfast.  Queenscliff lies almost at the tip of the Bellarine Peninsula, which forms one of the land masses enclosing Port Philip Bay. The Borough of Queenscliffe is a quaint hangover of the times when Victoria had over 200 cities, towns, shires and boroughs. In mediaeval parlance, the borough was a fortified town, and as a description of a local government area, it still remains elsewhere, notably in New York.

Bellarine Peninsula

Queenscliff in the Borough of Queenscliffe (note the additional “e”) is a burrow for the conservative elderly retirees, and when the reductions in Victorian local council numbers occurred in the 1990s, the local burghers exhibited their isolationist muscle and persuaded the conservative State Government that they should not be absorbed into the Greater Geelong Council, thus saving the requirement to rub shoulders with those Greater Geelong hoi polloi.

One of Victorian politicians made a very perceptive comment: “The Borough of Queenscliffe has not been included in the proposed amalgamation probably because of the number of elderly retired people in the area. The residents of Portarlington, Drysdale and St Leonards have expressed concern about their rates and the retention of the services that have been provided by the local council, such as nursing, podiatry and other services. Those people are used to the availability of face-to-face services and feel comfortable in a rural setting.”

It reminded me of several decades earlier when I was finishing my Doctorate of Philosophy on some aspects of angiotensin I and angiotensin II in the Monash Department of Medicine. I had a fabulous but challenging time, being supervised by Professor Bryan Hudson whose explosive charisma and glittering eye tended to scare the bejesus out of one; but I ended up on very good terms with him. Nevertheless, I could not see myself as a long-time researcher. Frankly, I was not good enough, and being a mediocre researcher was not where I wanted to be for the rest of my life.

While I was undertaking this PhD, I undertook a Master of Arts (prelim) at the University of Melbourne, where I needed to obtain six subjects at honours level before proceeding to writing a short thesis in order to graduate. It was in those days when university education was free, and I completed the coursework over three years. I had always been keen on the social contribution of health care since I had become “the accidental medical student” before graduating as a doctor. My social and student political agenda, marrying before graduation and my involvement in early childhood education with a working wife and two young children made my twenties a busy time. If I had wanted to undertake public health it would meant decamping to Sydney for a year to gain the appropriate qualification from The University of Sydney through its School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In my then situation, impossible.

Nevertheless, my career was never destined to be mentored in any conventional way, and when I searched for a job that would provide the transition into social medicine, there was nothing. Then for some reason, John Lindell, took an interest in me. He had headed the Hospitals and Charities Commission since 1953 and had been an innovative force in the development of Victorian health services. He showed some interest in my desire to change from the laboratory to the community health area.

He raised with me the possibility of setting up what he described as a community health service in Queenscliff. As he said to me, he already had representation from the Borough to set up a health service for the community. There were no specifications, but from my then experience, which included undertaking a multitude of part-time jobs to augment my meagre research fellowship, plus the sociological theory absorbed by my MA prelim, I believed I had the grounding if I had suitable support. Youthful enthusiasm is not enough when confronting a conservative community that wants the resources without any outside interference. John Lindell never pursued my appointment to what was a pilot program, even though I had popped up, seemingly at the right time, willing to set up a pilot program. However, once there was pushback compounded by the negativity of his Deputy, Manny Wilder, he just let the project drop.

This all occurred several years before the development of the community health service concept under the Whitlam government. By that time John Lindell had retired and died. I had moved on, and seemingly the Borough got the services it wanted without having to deal with a pesky neophyte.  The above quote from the parliamentary member 20 years later seems to suggest that it had.

I visited John Lindell in hospital when he was dying of cancer. I think he would have liked me to come along earlier, because our resultant association would have been strong enough to assure his vision of the community health centre.  One unfortunately can’t alter the calendar of birth and death to assure the right mix of people at the right time to assure change. That conjunction had to wait for later in my career.

Queenscliff

Breakfast at PikNik lasted two hours of warm friendly chat and reminiscence, and the bread bought just before we left was likewise still warm, being freshly baked. I wondered how many times more I would visit the Fortress of Queenscliffe, especially as some eccentric just down the road was promulgating setting up the Republic of “Jimland”. Its sovereignty would be defended presumedly by armoured lawn mowers. Not too far away from the sentiments among some of the burghers of Queenscliffe, I suspect. 

Watcher from A Cast Iron Mind

I watched this TV program called Q&A, which I have mostly ignored in the past because it is the megaphone of the self-opinionated who have little to say, aptly described as if “they are reading your own watch”.

In this episode of Q&A, the discussion between the Aboriginal people exhibited a rising crescendo as they attempted to talk over one another – one stridently anti-Voice, the other pro-Voice.  In fact, as the anti-Voice proponent pointed out, the Uluru Statement from the Heart had positioned itself as being that of all Aboriginal people, whereas Uluru was a totem of Walpiri people, who had incidentally not been involved in the development of the statement. This anti-Voice, Jacinta Price, the National Party Senator from the Northern Territory is Walpiri on her mother’s side, giving her a firm base from which to launch her salvoes. Having derided the Uluru Statement, her position was clear, whereas her fellow Senator from the Northern Territory (her land is in the Gulf Country), Malarndirri McCarthy, who represents the ALP, is very pro-Voice; hence the dispute between the two.

Listening to the competing voices reminded one of the disputes within Aboriginal medical services. At one moment one family would be in charge of the finances of a particular service and then that family was displaced by another family, both members of the same mob, the downside of that rivalry providing a lack of continuity with each family having different priorities. This does not help in maintaining staff. Aboriginal medical services do not generally have after hours service nor are open on weekends and public holidays. Disputation among Aboriginal people means that any Voice may not be a unitary force once it goes beyond this pre-referendum oratory.

A recent report among the authors of which were Aboriginal professionals, concluded in relation to the health of Aboriginal people thus: Unfortunately, the Government’s 2020 report card on Closing the Gap progress showed that life expectancy for Indigenous people, and the Indigenous life expectancy gap, have improved only slightly, and outcomes lag behind targets. Strong Indigenous voices are concerned that increased research funding and volume alone will not address this disparity without a corresponding broadening of intellectual investment in Indigenous health. This intellectual investment involves a shift in focus to self-determination, Indigenous-led research, community consultation, and research into the actual causes of ill-health, including racism and other social determinants of health.

Unravelling the learned article speak – nothing much has happened. This financial year, the Federal Government is committing $284.3m with the Ministerial anodyne: The Albanese Labor Government is continuing to work in partnership with the Coalition of Peaks, other First Nations partners and all levels of government to ensure sustained progress over the life of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. The dissonance in full writ is very clear between the two quotes. Obviously quotes can be cherry-picked, but these Aboriginal paradoxes have always worried me from the time I first became involved sitting around the campfire outside old Parliament House yarning with Charlie Perkins in 1973.

Another matter which troubles me is where the tribal elders fit within the Voice. The elders are of paramount importance in a people where there is only an oral tradition to assure passage of tradition.  I have witnessed on many occasions the difficulty of passing on the lore with all its complexity so distinctive for any particular mob, to the younger generation.

My experience itself was a generation ago, but I would like to know  how the “Voice”  takes into account the differentiated men’s and women’s business. I remember being in the mid-west of Western Australia in the late 1970s, in a one-on-one meeting, an elder of a mob spontaneously asked if I would like to see a couple of things that he had at hand. He said very little as he showed them, his voice monosyllabic. When I saw them, I must say that I have never seen the like again. This was men’s business; I was very privileged, the extent of which took me years to realise. I may have talked about what I had seen, but not in print. I continue to respect that insight; but where does that fit within the Voice.  In what appears to be a secular Voice where does the spiritual Voice fit, given that here there is not “One Nation” if the map is to be believed. There is just too much jargon to cover the unexplained; or unexplainable.

A further matter, which again raises questions, is that in traditional settings there is so much non-verbal communication. As I once said, communicating with Aboriginal people means being able to talk through the silences. The experience I’ll never forget was talking to a group of traditional Aboriginal people, and the sense of the non-verbal response I experienced from the audience, none of them announced who was who, but I detected who was “the elder among elders” and at the end of my talk, he said “bloody good meeting, let’s go and have a cuppa”. That was that. I had experienced the Aboriginal Voice.

My trouble with many of the proponents of the Voice is that they are “stateless”. The spiritual heritage of their tribes has been exterminated, and therefore they are faced with having to trying to concoct a lost oral tradition. It makes the symbolism of the Voice difficult to not only explain but also to justify.

It is over 20 years since I undertook the Rural Stocktake. It exposed me to various aspects of Aboriginal culture, including as it related to who is Aboriginal.  I was able to cut through some of the cultural blocks between myself, the “whitefella” and the “blackfella”, such that I had two who called me “brother”.

Therefore, given my exposure to Aboriginal bureaucracy which belies the oral tradition, I am concerned the Voice will continue to be just a flurry of words, full of fine oral argot but meaning nothing in improving the overall condition of the Aboriginal people. I have seen too much of the failure to improve the condition of Aboriginal people despite the accompanying rhetoric to be sanguine.

Finally, Noel Pearson has somewhat bombastically declaimed saying that if the referendum fails, he will fall silent. We whitefellas have a word for that – “sulking”! There is enough juvenile behaviour from the reactionary forces without having a proclamation like that, Mr Pearson.

Lunch on the Oregon Coast

The Oregon Pacific Coast is rugged, varied and, in parts, has quite beautiful beaches, so for an Australian used to living near the sea, one could be forgiven for being blasé. We stayed at Cannon Beach, and one beautiful autumn day, we drove down the coast, and when the lunch stomach rumbles intervened, we sought out a place to eat along the ocean road. We stumbled upon a small settlement called Netarts. We had no idea of the importance of this little place as we plonked ourselves down inside the Schooner café, there being no room outside on the terrace. We accustomed ourselves of the view over the estuarine Netarts Bay. Little did we know at the time that the bay was one of the major breeding nurseries for Pacific oysters.

The Schooner at Netarts Bay

The native Olympia oysters had long been fished to near extinction, and although tentative work was being done, they were not commercially available; but the Pacific oysters which I ordered were the plumpest I have ever eaten without losing a scintilla of taste. Those oysters remain my yardstick for Pacific oysters. Following the oysters, I ordered the Columbia River Steelhead trout, which was cooked in a cast iron skillet. This whole trout had both crispness and an underlining delicious flavour of wild white flesh. Both courses joined my gustatory memory bank. My wife had very small octopus with an admixture of capers, garlic, rosemary and char-grilled lemon. It was a memorable lunch, made even more so because it was so unplanned.

Definition of Obscenity – Washington Post Nuanced

As background to the newspaper report below, the Tennessee 5th Congressional District was one of the most closely watched of the election season because the Republican-dominated state legislature redrew the seat in 2022 during the redistricting cycle, “flipping it” from a Democratic-held seat to Republican, so that it was unwinnable for the Democrats. The District is now shaped like a person on the run. Nashville had been traditionally totally Democratic until this redistribution. There is now only one Democrat representative from Tennessee from an electoral district around Memphis.

Representative Andrew Ogles, a Republican who represents this Nashville district where the Covenant School is located, said in a statement that he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting there that left six people dead, including three children.

Gun-control advocates and Democrats highlighted another post from Ogles — a 2021 Christmas photo of his family posing with firearms.

After news of the Nashville shooting broke, Ogles said in a statement that he and his family “are devastated by the tragedy that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville this morning.”

“We are sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost,” he said. “As a father of three, I am utterly heartbroken by this senseless act of violence. I am closely monitoring the situation and working with local officials.”

Merry Christmas from the Ogles Family

The 2021 photo, which Ogles shared on Facebook, showed him, his wife, and two of his three children holding weapons and smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Ogles wrote, adding a line that is often — and dubiously — credited to George Washington: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”

Ogles is a strong proponent of the Second Amendment and gun ownership. On his campaign website, he said: “Disarming the people is the most effective way to enslave them, and we must remain vigilant when anyone seeks to erode our civil liberties. The rights of the people to keep and bear arms, protect themselves and their families, and prevent tyrannical rule is a fundamental liberty of our constitutional republic.”

Ogles is really a disgusting piece of work, so beware reading his Wikipedia entry. Sewage is everywhere in this entry.

Mouse Whisper

You learn stuff sometimes by not being satisfied with just accepting the name in this case of a racehorse. Many of the names are stupid concoctions, meaningless jumbles of letters, but since my Italian cousin Garibaldi was staying with me and we were sharing an excellent pecorino, the racing guide had slipped on the floor, and my eye alighted on a horse named “Bianco Vilano”. Garibaldi scratched his ear. “Vilano? Vilano – no. there is an Italian word, villano meaning “lout” or “oaf”. But vilano with one “l”? “Bianco” is white. I looked the name up on Mickipedia. For “bianco vilano” read the whorl of sepals of a flower collectively forming the outer floral envelope or layer of the perianth enclosing and supporting the developing bud; I must say I was none the wiser. Then the meaning paraglided in on the breeze – you mean Thistledown.

Modest Expectations – Chasen Hines

Farmed maggots

My eye was drawn to an article in the Guardian Weekly by Amelia Tait on the commercial production of maggots inter alia. Apparently, There is a maggot farm in Wales, which sends 600,000 packaged live maggots every year to various areas of the NHS and other health care providers. As Tait noted: “It is believed that ancient aboriginal tribes used maggots to treat the wounded and some academics argue that the practice ‘dates back to the beginnings of civilisation’. Hundreds of years later, these superbugs are now used to fight superbugs. In an age of growing antibiotic resistance, maggots are an alternative to modern medicine, as they help to fight infection by consuming dead tissue and bacteria. Between 2007 and 2019, the number of NHS patients treated with maggots increased by 47%”.

My encounter with the medicinal effect of maggots came very early in my medical career when I was working in the emergency department of a then outer Melbourne suburban hospital. I was called to see a man who had been found in a semi-conscious state in the bush somewhere in the nearby hills. He had been there for well over 24 hours as I was told, but actually how long was never clear; and he was a man who was sleeping rough anyway. When I was introduced to him, he was conscious -surprisingly alert.

When I moved his tangled hair, still matted with a mixture of blood and mud, I could see the white surface of the skull where the tissue had been removed. It was a little taken aback by the mass of white maggots wriggling on the cranial surface. I tried to look unconcerned seeing maggots since I was being accompanied by staff in the treatment bay with a penchant not to touch the patient. They were closely watching my reaction, but I just asked for an instrument to remove them. As I bent over with a pair of tweezers, I sensed feelings of revulsion beside me. Yet there was a wound to clean and there was no need of debridement. Still, the maggots were reluctant to leave their succulent eatery. It took me a considerable time to remove the bulk of the maggots before the patient was transferred to the ward. I heard there were maggots dropping out of a convenient hole in the galeal aponeurosis for the next week. It caused some unusual form of barrier nursing, when a maggot unexpectedly dropped onto a nursing arm.  Let me say I did not follow him up, but he must have been able to resume his wanderings at some time, maggot free.

Maggots have many uses, and one is their use as live bait in fishing if you’ve the personality to thread them onto little hooks and then attach a berley container, shaped like a ski lift gondola packed with more maggots. I’ll leave that piscatorial maggotry to others.

There are thus providers – the insect farmers. The article was almost breathless in describing Olympia Yarger, ACT Person of the Year 2023, in creating new jobs almost as fast as she’s breeding maggots. She is described as an insect breeding pioneer. Her Canberra-based food-waste-management “start-up”, Goterra, breeds maggots and houses them in internet-connected, remote-controlled shipping containers into which customers dump their food waste. When the insects have eaten through the waste, they’re harvested and sold to farms for use as animal food.

Finally, “white maggot” has long been a term of endearment heard bellowed around Australian football grounds, but recently not so much used now when the umpires are dressed in yellow shirts and coloured shorts.

NSW Elections

A few comments, which immediately occurred to me.

Number one: John Howard is not an electoral asset. Repeat after me:  John Howard is not an electoral asset. He emotes sagely after the election as he closes the stable door. So, when he comes calling in the future, resist the urge to disinter him.

Chris Minns

Number two: Chris Minns, the Premier-elect, has an interesting history. His only real job has been as a house husband; otherwise he is the successful detritus of the Catholic right, an essential conservative who, judging from his history, would have been comfortable with Bob Santamaria and his “Movement”. He has not been deterred from rebuff.  His adherence or not to a strict Catholicism, reflected in the conservative diocese with an archbishop with his shock-trooper Maronite brigade trying to repel most social changes, will be a matter to see in his future behaviour as Premier. The Sydney diocese seems immune from any of the Vatican reforms being introduced by Pope Francis.

The other worrying matter is his failure to hold the gambling industry to account.  Minns has a limp-wristed response in only setting up some half-baked trial. The challenge is to stop this insidious tax on the most vulnerable through the poker machine and defying the “joy-boyo” culture which festers in rugby league clubs and horse racing.

In an acknowledged success story, his wife, Anna has made her name and fortune in her Australian franchise of Terracycle, a waste management business founded in New Jersey. Some symbolism here. But there is more, she has started a new company, Boomerang Labs, which spruiks that it is the first circular economy accelerator, “by finding and helping grow the ideas and talents of entrepreneurs and small businesses that have circular systems and solutions at the heart of their businesses”.  It sounds that this is an interesting family, given that their social presence is interlaced with three sons, seemingly well-spaced. But then the Minns family exudes a calm sense of order, despite the odd aberrant T-shirt.

Southern Lights 

It is Friday evening. The Bureau of Meteorology has issued a space weather forecast indicating the prospect of seeing an Aurora Australis across the whole of Tasmania are excellent tonight. The optimal time in the Southern Hemisphere for viewing this phenomenon is between March and September when the Earth’s magnetic field is best oriented to interact with solar winds. Yes, the television transmission is being interrupted so the electromagnetic gremlins are at work. Then suddenly in Brisbane, the lights have gone out in the last quarter of the Melbourne versus Brisbane football match.  A power outage at the Gabba is the signage along the bottom of the screen. Surely the gremlins have not tracked northwards. Talk about outage, the outrage simmers just below the service among the TV commentators.

Aurora Australis, Strahan, Tasmania

My wife has returned from her perch three minutes’ drive away at Lettes Bay. She has had a clear view to the South. This following night there is a cloud bank to the South obscuring the Aurora, but there is still a red glow visible above the clouds. It is a pity because it is a dark night, and there have been nights where the view has been unobstructed as shown in the accompanying pictures.

Saturday morning, and the Aurora images were rife in the media, sent from all over Tasmania, where there had been no cloud interference. Every colour of the visible spectrum could be seen in these images. The images reflect a show only Mother Nature can show when she is at the height of her powers, The Kp-index describes the disturbance of the Earth’s magnetic field caused by the solar wind. The faster the solar wind blows, the greater the turbulence. The index ranges from 0 to 9, the latter figure denoting that an intense geomagnetic storm is under way. Last night it was an 8 here – highly unusual. There were people on the mainland wanting to come down, but it is a challenge to the tourist industry to catalogue these times, because as with all natural space phenomena there is always a degree of unpredictability – you need both an aurora and a clear night.

When I was in Iceland, Aurora Borealis bulletins were released daily at the hotel where I was staying. The hotel was situated well away from the lights of Reykjavik, but nonetheless to see the Northern Lights in Iceland does not mean long treks in the snow as occurs in Norway or Alaska, accompanied by some celebrity. For a time, it was such an accomplishment. In Iceland, as I have noticed before, if one is booked into the right room, the lazy way of seeing the Aurora Borealis is to stretch, sit up, push your nose against the windowpane – and it may be there. But there is something about standing out in the freezing cold to watch Aurora in her many veils dancing on the horizon, which watching from the warmth of your hotel room can never match.

By the way, the football match finally finished with three of the four light towers in operation. Twelve minutes had to be played, and Brisbane won – just.

Ramadan has Come

I was attracted by this article from the Boston Globe, which sets out what is available after dark during Ramadan. I remember being in Turkey during Ramadan. The early morning banging on a drum woke us up, but unlike the Moslem population, we turned over and went back to sleep. When we reflected back on our time as Christians at a time of Ramadan in a Moslem country, the only real privation was not being able to order alcohol with our meal.

Hagia Sophia

Whilst in Istanbul, we were fortunate to visit the Hagia Sophia in the early morning before the crowds arrived. This is one of those buildings which has remained while Byzantium became Constantinople and then Istanbul.  We were lucky to visit while it was a museum; and as such the Hagia threw out a sense of ecumenical tolerance.

When we roamed the upper gallery we very much alone. We were able to contemplate the icons of Christ and Mary holding the Infant Jesus, which had been covered over for many centuries but must have been painted soon after the Emperor completed the building in 538 – and had survived. This Justinian cathedral became a mosque following the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and remained a mosque until Kemal Atatürk changed its role from a closed place of worship for Muslims to a museum. Predictably, Erdogan has turned it back into a mosque – and the Christian symbolism presumably lime-washed.

Now Ramadan in Australia. There were reports of Muslim doctors being asked whether they were ill because they were not eating food nor drinking during the day. After several reports, I thought it would be useful if the health services where I worked set up an instructional lecture on Ramadan and the reasons for it, which in turn plumbed the core of the Islamic faith. One of the young female interns, came to our attention because of her mixture of piety and wanting to achieve perfection. This led to behaviour which clashed with the health service staff initially. She needed counselling early on in her internship but her quest for perfection proved appropriate when I suggested she might prepare a presentation on Ramadan. She agreed and it proved extremely popular because she revealed herself as a storyteller and one who had an ability to impart her piety in very simple terms. It had an impact on her colleagues, and her devotion to Islam made her a person who epitomised the very best of Islam. In the end, this work helped her professional relationships.

To me as a Christian, I’ve never been much for other religions – other than recognition that the very best of them have been a massive contributor to the world. After all, without Islamic mathematicians, the World would not have any concept of zero.

But then again, my knowledge of Islam remains scant. I have thumbed through the Qur’an, but the Bible is difficult enough, given the sense of craziness which some of the text creates in my mind.

Comparing Holy Script is one route to better understanding. Customs are also informative to reproduce this article from The Boston Globe (albeit lightly edited) indicating what Muslims consume after dark during Ramadan, in Boston at least.

The local Muslim community has roots in many cultures — 64 nationalities are represented among the 1,500-plus congregants of the Islamic Society of Boston, for example. But whatever dishes appear at iftar, the Ramadan fast is always broken in the same way: with dates, the food with which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have broken his own fast.

Ramadan began Wednesday evening, March 22 with Muslims fasting from dawn until dusk during the holy month, a time of prayer, reflection, service, and charity. When the sun sets, customers might break the fast at home with family and friends, at the mosque, or at one of the area’s diverse halal restaurants, some of which serve special meals for the occasion. {Ramadan ends on Friday April 21}

At Peshawri Kebabs in Waltham, patrons can climb a few stairs to a nook lined with cushions, carpets, and tapestries to share potato-filled samosas; chapli kebabs, flattened, minced patties flavoured with herbs and spices; the mutton stew nihari; and other specialties of Peshawar, in Pakistan near the Afghan border.

In the Fenway, Sufra bakes manousheh, Lebanese flatbreads, to order, topping them with the spice blend za’atar, cheese, ground beef, and more. Hummus, grape leaves, fattoush salad, and chicken shawarma are served with pickles, garlic sauce, house-made pita.

Lazuri Cafe in Allston serves kahvalti tabagi — Turkish breakfast plates laden with eggs, cheese, olives, salads, bread, and sauces — plus stuffed eggplant, the flatbreads pide, Iskender and yogurtlu kebabs, and many other specialties of Turkey.

“That’s a tradition for all Muslims,” says Rokeya Chowdhury, who runs Shanti in Cambridge, Dorchester, and Roslindale, as well as Dudley Cafe in Roxbury, with husband Solmon. “That’s a must. Dates have to be present at that table. They are the first thing you consume after water.”

The fruits are included in the meals Shanti puts together for iftar, the breaking of the fast. This is the second year the Indian restaurants have offered iftar meals. “My husband and I observe Ramadan,” Chowdhury says. “This is our offering to people who may or may not have families here, or even if they have families, we’re all busy. It’s our little part in offering it to people who are observing this, as well as sharing it with others who may not partake in it but could still experience the food.”

Shanti’s Iftar Box, available March 22 to April 20, includes kala chana, black chickpeas with potatoes, onions, and spices; piaju bhaji, lentil fritters; vegetable biryani; traditional sweets — and, of course, dates. Friday through Sunday during Ramadan, Shanti also offers haleem, a thick, savory stew of goat, cracked wheat, lentils, and spices. “It’s a comfort food similar to a porridge,” she says. “You simmer it for hours as the meat and lentils break down. It’s a dish traditionally you would see in South Asia around Ramadan a lot. It’s near and dear to our heart, so we really wanted to offer it to others as well.”

Yahya Noor, owner of Tawakal Halal Cafe in East Boston, describes a similar dish made with oats that is traditional for breaking the fast in Somalia, the country his family left when he was a young boy. “It’s sweet, it’s very savory, it’s pretty much delicious,” he said. “That’s something we grew up on. It has a lot of protein. It was almost like a poor man’s food. We also make drinks — passionfruit or mango or avocado — we usually make smoothies with that.”

During Ramadan, in addition to the regular menu, Tawakal will add things like a light breakfast that includes a few dates, tea or coffee, sambusas, and a kebab. “It’s a lighter way to start,” Noor says. “Everything becomes a reverse during Ramadan. We break fast at night.” Each year, the restaurant also approaches area mosques, offering its services for iftar. “A lot of young single guys, people who don’t cook, people who are working, they depend on going to the mosques to break fast.”

To everyone who comes into the restaurant after fasting, Tawakal offers dates. “It just brings an extra good feeling,” Noor says.

Boston Kebab serves a menu which includes a lighter iftar course of olives and the stuffed Turkish pastry borek for breaking the fast before returning for more prayer. Then there’s a heartier meal that includes lentil soup, salads and appetizers, a plate of mixed kebabs or other daily specials, baklava, and more.

When the sun goes down at Bab Al-Yemen, the buffet begins: Come for the sambusas, stay for the Yemeni honeycomb bread, stuffed with cheese and soaked in syrup. “Some people go to the mosque and some people go to the restaurant” to break their fast, says owner Ahmed Mahmood. “We’re kind of the only Yemeni cuisine in the area, and it makes it an exotic thing.”

Iftar – evening meal during Ramadan

The Kenmore Square restaurant is offering a rotating smorgasbord all month long: dates, soup, bread, appetizers, spreads, salads, four main courses (one lamb, one chicken, one seafood, one vegetarian), and a variety of desserts, fruit, and cold drinks.

Reservations are required. They weren’t last year. “It was mayhem,” says Mahmood with a laugh. “We learned a lot from that.”

The buffet begins at 7 p.m., whether customers have been fasting or not.

“Nobody will eat until sundown,” Mahmood says. “But it’s open to everyone. We welcome everyone.”

The Deciduous Australian

This is our last week at our Tasmanian property. As we walk down the pathway where the tangle of tea trees has largely been removed, there was revealed a slender tree with small, saw-toothed glistening green leaves, some of the leaves are brown.

I always love the autumnal glow, the flashes of red, yellow, and brown. Having once followed the Fall-line in New England, it is an experience expected where there are stands of exotic trees.  Tasmania is no exception.

My wife walked in, having taken a small cutting from a tree which I initially thought to be a specimen from the only native deciduous tree species in Tasmania, and the only cold-climate winter-deciduous tree species in Australia.

Nothofagus gunnii

The Nothofagus gunnii is a compact alpine deciduous beech tree, believed to have been in Tasmania some say, for 40 million years. As those familiar with Tasmanian South-west, there is a belief some of the forests may have existed when the dinosaurs walked the Earth. But this is a flora which has been very little disturbed by human depredations. Strangely, Australia has relatively few native deciduous trees and this particular beech is the only one that loses its leaves in autumn. It grows very slowly and fire will permanently destroy it.

Nothofagus cunninghamii

But alas, our discovery was of Nothofagus cunninghamii, the myrtle beech, which is not deciduous but has foliage superficially similar to that of its relative, Nothofagus gunnii. When Nothofagus cunninghamii has brown foliage, it is not because the leaves are ageing, rather that the leaves are young. Yes, Nature has her own paradoxes. 

Mouse Guest Whisper

Despite a fondness for a mouse-sized macchiato every morning, I never aspired to own a coffee machine (apart from their size, which is not compatible with a mousehole-sized household). Visits to a well-known coffee emporium in downtown Leichhardt, Sydney’s little Italy, always showed the downside of coffee machine ownership – those machines all seemed to break down and join a very lengthy repair queue that snaked off into the distance, seemingly never diminishing.

So, I was interested in a tale from a coffee man in George Town Tasmania, Australia’s third oldest European settlement, that he was never concerned about the growing number of coffee machine owners. Every year, straight after Christmas, his coffee sales would drop off, but by March, like clockwork, they were all back … coffee machine owners, he said, can’t be bothered to look after their macchiato makers and so they would start to make “sad” coffee and would all come back to his coffee shop.

He had a particular claim to fame for a small-town coffee shop – he owned one of only two vintage Rancilio espresso machines in Tasmania, perhaps the whole country – a gold machine with a flying eagle on top. Personally, I would have thought a flying mouse more appropriate, but I kept that thought to my mouse guest whisper.

Modest Expectations – Buenos Aires 1972

Defence Minister Richard Marles summed up the situation well on Wednesday by saying we live in the most strategically complex and threatening period to exist since the end of World War II – Red Alert publisher Mr Shield

Their Lordships of the Admiralty, with their hierarchy of Admirals under the First Sea Lord; the War Office with its Secretary of State and Army Council; even the later-created Air Ministry again with its Secretary of State—it was in these historic bodies that rested the real, practical control. Moreover, the responsibility of their political heads to Parliament had scarcely been altered by the emergence of the Minister of Defence.  Harold MacMillan, quoted by Arthur Tange

Approaching the lunch table I was accosted by the formidable and testy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, creator and guardian of America’s devastatingly powerful sub-surface nuclear strike capability, and notoriously defiant of control by his nominal superior, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt. The Admiral abruptly dismissed my explanation about the need to satisfy Parliament in our democracy saying that, if we did not want the US Navy to defend Australia that was fine by him and, as a coup de grace, after listening to us he saw no reason why they should be shouting us lunch – Arthur Tange

The prudent planning of defence preparation requires genuine intellectual rigour. Instead, all that is evident in the submarine announcement is intellectual rigor mortis, and the realisation of an idea of a former prime minister who was more famous for marketing than substance. -David Livingstone – one time graduate, Australian Naval College, in SMH opinion piece 15 March 2023

Now, thanks to AUKUS, Australia’s manufacturing will be built on a foundation of defence, specifically buying and making nuclear submarines. But there is likely to be an opportunity cost in that. Given the amount of money involved there won’t be much, if any, left for anything else, such as the global energy transition, health care and agriculture – Alan Kohler New Daily 20 March 2023

Paul Keating is an old man and many of his gestures are those of an old man. His brain is still sharp; he speaks with a verbal brutality that nobody can challenge publicly because of the immensity of his achievements in nation building. This has left his successors their only pathetic defence that the world has moved on and somehow he and his views are irrelevant. It is a new world, so they say. What utter rubbish! Why take his phone calls? He’ll just slag off if we do not agree – after all, he does it in public anyway.

Wong, Marles, Albanese are saying that he is of a different age; and have become a public chorus – with a variation of the “more sorrow than in anger” theme. Wong has perfected the low affect style of the Delphic oracle. She is measured; she weathers criticism with or without abuse by corridor whispering. A perfect foreign minister of whom Talleyrand and Metternich would be proud.

Defence Minister Marles

Marles is the classic politician captured by the Defence establishment. He fits the succinct description which former British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, himself a former Minister of Defence, warned of the capture by the “top Brass” of the defence forces. Marles grew up in Geelong Grammar School, where his father was a teacher for many years, and even with his Left credentials there’s no way he would not have been exposed as a schoolboy to those of the same ilk as those now in command of the defence forces. He is obviously comfortable being with his own class, although there are nominal differences theoretically in his political views.

There is no doubt that like so many of his predecessors as Minister, whether Labor or Coalition, whether it be “Bomber” Beazley or Peter Dutton, he has just dutifully spouted the American and or British line.  And what of Bevan Shields’ description of the profundity of Richard Marles? Yes, I read it, but where is it?

Now for the Prime Minister. Here was the man who on the first day of the last Federal campaign did not know the simplest of facts, stumbled, simpered, tongue poked out for some reason. David Crowe, the SMH political writer, in a recent by line identified him as the “trippy” Prime Minister. “Trippy” is a slang term for a person under the influence of a hallucinogen, and sometimes the accidental trip up contains a modicum of truth.

Albanese does not seem to want to offend, and his antics in India where his obsequious dealings with the current Prime Minister Modi suggest that he does not quite get it. Modi is a dangerous figure, whose politics lie at the extreme edge of Hinduism, whose embrace of Putin is well known, but where the prospect of an alliance against the Chinese seems to have lured Albanese into an uncritical acceptance of a man whose abuse of civil rights rivals that of Xi Jinping. Such a contradiction did not go unnoticed by Keating – nor should it by us.

When Morrison unveiled AUKUS, it was thought that this was the dying lunge of a discredited government waving the flag of jingoism; that it would die with his demise. But that has not occurred. Morrison had dumped the French, who still have a substantial presence in the South Pacific, for an alliance with a nation which has Pitcairn Island as its last remaining possession in the Pacific. It no longer has any strategic place in the Pacific Ocean. British Prime Minister Sunak, in his AUKUS speech at San Diego on 13 March, referenced Barrow-in-Furness and Derby as places in Great Britain which would benefit from Australian nuclear submarine construction.

As reported, on 10 March 2023 the U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the French President Emmanuel Macron held the two countries’ first bilateral summit in five years. They inter alia pledged to aim for a permanent European maritime presence in the Indo-Pacific, notably by coordinating deployment to the region of France’s Charles de Gaulle and the UK’s Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales aircraft carriers. No mention of submarines.

Two days later, Sunak met with Albanese prior to the photo-opportunity the next day. In the Australian Prime Minister’s words: “We discussed our shared commitment to bringing the Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement into effect to benefit businesses in both our countries.” Anything else?

As reported in the San Diego Union Tribune, Biden said Australian sailors will embed with the navies of both countries and study at schools specialising in nuclear-powered subs. In 2027, the U.S. and U.K. will begin placing their own submarines at Australian ports on a rotating basis. Now the USA has 275 vessels, 71 of which are submarines; Britain has a total fleet of 72 ships, 11 of which are nuclear submarines and, as the Union Tribune reported further, Australia has just under 50 ships, less than the Americans have docked in San Diego.

The paper dismisses the Collins class submarines as if they were some sort of ancient craft, an underwater galleon methinks. However, given all the aggressive talk about the defence capability of submarines, only two submarines have sunk enemy warships since WWII, which may say something about the deterrent capacity of having submarines. Nevertheless as Rex Patrick has  noted, American and British nuclear submarines have been involved in offshore bombardment of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Did the President stick round to talk to Albanese after such a momentous decision? No, he headed off to San Diego International Airport to board Marine One to fly him to a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe. Albanese was off to Fiji.

In simple terms, (a) the USA, by transferring its ageing nuclear submarines to us, also transfers the responsibility of nuclear waste disposal – if nothing else. The rumblings of “not in my backyard” have already started here in Australia.

(b) The British just want to flog off their nuclear submarines, thus supporting BAE ship building in Barrow-in-Furniss and the Rolls Royce nuclear expertise facilities in Derby.

(c) Australia pays a great deal of money, essentially for some very expensive toys.

What Keating did was to draw attention to the fact that the whole business seems to have been transferred from a regime known for its stunts to a new regime which had promised political sobriety. Yet nothing had changed; no real debate was entered into as the media mostly tried to smother any such discussion. The new Government was committing Australia to this enormous expenditure which frankly, on the face of it, does not make sense.

I do not follow the Keating assertion that increasing the number of Collins submarines will provide the defensive cover which his scenario projected. Nobody seems to have explored the workforce requirement, which is an important factor given that, at different periods of time, Australia has not been able to crew the Collins class submarines and apparently currently several don’t even have commanding officers. Thus, for a time, the submarines were unable to be deployed anyway. The new submarines need more crew, and while the suggestion of blended crews superficially seems reasonable, that is only if you do not accept the current Government’s banging on about “sovereignty”.

Currently the pay for an Australian submariner is about $167,000 a year, plus various other allowances, but being crew on nuclear submarines means coping with months on end beneath the waves, working six hour shifts and where night and day no longer have relevance. Blended crews mean being able to cope for long periods of having two cultures working alongside, even if they do speak the same language. There are differences that need to be addressed in sharing facilities. For instance, US naval warships are traditionally dry. It is easy to say that potential Australian submariners will be trained offshore; but what of social costs, including the attrition rate.

Then, in the world of technology advances, the prospect of unmanned submarines looms – unmanned underwater drones. The Russians evidently have that technology and it would be inconceivable that the major submarine manufacturers are not developing these as well.  Given the projected time surrounding the acquisition of Australia’s nuclear submarines, our purchases almost certainly will be dwarfed by these developments. The problem with the government propaganda is the assumption that everything else remains the same, and if they ever were, will remain on the cutting edge of technology.

David Livingstone’s opinion piece is like an antique Gatling gun deliberately mowing down the paper-thin justifications for this enormous transfer of “Australian sovereigns” from Australia to its colonial reliquary, Great Britain and the USA, whose reliability as an ally has been an article of faith adopted by both sides of Australian politics with only occasional inconvenient questioning – but certainly not by our current bunch of politicians.

The following is taken from an article published last year in an international investigative journal, Insider.

In 2005, the USS Ronald Reagan, a newly constructed $6.2 billion aircraft carrier, sank after being hit by torpedoes.

Fortunately, this did not occur in actual combat but was simulated as part of a war game pitting a carrier task force including numerous antisubmarine escorts against HSMS Gotland, a small Swedish diesel-powered submarine displacing 1,600 tons. Yet despite making multiple attacks runs on the Reagan, the Gotland was never detected.

This outcome was replicated time and time again over two years of war games, with opposing destroyers and nuclear attack submarines succumbing to the stealthy Swedish submarine.

With the Stirling engines, a Gotland-class submarine can remain undersea for up to two weeks sustaining an average speed of 6 mph — or it can expend its battery power to surge up to 23 mph. A conventional diesel engine is used for operation on the surface or while employing the snorkel.

Gotland-class submarine

The Stirling-powered Gotland runs more quietly than a nuclear-powered submarine, which must employ noise-producing coolant pumps in their reactors.

The Gotland class does possess many other features that make it adept at evading detection.

It mounts 27 electromagnets designed to counteract its magnetic signature to Magnetic Anomaly Detectors. Its hull benefits from sonar-resistant coatings, while the tower is made of radar-absorbent materials. Machinery on the interior is coated with rubber acoustic-deadening buffers to minimize detectability by sonar.

The Gotland is also exceedingly manoeuvrable thanks to the combined six manoeuvring surfaces on its X-shaped rudder and sail, allowing it to operate close to the sea floor and pull off tight turns.

The article then went on to say:

Because the stealthy boat proved the ultimate challenge to US antisubmarine ships in international exercises, the US Navy leased the Gotland and its crew for two years to conduct antisubmarine exercises. The results convinced the US Navy its undersea sensors simply were not up to dealing with the stealthy AIP boats.

However, the Gotland was merely the first of many AIP-powered submarine designs — some with twice the underwater endurance. And Sweden is by no means the only country to be fielding them.

China has two diesel submarine types using Stirling engines. Fifteen of the earlier Type 039A Yuan class have been built in four variants, with more than 20 more planned or already under construction.

Beijing also has a single Type 032 Qing-class vessel that can remain underwater for 30 days. It believed to be the largest operational diesel submarine in the world and boasts seven Vertical Launch System cells capable of firing off cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.

Diesel powered submarines are apparently particularly useful in assisting in maintaining littoral integrity if one is able to crew them. The Americans have determined to only have nuclear submarines so they can roam the world underwater – an international police force. Why else would a nation commit itself to such a program? The British want to join in if Australia will help to pay for their ailing submarine building industry– why else would the British want to use Perth as a base unless they want to join the USA in this role as a police force. Really, do we want to be part of this folly – “the final link in the chain” as Keating so bluntly put it, of nuclear submarines lurking in the Pacific Ocean.

There is another incidental fact I have learnt trying to fathom why we are committing ourselves to such enormous expenditure. The Collins class submarine was taken from a Swedish design. The Swedes have a fleet of five diesel-powered submarines, but under the auspice of Saab Kockum have committed themselves to building the new A-26 Blekinge submarine by next year, constantly advancing the technology and have ordered two more.

Finally, more than anything, Australia needs a debate on these matters – and outside the wardroom. I would like to know what we are defending and who really is the enemy, apart from the cost being committed for the next generations of Australians who will be forced to pay.

Mud by Name; but not by Taste

Continuing my occasional reminiscences of the most memorable seafood meals that I have experienced, this one concerns the giant mud crab, I thought wrongly to be solely an Australian delicacy. The crabs are caught in sheltered estuaries and mangrove areas, favouring the soft mud below low tide levels in Northern Australian waters. The flavours are distinctive; some say sweet; but like so many tastes which stick in the memory – mud crabs caught in the wild are distinctive. I first remember a large tray of these crabs on a VIP flight back in the 1970s when I first realised what I had been missing. Lobster was relegated to second place from that day on until many years later when I ate farmed mud crab fed on chicken meal. That unique taste had been lost. It was quite a disappointment.

On this night, after working in Mackay all day, we were recommended this place to eat on the outskirts of the city. Unprepossessing, the premises resembled a hut, and it was called The Hut or some such. It was 1988. As it so happened the British Lions Rugby League Team was in town and following them was a large entourage of British journalists because the whole trip was more of a jaunt than a tight schedule of Tests.

When we entered this establishment, it was somewhat basic; “homely” would have been a good epithet if the place had not been swarming with middle-aged Poms, who seemed to have done with any formal activity.  The alcoholic hubbub swirled around us, outsiders in our own country. Nevertheless, we secured a table in a corner facing the kitchen, so when the owner/chef emerged with this large mud crab, and asked whether anybody would care to have it for a meal, we responded with alacrity, such that the deal was done before the Fourth Estate had time to turn around, let alone react. Perhaps they would have enthused more over it, although there was a ripple of “got another one, guv?”

This mud crab had just been caught and dropped off at the café. I don’t know whether it was the only one, but I doubt whether I have ever seen one bigger. Even though I had actually cooked my own earlier in the decade, there was something about this mud crab feast which made it special. Unfortunately, with time, the wild crustacea and fish are increasingly a product of farming rather than being gathered from the wild. Mud crab farming is very popular in some Asian countries – Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Philippines. Mud crab is in huge demand, with equally huge prices in the international market, and thus they have mostly lost that uniqueness which we experienced one night in Mackay.

Dr Lee Gruner

Entering Bacchus Marsh

Dr Lee Gruner has just been banned from medical practice for 10 years. She is 74, and at that age, she would probably be retired or be living off the fruits of her labour, irrespective of the Medical Board’s finding. She has been punished for her actions at the Bacchus Marsh Health Service (Djerriwarrh Health) which occurred over a decade ago. It was evident to me well before that time that Dr Gruner was a smooth talker without much substance. The Medical Board’s finding about her behaviour even astounded me, although I was well aware of the dysfunctional nature of the Bacchus Marsh health service even then.

Gruner had always projected herself as an expert in quality assurance (QA), which is almost a Medusa in the number of jargon-laden interpretations to describe a very simple concept – the actual improvement of health care achieved against projected proposed improvement over a specified period. My association with managing improvement of health care first occurred with involvement in a successful “management by objectives” project in 1971-73 at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

In 1975, the then Federal Minister of Health, Ralph Hunt, challenged the medical profession to formally assure quality in health care.  As a result, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) together with the then Australian Council on Hospital Standards (ACHS) set up the ACHS/AMA Peer Review Resource Centre and the then AMA President challenged me to take on the portfolio of quality assurance and peer review. Within a decade I found myself as President of the International Society of Quality Assurance. During this time, it gave me a wide perspective of those involved in the various “players”, both in Australia and overseas.

While there was a cohort of health professionals genuinely interested in improving the quality of health care, I found there were many flim-flam persons, hucksters and grifters who drifted around drawing flow diagrams and pie charts, writing monographs telling the clinicians what they should do, speaking in the distinctive “quality assurance creole” and holding seminars and workshops purporting to be fonts of learning. Much of this QA movement was translated into more bureaucracy, which led to the creation every three years of shelves of folders containing rules and requirements, which were neatly stacked in the administrative section of the hospitals, but to which the clinicians in general were impervious.

Effective interplay between management and clinicians is essential if true quality improvement can occur and be maintained. In addition, the quality assurance movement flourished until the central agencies started extracting “efficiency dividends” from the health sector, and the hospitals were the most vulnerable as targets for such “efficiencies”. Costs were paramount.

Dr Gruner with her gush, winning smile and line of blarney, fitted in well with this scene. She became Censor and then President of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators (RACMA), being good mates with the then Chief Executive Officer. Yes, Dr Gruner constructed an impressive façade.

This façade crumbled before the findings of the Medical Board of Australia. Her behaviour, as set out in the Board’s findings, was truly appalling, given that under her medical management, neonatal management was wanting.

In 2021, Dr Surindar Parhar, who had been chief of obstetrics and women’s health between 2008 and 2015 at Bacchus Marsh Health Service, was formally reprimanded and disqualified from applying to practise medicine for 12 years after a finding of professional misconduct related to his time at the Service. But the doctor had surrendered his medical registration seven years previously, so the sanction was very much post hoc. The following is the finding, six years after he stopped practising; it happened under Dr Gruner’s watch and is equally appalling as her reprehensible neglect. (sic)

Dr Parhar was found by the Tribunal to have failed in almost every aspect of his role. The Tribunal found that he failed to conduct formal reviews in nine cases of perinatal death, and where reviews were conducted, he had failed to give sufficient clinical input and adequate processes were not used. Further, between 2009 – 2015, he failed to engage an external reviewer for cases involving foetal and neonatal deaths, failed to communicate important information and failed to supervise or assess junior practitioners who he was directly responsible for. Additionally, the Tribunal found that Dr Parhar failed to improve or maintain his own professional performance, did not keep accurate or legible clinical records, and inadequately investigated, diagnosed and managed a patient’s care.

Incidentally, the former nursing director and the maternity services manager were both banned for 10 years. Several other healthcare workers including senior midwives, junior doctors, a clinical support director and a physiotherapist were also disciplined.

Gruner now has no credibility and her neglect was allowed to continue for far too long. Nevertheless, the RACMA and the level of remuneration its Fellows attract has also gone too long without scrutiny. Some years ago, I offered to assist the College after a decade’s stint during which I was able to refine the role of Director of Medical Services (DMS) of small health services. I had a formal contract with each service at which I worked, and I had a modest base at one of the health services with shared secretarial services. From personal experience, I believe that the findings in relation to Dr Gruner’s position are sufficient reason to investigate the whole state of medical administration, where there are a number of aberrant practices, which Dr Gruner’s action highlighted. She just got caught. In Victoria there apparently is a tool to assist hospitals in appointing a DMS, and having read it, this tool is one of the theoretical “flannelling” documents that people like Gruner were adept in constructing to give the appearance of activity.

The task of a DMS is to work with and have the respect of the local doctors and visiting medical specialists; to ensure that the credentialing, scope of practice and privileging of these doctors is aligned with their knowledge and skills; to participate in the hospital management as required; and, as I showed, to extending the DMS role to being director of clinical training, as evidenced by the creation of the Murray to Mountains Intern Training Program. Removing a doctor’s privileging rights is difficult and requires a skillset not immediately obvious in medical administrator training. Moreover, the DMS must be a visible presence, not hidden away in the administrative suite of offices well away from the clinical action.

The other worrying matter shown by this Gruner episode is how long it takes for the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) to do anything. The Agency publicly displays its satisfaction rating, 1.6 out of 5. It is time the Chief Executive Officer, Martin Fletcher, is put under active scrutiny. An English bureaucrat imported to do a similar job he was employed to do in Great Britain, Fletcher has been in the role for 13 years, so he would know all the steps in the political foxtrot.

The current Federal Health Minister Butler had ordered a rapid review of AHPRA, which seems like a handball rather than “rapid review”.  “I am writing to the chair of the Health Ministers’ Meeting to put this issue on the agenda at our next meeting, including a rapid review of the response by jurisdictions to previous reviews.”

Martin Fletcher

I would say the AHPRA obfuscation is less “flannelling’ but rather a “whole suite of blanketing”. As such, Martin Fletcher may tuck in the last “blanket” in rejecting allegations that AHPRA had resisted government engagement and was slow to implement reforms, saying the leadership team was rolling out a “huge” program of work to improve procedures. That “blanket” sure has a lot of fluff.

Much more of this and it will be media suffocation so thick is the “blanket”. Gruner is just one of the cases to serve as a reason for a comprehensive review of AHPRA.

Time for action, and restoration of the integrity of AHPRA, shorn of excessive bureaucracy, but that is the ultimate goal, training quality staff and ensuring the agency does not have the opportunity to hide behind overly restrictive legislation – a matter for urgent Government review – and that the multiple agencies involved don’t allow cases to fall between the cracks. This will require close attention to the profile of those supposed to uphold the standards and in so doing recognise dysfunctional situations such as the one which allowed Gruner to flourish. One missive received yesterday from the current President trying to justify continuing trust in the College credentials, I’m afraid is far from enough.

Mouse Whisper

Will the Floridean Goldenlocks weather yet another Storm? Remember Shakespeare’s The Tempest?  The jester Trinculo, on hearing the Storm is coming, utters words perhaps relevant to a forthcoming New York Courtroom appearance:

Alas, the Storm is come again! My best way is to
creep under my gaberdine: there is no other
shelter hereabout. Misery acquaints a man with
strange bed-fellows. I will here shroud till the
dregs of the Storm be past
.

The golden mask of Trinculo

Modest Expectations – Anno Quattuor

∞∞∞∞∞∞

There’s a difference between psyching yourself up and misrepresenting yourself, and the latter is where “fake it” has gone too far. We need a reset, and to find a way to once again prioritize and reward diligent, honest effort over faux success. Government needs to return to enforcing meaningful financial regulation; politicians and entrepreneurs who deceive their supporters need to face consequences. And we need to be less credulous and stop falling for the next shiny thing. – Helaine Olen, Washington Post

So here we are the end of my fourth year writing a blog each week.

Sometimes I feel like the Beatles’ Father MacKenzie – writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near; look at him working, but then it goes on to something about darning socks in the night when apparently everybody has deserted him, but he yet retains a priestly insouciance. From this chiaroscuro cell of mine, may I thank Frank Meany for his encouragement in ‘mousing’ my first one in 2019. My socks remain undarned.

Nevertheless, Ms Olen’s observation remains very pertinent to me every time I pick up my mouse. I publish one blog a week; they have grown to over 3,000 words, but it has meant I read widely, and republish with acknowledgement information I find interesting. I write a blog as now I have the time to write.  Now I have time to reflect I can leave a legacy for what it is worth. So here goes into my no. 208.

I was talking to a friend of mine who had returned from a very comfortable dinner. I mentioned to him the breakdown of the refrigerated truck bringing food, in particular meat, to our village. It is a 45 minute drive to the next towns – one was over the range; the other over more undulating territory. We were expecting friends for dinner, and my wife happened to be at the only supermarket in town to hear the news that explained the empty fridge shelves. She was able to snaffle some chicken legs, but there was not much more to be had.

The weather was unexpectedly bad for this time of the year. Low weather fronts coming through, rapidly dragging thunderstorm, rain and gusts up to 100 km/hour. At about two am, the power went off. There was a pole fire nearby. This day was cold; there was no heat. Despite the house being built as a wilderness pole house, there is no chimney. A gas fire better heats the house; you do not have to cluster around an open fire trying to keep warm. But it needs electricity to create the spark to light the gas and run the fan.

Fortunately, we have a gas stove and could cook; and with battery and candle, we survived 18 hours without electricity. Having listened to what my friend said that he feared that there would be more outages, his prediction seemed self-fulfilling. True to his prediction, next morning, another outage shut down the Sydney rail system; the day after it was the turn of two large public hospitals in Melbourne. In neither case was it thought to be due to a malignant cyberattack.

Meanwhile, the flooded Kimberley region is running out of food – not just one lorry broken down as happened to us. All the roads are now cut off; and then next day, it was the turn of Mount Isa and all the rivers that flow north of the Selwyn ranges are now in flood.

We went for 18 hours without heating, and it was very cold. But think of the deprivation that so many people across Australia have suffered alongside COVID-19. Sure, I have had a bout of long COVID, but we’ve not been flooded or burnt out – yet! Our deprivation this time was really a nothing compared what else is happening and has happened over the past few years to so many people.

Thus, our deprivation was just an irritation and perhaps a harbinger of things to come; but look at the government priorities! Nuclear submarines for God’s sake! Moreover, the sabre-rattling group assembled by the SMH was predicting a war with China in three years.

As reported in the SMH: “Former Defence Department deputy secretary Peter Jennings estimates the eight boats will eventually cost taxpayers the equivalent of 1 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product or some $20 billion each year.

That’s roughly the combined annual revenues of Australia’s wheat and beef industries, or more than the cost of the NDIS last year. The problem is, the submarines are not expected to arrive for 15 to 20 years, which could be on the other side of a war with China.

“On the other side of a war with China.” What does that mean?

Admiral Chester W Nimitz, Fleet Admiral, United States Navy, former leading US Navy authority on submarines

As part of the agreement, the United States and Britain will rotate nuclear-powered submarines into port in Perth by 2027. One such submarine, the U.S.S. Asheville, is already there now on a port visit, before the formal schedule of rotations.

At that time, I must have dropped off to sleep because I dreamed a dream. Somebody nudges the March Hare to wake him up.  Meanwhile, the dormouse strewn with marigold flowers has arrived at the table and pipes up being asked to defend the purchase of these expensive toys, said: “This is about jobs … and Adelaide in particular will be a big beneficiary of this announcement, as well as Western Australia in particular”.  Just before being shoved into the AUKUS teapot, somebody watching asks aren’t the nuclear submarines about the defence force capability. The answer is lost in the gurgles, but the word “capacity” does get a mention before the dormouse goes down for the third time. I shake myself awake; was that a dream?

Call me the HMAUKUS Pinafore

Before contemplating further let us consider whether we have combatted our internal challenges. Our ability to cope with floods has come up short. Too much of our domestic and commercial infrastructure is built on flood plains and, with climate change heralding more extreme weather, there are large infrastructural costs awaiting Australia. Promises are easy, but nothing much seems to be done, given it is estimated that one million homes are at risk from flooding by 2030. Brisbane and the Gold Coast local government areas are the most vulnerable in numbers, but the Greater Shepparton area in Victoria has the greatest percentage of such homes (56%) with nearby Wangaratta not far behind (43%) – a total of nearly 3,000 homes. Increasingly such places are uninsurable, which leaves only we, the mug taxpayers, as the reconstruction funder.

Australia does not have the equivalent of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which, among its many functions, is flood mitigation, and although there were criticisms for the levee construction in New Orleans, there is consolidated expertise. A recent report in 2022 noted that “Seventeen years after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has completed an extensive system of floodgates, strengthened levees and other protections. The 130-mile (210-kilometre) ring is designed to hold out storm surge of about 30 feet (9 meters) around New Orleans and suburbs in three parishes.”

Even so, Nicholas Lemann, writing in The New Yorker, was not so sanguine.

After Katrina, as after Betsy, such plans were drawn up, but nobody wanted to pay for them. New Orleans had to settle for levee enhancements that fell far short of providing invulnerability to a Category 5 hurricane, and wound up returning to something not too different from its pre-Katrina state. The city is an irresistibly alluring place that does far better by its white citizens than its Black ones. Life is sweet when it isn’t tragic. Lodged somewhere in everyone’s consciousness is the knowledge that what happened in 2005 is going to happen again.

Eleven months after the Lismore floods, a Northern Rivers Reconstruction Authority has been set up and $800 million promised, but nothing much seems to have been done, which is visible to the community. Somebody might echo Lemann and say it will happen again because no government is prepared to spend the money to 100% guarantee waterproofing the current Lismore, but as with Lismore residents nobody wants to move away.

Cockatoo Island Sydney, once a ship builder, then a submarine repair yard, now an art precinct and “glamping” site

Now as the sabre-rattling group would insist Australia faces war with China. Do we wish to contemplate that? An old doctor in conversation with me years ago told of when World War I was declared, there were celebrations in the streets – he remembered hats being thrown in the air – excitement was everywhere. War was a jolly adventure in exotic places. Then, Australia was not threatened directly.

The last time Australia was directly threatened was 1942 – the population was mobilised – the dread when the postman came with news that your father, son, close relative had been killed. Food and clothing were rationed. But bombing of urban areas of Australia was restricted to Darwin and Broome – northern Australia. The Japanese onslaught was halted, they suffered mortal wounds as the War was washed north.

Volodymyr Zelensky has proved an unexpected obstacle. Given that we were fed a diet of Ukraine being corrupt, essentially a Russian satrap, and the line of least resistance was taken in relation to Crimea. Putin anticipated; NATO anticipated that Ukraine would just fall into the Russian sphere of influence.  Conventional early wisdom was that Ukraine would be partitioned with the Russians ceded the eastern fertile black plains, while the truncated Ukraine would retain Kyiv and the Polish border areas – at least pro tem.

But Zelensky had different ideas, and he inconveniently precipitated NATO leaders out of the cocktail circuit into a world bereft of Louis Vuitton and Dom Perignon. Zelensky has created the nightmare; he stood up to Putin. It was not expected that a comedian had transformed himself into a resilient warrior.

Nevertheless, the Americans always seem to have a war on the go, dragging us with them. However, none of the recent Wars have the European backdrop Ukraine has provided. So, destroying a country where the infrastructure is notably European is thus enough to put the fear of God into the Europeans. It is they which, even with the diminishing number that directly experienced the horrors of WWII, see it now being re-run in the Ukraine.

Forget the power of the people; unless they inconveniently have the power that Zelensky has. Looking around our leaders there is no-one who reminds one of this man. There seems nobody else who can lead a popular revolution.

And what of China? They assumed control of Hong Kong, breaking the terms of agreement with the United Kingdom.  There were street protests. There have been draconian measures put in place. There has been no urban warfare from those who opposed this take over. The sun still shines. The horses still race at Happy Valley and Sha Tin.

Power means control of the security forces. The street protests of the sort seen 40 years ago have been studied by those in authority and measures implemented to contain the people; these measures are increasingly perfected with more and more sophisticated brutality and repression.

The Chinese have not participated overtly in any war, apart from border skirmishes and the annexation of Tibet about 70 years ago, while in that same period the Americans have been in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – for what reward? I forgot Grenada, which the USA invaded in October 1983, a conflict which lasted four days before the Americans declared victory over a country of 113,000 people.

In fact on March 9 it was reported: that Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) announced on Thursday that air routes between Taiwan and 10 Chinese cities will be reinstated on Friday, with 13 other Chinese cities selected for cross-strait charter flights. Starting on Friday, flight routes will be re-established between the Taiwanese cities of Taoyuan, Taipei and Kaohsiung, and the Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Fuzhou, Qingdao, Wuhan, Ningbo and Zhengzhou.

Ok … but that statement does not suggest war footing. The Americans were not part of this decision, I note.

So, what is the point of all this purchase of extraordinarily expensive toys of war? Can anybody in words of one syllable tell me how the current expenditure will help defend this country? The Taiwan response – a video of a young woman running with rifle, stumbling, with her helmet falling over her face, and then giggling. War footing? More like slippage.

Yet Taiwan has the perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare, but has anybody got the stomach for a war? What is Taiwan’s appetite for war? The Chinese would prefer a compliant Taiwan commercially strong, but avoiding a potentially destructive conflict with China. Where does Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines in the mid 2030s fit that scenario?

There is thus a possibility that China and Taiwan will reach an accommodation that avoids outright war. Nevertheless, some Chinese with assets are moving them to Singapore and elsewhere including Australia. Yet let us not be under any illusions that the Chinese diaspora is anti-China; some estimated that the pro-Chinese element in Australia would be about 80 per cent.

At the 2021 census, 1,390,637 Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry, accounting for 5.5% of the total population. How is the Australian Government planning to deal with them in case of direct conflict with China. Internment? I think not. Think of the expense… but then again, those advocating building more and more sports venues, maybe they will have a secondary use. After all, the Melbourne Cricket Ground was requisitioned by the Americans and Australian defence forces between 1942 and 1945 with up to 200,000 troops using the ground facilities as barracks. Would we need it again – but now for an internment camp?

In any event, the last sentence in Helaine Olen’s opinion piece quoted at the beginning of this blog is particularly germane.

Billy Graham with a Pole

Bob Richards has recently died in Waco Texas aged 97.

Bob Richards

His would not be a familiar name today to anybody in Australia unless you, like myself, were a spectator at the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. He had been the Olympic champion in the pole vault in 1952 in Helsinki and had come to Melbourne in the USA team to defend his title. Pole vaulting was an unfamiliar sport in Australia, and I remember being seated close to the action. Australia had two competitors, but they had been knocked out in the preliminary round, finishing last and second last respectively.

Richards had not vaulted very well in the preliminary round, but in the final, he won with an Olympic record. As he freely acknowledged, even though he was able to surpass his Olympic record by pole vaulting over 15 feet many times, he was never able to surpass another American, Cornelius Warmerdam, a Californian who had set the World record in the early 1940s, but whose exploits were overshadowed by WWII. Warmerdam used a bamboo pole, which replaced the early solid ash poles; but by the time Richards was at his peak, the technology of the pole had moved to poles made of tubular aluminium.

Today’s top male vaulters, with refined techniques and springy fiberglass or carbon fibre poles that bow almost to U shapes, routinely soar over crossbars set above 19 feet (5.8metres). The world record is held by Armand Duplantis, an American-born Swedish athlete known as Mondo, who recently vaulted 20 feet 4-3/4 inches (6.22 metres). That height surpassed his own previous five world records, all over 20 feet (6.1 metres) and all set since 2020. From the Australian point, from the dismal performance of 1956, our standards have risen markedly.  An Australian, Steve Hooker won the Olympic pole vault at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

It is the one event, where it seems that there has been no brake put on the technology; and how far will such technology take man and woman into the ether. Hooker eventually jumped a height (6.06m), which remains the fourth highest height ever attained; in the end he lost his head for heights, who wouldn’t but anyway what a career!

As it was with Richards. With his etched looks he reminded me of Billy Graham and was, to some extent, much the same evangelical as he was ordained into a Brethren when he was only 20. He was given the nickname of the “Vaulting Vicar” by some, but all I  knew was that he was a pastor for one of those evangelical Christian churches, which find the Southern American States such fertile ground. Sagebush piety, cowboy strong face enabled him to be, between 1958 and 1970, the face on the General Mills “Wheaties” packet, the  cereal known as the “Breakfast of Champions.” He became director of the Wheaties Sports Federation, founded in 1958 after President Eisenhower called for a national physical fitness campaign.

So he was, his pole vaulting seemed to be a symbol of his form of Christianity where an aluminium pole and a bar being raised set against the sky were his basic Assumption.

An Added Thought from the Vault

Women’s pole vaulting does not easily fit into the Bob Richard narrative. Currently Australia has the number two rated woman pole vaulter in the world – Nina Kennedy. Last year she won the Diamond League title with a vault of 15ft 1.5in (4.61 metres) slightly less than her best, but would Australia ever know.

The first recorded woman’s world record holder was a Ruth Spencer, an American who vaulted 4ft 9in (1.44 metres) in 1910.  The height is testimony to the change in times, when modern female athletes would high jump way higher than that. The current world pole vault record was set in 2009 by Russian Yelena Isinbayeva with a vault of 16ft 7in (5.06 metres). She held sway in the first decade of the 21st century, and with arched eyebrows, one can say that her record has not been challenged in the last thirteen years – but she was Russian.

Women’s pole vaulting attained prominence when first introduced as an event in the Sydney Olympic Games, when Tatiana Grigorieva, a Russian-born Australian, unexpectedly won the silver medal. During the 1990’s repeatedly breaking the then world record, Emma George was dominant.

Emma George

I remember for many years driving into Beechworth, her name was emblazoned on her hometown signage. But her dominance ended in tears, as the stress induced by pole vaulting caught up with her.  She vanished even before the 2000 Olympic Games with a mess of chronic injury without any comment on her mental health.

In fact, she has become the mother of three boys, seemingly happy, still greatly attracted to the outdoors as judged by her profile in the media, where she acts as a free-lance journalist – a world which I once knew as that of a stringer.

A Sense of Theatre

Col Hodges

My eye caught the following on Twitter. “Race caller Col Hodges lives in flood ravaged Forbes. After having a cold shower this morning Col hitched a ride on a fire truck to get to a boat which took him to within 50 yards of the other side where he waded in knee deep water to get to a borrowed car to travel to Bathurst {to call the races}.”

Race callers are so much part of the heritage of the country.  They all have their individual ways of learning. No University course here. Col Hodges started shooting marbles around the backyard pretending that they were racehorses. I knew one other bloke who started calling matches floating down a gutter.

When you note how many race meetings there are, it means that while the race callers in the city seem to form a kind of Establishment, there are many other meetings that need to be called. On this periphery are race callers like Col Hodges. I note that he called his first race meeting in a tiny place called Fifield, which lies between Trundle and Tullamore in the Central West of NSW with its hotel known as the Pub in the Shrub. We stopped there once just up the road from what looked like an old boarded up mill; yet as I noted in an earlier blog, there was a late model yellow Ford parked out the front and an array of expensive solar panels on the roof.

Col Hodges called a race meeting there in 1971. As he recalled “It was a picnic meeting at Fifield on Easter Saturday. It was a dirt track, there were fields of between six and 10 to describe and around 500 people were in attendance. In those days a lot of tracks didn’t have photo finish cameras. A lady in the crowd called out after a close finish that I was trying to influence the judges. I went to a lot of meetings that didn’t have photo finish cameras so that’s where I learned to be pretty diplomatic in photo finishes. If I’m sure I’ll call it but there’s that many different angles, I call at about 30-35 race tracks, and some tracks you’re right on the line but unless I’m pretty sure I’ll just say it’s between this horse and that horse. I’ll have a go if I know the angle of the track and I’m confident but I don’t like letting people down by taking a guess when I’m at a bad angle just for my own glory.

Yet Col Hodges was the last to call a triple dead heat in Cowra in 1997, and even ventured at the time that it might be the result. This was rather adventurous given that there have only been four in the whole history of Australian horse racing since the introduction of the photo finish camera. It took the stewards 30 minutes to declare the placings.

As is said, race callers need to have a sense of theatre.

Such sadness

Last week I recalled our time in southern Malawi.  To quote local sources this past week: Heavy rains that triggered floods and mudslides have killed at least 199 people in Malawi, authorities. President Lazarus Chakwera declared a “state of disaster” in the country’s southern region and the now-ravaged commercial capital, Blantyre. Some 19,000 people in the south of the nation have been displaced, according to Malawi’s disaster management directorate.

This suggests that the Satemwa tea estate, a source of employment for many Malawians, which is only 43 kilometres South of Blantyre could not conceivably have been unaffected by Cyclone Freddy, to say nothing of the thousands of Malawian subsistence farmers whose farm plots crowded the river floodplains. Another country needing our help.

Mt Mulanje in southern Malawi in calmer times, now with floodwaters to the north and south

Mouse Whisper

He was complaining about the comment that bushfires had been reported as having decimated the ozone layer by five per cent. Five per cent is one twentieth. So, it is hardly “decimate”. Well, add this word to vocabulary to kill only five per cent – vicesimumate. In other words, we are going to be merciful – we are going to vicesimumate you lot.  Instead of two for the chop, you lot will only lose one.

∞∞∞∞∞∞

OUT NOW!

35 Poems by Jack Best

An illustrated collection of poems

Order your copy of 35 Poems now – $30 plus postage.
Email to cameo@iimetro.com.au for your copies. Any profits will go to the Ukrainian cause and Malawi relief.

Jack’s poetic side finally gets an airing in this, his first book of poems. Described in the foreword by John Bevins as:

“… a joy … indeed, hoped-for gifts beat surprises. In one of Jack’s deeply personal poems (some are jolly folly), we learn his Father urged him to read Xenophon. ‘The sweetest of all sounds’, Xenophon said, ‘is praise’. Well, this body of work — with its own sweet sounds, ‘sounds sizzling in the wires’ — gets my praise. All the more so because of Jack Best’s courage to say what he feels in a way that allows us to feel what he says”.

 

Modest Expectations – Elizabeth

Our kitchen benchtop is Corian, a synthetic material composed of acrylic polymers and an aluminon trihydrate extracted from bauxite.  Marble too has negligible silica, but natural granite and its synthetic offshoot Caesarstone has a variable amount up to 90 per cent silica. Corian is cheaper, but not so resistant to stains and chipping apparently as Caesarstone.

I have a friend whose grandfather and another relative were gold miners. Victoria had many gold mines. These blokes were dead of silicosis before I started as a medical student.

As a medical student, I learnt all about silicosis.  It was a common occupational disease among those who worked in dusty environments such as quarries and in gold mining and everywhere workers were working with quartz. At the time I was a student, preventative measures such as covering nose and mouth were becoming accepted practice, so that over the next 20 years deaths from silicosis halved.

Remember that was a time when cigarette smoking was more prevalent – nothing like dust covered fingers holding a fag, and then tucked between one’s lips.

Further, it was a time when there was still residual tuberculosis in the community.

Thus, it is hardly a new threat, even though Minister Burke tried to characterise it as the “new asbestosis”. So, I am surprised by this Ministerial statement “We have now tasked Safe Work Australia to do the work to scope out what regulation is required for workplaces that deal with silica dust and to scope out, specifically, with respect to engineered stone and engineered stone benchtops to do the work starting now, on what a ban would look like.”

I would have thought there were adequate regulations, given that silicosis is hardly a new occupational disease. The question is, why the casual attitude, unless one of the jurisdictions is being resistant. I would think, license the countertop makers, and mandate wearing suitable preventative gear – both of which should improve the defence against silica dust, notwithstanding that full face respirators have been available for years. Silica is so prevalent, singling out one industry for a complete ban given its history would seem extreme. The conglomerate, Caesarstone, invented in Spain and Israel in the 1980’s became very popular in the last decade.

As one would expect, given the long association of silicosis and lung disease, the recommendation to lessen the exposure whenever possible – cutting, grinding and shaping when wet – should be a given.  Ventilation and filtration systems should be used to collect silica-containing dust at source.  If these engineering controls fail to eliminate the risk, then use an approved N95 respirator at the very least, and this includes whenever adjustments are required on site where cutting and grinding in a suitable wet environment is unlikely to be possible.

So, what’s causing this haggling among the Ministers for action when making countertops is just another industry dominated by working with quartz?

Colour me Malawi

I like Malawi. Some years ago, before COVID, we went there and I recalled part of that experience in a previous blog. I find tea plantations restful – the glossy greenery of camellia sinesis and the way the plantations are so ordered that they give the impression of cascading over the slopes of hill country, where the air is clean, the morning mist clinging to the vegetation. Yet here is a very labour-intensive industry – and the fact of exploitation nags at my thoughts.

After the First World War a Scot called McLean Kay set up a tea plantation of nearly 900 hectares in Southern Malawi. This estate is called Satemwa, in the centre of which is Huntington House, the residence of the Kays. We spend a couple of nights there. It is not the main tea picking season, but we pass a line of men plucking tea leaves and placing them in shoulder baskets. Here both men and women share the load, unlike earlier in the year, where I had seen in Sri Lanka near Kandy tea leaf being picked by women with their baskets supported by a headband around their foreheads. Here the baskets were supported by the shoulders and the Malawi terraces were not the precipices of the Sri Lanka tea plantations where goats, let alone women with heavy baskets, would be hard pressed to cling. Malawi was way more considerate in the way the tea had been planted for the workers.

The flight, followed by the long drive, tired me out. So, when we reached the House, and had been welcomed and had admired the manicured gardens with the borders of flowering bushes and trees, we were shown to our room. This was one of five – but this one special because it was where the original founder of the estate used to sleep from the time when the House was built in 1935 to when he died in 1968.  The house could be coloured as lived in – all colours turn to “faded”.

However, the bed was comfortable and soon I was asleep. I awoke in the late afternoon and found that when I tried to turn on the lights, there were none.  There was nobody around as I tried every light switch, every lamp – to no avail! It is a strange sensation to wake up in a completely silent world where there is no electricity; and then trying to sweep away post sleep confusion.

I padded round the house; it was deserted. There was an office, but nobody there. It was all too gloomy, so I moved to the front door. Restful has turned to restless.

Oh, how mystery builds.  However, the mystery collapses when I call out to my partner and she emerges, camera in hand, around the far side of the veranda. She laughs at my situation says she is sorry that she did not wake me to tell me that there would be a power outage until 10 pm that night – load shedding.  This is a common occurrence in Malawi and although the House had its own generator it was missing a vital part to make it work.

Colour the dinner dark with flickering blobs of red and amber candles and hurricane lanterns.  The cognoscenti have headlamps, as does the son of the founder who comes by later in the evening to say hello. He introduces himself as “Chips” Kay.  Chips is 85 years old and has grown up in Malawi. His accent betrays the fact that he was schooled in Cape Town and says he did not speak English until he was six years old. “Chips” is short for Cathcart and every Kay has Cathcart somewhere in their Christian monikers.  They are of Scottish lowland stock, from Ayrshire yet have strong links to the outer islands being also Clan Maclean.

Even though he is a small man in off-white shirt and trousers, his is the demeanour of the white children born in what was once Nyasaland, but since 1958 called Malawi.  He has lived through the transition from colonial authority to self-determination and prospered.  He is married to Dawn and they have four children – at least they have been incorporated into the Kay family succession planning.  He remains British, although he is slightly annoyed that the Malawi Government has not given him citizenship. Thus, he lives there somewhat as an outsider.

He tells us that winter rains are essential for good tea, as is the altitude. I wonder if I drew blood from him whether it would not be the colour of tannin, so immersed and knowledgeable he is on the subject.

In the morning the baboons caper across the lawn and rock lizards slide along the terrace concrete. Salmon pink is the colour of Malarone, the tablet we take each morning since malaria is endemic to Malawi and we are taking no chances, even though it is the dry season.  Our defences are reinforced by repellent and mosquito nets over the bed at night.

A tea plantation would not be authentic without being invited for tea tasting. The tea tasting room is long and spare, located in the factory, a set of oblong buildings in what can be called “working white”. The room where the tea is to be tasted is off white, so as to give the impression that the tea that we shall drink has been created in a hygienic atmosphere. The factory is working full bore, with the furnaces providing heat required to dry the leaves The furnaces are fuelled by blue gum logs cut from trees, dotted as small coupes around the plantation. Blue gum can be harvested after seven years so rapid is its growth.

Brown is the tea in its various shades although we are invited to spoon teas labelled white, green and black.  Familiar names like Earl Grey, Lapsang and Oolong are mentioned –and the last tea is red. This is hibiscus tea, but nobody likes the taste much.

Lake Malawi

One afternoon we drove down towards the Mozambique border. Malawi is like a gash in the Mozambican body.  It is the commencement of the Rift Valley and later in our stay we would stay on Lake Malawi, a gigantic spread of water, along the line of the Rift, increasingly accompanied by the mountains towards the Tanzanian border. I have described this part of our trip in an earlier blog.

We did not cross over into Mozambique. Perhaps we could have, but flouting the rules is not a clever thing to do in Africa. Sometimes, the impression in Africa is of a lackadaisical attitude, but I wouldn’t have bet on it.

COVID changed everything in relation to Africa. We had to cancel a trip to West Africa; not whingeing but the bloody Virus has a great deal to answer for, as well as those who for one reason or not facilitated its escape into the world.  We miss Africa. We miss Malawi.  Given everything that has happened with us, has the World in sepia, learnt anything? Yes, some have, but the narcissists who have allowed this New Age to emerge have not.

The Amur River

“We thought we were a European country,” said Deripaska, who is founder of Rusal, the biggest aluminium producer outside China. “Now, for the next 25 years, we will think more about our Asian past.”

I have just finished reading The Amur River by Colin Thubron, an English adventurer, who recounts his journey from Mongolia, where some of the tributaries of the Amur River rise, then along the Amur River as it divides China and Russia, crisscrossing the border many times, and finally along the last stretch of the River through Russia to its mouth as it flows into the Okhotsk Sea, opposite the northern Sakhalin Island.

He catalogues with clarity this arduous trip – all the more so because at that time he had just turned 80.

Retreat of Cossacks, 1685 – after the siege, the Qing troops force Russian colonists to evacuate Fortress Albazin, on the North Bank of the Amur River

The Russians and Chinese have been in confrontation across the Amur River for centuries. In the 17th century, the Manchus, after a prolonged war ending with the siege at Albazin, then a settlement on the northern loop of the Amur River, were victorious. The Manchu let time destroy the besieged Cossacks, though as much due to disease as to war wounds, until only 20 defenders were left to surrender.

The Manchus then negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk and one of the conditions was the destruction of Albazin, after which the Manchu influence spread into Russia. There are quirky happenings relating to the Treaty and its aftermath. The Treaty was written in four languages (Latin also Russian, Manchu and Chinese). Then there were the Peking Albazans, who looked Chinese, dressed like Russian peasants and worshipped in Russian Orthodox churches. These people are presumed to have arisen from Cossack stock who deserted to the Manchus, built churches, even had an Orthodox monastery, and then were swept away by the Bolsheviks centuries later. The rise of Stalin was the time of the Siberian gulags where people were exiled into a terrible darkness, where the light of freedom was extinguished. Just to contemplate this is excruciating, and the West deigns to dine with the representatives of this savagery, as if Tolstoy and the Bolshoi ballet are sufficient compensation. But who am I to cast the first stone; it is just Thubron’s insight that made me shake my head.

Thubron is an Englishman who sees the beauty in this harsh area of the planet, admittedly though he was there at the best time of the year.  His descriptions of the landscape are beautifully evocative – these landscapes are diverse visual seams, an essential art form for successful travel writers. To him there was a certain familiarity as he had travelled across the same territory 20 years ago when the political situation had more political fluidity in the pre-Putin and pre-Xi Jinping eras.

Russian Amur River bank

Yet the condition in this part of the country does reflect the overall politico-economic situation of the country. When the central government is weak, and the other relatively strong, then it is reflected in the respective local economic activity on either side of the Amur River. Currently, the Chinese are building large cities, whereas the Russian side of the river is impoverished.  Here are the signs of a time when Russia once held sway of the region for some time after the Treaty mentioned above. China became weaker and moreover was preoccupied by restlessness in the South of the country and Formosa for a long period. Then later the war with Japan debilitated China further, far more than Russia. Times change. His overall  current description is of Russian decay.

The two countries may not have much in common culturally, but today it seems the two countries have tacitly agreed there is no point warring over the territory. Power is economic, not military. This has been asserted by the Chinese – the Russians do the menial work moving the Chinese-made products across the river. Yet it was only in 1986 in Vladivostok that Gorbachev asserted that the countries were confined to the banks and the border was the navigable Amur in between, and his assertion remains as a given. In other words, cultural conflict has not necessarily been translated into armed conflict, apart from a few cross-border skirmishes.

The river itself is partially navigable but before World War I, there were comfortable boat trips along that part of the river. Thubron describes a boat trip made in 1914 by an Australian woman, Helen Gaunt, who relished the boat’s velvet upholstery and mahogany panelling with lunches of sturgeon, chicken and red caviar ‘spread like marmalade on an English breakfast table’. Nevertheless, the hope that the river would provide a trade route opening up Siberia to the Pacific Ocean was dashed by the shallowness of the river and particularly at the mouth of river there are many sandbanks.

Russia has concentrated its port facilities 800 miles south at Vladivostok.  The Amur may be three miles wide at its mouth, but he describes it as “running at five knots of silvered mud”. And as always he outlines the Siberian conundrum of “unblemished hills that fall in spurs of forest light” on one side of the river with walks along a jetty on the other side “the carcasses of iron barges lie sunk under its water, and its shingle is heaped with fallen bricks and concrete, tangles of wire and chains”. Ah, civilisation in all its brutality.

The book ends there.  Was the voyage worth the difficulty, the hardship? I suppose getting to the finish is in itself an achievement and his contemporary insights must be unique for a European journeying in an Asia, where Russia obviously is a player, but seemingly subservient to China. Nevertheless, the insights of his journey are very complementary to the ruminations of the Russian oligarch at the head of this blog. 

Superannuation Taylored?

Taylor is one of seven Liberal MPs in the 46th Parliament of Australia who have obtained degrees at an Oxbridge or Ivy League university, the others being Alan Tudge, Josh Frydenberg, Andrew Laming, Dave Sharma, Greg Hunt and Paul Fletcher – Wikipedia entry. 

The Hon Angus Taylor MP

I watched Angus Taylor on Sunday. I always thought that this Shadow Treasurer was a garrulous “cockie” whose diction had been caused by having a silver ladle in his mouth for too long a time. The above excerpt from his long entry in Wikipedia is amusing as it seems to outline the March of the Duds. Unlike most Wikipedia biographies, which can be interminably dull, his entry is engaging and lists all his alleged malfeasance.

I had never before watched him in a long interview. Despite his mien, he is not dumb, and his acrobatics with the truth absolutely magical; but the ease with which he does it shows that his education at The King’s School and Oxford has not gone for nought.

He can talk nonsense with the surety that the viewer knows that he knows that is nonsense.  He is at ease with this paradox of the smart man hiding behind his public school interpretation of Crocodile Dundee, as anybody could be. If he can avoid being found guilty of any malfeasance, he is assuredly the next Coalition Party leader – nor will the current National Party crop be able to stand up to him once the time comes for him to make his move.

His comments on superannuation made me think. The Prophet Taylor tells all what their superannuation package will be like in 50 years, a time relevant to my grandchildren.  I started to rack my brains about my attitude to superannuation when I was their age, an age when Taylor warns young people are going to be indexed out of their retirement funds because of that Jim Chalmers, the one that Albanese cannot drown in his endless pot of political molasses. I didn’t give superannuation a thought in my twenties.

In my thirties, because I moved around in salaried appointment, I did not accumulate any pension/superannuation funds. There was no reciprocity. My father died early in the 70s and left me some money, which was subject to inheritance tax, now abolished.   At the end of the decade, I gained employment where there was at the time a generous superannuation scheme so that, after five years, I could take the whole amount including the employer’s contribution. It was useful to access it at that time.

Having done my five years  I, with another bloke, formed a consultancy, and my superannuation thereafter was paid from the company that employed me. Thus, from the mid-eighties I did not benefit from the wave of entitlement that the politicians in cahoots with the public service controlled what they could take from the system without being called “rapacious”.

I remember the cries that went on about “getting better people into Parliament if they were paid more”. One does not hear that now the entitlements have soared, yet the standard of politician has not improved. Imagine some of them running a business? Angus Taylor stands out as one who could. Yet he defends the current superannuation arrangements rather than agreeing to a modest tax designed to improve the Government’s ability to pay for a country progressively rotting under the effects of climate change and the coddling of the Australian plutocracy, which had been so rampant when he was in Government.

In 1992 the then Prime Minister, Paul Keating introduced the policy of compulsory superannuation contributions under the Superannuation Guarantee scheme. Since this time this has grown to over $1.5 trillion and is argued as one of the key drivers of Australia’s national saving rate. This has become an asset, and like all assets, where a tax is fair and reasonable, a tax such as proposed seems to be so. Therefore Angus Taylor, you know how confected your opposition is; we do too; and judging by the polls so does the general populace.

Or perhaps it is all your working with cows in the dairying industry, that Mr Taylor, you are having difficulty in recognising caic tarbh. Surely not.

A Crackling Good Idea

The following dermal delights appeared recently in the Washington Post. I normally stay away from recipes, but what next? Omentum? (Black pudding ingredient among Austrian Southern Tyrolean yodellers) Tendons? (Chinese of course, slow cooked beef tendons) 

Suddenly Tim Ma had skin in the game.

The chef behind some Washington restaurants was recently in Austin in Texas and was making a simple pork skin chicharrón. “We just could not get it to puff,” he recalled. “We scraped off the fat, dehydrated it, fried it at the right temperature, and it just wouldn’t puff. But then we tried another batch that looked exactly the same, and it puffed up immediately. So we stared at it like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ It’s a whole other world of science. I blame Texas humidity.”

Ma is not alone in his embrace of that other world of science. Chefs across the country are showing more skin: in everyday chicken skin salads and cow skin stews as well as fancy turns of, say, salmon skin chicharrón in Los Angeles. Or casual eats like the Chinese-Cajun cracklin’ in New Orleans and the curry noodle sandwich with crispy guinea hen skin in Durham, N.C. Even José Andrés’ grilled vegetables are skin-on. Every skin everywhere all at once.

“It’s cool to take something apart, treat each piece differently and put the pieces back together,” Ma said. “It’s a technique thing, but it’s also a good way to introduce different flavours, different textures.”

History does not celebrate the first skin-eaters, cultures around the world now enjoy skin recipes — whether Canadian scrunchions (pork rind), Indonesian krupuk kulit (beef skin), Jewish gribenes (chicken or goose skin cracklings with fried onions), Mexican cueritos (pork rind), Slavic cvarci (pork crackling) or Vietnamese tóp mo (fried pork fat). 

At The Mary Lane in Manhattan, chef Andrew Sutin keeps reinventing his menu’s trout dish with skin: first with a dried-skin crumble, then with playful curls of fried skin on sautéed fillets and now layered between sliced leeks in a potato soup topped with trout.

“It’s a fresh approach to something that’s already there,” he said, comparing it to a “bonus track” on an album. “Your creative landscape is doubled.” Sutin compared skins’ moment in the sun to the rise of aioli and yolk-heavy pasta, which came in tandem with the popularity of egg-white omelettes and egg-white cocktails earlier this century.

“We’re trying to push the envelope into interesting adventure,” he said. “It’s delicious. It adds texture. And it’s not too far out there, really. I don’t want to serve something weird for the sake of weirdness.” 

Skin is not magic. Celebrity Chinese chef Zhenxiang Dong built his whole menu around duck skin so delicate that it easily shattered. His American debut flopped, despite counting Michelle Obama among its duck skin fans. There are also limits to what diners will stomach: Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods”, once recalled with revulsion that he was almost served a human baby’s foreskin in Madagascar.

Even in less-extreme circumstances, a reluctance bordering on squeamishness around eating skin is not uncommon. “My dad loves making kilawin with the cow’s skin or goat skin,” said Sheldon Simeon, a Hawaiian chef with his own recipe for Ilocano cow skin. “Not something that I do in my restaurants, though.” Asked why not, he declined to answer.

Inspired by cotenne (an Italian pork skin crackling) as well as bì heo (Vietnamese shredded pork skin noodles), New Orleans-transplanted-to-New York chef, Dominick Lee makes a roast beef tagliatelle, with a gluten-free option of pork skin noodles. He also uses dried skin as a kind of furikake-style flavour bomb with rice. It can be a tough sell. “It’s not often someone wants to talk about skin,” he said. “You’re either extremely interested in food or you’re Buffalo Bill.” 

In Savannah, Ga., Rob Newton credited ketogenic eating with a rediscovery of skin. “Keto diets have really helped the eating of skin,” he said. “You can eat chicharrónes or fish skins in cured egg yolk. People want their crunchy, salty thing without a potato or corn, and pig skin has really stepped into that role.” He’s currently developing a kind of terrine he saw in Mexico City that incorporates pulverized chicharrónes.

A desire for zero-waste sustainability helps, too. “We want to honour every bit of the animal,” Newton said. “We don’t waste the bones, the feet, the ears, nothing. This is a way to help do that. And that makes us feel good, like we’re doing the right thing, because we are.”

Mouse Whisper

From To a Mouse

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion, 
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal! 

Better late than never for Mr Burn’s annual day, and belatedly remembering to drink the classic smoked fish soup and nibble the essential haggis, neeps and tatties – all rounded off with a traditional clootie dumpling and a dram of whisky.

Cho sona ri luch ann an lofa

Haggis, neeps and tatties

Modest Expectations – Boning up

Dr Tanveer Ahmed is a University of Sydney graduate, who is in psychiatric practice with an alphabet list of specialities from addictive disorders to transcultural psychiatry. Nowhere among the list is a claim that he knows anything about Medicare. In fact, what he wrote in AFR some weeks ago contains a particular passage of arrant nonsense replete with non-sequiters. (sic)

But as all relevant stakeholders agree, the Medicare system was dreamt up at a very different time. Half a century ago, the challenges were around infectious disease, infant mortality and work-related injuries in a manufacturing-based economy. The medical profession was about large hospitals and alpha male consultants.

First, Dr Ahmed, Medicare is a payment system of Federally-funded patient benefits, a Constitutional head of power granted to the Commonwealth in the 1946 Referendum. Earle Page, in 1953, was the first to try and harness this head of power for the benefit of the patient, particularly in setting up the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule. Still in operation today, Dr Ahmed.

Reporting on Nimmo

Now, progressing this nonsensical proposition that Medicare was the results of some reverie: the genesis for Medicare was the Nimmo Inquiry, set up by a Coalition Government and reporting in 1969. The Report was the platform, which enabled John Deeble and Dick Scotton to outline their plan for a universal health system. This was adopted first by the Whitlam Government (Medibank) and in its second iteration, Medicare, when Hawke was in power. Patient medical benefits have been at the heart of system. The throwaway line of medicine 50 years ago reflects the arrogance of ignorance. Unlike today, infectious disease was not perceived a major problem. It was the decade before AIDS; and Infant mortality was not a major discussion point, but abortion was. In 1972, yes, the mortality rate per 1000 live births was about 16; today it is closer to three. The figure for Aboriginal infant mortality is closer to 13.

Entering into a discussion about what was relevant 50 years ago demonstrates the resilience of the payment system and how it has coped with distortions. In other words, can that resilience continue?

A major challenge is that there is no recurrent mechanism for adjusting the fees for Medicare benefits. What happens now periodically is the Commonwealth sets up an inquiry into medical benefits – or more specifically one or two sections of the Schedule – and while the Inquiry proceeds Government uses it as an excuse to freeze Medicare rebates. So different from changes initiated by the Nimmo Inquiry 54 years ago.

Secondly, a serious distortion is the practice of public hospitals to double dip by “privatising’ their outpatient facilities, diagnostic imaging and pathology. Public hospitals are supposed to be funded through the State/ Commonwealth agreements. However, there were some State governments that diverted such funding for other uses and have been shamed. Politicians are very good at building monuments to themselves and hospitals can issue very useful media releases, especially if the number of dazzling gizmos blinds the population to the lack of staff and services.

Yet Dr Ahmed said the medical profession is all about large hospitals. Where does that comment get us? Hospitals are about staff and being able to provide an optimal 24/7 service. The solution lies in the management of the hospitals and when Dr Ahmed was in swaddling clothes, I was involved in a hospital management plan which worked because it encouraged participation by the medical work force in management – in other words not leaving the decision making in the health care system to others. But what has his statement to do with the current plight of the health system.

The recently constituted Review commissioned for two PSM awardees who probably know “where the bodies are buried” should be able to produce a “fearless review” report, unless both of them are among the grave diggers. The cynical view is that by commissioning the Review from the “Yes Minister” crowd, at best we may get a sample of the soil where the bodies are buried rather than a complete exhumation.

The third challenge is the growth of medical practice being treated as just another business commodity. The hedge funds, the private equity investors, the conglomerates based overseas mostly saw Medicare as a “Eureka” moment.  A government ATM! The doctors become salaried ciphers, as they get a guaranteed stipend while the patient benefit money flowed offshore into tax havens. Ahmed mentions this but does not make the connection between this distortion and Medicare.

The fourth is that the co-payment becomes the major patient cost as the value of the benefits decreases relatively. Given that medical specialists charges are increasingly detached from the medical benefit, then Medicare becomes more and more strangled – and in time irrelevant if no remedial action is taken. Two forces are contributing to this strangulation – (a) funding the NDIS – it is difficult to believe that significant funding that would otherwise be directed to Medicare has not been diverted to the NDIS, and  (b) the asymmetry of information undertaken. between patient and provider. The consumer is at a disadvantage in that when confronted with a diagnosis he or she is completely at the mercy of the information fed by the providers.

These are the real reasons Medicare has lost its effectiveness. A salaried profession is coming to general practice by stealth, coupled with an absence of regular review of the value of the patient benefits. In the past, George Repin assured that the AMA’s contribution was in Joint Inquiries, regular engagement with the Commonwealth that assured the value of the patient benefits. I fear today that the AMA in such updated reviews would be protecting the profits of overseas investors.

Introduction of capitation across Australia raises the question of why? The Constitution provides a particular way to go which has been remarkably robust, despite the attempt of Fraser’s Government in particular to sabotage it in its infancy before Medicare’s introduction consolidated the system under Hawke, with the guidance of his exceptional Minister for Health, Neal Blewett.

I have dealt previously with this idea that the health professionals naturally come together and work co-operatively. To accomplish this requires people with very special skills and not authoritarian personalities – perhaps Dr Ahmed’s feared alpha male consultants rampaging through Medicare. Still, I do not know what a reference to the alpha male medical consultant has to do with the value of the Medicare Benefit.

No, Dr Ahmed, the scheme was not dreamed up; and God knows why the AFR printed this shallow piece where simply put, the Commonwealth government, a Labor Government, is just starving the scheme into bureaucratic marasmus.

Meanwhile, the AMA sends out media releases printed on warm lettuce leaves.

Herding Goats

In an earlier blog, I wrote about my Uncle Frank Egan, who kept a flock of sheep in his backyard in Avoca, a settlement nestled in the Victorian Pyrenees. He fed his sheep by a judicious use of the Long Paddock for miles around, which earned its title as Egan’s Paddocks. It kept the flock intact, while he had very little actual land.

It struck me after driving through the extensive gorse lining the roadway between Zeehan and Strahan, after reading about the various forms of gorse eradication, that goats would seem to be the best way to solve the problem, as long as the relevant local government is patient as it may take a few years to fully accomplish.

Likewise, after the extensive rains, with the prolific growth of grasses alongside the roads, goats could be used to trim the verges. However, goats without a goatherd may prefer a diet of wheat shoots or canola rather than just stick to the roadside. Thus, goats need supervision. The concept of local government employing a goatherd should not be too difficult with a migrant community where the goat is an essential part of family life.

Boer goats

Goats are such versatile animals. Angora goats are known for their hair; others species for the quality of their meat, and further others as milking goats. The assessment of goats in relation to their weed clearing capacity, especially relating to gorse, suggest Boer goats may be the best.

In support of the above, a Dandenong Valley horticulturist, Colin Arnold has said; “Angled onion is a major problem along the Dandenong Creek. The goats love the flowers and eat the foliage too at certain times. They also eat other local weeds: privet, English ivy, pittosporums, blackberries, hawthorn and even prickly gorse. Gorse has seed that is viable for 25 years, but goats will find those seedlings and eat them, too. In areas where there are larger bushes, such as blackberries and tree regrowth, I put bigger goats.”

He added that young goats preferentially target weeds rather than eat the native vegetation. I would like to see the evidence, but generally the local councils should know where their native vegetation needs protection.

Arnold does use Boer goats for the task. They are also good meat goats – so in drought times, the flocks can be reduced. Others use an electrified corral where they can leave the goats to munch. The goats are resilient to being outside, if given a modicum of care. Nevertheless, the employment of goatherds by government could standardise the responsibilities of such a person.

Gorse

To me, it is a no brainer for the use of goats to be introduced and trained goat herders should be recruited to establish an industry that becomes no different from any other local government responsibility.

It is a pity that Uncle Frank never developed a business called “The Long Paddock Munch” – the family fortune could have been, founded in the mouth of the goat.

Pity about the lack of goats then, and the spectacle of Uncle Frank as a goatherder is just too fanciful, but the profession should not be discarded as a thought bubble today with so much exotic invasive weed needing removal – and hopefully also to fuel reduction in the bush.

Snug in the Huon Valley

Where would you find settlements called Snug and Flowerpot and Eggs and Bacon Bay?  Then there is Cygnet, just down the road. Has a certain ring about it, if under a different spell.

You drive along the winding road South from Hobart into the Land of the Scarecrows. It is a picturesque drive through small villages and past farms. There is a collage of primary produce outlets and markets along the way. Fruit and vegetables are fresh; the taste tells me so. Tomatoes straight off the vine; wonderfully variegated beetroot and radishes; home to stone fruit and once where apple orchards and hop field dominated, now there are cherry trees covered in netting, and at the end of summer the trees are showing exhaustion after bountiful crops.  This is the Huon Valley.

As we look out over the garden of our friends, there is the scenic D’Entrecasteaux Channel, which separates the Huon Valley from Bruny Island. On the Channel there is always a sloop or a ketch to complete the picture of summer serenity.

But if you look in the other direction covering the hillside are the brooding forests of eucalypt and blackwood.

On 7 February 1967 Southern Tasmania was engulfed in fires, an event which came to be known as the Black Tuesday bushfires. They were the most deadly bushfires that Tasmania has ever experienced, leaving 62 people dead, 900 injured and over seven thousand homeless. The fires were particularly linked with Snug, which was almost completely razed.  This occurred after a very rainy year in 1966, and there was plenty of bush to burn – as it did when the temperature rose, the wind came from the north-west and the humidity was low.

As we were driving on a hot day a week or so ago, we stopped at a roadside stall near New Norfolk and while we were buying his youngberries, the farmer looked up and said that the wind had shifted west, and had it done so in the morning that would have been a perfect scenario for bushfires to break out. Fortunately it did not occur.

Our friends have taken precautions against bushfire – a mandated reservoir of water, extensive clearance of vegetation including tree removal. Nevertheless, there is only one narrow road out of the Valley and despite the increase in fire trails, the bushfire danger to the Huon Valley remains, as it does to Hobart, as happened in 1967.

Fire management plans are available, but brochures are easy to write and their recommendations are often expensive to enforce. With the current doctrine of allowing everyone to do what they like, as a side product of decades of neoliberalism where trust in individual responsibility will suffice on the grounds that we all live in a rational world. Naïve, comes the cry!

After the Black Sunday bushfire in 2009 in Victoria, a curious journalist interviewed people implicated in deliberately lighting fires and found that “a criminal profile for bushfire arson {which} is fairly well defined, but to my way of thinking, unsatisfyingly clinical. We know arsonists are usually men at an average age of 26, with a disconcerting number volunteering with the country’s firefighting agencies. They also tend to be disconnected from friends and family and live with depression or {other defined} mental illness.

In fact, the man convicted of some of the Black Sunday bushfires received 17 years imprisonment.  The severity of the penalty was linked to 173 people who died; 2029 houses were lost. In contrast to the Snug bushfire, the Black Sunday bushfire took over a month to extinguish.

The Black Sunday arsonist was 39 years old at the time of the offence and a former volunteer in the Country Fire Brigade. Nevertheless, that fire’s common causes are three: fallen powerlines, lightning strikes and arson.  To that can be added the discarded cigarette butts and sparks from industrial equipment. Nothing much you can do about lightning unless the site of the strike can be immediately identified – a forlorn hope. Thus, reliance on community efficiency in preparation for bushfires may help; but I am not sanguine with climate change. Tasmania will become more and more like Victoria. This would be tragic, the signs of 1967 are not evident now in the Huon Valley. But for how long?

Picklefad? 

I used to play squash twice a week in the sixties. Australia at the time had the world’s best men’s and particularly women’s squash players. Heather McKay won 16 consecutive British Opens from 1962 to 1977. Squash courts were not cheap to build and as the popularity of squash waned, so did the number of squash courts. This has been ultimately the fate of indoor racquet ball sports; popularity is important to maintain their costly capital expenditure. There are a variety of these, now niche sports; moreover, table tennis without the table would be a little difficult for the ocular challenged. Badminton, once battledore and shuttlecock, is not a game for the concrete red-meat Americans. Royal tennis for the elite. The problem with croquet is that it needs a big lawn whereas tennis, once its companion sport, has proved adaptable to a variety of surfaces.

And now pickleball, tennis when one is not playing tennis – the conundrum is how long will it last before it becomes “pickled ball.”

By the way the name, according to trusty Wikipedia, as mentioned in the body of the following article, came about because in the summer of 1965, pickleball was founded by three guys fooling around on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Within days, it was called “pickle ball”, a reference to the leftover non-starters in the “pickle boat” of crew races – an American term. Note the date of invention and the time it has become popular. The rule of thumb between time of invention and time of general adoption is 18 years.

I am indebted to the Boston Globe for this edited version of how the new phenomenon has become a sensation, if not an addiction.

Karine Marino played pickleball from 8 until midnight on a recent Monday night, drove 11 minutes home to Bedford, took a quick shower, set her alarm for 5 a.m., and drove back to the same indoor courts for her 6:30 a.m. game.

“But I just do that once or twice a week,” Marino, 58, said. “It’s not all the time.”

No, no, of course not. She usually plays a mere three hours a day, unless she’s in a tournament, or she’s coaching a friend from her club, Life Time in Burlington, or …

Pickleball, as you may have heard, and heard and heard and heard, has become the “fastest growing” sport in the United States, per the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.

But it’s one thing to read that nearly 5 million people played last year — an increase of nearly 40 percent over 2020, according to the sports association — and another to watch a loved one get sucked into the game’s gravitational pull. Flying to pickleball camps, joining multiple pickleball leagues, eying a $145 designer pickleball dress, and playing through the pain of pickleball elbow.

A woman attorney recently figured out that her boyfriend was graciously giving her son a ride to school — under the guise of being helpful — in part because it is next to pickleball courts.

“He has a whole new social life with retired ladies,” she said.

Pickleball was invented  by three dads, who were looking for family-friendly entertainment. From there it famously jumped to retirement communities, and periodically word would come out of Florida or Arizona about some goofy-sounding game in which grandparents were engaged. If people talked of it at all, it was mainly to mock.

But in a makeover even people who eat plant-based diets (nee vegans) might envy, pickleball has come so far that not only is there such a thing as Major League Pickleball, investing in a team has become the hottest financial move since crypto, though ideally with fewer crashes and indictments.

“Naomi Osaka and Patrick Mahomes Join Wave of Celebrities Investing in Pickleball,” Forbes headlined in December. “LeBron James is a pickleball fan,” a 2022 CNBC headline read, “and now he’s buying a team.”

Pickleball has a reputation for being a friendly sport, and that’s accurate — unless you try to get between a pickleballer and their lifeblood, aka more pickleball courts.

“You are always hunting,” said Erin McHugh, a woman who sees empty parking lots as potential courts and author of “Pickleball is life: The Complete Guide to Feeding Your Obsession.”

There are an estimated 35,000 courts in the United States, more than double the number from five years ago. But it’s not enough.

At a South Boston indoor pickleball parlour, where courts rent for as much as $100 per hour, aspiring players need to act fast. Those who don’t grab a slot within seconds after the online sign-ups begin are unlikely to get a court at the time they want, said owner Brian Weller. “It’s like trying to get Taylor Swift tickets.”

As the sport grows so does the drama. Pickleballers are battling both tennis players for court space and court-side neighbours who are fed up with the loud thwack-thwack-thwack of the hard plastic ball hitting the paddle (and also the boisterous and sometimes drunken chatter from spectators).

Tension flared. In Marblehead {a coastal Massachusetts town} recently when pickleballers complained about the winter closure of pickleball courts, according to the Marblehead Current, “There’s a {Chinese} balloon flying over the Carolinas, but we’re worried about pickleball nets,” a member of the Recreation and Parks Commission said. “I’m at my wit’s end with pickleball chatter.” The Commission compromised by agreeing to reopen six courts for players who can bring their own nets.

Why is pickleball so seductive? Its relatively small court means there’s less ground to cover than in tennis. You could spend a lifetime working on your game, but you can also have fun right away. You can socialize and exercise at the same time, usually outside, and for that reason it became a pandemic darling.

But a sport doesn’t get this big without a sprinkling of magic. Perhaps Marino, a retired engineer and aspiring pickleball “evangelist,” captured it best.

“The majority of people say it takes them back to their childhood,” she said. “To that carelessness. You play in a way that you are disconnected from your reality.”

Mouse Whisper

This was sent by My Mouse on the Wye. It has been seen more than 20,000 times on Facebook, but still makes me chuckle.

There was this well-dressed man on the bus in Cardiff. He was the quintessential English gentleman, with the cultured arrogance as he directed a rebuke to the woman in the hijab talking to her teenage son for speaking a foreign language not English.

An elderly lady on hearing this turned around from where she was sitting, and said to yon knight, “She’s speaking Welsh.”

Modest Expectations – Dead Poets Society

King Charles inherited 45,667 acres of land across England & Wales, worth around £650m, generating income of £24m pa. He didn’t pay a single penny in inheritance tax & will only pay income tax if he volunteers. On the 6th May you will pay to put a crown on his head. These stark comments were relayed on a Twitter feed and, given the opaqueness of the Royal finances in many areas, the numbers are probably as reliable as any others.

It will be interesting to note which Australians will be part of the Forelock Shuffle to Westminster Abbey. How many avowed Republicans will be following the Prime Minister who, given his dainty ambivalence, will go and try to dampen criticism by offering to have a Regal Party on his plane, a modified KC-30A Multi-Role Tanker Transport, which in itself is a modified Airbus A330 jet, which can accommodate 100 passengers.

The Coronation

But then, at the Queen’s Coronation in 1953, 250 seats were reserved for Australians headed by the then Prime Minister, Robert Menzies. There were 8,000 invitations issued.  There was an Australian military contingent which participated in the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Two Australian warships participated in a Spithead Review of 300 ships. Notably, the commentator on British Pathe reported that the crews of British and foreign ships all cheered. Foreign? It should be noted our Australian nationality on our passports only occurred in 1949; the words “British Passport” was retained on our passports until 1967.

The coronation of Charles III provides an opportunity to dispense with all the seductive pomp at which the British are very good – it appeals to all of the Cringe in Australians, afflicted by an inferiority complex which also guides the bunyip aristocracy.

We have a High Commissioner in London – let him be Australia’s representative. That’s sufficient.

But no, no, no – maybe Albanese will still be Prime Minister when William V ascends the British throne. By that time Australia should be a republic.

But then that is Australia Dreaming.

The Flag

One of the most difficult changes in Australia would be to change the flag. My first response years ago would have been dismissive; namely “who cares?”

We are used to it, and then all our history is mixed with histrionics associated with preservation of the hoar frost for those who still yearn for the Mother Country and have never forgiven the Labor Party for doing away with Imperial Honours. The preservation of the Union Jack in the Flag would preserve the hoar on the railing post.

But I suspect most people couldn’t care less. There is not a strong sense of wrapping ourselves in the Australian flag and crying “patriotism”. Yet the process to change the Australian Flag is formidable. The current Australian flag was officially raised for the first time on 3rd September 1901 at the Royal Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne, unveiled by Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton. The design was the product of a competition held to find a national flag for the newly federated Australian nation. The competition attracted 32,832 entries from Australia and overseas; five individuals shared the honour of submitting the winning design. Apart from a few minor differences in the magnitude and number of points on the stars these people had designed what we now know as the Australian Flag.

The Australian flag was called the Australian or Commonwealth Blue Ensign until the Flags Act of 1953 gave it the title of Australian National Flag, confirming it as the chief national symbol by law, custom and tradition. This fact was recognised in 1996 when the Governor-General, Sir William Deane, proclaimed 3 September “Australian National Flag Day”.

New Zealand in the past decade spent NZ$23m in attempting to change the flag, a matter dear to the then Prime Minister, John Keys. He persuasively said that the similarity in the Australian and New Zealand flags was one reason to change. It should be noted that Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu, and Fiji are the only nations to retain the symbol of British colonialism. Moreover, Fiji is a republic.

Strangely, the State of Hawaii retains the Union Jack embroidered in its flag. Curiously the stripes on the Hawaiian flag are similar to those on the Russian flag. The construction of Hawaii’s flag occurred when the indigenous Hawaiian rulers were ingratiating themselves with the perceived powerful European powers in the Pacific.

In the end, changing our flag is indeed formidable, but not insurmountable. How did the Canadians do it? After all, Canada has always been the favourite place for the Royals to visit, in particular the late Queen.  The Canadians eschewed a referendum. They concentrated on the emblem of the maple leaf, set up a Parliamentary Committee, and then a process that involved progressive simplification of the design to the single red leaf.

On 22 October 1964, the committee voted in favour of the single-leaf concept. Two months later the House of Commons approved the design, followed shortly after by the Senate. The Liberal Ontario politician, John Matheson, one of the flag committee’s members, is often credited with achieving consensus within the committee and helping to end the Great Flag Debate in Parliament. The lesson is: keep it simple, use a universally recognised symbol, exert leadership and take nothing for granted.

I wonder if Keys had insisted on the silver fern and an “all black” background with or without the Southern Cross – and stuck to it – would the New Zealanders not have retained their current flag.

Gough Whitlam, in an interview in 1994, insisted that arguments about servicemen and women serving under the existing Flag in all of Australia’s wars were untrue. He said he had been the last Prime Minister to have served under the flag, (he was in the air force in World War II), but that Flag had been a red, not a blue, one and at RAAF funerals the casket had been draped in the Union Jack, not the Australian flag. The current flag had not been formally adopted until the enactment of the Flags Act of 1953, and had only been used in one war, Vietnam, and then only on land. The navy and air force continued to use their own flags.

We got this blue one because Menzies did not like red,” said Whitlam, adding that his Liberal predecessor had once used the New Zealand flag while on a visit to Canada. Trust Billy McMahon to get it wrong.

Whitlam went on to say, “We need an Australian as head of state who will be accepted by other heads of state in the world and we need a flag which is identified as Australian and accepted by all — the original Australians and those who have come here from overseas.” 

Whitlam said he favoured retaining that part of the flag that was distinctively Australian — the Southern Cross. 

Keys made the mistake of trying to establish a consensus, probably impossible when you need to obtain change when it is a matter of taste and to convince those who believe the flag is a sacred relic.

First, I would remove the Union Jack, and re-position the Southern Cross in the night sky.  I would prefer wattle as emblematic given that the Australian colours are not dark blue, but green and gold. To me, wattle provides the gold and the blue green of the eucalyptus as the background. In spring, in the southern states, the land is a tapestry of green and gold. Why do our representatives dress in a grass green colour given that this is a country of blue mountains, which essentially are the eucalyptus colour from a distance – and a suitable colour acknowledging this green merging into the blue should not be a great challenge to mix?

Then maybe Australia should have “a jury” to determine how to match the elements and then, as with Canada, the most suitable arrangement would evolve.

I must say, I have form. When I was a senior staffer, I was asked what would be discussed at the next parliamentary party meeting, the last meeting having been consumed with discussion of the Flag. I replied I supposed it would be the Party’s policy on heraldic symbols. It was reported in the media. There were some in the Party who were not amused. It gave some insight into the importance that I, as a young man, ascribed to the Flag, to which I alluded at the start of this piece. Maybe age has modified my flippancy.

Jackals and Hyenas Abroad

Rumore” in Italian is the word for “noise”. Recently, someone commented that I (née big Johnnie) had been kicked out of the Liberal Party. One person close to me said I should wear that as a badge of honour.

Others said to me, why bother?  Still a lie is a lie and needs to be corrected. Now the political process, as with any combative arrangement, attracts the jackals and hyenas to feed on the carrion of this process. By this I refer to the detritus of innuendo and lies served up in the clubs, and board rooms of Australia amid the sly chortles wreathed in cigar smoke and the glittering whisky decanters on the pour.

I was a member of the Liberal Party for about a decade in the seventies and early eighties. In that time, I was a political staffer; organised a centrist discussion group called “Grapple” with assistance from other like-minded so-called “small L liberals”, an unfortunate moniker; was a branch president for a few years and failed in three tilts to gain pre-selection for outer Melbourne parliament seats.

When I moved to Sydney in 1979, I cut my ties with “Grapple” and joined the then Australian Institute of Political Science. The Institute received funding then from some of the big Australian companies, but the money spinner was the Summer School, where aspiring politicians, and those interested in political science could debate a particular theme over the long weekend in January. The Institute produced the Australian Quarterly.

The Institute owed its existence to members of the Sydney establishment led by Norman Cowper who, in 1932, set it up as a reaction to a growth of the Fascist New Guard led by Eric Campbell on the extreme right. On the left was Jack Lang, the NSW Premier with his defiant populism, which threatened the established order in a far different way from Campbell.  Nevertheless, both were authoritarian as most extreme politicians are whether they are left or right.

In the early years of the Depression revolution was in the air. How serious in retrospect who knows, but one of the results was the Australian Institute of Political Science was formed. Cowper was shrewd in that in the construction of the Sydney-based Board he invited Labor Party members to join the Board – and thus for many years this bipartisan governance persisted. There were also Melbourne directors, who would be present at the Summer School. It was all very civilised; the only problem was that the Institute was running out of money by the time I joined.

There was enough money to celebrate the 50th anniversary, which I organised and invited David Owen, who was one of the leaders of Social Democrats and at that time considered as a future British Prime Minister. Unlike most politicians these days, he charged nothing for his appearance fee, but we engineered a first class airfare return to London plus accommodation.

The celebration was centred around the first Cowper Oration. Norman Cowper, then 87 years old, attended.  The celebration was a success, which surprised some on the Board which had become a comfortable place for mates to meet when money was not a problem. I was an outsider, a Melburnian. The Institute leaned towards the Labor party.  Despite the 50th anniversary, which was just a temporary fillip, the financial situation was increasingly dire and, not for the first time in such a situation, a Board turned to me to become the Chair and solve the resultant problem of potential insolvency.

In the mid 1980s, certainly the mood for change coincided if not clashed within the Institute. The Summer school became non-viable. Where once the Summer School was “the only game in town”, now the growth of forums, symposia, workshops and all sorts of scientific meetings were competing for the space the Institute once had to itself. Politics was becoming more partisan and trying to define the political centre became impossible with the bipartisan adoption of elements of neoliberalism, banging the drum of individual freedom and the contempt for government. In other words, there was a certain pessimism about the future of the AIPS with funds drying up.

At this time, there was a move by some of the Melbourne directors who were members of the Liberal Party headed by Richard Alston to take the Institute to Melbourne and convert it into a right wing think tank. There was no plan just an assertion to trust him while his cabal appropriated the name of the Institute. Nevertheless, the unseen hand of John Elliot, then at the height of his “Fosterisation” hubris, was probably behind funding an Alston-led organisation.

By this time I had let my Liberal Party membership lapse; but the action in resisting this move of the Institute and having the Sydney directors support me in resisting this move, did not win me any friends in the Victorian Branch of the Liberal Party of which I once was a member. Then I took the secretariat of the Institute into my office and it survived, as it does today. I was fortunate to have Gay Davidson, a senior political journalist in Canberra, as my Vice-President for much of the following decade. We retained Government funding. Australian Quarterly survived with people such as Ross Garnaut editing it for a time.

No, I was not kicked out of the Liberal Party. I left it with the minimum of fuss.

I resigned as Chair of the Australian Institute of Politics and Science (the name was changed during my stewardship to better reflect its change in function) after 18 years in 2002 and was succeeded by Rick McLean. The Institute and Australian Quarterly remain to this day.

Dauber or just Dabbler

When I was searching for a site for University of Melbourne Family Club Child Care Centre in the late 60s, I had a strange encounter when I met a Miss Dauber who was, if not the only surviving descendent of Horatio Larcher, certainly a major beneficiary of his estate. Larcher, according in his brief 1942 obituary, had been born in London in 1854, and migrated to Victoria in 1871. He built up one of the largest retail distribution businesses of milk in Melbourne. To illustrate this, by 1907 he was advertising his  Farm Dairy at 45 Moor St Fitzroy. At about that time, pasteurisation was introduced, and his dairy continued to increase its output from 50 to 100 quarts daily in 1896 to 10,000 quarts a day in 1922.

Larcher’s milk cart

Returning from the UK on a visit in 1936, Larcher had brought samples of sterilised and “homogenised” milk, very popular in England. The cream was pressed into the milk and the heat sterilised. Kept in a cool place, if the bottle was not opened, Larcher was quoted as saying the milk would last indefinitely. He brought back samples. “Such milk, which could be sold for about a penny a pint more than ordinary milk, would be invaluable in Australia for transportation over any distance.” He seemed to be describing ultra-pasteurisation.

In Victoria, the Milk Pasteurization Act 1958 specified that “no one should sell or deliver milk except milk pasteurised at licensed pasteurising premises and bottled and sealed as prescribed.” At that time, only about half the milk sold in Victoria was pasteurised. I was in Trinity College at the University of Melbourne then and we had cows grazing on the College grounds; we consumed the milk from the College cows – unpasteurised. No-one to my knowledge contracted bovine tuberculosis nor brucellosis.

Therefore, Larchers had distributed milk through major generational change when at first milk needed to be purchased almost daily from the milkman, unless the family had an ice chest or Coolgardie safe or the new-fangled refrigerator.

The Larcher method of distribution was the horse drawn cart and the horses were stabled on the Moor Street premises, where Larcher himself lived. While there is a photograph of a Larcher horse and cart outside the Southern Cross in 1966, it was not long after that when Larchers closed.

The times had now changed irrevocably. The whole method of distribution was now through the corner store or the supermarket where milk could be refrigerated. The road traffic had increased such that the horse and cart with streets covered with horse excrement was no longer the best method of retaining or distributing milk. This freed up the stables, with their extensive courtyard, in a place not too far from the University of Melbourne.

Miss Dauber was interested in the conversion of the stables into a child-minding centre, and thus I entered into negotiation and I found out I was drawn into a gossamer web. Miss Dauber was a delicate woman whose age was difficult to define by just looking at her finely lined face. She seemed somewhat detached but at the same time she affected coquettish behaviour. There was another young man competing for the property to provide the child-minding centre, but he had no overt experience; even then his strange persona concealed a dark side which ultimately led to him being “sectioned” and held securely in a mental health facility for a period.

With my then young family I visited Miss Dauber on several occasions at her extensive country property at Healesville. What I remember clearly was the magnificent cork tree. I had never seen a fully grown cork tree with its distinctive bark. Funny what you remember, but after a while I realised that, despite her elegant afternoon tea hospitality, I was being strung along, as if courting for Miss Dauber’s hand, much to her enjoyment.

In the words of a nineteenth century novel, I withdrew, thanked her with a flourish of effusiveness. and sought more successfully another premises, this one in Carlton. It was a complete break. I never knew what ultimately happened to Miss Dauber. In a later architectural history of Inner Melbourne, I note reference to a Dauber Child Minding Centre in 1971 located in the Moor Street premises.

Today, it is an undistinguished block of flats. But the Larcher chimney still exists as a remnant of its glory days.

The Melbourne University Family Club with its premises in Carlton has remained, a pioneer in early childhood development.

Mouse Whisper

Jeff Tiedrich is a 65 year old New York graphic designer known since 2000 for his acerbic blogs. He has played guitar in the band Alligator and looks uncannily like Eric Clapton.

After the recent Michigan massacre, he tweeted: Well-regulated militia opens fire on Michigan State University in East Lansing. Cheap thoughts and useless prayers now being rushed to the scene … more on this soon-to-be-forgotten-and-then-repeated story-as-it develops.

Jeff Tiedrich

Modest Expectations – We’ll drink champagne in Udine

Look, I’m not one for a Grudge …

To him, been just given the Nudge

I shall not, I will not, deliberately Fudge

Nor will I Budge

Yes, he said I did robotically Bludge

Then pushed me back into the poverty Sludge

Who? You guessed it, he was known as Alan Pakenham Tudge

Yes, some say he has left quite a Smudge

But whom am I to constructively Judge

As broken, defeated I onwardly Trudge

The Little Red Citroen

This is one prime example of the unexpected consequence. For years, when we have come to Tasmania, we hired a car. But with COVID and even before that, hiring cars was becoming prohibitively expensive in Tasmania, and at busy times of the years, the car hire companies introduced limits on the free kilometres.

Thus because of both this and increasingly wanting to stay longer in Tasmania at any one time, we made the decision to take the car ferry, the Spirit of Tasmania. Let’s say, that its disabled passenger cabin is excellent, even though it is a long corridor away from the lift, but the crew are solicitous, and one seems always at hand. On this occasion, travelling across from Melbourne to Devonport was uneventful, and we went down the West Coast to our property at Strahan.

When we decided to return, the rain had come to Northern Tasmania – flooding rains but some of the major roads remained open, even though much of the countryside was completely under water. However, the major unexpected consequence was that the level of the Mersey River at Devonport rose, floating the Spirit of Tasmania upwards, such that it was impossible to load cars and trucks. Therefore, with several cancelled ferries, and no confirmation of a new departure date for at least 48 hours, and a departure date delayed for effectively at least four days, we saw the uncertainty that bad weather introduces.

As we were due to go to Vietnam at the end of the week, we had no choice but to leave the car in Tasmania. Fortunately, we have good friends south of Hobart with space in their yard for a car. So we drove the car down from the North to their place, where we left the car and flew back to Sydney.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. Back in Sydney, preparing to travel to Tasmania to pick up the car. Then we were both laid low by a very nasty respiratory virus, not COVID, but may as well have been – how sick we both were. The upshot was that the car was marooned in Tasmania for another month.

Then “the cavalry” came to our rescue. Number two son said he was prepared to go and pick it up and bring it back to Melbourne – flight to Hobart, pick up the car our friends had conveniently left at the Hobart airport, then drive it to Devonport, overnight to the new Victorian Spirit of Tasmania destination, Geelong; thence up the Princes Highway and home.

By this time we were fit to travel, and as we had business in Albury, another friend offered to bring our car to Albury and meet us there. Number one son picked up the car, re-fuelled it and dropped it to our friend’s place. One-way hire of a modest sedan from Sydney to Albury cost about $1,000. Our friend having dropped our car returned to Melbourne by train, a trip which enabled him to read a book and which cost $20.

The exercise would have not been possible without this chain of friends and family. It makes us realise we are not alone on this planet – and we thank you all.

Medicare and the Constitution

Australia is consumed to a greater or lesser degree by the prospect of incorporating recognition of the Aboriginal people into the Constitution in a nebulous concept known as the Voice. 

Meanwhile, the Government is flailing around wondering how to make Medicare work.

Medicare is made possible, because it is based on providing a range of patient benefits for a number of defined responsibilities.

1946 – Prime Minister Chifley – action

In 1946 the following was passed in a referendum of the Australian people, an amendment to Section 51, namely:

(xxiiiA.)  The provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:

The Commonwealth does not have any constitutional power to regulate prices and incomes; and that is the greatest misunderstanding of how Medicare works. Hence doctors can charge what they believe is fair and reasonable; and only individual States can determine otherwise. Thus, of all health professionals, only doctors and dentists are able to receive Commonwealth funded patient benefits for their professional services. When the amendment was passed in 1946, the explosion of other health profession numbers had yet to occur, plus these professions being deemed to be in private practice. Patient benefits can only accrue to doctors working in private practice, although this has been systematically undermined by public hospitals “privatising” some of their clinics – in essence promoting double-dipping. Here the Commonwealth has been weak in its response.

In 1974, optometrists were given access to a limited patient benefits scheme where the profession accepted the benefit in effect as full payment; and they were deemed “medical” – a sleight of hand because at that time there was an unusually large number of optometrists as members of parliament. The other means of providing patient benefits is to provide a medically supervised patient benefit for a health professional group. In areas such as diagnostic imaging, radiotherapy and pathology, there has been a long term recognition that the benefit contains not only a professional component for the medical service but also the payment for technicians and scientists essential for the delivery of the services which are incorporated in the technical component of the medical benefit.  The other component is the capital component, which acknowledges the level of capital expenditure to deliver the medical service. This last is a vexed question because it has not been universally agreed, and for instance, there is a separate list, from which prostheses are costed.

Recently, there is a clamour by various health professional groups for direct access to patient benefits, but despite the above stratagem, it should be ruled to be unconstitutional.  As reported in the Persons with Disability and the Australian Constitution monograph, that:

In 1944, The {Pharmaceutical Benefits} Act was challenged by members of the Medical Society of Victoria with the support of the Attorney-General of that state. Publicly, the society objected to its members being co-opted into the scheme and having their professional judgment limited to only prescribing the free drugs from the Commonwealth scheme. The challenge before the High Court rested on two points. The first was whether the scheme that required doctors and chemists to act in accordance with the regulation was authorised by a legislative head of power in the Constitution. In short, did the Commonwealth have the power to regulate medical services? The second point was whether the Commonwealth scheme was in fact merely the appropriation and spending of funds authorised by the Parliament, and thus supported by the incidental powers under the Constitution.

The challenge was upheld by the High Court, but indirectly led to the future constitutional amendment in 1946. Effectively by adjudging the distribution of £30 million for the provision by the Commonwealth of free drugs to be unlawful constitutionally, it provided ammunition for that future constitutional amendment.

As a parenthetic comment, pharmaceutical benefits are directed towards providing a benefit to pay for medicines, and these are contained in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule, not for pharmacists to provide independent professional services, however defined. This is a major pressure point, but it effectively confuses two roles. The pharmacist often knows more about the drug; the doctor, the reasons behind the prescription. Currently a pharmacist may provide health advice, for which there is no patient benefit. The doctor provides health advice for which there is patient benefit.

The pharmacists receive a patient benefit for dispensing medicines, their administration and the potential side-effects but not for dispensing health advice.

2023 – Prime Minister Albanese – who knows …

The Commonwealth Government has different means of handling this. Already it is strangling Medicare and effectively passing the funding as sickness benefits under the NDIS system. The Constitutional amendment by including “sickness benefits” codified Commonwealth funding in the disability sector. It is unfortunate but the AMA has been asleep at the wheel for decades, as the value of Medicare benefits to the patient has been eroded. In response, specialists have just raised their fees, devaluing in effect the value of the medical benefit. Increasingly, GPs have abandoned bulk billing and are charging fees that leave patients with significant co-payments over and above the patient Medicare benefit.

This solution is not that easy for general practitioners. They have been fooled because every time the Commonwealth initiates a review into Medicare, it just puts the whole question of increasing patient benefits on hold. Stratagems such as reducing time with patients, so the doctors time spent is little more than a greeting, a cursory look and then dismissal has been one response. As one wag jokingly said, in some practices, one doctor spent so little time with the patients that they had to be fit because they were required to jog through the surgery to sign the benefit form at the exit.

The central agencies shudder when they hear suggestions that all health professional services should attract a patient benefit – essentially an unlimited payment scheme only constrained by the Commonwealth’s willingness to ascribe a benefit. Currently, the Constitution stands in the way, but if judged by the legal challenge against pharmaceutical subsidy back in 1944, a referendum to change all that would surely be in the gunny sack of every populist Australian politician.

Ironically, amid this agitation, under the Constitution a dental benefits scheme could have been set up long ago. None has ever occurred, despite the concern over the dental health of the nation. Why? The dentists traditionally have not wanted it. This says something about the “influencer”.

Dental influencer

Parramatta 1973

Back in September of that year there was a byelection. This was the first under the Whitlam Government and was caused by the resignation of the local member. This local member was Nigel Bowen who, after the 1972 election, had lost the leadership election of the parliamentary Liberal Party to Billy Snedden by one vote. In 1973, Bowen was appointed as Chief Judge in Equity in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This meant his resignation from Parliament, thus precipitating a byelection. Nigel Bowen in 1964 was elected to Parliament to succeed Garfield Barwick, then on his way to be Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. The Parramatta electorate at that time was “the Menzies gift”, as though he was propelling distinguished jurists into Federal parliament to emulate himself. It did not work out, although as Attorney General, Bowen produced some enlightened proposals, but not enough to be drafted in as Opposition leader.

The Hon Nigel Bowen

As a distinguished jurist, facing years in Opposition, he decided to resume his career, not unexpectedly, especially as he was 61 years of age at the time. Snedden was fifteen years younger. For the Parramatta byelection, the Liberal Party preselected a young Liberal, direct from conservative casting, his father was a State MP, Philip Ruddock.  Philip always danced from one end of the Party to other, but he had a certain resilience. He trounced his Labor Party challenger with a swing of nearly seven per cent.  Ten other candidates, mostly independents, contested the seat.

This was the first Federal election in which eighteen-year-olds were eligible to vote, the voting age having been lowered from twenty-one earlier in the year.

As was expected Bowen did not involve himself in the campaign. Snedden did, and although he was a poor public speaker, he was a good grass roots politician. Whitlam on the other hand made a declamatory speech which canvassed the forthcoming prices and income referendum to be held later in the year. As with the by-election, this referendum was soundly defeated. It had been a triumph for Snedden and helped to consolidate his shaky hold on the Party, especially in NSW at that time.

Peter Dutton, the acclaimed Leader of the Liberal Party, is now faced with a by-election in the first year of a Labor Party government, as was Snedden. The recently retired member, Alan Tudge has been a conspicuously poor performer involved deeply in the Robodebt imbroglio. Let us say, he is hardly the person Nigel Bowen was. In 1973, Snedden was campaigning in NSW whereas his natural base was Victoria. Likewise, Dutton will be campaigning in Victoria, where his normal habitat is Queensland.

Nominally both Parramatta in 1973 and Aston in 2023 were and are safe Liberal seats. The expectation would be that the Opposition Party would achieve a swing as this is the expected outcome after the election, thus strengthening the hold on such electorates. In Parramatta in 1973, Ruddock achieved this swing, and had no need to go to preferences.

Dutton wants a female candidate. He’d better choose wisely, because I hate to see a dead bird floating among sheets of unread Murdoch papers – lose the byelection and you are a dead duck paddling, mate! It will be interesting to see if a wild duck, disguised as a teal is pre-selected. And what of the Labor Party? Can’t lose many feathers contesting; and as a bonus gives an idea of whether it has made inroads into the teal vote.

Thus, what of Aston, where, despite a swing against him at the 2022 election, Tudge held the seat comfortably.  Can Dutton emulate Snedden?

ChatGPT – So you want to Cheat; go right ahead

Lawrence Shapiro is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is coy about his age, but he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, so he must be cognitively still vital.

He writes very calmly in the Washington Post about this artificial intelligence tool which has been heralded as a means of writing essays and assignments without even thinking about it – albeit a means of cheating.

This opinion piece is a very clear appraisal of the tool. He seems very relaxed. After all, he has recently published a second edition of his book Embodied Cognition which a reviewer has hailed as an outstanding introduction for those unfamiliar with but who would like to explore this movement. As the reviewer continues: It clarifies the very idea of embodiment, elaborates the central themes of embodied cognition, and evaluates theories of embodied cognition against standard cognitive science. 

I think I will stick with this general appraisal. 

ChatGPT

ChatGPT has many of my university colleagues shaking in their Birkenstocks. This artificial-intelligence tool excels at producing grammatical and even insightful essays — just what we’re hoping to see from our undergraduates. How good is it, really? A friend asked ChatGPT to write an essay about “multiple realization.” This is an important topic in the course I teach on the philosophy of mind, having to do with the possibility that minds might be constructed in ways other than our own brains. The essay ran shorter than the assigned word count, but I would have given it an A grade. Apparently ChatGPT is good enough to create an A-level paper on a topic that’s hardly mainstream.

Universities are treating the threat as more dire than an epidemic or even a budget reduction. The most obvious response, and one that I suspect many professors will pursue, involves replacing the standard five-page paper assignment with an in-class exam. Others expect to continue with the papers but have suggested that the assigned topics should be revised to focus on lesser-known works or ideas about which a chatbot might not “know” too much. 

Good luck with that. If ChatGPT can pen a solid essay on multiple realization, an issue on which I happen to be a world authority in good part thanks to lack of company, I doubt it would have difficulty constructing essays about lesser-known Shakespearean sonnets or unremarkable soldiers who fought for the Union Army. Besides, if we’re going to demand deep thought from our students, shouldn’t it be about the more important stuff? 

Here’s what I plan to do about chatbots in my classes: pretty much nothing. Let me say first that as much as I value the substance of what I teach, realistically my students will not spend more than a semester thinking about it. It’s unlikely that Goldman Sachs or Leakey’s Plumbing or wherever my students end up will expect their employees to have a solid background in philosophy of mind. Far more likely is that the employees will be required to write a letter or an analysis or a white paper, and to do this they will need to know how to write effectively in the first place. This is the skill that I most hope to cultivate in my students, and I spend a lot of time reading their essays and providing them with comments that really do lead to improvements on subsequent assignments. In-class exams — the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments — are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts. 

I should emphasize just how desperately my students need formal instruction in writing. My wife confirms that I’m noticeably crankier than when I first started teaching 30 years ago. Everything today seems worse than it was back then: traffic, TV news, macaroni and cheese. But I don’t believe that the deterioration in writing quality that I see is a consequence of age-tinted glasses. I read too many papers from upperclassmen, from students who have taken other writing-intensive courses, in which only one sentence out of five is not grammatically or stylistically defective. I would be failing these students if I let ChatGPT discourage me from teaching them what might be the most essential competence they can gain from me.

But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot).

Here’s an idea for extracting something positive from the inevitable prominence that chatbots will achieve in coming years. My students and I can spend some class time critically appraising a chatbot-generated essay, revealing its shortcomings and deconstructing its strengths. This exercise would bring a couple of rewards. First, analytical writing, like any skill, benefits from seeing examples of what works and what does not. While students might reasonably object to having their own essays made a target of public inspection, chatbots couldn’t possibly care. Second, given that chatbots are not going to fade away, my students might as well learn how to refine their products for whatever uses the future holds.

I urge my colleagues not to abandon writing assignments for fear that some students will let artificial intelligence do their work for them. Instead, let’s devise ways to make chatbots work for all of us. Truly, the cheaters are only hurting themselves — unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.

Mouse Whisper

He has been reading this book The Amur River which relates to Colin Thubron’s recent travel from Mongolia, reaching towards and eventually along the Amur River which divides Russia from China to its mouth. Fascinating book, he announced to all and sundry, and me. He could not refrain from telling us about Kim-Jong-Il, the original poisonous North Korean puffball. Kim-Jong-Il was not born in some celestial nursery but in a tiny Russian village near the Amur River and was swept up in fighting the Japanese. But Thubron recounted this description of this high born North Korean dictator – his tastes I doubt were developed along the Amur. How, I ask you do such nutters get these gigs – no mouse would ever be allowed to indulge in such a display?  {Sic}

Despite his propaganda, he was mundanely earthbound, and frightened of flying. He travelled only in a luxury carriage of his own armoured train. On a secret journey to Moscow, his Soviet escort described him eating fresh lobsters airlifted in every day, with roast donkey and champagne, while his people starved.

Amur River

Modest Expectations – Voiture ancienne

The Defence force spends somewhere in the region of $40m a year in recruitment of men and women to the army, navy and air force. Nowhere in the advertisements is the message, join the defence force to be killed fighting for your country. Rather, learn skills, enjoy yourself.

So why would a young doctor go into general practice when there is so much moaning in the background about how terrible general practice is. When I was young, I remember “Country Practice”, a TV show which extolled the virtues of general practice. Since then there have been TV doctors featured as dysfunctional, exiled to the country, as for instance in “Doctor, Doctor”. The portrayal involved a great amount of sordid activity. The characters were hardly appropriate role models, but when you watch an optimistic sitcom such as “Call the Midwife”, one wonders how that would play out if moved from an inner London setting to the Australian outback.

I was involved in rural health until about five to six years ago. I have seen very clearly what works and what doesn’t; and it distresses me to see the same suggested solutions rolled out, knowing they have failed previously. One is this bleating about how difficult it all is; and their need for more doctors. Then when a doctor is suggested to join some of these doctors in apparent need, some back away worrying that their income will be impaired.

Then I wrote about the challenges, which I have observed over the years; I doubt whether they have changed. They seem not to have been taken into account in the platitudes in the latest 12 page report supervised by the Minister, who unfortunately seems to have been captured by these purveyors of stuff that does not work. The challenges to rural practice are:

  • social dislocation
  • professional isolation
  • community tolerance
  • succession planning

Social dislocation is encapsulated in the reluctance of one’s partner to relocate and where the doctor needs to send his/her children away to school. Professional isolation exists in a variety of ways – working on one’s own so that one is effectively rostered on duty 24/7, without locum relief or where one refuses to share on-call with doctors in other practices. I have worked in small communities with hospitals; and well managed they provide an essential resource in enabling work with other health professionals where there are not enough doctors.

Community tolerance is thus at the heart of the inter-relationship with other health professionals and the community. The idea that health professionals will automatically work together, by some magical wafting of a bureaucratic report, is fanciful. Strength of leadership and an ability of the doctor to work in the community needs someone who automatically is expected to join a community and its activity. When there is an immediate barrier of language and customs, not to mention personality traits, expectations may not be fulfilled. Some doctors are not joiners, they do not want to become involved in social activities. Added to this, some doctors need to adjust to the fact that unlike the city, there is no anonymity; one common reaction is to leave the community over a weekend “just to get away”.

Then there is the most important challenge and that is succession planning. Few practices do it, but the ones that do are successful because they promote continuity in service and hence corporate memory and trust among their patients. There should be a rule of thumb that if one survives the initial period, then one should guarantee (and be guaranteed) a certain length of time in one practice.  Five years seems to be reasonable in this modern age, where there is fluidity in employment among health professionals. That means that once the number of doctors needed to provide the best possible service is settled, then one works to maintain that level, remembering that what attracts doctors is a functional practice which, implicitly or explicitly, has paid attention to the top three challenges I have listed.

Income is always important, but it is not a specific condition for general practice and the whole matter of Medicare will be dealt with in my next blog.

I have written about rural medical practice endlessly, (my previous blogs attest to this) but the underlying problem is that the bureaucrat writes the report as if the work has been completed. In reality it is only the beginning, because implementation is always the difficult part.

Once they genuflected and cried: Go to Pell

Many shameful episodes in Australian politics in recent years, but hard to think of a lower moment than seeing two former Prime Ministers attend the funeral of a cardinal who covered up institutionalised sexual abuse of children and protected paedophile priests – Twitter comment 

My eye was attracted to this comment about Cardinal Pell’s funeral. I have a relative who played football with the young George Pell when he was a journeyman country Australian footballer, a big man (195cm) who shouldered some of the ruck load. My relative was adamant that Pell would never have been a child abuser.

The problem is that Pell did have “form” from his time as a young priest, was criticised by the Royal Commission into Child Abuse, was convicted and imprisoned, and the conviction overturned on technical grounds which did not clear Pell, but the decision indicated that High Court was not convinced that the matter of reasonable doubt had been addressed satisfactorily.  The evidence of a monsignor seemed to be believed above the evidence of others, without any real evidence of the veracity of his recall of the circumstances of the accusations made against Pell.

After Pell disappeared to Rome, the Sydney diocese must have started planning for his inevitable death. It was such a highly staged spectacle, seemingly having every Roman Catholic priest recruited for the ceremonial requiem mass. It also seems that the Sydney diocese has decided not to go with the shift in the political winds in Rome, even with the current ailing Argentinian pope, and to combat the progressives who are on the rise. Sydney may decide to become the home of such Roman Catholicism – refusing to consider contraception, abortion, celibacy, the ordination of women, vaccination against cervical cancer and even encouraging the re-introduction of the Tridentine mass (currently four churches in Sydney).

To airbrush Pell is a common trait in Australian culture – turning a scumbag like Ned Kelly into a national hero is another example. Tony Abbott ‘s extravagant comment does not do the situation justice. Abbott is not rabid, in that he has not presumably been bitten by a dog, squirrel or civet.  His statement that those outside the cathedral yelling “Pell go to Hell” meant they at least believed in the afterlife and thus this was the first verified Pell Miracle (gained him a few cheap tweets) but was just plain stupid.

The Church cannot be serious about canonisation of a man who has been shown to facilitate, indirectly or directly, sexual molestation of children by a collection of priest predators, some of whom were close to him at some point. Since Peter became the first Bishop of Rome, the Church has survived a great deal of malfeasance, and perhaps this will continue to persist.

The other perception of the Church is how ludicrous some of the regalia looks when placed alongside stated conservative attitudes. After all, look at the fancy dress of the church dignitaries and then fast forward to the forthcoming dress-ups for mardi gras by the queer dignitaries.

And the other intriguing question, will Abbott and his seminarian mates have to wait for a new Pope to get an Australian Cardinal – or will there be a progressive addition to the Curia gifted by Pope Francis? And could he reach beyond the current list of bishops to perhaps a priest of principle, a man with a progressive tinge. 

My Country, Ngangkari

It was one of those times when I was in Ernabella, and I was introduced to a young man, who I was told was a ngangkari. Ngangkari is a Western desert name for the medicine man. In every community I understood that there were these people, not necessarily men, who were responsible for the spiritual totems. I became aware of this fact when there was talk of a kadaitcha man when I was working in western NSW in the 90s. Although he was never identified, I was assured that he existed, right down to the feathered feet not leaving footprints. Before this can be dismissed as myth, I wonder if, in the construction of the Voice, whether these medicine men were consulted. Do they still exist, because it is important for the integrity of the Aboriginal traditions given the fragility of oral traditions; to assure the continuity of the spiritual values of each particular tribe.

As I said, at Ernabella I was introduced to a young man, who had been identified as a ngangkari. Like many Aboriginals, he was taciturn, especially confronted by a whitefella “blow-in”.  What attracted me to him were his luminous indigo eyes. I was looking into the 40,000 or whatever years of Aboriginal heritage. I tried many approaches to engage him, and the one that worked was when I said “Adelaide Crows”. He broke into a wide smile, and the indigo eyes glinted into the twentieth century. For me, it was important to know that the medicine man existed; it was not for me to interrogate him. He was non-committal in describing his role; but what I knew was how important the oral tradition was to the medicine man/woman and the secrets that had been passed onto this man. By responding to Adelaide Crows meant that this ngangkeri was not set apart from modern life.

Aboriginal healer and artist Betty Muffler, standing on Iwantja, Yankunytjatjara Land in front of her artwork, Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), (2020)

The question arises as to where these medicine men and women have been included in defining such an ephemeral notion as the Voice, because so much of the tradition included in the Voice is embodied in oral tradition. This handed down from one generation of medicine man/woman to the next would seem to be more important than a bunch of Aboriginal academics with confected lines, none of which are incorporated in oral tradition that have been lost or remain as an imagined thread.

I just hope that Voice is not an exercise, a grab for power, by some clever Aboriginals without any real links to the oral discourse. It is as if in the same way I would invoke my Irish ancestors in justifying an Irish voice in how Australia is run. In the end so-called “recognition” could be extended to being an implicit right of veto over legislation, as interpreted by a sympathetic High Court so that the end result is a third chamber of parliament in Australia, with all the complications that would bring.

The ongoing judicial interpretation of something as broadly worded as seems to be proposed by the referendum is likely to cause headaches, since Aboriginality may become of one of judicial interpretation. The legal consequences of a successful referendum will move slowly. Without the involvement of those such as the medicine men or women who carry the Aboriginal lore, it is in danger of becoming the plaything of that band of academic Aboriginals, and of course Noel Pearson. I do not have to worry about the unexpected consequences of all this political malarkey which threatens to consume the country’s political life this year, but my grandchildren may.

Our Bicentenary 

I was amazed to see how the mangroves are flourishing around Iron Cove in inner west Sydney. The past three years have meant that I have spent little time in a place where, 30 years and more ago, I used to run to maintain fitness. The Iron Bay run is 7 km, and relatively flat. Nevertheless, the run includes a number of microclimates, which make it an interesting route. The problem with Iron Cove, which is one of the estuarine inlets of the Parramatta River, is that it has experienced two centuries of whitefella pollution. One of the major pollutants has been dioxan, and therefore I would never intentionally eat fish or crustacea from the Cove. But others do.

When I used to run the Iron Cove, the mangroves were there, but not to the height and extent as the mangrove forest now. It used to be stunted and did not exhibit its current lushness – rather it was a swamp bordering on the estuary, the water flowing tidally, and at ebbtide, it was a muddy swamp with just a thin cover of mangroves. Now it is different and given the mangrove so essential for water hygiene, maybe the underlying pollution will diminish.

After all, the Parramatta River which is estuarine for a considerable way contains numerous diverticular inlets to enhance its presence and importance. If there had not been such a river, the original settlement would not have survived because the soil around the harbour is poor and shallow on the underpinning sandstone. Gardening in suburban Balmain attests to the need to improve the soil and not dig too deep. The Parramatta River was a gateway to its upper reaches where cereal crops could be grown. In other words, here was the arable land,

In recognition of its importance, to celebrate the Bicentenary in 1988, we ran the Parramatta River from Long Nose Point as far as we could to Parramatta and to where the Toongabbie Creek flowed into it.

Like the mangroves, there has been a cleansing of the Parramatta River and its banks. This has been done without interfering with historic buildings built in the early years of the colony. Then many of the buildings were fenced off and left to rot because they were deemed too expensive to renovate. A large chunk of land with a 220 metre frontage on the Parramatta river was given over to the Department of Defence Naval Stores depot at Ermington, fenced off and like so much of the littoral lands unavailable to public access. In some parts, the other side of the river was available. But there was still a great deal of industrial land to be negotiated, for instance running through the coal dust and railway lines at Camilla. The skun dog carcase added to the sights as we padded along the riverside pathway nearing Parramatta one Sunday.

In 1988, it was an unloved waterway – the industrial sewer, yet with these marvellous sandstone Georgian buildings boarded up; fenced off – then too expensive to renovate. To us, just running it was our tribute to 200 years of European migrant population

Now 44 years later, the NSW Government has announced that it will put $60 million towards the pathway, which has been dubbed the Parramatta to Sydney Foreshore Link, a 91 kilometre path able to be used by both pedestrians and cyclists. It will start by the Harbour and end at Parramatta Park.  “In the process, it’ll become one of the city’s longest transport connections, spanning a whopping 18 suburbs,” boasts the media release. 

So, there you go, it took us several Sundays to run the distance. We had to make various compromises because the foreshore was unavailable; but what it said to us about 1788, there were many resourceful people who for better or for worse brought their civilisation to this huge continent.  While we have despoiled, we have avoided building a country torn apart by waves of invaders battling over territory, because the Australian continent was ignored until the end of the eighteenth century except by a few, who left alone for thousand of years developed a most intricate culture among a remarkably diverse “nation”, yet which needed only one group of invaders to almost destroy it. But then again, Australia could have been colonised like Africa, and then the Continent would have been properly shredded.

How to deal with a Pomegranate

Obviously, pomegranate seed mining presents a problem for Americans, as suggested by this article in the Washington Post.  An example of tough love?

Cut the pomegranate in half through the equator, hold a half cut side down in your hand over a dish or bowl and whack it — firmly, confidently — with a wooden spoon. 

That’s it. Just make sure you’re hitting the fruit with the underside of the bowl of the spoon, rather than the edge, which is more likely to crack it. If you want to be a little extra, you can roll the fruit around on your counter before cutting to help loosen the seeds, though I didn’t bother. If you’re worried about splatters, use the biggest, widest bowl you have. (don’t do this while wearing white.) 

It took me a less than two minutes per half to remove all the seeds, no prying required. Just periodically turn the halves over to see where you need to focus your efforts to ensure all the seeds come out. Very little of the membrane or white flesh ended up in the bowl, and whatever did was easily picked out. If I shook the bowl like I was tossing a salad, the extra bits rose to the top or spun to the edges, making it even simpler, no water needed. After that, it was easy to transfer the seeds to an airtight container in the refrigerator, where they should be good for at least five days, though I’ve pushed it longer. If you want to freeze the seeds for a few months, be sure to place them in a single layer on a lined baking sheet and then pack them in a bag or container once they’re froze. 

This simplicity of this method was in stark contrast to the more photogenic technique that infiltrated my Instagram feed, in which you carve out the top and then try to cut the pomegranates into its naturally occurring segments. It took me way longer to do this, as I still had to press and pry out the seeds. Plus, surprisingly, it sent more seeds onto the floor than the whack-it-over-a-bowl method.

As an added bonus, the wooden spoon strategy is incredibly therapeutic. Whack out your frustrations, and then enjoy the fruits of your labour. Win-win.

Mouse Whisper

As he says, his pronunciation leaves something to be desired. Thus, when he pronounced his Citroen as a “Citron”, he wondered why it did not sell, until he was placed in the front of a mirror and given an elocution lesson.