Bush fires Archives - The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Smokin’ Joe on the Wing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moutardiers du Monde, Unir!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dwelling on Stable Circumstances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’ll be Apples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tangier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What price is America prepared to pay for its preservation?

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

Mouse Whisper

Reading The Economist (Rodent edition)

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

Modest Expectations – Boning up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herding Goats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snug in the Huon Valley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picklefad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

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

Modest Expectations – Sudan

It was a modest dilemma, but a dilemma nevertheless. We had stopped in Genoa, a small sliver of civilisation which had nearly been razed to the ground two years ago by the 2019-2020 bushfires which had burnt through the far east of Gippsland. It resembled a ghost town. The late autumn day was beautiful, and we noted that there was a new bridge over the river which flowed through the hamlet. So even though there seemed to be no one around, someone had spent money on the bridge.

We stopped in front of a very shabby building. The sign on the front of the building indicated that it was once a hotel/motel. It seemed to me to be disused; my wife disagreed. She thought there were people living there. There was no fence around the front of the motel.

However, in the front of the building was a tree loaded with lemons. There was only one windfall, and that was on the wrong side of ripe.

As we were contemplating a guy riding on a tractor rode up to the north wall of the motel, but did not stop. That was the only person we saw.

I looked at the lemons. They were many beautiful ripe yellow lemons.

I was tempted; my wife said no.

The dilemma: Would you pick lemons off the tree or not?

We were only 45 minutes by taxi from Eden. Could not see any apple tree though.

Wistful in Werriwa

My eye was caught by a small piece which said that Morrison was contemplating winning Whitlam’s old seat of Werriwa. He had descended on that electorate to start the day with a group of locals, or so it was reported. Now Werriwa is the Aboriginal name for Lake George, which mysteriously periodically fills up with water and then empties, with no river flowing in and out to explain its fluctuation. Werriwa was one of the original electorates at the time of Federation. As the population has grown, the electorate has moved closer to the southern outer suburbs of Sydney, and thus has been a stronghold of the Labor Party since 1934.

Morrison believed such a seat was winnable, as he cast himself as the Everyman battling the Political Elites. He was encouraged by a media machine that we have endured for a long time, particularly after the accession of Rudd, biased to the Coalition. Morrison was also buoyed by his surprise victory in 2019, with a major swing in Queensland. He made the assumption that he could cast himself as the champion of the working man. “Man” was the operative word. Werriwa has a woman member, and with a very “Anglo” name, Anne Stanley.

Added to that were migrant communities where you could sow the divisive wedge politics, particularly playing upon conservative religious practices. Here, sexuality and general relaxation of patriarchal family relationships, admixed with spurious declamation about religious freedoms, were perceived by Morrison and his advisers to be fertile ground for playing on prejudice to gain votes. The Liberal Party candidate was Sam Kayal, the surname Lebanese; and obviously he seems to be very friendly with the Mayor of Liverpool, who is also of Lebanese heritage, presumably Christian.

When you reviewed the first preferences in the recent Federal election, the Liberal Democrats, the One Nation Party and United Australia Party collected about 23 per cent of these. The Greens received a modest increase of just over one per cent to 6.6 per cent.

Both the major Parties in the allocation of first preferences lost ground – Labor lost eight per cent and the Liberals four per cent. After the allocation of preferences, the swing against the Labor Party had been reduced to 0.3 per cent. If the three right wing splinters had been solid for the Coalition, the seat would probably have fallen to the Liberals.

When I first read the piece about Morrison, I scoffed. Now it is food for thought; maybe it was a lockdown reaction, where each side received electoral contumely. Certainly, how the votes flow in the NSW election next year will be more interesting, because the antipathy to the enforced “lockdowns” should have faded by then.

Enter Dr Ryan

Let me say, as I have said before, that my health care has been very good, considering my co-morbidities. Yet I do not have one health professional who can provide all my ongoing care. Why? Because the world of medicine is so sub-specialised that having all the information in one place is impossible. As I have been a medical practitioner, I have navigated the system with varying degrees of success. This has meant that for probably six months my auto-immune disease was undiagnosed; but I knew when I was fibrillating and not reverting to sinus rhythm.

Take for instance, because of arthritic changes in both my cervical and lumbar spine, coupled with some symptomatology which suggested impairment of neural function, a spinal surgeon that he would operate. I found his clinical approach puzzling and consulted a colleague of mine – a neurologist – who said that, in his opinion, the operations were unnecessary. That was six years ago, and the disability caused by these changes has not progressed.

He retired but referred me to a neurologist in Sydney. The cost for the initial consultation was announced by the practice to be $800, more than three times the appropriate Medicare benefit. I would have thought that outrageous, especially so given that he would have my notes passed on by my previous neurologist who had settled for the Medicare benefit as full payment for a consultation.

Ironically, through the consultant physician professional association of which I was vice-president at the time, I had negotiated with the Commonwealth Health Department in 2006 to create the Medicare item which reflected recognition of significant complexity in consultations.

Let me say that the neurologist whom I consulted was understated, yet had an eye for detail; more importantly, he had wide clinical experience and a great modicum of common sense.

Talking of neurology, Professor Monique Ryan, a prominent paediatric neurologist has been elected to the Federal Parliament. As a member of a small sub-specialty, her natural health constituency is one of the “elitist” areas of the profession – small patient load given there are about 120 paediatric neurologists; yet, irrespective of needs, the sub-specialities keep on expanding. There is also a tendency in these small specialties for the doctors to become researchers or even more sub-specialised. In a review of the field, 250 neurological disorders have been isolated, but most are very rare diseases.

Yet reflexly the tendency continues to also train more and more, despite smaller and smaller patient load per neurologist.

As a result, they tend to “keep” their patients rather than “returning” them back to the referring doctor. The other way to expand the clinical base of the paediatric neurology sub-specialty is by moving into the mental disability field, where rehabilitation is the aim, or areas such as attention deficit disorders and autism, which have become very “popular” diagnoses.

Whenever I watch reports on these spectrum disorders, I am reminded of the successful long distance swimmer, who was concurrently being treated for chronic fatigue syndrome.

While many of my medical colleagues would bristle and dismiss my comments, it’s very difficult to get any medical sub-specialty to objectively review what has been achieved as against that which was promised over a given period – and to agree on when is “enough is enough”.

Monique Ryan may now represent the electorate of Kooyong; she also represents by her professional attainment and experience, a rather narrow tranche of the health system. That is not to decry its importance; it is a matter of the allocation of scarce resources. Now she has Parliamentary standing, her utterances will be interesting; especially as the ego lurks very close to the surface in most maiden speeches to Parliament. I will read hers with very great interest, given my own experience, and see where her priorities lie, once you strip away the comments of the generalities.

The dangers of rampant sub-specialisation in medicine and elsewhere in the health system is just one potential dysfunction which needs to be rebalanced in the health system after the COVID-19 experience, an indifferent series of Federal Ministers and the unfortunate influence of a number of public servants, some of whom should be ashamed to take their pensions let alone the consultant work they fouled up – and that is before Australia has a decent Integrity Commission to investigate whether there are shenanigans and rorts to attract any action.

If the aim is to get a more equitable spread of health professionals, then as one whose nationwide Rural Stocktake in 1999 led to the creation of the rural clinical schools and university departments of rural health among other changes and who introduced a successful intern training program and opposed lengthening the post-graduate training in the name of professional “slavery” rather than education, I have been disappointed that its success has been seemingly ignored and structures dismantled. Yet there is a crescendo of complaints about the lack of rural health professionals. I shall define the systemic pathology and suggest what has to be done in a number of my following blogs.

I just hope that the incoming Health Minister can think outside and beyond the normal temptation to just get the matter off his desk and onto the States, with resumption of the “blame game”.

The Fall of Globalisation – How inconvenient.

In the years just before COVID-19 struck, I travelled widely, and in doing so visited Finland, the Baltic countries, and the countries on the lower Danube (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary), the boat on which I was travelling ending up nosing into the Black Sea before turning around; also Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro; Slovenia. I had been to Russia and Poland on earlier trips. Although it did not occur to me at the time, I was able to do this under the mantle of Globalisation; in fact, as long as you flew there you could also then visit Belarus from Lithuania. Belarus, together with Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, were the only two places where entry was not automatic in these European wanderings.

All the time Russians were seething; or rather Putin was seething with his Peter the Great complex. Plotting – planning for his dystopian world is just the end product of the authoritarian narcissist who gazes at their image in the world; the Chaplinesque caricature now widely spread across the world.

In the USA, it is unbelievable that the Republican Party, which ostensibly believes in free enterprise, has been complicit through the Vandal Trump in the Putin destruction of globalisation.

Trump was not the only one. For instance, the narcissist Rumsfeld cajoled a group of politicians into a “coalition of the willing” on the grounds that Iraq would be easy pickings for the American oil industry. Others may nuance it to share the blame around and saying pillorying one person is never the reason. However, George W. Bush’s famous assessment of Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.” needs no commentary.

It seems that remains the belief of that great meddler, Henry Kissinger, who was so important in Hanoi winning the Vietnam war. Kissinger turned 99 a week ago; and his wrongheadedness is still being reported.

Nevertheless, the greatest win for Putin was to have his Manchurian candidate, Donald Trump, in the White House. Thus, while America slept or was “tarbabied” in Afghanistan, Putin consolidated his power base. If Hilary Clinton had been voted in as President instead of Trump in 2016, this current situation would not have arisen. She would have kicked the All European cocktail circuit which for years has gone under the name of NATO, in the backside. At the same time, Putin was meddling with a British Isles polity befuddled by one Nigel Farage who may well have been on the Soviet payroll in order to play wazir to the aspirant sultan Boris.

After all, in a prescient speech 12 years ago, Clinton stated inter alia: …NATO Headquarters is bulging with over three hundred committees, many with overlapping responsibilities. Too often, our budgets – military and civilian – are divorced from Alliance priorities, and the most important priorities have been under-resourced for years. Our secretary general has not been invested with the power he needs to truly manage the organization. This must change – and we must agree to that change in parallel with the new Strategic Concept. A new Concept with old structures will not be transformational. In fact, it may not change much of anything at all.

But that did not happen. Hilary Clinton was a casualty at a time when the world was reaching a crescendo of dystopian behaviour.

Now, it has taken a young man, unencumbered by the cocktail circuit and with the true insight of the comedian, to stand up and fight. As he said, he does not need martini glasses, he needs the armaments to vaccinate Europe against this particularly virulent Russian variant of Monkey Pox. But old habits die hard; the clinking of glasses still resonate around the palaces of Brussels.

Old Age

“It is a giant labyrinth that you walk into, they lock the door behind you, and there is no exit,” she said. “I can’t keep doing this. I’m falling apart.”

I have been concerned with care of the aged since not long after I graduated in medicine in 1963. It is now 2022. During this time, there has been a huge change in the technology surrounding care of the aged.

Yet is this reflected in the care?

People are living longer, and hence the gap between ceasing employment and death is growing. I have joined the throng.

There is this myth that looking after old people is more about care rather than medicine. When I was in practice, I was less concerned with “fast rehabilitation”, typically treatment of the sporting injury, but more with so-called “slow rehabilitation”, the staff, including the doctors, employed all the expertise available to assures each person attains his or her highest level of capability, and then maintains it. While most are old; that is not necessarily the case.

The projected Labor Party policy is to have a registered nurse on duty 24/7 in every aged care facility, which equates to employing six registered nurses to cover the one position. This is very difficult to achieve given that government has allowed the nursing home to be separated from mainstream health care with different rules – and for aged care to be largely private. The more you diffuse the expertise of a group of professionals, especially with an absentee landlord, the more you undermine the staff morale which, in turn, leads to increased staff turnover.

When almost 20 years ago I started working as Director of Medical Services in a country hospital, to which was attached a nursing home, the first thing I did was a drug audit for each of the residents with the local pharmacist. I then asked each of the general practitioners how often they reviewed each resident’s medication charts, which most did with varying degrees of reluctance.

There was a visiting geriatrician at the time. “Visiting” was a joke. He would not visit the nursing home; insisting each patient be brought to the rooms from which he worked. Incredible. In the end I secured a mate of mine, a city geriatrician to periodically visit to not only see the nursing home residents but to also provide tutorials to the local doctors and other health professionals. The problem with any program which involves visiting staff is its sustainability.

When the policy makers – divorced from reality – say “train more staff”, it is far from a magic solution.

There are basically three ways of training staff

In dedicated training institutions,
On the job – apprenticeship style,
Importing staff trained in other countries,

coupled with:

Periodic in-service training programs.

To me, what is important is to reduce the attrition levels and minimise the spread of disease. Simple to say; hard to accomplish.

There has been a shift from people suffering stroke to those suffering dementia. The incidence of stroke has fallen because of improvement in cardiac treatment, in particular in the treatment of high blood pressure. With stroke, the hope is that the patient will improve; once improvement is stabilised, then the level of independent living ability can be assessed. The problem with dementia is to slow the rate of deterioration; but in both cases, redemption is a limited commodity.

Care of the aged as I have found out is care and competence. One of the most frustrating aspects to exercise even the basic function of getting out of a chair, which once was automatic, is having to wait for someone. The horrors of not being able to undertake normal bodily functions without soiling yourself is ever present. If many of the population are like me, impatient, then learning to wait becomes one of the challenges. This is compounded everywhere by the challenge of the furniture: once it was great to be able to sink into an armchair. Now the softness becomes a giant jellyfish from which you alone cannot escape.

When I was involved with a nursing home attached to a country hospital, the key to its success was that the manager was very competent. Competency is being able to utilise the resources allocated to achieve that no patient is neglected – falls, hygiene, bed sores, nutrition, compliance with treatment being uppermost in those items monitored continually. She had an eye on how everyone was performing, which is what is needed in developing a coherent happy team and thus reducing the turnover of staff. This is important if employment is continually being disrupted by the pandemic.

I am one who believes that in community health structures you build from the bottom, not with great fanfare spray funding from the seat of government and the assumption it will work. There are packages of care everywhere, but who is monitoring the implementation rather than just the distribution of these government initiatives, which are often encased in impressive language, but of what meaning?

One may suggest a number of ways to improve the quality of care of the aged. I believe that there are indicators which denote good care. I also believe that there should be a credentialling, definition of practice and privileging system across the whole sector. When I tried to implement this process in aged care, despite it being the norm for hospitals, the Commonwealth Department of Health protested. Gives you an idea of the appalling track record of the Commonwealth Health Department in that sector. after all, has the sector improved since the kerosene bath era when Bronwyn Bishop was the Minister at the turn of the century? I have viewed hapless Federal Ministers, but the antics of Richard Colbeck in this sector shows how little the Coalition continue to view this sector of human existence.

As a result, a bad situation has festered.

Nursing homes should not be an area where the output is conspicuous consumption, as shown in the media by the acquisition of a yellow Lamborghini because of the apparent profitability embedded in the current aged care arrangements. As can be seen in the media, or in expensive church vestments (as we saw during the first year of COVID-19 when deaths in nursing homes were rampant), the residents of these facilities, many without comprehension, are in need of care, compassion and dignity. However, then give some thought to all the marvellous medical technology which has enabled lives to be extended in this way.

I am well aware that any system which seeks to monitor behaviour in all its forms will receive resistance; however, over a long period of time I have found that it works if you have the will to make it so. I am also a believer in hands-on management, not of the individual interaction between patient and health professional, but of the system. This has enabled me to pick up when inevitably, even with the best of intention, events go “pear-shaped”.

Also accept the blame for such situation where you are ultimately responsible. Then review when this happens – and one of the results of credentialing, defining the appropriate clinical practice and then privileging is that the staff members can learn from others – both the right and the wrong – with recriminations as a last resort.

Unfortunately, most systemic failures have an individual implicated; and that is often the hardest part – to get rid of that individual or individuals. A well constituted system under the new government, where all the parties are bought together in perhaps an electorate-based arrangement, so that each elected member can follow the monitoring of aged care in their electorate – and, as I said above, credentialing, definition of clinical practice and privileging would be one way of attracting attention to an area of past government neglect.

Perhaps a Prime Minister faced with the care of the aged will find out sooner than he thinks that he may need to enter its portals. Therefore he may like to receive periodic factual reports of what is currently occurring in his electorate of Grayndler and aim to visit each over the lifetime of the Parliament. After all, across Australia 151 committees should not be too much of a burden to assure better care of the aged, providing insurance for that time which each of us will eventually reach, if we live long enough. To face being placed in a nursing home, and knowing that I will be cared for in the best way possible; not left to wallow and nobody comes.

After all, as I found out, 70 may be the new 50 years; but I assure you 80 is still 80.

I am not alone. However, even though there has been an extensive review of this area recently, who of us has been consulted? Who among us aged is the protector of that increasing group of people alongside me who are demented? You see in your contemporaries the slow decline in cognitive function, the irrational behaviour, and unless each one of them has a carer who truly cares for them and has the resilience to battle the many hurdles to getting an acceptable aged care situation, they end up on a scrap heap which, for administrative purposes, is called a nursing home.

The nursing home nightmare is when I cry out, but nobody comes.

Mouse Whisper

Serious Mouse!

Since 1982, 123 mass shootings have been carried out in the USA by male gunmen. In contrast, only three mass shootings (defined by the source as a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed) have been carried out by women.

Modest Expectations – Leyland Sprinter

Near the end of last year, we decided to decamp to Tasmania for February because we reckoned then that February was the worst time to be in Sydney – always so humid and oppressive. Hopefully we would be climate-wise. Little did we think what would eventuate.

I have jokingly said that having a place in Tasmania is an insurance against climate change. Macquarie Harbour is on the West Coast and is six times the size of Sydney Harbour. Unlike Sydney Harbour, the number of people living in the rim of the Harbour is minuscular – there being one permanent settlement, that of Strahan, which is home to both a fishing and a tourist industry. Salmon farms dot the Harbour.

In my blog I have written twice about my view as a lover of Tasmania. In a blog I wrote about a year ago, inter alia, I mocked the pitiful amount being allocated to bushfire control. The West Coast of Tasmania has been thought immunised against bushfires, because it rains on average every second day of even the driest month, February, and thus having about 160cm rain annually has been some insurance. Bushfires have ravaged the area, but mostly in the mining area around Zeehan to the north where fire erupts from the Savage River iron ore mines.

This was the case in 1982 when a fire was sufficiently worrying for there to be some evacuation of Strahan. The fire had apparently been started by some mutton birders trying to smoke the bird nests in the Ocean Beach dunes, as a preventative measure against any tiger snakes that might be in the burrows. Somewhat exciting if you put your hand into a burrow and you grasp a tiger snake rather than a mutton bird. Anyway, the resultant fire spread through the scrub and nearly burnt the township down.

Nevertheless, while we have been here, there has been a small bushfire near Tullah, which I mentioned earlier in my blog – and another in a more remote area, threatening the Truchanas Huon Pine Forest reserve; a fire in that area would have been equally as devastating as if the bushfire in NSW in the summer of 2019-20 had not been halted before it reached the Wollemi Pine habitat in the Blue Mountains.

The latest news on this bushfire in the south-west is that “as a result of concentrated ground works and co-ordinated water bombing, the fire had downgraded from Going to Under Control with aerial firefighting resources and remote area fire crews continuing to work their way around the boundary edge identifying and extinguishing hotspots with continued aerial support.” That report was a week ago, and there is no evidence that local circumstances have changed.

But worldwide, circumstances have changed. Climate change is now an entity which governments are freely blaming for the conditions which have caused the extreme flooding events that have occurred in both New South Wales and Queensland recently. Terms like “one in a thousand years” calamity is meaningless when it is clear that there has been a change in the environment in which we are living.

The solution to repeated fire and flood is to provide the defence, especially when in this neoliberal world designed to value exploitation rather than conservation, building on flood plains or in the areas liable to engulfed in by bushfire seems to have been acceptable.

Clearing our own property is one thing, but when your land is hemmed in by plots of land that are neglected, with local government unwilling or unable to enforce the clearance presents a problem, as we do, then we do have a problem. The owners of the neglected plots are lost in the fog of the titles office; so we have cleared most of an adjacent plot, taking out eucalypts which threatened to fall or were already leaning over our house, which the previous owners had built close to the boundary of the property. To complicate matters two of the blocks of land now don’t have any access to a road, since the road which exists on the town plan has not nor will ever be built.

We have probably dodged the bullet as we go into autumn, but in fire prevention there is still much to do, irrespective of how complicated the situation is.

Governments have spent money to ensure that most parts of urban Australia have clean water – this is already a matter which we take for granted, but it spares a flooded community from cholera or other waterborne diseases which are endemic in less fortunate communities.

I remember those stories, apocryphal or not, of unscrupulous developers who used to subdivide land which only was visible at low tide; but in regard to flood plains, the lack of scruples is only a matter of degree. The cry of “caveat emptor” applies even when the information is symmetric, which is not the case in this world of hustlers and grifters, some of whom graduate into government, as we have seen. Australia has yet another big clean up job ahead of us, because the stinking mud is not only on the streets of Atlantis, which used to be called Brisbane, but all across this land so strikingly described by Dorothea Mackellar.

Vera Putina’s little boy

“Greetings to Ukraine. Once upon a time Finland too fought the Russian Army with everything we had and was able to hold on to our freedom and independence. That’s what we wish for you as well. The whole Europe stands with you.” – A message from a Finn who fought against the Soviet Union in the 1939-41 War who is still alive at 98.

In one way, the number of options for the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian War are diminishing. They all revolve around Putin’s mental state, now that it has been determined that the Ukrainians are not a pushover. Even in those areas where it would be expected that the people would be little different from the Crimeans, there seems to be vicious fighting. The Ukrainians are not rolling over.”Those Neville Chamberlains” in the US State Department who offered Zelensky asylum did not appreciate his strength. If Zelensky had accepted, that would have been the end; but Zelensky has ditched appeasement in the face of the appeasers.

For Putin, this is very inconvenient. Everybody talks about his unpredictability; but I believe he has the predictability of the tyrant. Thus, it was not long before he sent in his thugs to assassinate Zelensky. How many times he will try to repeat it, who knows! Yet when people become unhinged, as he apparently has, then do we observers put everything down to unpredictability?

While he is using the usual modern warfare device of bombarding the civilians by missiles and bombing, he must break Ukrainian morale to have any chance of winning. The Russians must husband their very finite resources. They are not endless, a very important variable now that the Ukrainians are putting up such resistance. The cost of Putin’s war should be soon, if not already, affecting the Russian population, given the sanctions and the strength of the opposition. The Russians have tried to compensate with mastery of the cyberworld, which did not have a major “combatant role” in their attempted conquest of Afghanistan. I suggest that with NATO and others supplying both military hardware and essential food and other commodities, the war will be won once the USA can reliably control cyberspace. It would be interesting to know what is the cyber surrender equivalent of the white flag.

If Putin did not have a nuclear arsenal, then life for NATO would be less complicated. NATO will just continue to use Ukraine as a surrogate to do the fighting – and eventually exhaust Russia. Obviously, a mad Putin could make good on turning his nuclear preparedness into an all or nothing nuclear winter – at least in the Northern Hemisphere. What the Chinese decide to do will ultimately decide the length of the War.

The fact that the world is experiencing climate change is one good reason why the Russians should dispose of Putin, but he has learnt the tactics of previous Russian despots, where Russia has not only survived but thrived. The only hiccough occurred in the late 1980s when Russia had a rational leader in Gorbachev.

One clue to future action is how the Russians deal with the Ukrainian nuclear reactors. They could continue the boneheaded initial bombardment or think that by doing so the World will watch a new phenomenon, namely the deliberate destruction of nuclear reactors with all the consequences that will entail. Maybe there is a playbook for such an occurrence, learnt from the Chernobyl disaster (when there was once peaceful co-operation). If the nuclear reactors were to be seriously damaged that would be an excuse for any sane person to seek an armistice, I would think.

Anyway, it would give the Orators of Davos something to think about as, having hurriedly packed their Louis Vuitton luggage and checked the time on their diamond encrusted Rolexes, they headed out into the nuclear cloud in their luxury Gulfstreams.

“A stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve.”

I first became acquainted with George Will through the New York Review of Books as a very astute and perceptive critic. I have never met him, but he is of the same vintage as myself. An Oakeshott conservative, but with an insight not dulled by ideology. He has been a Republican, but now writes regularly for the more Democratically aligned Washington Post.

In many ways Will serves as a policy digestif, enabling the unpalatable to be analysed rather than immediately disposed of.

Presuming that as a senior member of the media and as also a student of history, he can make links that may not be immediately apparent. He has depth of experience able to fathom what have the been the quotient of all his senses over his 80 years. Thus, George Will has both literary subtlety and savagery.

This piece below should help you assess whether this veteran has more than a fine use of words or a sentence that Trump should indeed experience at some stage, when his “sin taxes” become too much to accommodate and a “prigioni lifestyle” threatens.

Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve. His residual power, which he must use or lose, is to influence his party’s selection of candidates for state and federal offices. This is, however, perilous because he has the power of influence only if he is perceived to have it. That perception will dissipate if his interventions in Republican primaries continue to be unimpressive.

So, Trump must try to emulate the protagonist of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. In Mark Twain’s novel, a 19th-century American is transported back in time to Britain in the year 528. He gets in trouble, is condemned to death, but remembers that a solar eclipse occurred on the date of his scheduled execution. He saves himself by vowing to extinguish the sun but promising to let it shine again if his demands are met.

Trump is faltering at the business of commanding outcomes that are, like Twain’s eclipse, independent of his interventions. Consider the dilemma of David Perdue. He is a former Republican senator because Trump, harping on the cosmic injustice of his November loss in 2020, confused and demoralized Georgia Republicans enough to cause Perdue’s defeat by 1.2 percentage points in the January 2021 runoff. Nevertheless, Trump talked Perdue into running in this year’s gubernatorial primary against Georgia’s Republican incumbent, Brian Kemp, whom Trump loathes.

In a February poll, Kemp led Perdue by 10 points. Trump failed in his attempt to boost his preferred Senate candidate in North Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd, by pressuring a rival out of the race. As of mid-January, Budd was trailing in the polls. Trump reportedly might endorse a second Senate candidate in Alabama, his first endorsement, of Rep. Mo Brooks, having been less than earthshaking. Trump has endorsed Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin in the gubernatorial primary against Gov. Brad Little. A poll published in January: Little 59 percent, McGeachin 18 percent. During Trump’s presidency, a majority of Republicans said they were more supporters of Trump than of the GOP. That has now reversed.

Trump is an open book who has been reading himself to the nation for 40 years. In that time, he has changed just one important word in his torrent of talk: He has replaced “Japan” with “China” in assigning blame for our nation’s supposed anaemia. He is an entertainer whose repertoire is stale.

A European war is unhelpful for Trump because it reminds voters that Longfellow was right: Life is real, life is earnest. Trump’s strut through presidential politics was made possible by an American reverie; war in Europe has reminded people that politics is serious.

From Capitol Hill to city halls, Democrats have presided over surges of debt, inflation, crime, pandemic authoritarianism and educational intolerance. Public schools, a point of friction between citizens and government, are hostages of Democratic-aligned teachers unions that have positioned K-12 education in an increasingly adversarial relationship with parents. The most lethal threat to Democrats, however, is the message Americans are hearing from the party’s media-magnified progressive minority: You should be ashamed of your country.

Trump’s message is similar. He says this country is saturated with corruption, from the top, where dimwits represent the evidently dimwitted voters who elected them, down to municipalities that conduct rigged elections. Progressives say the nation’s past is squalid and not really past; Trump says the nation’s present is a disgrace.

Speaking of embarrassments: We are the sum of our choices, and Vladimir Putin has provoked some Trump poodles to make illuminating ones. Their limitless capacity for canine loyalty now encompasses the Kremlin war criminal. For example, the vaudevillian-as-journalist Tucker Carlson, who never lapses into logic, speaks like an arrested-development adolescent: Putin has never called me a racist, so there.

Forgotten Ohio Ukrainians rallying against Putin’s war

One Ohio aspirant, grovelling for Trump’s benediction two weeks ago said: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” Apparently upon discovering that Ohio has 43,000 Ukrainian Americans, this man Vance underwent a conviction transplant, saying, “Russia’s assault on Ukraine is unquestionably a tragedy,” and emitting clouds of idolatry for Trump’s supposedly Metternichian diplomacy regarding Putin.

For Trump, the suppurating wound on American life, and for those who share his curdled venom, war is a hellacious distraction from their self-absorption. Fortunately, their ability to be major distractions is waning.

Albored Part IV – No Longer Unready?

I have admitted that Albanese is probably not unready, but he is unsteady. He strikes me as a guy who has grown up in the kindergarten of factional politics, but really does not communicate well outside that factional circle.

He is fortunate to have some bloody good women who have shown the guts to stand the incompetents up, and hopefully, on a change of government if that occurs, they will team with some of the aspirants running for ostensibly safe Liberal seats as successful candidates.

I was worried by the absence of Penny Wong and the short statement that she has been ill has been left at that after she turned up on the Insiders program. The problem with presenting the Albanese foreign affairs approach is to work out what it is. Wong’s comment on Insiders:

Working with partners in the region to build our collective security, to diversify our export markets, secure supply chains, provide renewable energy and climate solutions, avert coercion, and respond to natural disasters. By investing financially and intellectually in the security and stability of our region – because defence capability on its own won’t achieve this. We share with ASEAN states an abiding interest in averting hegemony by any single power – so this is where our energy must be applied.

In responsibility terms does the distribution of Ministerial Portfolios need to be reviewed – Foreign Affairs, Home Affairs, Defence, Environment Protection? In Government, the responsibility for legislation, both future and existing, needs to be clearly defined; and yet the intrinsic danger of having exclusive enclaves centred around such legislative responsibility makes talk of co-operative government nothing more than meaningless waffle. The question is whether Albanese will have the innate skills, intelligence and authority to assure his Ministers work together.

The obvious question is if you, Albanese, get into office, what do you do on day one, because if you dissect this paragraph above, it is an overwhelming agenda – so large it leads to policy paralysis. The policy drought is evident with so much discussion on nuclear submarines, which are of no immediate relevance – and given the lead time, how relevant ever, except to continue to create for the huge hole in the Budget. If Albanese stepped back and thought that nuclear submarines are the panacea, then he is as blinkered as our supremely unintelligent Prime Minister.

I believe that the defence of Australia, as is the case everywhere, is yet to move from a traditional discussion of muskets and cannon balls. As Putin is demonstrating, it is all about killing more civilians of the “Away Team” than the “Home Team”. The Russian armed forces are seeing the people as the real target. Just look at the Ukraine. It is the war which confirms that the most vulnerable are this target. Children and mothers are the prime target, with the latest atrocity being the bombing of a children’s hospital, irrespective of what the propaganda says to the contrary. Putin may claim that everyone has been evacuated; but tell that to the mothers in labour inside the hospital as the bombs fell.

Unlike the countries which have constituted the battlefield over the past 20 years, Ukraine does have a network of underground bunkers, formerly called train stations (which were an important bulwark in the bombing of Britain 80 years ago). The lessons of the Ukraine War are and will continue to be relevant, rather than government solely succumbing to the blandishments of the armaments manufacturers for more and more lethal toys, which if used will destroy us all.

In one way, just the vastness of a very dry continent with a dispersed population, yet with areas that are intensely populated, provides a defence for Australia, the strength of which needs to be exploited in any future conflict. Albanese seems to have succumbed to the one scenario of invasion, given how much sinophobia has framed the foreign and defence policy of the current government.

Just one simple question? How quickly could our underground accommodate our population, how many of them and how strong would our underground need to be to withstand a missile assault?

The other critical area is cybersecurity – far more important than a few pieces of military or naval hardware. Is the arrangement of the current capacity, in all its diverse acronyms, the right way to conduct our national security? I well remember the Hope Inquiry which Whitlam instituted in 1974. It did not help prevent his dismissal the next year.

While much has changed, Hope’s biographer, Peter Edwards, has written that the principles Hope outlined then remain fundamentally important today: effectiveness must be matched by accountability; intelligence assessment must be separated from policymaking. Intelligence and law enforcement should also be kept separate. Most importantly, both intelligence assessment and national security policymaking must be whole-of-government processes, based in the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio, with no single department or minister to have undue influence.

The first decision on day one is more pragmatic. What do they do with Mr Pezzullo, given the number of strings that he has pulled under the Coalition? Presumably Albanese believes it is essential that he is removed and neutralised in his ability to have any influence.

The next decision on day one of a new Government is to review the head of the Australian Federal Police, Reece Kershaw. The danger of authoritarian governments is that they crave a secret police to enact their vengeance; and unfortunately signs are that that is occurring in a complacent Australia.

The problem is this drive towards a police state, whether it is called plutocracy, oligarchy or just plain dictatorship, is muddied with cyber security. I have not seen this matter explicitly addressed by Albanese. As someone who studied Georges Sorel, I am well aware that a secret police is the result of the authoritarian mind, whether extreme right or left wing. Australia should not underestimate this scenario, given the example of Witness K and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, who were not allowed to release information about our underhand dealings over oil with Timor-Leste. The Guardian did not hold back in a report of the matter where Howard and Downer were described as “shills for the corporations”. Albanese has not disclosed his position, because the whole conduct of the Australian Government in this case reeks of secret police.

Maeslant storm surge barrier near Rotterdam

Climate change is the other enemy, against which it has been shown that Australia has almost no defence. Flood mitigation by the Dutch has been going on since the 13^th century. The Netherlands, built on a series of sandy outcrops primarily that of the Rhine, had suffered from the ravages of the North Sea well before “climate change” came into the lexicon. The flooding of the Netherlands in 1953 was the biggest wake-up call. As one writer put it:

The greatest lesson to be learned from the Dutch is perhaps less about engineering and more about mindset and culture. “It’s easy just to talk about technological and engineering solutions, but a lot of the problems surrounding sea-level rise are legal and political. The Dutch have a legal and political system that is united around dealing with water issues; they’ve been doing it for a thousand years.”

As a result, their technology provides an avenue for combating floods, which has been used in attempting to waterproof New Orleans. Yet here, the only discussion about flood mitigation seems to be around raising walls of dams.

Bushfires present the problem of occurring in isolated forested areas under a hot sun and strong north winds, lit by a lightning strikes. In this country, the approach to bushfires should be inculcated from childhood; bushfire prevention and the community response to fire should be part of the school curriculum. As we age, so increases our responsibility and skill at dealing with probably the greatest enemy of all – fire – particularly when lightning is man made such as by a missile attack. Not sure how this has been discussed by Albanese in his quest to be Number One.

It is a curse that when war flares, conservation of the planet in the long term is replaced by survival in the short term. All the fossil fuel villains of peace time are now life savers. That is the Putin legacy, trying to maintain an order different from that which only exists in the mind of a madman.

That is one lesson of history at this time, for Albanese – John Curtin.

I may not have said that several weeks ago, but just how much times change has been shown by the events of the past two weeks. Remember the instability of the previous United Australia Party leadership in the events leading up to the entry of Japan in WWII; the touching of the forelock to a useless ally before Curtin won Prime Ministership. Would any of our current leaders have stood up to Churchill and brought our troops back from North Africa as Curtin did in 1942? (Remember Menzies had previously committed Australian troops to the ill-fated Crete campaign under the thrall of Churchill.)

Since Curtin, there is no Australian Prime Minister except Whitlam who has put Australian policy in the world first and refused to send our young men and women as cannon fodder as an excuse to defend freedom. Will Albanese be the next?

Rupert’s Quote of the Geek

The alleged comment of the Australian General, explaining the delayed deployment of the Army to the NSW floods because it was initially too dangerous.

Try Ukraine, Buster!

The Armed Forces are said to spend $40 million annually on advertising, which seems to suggest the war preparation is a succession of jolly japes, with imagery reminiscent of Coke ads in camouflage. Even Sportsbet has joined in trivialising military imagery to sell gambling. Often in such imagery there is a grain of truth.

Mouse Whisper

There is a photograph under spotlight of eight Russian soldiers in an elevator – all looking as they were escapees from a KAL cartoon – well allegedly these heroes of the Putin special operations decided to take an elevator up to the roof of a Ukrainian building, and the Ukrainians just turned off the power to the lift.

Could the Russian soldiers be that stupid? But whether true or not, the lift occupants do look a little bewildered apart from the one with his balaclava drawn over his head where only the eyes can be seen – it has that black humour which accompanies tragedy.

Modest Expectations – Jeffrey O’Brien

We had a bushfire the other day up the road at Tullah. It seems not to have been deliberately started, but a stray cigarette or a spark from an exhaust would suffice as explanation.

Next minute, fire crews were working on the outskirt of the Tullah village through the night and had the blaze on the nearby Mackintosh Dam Road contained by Sunday morning. In the meantime it burnt down one vacant property and a number of sheds. It was contained, but the resources that were thrown at the fire early were spectacular, drawn from all over Tasmania. The fear was that it would get in the pine forests and then it would have rivalled the mainland fires of two years ago. The other danger was fire getting into the peat, which lies at the base of the button grass meadows that constitute so much of the West Coast. Then it could burn for a very long time.

Tullah, by way of explanation, describes itself as a village on Lake Rosebery. It was a settlement built by the Hydroelectric Commission when one of their schemes was to dam the Tasmanian West Coast (or was it damn?). It would have culminated in the Franklin River being dammed, which would have had a great impact on the region.

Returning to Tullah, the older part of this township lies directly on the Murchison Highway. An old silver lead mining area, it consists of a pub and a few houses and displays one of those famous locomotives now cast onto an Australian coin – Wee Georgie Wood. It was used to transport the ore before there were any roads and was in that part of the township threatened by the fire.

Having had experience some years ago of a fire initiated as a “burning-off” exercise by the Department of Parks and Wildlife (laughingly referred to then as that of Sparks and Wildfire) on the ridge behind our house in which we lost a shed containing most of our stored linen, it was great to read how much the fire fighting service has picked up its game.

One of the newer residents of Tullah, who runs a microscopically-sized café with excellent coffee (and a resident alpaca), was obviously relieved when the fire was halted on the outskirts.

Tullah is on the edge of the West Coast wilderness area, which has some of the most undefiled temperate rain forest in the world. Because of the high rainfall, an average of 240cm a year, it has been thought of as somewhat protected from fires. Ironically the wettest place is actually Tullah, with an average annual rainfall of 280cm. So this recent blaze serves as a warning. Climate change is coming – I’m not clever enough to calculate how quickly and how selective will be the change. Yet the forests of the West Coast and South-west are vulnerable. Whether one believes that the forested wilderness is little changed since the time when the dinosaurs walked the earth, it becomes all so academic if this part of Australia catches alight as has occurred periodically in NSW and Victoria.

Ubertas et Fidelitas

An interesting datum. The state which has the highest identification of its inhabitants as Aboriginal people is Tasmania (close to five per cent). As a person who grew up believing the last Tasmanian was Truganini, as I have grown older, I have been surprised by the number of Tasmanian Aborigines who emerged from “among the Huon pine”.

A Dulcie Greeno maireener shell necklace

We have purchased several traditional Aboriginal Maireener shell necklaces, with their characteristic iridescence. Much of this art form is concentrated on the Flinders Island in Bass Strait. We have other cleverly executed pieces of Aboriginal art with a Tasmanian tag – but seemingly made in the last 20 years. My problem is connecting them to a tradition that shows areas of petroglyphs and middens on the shore which have survived the often violent storms which characterised that part of Tasmania for millennia.

To celebrate Tasmania Day in 1986, a collection of papers from the early days of Tasmania was published, including that of Captain James Kelly’s voyage, which commenced on 27 December 1815.

Then James Kelly sailed out of Hobart in a five-oared whale boat, with four men, John Griffiths and George Briggs, who were described as native to the colony and two others described as “European” William Jones and Thomas Toombs, the last named’s previous occupation being listed as“bushranger”. King’s aim was to circumnavigate Tasmania and, as part of this voyage, he discovered Macquarie Harbour. This harbour, the third largest in Australia, has a treacherous entrance, which was later christened Hell’s Gate. The weather was very compliant as they came into the Harbour under the smokescreen from the Aboriginal fires at the Heads. They reckoned that enabled them not to be seen initially. They spent some time and made contact with a number of Aborigines, warriors with whom they developed an uneasy relationship.

However, when leaving the newly discovered Harbour, which Kelly named after the then Governor Lachlan Macquarie, (whose territory then incorporated both NSW and Tasmania), the fury of Hell’s Gate kicked in and they were lucky to survive.

The insights into Aboriginal life and the interaction with the whitefellas is expressly discussed under the heading of “female sealing”. Seeing how they went about harvesting the seals obviously astonished the diarist. The women showed a distinctive methodology, as though they had to commune before killing the seals. It shows how important the description of Aboriginal life, when the only chroniclers of the day-to-day activity came from these early reported interactions, at a time before extermination became government policy with the inevitable destruction of the social fabric.

The recent literature trying to show that the Aboriginal tradition progressed from the hunter-gatherer society to one of adopting the tenets of the agricultural revolution as its origin is promoted by a number of Australians who claim Aboriginal descent and are clustered around the University of Melbourne. From what I have read, I do not believe it to be so. Take this excerpt.

The description of female sealing in the Bass Strait islands is a prime example. No mention of herbs and spices in cooking the young seal. Having personally been one of those who have tasted seal, I would suggest it is not among my top ten gustatory phenomena.

“We gave, says the journal of the exploring party, the women each a club that we had used to kill the seals with. They went to the water’s edge and wet themselves all over their heads and bodies, which operation they said would keep the seals from smelling them as they walked along the rocks. They were very cautious not to go to windward of them, as they said “a seal would sooner believe his nose than his eyes when a man or woman came near him.” The women all were about nine or ten seals upon each rock. Lying apparently asleep. Two women went to each rock with their clubs in hand, crept closely up to a seal each, and lay down with their clubs alongside. Some of the seals lifted their heads up to inspect their new visitors and smell them. The seals scratched themselves and lay down again.

The women went through the same motions as the seal, holding up their left elbow and scratching themselves with their left hand, taking and keeping the club firm in their right ready for the attack. The seals seemed very cautious, now and then lifting up their heads and looking round, scratching themselves as before and lying down again; the women still imitating every movement as nearly as possible. After they had lain upon the rocks for nearly an hour, the sea occasionally washing over them (as they were quite naked, we could not tell the meaning of their remaining so long) all of a sudden the women rose up on their seats, their clubs lifted up at arms length, each struck a seal on the nose and killed him; in an instant they all jumped up as if by magic and killed one more each. After giving the seals several blows on the head, and securing them, they commenced laughing aloud and began dancing. They each dragged a seal into the water and swam with it to the rock upon which we were standing, and then went back and brought another each, making twelve seals, the skins of which were worth one pound each in Hobart Town. This was not a bad beginning for the black lakes (sic), who now ascended to the top of a small hill, and made smokes as signals to the natives on the main that they had taken some seals. The smokes were soon answered by smokes on the beach. We skinned the seals and pegged them out to dry. The women then commenced to cook their supper, each cutting a shoulder off the young seals weighing three or four pounds. They simply threw them on the fire to cook, and when about half done commenced devouring them, and rubbed the oil on their skins, remarking that they had a glorious meal.

As I said above, food for thought!

Reflection in the Pool of the Land of the Anziani

I suspect that the aged care portfolio has caught up with the politicians because when it is part of the health portfolio, it tends to be cast into “the too hard basket”. Yet with the increase in longevity and the growth of the private nursing home sector as a lucrative business for the owners, government responsibility should have increased not lessened in maintaining our aged through the time of life when a person becomes increasingly dependent on others. Once into the nursing home it is very much one way, but it should not be a nightmare.

When I had my 70^th birthday, I half believed the axiom “that 70 was the new 50”. Three years later and that concept went into the rubbish bin.

For myself, the acute phase of the disease took a long time to settle into a chronic burn, and as the years have passed the co-morbidities have accumulated until now I can no longer live independently. In previous times, there may have been an array or servants, but in the modern world this not feasible without wealth.

I had two aunts who entered nursing homes in their nineties, wealthy women who were able to afford a nursing home where all the “creature comforts” were available and provided. What struck me was the number of Filipino and Nepalese nurses, both male and female, and feeling of optimism in this establishment. But it was at the high end. They were both dead before the Virus struck and surveying the conditions in that nursing home gave no reason for me to worry about their care, even as one increasingly succumbed to fronto-temporal dementia.

The Virus has taken a toll in other ways. I used to go to hydrotherapy twice a week. The hydrotherapy pools where there are supervised programs have vanished, as the pools have closed because of the Virus. This gets no coverage, but when one depends essentially on allied health professional services, the Virus has curtailed them, and with any such program, once they cease so too do the levels of personal fitness and social interaction decline. Gyms get all the publicity, but circumstances for the aged are probably worse once you lock people in their rooms with staff barely having the requisite nursing skills let alone those of allied health professionals.

Some of the drugs required for my treatment, such as the corticosteroids are essential but impose complications. I had the rapid development of drug induced cataracts, both of which have resulted in new improved lens (no longer any astigmatism). Otherwise I have eschewed operative intervention. Some of the operations had the potential to make life worse, and I value the fact that I can still communicate. The bottom line is that if I did not have my wife, who is a very caring individual, I would be facing institutionalisation and all the uncertainty that entails.

My sleeping arrangements have been modified, so I am close to the toilets. I still have been negotiating stairs. My fall a few months ago emphasised the line between having my immediate daily care and then having to wait face down for someone to come after nearly two hours. I have learnt to curb my impetuosity, since change is now a one way trek, but the nursing home looms as a prison, with the likelihood of solitary confinement.

And a Minister in charge of this crisis who goes to the cricket for three days! He has either given up, or else needs a cognitive test to assess whether he needs the pity for a person with early dementia. Or is he just callously insensitive? I cannot believe that this man is functioning normally; but then the last people who are considered to have such pathology are those with the public relations machinery of denial. Morrison has demonstrated himself to be a Prime Minister with zero human relations skills but with a formidable expenditure on public relations.

Having experienced Bronwyn Bishop’s hair-raising approach to any portfolio in which she was put, I thought that disclosure of kerosene baths in nursing homes under her watch would have elicited a positive reaction for reform. There was the predictable furore and then nothing. Even Royal Commissions do not move the dial, because the people trapped in nursing homes have virtually no say.

The idea of little children mingling with the elderly as gleaned from the ABC TV program has long since been suspended because of the Virus, but it is ironic to see a photograph of myself at two years of age with the wide gait; and realise that I am not that much different now because of loss of proprioception.

I remember a child staring at me from a stroller; I was in a wheelchair.

“Don’t worry son, you’ll be here soon enough.” He was too young to understand, but it certainly brought home to me the irony of existence. His parents did hear me, and laughed. Vulnerability is the product of the child in the stroller and the guy in the wheelchair.

The role of government intervention in both areas has demonstrated the difficulty, because childcare and care of the aged have both been exploited, and over a long period. The failure of the religious institutions in these areas has been shown, and in many areas, disgraceful exploitation has emerged – yet these institutions keep their charitable status in regard to taxation

The whole failure of government intervention has been compounded by the laissez-faire approach to looking after the elderly – maximising profits by exploiting the elderly is a spreading stain on the Australian community.

I can only watch the stain come closer because I have no confidence in the area being afforded the priority it needs and which one only realises as 80 is the new 80.

Yet during my professional life I have sought solutions, but many of the schemes in which I have invested myself have reverted after I have gone. Some have survived.

Is there a solution?

Over my professional life, one way or another, I have had considerable contact with care for the aged in its various forms. The problem with being old as described above is that nevertheless it is not a homogeneous product. People age with different disabilities and hence needs.

The problem with age is that it comes at a point when nothing more can be done for you, but to ensure you are comfortable, pain free, not isolated, able to use the toilet facilities, and that your medications are regularly reviewed, and you have enough to eat and drink and to operate at the higher end of your residual competency.

To accomplish this properly requires both a high level of management skills and continuity of these skills; thus the competency of a clinical manager of each facility should be recognised and rewarded appropriately and succession planning encouraged.

I am a great believer that credentialing and privileging should be undertaken not only in health services but also in nursing homes. I am a purist as I have retained “credentialing and privileging”, whereas others have replaced “privileging” with “scope of practice”. In fact, the process has four stages –

(a) Credentialing is self-evident as it is based around the qualification.

(b) “The scope of practice” is what is requested by the health professional, but

(c) privileging depends on the capability of the health service and confidence of the director of clinical services (or equivalent) that the requested scope of practice is appropriate and safe given the resources of the health service.

(d) approval of the board on the recommendation of the credentialing and privileging Committee

All recommendations to the Board must involve the director of clinical services and if the terminology is correct, the nursing home manager who should be a nurse.

To me that is a very simple statement of intent, and I was able to successfully implement such a process among a number of small health services over a decade. To me, it satisfied the requirement of the clinician and the administrator and it made those involved take it seriously. In the private sector, that includes the owner (or representative). In my health service experience the hospital board was very visible, but in the nursing home sector, who knows in the tangled web of business resulting in the lack of oversight in this sector. And with the obscenity of some of the owners with more concern with having the latest Lamborghini, it is a massive task to permanently change the culture when the government is basically uninterested.

When I suggested that the nursing homes be included in the regional credentialing and privileging scheme, the pushback from the Commonwealth Department of Health was fierce. The nursing home was the person’s home; it was not a quasi-health institution, it was said. The residents could have whomsoever they wanted as carers, without interference from government, and certainly by such a scheme which attempted to codify standards. God, no.

Yet there is an unfortunate strain of authoritarian behaviour which I have seen in the transition stage between hospital and nursing home. In the acute hospital, for some of the staff, an old person admitted is an old person to be get rid of, because of his or her occupancy of an expensive acute bed.

As the hospitals move from metropolitan teaching hospitals, the pressure on the bed is not as great. Nevertheless I once was faced with an officious nurse who was attempting to threaten me because I believed my father-in-law needed more time in the acute bed before being sent to a so-called “sub-acute care” environment. She attempted to stand over me by threatening to have him placed in a nursing home in a far-off town where he would have no-one able to visit him easily. After a strong word, that option was removed and he stayed in the hospital for some further period until he was well enough to be transferred. Nevertheless influence, like information, is asymmetric.

The fiction that a nursing home is a domestic situation is nonsense, because of the nature of the residents, who need personalised care but which is often left wanting because staff levels are squeezed for a number of reasons – profit margins, COVID-19 restrictions, poor pay and conditions.

Some nursing homes are attached to the public hospital. Therefore, I was in a position to influence the rules for visiting doctors. My initial approach was to look at the drug charts of each resident as this gives one an idea of how often the resident is reviewed by a doctor. The need for documentation is as essential as regular visits by the local general practitioner, and each nursing home should have access to a consultant geriatrician or specialist in rehabilitation medicine (and ensure one or the other visits regularly).

The requirement for allied health cascades from this overall need to ensure that in a world of specialisation and constantly improving technology, the aged are not deprived of the benefits of these advances.

In the health area where there is increasing specialisation, the pool of generalists in all fields becomes limited. The concept of nursing staff in rural areas acquiring some of the basic skills of allied health professionals has been regularly canvassed. Whatever the current state of this move to develop generalists should accommodate that some of the generalists will develop special area on interest and hence expertise.

The suggestion of “care finders” adds another layer without any improvement. To establish a new professional group is to establish a new bureaucracy, not necessarily improve care of the aged.

I well remember the country hospital which was converted from a general practice procedural hospital to one concentrating on geriatric treatment. The “driver” was a doctor who persuaded the staff to re-train from the theatre to treating the aged. He was successful and well-liked but did not want any limelight – and presumably this pilot program died with him.

However, successful models abound. The problem is each requires a certain discipline, dedication and time to implement and maintain. To change the culture is not just taking a pill. Governments, when pressed, can be reasonable at getting the input right through the multitude of ways enquiries can be organised.

Government falls down in the implementation. Many of the ministers and the bureaucrats think that fussing over the nature of enquiry is enough, and unfortunately too much of the intellectual capital is invested in the initial enquiry and its report. In fact, the report is only the start; but too often it is the end point, gathering dust with so many others.

In the end it is the clinical management standard that counts.

One question, what is the best private nursing home in Australia; and what is the best public nursing home?

In such a search, the common feature I postulate will be the ongoing standard of the clinical management team. Appropriate credentialling and privileging should be able to validate that approach.

In the end I want to know what works; and what has worked over a generation at least. Imprecise, but once you see success, you know what it is. To achieve this insight, experience helps.

Mouse Whisper

Just two items for Trivial Squeaksuit (obviously in a cat-free environment – pur is a palavra proibida).

Who is Dorothy Gale?
Who is Barbara Millicent Roberts?

Dorothy, the heroine in the Wizard of Oz.

Barbie doll.

Simple really.

Modest expectation – Border on the Fly

When I was around politics, our office had a regular visitor called Emil Delins. He was a Latvian-born journalist who was a strong supporter of the exiled Baltic countries – Estonia and Lithuania – being joined to Latvia in his advocacy mix. He was very polite, always articulate and fiercely anti-communist (and certainly anti-Russian).

Delins had graduated from a French Lycée in Riga one week before the Soviet occupation of Latvia in June 1940. The Russians then went on a selective elimination of Latvians, concentrating on the armed forces.

A year later it was the Germans’ turn to occupy the country, and a section of the Latvian people welcomed these new invaders; in fact they were numerous enough to create of division in the German army. Latvian Auxiliary Police battalions were raised from volunteers, the first sent to the front was involved in heavy fighting in June 1942 and acquitted itself well. Latvia however wanted to raise a Latvian Legion, under the command of Latvian officers, offering to raise an army of 100,000. In January 1943, Hitler agreed to the creation of the 15^th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1^st Latvian). These Latvian police units were deeply implicated in the massacre of 90,000 Latvian Jews and 2,000 Roma people.

It was in the confused situation during the War, but Delins was able to spend time in university studies. Meanwhile, Latvia was occupied by the Germans, but then nearing 1945, the Russians were back, first occupying Estonia before moving towards Latvia. Along the coastline the German resistance, with Latvians involved, was successful in that it remained intact even on the day Germany surrendered, May 8^th, 1945.

As such this battleground provided a conduit for Latvians fleeing the advancing Russians by enabling them to cross the Baltic to either Sweden or Germany. Presumably this was the route taken by the Delins family because he bobs up in Germany where there was a note that he undertook further graduate studies in politics. They were lucky in their choice; those who chose Sweden were deported back to the Russian or their Latvian communist allies.

The Delins family reached Australia in 1947.

Even though the number was relatively small, the impact of the Latvian immigrants on our country was vast. There was always the suspicion of migrants, especially the educated, that they were German sympathisers escaping the wrath of their now Russian-occupied country. As I had found out through personal contact, in any country which had been a battleground there was always a group of true believers in a free democratic country, but their problem was that they were the targets for both the committed communist and the committed national socialist.

I knew Delins was anti-Russian and passionately anti-communist. His advocacy did not convince Whitlam, whose government recognised that the three Baltic countries were legitimately part of Russia. Emil Delins’ advocacy outlasted the Whitlam decree, and the following year the new Fraser government reversed the decision of the then status quo.

One could detect the hidden hand of Emil Delins.

A further reflection

Despite his courtesy and surface good-naturedness, I always felt uncomfortable with anyone who was part of advocacy anti-communist groups. Delins detected that uneasiness in me, and on occasions he asked me questions designed to see how strong my sympathy was for his cause.

My problem with all these refugee groups, including those where the members had come from countries where there had been a strong collaboration with the Nazis, and especially those who were well spoken and articulate, was knowing to whom I was talking.

Not that Delins gave any suggestion of that, but in one conversation I did mention the similarity with Ireland and the centuries of oppression we had to endure at the hands of the British. But then what would he have made of one schooled in the best public school tradition? In a way my Irish ancestors collaborated as they worked for the British landowners. I always remember the disdain of the lady in the Clare Heritage & Genealogy centre in Corofin, when told that my ancestors were Egans from Clare but of the Church of Ireland. Egans from Clare not Catholics? Not possible. Nevertheless, that was the end of the conversation as I slunk off. I still can’t go back on the Egan side beyond the late 18^th century. My great-great grandfather, John Egan, was a flour miller.

I have written about some of this Irish heritage before; the flour mill still stands on the river Inch. The Irish have been long oppressed; it has how I rationalised the advocacy of the Balts for their freedom.

The problem is that oppression is a very ambiguous word.

Tolarno’s – where we used “to get Shot” on Fridays.

Mentioning Latvians. I have known quite a few. One was Andris Saltups, who was then cardiology registrar at Prince Henry’s Hospital. He and myself, together with Jan Stockigt, who was a young doctor researching diabetes, regularly lunched together. Of these three blokes who went to lunch on Friday at the then recently-opened French restaurant Tolarno, I was the only one born in Australia – Jan/Jim in Germany with an Australian mother. Both Jim and his mother were caught in the crossfire fleeing from the Russian advance to escape from Germany.

We were all three mates in those days, in those far-off days of conformity we had ties with cannons on them to acknowledge the guys who got “shot” on Fridays. Andris, who had become Andy, was correct in a suit, Jan now transformed to Jim with a blazer; and Jack, once known as John, in an ageing stained sports jacket. Probably a bit formal by today’s standards.

Tolarno had a whiff of the exotic, even if our semi-jock doctor image did not quite fit the bill. The plat de jour and the red wine did.

The walls were covered with distinctive murals – distinctive faces – bit spooky I thought.

The documentary on Mirka Mora reminded me of those days in the 60s when both the Moras were in full flight. There was something exotic about a French restaurant. Drinking wine for me had become a relatively recent habit, for I grew up in a world of sherry and whisky; with perhaps a touch of Drambuie, crème de menthe or chartreuse after dinner. What is so everyday was new, and the Moras were in the forefront. Not that we fitted into the arty-crafty school. Georges would acknowledge us because we regulars were often engulfed in hilarity, but his loquacious wife Mirka had difficulty finding an opening to talk to us, but perhaps we were not interesting enough. Understandable.

Prince Henry’s hospital is no more. Georges and Mirka split. Tolarno survived under Leon Massoni, whose family had owned Florentino’s, then the posh signature restaurant in the City.

Eventually, Jim Stockigt went off to California to work with Ed Biglieri, a research scientist /clinician. I remember just before Jim went that he made sure that he had a very short haircut, because haircuts were reputed to be expensive in America. Jim came from a musical family and was a highly skilled bassoonist.

Andy Saltups was friendly with my wife, as both were refugees, and I think the parents knew one another somehow. We saw him socially quite often as he was, for a time, very close with one of my then wife’s friends.

The lunches at Tolarno were a tiny wedge in one’s life. After lunch we would occasionally go down the hall to the Gallery, but there was only so much to see, and it seemed an extension of the murals which adorned the restaurant.

Over the years, I saw Jim twice more after he came back from America, the last just before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The promise to catch up was there, but in this case Fate intervened.

As for Andy, when I left Prince Henry’s the link was broken – too little remained common. He stayed there as a specialist cardiologist. I have not seen him in 50 years. Prince Henry’s closed in 1991 and is now the “Melburnian”, a high-priced apartment building.

As I watched the Mirka Mora documentary, Tolarno was mentioned more in the context of the gallery and her paintings rather than the Moras’ influence on Melbourne’s dining habits. Understandable, given the bias of the documentary.

When we lunched at Tolarno, Mirka was always there. She had a dark uncommon beauty then, suggestive of Leslie Caron. I was disturbed by the documentary. What was presented in the documentary were people remembering their link with an elderly Mirka. There is a fine line between description of idiosyncrasy and that of pathology.

What I found most disturbing was the story of this woman seeing Mirka in what was probably 2005, sitting at the far end of the Georges’ tearoom. Georges was a department store which epitomised the Melbourne couture, a magnet for the well-connected or those who wished to be. However, even such a beacon of detached privilege was on its last pegs at that time.

This woman, who knew Mirka, recounted staring at the solitary figure who had a giant éclair in front of her. Once Mirka knew she had an audience, she promptly stuffed the whole éclair into her mouth, so that cream smeared her cheeks and chin. One enormous ingestion. The watcher thought it was a supreme example of Mirka’s humour; whereas I felt a sense of sadness. Had she come to this! The documentary was riddled with stories of her artistic attainments, her generosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her love of children as she aged. Yet that image of stuffing her mouth with an éclair stuck.

Sometimes I wonder whether the sense of the ridiculous, playing the fool, should not be translated into self-loathing. I have no right in one way to make a judgement on Mirka Mora, but then the documentary watchers did not see her in a newly-opened Tolarno in 1967. The documentary brushed over that time, and once you document a person then there should be nowhere to hide such crucial subject matter.

But for good or ill, it provided me with an opportunity to remember an uncommon time, which would become all too common as Australia emerged from its wartime monochrome and we talked endlessly about “multi-cultural”.

The woman who should have been awarded two Nobel Prizes

Janine Sargeant. Guest Contributor

In the week when Kate Jenkins, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, released her report on the “frat house” culture (as described in The New York Times) of Australia’s Parliament House and the generally bad behaviour there, a revealing book on work culture and the treatment of women in another era has been reviewed in The Guardian Weekly.

For those of us who know Rosalind Franklin’s story, the book just serves to further highlight the appalling behaviour of her fellow researchers. For those who don’t, we are talking about the discovery of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin was a graduate of Cambridge University, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer. She discovered the key properties of DNA, which led to the correct description of its double helix. Specifically, it was her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly “Photo 51”, that led to the discovery of the double helix.

Her colleagues, Francis Crick and James Watson not only appropriated her research findings as their own but hogged the limelight without any attribution to Franklin.

The reason? Franklin’s “Photo 51” was handed to Watson by a colleague, which led Watson to redo his 3D modelling and it was another piece of Franklin’s work that similarly led Crick towards “their” scientific discovery of a lifetime.

The book, The Secret of Life, by Howard Markel, condemns all the men involved, but singled out Crick and Watson whose “lack of a formal citation (in their historic paper for Nature) of Franklin’s contribution … is the most egregious example of their negligence”. Negligence? No, that word implies omission; this was a sin of commission – they deliberately excluded Franklin. Watson has been described as having many strong prejudices, but perhaps Franklin’s greatest sin was simply to be a woman in a man’s laboratory.

In his book, Markel went on to paint a picture of a culture of misogyny and egotism that punished Franklin for personality flaws that in her male colleagues were tolerated.

Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins – who had given Franklin’s “Photograph 51” to Watson – shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for “their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, which helped solve one of the most important of all biological riddles”.

Nobel rules now prohibit posthumous nominations (although this statute was not formally in effect until 1974) or splitting of the Prizes more than three ways, which perhaps makes the omission of Franklin all the more egregious. Easier to just ignore Franklin’s contribution. Apparently in 2018, Watson still remained outraged at the suggestion that Franklin might have shared the Nobel Prize, although he acknowledged that his actions with regard to Franklin were “not exactly honourable”. Too little, too late.

But there’s more: after a disagreement with colleague Watson and the Research Director, John Randall, in 1953 Franklin had moved to Birbeck College at the University of London, a public research institution and much of her work done on DNA, including her crystallographic calculations was then just handed over to Wilkins.

At Birbeck, again using X-ray crystallography, Franklin led pioneering work on the molecular structures of viruses. At that time her findings were in direct contradiction to the ideas of the then eminent virologist Norman Pirie – it was her observations that ultimately proved correct.

In 1958, on the day before Franklin was to unveil what would now be excitedly announced as “a significant research finding” on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, an RNA virus, at an international fair in Brussels, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37. Her team member, Aaron Klug, continued her research and he went on to become the sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 “for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes”. This work was exactly what Franklin had started and which she introduced to Klug; she should have shared that Nobel Prize too.

Rosalind Franklin was never nominated for a Nobel Prize. Her early death meant awkward decisions about including a woman as one of the nominees didn’t have to be made.

An interesting endnote: on 28 February 1953, Watson and Crick felt they had solved the problem of DNA enough for Crick to proclaim at The Eagle, a local pub in Cambridge, that they had “found the secret of life”.

Watson and Crick did not cite the X-ray diffraction work of Wilkins and Franklin in their original paper, although they apparently admitted having “been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr MHF Wilkins, Dr RE Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College London”. In fact, Watson and Crick cited no experimental data at all in support of their DNA model. Franklin and Gosling’s publication of the DNA X-ray image, in the same issue of Nature, served as the principal evidence. So just whose “secret of life” was it that Watson and Crick were announcing?

(In the past 25 years there has been a catch up, with a plethora of recognition and awards, including a TV movie, two documentaries and three plays; the Boat Club of Franklin’s alma mater Newnham College Cambridge launched a new racing VIII, naming it the Rosalind Franklin, and in 2005, the DNA sculpture (which was donated by James Watson) outside Clare College Cambridge, incorporates the words “The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins” – elementary Dr Watson). James Watson is now 93 but it is not too late for him to acknowledge the actual role of Rosalind Franklin; he was absorbed into the same British research establishment mores that also distorted Alexander Fleming’s actual minimal contribution to penicillin research. This still did not impede Fleming sharing the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, whereas it should have gone to another.

Happy Hannukah

Latkes are deep-fried potato pancakes and are a traditional food of Hanukkah, but reporter Tamara Keith couldn’t figure out how to make them, even with the help of her mother-in-law’s recipe. After spending some time in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, she learned that the recipe was to blame

TAMARA: When I was converting to Judaism, my rabbi strongly recommended that I buy some cookbooks. It seems part of learning to be Jewish was learning to cook Jewish foods. Growing up Methodist in a small town, my first introduction to latkes was in college after I met my boyfriend, Ira. The potato pancakes Ira’s mom Andrea and sister Shannon made were terrific. Crispy and warm, dunked in apple sauce for that perfect balance of grease and fruit.

I asked for the recipe and Andrea photocopied a page from a paperback cookbook. The next year at Hanukkah, I followed the recipe exactly but the latkes came out all wrong, like over-crisp hash browns. Failure after failure led me to Manishevitz instant latkes. Just add eggs. It’s like defeat in a box. Ira and I are married now, so it finally seemed okay to go back to my now my mother-in-law and ask her what I had been doing wrong. The first step is easy, peeling the potatoes.

And then what comes next?

ANDREA, her Jewish Mother-in-Law: Next we have to grate the potatoes the proper amount of smoothness and roughness. They have to be smoother than hash browns, but we don’t want them to be completely mushy.

TAMARA: Which none of this is actually in the recipe.

ANDREA: No.

TAMARA: The whole consistency thing.

ANDREA: This is the magic of Jewish tradition and family tradition.

Hannukah occurs in December. In the second century BCE, against all odds, a small band of faithful but poorly-armed Jews, led by Judah the Maccabee, defeated their Syrian-Greek rulers, drove them from the Holy land, reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to the service of Jehovah.

When they wanted to light the Temple’s Menorah (the seven-branched candelabrum), they found only a single pot of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks. Miraculously, they lit the menorah and this single pot of oil lasted for eight days, until new oil could be prepared with ritual purity.

To commemorate and publicise these miracles, the festival of Hannukah was begat.

There is thus no possible connection with the Christian Christmas apart from the timing, and in a season of presents, one tradition of Hannukah is giving money to children. But once it arrives, the insidious euphoria of commercialism can overwhelm any religious significance.

Christians undertake an annual ritual engorgement around Christmas Day, presumably to counterpoint the meagre circumstances of the Bethlehem birth. Hannukah, because of the oil association, is a festival of the deep fried, as the description of Jewish potato cakes above attests.

Hannukah does not make the same impression on our community as it does in the United States. My attention nevertheless was directed to an article lamenting how Hannukah had been polluted by some of the impedimenta of Christmas.

This article in the Washington Post bemoaned the creeping tendency of Hannukah to be converted into a Jewish Christmas, where it is in fact one of the lesser Jewish holiday periods, and in the eyes of the author of this piece, acknowledging Hannukah could be as simple as lighting the menorah and let its light shine for eight days.

He describes a recent trip to a large retailer where he spotted the following abominations: a festive tray featuring four minuscule bearded dudes, their hats decorated with dreidels, above the phrase “Rollin’ With My Gnomies”; a throw pillow, in the blue-and-white color scheme of the Israeli flag, stitched with the phrase “Oy to the World”; an assortment of elves, sporting Jewish stars and looking like they belonged more in a Brooklyn yeshiva than anywhere near the North Pole; and a set of three kitchen towels with the truly baffling wording, “Peace Love & Latkes”.

There is not much more to add, except for you, the reader to contemplate the Mouse’s Whisper this week. It is not only Hannukah, that Mammon defiles.

A Card from Our Seychellois Friends

This week we received a Christmas card from Michael and Heather Adams. Isn’t it so quaint to receive Christmas cards, especially from a family in the Seychelles.

We visited the Seychelles over 30 years ago, and it was the last leg of our African tour, which in that Apartheid period excluded South Africa. Qantas then flew to Harare in Zimbabwe, where we disembarked and roamed through a number of countries, including climbing Kilimanjaro and succumbing to malaria in Madagascar. Seychelles was the place to recuperate. We flew to the main island Mahé and stayed in the capital Victoria.

The Seychelles was once uninhabited and the first Europeans to sight the main island was Vasco da Gama. It later became a matter of disputed acquisition, between the United Kingdom and France. In this case, the UK were the winners, but there has remained a strong French influence. Once the Seychelles was settled, there inevitably were slaves, emancipated in 1835, from whom the Creole culture has emerged.

It should be recognised that Seychelles has a huge footprint across the Indian Ocean – 115 islands, of which only eight are inhabited, but it had to wait until 1903 to gain a separate existence from Mauritius.

At one stage during this stay, we ended up driving down this gravel roadway and coming up to a picture book wooden house set in this tropical backdrop, which spilt across the house itself. This was the home of Heather and Michael Adams. The home was on Anse des Poules Bleues and, it is said, true to the name of the Bay, the family had bluish hens which laid blue eggs.

Michael seems to have recently acquired a knighthood, which is not surprising given the high regard for his skill in silk screening, its composition and his depiction of his Idyll. He has been in Seychelles since 1972 and recently has said that he intended staying there. He had grown up in England and is said to have been inspired by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, at a time when the garden was a wild unkempt neglected “lost garden”.

Heather had been in Kenya when they met after he left Uganda to get away from Idi Amin, and they married. They have two talented children, both artists, both having learnt the silk screening skills according to the latest Christmas card, all still in the Seychelles. Their names are Tristan and Alyssa.

When we stumbled upon his gallery, we were absolutely blown away by the complexity, yet a compelling simplicity of the lines of colours; colour which overwhelmed us when we entered his studio.

We bought some of Michael’s works, including a large screen print which adorns the wall, and required more than 20 screens. His works are so reflective of his perspective, of a person awash in the joy and yet serenity of his Seychellois life. No wonder that he has been likened to Paul Gauguin. One in French Polynesia; one in the French diaspora of the Indian Ocean.

I recently purchased one of his silk screens for one of our sons for his half-century, which has pride of place in his home in Melbourne.

Otherwise, the intention has always been to go back to the Seychelles, but we haven’t. For Australians it is off the beaten track. The Seychelles may be the playground of the wealthy Europeans; it may sit uneasily off the African coast where Somali pirates have recently roamed the archipelago. To see the giant Aldabra tortoises, reputedly the oldest one being about 190 years old, but apparently exiled to St Helena – a testudineous Bonaparte.

Yet every time the Adams family Christmas card arrives, it stirred the intention to return. But with the intervening years since 1990 when we were there, the intention has burned lower as age entangled us.

This year, the watercolour painting of copra workers of the Botanical Gardens reflects the time he and Heather had just arrived in the Seychelles – 1973.

But to emphasise how determined the continuation of this exchange has been with us and others, whether for such a period of time, on the bottom of the card is printed:

“Apologies if you did not receive Christmas cards last year from us but due to Covid, our Post Office was closed for most of the year and no post was accepted to most countries.”

Our card to them this year will be emailed.

James Pindell has a few questions to answer

James Pindell is a bespectacled unremarkable looking graduate of the School of Journalism at Columbia University. He could be anybody’s journo at that Press Conference. Yet he is a political reporter for the Boston Globe, which lifts his ranking. He posed these questions on November 26.

He sets out three questions about Biden and provides commentary rather than answers.

Question 1: But why wouldn’t Biden run?

Very few American presidents have openly taken re-election off the table: One of them, James K. Polk, announced it the moment he received his party’s presidential nomination in 1844. His decision was part ideological — as a believer in limited government power — and practical: agreeing to only serve one term was likely the only way he could build a coalition of party power brokers to back him for the nomination.

Biden has different issues. The reason people talk about him serving only one term is largely due to his age. At 78, he was the oldest person ever elected to serve as president in 2020. He could break that record if he ran again in 2024 at age 82.

Mental and physical capacity to serve as the leader of the free world is something that voters must determine for themselves. While plenty of data is available from Biden’s doctors, it is still a subjective decision by every voter in how to read the data.

But lately, there is a second reason that people, including Democrats, are asking whether Biden will run: his poor poll numbers.

Now 10 months into his presidency, Biden’s approval ratings have never been this low. A Marist poll out on Wednesday showed him at just 42 percent, in line with other recent polls. This means Biden is the most unpopular president at this point in his presidency, other than Donald Trump.

Question 2: Can anyone other than Biden win?

Aides have already signalled in anonymous quotes to the press that if Biden does run it might be out of a sense of duty. The 2020 election turned out to be much closer than Democrats thought it would be. It is possible that among all the Democrats who ran in the 2020 primary — the most diverse field in history and one of the largest — only Biden could have defeated Trump for re-election.

With Trump looking more likely than not to run again, the Trump factor is not off the table. And the field of potential candidates is basically the same crew that ran in 2020.

And, yes, if Biden doesn’t run it likely would be a crew. The most obvious heir apparent to Biden, his vice president Kamala Harris, had a 28 percent approval rating in one recent poll.

This has led to open speculation, even this week, that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg could run. Buttigieg would not only be among the youngest people to be elected president, but also the first openly gay person.

Let’s be clear here: Even after winning the Iowa Caucuses and coming in a close second in the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic electorate didn’t think Buttigieg could win (or that he sufficiently understood the Black vote). It is unclear whether a stint as transportation secretary would change that.

Question 3: If Biden doesn’t run how badly will tensions within the party explode?

As anyone could see during the Democratic presidential primary season or witness this year during negotiations over infrastructure and “Build Back Better” legislation, there is a lot of tension within the party.

The party’s base has moved left and wants leaders who are not old white men. There is also an establishment, led by Biden and South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, who feel like they are more in tune with Democrats and the electorate as a whole.

That next year the Republicans could win big because of Biden, prompting Biden and his allies to say that only proves that Biden has to run, is the conundrum.

Having read the questions, let me answer them in my normal ‘umble way.

When you get to 80, it is not the new 60.
I doubt whether Kamala Harris has the firepower. I have always been a fan of Amy Klobucher, but the question is, will Biden survive 2022 (and for that matter will Trump)?
Chissà!

The Pindell article could now be subject to the “Omicron-scope”. A great deal can happen in a day or two while the Virus stalks, changes its clothes and attacks again. After all, he did write this opinion piece in the Pre-Omicron Age.

Mouse Whisper

Black Friday 1939

Fire sale. Damaged goods at a generous discount.

Modest Expectations – Stumps

After another 100 days I hope the world will have the same hope in Biden that it does now after the first 100 days. Having survived the four years of President Trump with all his mimicry of Batman’s enemies, it is good to have Bruce Wayne alias Joe Biden back. Sorry, so sorry I mistook your disguise as the doddering anziano, but your treatment of Anita Hill can never be disguised or forgiven because you begat Clarence Thomas, one of the great catastrophes of modern America.

Sometimes He gets it Right

Anonymouse

It was May and then June last year that this Blog started to advocate for custom built quarantine facilities. One of the Blog’s mates thought it would be too expensive, and in any event the hotel industry had near empty facilities desperately in search of customers, so hotel quarantine was born. People returning from overseas fitted the bill for the missing customers, but viral outbreaks from these hotels have sporadically occurred. However, use of such facilities has also produced lessons – all of which can be applied to the adaptation of or construction of bespoke quarantine facilities in each State near ports of entry.

The Federal Government seems to be able to wrap its collective mind around all sorts of spending needs – defence spending seems to be a bottomless pit with an endless time frame. However, when the matter of defence is against an invisible foe, with so many tricks in its RNA, then Government seems not able to grasp the enormity of the problem and has sat on its hands for 12 months now apparently wishing it would all go away. COVID-19 will persist, with no idea when it will be conquered. At the same time, the social links between countries will be irrevocably changed.

Quarantine facilities require their own expertise and one of the various expertises needed is to ensure the rapid construction with best practice observed. That is why hard-nosed visionaries such as the Wagners in Queensland who were asked by that Government to prepare a plan, should be taken seriously; their Toowoomba airport venture should be sufficient proof as to their competence and ingenuity.

But in true Australian style, Government asks for a report. Jane Halton’s report was adequate in that she articulated the obvious – a national quarantine capacity – although it’s hard to see that recommendation, together with a collection of documentation, to be worth the alleged $118,000 it cost. The Report nevertheless provides the weasel words for the Government to ignore the positive parts of the report. For instance, the Halton pronouncement set out such a situation for the “Commonwealth Weasel”.

States and Territories should now consider their hotel quarantine operations in line with the features of good practice and make adjustments where necessary to meet these baselines. Noting issues about scalability and the specialised nature of the workforce required to implement hotel quarantine, States and Territories should also investigate establishing standing arrangements with AUSMAT in the event of the need to scale up operations quickly.

Stripping out the verbiage, of which there is plenty, the recommendation is to get a national system of quarantine, with agreed standards and scalable capacity. Too much to ask that our Federal and State Governments behave like grownups and just do this? The Federal Government’s admissions about quarantine in relation to returnees from India demonstrate the scale of the problem.

How long ago did Halton write her report?

The Inglenooks of Age

When I was a young doctor, elderly patients who presented in hospital, with apparently uninteresting symptoms and signs, besides being old, were called “old sloughs”. Now I have reached that “old slough” age, it just confirms how offensive that description was. Even then I recoiled from the dismissive way hospitals were places where these patients were admitted. Care was a secondary consideration. Therefore, old people when there was considered nothing more could be done, were left in a bed with minimal attention until they could be moved to a geriatric hospital, which was one step before the nursing home.

One case stood out when I was reviewing some of these older people in hospital. It was at a time before the specialty of geriatrics had been carved away from general medicine and general practice. In Victoria there were geriatric hospitals; later I received a more detailed insight into such care when I had to run the rehabilitation unit at one of the large teaching hospitals in Melbourne and later still spent time reviewing facilities when I was responsible for certain sectors of community aged care.

I stopped at the bed of an elderly lady who had been classified as suffering from dementia. I reviewed her charts and there, on her drug charts, was a nightly dose of Relaxa-tabs. She had been taking these for years and the order seemed not to have been changed. Naturally, with the dose prescribed, she would sleep, but I was taken aback by the quantity.

Relaxa-tabs contained bromine and so, out of curiosity, I ordered a serum bromine. When the result came back it showed her serum bromine was at toxic levels and clearly explained her apparent dementia.

The tablets were stopped at the time of the test, and once the serum level was known treatment was instituted to flush the bromine out of her system. Over the next fortnight her mental state improved to such an extent that I cannot remember whether she went home directly or had a staged return to a more normal living. The demented state cleared – I know that much.

To me it was a salutary lesson in labels, especially now I am of that age. Bromine in not the problem it was in the past as it has been removed from reputable pharmaceuticals. I have read that in the USA it is licensed to be added to the water supply of naval ships and oil rigs, as in addition to having sedative properties, it also allegedly dampens the male libido. I grew up, myth or not, believing that bromine was added to the tea of soldiers for such an effect.

You can have as many government inquiries into aged care as you like, but society has passed you by when you strike 80. The elderly with money can have their care softened by the cushioning effect of their money. I had an aunt who lived for her last years in a very plush nursing home, but even in that home, it was evident how many of the staff were recent immigrants, particularly from the Philippines and Nepal.

Yet neglect remains the headline for much that goes on in the aged care sector. The stories on the one hand of the Greek Orthodox Church demanding its nursing homes pay a tithe so the archbishop can have a wardrobe of fancy raiment or, on the other hand, of nursing home owners who live lavish lifestyles, complete with the signature matching yellow Lamborghinis, running nursing homes with minimum standards of care. I well remember the whole fiasco of Bronwyn Bishop’s stewardship 20 years ago when she was the Minister responsible for defending the use of kerosene baths in nursing homes Nothing much has changed, except perhaps the kerosene.

The exploitative areas of the nursing home industry should be shut down. When Governments crab away from such a drastic solution, they tacitly agree that the immensity of the problem of nursing home care requires not only more but also better trained resources in a coordinated environment and regulatory unification between the sectors – and Governments keep saying that, but effectively do nothing about solving the problem. It is ridiculous for the Commonwealth to be running the aged care sector and the States the public hospitals, when it should be the one sector.

As indicated above, I have been involved at various times of my professional career with the aged care sector, and it is a no brainer. There should be a single system, because age is a continual wave eventually crashing on the shores of death. At present, the method of distribution of health care is via aged care packages, depending on the funding source floating on the top of the wave. Quality is incidental.

There is a philosophy with certain government sources of shovelling out the cash – job done – but what about quality and outcome? To some bureaucrats that requires actual work, collection of data and, given the reigning politicians suppress as much information as possible, they may argue what is the point?

Political announcements are all about input and the immeasurable glorious future where the recipients of such input are chewing lotus leaves – or their gums. Who needs data, especially when this is the third or fourth time the same announcement of government largesse has been made? To make the point, sometimes irony is the best way to highlight the problem, especially when the government itself is the very epitome of irony when it says, “We are taking the matter very seriously.”

The other public problem is the lack of an articulate advocate for reform on behalf of aged care residents. If you look at the vast array of those who appear on the media, there are none who regularly appear when the topic moves onto the way to actually improve the lot of the aged. The last woman of consequence to appear regularly on a panel show and make an impact by clearly showing that age was not automatically the gateway to dementia was Margaret Scott, the Tasmanian poet, who was a regular guest on Good News Week in the 1990s.

It is mainly a variety of social workers and health professionals who are some way away from being aged, often well skilled in the vocabulary of “shock and horror show”, but stopping short of doing anything.

There is the vaudeville act that the ABC has twice arranged by mixing the very old with the very young. This concept was aired first on the BBC and, given the COVID-19 pandemic, the ABC have been venturing into perilous territory, but it is assumed everybody involved has been “dry cleaned”. The concept is very interesting, but not just as sporadic entertainment. After all, grandparents looking after their grandchildren has been around for a long time, just ask the Indigenous community. I am just not aware of any program which seriously looks at the benefit of those arrangements long term and whether a program such as the ABC is airing is demonstrating anything sustainable or generalisable.

There is also that myth about 70 being the new 50. However, it is illusionary. The general improvement in the welfare of the community has improved. Too many in the years after the “new 50” start to die in a manner not befitting of a reborn generation 20 years younger.

The problem with age is invalidism and the daily humiliations that accompany it. I am reminded of the words of a young woman with motor neurone disease who said she most feared the time she could not wipe her bottom – to her this represented a turning point. Don’t just be appalled about the frail and elderly dealing with such daily humiliations. Demand that every politician spend a week or two in community service looking after the aged and contemplating their own probable destination before they can pontificate about the problems of aged care. Although perhaps their pensions will be such that their choices will be much easier in the future.

The Drums are beating

This past weekend, Essential Quality came fourth in the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. Louisville is the city in the middle of this blue grass country and Bourbon distilleries.

As the NYT has reported, pre-race talk among the racing fraternity was all about what Sheikh Mohammed’ al-Maktoum’s money has accomplished, and the fact that the same group completely ignored the international human rights scandal over the Sheikh’s role in the disappearance of Sheikha Latifa, one of his daughters.

But others are speaking up. A group of human rights lawyers and students at the University of Louisville filed a complaint with the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, asking it to bar Sheikh Mohammed and thus Essential Quality from the Derby.

“The Horse Racing Commission must also use its authority to end his involvement in Kentucky horse racing, at least until Princess Latifa is free of captivity,” the complaint document insisted. The Kentucky Racing Commission went for the long blue grass; after all, the pervasive influence of the UAE ruler who pays the wages of a large segment of the racing industry not only in Kentucky but also across the world. In Australia where the racing industry has a disproportionate influence, one can only cringe when one hears our equine commentators falling over themselves to address “His Highness”.

Two weeks ago a panel of United Nations human rights experts, including members of a panel that deal with forced disappearances and violence against women, asked Dubai for proof that Sheikha Latifa was still alive and called for her immediate release.

“Evidence of life and assurances regarding her well-being are urgently required,” the U.N. analysts said. In recent years, videos have of Sheikha Latifa, saying she was imprisoned in a Dubai palace and afraid for her life. In a 2018 video she said, “her father only cares about himself and his ego.” In an ominous premonition, “I’m making this video because it could be the last video I make,” she said. She was last seen at a meal hosted by her father that the former Irish President and erstwhile defender of human rights, Mrs Mary Robinson attended. She later said she had been tricked into attending. Yet her excuses sounded lame in a report of the matter in the Irish Examiner when, in her attempt to rationalise the woman’s dire situation, she was reported to have said Sheika Latifa was said to have a bipolar disorder. I would say it was the least of the Sheika’s worries.

As widely reported, Sheikha Latifa hasn’t been seen in public since an attempt to escape in March 2018, when her Finnish personal trainer and a former French soldier joined forces to smuggle the Sheika aboard a boat, which was later boarded by armed Emirati commandos in Indian waters. Sheikha Latifa and her personal trainer, Tiina Jauhiainen, were captured at gunpoint, sedated and returned to Dubai, with Ms Jauhiainen released after a fortnight. No mention is made of the French soldier’s fate.

This is not the first time Sheikh Mohammed’s treatment of female family members generated outrage. Last year in Britain a judge found that he had abducted another daughter, Shamsa, off the streets of Cambridge in the UK in 2000, flew her by helicopter to France and then returned her to Dubai.

In addition, his youngest wife, Princess Haya, Mrs Robinson’s mate, has also left Dubai fearing for her life after she was subjected to a campaign of intimidation and harassment.

But then the Sheikh has 30 children from six wives. Given the attention being shown to women’s right in Australia, who will be the first to issue an invitation for Princess Latifa to visit Australia – if she hasn’t been killed already by Godolphin Blue.

Tasmania – the place where it counts

Each of five electorates are called divisions. Each division has approximately the same number of electors. Voting for the House of Assembly is by a form of proportional representation using the single transferable vote (STV), known as the Hare-Clark electoral system. By having multiple members for each division, the voting intentions of the electors are more closely represented in the House of Assembly.

Since 1998, the quota for election in each division, after distribution of preferences, has been 16.7% (one-sixth). Under the preferential proportional voting system in place, the lowest-polling candidates are eliminated, and their votes distributed as preferences to the remaining candidates. If a candidate achieves a quota, their surplus votes are redistributed as preferences.

I was once elected to office by a similar system.

In this election Premier Gutwein in his Bass division nearly achieved three quotas. That is the way to do it, because once you reach the required number of votes, the surplus cascades to your fellow party members. If the level of this popularity for Gutwein had been translated across the other four division, he would have won in a landslide.

That is not how Tasmania works. Like Gaul, Tasmania is divided into three parts. Hobart in the south, Launceston in the north, and a conglomerate of towns on the north-west and west coast.

Hobart spreads westwards along the Derwent is a different constituency to Bass. Divided into Clark, where the Liberals struggled to gain a second seat and Franklin, where the Liberal and Labor Party gained two seats and Greens one, the electoral picture is far different in the other three constituencies of Lyons, Braddon and the Gutwein fortress of Bass.

Launceston, the overwhelming population centre of Bass, in fact is a much smaller electorate in geographical terms than the other two northern electorates. Yet it does include Flinders Island, where the Islanders are the closest living remnant of an Aboriginal race despite some residual controversy, where its purity left with the death of Truganini in 1878.

Devonport is the largest town in the north-west electorate of Braddon, but this electorate has a number of settlements ranging along the coast (plus King Island) and then extending down the Murchison Highway to the “mineral shield” settlements of Rosebery, Zeehan and Queenstown and the fishing and tourist settlement of Strahan lying as it does on Macquarie Harbour, the third largest in Australia, larger than Sydney Harbour.

Within Braddon are some of most extraordinary examples of untouched temperate rain forests, despite the efforts of successive Governments to destroy it in the name of jobs. Here, in one the most magnificent wilderness areas, despite a strong working class population the electorate is strongly Liberal – the heartland of Morrison populism. The Greens are the foe. Yet the south-west is the State’s unique flora and fauna Treasury.

Lyons, also a Liberal State electorally, is an amoeboid electorate which spreads its pseudopods from the east coast through the Midlands into Sheffield, a trendy watering hole just 22 kilometres south of Devonport which lies within Braddon on the north coast. Federally it has a Labor party member but in this State election it voted for the Liberal Party, a crossover trend which occurs in Tasmania; as does the number of Independent members of both State and Federal Parliament, which is not difficult to understand given how strong private politics are in Tasmania.

Last Saturday was the first time I had been in Tasmania when the State election had been held. The gracious concession speech of the Labor leader and the gruff laconic acceptance speech of the Premier contrasted with the predictable loquacity of the Greens leader given a post-election microphone. She unfortunately provided a strident tirade, and before turning her off, I had thought politics at the top here was refreshingly different. Not so.

For a population of about 550,000 with one in four of the population living in Hobart, it has 57 Federal and State politicians; and between 200 and 300 local councillors in the 29 municipalities (it was 79 when I first visited Tasmania).

Tasmania is grossly over-governed. Under the Australian constitution it is guaranteed five seats in the House of Representatives; and as with the US Senate each State has the same number, apart from the ACT and the Northern Territory.

Comparing Wyoming with a population slightly larger than Tasmania’s, it sends only one elected representative to Congress (out of 535). By contrast, Tasmania sends five elected members to the House of Representatives (out of 151).

Therefore, Federal Government policy towards Tasmania has traditionally been to fill the begging bowl and a tree not chopped down or a river not dammed or native species not exterminated have dogged policy considerations to the detriment of the State. It is private politics in its purest form. Take the health system: if Hobart gets A, Launceston and Burnie will want A too. It is the root cause of so much of Tasmanian problems – the inability to live with one another.

I was just perusing The Advocate, the paper of the north west. The number of football teams in the area is extraordinary, and as I have written elsewhere the antagonism between towns is often reflected on the football field and the closer the towns are to one another, the greater the antagonism and failure to work together. Thus, in terms of rationalising resources, this part of the State presents a problem in getting agreement to any public policy.

My contribution to this private politics, since I am a ratepayer, is the following ; first the gorse along the Zeehan-Strahan road needs to be eradicated before it consumes Tasmania, just as Queensland was threatened by the prickly pear infestation before the introduction of cactoblastis beetle. The other problem with gorse is that below its impenetrable prickly greenery it stores all its dead wood which can act as a fire accelerant.

Peruvian goat herders have been used in the USA to oversee goats which eat noxious weeds. Paradoxically if you do burn the gorse, then four to five years’ worth of goats feeding on it will eliminate gorse. Andean Peruvians are said to be the most reliable goat herders; apart from which, having a goat herd in the area will provide an industry and something for tourism. However, don’t let the goats become feral otherwise it’s another cane toad.

Secondly is to upgrade the Strahan airport to a level where it can receive planes as big as a 737. The latter is unlikely in the short term even thought it could be used for tourism in the south-west and would certainly open up the tourist market, especially with a rental car franchise. The longer term consideration is with climate change – inevitably the forests will dry out, and therefore there is a need on the west coast of Tasmania for the airstrip to be upgraded so water tankers can land instead of being based in Launceston or Hobart. For those with short memories, no one seriously believed the rainforest of the south coast of New South Wales could burn the way it did.

Then thirdly, more a suggestion than a demand, there is another industry which I find it strange that the Liberal Government has not promoted and that is dedicated quarantine facilities. I would not advocate Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour, once a prison, but a properly constructed quarantine facility in Tasmania is certainly closer to Australia than Christmas Island.

But then the success of private politics depends on how determined and how committed one is for the long game. I wonder how well this is translated into the future administration of Tasmania.

Mouse Whisper

An unguarded comment?

As one of his colleagues recently remembered:

“30 years ago today, the wonderful C… H… died. Fabulous economist & mentor with unlimited time to talk. Friday drinks in his office often included Pichon Lalande, Lynch Bages & Chateau Talbot as he mulled over the next additions to his cellar. Great man; greatly missed.”

Different time – wrong look. Yet the connoisseur of lotus cuisine continues to be the role model for the current Canberra Elite.

Modest Expectations – Tunisia

Some years ago I wrote a short story about a serial killer who is killed by a woman who has cause for vengeance, but lulls the killer into a false state of security. Set against a background of Carnarvon and Gascoyne Junction, the killer is a very good looking man, who carefully grooms himself – and the woman, his killer, the impossibly beautiful woman. Prey becomes the stalker. It was part of a series of short stories that I wrote after a trip to the Kimberley, before it became a tourist destination. Whether allegorical or not, it has given me the thought that the woman was a journalist who acted as bait to trap the predator into revealing himself. But maybe that is another story – the journalist who endures contumely as the girlfriend so that her probings cause the sociopath to betray himself in front of his peers.

Rape is an act of violence and control. The violence is given a context -sexual assault. However, if the police were informed that a serial killer was loose, there would not be any hesitation. But violent rape, a close relative of murder, seems to invoke legal hesitation. The Federal Parliament situation needs a change in behaviour to complement attitudinal change to stop the disgusting spectacle.

The refuge for this situation about “Pick the Minister”; the betting firms would have been running a book, except there were too many in the know for any realistic odds on who it was. The accused cabinet minister was known to a large number of people, but the name was withheld until Wednesday. “After all, why should I acknowledge something which did not allegedly occur in 1988, and anyway I was different person then. I am now a Cabinet minister!” Not quite the actual words finally uttered but consistent with the eventual lachrymose performance.

Twitter has been alive about the non-allegations in relation to this Cabinet Minister. Disgusting is a mild way to put some of them, but if they are true, the highest level of disgust should be accorded to the now Cabinet Minister.

However, truth in this case is an elusive beast, especially when waiting in the wings of your staged performance is one of the best defamation lawyers in the country.

Given the seriousness of the case, before I knew his name, I would have thought it timely for the Prime Minister to consult with the Attorney-General. He is, after all, the senior judicial officer in Australia, and the Prime Minister was faced with a systemic problem of law enforcement penetrating even his Cabinet. I reflected in an earlier draft that the Attorney-General hopefully will have a solution to the problem. How ironic!

The problem is that the government is in denial, the more the cover up, the more people exposed with inside knowledge; it is just the sort of scenario that any sociopath would delight in. Sociopaths lie. Along the primrose pathway that such men have trodden to get to where they are now, there may well be a number of dark areas from which somebody could emerge, or not. At present, many of such dark areas seem to be coming to light.

It was inevitable as the uproar increased, that this person would be named under Parliamentary privilege. As I wrote early in the week, my hope was that it would be a male who outed him, preferably being the accused himself. Christian Porter has done that. He recognised to his credit that the problem is that if this non-naming had gone on much longer, with increasingly everybody knowing he was the accused, then the Parliament itself becomes a protector of this man and hence compromised. Therefore, someone would have named him in Parliament.

My view has always been to tackle the negative quickly; fallout is inevitable. So what better action than to excise the poison by now setting up an independent inquiry. In particular, for the Prime Minister, if unresolved, the situation becomes a form of political hemlock.

The one matter that troubles me is that a female senator who should know better has resurfaced a claim against a senior Labor member. Unless she knows something others don’t know, why has she surfaced with an old allegation which actually was reviewed by the police and refuted. Just now! Why? Surely this woman would not indulge in an infantile diversionary tactic? Porter in his appearance before the Press then sympathised with Shorten’s plight. So much for Senator Henderson.

There is something in the culture among the Liberal Party women which seems to be toxic to the furtherance of gender equality. I have known many, and some, like former Senator Judith Troeth, were exemplary, but they were closed down; the pressure of being cooped up in Parliament House is not that much different from boarding school bullying.

Christian Porter – no matter how the imbroglio is sliced and however innocent ,while in public life he will be a target, especially in the year of Grace Tame.

Blue Book

Just in case you have not seen the blue book Growing a Strong and Resilient Regional Australia which was published with the Budget papers, it starts optimistically. “Australia’s regions – despite all that’s been thrown at them, are not only still standing but are on the cusp of a great future.”

I am not going to parse the whole report, but even this first sentence, with its recourse to a metaphorical flourish, begs a number of questions.

Even one sentence. It seems “regions” mean any place outside the capital cities, as though the capital cities are apparently a separate entity; in fact they are a diversity held together by being the seat of a government.

The next sentence provides a crude definition of what Australia is beyond the capital cities, and I have always disputed the integrity of a “Capital” as if it is a walled city with a peasantry milling around outside.

I recognised when reporting to Government on rural health that there was “inner rural” and “outer rural”. I had never thought of subdividing coastal settlements in that way. On reflection, coastal settlement has been shown after the bush fires last year as having specific characteristics, particularly in relation to accessibility. When I made this classification, I did it on the basis of an urban development which sprawls and engulfs what were autonomous mostly rural settlements.

I once identified a ring of what broadly could be identified as similar settlements about 100 kilometres from Melbourne in which there was a substantial number of procedural general practitioners who lived in or near the township. As urbanisation approached, the general practitioners became progressively deskilled; the practices became “lock-up” since the doctors no longer lived in the community; after hours care was the locum wasteland and the community ill, a referred burden to the nearest big hospital with an emergency department.

The other comment I would make was that during the time of my investigation, I set myself an exercise to drive from Colac to Warragul. All of the towns along the way were about the same distance from Melbourne, along highways which radiated from Melbourne. If you followed these radial roads, accessibility to the cities was manageable. When I drove the circumferential routes between the towns to assess the accessibility of each to the other, it was more tortuous, but the roads were asphalted until I drove into the Great Dividing Range. Here the road became gravel and the accessibility factor showed how isolated this area was, even to Melbourne, remembering my approximate route at all times was equidistant from the Centre of Melbourne. This inaccessibility was later so clearly shown up in the 2009 bushfires which spread across outer Melbourne, and where the problem of accessibility proved to be catastrophic.

Tackling infrastructure challenges is being able to differentiate communities of interest and then attend to them appropriately. I have always believed that in Australia local governments are the best surrogate, unless otherwise demonstrated, for consultation. I once instructed the bureaucrats under my aegis to visit every municipality in Victoria to get their views on an initiative with which I had been entrusted. There then were 210 municipalities and only one refused to meet with us to discuss the initiative. My bureaucrats were put in a position where they could explain to people who did not know much about the proposed investment, who were then mostly male and who had no idea about the importance of early childhood education.

I have been involved in working closely with communities for most of my career. I enjoy it because I enjoy the diversity of Australia. It has meant that there are very few areas of settlement in Australia that I have not been to in my long public service.

However, it is an attitude which has set me against Bureaucracy.

This limitation of Bureaucracy is shown clearly in this Blue book of Government largesse apportioned essentially by Ministerial portfolio. There are thus multiple pots of government money without any reference to one another or any indication what the expected end product will be.

This addendum to the budget papers requires close reading, because the document is drafted as if the Federal Government is the Cornucopia and Minister McCormack the Goddess, Abundantia.

To me, this is the McCormack pork barrel. Reading the Ministerial statement, you can almost smell the crackling. However, it can be argued that aroma is less pronounced than that of the Sports Rorts. Special interest groups want something; one of the specialties of any portfolio that the National Party holds is the titration of funding against the electoral advantage.

Moreover, Berejiklian has given the practice her benediction last November. “All governments and all oppositions make commitments to the community in order to curry favour. The term pork barrelling is common parlance. It is not something that I know the community is comfortable with. If that’s the accusation made on this occasion …. then I’m happy to accept that commentary. It’s not an illegal practice. Unfortunately, it does happen from time to time by every government.”

God knows, why she contaminated her defiance with “unfortunately”? Joke!

I looked at the proposed Blue Book largesse in regard to “post- bushfires.” A couple of line items attracted my interest. The first among all the grants was $31million allocated specifically to apple growers to “help re-establish” apple orchards, with an individual maximum of $120,000 per hectare to be allocated over one financial year. This is very generous, even if the tree planting is concentrated. It should be recognised that apples and pears are grown together, so there is a definitional problem as only apple growers are mentioned as eligible. There were three apple growing areas affected – Adelaide Hills, Bilpin and Batlow – the last of which lies within the Wagga Wagga State electorate.

From reports there was some damage to the orchards, but that damage seemed to be minor; one producer with 200,000 trees at Batlow lost less than 5,000.

Then about six months after the bushfire in 2020, an industry source reported” … some are choosing to let crops rot on their trees rather than accept farmgate prices set by the big supermarkets at as little as 90 cents per kilogram for a fruit that costs at least $2 a kilogram to produce.

At the same time, Australians are eating 12 per cent fewer apples since 2015; apple exports have fallen 19 per cent since 2016, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Then there’s the drought and its impact on the size and number of apples produced. Australian farmers grew 14 per cent fewer tonnes last year compared to 2017”.

There was no mention of bushfires. So, I’m only on P17 of this 189 page Blue Book, but I wonder what the hell is going on. Turn the page and there is the second line item of interest – Pratt received $10m for his Tumut paper mill.

The problem is that nobody tries to develop a picture where government financing will produce any lasting benefit for Australia. There are pots of money to tap into if one knows one’s way around Canberra.

This is a form of central planning perverted to become a gigantic slush fund; Australia has been blessed indeed as the Land of the Cornucopia – but then I have never watched the Hunger Games.

Over there; Just not yet.

This country has been spectacularly successful at suppressing the Virus, but the problem with success is complacency, when all about have succumbed to the Virus through political pigheadedness in the main plus a basic lack of discipline when confronted with a universal enemy. Given the number of disaster and alien films, excluding “Contagion”, it is ironic in this case that the invader is unseen. The whole axiom-out of sight; out of mind – should be remembered.

Australia has dealt with this change of circumstances after an uncertain start, by locking the country away from the rest of the world. To get into Castle Australis is difficult, but there are still normative judgements about who can enter the country or cannot, although it seems to be common practice to insist on 14 days quarantine. The fact, like so many other things in this public-relations’ obsessed country, we were faced with border closures ostensibly due to health concerns but clearly political considerations. At the outset, it was understandable that restriction in movement should be uniformly applied, but it was not. This stemmed from a basic mistrust in the Commonwealth Government. Here there was pressure from the Prime Minister’s business circle not to impose restrictions, which would have led to a US-style situation. If sources are to be believed, it was a very close thing. After all, Morrison found an unsanitary affinity with Trump.

However, once they were imposed and the longer they went, border closures became a political weapon more than a health reason. When border closures clearly became a complete nonsense, at least Berekjlian, who, from many of her actions has often showed herself to be a rolled-gold guaranteed “dropkick”, was so right. Once it was clear from the NSW public health response that the COVID-19 cases could be gathered into clusters, then as she reasoned rightly, why indulge in group punishment by closing borders indiscriminately.

However, it has bred in the populace more than a risk adverse sentiment –fear – especially as the spectre of lockdown is constantly held over it.

For many years Australians have been used to being able to holiday both at home and overseas. As someone old enough to have grown up when overseas travel was a luxury and generally linked to overseas employment, it is a return to the old days of my youth.

I was one of those who went overseas in 1971, admittedly for the second time, 14 years after my first. Then, apart from a couple of years, I went overseas at least once each year until last year. In 2020, the Virus intervened. Now there is an uncertain future for overseas travel; the success Australia has had in ridding itself from the Virus has made most Australians value a COVID-19-free environment at the expense of overseas tourism.

Vaccination has introduced a new variable, but the vaccines development has been accelerated in a way that the mid-term to long term effect is yet unknown. The community knows that hygiene, masks and isolation (social distancing), works. However, community compliance is a factor which has been one of the reasons for the Australian success.

Within the borders the sense in confidence of moving about is growing, but the country has endured a harrowing time to see what works. Therefore, tourism will only return on the back of a confident people – confident that it can occur within a world where the virus is controlled.

The only way that this border issue can be addressed in the short term is for Australia and New Zealand to open up their orders to strictly Trans-Tasman Travel, and work from there. After all, there is confidence building so that the States do not instinctively close their borders. The Governments are increasingly confident that they can control clusters into hot spots.

Look at the situation in New Zealand – one case in Auckland and the city goes into lockdown. Therefore the “outbreak fear” level approximates that here in Australia, unlike the USA where any fall in the prevalence of the Virus is almost invariably followed by a premature relaxation of restrictions. As was reported this week in the Washington Post “the downward trend in new coronavirus infections had plateaued, perhaps because officials relaxed public health restrictions too soon and more contagious virus variants were becoming more widespread. Experts say a vigorous vaccination effort is key to stamping them out.”

Australia and New Zealand should bite the bullet and enter into an arrangement whereby people can travel between the two countries, leaving details of their destination on arrival. Thus, mutual trust needs to exist, otherwise both countries will be caught in a Western Australian bind of unreasoned defiance, which fortunately is abating as the Premier sees electoral victory this month.

Then we can move into the Pacific to help our neighbours who need our tourism but need to attain the same public health level as Australia and New Zealand. It is a wondrous thing to think that a Virus can assure a common effective response beginning in the Pacific. But then I am always the romantic, believing that advances come the quality of the response to adversity. Australia needs a different government I’m afraid.

In the Pink

Anonymouse

What does it take to get Sydneysiders to flock to the Blue Mountains? Well, me at least. I was thinking as I drove around the rim of the Blue Mountains what an impossible terrain it is, but without its escarpments and jagged pinnacles there would not be the unparalled views. I could be excused for thinking that when William Wentworth, one of three adventurers who first crossed the Blue Mountains to stand on one of pinnacles, the landscape below revealing what Thomas Mitchell later called Australia Felix, confessed that “his love of Australia was the ‘master passion’ of his life.” I could only agree. Yet here was plain the devastating effect of the bushfires which spread though the area early last year and left in their wake a bare blackened landscape.

Yet Australia Felix is never far away. I had gone looking for nature’s compensation for the terrible destruction, a special tapestry of tiny pink and white flowers. For a few short weeks, a year after devastating bushfires in the Blue Mountains and other areas of eastern Australia, the bush has regenerated and a profusion of pink flannel flowers has appeared.

These tiny flowers appear only rarely. Known as bushfire ephemerals, they are regenerated by fire, followed by good rain. It requires specific climatic conditions for seed stored in the soil to germinate. It is thought the plants germinate in response to bushfire smoke, rather than heat. The smoke-derived chemical karrikinolide is the active ingredient that triggers the plants’ emergence. Other plants with a similar activation after bushfires include grasstrees, or Xanthorrhoea, that send up flowering spears, and Gymea lilies. I saw the rebirthed grass trees, but alas no Gymea lilies.

The current bloom is spectacular, with pink flowers woven among the blackened banksias over these large tracts of shallow, skeletal mountain soils.

With their complicated rosy centre of tiny florets and hairy white bracts, rather than petals, they resemble a daisy, but are actually in the same family as carrots, parsley and celery. They are similar to the common flannel flower but are considerably smaller and have a distinct pink hue.

Pink flannel flowers are a mixed blessing – without fire, they remain dormant. See them while you can, hopefully it is many years before they can appear again. I wonder whether Wentworth ever saw them. I doubt it.

Mouse Whisper

Neera Tanden, a professional Democrat and President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget, fought her way to the threshold of the White House, only to be swatted at by senators who claimed that her appetite for partisan conflict — on Twitter, specifically — disqualifies her from holding that much power. The same fighting that got her here, in other words, now threatens to sink her.

“Just to mention a few of the thousands of negative public statements,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), speaking with the steady monotone of a not-mad-but-disappointed dad, “you wrote that Susan Collins is ‘the worst,’ that Tom Cotton is a ‘fraud,’ that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz.”

It is an interesting commentary on a feisty intelligent woman, who has raised a swag of money for her Center for American Progress (CAP). She has been a Hilary Clinton sidekick, but it is not only the above Republicans who have been the target of her venom. That honour resides with Bernie Sanders, and at one stage it is alleged that Tanen assaulted the person who later became Sanders’ Campaign Manager. The reason was that Ms Tanen did not like his question directed at Hilary at a CAP forum.

By the way, among her considerable set of donors for the CAP is Mark Zuckerberg who is recorded as giving about US$700,000 in 2018. She certainly is thus a lady not for turning, but her fate will be interesting because she will almost certainly fail to get the nomination for the Cabinet job.

Needless to say the President has withdrawn her nomination later this week.

Modest Expectation – UoVa Piazza UOva

I am commencing this blog on Boxing day, another of those dubious holidays related to the British class structure in which boxed trifles were provided to the deserving poor on the day after the upper classes had gorged themselves with exotic meat, forcemeats and sweetmeats – the proclivity of the entitled for languid enquiries “Another swan breast, Andrew? Perhaps another leg, Charles?”

In Great Britain swans have received special protection by the Crown at least as far back as 1482, when King Edward IV authorised the Act Concerning Swans, which made all swans in Great Britain property of the Crown. He signed the law, which remains in force today, not because he wanted to conserve them, but because he loved eating swans. Edward, although born in Rouen, was a Yorkist who was embroiled in battling the Lancastrian Tudors and having seen Henry VI off, he died in his bed. His sons were not so lucky, ending their brief lives in The Tower of London due to a bit of nepoticide by their uncle, Richard, who became the Third.

Like all British idiosyncrasy, only unmarked muted white swans fit into that protected category, and the Queen is even more discerning. She only eats swans from the Thames and its upper tributaries. Elsewhere the Crown has made a deal with the Worshipful Company of Vintners & Dyers in regard to swan ownership and from them to the Fellows of St John’s College Cambridge, who are the only chaps outside the Royal Family able to indulge themselves with roast swan on certain days of the year. These jolly fellows used to have swan traps along their College walls, but the traps have fallen into disuse. The College does not have a separate Warden of the Swans as the Crown does to maintain its swan traps.

Swan meat is said to be gamey, but tasty, presumably it is little different from goose except for the fat. It would be fitting that when “Banjo” FitzSimons achieves his Republican Dinner to mark our eventual break from the 1788 Invasion he should institute a “Swan Song” dinner where the major fare is a muted white swan garnished to acknowledge Edward IV’s other undying contribution – Yorkshire pudding.

I am sure that we could find a suitable South Melbourne-gone-Sydney person to carve our exotic roast. In recognition of our cultural affinity, the Swans regalia has always been red and white. But aren’t Australian swans black?

Huon Pine

in Strahan, a village on Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s West Coast there is a two-storied Pole House called Piner’s Loft. It was the labour of love of an extraordinary builder called Dan whose partner was so important to him in providing the inspiration to construct from old Tasmanian wood. In other words, it was built as an homage to the Tasmanian forests. He used only recovered wood, except for the structural poles which were blackwood, and not completely seasoned. However, even with the cracks in the unseasoned wood, blackwood is sturdy and the cracks have stabilised with age. Blackwood is not immediately endangered and is an essential component of the temperate rain forest which covers south-west Tasmania. There are two of these lofty trees along the drive. This drive to the back door has been delivered by the local vicar, who also works in his earth-moving business – literally not only moving heaven, but also earth.

There is another structural pole tucked away in the Loft, and that is one of King Billy Pine. However, in the case of the indigenous pine only recycled wood was used. The floorboards, window and door frames are mostly celery pine, and outside the back door, there is celery pine growing quietly. The fascia board is of Tasmanian blue gum, the only tree whose flower is a State emblem. Blue gum is a tree whose profligate growth has made it declared verminous in California.

Meanwhile, the bathroom door is an exotic, Western cedar.

The Piner’s Loft kitchen is composed of that most beautiful of Tasmanian woods, the Huon pine. Once almost sawn to extinction, these trees live a thousand years and beyond. In the forest, their caterpillar like fronds suggest a tree which may have watched the dinosaur walk. In the wild they are the most unprepossessing trees as they age, with bare arms stretching through the canopy. The trunks are gnarled and twisted; and yet the wood is magical as it is worked.

The Huon pine used to be cut by men called piners, who would travel upstream searching for it because Huon pine grows close to water courses. These piners would stay in rough shelters enduring the rain year round, sleet in winter and mosquitoes in summers. They floated the cut logs down the rivers. They all but cleared the forests of the pine, so now only salvaged wood can be worked. Cutting down a Huon pine is cutting off your inheritance; the remaining trees are protected.

Huon pines contain a natural oil called methyl eugenol, which gives the wood both its legendary durability and its unique fragrance. They grow very slowly, requiring about 500 years to reach the size at which time the trunk can be sawn into timber. Huon timber varies from a light straw to a rich golden colour. Fresh wood surfaces darken after contact with air and sunlight. It is a light, soft and very fine textured wood which is easy to saw, chisel, plane, turn or sand. It is a very good timber for building boats because its close grain, in addition to its lightness and the oil in the wood assists in the waterproofing.

The shavings work well in cupboards to guard against silverfish and other insects which like to eat one’s clothing. It is thus a wood of many seasons.

I am now looking at a Huon pine bowl we mutually presented ourselves as a Christmas present. The aroma is pungent, filling the air as you would expect. It is not the smell of the eucalypt. Roger, the wood turner who made the bowl says he can no longer smell the wood, but for those of us unused to its distinctive pine oil odour, it fills the room.

The wood is known for its “birds-eyes”, flecked dark spots in the wood which is prized. This bowl has waves through the timber like the clouds in a sunset, where the pale yellow of cloud grades into ochre heavens and in so doing catches all the shades in between. It is a glorious piece of carving and like the Loft not only is testimony to the sawyers of the West Coast but also the survival of the fauna and foliage of that State struggling against the barbarian blackberry, bracken and gorse – and bushfire.

This Tasmanian heritage is threatened but unfortunately the government sits by, its hands tucked firmly under it buttocks, while it dreams of dams and concrete. This is what it terms heritage.

But perhaps I am being too critical, but this excerpt from the 2020/21 Tasmanian Budget is indicative of the priorities:

Funding of $75,000 has been provided in 2020‑21, to continue the development of bushfire mitigation legislation commenced in 2019‑20. The legislation aims to improve bushfire mitigation in Tasmania by streamlining approval processes to reduce fuel and mechanically clear vegetation, and ensuring clear accountability for landholders and occupants. Enough to clear the politicians’ country chalets; how thoughtful!

Such is this frugal cornucopia emptied on fire protection, but Captain Courageous stands on his poop deck – and emotes “Thou shalt not enter, ye vermin from other States who dare to violate the purity on my Bailiwick.”

But for the time being, I am looking at this beautiful Huon pine bowl.

Gascon Paradox

This is probably well-known; thus, I apologise for those in the know. Nevertheless, it was mentioned during the preliminaries to cooking a goose for Christmas lunch. Gascony is considered that part of France in the Southwest below Bordeaux and stretches into the Basque country at the foot of the Pyrenees and to Bayonne nearer the coast where the rivers flow from the mountains.

Bayonne is famous for its cured ham – so the story goes, a mediaeval nobleman was out hunting and mortally wounded a wild boar which escaped, only to be found some months later dead in a hot briny pool. The carcass had been so cured by the brine in the intervening months, such that the discoverers waxed lyrical and Bayonne ham was born with all the attendant requirements, which the French love to impose, such as in this case special river salt that is needed to cure it … need I go on?

Gascons, who have affinity to these Bayonne Basques, are believed to be the owners of a gastronomic paradox. To paint a suitably gourmand picture, foie gras is one of the delicacies of Gascony but if one is to eat it one has to turn a blind eye to the process of gavage where the goose is force fed so that its liver suffers fatty degeneration, and then the bird is harvested, its liver to destined inter alia to be spread on toast. I must admit to having had such a breakfast, beats rice bubbles and Vegemite on toast – at least in France. Sorry, I did feel not any pangs – to me it is just an exotic form of dripping .

However, that is the Gascon way. They eat loads of goose and duck fats – saturated fats to the brim – and yet the Gascons live the longest of any Frenchman or woman, with the lowest incidence of heart disease. There are various reasons given – you know, they have an amazing leguminous diet, but the reason I like best is that Gascony is an area where fine dry wine from Bordeaux is produced, and imbibing that in moderation has a positive effect in countering the fat. They even mention, as one moves across Gascony to Condom from where Armagnac, the source of oldest top-flight brandy, has been made since the thirteenth century, one can begin to salivate at the prospect of a cooked goose. Armagnac is the foxglove extract of France.

To make a point, our goose was moreover well and truly cooked.

The roast goose on Christmas Day was perfect; it is a difficult bird to cook well. The line for it being overcooked is thin and then, as experienced by us many years ago, the goose becomes tough and inedible. The traditional cold goose on Boxing Day was well complemented by the fennel and orange salad. The company was perfect in the Padlocked City.

But the Chateau Rothschild will have to wait.

Retreat into Reality

I am so sick and tired of incompetence and/or corruption of government, where deceit is a valued commodity in a Pentecostal cloak, which has now assumed the dimensions once afforded to the Masons’ secret handshake.

So much so, that I have retreated into the reality of the most memorable opening scenes of films that I have seen during my life.

The first is Out of Africa, where the opening scene, Kenya 1913, is of a steam train coursing across the empty savannah Plain. It is a spare train, few carriages and then the first image of Meryl Streep. She has a luminosity as though encased in an aureole. The image is brief.

Then onwards – images of the train coming into focus, crossing more fertile country, always mountains in the background. Night falls, and only the train’s headlamp and lights in the carriage burn bright, and then it is next morning and the train reaches its destination. People, apart from that fleeting glimpse of Merryl Streep as Karen Blixen as appear for the first time. The background wistful yet lush music of John Barry is a perfect accompaniment to this beautiful opening scene.

Then there is number two, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is 1961. The vision of a yellow taxi driving down a deserted Fifth Avenue around dawn and depositing this slim figure in black with the beehive hairdo in front of Tiffany’s is one of minimalist elegance. Whether any actress other than Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly could have provided such panache with so little movement would have been a challenge. Eating a pretzel and drinking coffee from a paper cup without fumbling is in line with the minimalism.

For an instant, in front of the Tiffany’s window, she is the lady behind the bar at the Folies Bergère in the Manet painting of the same name, and then she is drifting around the corner, down 95^th street, finally depositing the food bag in a trash receptacle. All the time, Moon River is being played.

The third is Chariots of Fire where, after the memorial service introduction, we see this phalanx of young men in the training gear of the time, white shirt and shorts running through the shallows, supposedly at Broadstairs in Kent, where the British team was in training in Paris for the 1924 Olympic Games. The fact that they were running in bare feet is emphasised in the first shot. This opening sequence was shot in Scotland near St Andrew’s Golf Course and that the other runners were essentially a bunch of golf caddies is just too much inconsequential information. The fact that the final clip from this opening scene sees the running pack traversing the first hole at St Andrew’s, rather than the Carlton Hotel’s lawns on the Kent foreshore, did not diminish the expectations for a film which celebrated an idealistic romantic notion of heroism. That is the reality I like – and the Vangelis theme helped.

I could not summarise the theme better than the composer himself – Vangelis was a somewhat more convenient name than Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou.

He recalled the dilemmas of Eric Liddell, the Scottish athlete who would not run on a Sunday because it was contrary to his Christian beliefs; Lord Lindsay, who selflessly gave Liddell his slot in a weekday heat so that the Scot could compete in the Olympics; Harold Abrahams, the Jewish runner ostracised by the establishment. All were men who would not compromise on their values, no matter the cost.

“If you look for truth you have to be courageous. My main inspiration was the story itself. The rest I did instinctively, without thinking about anything else, other than to express my feelings with the technological means available to me at the time.”

The title “Chariots of Fire” brought me back to the where and now. The term derives from the Old Testament and it is adopted as a metaphor by William Blake. Jerusalem, the choral interpretation of his poem, is embedded in my brain. We sang it so often at school. The men above deserved a “chariot of fire” as their accolade.

If Blake could descend in a chariot of fire and see our Australia, would he wonder whether we could ever build Jerusalem among our own dark satanic coal mines. But we should finish the anthem – and the race which both Abraham and Liddell ran beyond their Olympic participation is equally applicable to us Australians – a universal call

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem

Safe as a Bronte Beach Santa Party

Anonymouse

First fireworks, and now cricket – what is the NSW Government thinking? Picture this: in the red corner, Cricket Australia, the SCG and the McGrath Foundation, and in the blue corner, “the best medical advice” of NSW. So, who won the bout between cricket and good public health sense? Well, who do you think? But the more pertinent question is who lost, and the answer is the people of NSW.

At the same time as the Premier of NSW has the northern beaches locked up and the best medical advice to everyone in greater Sydney is don’t go out for new year’s eve, apparently it is perfectly OK for up to 125,000 people to travel by public transport to the SCG, mingle as they enter and exit and sit in the stands unmasked (that’s 25k for each day of the test). How can this be so?

Memo to Gladys: Cancel the cricket, give the McGrath Foundation the million or two dollars that it raises at a Sydney test (and in the long run that will be a bargain compared with the massive cost of many COVID cases and a protracted lockdown that inevitably will be caused by the super spreader test), send the cricketers and their entourages packing to somewhere much safer for them and for NSW. Stop mucking around with the lives of the people of NSW, lock down greater Sydney and mandate mask wearing immediately until you actually have this outbreak under control.

With the Northern Beaches and Croydon outbreaks growing and the potential for weeks or months of lockdown looming as happened in Melbourne, having fireworks and allowing five days of cricket with spectators to go ahead is about as responsible as the Bondi Beach Santa party. Time will tell – if the cricket goes ahead – whether all the predictions of it being the super spreader of all time are realised. If so, NSW’s world best contract tracing system won’t amount to a hill of beans. We still don’t know who was the source of the Avalon cluster, or who has pushed so hard for the Test to go ahead in Sydney and why the NSW Government is taking such a huge risk in allowing it?

Mouse Whisper

I get sick and tired of hearing this doggerel. You know that one that starts “A for horses”… “B for mutton”….”C for yourself” and ends up “X for breakfast”, “Y for husband” and “Z for breezes”. For the least comprehending of you guys read, in order:

Hay

Beef

See

Eggs

Wife

Zephyr (incorporates the “for”)

I bet you are all slapping your thighs with laughter and emoting “How clever”. But it is a clue to the reason for the title of the blog in the twisted mind of my mausmeister … if you can be bothered. I believe he is going to publish the hundred Blog title names after he reaches that centenary blog.

Modest Expectations – Powder River

Ukhaa Khudag mine, one of at least 15 coal mines in Mongolia

Friedland chairs Toronto stock exchange-listed miner Ivanhoe Mines which owns 79% of South Gobi Energy Resources which currently achieves the most export sales out of the Mongolian coal producers.

The tax on mining profits in Mongolia was 25% compared to Australia’s proposed 30% mining tax, Friedland said.

Mongolia had a clear advantage in that it neighboured (sic) its Chinese customers.

“They’re closer to China than your lucky island.” Friedland told the Diggers & Dealers Mining Forum last week.

Australia-listed Hunnu Coal is busy advancing several promising Mongolian thermal and coking coal projects with minimal start-up costs.

Wood can see some shocks ahead for Australia’s leading export industry.

“I think Australia is going to find it hard to compete with coal 600 kilometres from Beijing with labour at tenth of the price. Mongolia has a highly supportive government and has abolished the stupid taxes Australia is now contemplating. Australia has got some problems.”

He noted some other advantages of mining coal in Mongolia. “Australian mines are getting deeper and older. The easy, cheaper coal is gone. These deposits in Mongolia are open cut from surface – they haven’t even been developed yet, the best years are still coming.”

The Mongolian government is working hard to expand the coal industry and announced major railway investment plans last month.

Wood said one of the plans was a link from the giant Tavan Tolgoi coking coal field in the South Gobi province, where Hunnu Coal has projects, all the way up to northern Mongolia where it can link up to Russia’s Tran Siberian railway line.

From there, the coal is railed out for export through Vladivostok port on the east coast of Russia.

“That’s a very short boat ride to Korea and Japan,” Wood said.

He said the Koreans, Japanese and Russians were keen to invest in Mongolian rail.

Wood said the Japanese and Koreans were extremely keen to get access to Mongolian coal “so it’s not just about China; Mongolian coal will be seaborne and that is a real threat to Australia.”

“That’s why Friedland is saying these things.

“These things aren’t going to happen next month, they are not going to happen next year but people are making investment decisions in Queensland based upon five to ten years.

“In five to ten years they will be competing against Mongolian coal well and truly.”

In the light of the recent announcements about Mongolia supplying coal to China, perhaps it would be useful to refresh the Australian Government’s recall of this article that appeared in Mining of 9 August 2010 when the coking and thermal coal deposits were being opened up in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

While there is Australian investment in mining in that country, this assessment was given by the Canadian/American billionaire, Robert Friedland. He had then invested heavily in Mongolian coal, as now he is investing in gold and nickel in Australia. His parents were Holocaust survivors and Friedland from a young man has moved with shakers. For instance, as a student he managed an apple orchard in Oregon, where Steve Jobs, a friend would come to work at weekends – that “small enterprise’s” name came from that Jobs’ experience. Friedland himself is undoubtedly smart and well-connected.

Matthew Wood is Australian and was trained as a geologist with qualifications in mineral economics. At the time of this 2010 article he owned Hunnu Coal, but sold it two years later to Hong Kong interests. He has kept up his mining interests in Mongolia so much so that he was recently awarded the Order of the Polar Star, the highest award which the Mongolian government gives to non-Mongolians.

Hey, Prime Minister, when you held up that lump of coal in Parliament, were you sure it was Australian?

Peterborough, Coorey and the Goyder Line

Phillip Coorey has a very spare entry about his early life in his published biography. However, on radio recently he revealed that he was bought up in Peterborough in South Australia. He rattled off a few not very convincing reminiscences to the effect that, as a lad, he may have been committed to a life on the header there.

What he did mention was Goyder’s Line. Surprisingly, the radio interviewer seemed not to have heard of Goyder’s Line. This is a line drawn across a map of South Australia by George Goyder, the then state surveyor, who meticulously drew this imaginary line from just north of Ceduna to just north of Pinnaroo on the border with Victoria in the early 1860s.

Above the line, the land was unsuitable for long term cropping; below the line it was suitable for cropping. His findings were greeted with the normal sceptical response, even when recognition of the line was drafted into legislation. A few good rainfall years turned scepticism into scorn and the Act was soon repealed. Then the normal series of drought years followed, validating Goyder’s observations, and the Act reinstated.

If you drive north of Goyder’s line, there are the results of the scorn on view, ruined sandstone houses of those who knew better. The land along the Flinders Range is littered with evidence of how correct Goyder was.

Ruins of a farmhouse, near the Flinders Ranges

An interesting observation when driving south is that fords across the many water courses are replaced by bridges, starting just north of Goyder’s Line; a significant reminder of the more reliable rainfall south of the Goyder?

Peterborough almost straddles the line – so cropping occurs for now. In any event Peterborough has another claim to fame besides Mr Coorey. It is where there is one of the two horse abattoirs in Australia. A horse abattoir differs from a knackery in that it produces horse meat suitable for export, mostly to Europe.

Goyder’s Line is the drought line. No other State has such a meticulously worked out differentiation of this arid land into its cropping and grazing potential.

As was reported: “George got on his horse and rode 3200 km east to west across the colony. Finally, in 1865, Goyder submitted his report and map to the state government.

Goyder used old rainfall guides and changes in vegetation to produce his report. He noted that mallee scrub, which needs a higher rainfall, dominated in the south while saltbush which can exist on far less moisture was the main vegetation in the north. With his report showing that north of the line was drier and the south wetter, he discouraged farmers from planting crops north of his line, as he considered this land only suitable for grazing.”

Goyder’s Line thus remains. Thirty kilometres north of Peterborough is a ghost town called Dawson. It was set up in defiance of Goyder’s finding. It remains as a testimony to those who gambled their livelihood against the empirical evidence; and lost.

Peterborough survives as an outwardly prosperous town for now, but there is the ever-present threat of a shift of Goyder’s Line away from Peterborough because of climatic change.

Irrigation has enabled the Riverland to prosper above Goyder’s Line; and technology has been used to crop above Goyder’s Line, but it remains as a concrete reminder of scientific integrity.

Australia has produced an array of substantial scientists, whose renown does not rely on being puffed up by that bane of civilisation – the public relations spinning arachnoids. Goyder was one such scientist.

The night I danced with Nikki Savva

It was a time before Cyclone Tracey, and the Travelodge was the most prominent feature of Darwin. We were there campaigning for the LCP in the Northern Territory election, which resulted in the LCP winning 17 out of the 19 seats. The remaining two went to independents; Labor’s strategy left them with no seats. How much our visit to Darwin influenced the result is not clear. After all, there were no Aboriginal candidates in any of the electorates. All the candidates were Territorians, aka “whitefellas”.

In this bubble at the Travelodge that evening, there was much jollification, and I remember at one stage dancing with a young reporter from The Australian, Nikki Savva. It is a funny thing that memory of this brief encounter has stuck in my mind when other memories of that night have dissolved.

Eventually, I drifted off to my room staggering along with my colleague. He had the room opposite. It was a different image when I awoke next morning. The door of the room opposite was wide open. The room was empty. The room was now a wreck – it looked as it had been trashed, but when I walked across the corridor, I smelt the aftermath of a fire. The walls were covered with soot – there had been some water damage.

Blearily I went back to my room. It never occurred to me until later that I had not been evacuated. I had slept through the ruckus and nobody had thought to wake me. Such considerations came later when I learnt that my colleague had lit his mattress and was found in a smoke-filled bathroom, completely disorientated. His rescuer was a journalist travelling with the team. The fire brigade had been called, but I slept on. This was not the last time I slept though an awkward situation, nor that I escaped being burnt to death. Sometimes as the memory grew distant, in one of my rational moments, I believe that there is a force which determined that my time was not up – not then.

What was so different from today? There was no report in the media, although everyone knew but nobody talked about it – nobody wrote it.

I never knew who paid for the damage. It did not come across my desk.

Somehow I doubt whether that would be allowed to go unnoticed today.

However, so much has changed, but old habits die hard for me not acknowledging by name those who were in that burning room that night.

But I do remember Nikki Savva – a brief encounter and I doubt whether we have ever spoken since, such were our different career pathways. However, I enjoy her insights – and sometimes I agree with her, for what it is worth.

The charred Letter

In a slightly different mode, after the 1974 election I went to Snedden and said that the Liberal Party should have a Tasmanian strategy, since all the five House of Representatives seats were held by Labor, but were very winnable given that the number of electors is relatively small and local issues dominate. Labor was vulnerable if Whitlam’s lack of empathy for Tasmania could be countered. In fact, Lance Barnard being Whitlam’s deputy and a Tasmanian gave a certain sheen to Whitlam in the eyes of Tasmanians.

When Barnard retired from the seat of Bass not long after Fraser replaced Snedden, little or no credence was given to Snedden’s campaign to highlight that being distinct from the Whitlam haughtiness, Snedden cared for Tasmanian problems. There was even a shadow ministerial portfolio which Snedden gave to Bob Ellicott. It was pure populist politics.

As history showed, a retired army officer called Kevin Newman, well connected by marrying into a northern Tasmanian establishment family, won in a landslide. Many of the sage journalists identified it as a turning point in the eventual electoral demolition of Whitlam.

That is the background to this response the office received after letters seeking their priorities were sent to each of the Councils in Tasmania, which in those days numbered 79. This meant that some of the municipalities were formed when the populations of some was far greater than now.

Ruins of hotel, Linda Valley, Gormanston

I was reminded of one response when driving through Gormanston on the shoulder between Mount Lyell and Mount Owen before the Murchison highway plunges down to Queenstown. Where once copper miners lived near the mine the municipality no longer exists. Now almost a ghost town, but back in 1974, it was a separate municipality. Many replies to the letters were received, but about six months after, a reply was received from the Warden of Gormanston apologising for the lateness, but the Council offices had been burnt down. The letter was written on decent note paper, but it confirmed the Warden’s excuse. The edges of the letter were severely charred.

Snow Gums

Some years ago, we were driving around Tierra del Fuego and on a bare hill there were these blanched fallen tree trunks, resembling the bones of long lost creatures. When I asked about them, my guide said that there had been a great fire about 50 years before, and in the harsh conditions of the island, trees had never grown back.

I remember a few years after a bushfire at Falls Creek in the Victorian Alps, had destroyed a great number of snow gums. They were whitened reminders among a blackened landscape slowly recovering. However, snow gums take 50 years to grow again, and before the fire there had been a huge stand of these beautiful trees. Now there are bleached reminders of nature’s revenge.

Near Mt Arrowsmith on the Tasmanian West Coast snow gums abound. They have one of most beautiful trunks of any of the eucalypts, along with leopard gums and salmon gums, not to mention the ghost gums of Central Australia. The trunks have dove grey and fawn markings against an essentially creamy white trunk. Bark is added decoration, lightly suspended from some the trunks, for snow gums are the contortionists of the eucalypt world, tossing themselves into bizarre shapes, but always maintaining their delicate beauty.

The road near Mount Arrowsmith is where the Murchison Highway is liable to be closed by snowfalls in winter, and it is here that a bushfire has left its signature. The bush has been reduced to a picket of black sticks where the only regeneration is blackberry bushes and bracken. It showed how long it had been since we had travelled the road from Hobart. Normally, we come down to the West Coast from Devonport – at least before COVID-19 closed off Tasmania. It showed how long it had been since we had driven from the south, because Hobart is further away than the northern Tasmanian cities.

I always believed that the West Coast of Tasmania was immune from bushfires because of its high rainfall, but in January 2016 there were multiple storms without much rain, but with a large number of lightning strikes which resulted in the West Coast burning in patches. Most the fires were concentrated in the northwest corner, but 1.2 per cent of the wilderness area was burnt. My belief that rainforest and moss lands would contain such a fire was disabused by the findings of an Inquiry. When the weather was dry, and today as I write this the temperature is 32^oC in Strahan, then “all bets are off”. The West Coast of Tasmania will burn.

It is a wake-up call, especially as trading off an irreplaceable flora against a lean-to shed built by someone secretly growing marijuana and which can – and probably will – be easily rebuilt seems to be a no brainer. Those entrusted with fire control need to make decisions based on the greater good – saving endangered irreplaceable flora makes a lot more sense than sacrificing it to save a couple of sheds.

Here in the south-west of Tasmania preservation of the environment is paramount. The human population is small, but if the wilderness was destroyed in a bushfire, it does not have the ability to regenerate quickly – if at all. The indigenous pines grow slowly – that is why when you look at a fully grown Huon Pine, or King Billy Pine you are looking back at a thousand years; some romantics say that the forests are little changed from when dinosaurs walked.

Gorse invades the West Coast of Tasmania

There are different priorities, because it is not only lightning strikes and man-made hazard reduction that can destroy the irreplaceable but also the disgraceful lack of attention that the Tasmanian government pays to the invasion of blackberry, bracken and particularly gorse, all together already creating a monument to West Coast neglect. A northern hemisphere native, gorse is a noxious weed here and a major fire hazard.

Look at the scene in the South-West four years after the fire. Just forgotten. It could be the harbinger of things to come.

Reflections on Matthias

Matthias Cormann is on the road again, metaphorically speaking. One of the pursuits which engages those trivia-centred people is to name five famous Belgians; and then for the master class five famous Walloons and five famous Flems. Matthias is neither of these. He was born of working class parents in the sliver of the country bordering Germany, which is naturally German speaking. Here the border has moved between the two countries depending on the political situation. He lived very close to the German border and his obvious affinity for Germany rather than the country of his birth is shown by his middle order award in 2018 from the German government for advancement of relations between Australia and Germany.

Cormann studied law and learnt Flemish at the first and French at the second university. He then went on an exchange Erasmus scholarship to Norwich, in the course of which he learnt English – all before he was 24 years of age. All that is on public record, together with his pursuit of a young woman to Perth.

Rejected, he went back to Belgium, but the second coming was very soon after. It seems an impetuous action, but then he was only 25. His quick eye obviously saw better opportunities in Western Australia rather than the country of his birth. Whether, as a member of small minority in a country riven by tribal strife where, in the job market, these tribal allegiances are translated into patronage, from which he was excluded, one can only speculate. However, if he is a serious contender for the OECD job, you can be assured there will be a rake going through the reasons for his flight from Belgium.

His adeptness at negotiating the political shoals in Australian politics were probably helped by a deferential mien which, as he rose up through the ranks, was retained as a courteous demeanour of appearing to listen. Perhaps having a very good grasp of where he was going and where he resides on the ladder of political influence was equally important.

He has no ideology; and that helps when some of your colleagues show moronic shrillness. However, his accent has been a useful weapon, when in others it could have been scorned. The accent is like a blade of steel – it gives him authority, even when he has blathered on and on, not answering questions as is his irritating wont.

Now he is trying his array of tricks on the world stage. Whether he survives the first cull is problematical given the Prime Ministerial aroma on this stage. Being a political chimney sweep covered in coal dust is not the image for selection for the OECD position. If Cormann presents a green visage to the members of the OECD, he needs to measure that against his welcome back into Australia, where his backers essentially have been the mining business community. Even a modern-day Metternich has limits to dissemblage.

However, what he may be angling for is the Australian ambassadorship to the OECD. The current incumbent could easily be recalled and there would be Matthias, like Banquo’s ghost, to haunt the new boss of the OECD – and incidentally polish his credentials on the world stage. Just a possibility.

Mouse Whisper

Kristi Noem sounds like the name of a Christmas elf or a doughnut; but she is in fact the Governor of South Dakota.

She was recently in Casa Blanca, where she was surprised by her bruised hero, Heel Spur. She did not have time to express her adoration before he looked at her contemptously and turning to the pianist snarled: “You played it for her. You can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can. Play it, Uncle Sam!”

Uncle Sam commenced playing, wistfully singing “You must dismember this…”

Tears formed in her eyes, “Oh, Heel, you know we’ll always have Pierre.”