Aboriginal people Archives - Page 2 of 4

Modest Expectation – Malopolskie

A young American national guardsman was apprehended as the person alleged to have leaked “State Secrets”, not apparently for any reward apart from seemingly to “big note’ himself. He apparently is big on Guns and God; not an anarchic nihilist, but one who is a dab hand at getting into the holy of holiness – “the State Secrets”, and what’s more, converting it into a video game. The force sent to arrest him magnified the view of the Government being a Puffer Toad, so many Federal agents were deployed to arrest this one guy. The melodrama was almost comical and shows how difficult some elements of the US government have in maintaining perspective.

Meanwhile, back in Australia, two female Federal police officers arrested some guy who had allegedly been flogging Australia’s State Secrets, presumably to some Chinese agents. The vision of this duo bundling the guy into the back seat of an unmarked police vehicle contrasted so markedly from that beamed from the United States showing the arrest; thus showing very clearly the matter-of-fact way these two women had gone about their task. Oh my God, two women in mufti, without flak jacket, and not armed to the teeth in arresting a “Suspect of One”. This scenario would not do for the American media, with their “Law and Order” knee jerk response.

The question arising from the American experience is that if a lowly national guard could gain access to such sensitive material, it would be inconceivable that all the expert hackers all over the globe would not also have been able to access all this “secret information”. Then there is presumably a battle to determine whether the information is false, which in turn sets the scenario for a gigantic maze of false clues and games not too different from that devised allegedly by the hapless young man with a love of Guns and God.

Five Bells

John Olsen died last week. His bird’s eye view of the Australian landscape has been praised by figures more authoritative than me. He painted at least two spectacular tributes to the greatest elegy ever written by an Australian. I have borrowed this succinct description of Olsen’s contribution: John Olsen’s 1963 painting, Five Bells, on permanent display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and his 1973 mural, Salute to Five Bells, installed in the northern foyer of the main concert hall at the Sydney Opera House. In the Royal Botanic Gardens near the Opera House gate, Guy Lynch’s Satyr, modelled on Joe, looks out to sea to where his brother drowned and where the Manly Ferry passes on its daily route.

Just let me say, I love these representations of the variety and vastness of Australia. Fred Williams was one such painter of this genre. We have a painting which very closely mimics a Fred Williams. I like it, although the purists would say it lacks the magic of Williams’ aerial views.

However, we do have a Hissing Swan’s view of the Western District of Victoria. Hissing Swan is the whitefella name for the Aboriginal artist, Karun Warun, whose vision of his land is very striking, with the overlay of an Aboriginal warrior imprinted on a fiery background of his tribal land spear in hand looking down on the fallen one.

Kuran Warun grew up in Framlingham, an Anglican mission originally on the Hopkins River north of Warrnambool. In 1971 the Aboriginal people were finally granted ownership of 237 hectares there and the land is now managed by the local Aboriginal Trust. Karun Warun is a Gunditjmara man. Originally his mob were from north of Portland, around Lake Condah, but they were also forcibly moved to Framlingham, and this was inter alia the depiction of his lands.

But the the actual painting subject is the snake tribe and goanna tribe in conflict.

But what of Five Bells?

Some years ago, I acquired the original 1939 edition of Five Bells by Kenneth Slessor. This elegy to Joe Lynch, his artist friend who drowned in the Sydney Harbour in 1927, took him several years to complete. It is a remarkable poem because his wording for me has a certain narrative to which I can relate. There is an intimate revelation, interrupted by the “Five bells” amen.

The Sydney ferry Kiandra, from which Joe Lynch dived into Sydney Harbour, and drowned

Five Bells occurs at 10.30 pm (and at 10.30 am) on a ship’s watch, and it suggests that was the time at night when Joe Lynch dived from the Harbour ferry, drunkenly saying he could swim faster than the ferry. (The other explanation was that he just fell overboard with his overcoat full of bottles of beer weighing him down.) This poem was written between 1935 and 1937 and it is obvious reading it that the death of Joe Lynch had a traumatic effect on Slessor.

It finishes thus:

And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard

Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal

Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,

Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.

Five Bells

There are other poems in this slim volume with the accompanying “six decorations” by Norman Lindsay and dedicated not to Lynch, but to the memory of another Australian poet, who died at the age of 28 in 1932, John Alexander Ross McKellar. Five Bells dominates as it does Australian Poetry.

Where Am I?

I was first concussed badly during an intra-school football match of Australian football. I was knocked out and remember nothing about it. I woke up in the school sick bay with no memory of the event. I must have been 13 at the time. I had a headache and my father picked me up, took me home and after a weekend in and out of bed, I went back to school on the Monday. After some time, I learnt that one of the opposition players had just run through me when I was gathering the ball. Although we went through another four years of school, it was never discussed, and he certainly never apologised. It was considered not that serious, just one of the risks of playing a contact sport.

Life was much more physically confronting when I was first at school. Everybody was expected, unless excused, to participate in the annual boxing tournament. The finals were held on a wintry oval, and I still remember losing the fight with a broken nose.

These exercises in inciting concussion paled into insignificance when I had a major car accident now nearly 42 years ago. Among my multiple injuries, I had significant head injuries which, in reprocessing the incident, I must have been initially knocked out before I remembered releasing my seat belt and opening the car door. I do not actually remember getting out of the car but remember maniacally laughing as I watched the car burn – with the ambulance bells ringing in my ears approaching in the distance. The next memory was waking up on the operating table at the Goulburn Valley Base Hospital.

My injuries were moderately severe, but in relation to my head, my sub-galeal space, that potential space between my skull and the fibromuscular tissue which covers the cranium, was full of blood. It was in such a quantity that if you poked one side of my head the vibration was transmitted through the pool of blood to the other side of my head. I had a cut over my right eye, and a cruciate wound where my jaw struck the steering wheel ( and which required several plastic surgery interventions).

Yet I had no bleed in the brain, but I did notice over the years that I had a change in personality – something only a person with the introspection of an only child could detect.

The other observation of relevance is that once when I was having some orthodontic work, the dentist kept breaking his drill bit on my bone which he likened to marble. It has also been noted that repeated concussions are associated with thickening of the skull, but what of the benefits if you are born with dense bone? I make no further comment, but we Australians do wear helmets, presumably to minimise brain injury – although that benefit is to some experts problematical.

I do add that I am suffering from long term problems elsewhere throughout my body from that accident so long ago.

Still, should I say I am perhaps a case of dementia-in-waiting?

Julian the Lesser?

Leeser, whose stance will help him keep his once-safe northern Sydney seat of Berowra from the teals, is likely to join other high-profile backbench colleagues such as Andrew Bragg and Bridget Archer when the official “Liberals for Yes” campaign begins.

This summary of the survival instincts of Julian Leeser received attention by Philip Coorey’s article in the AFR about the defection of Leeser from the Party line over the Referendum. A lawyer, Leeser’s route to accession to a safe seat in the leafy Liberal Party stronghold illustrates wending his way through the NSW Liberal Party organisation into the moderate faction where, under John Howard’s influence, members have suffered ritual humiliation in the broad church of “Oxymoronic Liberal Intolerance”. This was the price one paid for being a voice of moderation in such a Church – just ask Petro Georgiou.

Leeser worked for McMahon when he was Prime Minister. On his defeat in 1972, the Liberal party was not that far away from that apocryphal perception of the Country Party’s Aboriginal party policy as “poison the waterholes”. Snedden was very conscious that his office make contact with the young mainstream Aboriginal activists, even though Neville Bonner had been elected a Coalition Senator for Queensland in 1971. Bonner was awarded all the recognition one would expect for the first Aboriginal person to be elected to the Federal Parliament. Nevertheless, he made a revealing comment once: I was treated like an equal on the floor of the chamber, neither giving nor asking quarter, but there were hours sitting in my office and I went home alone to my unit at night. There was never one night when anyone said “Hey, let’s go out tonight”.

Paradoxically in 1967 it had been Harold Holt and his Government which initiated giving recognition to the Aboriginal People by repealing section 127 of the Constitution and deleting the reference to ‘the Aboriginal race’ as it was deemed discriminatory and denied the Commonwealth Parliament the opportunity to make special laws for Aboriginal people even if they were of an affirmative nature.

The amendment proposed repealing section 127 of the Constitution, “In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a state or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.”

It had been claimed that section 127 had been included in the Constitution because Aboriginal people, at the time the Constitution had been written in the last decade of the nineteenth century, were looked down upon with the epithet bestowed of them as “Stone Age people”, being used as a term of denigration. Prime Minister Menzies is quoted in 1965 as saying Aboriginal people “being a mainly tribal and nomadic lifestyle creating ‘practical difficulties … in satisfactorily enumerating the Aboriginal population’.”

In introducing the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) Bill 1967, Menzies’ successor as Prime Minister, Harold Holt, said, “The simple truth is that section 127 is completely out of harmony with our national attitudes and modern thinking. It has no place in our Constitution in this age.”

When put to the Australian electorate the usual practice of presenting a “Yes” case and a “No” case for these two amendments was not followed as no Member of Parliament could be found to authorise a case against the proposed amendments. This was reflected in the overwhelming support for the Referendum, remembering it was still a time when you had to be 21 years of age to vote.

These proposed amendments received 5,183,113 votes or 91 per cent in favour, the biggest majority ever given to a referendum question in Australia, and it passed in all six States. It should be noted that it was not until 1977 when the referendum approved an amendment to the Australian constitution to allow electors in the Australian territories to vote at referendums, Territorians could not vote in referendums. Their votes are only included in the national total, but in the 1967 referendum, the area of Australia with the most visible Aboriginal people, the whitefellas could not vote in that referendum (nor for that matter those living in the ACT, Cocos Islands, or Christmas Island).

The advent of the Aboriginal Tent Assembly populated by young Aboriginal activists sprang up in 1972, as an accompaniment to Black activism in the United States. Vietnam protests were another source of youth discontent. After all, one could be conscripted at 18 years but not entitled to vote. The sight of a tent assembly with campfires being lit in front of the then Parliament House assaulted the sensibilities of a conservative parliament.

I went out and talked to Charlie Perkins, and after an initial wariness, we hit it off well in that year, so much so that once I was sitting around the campfire yarning with Charlie Perkins and others such that it prompted one National member of Parliament to ask “who was that Communist working for Snedden?”

Dutton, from my observation, has not a clue how to approach Aboriginal people. He seems to rely on the one voice of Jacinta Price, and otherwise naturally gravitates to whitefellas, who share his basic lack of sympathy. He is not only an authoritarian personality reinforced by his time as a Queensland policeman but also by not being particularly bright.

He has taken time to achieve leadership of the Liberal Party, and the Labor Party are “playing” him well. After all, the Labor Party had a foretaste of the authoritarian personality when Mark Latham was its leader. The other seeming benefit that Dutton enjoyed was the support of Murdoch. The timidity of the Australian politicians – the fear of Murdoch’s relentless assaults. The Murdoch Empire now is showing early signs of disintegration – as Murdoch himself concealing his obvious frailty, not unexpected once one reaches ninety, coupled with a shaky succession riven with conflict.

Dutton is thus a product of a time which clouded Australian politics, but the number of reverses he has experienced demonstrates that the same way he addresses every matter – the blunderbuss of negativity – is not working. He may have a point in referencing the Aboriginal Voice as the province of Canberra based Aboriginal bureaucrats, a shorthand for a Canberra group with a grip on the Larynx, but who is listening?

The really disturbing point coming from the Dutton’s recent visit to Alice Springs is the report that some Arrernte people, whose land includes Alice Springs, were taking umbrage about Senator Price’s voice because she is seen as a Walpiri woman, and therefore not entitled to speak for Alice Springs residents. If that division is so, then that is not a good sign for a unified Voice.

Sketch of Vincent Lingiari, by Frank Hardy

Nevertheless, the late Vincent Lingiari said it all. “Let us live happily together as mates, let us not make it hard for each other… We want to live in a better way together, Aboriginals and white men, let us not fight over anything, let us be mates…”

Amen – sotto voce.

Once a Romantic Friendship

Trump is wanting to emulate Grover Cleveland by having two non-consecutive terms as President of the United States. Despite his corpulence, Cleveland was a louche, but even though he had a previous relationship which yielded a child, he entered the White House as a bachelor at the age of 50 years. His sister filled in as the First Lady for a time; and according to an article in the Washington Post, one of which appears below, she was the First Gay Lady.

In the summer of 1910, Evangeline Simpson Whipple told the caretaker of her home not to move anything in her absence. The wealthy widow was going on a trip, but would be back soon, she said.

She never returned. When she died in 1930, she was buried at her request in Italy next to the love of her life — a woman with whom she had a relationship that spanned nearly 30 years. That woman, Rose Cleveland, had served as first lady.

The letters, preserved by the caretaker at Evangeline’s Minnesota home, are collected in, “Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple, 1890-1918,” and make clear that they were more than just friends, according to its editors.

When Grover Cleveland took office in 1885, he was a nearly 50-year-old bachelor, a fact that almost derailed his campaign when rumours spread that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. (He had.) Protocol for unmarried or widowed presidents called for a female relative to fill the role of first lady. In stepped his sister, Rose.

She was seen as an important counterbalance to her brother’s scandalous baggage: She was respectable, well-educated, a former teacher at a women’s seminary and the author of serious books.

Her term as first lady, however, was a mixed bag, according to the National First Ladies’ Library. Her book of essays, “George Eliot’s Poetry,” became a bestseller based on her fame, but she was frustrated with public scrutiny of her necklines and a ban on her going to private dinners or public markets.

Fourteen months in, Rose was relieved of her duties when the president married his 21-year-old ward, Frances Folsom. Rose returned to her family estate, nicknamed “The Weeds,” in Upstate New York.

Rose met Evangeline Simpson in the winter of 1889-1890, less than a year after her brother left office for the first time. (Cleveland is the only two-term president not to have served his terms consecutively.) They probably met in Florida, where both spent the season making the rounds among the nation’s wealthier families. Rose was 43 and never married. Evangeline was probably 33 and had inherited a fortune from a late husband nearly five decades her senior. The love letters begin in April 1890, once the two returned to their respective homes. (Evangeline lived in Massachusetts.)

There was no word for what were termed “romantic friendships” for relationships between two women, especially when the relationship was sexual as revealed in the letters.

Between 1896 and 1901, the time when Evangeline was married to Bishop Henry Whipple, the first Anglican Bishop of Minnesota, the friendship was disrupted. He died in 1901, and his is another story of an extraordinary man. The relationship between the two women endured until Rose died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. The evidence of this relationship is contained in a trove of letters and memorabilia contributed by the Whipple Family in 1969 to the Minnesota Historical Society, even then with some inkling that it contained Rose’s love letters which Evangeline had kept.

Mouse Whisper

SPOILER ALERT!

The TV drama “Succession” has left its audience in a lather because Il Padrino, Logan Roy, is put to death by the producers at the start of the new series. As has been stated, Logan was a bully who maintained his power by belittling, demoting, and arbitrarily firing his employees and relatives. I understand despite public denial, Rupert Murdoch is an avid watcher. Always looking to the future is our Rupert, at least that was what his pet rat, Tucker, always says.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.”

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 – 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.

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”.

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.

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 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.

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.

Modest Expectation – The Deer Hunter

Activity in War is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man immersed in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in War, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what everyone knows—how to walk.

I am no Clausewitz; what is going on in Ukraine probably owes something to those who are familiar with what he has said on War. War creates extraordinary times, and only a few people can survive its intensity. Zelensky is on the cusp of greatness, and unlike Churchill who was deeply flawed, could emerge as a great figure without the negative aspects – and at a younger age. Zelensky is a comedian – as such he understands the frailty of human nature; and it is that understanding, coupled with his incorruptible ferocity, which enables him to tower over both friend and foe. Before Zelensky, Ukraine was seen as a basket case, with both a succession of corrupt governments and, for a time, a very pro-Soviet Government, not unlike Belorussia.

NATO, with the escalating commitment of tanks to the War, seems to be signalling a Spring offensive, where the tactics which the Germans used in early 1940 to win the battle will be played out again, albeit in a modified form. Even without feeding the troops with amphetamine as the Reich did, it is here that NATO has an overwhelming advantage. Black soil dry is a beautiful surface upon which to launch an offensive, but if the Spring rains come, then the tanks will become less effective in the terrain. But the overall number of tanks in the offensive should be sufficient to counteract the rain – hopefully.

At the same time, intelligence is being gathered as to where the pro-Russian population resides within the Ukraine boundaries. Neither side wishes to garrison a countryside where an underground resistance movement is the last thing anyone wants, having been exhausted by war.

Nevertheless, despite the NATO decision to contain the War, the aim will be to take back Crimea, which has been considered pro-Russian. The Kerch Bridge and the land bridge from Rostov in Russia through Mariupol and Melitopol in Ukraine and into Crimea would be viable targets for an augmented Ukrainian force. Therefore, optimistically, assuming that Crimea will be retaken and Ukraine is accepted into NATO, Russia will be strategically outflanked in the Black Sea. No need to cross the border; all so simple. Unfortunately, no. No need to garrison anybody.

One suspects that Russia is so riddled with corruption that it is hard to imagine that such a country, despite an initial overwhelming superiority in arms can endlessly prosecute conflict at the current level without a massive change in the situation it finds itself in. The refusal of NATO to allow the war to spread across the Russian border provides some relief. This allows the Russians to destroy much of the Ukrainian infrastructure, without it appears, it cowering the general population. But there are limits, and the Russians in the end have at least one viable threat – convert the Ukraine War into a nuclear war.

What puzzles me is the seeming disconnect between the everyday life – in Australia concerned with the so-called “Invasion Day” and preparing for a year with scant attention to the prospect of a nuclear war and the inexorable movement of the planet to irreversible, unmanageable climate change. A nuclear war is not being seriously contemplated. But much of the World is being governed by old men, most of whom are in positions where they are protected from being fingered for dementia. I do not rule out that some of these grandees have tertiary syphilis, but nobody looks for the chameleon disease. In the end, the World does not need demented grandiosity.

Men are loath to go to the doctor. Putin has been subject to speculation over his mental condition, and he would have steered clear of any examination which might confirm this – especially if an organic cause were incidentally discovered. As written in the Los Angeles Times just after the Ukraine invasion in February last year, it suggested that while Putin could be going mad, mental disability can be used as a ruse. The notion that a head of state can reap foreign policy rewards by appearing utterly unpredictable — a tactic President Nixon was said to have employed to try to rattle North Vietnam — also had recent echoes during the Trump administration, when supporters maintained he cleverly flummoxed opponents by unexpectedly breaking with established norms. I think cum grano salo, notwithstanding!

As I said, nobody seems to take the nuclear war option seriously. Russia has extensively destroyed Ukraine infrastructure which will need to be rebuilt. What will stop Russia from going the further step, if madness is abroad within the Kremlin. When the Cold War was at its height in the 1950s, and there was a real fear of a nuclear war, WWII damage in Europe at least was still evident. Russia had effectively sealed off Eastern Europe and neutralised Austria and Finland; thus, the Russian Empire had a huge buffer zone, and when rebellion occurred in Hungary in 1956, the West just sat on its hands and watched Hungary moved back into the Russian fold. Yet the prospect of nuclear war was uppermost in the American government’s minds, culminating in the Cuban crisis. However, the defences against a nuclear war were extensive – I remember seeing the nuclear shelter at Greenbriar, a historic hotel in West Virginia, where a bunker was built so the government could be transferred there from Washington in the event of a nuclear war.

Putin has shown that he is the master of divide and rule; and he has been able to exploit the narcissism of the wave of populist dictators. Particularly troubling has been his relationship with Trump. The relationship as reported as changed from the years when Trump was hosting a “world” beauty contest as his then contribution to American foreign relations. In 2013, Trump admitted to an unspecified yet warm relationship with Putin, something he later denied. Nevertheless, what exists behind outward conflicting statements, can only be only the subject of conjecture, but it is inconceivable that the Americans are not well acquainted with Trump’s behaviour in compromising his own country.

Another game changer the Russians must be contemplating is the assassination of Zelensky, and reckoning that the Ukrainian resolve will crumble, given that Ukraine was perceived to be corruption-ridden not so long ago. Zelensky, from his recent action, is acutely aware that corrupt behaviour must be combatted quickly.

Then what is to stop Putin slinging a few nuclear warheads into Poland to test reaction. Once the tide turns as inevitably it must, Russia must face defeat, whether they cut off her head by employing nuclear devices or mounting an invasion by technology superior to any the Russians can muster. Presumably NATO has enough data to assess the risk. NATO is in a bind. Things were fine when it was just a case of brinkmanship, but Putin changed the game when he invaded a country close to the heart of NATO.

He had telegraphed his tactics by the brutality in the Russian Caucasus, and in Georgia where he took a piece of that country because he could. Armenia was another playground, but rather than upping the ante there, he turned to the Ukraine. He predicted after his takeover of Crimea, that the Ukraine would be easybeats.

Nevertheless, he has shown that while he may be losing the ground war, he can destroy the infrastructure of the country with impunity. He may believe that Europe is not ready for the same level of destruction in order to prevail over Putin. Putin may, as I wrote above, send a few missiles into Poland to see whether NATO has the appetite for a war as bruising as it has been for Ukraine.

In one way, the deployment of the leopard tanks is symptomatic of this hesitancy, which dictators view as weakness, and others bureaucratic sluggishness. Presumably if someone decisive in NATO said, “let’s muster all the tanks and let’s go!”, there would be a flurry of reasons advanced not to send them. Masterly inactivity; and all the while the Ukrainians keep defending their country, despite it being gradually destroyed. Anyway, Spring will come at the beginning of March, and it will be Autumn in Australia. I’ll be celebrating St David’s Day, eating Welsh rarebit and watching “On the Beach”, so as not to worry about the cloud on the horizon.

But in the end, what would I know, as Clausewitz said about just telling everybody how to walk without, I suggest, sucking an egg or two. I can’t even swim.

The Battle for Alice Springs

Our major aim would be the central remote building construction. It is one that the government worked very closely on, through the Indigenous Housing Authority of the Northern Territory. It was one where they changed the procurement process from each community having a pick of housing to it being under one project manager. The project manager had the responsibility of allocating the houses as well as the funding, so it was vacant of any deception or manipulation. That having been done, the standardised designs and standardised specifications came in. It got rid of a lot of unscrupulous thinking and made it workable. That is the way that the community had control over the apprentices, where they wanted the houses and the designs, and the money came directly from my hand into the project. – William Tilmouth Executive Director the Tangentyere Council 2005.

The Alice Springs debacle challenges the relevance of the Voice. The NT government virtually gave open slather to the town camp inhabitants to be intoxicated at will so that domestic violence has increased and the young kids rampage through the night, showing a combination of boredom, recreation and pilfering.

It is summer and the Aboriginals tend to come to town to avoid the heat of the outstations; but as I always remember when I was visiting towns where there was a high proportion of Aboriginal people, there would be talk about the “bad people” coming to town, without specifying who they were. But if you worked in a place long enough, you had a good idea. The other influence which was mentioned to me was the kadaitcha man, unseen whose power was exerted over spiritual totems, but nobody identified anyone to me, although I met a number of ngangkari, (medicine men had a number of names).

Alices Springs has presented a chronic problem of alcohol abuse. It is commonplace to have loud shouting matches in the streets, and at the root of the problem is alcohol, drugs, neglect, boredom. These need addressing, but not by a fleeting visit by a Canberra entourage. Each of these demands strengthening traditional structural change and a willingness for this to occur.

Years ago, William Tilmouth, when he was the Executive Director of Tangentyere Council, took me around the camps where Aboriginal people live for at least part of the year. It was a time when his elder brother, Tracker Tilmouth was still alive. It was clear that William and his brothers carried authority. He was intent in improving the standards of town camps, at a time when outstations were the winter accommodation. When I met him, he was one of Arrente brothers, who were described to me as graziers. Between 1989 and 1997, his brother Tracker planned and oversaw the purchase of five pastoral leases for Aboriginal traditional owners. As Warren Snowden said about Tracker at the time of his death in 2015, “He was an enigmatic figure but he had a real passion for getting people involved in employment.”

William did, and the youngest, Patrick, also have similar passions. In explanation, the three brothers were the last trio of children born into a family of eight. Ostensibly because of their darker colour, these three were sent north to Darwin in the first instance. The first five because their skin was a lighter tone were sent to Adelaide. The whole family were part of the Stolen Generation – dispossessed from their lands. Hence when they returned, the three brothers gained influence through the land acquisition.

In 2018 William had moved to head Children’s Ground, (inter alia its aim is to secure the fundamental rights of the child, the family and the community, wherever intergenerational inequity pervades). Yet Tilmouth said, When my father’s traditional lands were given back, my brother and I were not even notified of the ceremonial handback. The apology meant nothing to me – there are too many sorries and not enough truths.” In other words dispossession is a great weapon which the white populations so exploited.

The point is that William Tilmouth is not a blow-in. Yet when the Prime Minister dropped by and presented himself as an exemplar of old whitefella paternalism, Tilmouth was apparently not invited. After all, Linda Burney and Pat Dodson came too – talking the normal banal stuff, to which the nation has become inured. It should not take a gaggle of photo opportunity prone politicians pontificating to reinstate the alcohol bans, which should have never been removed.

The local Member of Parliament for Lingiari is Marion Scrymgour. I thought she looked distinctly uncomfortable as part of the Prime Minister’s entourage. I knew her when she served as director of the Wurli Wurlinjang Aboriginal Corporation, co-ordinated several trial community care programs around Katherine, and as Director of the Katherine West Health Board Aboriginal Corporation. She did a very good job, and I remember she had a corps of very good Aboriginal health workers (as they were then called). I had always identified her with Katherine and the Jawoyn people, but she is half Tiwi; half Arrente – which does give her sufficient standing to sort through the challenges this Alice Springs crisis presents.

The problem is that it is said Canberra only listens to Aboriginal people, who some deride as “coconuts”. The currently most influential of the Aboriginal bureaucrats seems to be Tom Calma who has walked that edge. He is an Aboriginal who has immersed himself in the Canberra bureaucracy since 1992 and become the convenient authority for the media to consult. He is the whitefella anodyne, who has an exceptional ability to collect laurel wreaths and shiny baubles, the latest being Australian senior citizen of the year representing the Australian Capital Territory. It is not an unfamiliar trajectory, as in 2012 he was named ACT Australian of the year, only to be defeated by Geoffrey Rush for the gold medal. The nature of the man is not to give up in the quest for ongoing deserved recognition.

His trajectory has also shown a canniness of being given credibility without leaving Canberra, without the unpleasant task of doing anything but pamphleteering – a blackfella Fabian. He has left that activism to his mate, Marcia Langton, and Noel Pearson; demonstrating what can be done by a distant megaphone? History will judge whether Calma will have any legacy but a trail of documents and whether he will have any impact in solving the problem with black and white relationships, as shown by this latest trouble.

I have a simple solution as a start. Sit with William Tilmouth and whoever else he believes relevant and review what has worked in Central Australia, and as often happens what has worked for more than just a couple of years, generally until the governing “mob” changes. A common scenario is that a different mob gets control, and matters go back to square one. Feuds are common among Aboriginals, but whether these are greater than in the whitefella world, it is for others to provide objective evidence. I was not aware of that having been shown in Alice Springs.

I was amazed to see the Congress (Central Australian Aboriginal Congress) buildings vandalised. Congress, I remember, was integral in assuring Aboriginal social and health status in Alice Springs. At the time I was most closely involved with Aboriginal people the idea that it would be vandalised would have been unimaginable.

However, I am haunted by the time when standing in an Aboriginal quarry elsewhere with an Aboriginal elder. We were accompanied by a woman doctor. I turned to him and said, “This is men’s business”. He looked at me for a minute and replied, without directly responding, “When the young fellas moved the corroboree stones to do burn-outs, I gave way and do not care any longer.”

Thus goes Aboriginal elder authority.

Hog Deer, Anyone?

Control measures for deer have not been extensively investigated as priority has been given to other pest species in Australia… once and future bureaucratic published excuse!

Deer are the next pests to be exterminated. They are just big rabbits. So, while they will eat out native vegetation, unlike the rabbits, they are hoofed animals so they also trample it and as such are enablers of weed infestations. Deer spread disease, and foot and mouth disease is an everpresent scourge which has been kept out of Australia. Then there the incurable wasting Johnes’ disease (JD), caused by a paratuberculosis bacteria. Reservoirs of this disease are known to occur in deer, very germane to this comment from the Queensland Government where the highest risks of spread of JD into and within Queensland is the movement of livestock from high-risk populations interstate and from properties where infection is known or suspected. It is unsurprising that deer are considered a feral pest there.

Thus, some states and territories consider feral deer to be pests (WA, SA, QLD, NT, ACT). Yet States with the largest deer populations (VIC, NSW, TAS) give deer full or partial protection status and ostensibly manage deer primarily for recreational hunting. In Australia there are estimated to be two million deer, in 1980 there were 50,000. This is despite an estimated legal harvest in Victoria in 2011 of 41,000 deer, including 34,000 Sambar.

The Victorian laissez-faire attitude is exemplified by the fact that “Hog, Red, Sambar, Fallow, Rusa, Chital, Sika and Wapiti Deer are defined as protected wildlife under the Wildlife Act 1975 (Wildlife Act). Hog, Red, Sambar, Fallow, Rusa and Chital Deer are further defined as game, which means they can be hunted by licensed game hunters. All other species of deer are declared as prohibited pest animals under the Catchment and Land Protection Act 1994 (CaLP Act).” The whole of the Victorian approach is that Victoria is akin to the Scottish Highlands, where deer hunting is a recreational activity, where class distinctions are acted out. Take the Victorian concern that hunters must also follow approved hunting methods and equipment; must comply with bag limits, seasons (for Hog Deer), and hunting times (no recreational night hunting); and must have a current Game Licence endorsed for hunting deer: either stalking and/or hunting Sambar Deer with hounds.

So much rubbish only in place to protect the hunting lodges which do a lucrative trade in providing accommodation for the deer hunters and charging fees to hunt on their property. Hardly a sufficient excuse, but enough to have the funds to lobby politicians.

Tasmania still has legislation which has protected the deer population up till now. In Tasmania the deer are fallow and, it is estimated, now number, 100,000. This has ignited the people with a green edge to campaign for the unequivocal declaration of the deer being vermin, with no limits on the number killed. The Tasmanian government is about to embark on aerial shooting of deer using firearms and night spotting equipment not readily available in Tasmania. Aerial culling has been shown to work in New Zealand.

Move across the South Australian border, and the incidental comment that deer have been eradicated from Kangaroo Island just confirmed the tenor of the South Australian approach. Hunting the deer which are considered a pest was the responsibility of the landowners, with the intent of culling the number of female deer, so the number of fawns falls. The small and relatively localised deer population on Kangaroo Island made the eradication program feasible and possible because of community involvement, particularly in reporting sightings. What did not work was use of stalker dogs and food lures. However, with the bush fires in 2020, while the level of destruction was in region of 44,000, most of which were sheep, deer casualties were not mentioned, suggesting that the previous eradication had been successful, but the original numbers were comparatively small.

Kangaroo Island deer became a problem when a deer farm collapsed and the deer were set free. This is one of the common reasons for the explosion of the deer population – deer farms that fail and the deer are let go. The other major reason for the deer explosion has been the “salting” of the environment by deer hunters, who want variety in what they bag. In all these endeavours, there are devotees in high places, who have blocked any endeavours to change the system,

Deer have a number of advantages. There is this lack of recognition of how dangerous they are. Unlike feral horses in the high country, they hide away from urban Australia. Their destructive effect is complicated by perceptions of deer, either being dewy-eyed fawns – the bambi effect, or alternatively projecting the majesty of the Monarch of the Glen. The hunter lobby is very powerful given that, in both the Victorian and New South Wales parliaments, there are representatives of Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

As a footnote, what intrigued me is that enshrined in Victorian Law concerning deer is the inclusion of wapiti as protected species. We know them as elk, and for hunters the antlers are irresistible as wall hangings, and the elk sausages I once had when staying with a family in Montana – very tasty. Australia, you have been warned; elk are loose in the South Island of New Zealand.

Time to develop a national plan to rid Australia of a pest, before the eastern States release elk into the wild, adding to the list of feral animals destroying Australia. Or is the shootin’ and huntin’ lobby and its votes in parliament just too strong in Victoria and NSW?

Mouse Whisper

In a recent issue of The Economist when the future of the Walt Disney company now that it approached its centenary was being considered, the writer reminded us of what Walt Disney said on the eve of the first Disneyland opening: “I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing – that it was all started by a mouse.”

Modest Expectations – Ghost Moth

I am ruminating on these 40 year old males who, as men in their early twenties, partied in the uniform of a Nazi. Presumably this act was not confined to these two guys, continents apart. It would be amazing if Harry and Dominic were the only ones among the millions of their contemporaries now in the 35-45 age group who had not at some earlier time dressed up as a Nazi for a party, night club or whatever after dark. Added to this, for even those who may not have encountered a Jew during their schooldays at Eton for Harry, or two exclusive Roman Catholic schools for the Premier, WWII was a long time past, and some children of privilege do often have the sensitivity of a warthog. Sometimes in the morning when I looked in the mirror I wondered where my tusks had gone. But that particular animal act was not part of my partying in the late 50’s and early 60s.

The well-known German artist, Anselm Kiefer, was photographed in a Nazi uniform in 1969. He had been born in 1945,(thus 24) and what he did at the time was illegal in Germany. Whether you believe that Kiefer’s interest in exploring the possibility of coming to terms with the Nazi past by transgressing post-war taboos against visual and verbal icons of the Third Reich is replete with irony, as has been stated in an apologia, is up to you. Yet this action has not cast Kiefer into the wilderness nor, to my mind, has he been pursued by members of the Jewish diaspora.

There is a term “Nazi chic” which, as one writer wrote: “From high end designers to campy trends like “swastikawaii”, ” the iconography of Nazi style has elbowed its way through history, whether its wearers promote its ideology or not.” You see echoes of this in the uniform of those services which dress in dark leathers and buzz round on motorcycles in pursuit of the errant motorist. In fact, if you look at a photo of a German officer such as General Rommel, you see a man in a well-tailored uniform, and the fashionista that appropriate such a uniform, they do not seek meaning, rather they concentrate on appearance.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, was very aware of the magnetic attraction of fashion in devising the Third Reich’s militarism.

As another writer says: Uniforms, which have come to be known as one of the most visually-striking elements of Nazi aesthetics, served as one of the principal vectors of propaganda in the Third Reich. In biology, a vector is an organism, typically of the biting sort, that transfers a disease from one being to another – Nazi uniforms did just that. However, instead of fleas transferring the plague, the Nazis used clothing to present propaganda that conveyed their message of racial dominance and militarism without uttering a word. Uniforms operated as an arm of the Nazi ideals of Volksgemeinschaft, in English, a people’s community and Gleichschaltung, the idea of bringing everything in line with the values of national socialism. The Nazi uniform aided in the destruction of personal identity and smoothed out the differences between German citizens thereby constructing both an egalitarian and passive society.

When I was at university, I went to many parties and there was never any question of us impersonating Nazis. We knew people who had survived the concentration camps – the number on the forearm. I clearly remember these numbers on some immigrants I met. There is nothing so shocking in seeing images of concentration camps, even if they were grainy and in black and white. I reckon that many of my contemporaries saw the same images, and there was no way we would don the swastika.

Moreover, many of our teachers had been in prisoner-of-war camps. So, impersonating the Japanese was taboo (unless cartoonish) but there was never any “Tojo chic” that I know of. The POWs may not have been gassed, but their living conditions were hellish; yet they were members of strength and they refused to relive their life in captivity – well, not in front of us who had lived through World War II as children.

Some of those who have studied this area believe the genesis of “Nazi Chic” can be attributed to the film the Night Porter, where a concentration camp survivor resumes a relationship with her Nazi captor, who is now a night porter in a Viennese hotel. It is said that Dirk Bogarde regretted his role as Night Porter, but it brought notoriety to Charlotte Rampling. What “Nazi chic” brought to the fashion-conscious uniformed services was leather – the black or grey leather jackets, leather gauntlets, leather leggings. Thus, when you pass members of the uniformed services, it is interesting to see how many of those services have adopted black shirts. Nazi Chic?

Backroads

I must say that I have been to most of the places featured on the ABC’s Backroads. Initially I resisted looking at this series, because the trailers reminded me of an endless loop of old Women’s Weeklies replete with “human stories” of a crowd of old inhabitants, the more eccentric the better, and young people making a go of it in the bush with an endless succession of dances, pubs, race meetings, and cake stalls.

I remember that I had been told that the ABC team descended on Strahan in Tasmania, and at the end of this recent Backroads episode I wondered how enlightened the visitors would be about this little township beyond a few elegant images of a most photogenic Australian region. Stories of brutal convict prisons may be a historic backdrop, but they have next to nothing to do with the reason for Strahan’s continued existence.

And as for showing that waterskiing record; what the hell was that to do with Strahan, apart from being held there. The organisers, the Horsehead Water Ski Club, are located far from Strahan in West Kentish in Northern Tasmania, and as far as I know they have never come back – nor for that matter have I ever seen anybody waterskiing on Macquarie Harbour.

What else? The guy with the smart ocean-going yacht Stormbreaker – images of tannin-stained water, an introduction to Macquarie Harbour; images of the 1982 Franklin below Gordon River protest, which stopped a dam being built on the Gordon River, and where the Stormbreaker picks up those adventurers who kayak the river. It would have made sense for the ABC crew to have kayaked the river and been picked up by the Stormbreaker, rather than the presenter just being briefly on board with glass in hand without explaining the relevance of ecotourism to the area.

The other image of the Strahan episode was that of the Ocean Beach, and the tragedy of the periodic beaching of pilot whales and, despite all the endeavours by the locals, mortality is high. It is a recurring tragedy, and there are many bones of whales under the sands,

What was grating was the appearance of a couple of the Maunsell women wandering the Ocean Beach. They were shuffling broken shells and pieces of stone – and trying to say these are relics of Aboriginal habitation. Their contention was these were parts of a midden. The idea that a midden could survive on a beach with such ferocious storms is ridiculous. Yes, I have seen middens at Trial Harbour further up the West Coast, but not in such an exposed location as the Ocean Beach. As for fashioning stones, I have been shown an Aboriginal quarry elsewhere. Aboriginal quarries where stones were fashioned are mentioned in The Aborigines of Tasmania, H. Ling Roth’s book first published in 1890. The idea that the Aboriginals would have a quarry on a windswept beach and moreover had any use for them there strains credulity. Yet the Backroads crew fell for such nonsense.

Heather Ewart has been the main presenter and she comes across as lovable but a bit of a boofhead, who gains her rural legitimacy by being brought up in the Victorian countryside near Murchison. I was disappointed but not surprised by this last but one Backroads episode about Brunette Downs. It would have been useful to know more about the Australian Agricultural Company, which owns and operates a string of properties, feedlots and farms, comprising around 6.4million hectares of land in Queensland and the Northern Territory, including Brunette Downs. This equates to roughly one per cent of Australia’s land mass.

What made me particularly shudder was Ewart dressing up for the race meeting which is held in June each year, and which seems to have been the centrepoint of the episode – a race meeting, which was an all-white affair, aping the social calendar of metropolitan meetings.

But what saddened me in watching the Brunette Downs episode, is that there seemed to be little interaction at a personal level between whitefella and blackfella. Sure as one the Aboriginal men, Elvis said working conditions had vastly improved – and one of the older white men entrusted to training the newcomers said how much he had learnt from the Aboriginal stockmen, a theme not further pursued as Backroads reverted to the Blue Hills view of the Bush.

There was no time where blackfella and whitefella were interviewed together, which suggests that was the reality. The ABC is always footnoting everything with a statement about what “country we are on”, but the fact is that Brunette Downs is part of a business, which claims one per cent of the Australian land mass.

In 2014 the Federal Court made a momentous decision. In session in 2014 in Tennant Creek the Federal Court granted land rights (excluding mining rights) over 37,000sq km (including Brunette Downs) to the “Kulunurra (Anderson), Purrukwarra, Karrkarrkuwaja (Kalkalkuwaja), Jukatayi Palyarinji, Walanja, Kurtinja, Kuakiji/Lukkurnu, Kunapa, Jalajirrpa, Mangurinji, Kujuluwa, (Y)ijiparta, Gurungu/Kulumintini and Warranungku”. I don’t remember that being footnoted on the Backroads episode.

In the crowd that day {in 2014} were old ringers in cowboy hats and wrangler jeans and the younger men in baseball caps and urban streetwear. One elder reminisced a few men lived with him at Connells Lagoon between Brunette and Alexandria, with the women and children in town because there was no school.

He said: “Us kids were born in the saddle and we got paid in bread and beef. You can’t stay around the camp, old people had to go out and walk, out and hunt, looking out for food. They used to send us out to the stock camp, do a little work around the kitchen, helping the cook out, just for a feed. In those days we went hunting in a wagon, no motor car. We used to walk from Alex to Brunette. It was about three nights on the road, walking and a wagon just to carry a bit of swag and a bit of water.”

Those words said in 2014 voiced conditions once occurring at Brunette Downs; the same year a waterskiing record of no relevance was broken on Macquarie Harbour. In one episode of Backroads, the question of what has occurred in respect to land rights was not addressed; in the other the Backroads crowd highlighted an event of no moment to the Strahan community – yet so much of real relevance is ignored.

Is that all there is? A race meeting and a waterskiing event to characterise the essence of an Australia back road. Not a mention of land rights nor the forthcoming referendum.

In a year when there is a proposal to give the Aboriginal people a Voice – for what? To determine the horses to run on Annual Cup Day at Brunette Downs or judge the fashions on the field there?

Why not answer the question of what has giving land rights to the Aboriginal people done for those living on Brunette Downs – much more fruitful than sitting on a rock on West Strahan beach waiting for a water skier cavalcade to pass by on Macquarie Harbour. Or was that Godot?

Far Removed

People always remember those who were at school and made good – and not only made good but became a household word, hobnobbing with the rich and famous until they become the object of hobnobbery. One such person is Sir Michael Parkinson CBE.

I have a friend who came from the same village, Cudworth, as Parkinson. Yorkshire men they went to the same school – Barnsley Grammar School in Barnsley – the nearby town. Both are passionate supporters of Barnsley FC – The Tykes. They have once won the FA Cup in 1912, but currently lie mid-table in the 3^rd level of the Football Association. I am sure you need to be Job to be a supporter, given the Tykes’ lack of success. That might just describe a South Yorkshire child of a coal miner. The comment was made about Parkinson’s claim that his father worked six days a week, 12 hours a day, a mile underground. One other respondent thought that a bit odd as his father had worked eight hours a day for five days a week, as his dad was a “deputy” like Parkinson’s father and believes both fathers would have been employed on similar terms.

Parkinson did not endear himself to his old boy contemporaries, when he said that “Barnsley Grammar School did for education what myxomatosis did for rabbits”.

As my friend said “Every year all kids around the age of 10 years old in Barnsley and district sat examinations called the 11 plus. The top 150 boys and 150 girls were then offered places at Barnsley Grammar School for boys and the Barnsley Girls High respectively.

He went on to say: “I thought Barnsley Grammar was an excellent school with mainly good teachers and great sporting facilities. With one O Level it sounds like Parkinson was in the lower graded classes i.e. the ‘E’ stream. That’s where kids of poorer academic ability ended up. In the cruel way of school kids they were known as the ‘thickoes’ but not to their face … that could be dangerous. For Parkinson it just goes to show there’s a life without O Levels – in his case a brilliant one.

For Parkinson, in his autobiography, wrote: “I didn’t like the school and it didn’t like me. I decided at a very early age … that I didn’t want to have anything to do with the place. I wanted to leave as soon as possible.

I dropped out of the “express stream”, which fast-tracked brighter pupils into taking their O-levels a year early, and went into the A-stream. And that’s where I stayed until I left at 16 with two O-levels – in Art and Literature – to my name.

It didn’t matter to me. From the age of 12, I knew I wanted to become a journalist.

The description of the class to which Parkinson was consigned was not unusual then. This bottom class at my school in Melbourne was called ironically Remove, which was a subconscious hint to the boys in the Remove that they would languish at the bottom of the academic ladder. Hence nobody stood in their way to leave school, and then the age one could leave school was 14 years. I remember my first vacation job was just after I had turned 14 years. This one was in the public service assembling files, for which I was paid £3/6/7 a week. At least this was only a vacation job – taught me a lot, but mind numbing if you did not turn the tasks into a game.

One of the reasons one was sent to Remove was if one was hopeless at mathematics, as Parkinson admits he was. Overall, his complaint about school was the standard of the teaching staff. Generally, the poor teachers were consigned to the least academic. One of my sons was sent at one stage to remedial maths. His teacher was a guy who had been a teacher when his grandfather was at the same school. He was not much of a teacher when I remember him at school, but he provided a stern pastoral role for the boarders. By the time of my son being at school this fellow had been at the school for a good 60 years. My son realised how little the old boy knew, and his uselessness was compounded by him constantly dropping off to sleep. In other words, they were hiding a faithful servant on the edge of dementia. As my son said, he knew more mathematics than this poor old man.

Nevertheless, it is also said about poor teachers that they dislike children, and I had the experience of one teacher, who had a massive tantrum in front of the class. He sent the whole class to be caned by the Principal. It was a non-streamed class at that stage; we were not caned. After that incident he really hated us, and we were not blameless. Nevertheless, at that time, which would have roughly coincided with the time Parkinson was at school, the quality of teaching was sometimes bizarre; and some of the characters were indeed consigned to the Remove class.

But in the end, what did it matter to a guy like Parkinson, as one of his fellow old students, said.

Retreat to Cleverness?

I reckon Pelosi would not have wasted the time with such cuteness as reproduced below. This is the problem of self-conscious intellectual pretentiousness – imagining themselves as latter day Ciceros. Obama did have a bit of the rhetoric rather than action which, in the case of this guy below, does not bode well in what is going to be free-for-all legislative savagery over the next two years. For instance, what is his index for success, say of “freedom over fascism”.

Here is what he said, in part:

Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) got off to a flying start in the 118th Congress with what will forever be known as the “alphabet speech”, including this bit of acrostic poetry:

We will never compromise our principles.

House Democrats will always put 

American values over autocracy. 

Benevolence over bigotry. 

Constitution over the cult.

Democracy over demagogues. 

Economic opportunity over extremism. 

Freedom over fascism. 

Governing over gaslighting. 

Hopefulness over hatred.

Inclusion over isolation. 

Justice over judicial overreach. 

Knowledge over kangaroo courts.

Liberty over limitation. 

Maturity over Mar-a-Lago. 

Normalcy over negativity. 

Opportunity over obstruction. 

People over politics. 

Quality-of-life issues over QAnon.

Reason over racism. 

Substance over slander. 

Triumph over tyranny. 

Understanding over ugliness.

Voting rights over voter suppression.

Working families over the well connected.

Xenial [hospitality] over xenophobia. 

‘Yes, we can’ over ‘you can’t do it,’ and

Zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation.

Makes one want to weep – how bloody awful the flight of rhetoric is, from one so crucial.

Mouse whisper

I am always mildly interested in why the French call a bat – chauve souris. You know, bald mouse. First, a bat does not look like a mouse. The only mice I’ve seen hanging upside down were a couple of mates into murinyoga. Anyway, the naming is a mixup. It should be cavannus souris – night owl mouse. Has a bit more class. “Cavannus” is Gaullish Latin!

Modest Expectations – A Recent Australian Declaration

I always remember that mixture of nihilist and smart-arse sage, Reg Withers, ruminating on the cupboard we had in our office which was stacked full of anti-abortion letters to the then Leader of the Opposition, Bill Snedden. This was in early 1973, when this matter was subject to parliamentary debate. He looked with some disdain at the overflowing cupboard and the 100,000 letters. He then said there were 13 million people in Australia and this protest therefore constituted only a small fraction of the voters. Yet it spooked the whole of the Coalition into voting for the anti-abortion crowd. Even when Andrew Peacock flamboyantly stood up, I am sure with the intention of leading a group of Coalition members into the pro-abortion vote, but when he looked round and saw he had no support except from the Opposition staffers, he quietly sat down.

I had the same feeling as Withers concerning the mention being made of the number of those who filed by the body of Benedict XVI lying in State in Rome last week. Maybe up to 200,000, being generous in the number who did, but the celebrities were few, especially from his country, Germany. I noticed that they were not burying him with his famed red slippers. Funny, the things you notice, but I found out later he had to relinquish the red slippers with his pontificate. Funny, in another way!

The denominator – us – seemed indifferent to the death of this man. This denominator numbering billions would form, I suspect, an indigestible number for the Roman Catholic Church, if it chewed it over for a moment.

Many matters have always worried me about Cardinal Ratzinger. Perhaps it was his opposition to the worker priest movement. Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI said very clearly,

“Clerics must not “surrender to the temptation of reducing [the priesthood] to predominant cultural models.” In today’s world, “widespread secularization” has cut into appreciation for the priest in his pastoral and ministerial role and accentuated his public activities. There is great need for priests who speak of God to the world and who present the world to God; men not subject to ephemeral cultural fashions, but capable of authentically living the freedom that only the certainty of belonging to God can give.”

The worker Priest movement had originated in France during WWII “putting young priests into secular clothes and letting them work in factories, to regain the confidence of the French working class, which had almost completely abandoned the Catholic faith.”

Then, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was the warrior against liberation theology, which was sweeping through South America repelled by the fascist regimes, some of which were sheltering Nazi war criminals. Cardinal Ratzinger, the doctrinal enforcer for the Polish Pope, John Paul II, called Liberation Theology a singular heresy. As reported, Cardinal Ratzinger blasted the new movement as a “fundamental threat” to the church and prohibited some of its leading proponents from speaking publicly. In an effort “to clean the Papal stables”, Ratzinger even summoned outspoken priests to Rome and censured them on grounds that they were abandoning the church’s spiritual role for inappropriate socioeconomic activism.

No wonder that the current Pope, the Argentinian Francis I, has exhibited an ambiguity in his relationship with his predecessor.

I have other major concerns and that was the apparent ease with which Cardinal Ratzinger moved from the Nazi Youth into the seminary towards the end of WWII, when Germany was in chaos. Bavaria was one area not spared from the war, unlike much of the Southern Poland of John Paul II, alias Karol Józef Wojtyła. Munich was heavily bombed. It seems that the Church can always produce a couple of Monsignor apologists (the title apparently provides a degree of gravitas) when they want to paper over inconvenient cracks. Thus, Cardinal Ratzinger was in the middle of this chaos as a teenager, but survived. The period needed that papering over.

Contrast the fate of Father Reinisch, the Austrian priest, who just before his execution by the Nazis in 1942 said: “I am a Catholic priest with only the weapons of the Holy Spirit and the Faith; but I know what I am fighting for.” A simple affirmation, no. sophistry. He, together with Franz Jagerstäter, the Austrian conscientious objector, believed his Catholicism was incompatible with giving his oath of loyalty to Hitler, Jagerstäter was guillotined in 1943. This oath to Hitler, from which the Hitler Youth were not exempt, is airbrushed from Cardinal Ratzinger’s biography.

Jagerstäter had been inspired by Father Reinisch. In 2007, the Vatican, through the Bishop of Linz, beatified Jägerstätter, the conscientious objector finally being bestowed with the halo of martyrdom from the Catholic Church. The bishop’s predecessor had tried to talk Jägerstätter out of sacrificing his life for his faith during World War II, and instead, align himself with the Nazis as the Catholic Church hierarchy had done.

Therefore, resistance to the Nazis was hardly a situation where one could disavow the Nazis without retribution, but Cardinal Ratzinger and his elder brother, Georg, seem to have been fortunate in this regard, but then he was only about 18 when he handed in his Nazi Youth credentials and vanished back into the seminary.

There was allegedly a period of being held by the Allied Forces in between these two events – presumably there is documentation to prove that they were held by the Allies. Both Reinisch and Jagerstäter, who were executed, were men and they were Austrian. The point was made to excuse their membership that the Ratzingers were insubordinate when members of the Nazi Youth. As if that attitude would have helped the survival of the young Ratzingers, as members of Hitler Youth? I would have thought not – as they say “pull the other leg and it plays Jingle Bells”.

The younger brother was briefly Archbishop of Munich before he was appointed to Rome by Paul VI, but it was the time when the sexual predatory nature of the Roman Catholic Church was emerging. Cardinal Ratzinger was not blameless. The familiar shuffling of predatory priests under his rule ended up with one notorious predator consigned to an isolated Bavarian village where he plied his sexual trade, destroying at least one life.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s elder brother was ordained and was the choirmaster at the Regensburg Cathedral between 1964 and 1994, and this too seemed to be a hotbed of sexual molestation. Choirmaster Ratzinger the Elder was reported as being unaware of this; or was lying. “Lying” is a word which the Roman Catholic Church seems to hate using, but again when the younger Ratzinger was accused of turning a blind eye also, then the veil of obfuscation (in other words – lying) comes down.

What is clear is the younger Ratzinger tried to keep sexual molestation accusations within the Church and not have them reported to the police. His expertise in rolling out the Roman Catholic mystique was second to none. He was smart enough to cherry-pick obvious and completely indefensible targets, such as Father Maciel, the Mexican priest, who founded the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi movement of which he was its general director from 1941 to 2005. With the declaration of ridding the Church of “filth”, the then Cardinal Ratzinger heralded his intention to pursue Maciel, who was known to have molested his seminarians. The newly minted Benedict XVI was able to force him to relinquish his position. Never defrocked, Maciel died conveniently in 2008 after which his practical views on priest celibacy were also revealed, having fathered six children from a number of relationships.

I first became aware of Cardinal Ratzinger years ago when one of my Roman Catholic acquaintances quipped about a cartoon of Archbishop Ratzinger immersed in a pool of sewage so only his head and neck was showing, but he was smiling. I asked “why?”, as I was supposed to do, so my acquaintance could insert the “killer line”, by saying “He is standing on Hans Küng’s head.”

Hans Küng was a liberal Swiss Catholic theologian, a contemporary of the aforesaid Ratzinger, who was censored in 1979 and essentially removed from The Church. My acquaintance thought the quip very funny. I didn’t.

Doctor Goes Walkabout

The European invasion of the outback destroyed this balance between man and nature for ever. The sheep and cattle of the settlers ate up the ground cover on which the natural food of the Aborigines existed; the kangaroos and other bush creatures were shot for sport or because they ate the feed needed for stock pasture, and the soaks and waterholes were taken over by the intruders. Also, the sacred places of the tribesmen were profaned by the white men.

Charles Duguid, who lived to 102, wrote these words. He was born in the same year as my grandmother in 1884. Thus, I have a personal acquaintance with the age in which he lived. Duguid wrote this reminiscence, “Doctor Goes Walkabout”, when he was 82. It detailed his life from a Scottish childhood and early adult life as a young doctor.

The book opens with a description of the ingenuity of doctors at a time when there were no off-the-shelf remedies. Faced with a girl with quinsy where the pain prevented her from opening her mouth, his grandfather doctor ordered a poker to be heated until the point glowed red. He then approached the girl menacingly. The girl screamed, the abscess broke, the quinsy had been cured without him placing a hand on the patient. Never mind the morbidity associated with the tactic. It was anecdote -the stuff of medical recall – often where sensitivity is subordinate. This book is no different.

However, I found the book informative because this was a man who graduated from Glasgow University at the end of 1909, and then when he first came to Australia practised in the Victorian Wimmera town of Minyip, which I knew well. He paints a dark picture of the life there, where he witnessed a strychnine poisoning – a murder carried out before his uncomprehending gaze. Later, following a conversation with a neighbouring doctor, he realised he had been duped by a family conspiracy.

His book portrays a devout Presbyterian who was always very close to his church, with all its basic conservatism. He saw action in Palestine in WW1, and amid the carnage with which he was expected to deal was his search for his brother, Willie, who he found was coincidently stationed in the same part of Palestine. Eventually, the two meet, after Charles had gone on an extensive search for him. They talk through the night, little knowing that this would be the last time he would see his brother, killed soon after.

His description of his first wife’s death is succinct. He dismisses it in a sentence. Coming home from England, she had an intracranial haemorrhage and died; by the end of the page, he had married again, to a teacher he met at the annual prefect’s dance at the Presbyterian Girl’s College in Adelaide, which eventually served as base. It was a wee bit offhand I thought, given the description of his efforts to seek out his brother. But then I suspect he was very stiff upper lip.

There in Adelaide he set up his practice eventually, but he was always off somewhere; and soon he was concerning himself with Northern South Australia (the Pitjantjatjara Lands). His relationship seems very similar to that which occurred later with Paul Torzillo; visiting, providing advice and support, but never practising among them for an extended period. Duguid’s view of his contemporaries I found interesting. He liked Pastor Albrecht and the work that was done at Hermannsburg. The Lutheran influence on Aboriginal life probably has been discarded by the present view as pernicious, part of the “whitefella” mission culture. Yet Duguid noted in his book was that of all the outback missions only Hermannsburg looked after full-blood Aborigines in the 1930s.

Duguid was less charitable about the Australian Inland Mission (AIM). He did not care for Flynn abrogating the initials from the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) which had been founded some years before. Flynn did not care.

Duguid and Flynn disliked one another. The author, Brigid Hains has written extensively about the feud between the two men. Thus anything Duguid wrote about Flynn should be taken with that in mind.

Duguid quotes the Director of the Australian Inland Mission, without naming him, as saying: “The A.I.M. is only for white people. You are wasting your time among so many damned dirty niggers.” John Flynn was Superintendent of the AIM at the time, not titled “Director”. Duguid then hastened to say that the AIM did a “splendid job” for the white community, especially for white women. The nurses were the “wellspring” of the Flying Doctor Service, “inspired by the Reverend John Flynn of the AIM” and made possible by the invention of the pedal wireless. Later in the book he describes in 1936 arranging with the “Padre of the AIM” for white children to sit with a group of Aboriginal children. As described, this annoyed the Padre very much. “He rang me, told me that he was making other arrangements for the day, and said, “You’ve invited those children – asking them to sit with niggers”. The chapter ended – no further comment.

The anonymity of these two persons only named by their titles suggests that perhaps Duguid was ascribing a Jekyll and Hyde persona to Flynn. Brigid Hains in her 2006 article makes the same point about Duguid’s view of Flynn.

In 1934, at a Presbyterian Fellowship Conference in Adelaide, Duguid said “the shooting and poisoning of natives that took place in the past are too horrible to recall, and yet occasional happenings of a similar kind still take place for outback areas.” His words were reported as “sweeping allegation by Dr Duguid”. Instead of defending the essence of what he said, he pursued the Adelaide News for wrongful reporting; and he was mortified when the report went further and he received inquiries from the Federal Government. The essence of what he said was true – that these actions against the Aboriginals were still happening at the time he had spoken at this Conference. Yet he was concerned with his personal reputation, rather than confirming the general veracity of what he had said.

Later in the 1950s he again appeared again more worried about his own standing. When the Government alienated Pitjantjatjara Lands for the Woomera Rocket Range, his reaction was not that of an outraged defender of this people who had befriended. He certainly resigned from the Aboriginal Protection Board when they agreed to Woomera, but his disapproval seemed to have been assuaged by the appointment of a “good white man” by the government – a man who looked after the sheep at the Ernabella Station as the Aboriginal Protector. He was “ideally suited to the job”. I am not sure that Duguid realised how that could be interpreted, as likening the Aboriginal people to sheep. But remember, for the devout, a reference to “sheep” is not derogatory.

He should have taken a stand, but that was not his nature – the quintessential man of reason. As he progressed through life, he still expressed concern for Aborigines but did nothing that might offend a country inured to the thinking that Aboriginals were relics of the Stone Age.

In the end, despite his long life and his good intentions, and a clear insight about the treatment of the Aboriginal people, I doubt he left much of a legacy, except in his writing. What can be said is that he tried, but his conservativism, his paternalism and his concern about other people’s opinion probably inhibited his effect on public policy; but at least he never referred to Aboriginal people as “niggers”.

In other words, Australia may have expunged such words, but given the referendum this year, how far has the country really progressed from the times of Duguid?

O Verão de 42 (The Summer of ’42)

Essa canção é tão bela, transmite uma harmonia tão grande que é até difícil descrever em palavras!!!
Eu concordo, meu amigo brasileiro

Portuguese is such an evocative language, and I noticed the above comment, and I agreed with it – simple as that.

I had just finished listening to The Summer Knows, the theme song of The Summer of ’42 written and played by the late Michel Legrand. The essay below by Roger Ebert describes for him the inevitability of the distortion of the nostalgia for that time one had a brief relationship with an older woman. It is one of those experiences with all the magic of a fairy tale which, as you grow older and the evocative last words of the film “I never saw her again” exaggerate the poignancy but also the unreality of this experience – not the tragedy that it originally seemed, but a privilege to have briefly believed one was in love. And perhaps one was, but I am no longer the adolescent to verify that emotion.

Robert Ebert, who was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, wrote this brilliant piece about the film; brilliant in being flashy rather than being brilliant in his insights because I suspect it probably never happened to him. The background stuff which he describes is only mortar holding the film together but contributing very little. The action between the youth and the older woman is the centrepiece, which needs to be dissected carefully and laid out, because it has a fine grain and yet a longing for something that doesn’t exist. Yet so important to build the romantic cushion, which some would call soul and others cloisters upon which to gaze upon long ago.

Nevertheless, even though I may disagree in part with his piece, it is worth reading both as background to the film and as a piece of fine writing.

Word comes to the woman that her husband has been killed in action, and almost wordlessly she takes the adolescent boy to her bed that very same night. The next day she is gone, leaving behind a note in which she gently declines to comment on the meaning of their experience — suggesting that perhaps, with time, it will take on an appropriate meaning of its own for the boy.

The problem is that it doesn’t. Robert Mulligan’s “Summer of ’42” is constructed to suggest that during that summer an event happened after which the boy was never the same. But we have to be content with an adult narrator who tells us this about himself; we never do learn how the boy, as a boy, put it together for himself. The fault may lie in the movie’s obsession with nostalgia. The movie isn’t set up to tell a story about a boy who was young in the summer of 1942; it insists on presenting itself, instead, as an adult memory of that long-ago summer. We don’t learn very much about the boy because the movie’s adult point of view refuses to come to terms with him.

Nostalgia is used as a distancing device — to keep us safely insulated from the boy’s immediate grief, love, and passion. “Summer of ’42” seems to be suggesting, between its frames, that since all these things happened long ago and far away, in a world of meat rationing and old Unguentine ads and black Hudsons with running boards and theories about the care and use of rubbers, that the boy’s experience is somehow less intensely human.

The movie fairly drips with what’s supposed to pass for taste and restraint; the love scene itself, for example, is filmed in a stubbornly minor key (as if, here again, Mulligan was trying to turn ice into slush, or an immediately felt human experience into a sort of vague and gentle memory). But in the scenes that produce the most laughs — the hero’s embarrassment in the drugstore, or his friend’s sexual initiation on the beach, or their double date at the movies — “Summer of ’42” isn’t restrained at all.

That drugstore scene, for example. “Second City” has had at least two versions of the sketch where an adolescent tries to whisper his order for Trojans to a loud, unsympathetic druggist. This will do as comedy revue material; but “Summer of ’42” handles the material on exactly the same level, breaking step with the movie’s cadence to get some easy laughs. Same with the double date scene, which is crude in comparison with Frank Perry’s similar scene in “Last Summer”.

What we’re left with are some beautifully produced and photographed notes toward a movie. Mulligan has succeeded in convincing us that his movie remembers and understands the wartime summer of 1942. He is very good, too, at trying to convince us that adolescence was somehow more innocent then. But anyone who has ever been an adolescent — and every adult has — will remember that it is hardly ever easy-going, in 1942 or any other year, and that although it may seem innocent when we remember it nostalgically, at the time it felt like an agonizingly prolonged fall from grace.

As she was going through the family papers

The Prussian Army at the Battle of Waterloo

Today, my wife, Janine found out that her great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Hoffmann, was a member of Blücher’s army, which fought at the Battle of Waterloo. He was 20 years old at the time but stated to be a surgeon. He emigrated to Australia in 1847 with his wife and nine children to escape the Lutheran persecution initiated by the Calvinist King of Prussia, Frederick III. The Hoffmanns came from Silesia, the Centre of the Old Lutherans who had refused to buckle to the King’s decree for unification of all the Protestant Churches.

I had a relative who was in the British Forces at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, but Waterloo…!

Mouse Whisper

The U.S. will fund the purchase of 18 new High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) for Ukraine, more than doubling the number of launchers that have arguably altered the face of the war in Ukraine. The Ukraine now has an almost 3,000 kilometre border with Russia, of which about 10 per cent is a sea border.

The Australian coastline (the sea border) is nearly 26,000 kilometres. How many HIMARS does the USA have? The US Army has 363 and the Marines 47. Singapore and Romania each have 18 and Jordan has 12. The Poles ordered 20 in 2019 and want 200 more, and it has been reported the USA Defence Forces are said to want another 500 by 2028.

To get comparable protection, it would seem that Australia will need all of these above. After all, Singapore’s coastline is 193 kilometres and it has 18 of these weapons!

But being a Mouse, have I got my calculation wrong?

One of the 2,600 HIMARs Australia would need?

Modest expectations: Then off to Sydney

What would happen if we ended up as the only country, apart from the United Kingdom, to remain a constitutional monarchy owing fealty to William V with a potential George VII as the Prince of Wales next in line? Maybe it will not be that long to wait. Maybe climate will beat us all.

We can keep kicking this prospect down the road because every potential solution depends on a level of trust but within the parliaments of Australia festered by the Murdoch Press, there is too much venom for there to be cross-party agreement at present.

Albanese is tainted by being on the left; a nominal Republican, not a member of the Establishment yet trying to compensate with his apparent obsequies; but Prime Ministers do not seem to last for that long a time. In any event, Albanese has chosen to become immersed in the web of Aboriginal politics, which has the very uncertain hand of Linda Burney to guide it.

The danger for Australia is that we become an anachronism – a legislative curiosity. A country which once prided itself on its youth, until the Aboriginal agenda kept banging on about being the oldest civilisation on Earth, with the least material evidence of its longevity, but with the dangerous heresy of consigning Cook and us Anglo-Celtics to some monarchist Hell. The anachronism being the last constitutional monarchy owing fealty to a sovereign who never comes, who never barracks for Australia and ours being the last country to have the Union Jack incorporated into its flag.

Thus, for the purpose of this thesis let’s create our own Head of State called a President, with a fixed term of five years with no extension. Precedents for a casual vacancy abound in every relevant legislation.

I suspect that one of the biggest hurdles in appointing a Head of State called a President, apart from timing, is to determine the people who would choose such a Head of State. One suggestion; not that original – since Australia is a Federation – we would either choose 12 or 16, assuming the panel to be gender neutral and thus two selected from each State and Territory.

I believe that a jury system would be the best, and thus no more than 16 electors chosen at random from among those entitled to vote would be an appropriate Committee; the jury system has stood the test since mediaeval times. The Committee lottery would be run by the Electoral Commission. The only conditions I would recommend are that:

(a) everyone chosen has the opportunity to refuse,

(b) only expenses would be paid,

(d) the process takes one month from closure of applications (if they are allowed).

For instance, there are always moneyed someones intent on manipulating campaigns for potential applicants. It then becomes a popularity contest; or just a quasi-Presidential campaign with political overtones.

The above sentence encapsulates the impossibility of the task, unless rules are made such as there is limited time to agree a course of action.

The KIS principle can be quickly compromised; think how simple nominating the next Governor-General is: one person makes the recommendation for the next incumbent. However, that recommendation – in the context of a transition to a Republic – is made to the very person who Australia is trying to remove. So how do you remove that person from the process?

I’m glad that I won’t be asked to devise the process; thankless, thankless task, as inevitably you are always wrong in making any such decisions.

Nevertheless, there must someone courageous enough to make the decision. After all, the Governor-General is recommended by the Prime Minister. In my lifetime, since we gave away titled British men in the role, there have only been two complete duds, and one of those lasted barely a year. Geoffrey Robertson, in this opinion on the future of a transition from Governor-General to President, questions whether we need one anyway – and he cites the stumbling General Hurley, whose recent actions, on the surface, seem completely reprehensible.

One final thing. I hope Australia will not be the last to abandon the Union Jack, and in so doing change Australia Day from January 26. However, given the cultural cringe from which this country has never divested itself, I would not bet on it.

When you are Young

I thought this reflection appropriate for this time when I was one of a group who met the then Philippines President, Ramon Magsaysay. At nearly six feet tall, Magsaysay was tall for a Filipino; I remember him as a person who embodied the concept of “charisma”.

It was a few days after my seventeenth birthday, and the invitation came as somewhat of a surprise. It was the first time I had met someone who had been a genuine war hero. He had stayed behind in the Philippines to fight the Japanese, whereas McArthur was evacuated to Australia. Yet for our visit there were no photographs, no autograph, no memorabilia. It had been an impromptu visit, but where some business was obviously transacted under cover of a cup of coffee.

Magsaysay’s life was cut short; he was killed in a plane crash in March 1957 near Cebu. Sabotage was suspected. The Communist insurgents, the Huks, were high on the list of suspects. Nothing was ever proved. President Eisenhower expressed his condolences. Magsaysay was to be his guest in Washington.

This following excerpt is contained in my memoir about that momentous year 1956, titled “Scars of ‘56”.

A couple of days before we were to leave, there was a sudden invitation to meet the President. There was some unexplained link between the Da Silvas and the new President, Ramon Magsaysay. His name meant little to me, except that I knew he was supposed to be charismatic.

Charisma – what a great word? Charisma has no greyness. It could inspire you to be either good or evil, depending on which path the charismatic leader took you down. Later, in the Presidential Palace staring at Magsaysay, I knew I had found the meaning of the word and, for a time, he was my model of charisma.

This time, cars came to pick us up. There were enough vehicles for Gay and me to sit together in the back seat. My father seemed to make that decision and assured her family that he would ride with us, but in the end he took a lift with the Da Silvas and Gay and I had the car to ourselves. We were all dressed up. I noticed that Gay was wearing gloves. We sat apart – her gloved hands on her lap. I sat on my hands.

The Presidential Palace was really only a fine house; it was not palatial. Magsaysay had been careful not to be extravagant. He was very much a man for his people! He had been a war hero, staying behind in the Philippines and then continuing to fight the Japanese. It was a point emphasised by the Da Silvas.

The President was a man with keen smiling eyes who strode down the line of those being introduced, looking intently at each face. What do you say to someone who makes you feel good for a fleeting moment but then before you can say anything he has passed to the next person?

Nothing of moment as it turned out, but as I waited to be introduced it prompted me to wonder about what important people said to their subjects.

I had once seen our Queen talk to one of the soldiers in the line. What did she say? It intrigued me. I pondered whether the soldier was asked about what he was interested in, and whether the response could be so interesting that the whole itinerary would stop while he explained the complexities of how unique he was in his pursuit of collecting football cards and that he had only number 54 to get.

Normally the Queen would be ushered up and down the line of soldiers standing at attention, with the normal pomp and circumstance. But what would happen to the pomp and circumstance if she suddenly engaged in an animated conversation with one soldier?

My mind flashed back again to that bloody awful experience on Anzac Day the previous year, when I was standing either “at attention” or “at ease” for hours. No Queen here; just the butt of a lot of comments from the passing parade of men in ill-fitting suits. At least the Queen would be courteous. I assumed that was the same as being regal.

Then, at last, it was my turn to be face to face with the President. It was my first experience of being noticed by somebody important.

However, all the great man did say when he met me was; “you look like a fine Australian young man, pleased you could come. Hope you enjoy your stay.” And that was all! At least he avoided “boy”.

There was no condescension. His gestures were all so fluent, and the smile was one of momentary engagement that made the recipient feel good; and then he had moved on.

My response was thus lost on the shoulder of the next person, whose hand was clasped, and for whom he had the same sort of a greeting, although in this instance it was Gay.

He did spend a few more moments with her than he had done with me, and on reflection the handshake was more raising her hand towards his lips, and then dropping it softly. I continued to watch him – the first politician I had seen at close range. He seemed to know the Da Silva family quite well, and he drew the father off through a door that led into the garden. He had such an easy way of moving between people, of communicating.

My observation was interrupted. “Coffee or tea, sir?” I said “Coffee, please”. After all, black coffee was always the drink you had in smart company after a meal, with a slice of lemon.

All the time, while I sipped my coffee, I kept staring at the President. The only person remotely as engaging – as charismatic (that word would be over-used in my vocabulary for a time) – was my headmaster, who used his large build to reinforce the power he wielded. Ramon Magsaysay was a man who did not use power as a blunt instrument. This man had finesse. You knew that you were in the presence of a man (and it was that kind of world then, when “man” was synonymous with “person”) who knew he had power. It was just the difference in the ease with which they responded.

We finished our afternoon visit and were driven back to the ship. It was all done with white gloves and gaiters; there was that tinge of the military, all politeness and efficiency in moving the guests across a city where the traffic was chaotic and the world less than polite. The Presidential car just sliced through. I thought it impressive; any kid would. However, that was the prize for power I thought. To do what you liked. But in this man, authority was not the same as arrogance.

The Ngarrindjeri

The Naturalization Act 1903 explicitly prohibited naturalisation of anyone with ancestry from Africa, Asia, or Oceania (except New Zealand). Indigenous Australians who did not already have their names placed on a state electoral roll on the date of federation in 1901 were prohibited from enrolling to vote until 1962.

Being an Aboriginal person in South Australia at the time of Federation meant you were entitled to Australian citizenship. As the then Governor of South Australia, Sir Eric Neal, proudly informed a group of us once, the South Australian Aboriginal had the advantage over others of being able to vote in Federal elections as a result of universal suffrage legislation passed in 1858, which stated that all born South Australians including Aboriginals were granted citizenship.

The Ngarrindjeri were the Aboriginal nation at the mouth of the Murray River, extending down the Coorong and yet with links with Port Pearce, a tiny settlement on the Yorke Peninsula, on the fringe of the copper towns.

Their settlement on the Murray River, Raukkan, or its Anglicised name of Point McLeay, had begun as a mission for the Ngarrindjeri.

I mentioned Raukkan in a previous blog about bark canoes, which is indicative of how resourceful these people are.

They built more or less permanent shelters. Some say they used logs, evoking the concept of the log cabin. On the contrary, the early illustrations still emphasise the structural bower nature, just a more complex gunyah. There are illustrations of some of these shelters, which included whale bones as struts. Despite living in a fertile part of Australia, as described by the early white settlers (to which I referred in an earlier blog), there was always enough food without having to cultivate crops.

When we visited Raukkan, there were a number of stone buildings one of which, the Church, is illustrated on the Australian $50 note. In the forefront from a late 19th century photograph are shown two Aboriginal elders, Milerum “Clarence” Long and Polly Beck, dressed in whitefella (grinkari) clothes.

Yet the Ngarrindjeri had their own clothes – an Aboriginal clothed neck to ankles in a toga of possum skins, a woven dilly bag slung over his shoulder, carrying a nulla in one hand and a shield in the other cuts an impressive figure. Other early illustrations show people with woven seaweed cloaks. These were skilful sophisticated hunter/gatherers.

Of course, the man on the $50 note is David Unaipon, a Ngarrindgeri man, who has been characterised as being the Aboriginal “Leonardo Da Vinci”. I visited his grave overlooking Lake Alexandrina with Henty Rankin, one of the elders. The fact that images of Unaipon are freely available is unremarkable since lining the walls of the Ngarrindjeri offices are portraits of past elders as one would find in grinkari boardrooms.

George Taplin is the most prominent whitefella or grinkari associated with the development of Raukkan as a mission. He came there as a zealous teacher in 1853, became ordained as a Congregationalist Minister and immersed himself in the culture and became fluent in the language which he transcribed. He lived the rest of his life among the Ngarrindjeri.

Uncle Henry Rankin gave us a copy of the book “Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri” during a visit just before Christmas in 2000. He had been significant in maintaining the integrity of the community – a community whose members are spread far and wide and who are prominent members of the South Australian community. This edition was an update of the original work written by a University of South Australia academic, Graham Jenkin. Originally published in 1979, it won the Wilke Literary Award for non-fiction; the second edition was published by Raukkan itself in 1995.

There is no doubt that the Ngarrindjeri were nearly destroyed by the mission system, despite people like Taplin. That mixture of disdain and paternalism, the removal of children, the dispossession of land, were encouraged by the mission system. The introduction of measles, TB and smallpox, amid a litany of diseases, increased the destruction.

Yet despite all this, the Ngarrindjeri nation have not only survived but been significant contributors to the whole Australian nation.

The Angel Falls if it ever existed outside Venezuela.

This action indicates that Trump has spawned a legion of nasty smart-arses, soul-destroyed individuals who enjoy the sadism of the initiation rites abundant wherever there are male tribal gangs; among other processes, the time-honoured desensitising process inter alia spawned the Leaders of The Universe – that is, until Women have said “enough”. But not all and not quite enough.

Below is a distillation of the Boston Globe and Washington Post reports – get angry!

Venezuelan migrants filtered in and out of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Martha’s Vineyard Thursday morning (last week) after arriving Wednesday on planes dispatched by Florida Governor, DeSantis.

The migrants believed they were headed for Boston.

Eduardo, a 25-year-old undocumented migrant from Barquisimeto, Venezuela, said he set out almost three months ago and eventually reached San Antonio. He stayed in a shelter for a week and a half, but authorities were going to expel them, until, he said, he received word that he could go to Boston.

“At first they said it was to Boston,” he said. But “during the trip, the captain of the plane said the name [of] here — of the island. And well, most of us, we were all surprised because, as they had said Boston, and they threw us here on the island.”

What kind of guy would put a bunch of vulnerable people on a plane under false pretences and dump them on some island off the coast of Massachusetts?

The next Republican nominee for President, that’s who.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s been itching to supplant Donald Trump as the GOP’s standard-bearer, made Trump’s border wall stunt look like child’s play by putting about 50 undocumented Venezuelan migrants on charter flights and depositing them on Martha’s Vineyard, summer playground of the liberal elite.

The migrants were told by the flight’s organizers they were going to Boston. They were told they would receive work papers.

It’s an outrageous ploy, an episode of “House of Cards” written for Fox News. Instead of Kevin Spacey pushing someone in front of a train on a fictional TV show, DeSantis lured a bunch of poor people onto a plane in real life.

To right-wingers, the Vineyard is Sodom and Gomorrah with lobster rolls and soft serve.

Hell, the Obamas own a mansion there. What could be better?

Maybe Nantucket, but then there’s a lot of Republicans who own second, third, and fourth homes on that island, and DeSantis held a fund-raiser there last month, so maybe not.

The Vineyard, where the Birkenstock-wearing lefties have shunned Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz because even though he’s a liberal he’s defended Trump, checked every box.

You’ve got to give DeSantis credit. The only way his fellow immigration huckster Governor Greg Abbott of Texas can one-up him at this point would be to parachute a bunch of undocumented Hondurans onto Harvard Yard.

As right-wing political theatre, the DeSantis move is a hit, a blockbuster, pure conservative gold. As his spokesman told state media, aka Fox News, Florida gladly picked up the tab to fly the migrants to the Vineyard because Massachusetts is a sanctuary state.

Fox ran a story crowing about dumping the migrants on “ritzy” Martha’s Vineyard.

Oak Bluffs is ritzy? Who knew?

According to DeSantis, liberals in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts talk a good game, sticking up for undocumented immigrants with virtue-signalling rhetoric, while red states like his bear the cost and burden of taking care of them. Kind of like how every state, including Massachusetts, regularly picks up the tab to repair Florida when it gets wrecked by a hurricane.

Cynical? You bet. And it plays well with the crowd. At least to those who get their information from right-wing outlets that scare the hell out of their viewers by claiming the southern border is a free-for-all that has gotten out of control since Joe Biden was elected.

This was literally political theatre: a videographer who just happened to be there when the migrants arrived on the Vineyard shot video that appeared almost immediately on Fox News.

If you think it’s in poor taste, or even morally reprehensible, to use desperate people to score political points and make a propaganda film, then you haven’t been paying attention.

This is all about owning the libs. Scoring points is the point. Using vulnerable people is, for craven politicians like DeSantis, just a case of the ends justifying the means. While most people will see this as shameless and shameful, the DeSantis crowd considers it a justifiable exercise that showcases liberal hypocrisy.

Unfortunately for DeSantis, the good people on the Vineyard messed up his script. They pulled out all the stops to welcome, feed, and accommodate their unexpected visitors. Their compassion was as spontaneous and generous as DeSantis’ act was calculated and cruel.

State Representative Dylan Fernandes and State Senator Julian Cyr, who represent the Vineyard, were as proud of their constituents as they were disgusted by the political game that forced them into humanitarian mode.

“What better rebuke to this shameless political stunt than a community actually rallying to help people and recognizing and appreciating their humanity and dignity,” Cyr said.

Dignity? You won’t find any in the corner office of the shady state of sunny Florida.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s humane response forms a “work-in-progress” epilogue for the DeSantis “dog” act. The Florida Governor may have committed a felony by this act.

Note: Governor Charlie Baker is Republican. There are thus humane Republicans

The roughly 50 Venezuelan migrants flown unannounced to Martha’s Vineyard Wednesday in what critics derided as a cruel political stunt by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are now being offered temporary shelter at Joint Base Cape Cod, the Baker administration announced Friday.

The state will offer the migrants transportation to a temporary shelter on the base, which is located in Bourne. The move will be voluntary, the administration said in a statement. Governor Charlie Baker is prepared to mobilize up to 125 members of the Massachusetts National Guard as part of the relief effort.

Mouse Whisper

I thought it appropriate to reprint the final paragraph of a eulogy to one Arnold Mouse of Brooklyn from the New Yorker.

Though he favoured family-size bags of chips, Mousey leaves behind no rodent relatives, as he was the only mouse that’s ever lived in my apartment. Rest in peace, Mousey. You won’t be missed, but whenever I hear a scratching sound in my wall like the one I’m hearing right now, I’ll think of you.

Modest Expectations – Tura Beach V

Queen Elizabeth II

Her everlasting legacy. She did not linger. She died with dignity. She would have ensured that.

Celebrate her life; not mourn. She would not have wanted the clocks to stop.

Reflection

I reluctantly must accept that I have a form of long COVID-19. It is September; I reverted from a positive to negative RAT in second week in July. My condition is characterised by persistent productive cough, lack of sleep, a veil of depression. Some days are better; some I relapse.

In any event:

The window exists 

at the end of the room

A discoloured pane frames the tree 

Sallow maple leaves cling

Potted cymbidiums hang

From trunks

That gently swing

defiantly green

Striving to touch the cycadic spikes

Along the unseen cobblestone path 

The gate aubergine 

and fire-bricked wall

Brown-wooded letter box 

All separates me from the World

Nothing else? 

That’s right

Nothing else

Why bother?

I do not go out

Just lean back in my chair 

And realise that Winter has come.

I wrote the above which I called “Reflection”. It is this view which I see every day from my table, where I sit behind my computer. To my right is the television screen – images bouncing around as the sound is turned off. I love flowers and now on the table to the right of my direct gaze is a bunch of garnet-coloured dianthus (Sweet William) in a muted patterned rosé vase. It is framed by an arced spike of cymbidium flowers – carmine stigma and delicate red russet petals – cut from our garden – stuck in a Tall Poppy Vase, that someone gave me some years ago.

Yes, this past week was my Australia Day – September One – the start of seasonal regeneration and when the wattles are at their zenith. I will get out of my chair and go out. Maybe I shall improve, but it is draining me.

Fishing traps

Rain is a myth haunting the arid places
And clouds are the dry eyelashes of the sun and moon. . ..
Its only protest is dust and the rivers drying
And the horrid gaping sores of a dying race – Maria Reay, Poem from Brewarrina (1946).

I was reminded of one of my visits to Brewarrina by my son meeting “Dean from Brewarrina”, in the Tasmanian Highlands for God’s sake. We are a literary family, but predominantly in the lifestyle area of writing. Maybe I stray when I comment about the fish traps on the Barwon River at Brewarrina, a very old manifestation of Australian Aboriginal identity and industry.

The poet, Mary Gilmore, grew up in the Riverina and moved around NSW as a child. Her father if not a sundowner, was certainly a wanderer. Mary Gilmore herself moved around and was one of a group which followed William Lane to Paraguay in 1893 to found the settlement of New Australia to pursue a socialist ideal. Hers was a short lived emigration; nevertheless, she lived her life back in Australia with her exquisite literary ability used to promote her socialist ideals.

In 1933, when she was 56, she wrote about the fishing traps in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, the following of which is an extract:

That the aborigines made fish-traps and fish-balks (as we used to call them when we came across them) is a fact. That they used natural barriers as Mr David G Stead writes is also a fact. Sixty years ago there were many of the smaller balks in existence, and white people knew them and made use of them for other purposes than those intended by the aborigines. The larger fish-traps were made for the great gatherings, and were invariably based on a running reef or natural outcrop of rock. There were a number of these places of gathering known to my people, and I often heard them spoken of. One of these was on the Clarence, one at Brewarrina, one on the Upper Murray, and one down near Hay or Narrandera – it was near the swamps between these two places, the swamps being sanctuaries.

When you view the fishing traps on the Barwon River at Brewarrina, there is a necklace of rocks meandering down the river, and when Gilmore was writing her articles, she was responding to opinion which tended to dismiss these traps as manmade. Gilmore concedes in this paragraph that the local indigenous people used natural rock formations upon which to fashion their fish traps. The reason that few have survived is attributed to whitefella dismantling the structures; but another reason is that all the structures as described, particularly those made of wood and reeds, would have been susceptible to the periodic flooding of the Murray-Darling Basin.

The reason for the survival of the Brewarrina fish traps was the fact that Brewarrina was beyond the navigability of the river paddle steamers. However, the structures are simple and could have been easily reconstructed by tribal groups after every river catastrophe, because the river is susceptible to spreading across the floodplains. Brewarrina may have these rapids, where rocks are suitable for re-arrangement, but it emphasised the importance of Brewarrina as a gathering place for Aboriginal tribes. These corroborees required some preparation to ensure sufficient food was available. Hence the importance of ensuring the fish traps were in good condition; but the converse may be true. For a hunter gatherer society where the corroboree was a regular convocation of the local tribes, it was essential to hold them in a place where food was plentiful.

One of the observations about the necklace of rocks defining the fish traps was that each fish trap is said to have one family responsible for its trap. Given the nature of Aboriginal society, I find it unusual that, in this instance, each of the fish traps was singled out as a single family’s responsibility, implying that the fish traps conferred de facto property rights.

Depiction of fish traps, in ochre on sandstone

Brewarrina has an Aboriginal Cultural Museum recessed into a hill, and one day when driving between Bourke and Walgett, we dropped by. I remember this day well. I had no intention of purchasing anything – after all it was a museum. Nevertheless, there was one item for sale and that was a slab of sandstone upon which a depiction of the Brewarrina fishing traps was painted in ochre. The cost was $250. We bought it.

It was a very heavy piece. We transported it back to Sydney, where it sits on its mulga wood stand. We also picked up a large rock, which sat at the intersection of two sandy tracks just outside the Tilpa pub. The rock squats incongruously in the front garden, a desert souvenir in a sub-tropical mess of bromeliads. Both remain as treasured memorabilia from the Outback.

The fish trap painting was something special – whether the fish traps were nature’s work, manmade or shared between both, it does not matter. What is not debated is that Brewarrina has been a place of significance to the Aboriginal people, even now the site of the annual Baiame’s Ngunnhu Festival, belying the misery implicit in the words of dispossession written by Maria Rey nearly 80 years ago.

Utopia

Now

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country – Uluru Statement 2017

Then

The objectives of ATSIC are:

to ensure maximum participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in government policy formulation and implementation
to promote indigenous self-management and self-sufficiency
to further indigenous economic, social and cultural development, and
to ensure co-ordination of Commonwealth, state, territory and local government policy affecting indigenous people. – Section 3 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act 1989.

By way of

“Where a clan or group has continued to acknowledge the laws and (so far as practicable) to observe the customs based on the traditions of that clan or group, whereby their traditional connection with the land has been substantially maintained, the traditional community title of that clan or group can be said to remain in existence.” – Attachment by certain High Court Judges to the Mabo decision

Once I was invited to address a bunch of Aboriginal elders at Utopia. This settlement is home to both the Alyerrerre and Anmatyerre people. It lies 350 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs on the Sandover Highway, an unmade road which runs across the Northern Territory spinifex and black soil plains until it eventually joins the Camooweal-Urandangi Road just over the Queensland border.

Utopia had even earned a reputation as a centre for Aboriginal art, being where Emily Kame Kngwarreye lived and painted. When we visited, she had passed away three years before. She was one of a number of Utopia artists, notably Minnie Pwerle, Barbara Weir and Gloria Petyarre.

The distinctive style of Utopia painter Minnie Pwerle

As I was undertaking work for the Commonwealth Government, the Aboriginal elders, an all-male group, invited me to tell them why I was there. They had moved to a roofed, open concrete area, and then they squatted in a semi-circular area. A whitefella, to whom I had not been introduced hung onto a pole on the fringe.

Even though the Aboriginal elders had seemingly sat in a non-hierarchial arc it was not difficult to work out who was the boss. As I started to talk, I started to experience this extraordinary energy of the gathering. I had never felt this level of non- verbal communication, despite their expressions being impassive, as I glanced down and around the group.

In retrospect, I likened it to the same pressure I had felt at school, when you had to speak for two minutes, without saying “um” or “ah” – or repeat yourself. The pressure was constant during the 15 minutes I spoke. When I finished, the man whom I had already identified as the leading elder stood up and said, half to the meeting in general and half to me. “Very good meeting. Let’s go have a cup of tea.” That was that.

I had felt the communication during my time talking; it had been intense, continuous but not hostile. Over the mug of tea, the discussion was general. One indication of whether you, the whitefella, was acceptable was the ability to chat. Aboriginal people can be silent; and if they believe it to be irrelevant, they simply don’t turn up for a meeting. I have been snubbed several times; “sorry business” takes precedence.

This time the two women in the party then joined us for tea. The centre of attention was the young kid with a charred kangaroo head which he gnawed at distractedly. It is amazing how small instances stick in one’s memory when other parts of that weekend passed in a blur.

The women went off with the women elders for “women’s business”. I have no idea what went on, even though one of the women was my wife. So, I can say no more; but if you are a woman reader, then you can find out if you wanted to do so.

But what is then the “Voice” in Canberra whitefella terms?

This was just one of my experiences with Aboriginal people. These were essentially desert people, and a significant group. It emphasised to me something that I had come to realise – the level of non-verbal communication among Aboriginal people. There was no indication of how well the two tribes intersected. In modern settlements where tribes have been forced together, such as Doomadgee in the Gulf Country. This product of the mission supervision and education led to displacement from traditional lands. Doomadgee is now a cauldron of various tribal groups forced together. Unsurprisingly, they are often in physical conflict.

Therefore, the concept of Voice has different connotations.

William Buckley escaped from a failed white settlement in Victoria in 1802 and lived for over 30 years with the Aboriginals who inhabited the land around Port Phillip Bay and thence into the hinterland where Colac and the shallow Western district lakes are located. When he emerged from the bush at the time Batman came from Tasmania to settle Melbourne, he had lost the ability to speak English.

Nevertheless, he had a unique perspective on what constituted communication. “Voice” in terms of a continuous Aboriginal traditional means of communication has always had a huge component of the non-verbal but also the song lines.

Buckley quickly regained his use of the English language, and in his memoirs, he describes his original exposure to a corrobborree (sic). These seemed to be where tribes could meet in harmony or for a celebratory purpose. When he was picked up by the Wathaurong tribe, as white was associated with death, he was thought of being a re-incarnated relative. So his “initiation” into the tribe was the reason for a corrobborree (sic) where there were hours of dancing and singing and beating of sticks and improvised drumming by the women on their skin rugs which they had removed and tightened between their knees to resemble a primitive tympanum. This gave meaning to the Voice?

Then one Aboriginal fellow, whose family were from Queensland, demonstrated that in his tribe there were clicks in his language. At least there is one Aboriginal voice, known as Lardil, where the clicks express a certain meaning. He demonstrated the clicks.

I had experienced a click language before, in Namibia among those from the Kalahari Desert people. In fact, where we were once in Namibia I asked one of the women serving us to read out the menu in her language. A wondrous experience – words mingled with clicks. I regret that I did not record her recitation.

Above I mentioned songlines. I remember the small group of Aboriginals, whom we once encountered on the banks of the Murray River near Mildura. They had come from the Pitjantjatjara Lands to get away from the “troubles” as they said. These people live in the northern part of South Australia, but they have a number of what I thought were songlines which they can follow across “country”. After all, I had also met a group of Pitjantjatjara men in Ceduna on the Southern Australian Coast, an eight day walk across the desert from Amata, one of the Pitjantjatjara settlements. It was suggested that this small group on the Murray River may have followed other songlines, as one Aboriginal man later suggested. Unlikely, but then these people do travel – and it is their land as they would have it.

Songlines are events where fact merges with myth interpreted through storytelling, rock art, songs and dance. As one Aboriginal elder has said: “Aboriginal people use songlines as a means of navigation, following all the landmarks they sing about. You may not have been there, but the songs give you enough information to find your way. Our people learn hundreds of songs.”

Thus, there are many interpretations of “Voice”; the Aboriginal people have so many languages and so many different totems and taboos to augment the various voices.

Given that, I have no idea what the Voice means. Is it just a forum for the articulate Aboriginal, given that there have been a number of these manifestations?

The sorry history of the Aboriginal and Torres Islander organisation (ATSIC) failed the Voice test. ATSIC was defunded nearly 20 years ago; and the former Chair is still facing 380 fraud charges. This miserable outcome of ATSIC is being used by opponents of enshrining a Voice. What has changed?

My vote in any referendum is contingent that its interpretation does not enshrine an Indigenous elite. Not the shrill Voice of self-importance. Secondly, nor should the Voice be a nod to tokenism.

The dulled Voice of dispossession continued.

Jobs and Skills Summit

We hardly need to labour the importance of the AMA’s core purpose—fighting for doctors’ interests—amid the chaos COVID continues to inflict on a health system that was stretched and inefficient to begin with. It is true that doctors’ interests have rarely, if ever, perfectly aligned with the public interest. Nonetheless, the debate over the future of healthcare in Australia stands to benefit from coherent and unified advocacy on behalf of the medical profession. The AMA still has political clout, but it needs a renewed clarity of purpose to more convincingly argue that doctor knows best

Thus concluded an editorial that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in July bemoaning the lack of engagement and the fall in the influence of a once powerful Australian Medical Association. In 1983 I attended the Hawke summit as part of the invited Association delegation, where the AMA President spoke.

It is important to reflect on how important the Hawke Government Summit was. It was summarised thus:

The Hawke Labor Government has not been conspicuous for its reforming pro-labour initiatives. With the exception of Medicare (itself quite a limited initiative) little has been done to improve the position of the least well off members of the population. This is not to say that the Labor Government has done nothing and is not interested in reform. It is just a question of the reforms they have introduced: assets tests, the deregulation of banking, entry of foreign banks, abolition of exchange controls and the floating of the Australian dollar.

The “relevance symbolism” of AMA involvement was not lost on some of the more assertive members of the AMA, but the following years were full of fighting for doctors’ interests. Whether the SMH editorial writer above was referring to the rise of Bruce Shepherd and his protégé, Brendan Nelson in the late 1980s I’m not sure. Certainly, the last bilateral Inquiry into Fees for Medicare Benefit occurred in 1984. Thereafter relations between government and the AMA dissolved into conflict.

Influence has faded once the strategists, who facilitated the AMA presence at that 1983 Summit, moved on and it lost its strategic direction under the populist Shepherd and his acolytes. Shepherd may have won a few battles, but an association where office holders are ephemeral loses continuity, (especially when they pursue personal agendas rather than those of the Association) – and may I say clout.

The AMA was not invited by Albanese’s crew to the recent summit. In fact, there appear to be only three invitees associated with health – Annie Butler; Federal secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwife Association; Carmel Monaghan, CEO Ramsay Health; and Christine Nixon, Chair of the Australian College of General Practitioners.

One was a health professional, Annie Butler, heading 290,000 nurses – an experienced nurse; one businesswoman heading a successful private health group and an ex-copper who has had her fair share of controversy. Given the politics of general practice, as distinct from the practice of general practice, who knows what her grasp of the health sector is apart from the petty intrigue which has dogged the RACGP for years.

The effect of the pandemic on employment seems to be ignored in the lack of AMA representation at the Summit last week. Although the AMA had made plenty of comment, it failed to have a leading role. In fact, it was one of the failures of organised medicine that it assumed a passive role and at no stage attempted to co-ordinate resources and advice outside government during 2020-2022.

Such intervention would have shown relevance and helped quell extreme opinions. A very small but vocal minority in the community seized the agenda; and the politicians had no defence except enforced social isolation. This was an important incentive for vaccination when it had become available, but once the lock downs were revoked, there was no other incentive to maintain the level of vaccination, which had been further complicated by the different times of the approval for administration to the various age groups. Their public health experts were silenced.

Medical associations now have lay administrators. Their loyalty is to their career. They have no ongoing professional stake in maintaining the professional relevance with government.

As one who has led a number of campaigns, notably the campaign against the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific in the 1990s, I eschewed the self-aggrandisement for action. We had a plan. Irrespective of its effect, France has long since stopped the nuclear tests. The lesson was that when the interests of the medical profession coincide with those of the public as it did then, it is a powerful combination.

An AMA which exists with its office-bearers counting the number of the media releases and their appearance on Tik Tok or whatever – but in effect doing nothing or as one person said using the phrase “looking good in their suits” to define inactivity. That unfortunately is the AMA, a sound bite expressing concern or saying why doesn’t the government do something is in itself a recipe for irrelevance.

It is not surprising that Annie Butler has the ear of Government. She is an experienced nurse. She does not have to look good in a suit.

Mouse Whisper

Overheard in a lunch bar

Sandwich maker: What would you like in your salad roll?”

She: Everything except onion, please.

He, in American accent (next in line): That is a very Australian way of ordering.

She: Is it? Never really thought about it. Still, better than saying tomato… and a slice of beetroot … carrot … lettuce yes… jalapeño… perhaps jack cheese… at least with using “except” I’ve avoided the list sliding into infinity!

He: I get your meaning. So different from us Americans.

Whisper: The efficient quiet Australian!