Modest Expectations – Tura Beach V 

Queen Elizabeth II

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

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

Reflection

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

In any event:

The window exists 

at the end of the room

A discoloured pane frames the tree 

Sallow maple leaves cling

Potted cymbidiums hang

From trunks

That gently swing

defiantly green

Striving to touch the cycadic spikes

Along the unseen cobblestone path 

The gate aubergine 

and fire-bricked wall

Brown-wooded letter box 

All separates me from the World

Nothing else? 

That’s right

Nothing else

Why bother?

I do not go out

Just lean back in my chair 

And realise that Winter has come.

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

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

 Fishing traps 

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

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

Brewarrina fish traps

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depiction of fish traps, in ochre on sandstone

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

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

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

Utopia

Now

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

Then

The objectives of ATSIC are:

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

By way of 

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

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

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

The distinctive style of Utopia painter Minnie Pwerle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therefore, the concept of Voice has different connotations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pitjantjatjara land

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

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

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

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

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

The dulled Voice of dispossession continued.

Jobs and Skills Summit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annie Butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

Overheard in a lunch bar

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

She: Everything except onion, please.

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

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

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

Whisper: The efficient quiet Australian!

Modest Expectations – SXM

Here we are in Mungo National Park. The power is off. My computer needs re-charging. Thus, after this sentence, there will be a lull. Transmission will resume after we get to Balranald.

When you write something as disconnected as that, there must be what they call in the trade a prequel, and there must be a postscript as well.

But first, the scene should be set for both.

Mungo National Park was the site of an ancient lake, Lake Willandra, dry saltbush expanse disappearing into the horizon.  On one side of this lake is a long stretch of dunes caused by the winds blowing the sand and grit into have termed “The Walls of China”. There has been differential erosion across these dunes leaving a series of obelisks in the sand. They are a small version of the famous Pinnacles in Western Australia.

I first drove around Mungo National Park 30 years ago. The Park had been given WHO Heritage status in 1981, the remains of the modern Indigenous Australian man, at least 40,000 years old, were discovered in the Willandra Lakes in 1974, with the remains of a perhaps equally ancient female having been discovered in 1968. They were labelled Mungo Man and Mungo Lady.

The bones have languished in Canberra, until Mungo Lady was returned “to country”, and is kept under lock and key in the Visitor Centre while a suitable burial site could be designated. Thirty years have passed. The then Minister of the Environment in May this year gave permission for reburial. Having been given the gravedigger role, the NSW Government has baulked.

Meanwhile Mungo Man’s remains await, to be interred in an ancient river red gum box.

The Paakantji, Mutthi Mutthi and Ngiyampaa share the land, saying their people have effectively been there forever – well for at least 40,000 years, but when I first went to Mungo, there was not much evidence of their occupation. One could freely drive around the Walls of China; you could walk around the ancient site without the benefit of an Aboriginal guide. Sensitivity towards these lands did not require a boardwalk. The country was full of kangaroos; this time there was not one to be seen.

Then there was a seasonal Lodge at the entry to the Park, where you could stay, except during the summer months, and water was at a premium. Today, there is a renovated Lodge, well set up with cabins clustered around the administrative and dining facilities. The highlight of the evening meal was the rack of lamb; after all, in the land of sheep in the saltbush, how glorious was the taste of a very generous serving. We agreed that it was the best lamb we had eaten since one memorable meal at Wanaka in the altoplano area of the South Island of New Zealand, where Canterbury lamb is raised, and until this Mungo experience was the most succulent lamb meal.

Strange, in search of an Aboriginal masterpiece, it was the product of imported fauna which provided the most memorable experience, apart from the cold which, although not unexpected, when combined with a wind chill factor pushed the thermometer well below zero.

As the reader may discern, I was disappointed being locked out of the self-drive tour, and there were suggestions that a sunset tour with two adults and two children at $200 was expensive, but then life is not cheap when you stay in the Park.

On the road to Balranald

Although it is stated that there is no need for a four-wheel drive, some parts of the road to Balranald were, as they say, challenging, especially as it seemed not to have been graded after the floods, and deep dried ruts dotted the roads and in the sandy areas, the bull dust concealed potholes in the road. On the other side of the coin, the asphalt roads are creeping outwards, especially where mining interests are concerned. On reaching the junction with the Balranald-Ivanhoe road, I was surprised by this newly sealed road.

Why? Mining means improved access.

Mineral sands mines had been opened 175km south–west of Ivanhoe. The heavy mineral concentrate (HMC) from the mine is trucked to a new rail siding just outside of Ivanhoe, then transported to Broken Hill for further processing. Unsealed roads used to go in all directions from Ivanhoe, which existed as a place where the rail fettlers lived and where once the Indian Pacific stopped at 3am to let me get off. If you want to emulate that feat just remember the station is approximately a mile from town – and there are no taxis.

There you are, the future of the NSW Far West, tourism and mining, not forgetting the traditional overlay of cattle and sheep. Just setting the scene.

The Prequel

David Lyle

We had been invited to a farewell of Professor David Lyle who, for the past 27 years, has headed the first University Department of Rural Health (URDH) created in Broken Hill. The concept was bitterly opposed at first by some elements of the Federal Department of Health and certain then influential general practitioners. The brainchild of these university departments of rural health was Dr Sue Morey, then the NSW Chief Health Officer, who believed that teaching of medical students should be available in a structured rural facility and should have a strong public health component with equally robust community involvement. Sue delegated me to sort out the structural barriers and importantly secure local involvement. As it turned out, Clyde Thomson, the remarkable CEO of the local Royal Flying Doctor Service, was that person. I have written extensively about Clyde elsewhere and it is about time that his status of being a “national treasure” is fully recognised.

Clyde trained as a pilot, but he grasped very clearly what we were about and how an air transport facility, an almost untouchable icon delivering emergency medical care to the outback, could be further broadened to be an integral part of the clinical life of the community, including most tellingly of the Aboriginal people. Clyde embraced the ideas and demonstrated very clearly the essential need for a “local champion” to work in the planning and implementation.

Although Clyde was Chair of the Hospital Board at the time and a university department of rural health being attached to the local hospital seemed an attractive option – in this case we avoided the danger of parochialism in that even if it were considered successful, there would always be a number of reasons advanced that a “Broken Hill Department of Rural Health”  would not be a generalisable model.

Also, medical education at an undergraduate level is the preserve of universities in Australia. We decided that despite a locational problem, the University of Sydney should be invited to participate in the project. At the time university medical school thinking about having a rural component was to have it located on a campus on the outskirts of Sydney, not 1,200 kilometres away in a mining town which was closer to Adelaide.

Crucially, Broken Hill was located in NSW. As time went by, the rural involvement of the University of Sydney moved towards Sydney to Dubbo, then to Orange, over a number of years. This would have been impossible if Broken Hill had been linked to one of South Australian Medical schools, which initially appeared to be the easy option given Broken Hill’s medical relationship with Adelaide, but would have assured failure. There was some academic resistance in University of Sydney Medical School; it was overcome. The Dean, Steve Leeder, helped – a crucial ally.

I was asked to do a Rural Stocktake across Australia by the Department of Health in 1999, and I reported early in 2000.

There is no doubt that Minister Michael Wooldridge’s dedication to rural health improvement drove implementation, in particular securing funding for the program in the 2000  Federal Budget, which was distributed to universities with medical schools, with the proviso that the Universities could not skim any of the funding for “administrative expenses”. All the funding went to the various programs.

The final keystone for this Broken Hill project was David Lyle. He is a public health physician who had been involved, even before his appointment, in determining the extent of lead poisoning in the children of Broken Hill. He has always had a reputation as a great teacher, and ensured that his URDH was expanded to embrace other health professionals, including Aboriginal Health workers.

He oversaw the conversion of disused wards at the back of the hospital into a tangible Department and attracted a significant amount of research funding. There are now 19 UDRHs across the country, and the fact that David, until now, has been the unmovable champion and therefore crucial in the growth of rural training of health professionals, including public health.

His replacement has yet to be named and the University of Sydney advertisement suggested that the office would be based in Camden, where apparently the university has some agricultural facility, such is the systemic idiocy in the university bureaucracy. There is a problem among medical deans where there is an obsession about ranking, largely determined by research citations. Most of the medical deans have had professional careers within academic cloisters where the sun of rural Australia doesn’t shine. It is alleged that rural health money is taken and strewn around the city campuses.

This response by the University of Sydney indicates the bane on any program – lack of corporate memory without a record of the genesis of the program.

David Lyle must leave a written legacy or podcasts to ensure that 27 years of experience is not lost, given he is the last of the original heads of the URDHs.

The Postscript – What’s in a Name!

Years ago, I was asked to review an alleged problem in the delivery of medical care at Hopetoun. Hopetoun is a small township just South of Wyperfield National Park – an area of mallee desert country which lies in the far north-west of Victoria. During my time there, a case of a pregnant woman with no access to ante-natal care, was raised with me.

It was an anecdote raised in passing as an example of the general lack of access to medical care.  Strangely over the years the name of this tiny place, Lascelles, has stuck in my mind.

This week we were returning from Broken Hill and decided to go across to Victorian border to visit the pink lake, Lake Tyrrell. Because of its colour, it has become a destination for Chinese tourists because of their association of pink with luck. When we visited the wind was blowing and sun was reflected from the water against a cloudless sky. You could pick out fragmentary pink colours in the shaded areas of the lake, but there is a far better pink lake in the South Australian Coorong. Anyway, Lake Tyrrell has put the Mallee town of Sea Lake on the map, but also on the map has been inserted the Silo Art Trail. Many of the silos in the district have murals painted on them. One of these silos was at Lascelles and at Sea Lake there was a signpost to Lascelles.

Lascelles silo art

The signpost evoked my memory of the name. I thought that it was a speck even further into the bush than Hopetoun, but for the first time I could put a face on this hamlet, where the major medical centres of Mildura and Bendigo were about two hours away. Lascelles is a pub and a few homes and on the silo wall there were beautifully painted, in sepia tones, portraits of a farming couple, the Hormans.

That is the endemic problem of small settlements, so small they do not merit any shops, but most do have a pub, a hangover from the time the trains stopped there and now a place for the locals to come and have a drink. The pub is often the only community resource and would be a perfect place for regular clinic by a visiting medical team.  As a model, the flying doctor provides  the excitement in community by arriving by air.  I remember in the 90s flying with the RFDS when they provided medical care at the Noccundra rodeo; and boy is Noccundra remote! Yet a plane on a gibber plain air strip indicates that the doctors and flight nurses have arrived.

Noccundra in Far West Queensland had a permanent population of four, but there was a pub made of stone. The RFDS provides a model for a visiting service, with provision of a regular clinical schedule and being available for outback events such as the rodeos where inevitably there will be injuries, some of which may require evacuation, either to Broken Hill or Adelaide.

There is much discussion about the lack of doctors in the bush. I believe the root cause is that there is no coherent succession planning, but for such planning there needs to be a facility which can appropriately both monitor and supply a regular flow of doctors.

To me all programs of clinical care must have a teaching component to assure the flow, as occurs in teaching hospitals.

Therefore a university facility, whether it be a university department of rural health, rural clinical school or a rural medical school, could provide a regular means of servicing the small communities with clinicians and providing two elements – one: clinical experience and two: continuity.

Much of these ideas have sprung from my own personal experience of providing a visiting medical service. For a number of years when I was newly graduated I would do evening consultations by visiting patients who, for one reason or another, could not present at the rooms for ongoing care. I did it twice a week, and if I encountered any deterioration, I would let the general practitioner know. Here the General practitioner was my educational resource and I went out on my visits -five or six patients generally had to be seen each evening.

The principle is simple – a travelling medical team connected to a teaching centre, where public health is an essential ingredient. As I have found out, if you provide a mixture of collegiality, teaching, recognition and succession planning, then you can build a coherent team of health workers.

Such a concept where you use colourful cars in lieu of aircraft to attract attention as the means of providing a regular service to remote settlements need to have a David Lyle to implement such a simple but obvious concept. But make sure that the travelling band arrives in each township with panache and always come when they said they would -punctually.

Incidentally, there was no problem with the medical care in Hopetoun, but that is another story, but instructive in trusting your on-site observations to strip away the hearsay and gossip. 

Sarah Jane Halton and her Stomach Knot

Jane Halton has bobbed up again. The incoming Health Minister, Mark Butler, has asked her to review the existing vaccine contracts and whether the country had a regular source of vaccine supply – a guaranteed pipeline.

The background is the dilemma being posed by the surge in the number of cases of the virus and the fact that the new variants seem to be more contagious. The fact that the level of vaccination including boosters has declined and there seems to be a growing complacency in the community with the removal of public health safeguards presumably is driving the review.

His action follows on from a national surge in case numbers, with health department estimates showing around 200,000 people are actively infected. He also confirmed that COVID-19 vaccines for children aged between six months and five years, which have already been approved in the United States, are progressing towards approval in Australia. Pfizer has been granted provisional approval to put in an application to provide a paediatric COVID-19 vaccine.

At the same time the impact of the transmissibility of the new variants BA.4 and BA.5 has introduced another variable, because of the unknown factor around the virulence and the effectiveness of current mRNA vaccines against these variants. That is the problem with mRNA viruses – they are fickle, mutating regularly.

Reading between the lines, Butler wants a “quick and dirty”. Despite what has been provided in the media release, and a comment that he was only interested in the future, the lessons come from the past.

Butler’s appointment of Halton is a shrewd one. She is a Howard-Abbott warrior. Therefore, her appointment has a “Teflon” quality. As a Deputy Secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Halton was convener of the People Smuggling Taskforce in the Children Overboard Affair. This was a convenient vehicle for Howard’s scare tactics in relation to the “Boat People”. She was the dummy in believing false claims, but she was rewarded with the post of Department of Health Secretary, where the then Minister, Abbott obviously saw her as a person in his own image and when he became Prime Minister Halton moved upwards into a central agency – that of Finance.

She became a member of the ill-fated Executive Board of the Australian National COVID-19 Coordination Commission in March 2020. That would suggest that she was engaged in the whole sorry process from the start, the entrails of which she has been asked to examine. Maybe she will be able to airbrush any involvement of Sarah Jane Halton from her report to Minister Butler.

After all, the Chair of the Commission, Neville Powers was convicted of breaches of COVID-19 rules. Maybe the activities of this Commission will figure in her solution. So far, the only public contribution by Halton as a result of this association was an indifferent report on hotel quarantine.

However, there is no doubt that Halton is an expert on integrity having been a member of the Board of the Crown Casino which presided over a raft of corrupt practices, the criminality of which has not been tested in the Courts.  Nevertheless, the former judge Patricia “Paddy” Bergin, who ran the Inquiry  on Crown, noted that despite her involvement in some of the deceptive practices, her integrity emerged intact.

James Packer had a business model which relied on an ongoing river of Chinese money replete with all the attendant malfeasance connected with the movement of large amounts of money, including junket tours and money laundering. It seems that ASIC is not prepared to take the matter further – “too big to fail” is the mantra.

Halton is a beneficiary in that the level of her involvement in the shenanigans will not be tested in court. Nor unsurprisingly, this involvement was not mentioned in the Butler media release, where she is described as “a vaccine expert” and Chair of an international organisation – the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) based in Oslo, which is the brainchild of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of India. Given the generous description of her as a vaccine expert by the Minister, the published description of the CEPI Board, acknowledges her starkly by a single word “Chair”, a position to which she was re-appointed last year for a further five years. Yet others on the Board are clearly defined as vaccine experts. It is as though the authors of the CEPI Report were unsure why she was there.

I therefore was surprised with the Ministerial comment: “I make no judgment about the existing arrangements. I think it’s entirely appropriate for us to have some independent advice about incredibly important arrangements that we have inherited.”

Excuse me for gagging on “independent”.

Now that ex-Minister Hunt has retired, also excuse me by speculating if there is now one remaining person with a target on his chest. Also let’s hope that she does not get that knot in her stomach – her own shorthand for the times she has stuffed up.

Climate Change

Ravenserodd – site of sunken Medieval town

The worst manifestation of this deteriorating climate was the Grote Mandrenke (Great Drowning of Men) of 1362, the greatest North Sea disaster in history which saw up to thirty thousand dead and almost half the population of the marshland districts along the Jutland coast drowned, not to mention the inundation of substantial chunks of the city of Dunwich and the port of Ravenserodd on the North Sea coast of England.

This above excerpt from a newly-published examination of ancient Britain settlement, Shadowlands by Matthew Green describes the changes in the British coastline because of climate change in the early part of the last Millennium. There is the description of Old Winchelsea where, over a period of a hundred years, this settlement – an important port on the Kent coast – was washed away. The intervention of King Edward 1 in acquiring land in the hills above Winchelsea was not without controversy because it meant a shift of Winchelsea being superimposed on existing settlements on this higher land.

These were turbulent times as the Northern Hemisphere moved from a calm Mediaeval Warm Period (c. 900-1200) into the turbulent Little Ice Age (c.1300-1900).  During this time, hundreds of settlements on both sides of the Channel were inundated with extensive loss of life.

As Green says, this period  was instructive for our time, when climate change is very much in the hands of manmade intervention, which as he says, it is probably much worse than the thirteenth or fourteenth  century “ever dreamed up.”

May I suggest that the inhabitants of Lismore and other places that were once ports and which are now being repeatedly flooded, read what happened to this mediaeval port of Winchelsea. It took time but, in the end,  the once thriving port of Winchelsea was no more, death from repeated flooding.

Mouse Whisper

My Bushrat relative, Rafferty, turned up the other day. He had hitched a ride on a number of trucks around the southern part of the Far West of NSW with a mate, Jack Kerourat. Anyway, he said that the Hay Plain was so flat you could see the curvature of the Earth’s surface.

The other thing he mentioned was in the bar of the Penarie pub where he heard one of locals say, “Look mate, you know what a remote place is in Australia. It’s where there’s no TAB betting agency.”

Penarie pub

 

Modest Expectation – There is Much Binary in the Math But Not With This Base.

There are a select few who try to work out the association of the Modest Expectations number with the accompanying narrative. The title of 158 is a take from an old BBC comedy show. “There is Much Binding in the Marsh”. The association is so old that only those who lived in the early post-wars would remember, but the series was very well-liked in Australia.

The series was originally set on a mythical RAF base modelled on the real-life Moreton-in-the Marsh RAF base. It featured a number of English comedians, such as Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne. Their audience thought them funny as their binding – that is grumbling – was undertaken with a comic air. As was said about Horne, “a master of the scandalous double-meaning delivered with shining innocence” – the basis of much English humour.

However, this is one of three puzzles based successively on the numbers 158 (as in this case), through to 159, to ultimately 160, all produced by guest numbers man, Rick McLean.

One clue: the answer to 158 has nothing to do with the BBC series, just a convenient pun – really a double pun if that exists.

The Political Leak

I have never been a member of Parliament, but as the Principal Private Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition as I once was, I was one who was privy to confidential information.

It was also 1973, when much was happening in Canberra. Let’s say it was not a boring year in politics. Given that I lived in this different era in Canberra, on several occasions Gough Whitlam’s speech writer, Graham Freudenberg, invited me around for a drink in the Prime Minister’s office after stumps were drawn, and on at least one occasion we were joined by the journalist, Laurie Oakes.

Graham Freudenberg could approximate Gough’s cadences; and I could do an adequate Freudenberg imitation. It was not that we were bosom pals, but in the Parliament House environment, we got on well. Freudenberg enjoyed berating me for my political affiliation in his best Gough voice and I returned serve in my best imitation of him mimicking Gough.

However, among the jollities there were rules; one was to keep the discussions general and I would never go near Gough’s desk. On one of these occasions, Freudenberg left me alone. Nevertheless, the Leader of the Opposition’s Principal Private Secretary apparently alone in Gough’s office late at night was not a good look if Security came by.  In those days, it was more relaxed admittedly. Nevertheless, there were some sensitivities because in the previous year a journalist, Barry Everingham, had been found lurking in Whitlam’s office.

In my situation, Freudenberg was in the toilet; something had disagreed with him and he needed to hurriedly decamp there.

When I reflect on this exchange, I must have engendered enough trust that I could be invited for a drink in foreign territory. Even to this day, I have no idea whether Opposition apparatchiks were regularly invited to have a drink with Freudenberg under such circumstances, and although I did not talk about it with my colleagues, I doubt it was a regular occurrence.

In a Parliamentary system which is constructed as adversarial, there are many friendships which cross political borders. These friendships are ephemeral, but if you want to maintain even such ephemera, you needed to be trusted.  Leaking the other’s confidential material is a sport. There appear to be two major ways to leak – one is to leak to inherently lazy journalists, a process which Bjelke Petersen called “feeding the chooks”; the other is to leak against members of your own side, mostly to try and destroy them.

I had one experience of being accused of leaking to Laurie Oakes the contents of a sensitive meeting between Bill Snedden, Jim Carlton, then the general secretary of the NSW branch of the Liberal Party, and then Premier of the NSW, Bob Askin. I was taken to lunch – I remember by Tim Pascoe, then a Liberal Party operative – and he passed on Jim Carlton’s concern that I had leaked the details to Laurie Oakes. Why? Because I was seen as close to Oakes at that time. I did not know what he was talking about, as Snedden had not mentioned the matter to me. When I confronted Oakes, he admitted it was Askin. Carlton would not have believed that such a luminary as Askin would leak – after all, he was the Premier. It was just one accusation used in undermining my position. I informed Snedden of my conversation but otherwise kept quiet. Now, so many years on, who cares about revealing the leaker – but remember the lesson, never pick the obvious.

Many of those who leak are very skilled, but not all! Morrison has more than a touch of McMahon, but more a watering can than a simple leaker.

Remembering Albright

Madeleine Albright died last week. She was the first woman US Secretary of State. I reckon she was worthy of noting. I don’t know whether her contribution to diplomacy will necessarily be more than a historical footnote, but she epitomised one thing to me – when you viewed her performance, you never thought about gender. She was a top diplomat, full stop.

She was born a Czech and as a Slav was looked down on as an inferior race by the Germans, who partitioned her country in 1938. Her early years were thus against the background of a War not far away. Her family escaped from Czechoslovakia after the War. I was once married to someone, younger than Albright but who endured similar traumatic childhood years in Europe. She grew up with a strong sense of morality – what was right or wrong, rather than just whether something was acceptable and something not.  I suspect that Madeleine Albright was not that much different.

Below are random quotes mostly garnered from the Boston Globe.

When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked her in January 2007 whether she approved of Bush’s proposed “surge” in U.S. troops in bloodied Iraq, she responded: “I think we need a surge in diplomacy. We are viewed in the Middle East as a colonial power and our motives are suspect.”

Albright was an internationalist whose point of view was shaped in part by her background. Her family fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 as the Nazis took over their country, and she spent the war years in London.

As Secretary of State, she played a key role in persuading Clinton to go to war against the Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic over his treatment of Kosovar Albanians in 1999. “My mindset is Munich,” she said frequently, referring to the German city where the Western allies abandoned her homeland to the Nazis.

She helped win Senate ratification of NATO’s expansion and a treaty imposing international restrictions on chemical weapons. She led a successful fight to keep Egyptian diplomat Boutros Boutros-Ghali from a second term as secretary-general of the United Nations. He accused her of deception and posing as a friend.

In her U.N. post, she advocated a tough U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the case of Milosevic’s treatment of Bosnia. And she once exclaimed to Colin Powell, then the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Powell, who died last year, recalled in a memoir that Albright’s comments almost made him have an “aneurysm”.

An aneurysm? Really, I have never thought of somebody inducing an aneurysm. An aneurysm of Generals? I would have thought more appropriate “an aneurysm of politicians”, you know, prone to leaking.

The Floods – The Clarence River

I am fascinated by the lack of national funding for flood mitigation works, but then the levers of power are firmly in the hands of the climate change deniers. Whether that changes if the current Government is defeated is not known, because of the intrinsic influence of the fossil fuel industry and the nostalgic attachment to coal that the Labor Party has, is strong. The Russo-Ukrainian War has provided the climate change deniers, albeit sceptics, with a reason to stick to the old fossil formulae.

Just for the record, there are three major river catchments broadly labelled the Northern Rivers, which lie between the Great Dividing Range and the Coral Sea. The Tweed near the Queensland border, the Richmond River tributary where Lismore is situated and the Clarence River Catchment, south of the Queensland border, the biggest catchment area apart from the Murray River. Apart from the Clarence River itself, it has 24 tributaries and creeks – including the substantial Nymboida and Mann Rivers.

Lismore floods

The ongoing Northern Rivers flooding has left us with images of devastation with particularly Lismore almost completely submerged by the Wilson River, a tributary of the Richmond River.

Yet Grafton on the Clarence River was barely affected. It was not that there was not the same huge volume of water, but Grafton has a 17 km long levee running through the city; the levee is 8.13 metres in height. The flood reached 7.66 metres, and therefore if there were any breaches, they could have been sandbagged relatively easily. Where there was flooding in Grafton it was just the direct amount of rainwater falling within the levee, and the pumps unable to remove it quickly enough. It was suggested to me that those living here are acutely aware of the town being prone to flooding, and the cost of pumps to prevent such limited flooding are prohibitively expensive. That is the key word to describe the level of risks that a community should bear for a particularly flood prone area.  In blunt terms, with the climate in flux should we encourage re-construction on water?

I was informed by a hydrologist that there is a finite capacity of clouds to hold rain, and if this was calculated out in terms of how high the levee level in Grafton should be, it would be 9.17 metres. Thus, Grafton is still not completely flood proof. Therefore, the question arises as to whether raising the height of the levee another metre is worth the expense.

By contrast, South Grafton mostly escaped flooding because it was built on a hill.

Lismore, Grafton and Maclean were originally built as ports when there was no other feasible way of getting produce in and out of the region. Ships could be loaded and unloaded and it was in the interest of the populace to keep the rivers dredged – but that did not stop floods occurring. The population was smaller and the memories of past floods were sufficiently fresh for the building floors to be kept as clear as possible.

In a previous blog I talked about the expertise the Dutch have developed in dealing with floods since the disastrous North Sea flood of 1953. I wondered whether we had ever tapped into such expertise. In response to this question, I was directed to the 2017 Report entitled: Flood Safety in the Clarence Valley Feasibility study into flood mitigation measures to make ‘Room for the River’”, prepared for the Clarence Valley Council.

In this study, six post-graduate students from Delft University of Technology (Delft TU), one of the top universities in the world across a wide range of technologies, were part of the collaboration. Part of the Dutch solution is to maximise the ability of the floodplain to absorb the excess water – hence the name “Room for the River”. It is not a universal panacea but minimising the number of trees, not to mention housing, on the flood plain does help in a flood where the detritus such as tree logs can cause immense destruction, especially if there are barrages across the river that may be vulnerable to fast flowing detritus ramming into them. Also, if there is a lot of such detritus, houses on stilts – the typical Queenslander – are not immune but also may be knocked over by the combined force of the water and uprooted vegetation.

The Report concluded by saying that the impact of flooding in urban areas of the Clarence Valley can be reduced by making use of the storage capacity of floodplains. Currently, no urban flooding occurs for the 5 year average recurrence interval (ARI) flood events. The urban flooding during a 20 year ARI flood event, can be mitigated by using only the storage capacity of the Southampton Floodplain.

To prevent urban areas from flooding during the 50 year ARI flood event (and higher order flood events), more extensive measures need to be taken. The combination of heightening the levees around Grafton and making use of the Southampton Floodplain, Baker’s Swamp and the Clarenza Floodplain should be investigated. Around Maclean, no scenarios were modelled but some upstream measures showed a reduction in the impact of flooding of Maclean as well.  

For the Swan Creek Floodgate, more research into the cause for the occurring stability problems is required. In order to maintain the floodgate’s function in the future, one could apply one of the proposed solutions. For the Maclean Levee Walls, piping problems are identified, which could lead to stability problems. This report shows the possibility of using floodplains as flood mitigation strategy in the Clarence Valley. Agricultural areas can be inundated in case of high discharges.

The most common strategy nowadays is increasing levee heights, which only solves the problem locally. By using the storage capacity of floodplains, one could solve flooding regionally as the storage of water influences downstream areas too. An example is the upstream measures taken near Grafton, which also reduce flooding in Maclean. However, to implement the strategy of creating more ‘Room for the River’, a shift in mitigation strategies is needed. This shift in mitigation strategy could be a long-term solution to reduce flood impact in urban areas in the Clarence Valley, and possibly other flooding-vulnerable areas in Australia.

Having said that the Report was open about its limitations in saying “The financial aspects have not been taken into account for any proposed simulation or solution in this chapter. For example, information on execution costs, material costs and project costs is unknown. If a budget-objective would have been taken into account for the multi-criteria analysis, possibly other scenarios would have been assessed in more detail. Due to the limit time of this study and lack of knowledge no financial assessment has been made.

The reason I concentrated on this Report was because of the Dutch contribution and how Grafton has been relatively unscathed, unlike Lismore. On reading another 2017 report on Lismore about the prospect of flooding, there seemed to be an attitude more of defiance rather than admitting a need to do anything radical, apart from saying that the town centre was historically placed right on the river, no longer important. There were many photographs of houses on stilts in this Report, which said that 13 metres was the height limit, as if to say, such housing provided immunity. Lismore, with its topography of hills and valleys, presents its own problems, but perhaps the solution is to move the whole city centre, especially as it becomes uninsurable.

For Governments with grand designs and recognising the Northern area catchments are combined into a crucially productive areas of the State, perhaps it is worthy of expenditure rather than the umpteenth sporting stadium or having an inland railway stretching from Boondoggle 1 to Boondoggle 2.

There have been many Reports. Given that climate change is altering the narrative to a need for urgent action, why is the whole area of flood mitigation not a prime expenditure item foreshadowed in the Federal Budget just handed down?

The Island Part II

The view of the Gut from Five Rivers Lookout

This follows on the first part of Bill’s Kimberley adventure from Kununurra and Wyndham to pick up a hire care including his introduction to the Wandjina and describes waiting for the car to be fixed; fittingly the intermission in the most northernmost town in Western Australia, the prime port for the export of livestock.

It was near dusk. They had reached the town. They had found the car and Bill confirmed quickly that it had two flat tyres.

At last, Bill had reached the opening paragraph of his travelogue. There was the vehicle…

They dropped him off at the garage. They’d said: “Why not wait until morning?” But Bill wanted the car fixed.  The guys in the workshops were still working on other vehicles but the boss looked Bill up and down and said “OK, we’ll fix the car. “

They’d seen the car — it had been there for days. And they had the requisite tyres in stock. Bill was somewhat surprised — they had the tyres, and they were prepared and come and change them. Bill was only to learn later that the Avis people had telephoned, and the garage was expecting him. They were only slightly grumpy with him turning up as late as he did, but they were not prepared to do anything until he arrived.

The other doctors had hovered and continued to press him to stay in the Port. Bill again refused. He wanted to get back — no reason except he had no gear with him; and he was a creature of habit. He wanted to wake up in in his motel bed with his own familiar comforts, including his particular non-allergic shaving cream.

The senior specialist’s manner had a slight edge as if he wanted to get to his motel. He had done enough for Bill.

A minor concession: “We’ll drop you off up at the hospital where you can get something to eat, someone will surely be able to drop you off back at the car.” — The garage owner said he would bring the car up to the hospital, because they’d also need to do a quick wheel alignment — and that would give him time to eat.

The hospital was on the edge of town. Once they had dropped him off, he went up the steps and found what passed for a doctor’s lounge.

He sat down and it was not long before a guy whom he recognised from his student days walked in. This doctor had been a few years behind him at medical school. Bill remembered this guy’s name was Graham. It’s funny that people who have a regard for one another, but haven’t seen one another for years can quickly pick up the threads of their intervening careers. Graham had come to the Port soon after his first year residency and liked the area. He offered a Bill a drink. Dinner had been early. There were biscuits and some cheese in the fridge — perhaps a very few pieces of fruit. Bill said no worries — he would eat when he got back to Town.

Graham himself opened a can of beer and sat at the edge of the lounge. He lived at the hospital. A few others moved into the room and went for the fridge. It was very low-key. They talked briefly to Graham about a patient; Graham said he would go and see him later.

Graham was a contemplative man. He seemed relaxed in his body, yet his face bore a serious gaze.

Graham sat quietly looking at Bill in the deepening shadows of the room, still sipping his beer. He worried that Bill would not eat, but Bill said he was more alert on an empty stomach — and he had only a little of his beer.

Graham said, “Watch the night. The cattle come out on the road when you least expect it.” Bill asked about kangaroos. Graham responded by saying, “Watch the cattle; they are complete bastards. Anyway, there are few kangaroos in this area. But the cattle just come out of nowhere. The first couple of kilometres are not too bad. But after the Intersection, the country is alive with the stupid bastards.”

At that point, the garage owner appeared. Everything was ok. As for the tyres that he’d replaced, he said: “Bald as buggery. Rat shit, both of them, but I put them in the boot for you.” Bill said thanks, and took the keys. He thanked Graham for the warning, put down his half empty can, said goodbye and walked down the steps to the car.

The hill behind the hospital had almost disappeared into the night. The town itself was now consumed in its shadows. The garage owner had left with the parting shot: “Hire cars dragged up from the Big Smoke — good for city driving, but shit here! Anyway, if you drive carefully, you should miss everything, as long as it doesn’t move. Thank God, there are no emus in this part of the world.” He departed with a faint laugh.

Bill on the move now. The moon cast a faint light — headlights full on, passing the derestriction sign, he was headed back to base. Still, he felt uncomfortable against the hard vinyl seat back. The white lines of the road streamed under the yellow stare of the car lights. No other light anywhere. The scenery had become amorphous; no longer the sweeping watercolour vistas which had absorbed him during the afternoon. Now he was concentrated on the road and the accompanying distance signs. (To be completed)

Rupert could not have said it better

Ketanji Brown Jackson

One of life’s inexplicable wonders is how Harvard can produce someone as grounded and poised and principled as Ketanji Brown Jackson and also someone as unmoored and annoying and unscrupulous as Ted Cruz.

Jackson’s confirmation hearing start to finish is proved a marathon of high drama and low farce.

Just a comment in the Washington Post, saying it all about the puerile performances led by the Number One Disliked Senator, “the Saurian Cruz Slip”, at the confirmation of Justice Jackson to the Supreme Court.

Mouse Whisper

Invasion of Poland (1939)
Casualties and losses
Germany: 16,343 killed, 3,500 missing, 30,300 wounded Slovakia: 37 killed, 11 missing, 114 wounded USSR: 1,475 killed or missing, 2,383 wounded Poland: 66,000 dead, 133,700 wounded, 694,000 captured

As this blog mentioned some time ago, this campaign lasted 38 days. The Russo-Ukranian War reaches this day on April 3. A month has passed, as the media has noted, but a month is a short time when February is factored into any comparison. Above are figures from Google but even if there may be certain caveats, it is a not bad estimate. At that time, Poland had a population of 35 million; then over 5 million were killed in World War II, including 90 per cent of the Jewish population.

Looking at the above figures, with it coming in late to share the spoils, Russia should not have the emblem of Bear, but more Hyaena.

Final Question

Is Mariupol the Russian’s equivalent of the German’s Stalingrad?

Before the Russo-Ukrainian war, Mariupol’s population was 446,103

Before World War II, Stalingrad’s population was 445,476.

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? 

Concept village – mining, quarantine …

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.

Essential Quality

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.

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.

South-west wilderness

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 herder

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.

Sarah Island, Macquarie Harbour

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 – Ohotata Kore

I once had a Welsh friend, the navigator who sat beside the driver in those car rallies where the object seems to be to charge along tracks in the bush, often at night, at terrifying speeds. The navigator’s job was to keep his eyes on the map under torchlight and bark at the driver the instructions in regard to what the road in front was about to do. In other words, he did not look at the road; his only instrument was the map. Therefore, his accurate reading of the map was crucial to survival. Year after year he did this. Then one day, in mid rally, he told the driver to stop. He folded the map, got out of the car and never rallied again. In his case, he had lost his nerve.

In my case, I am writing my 105th blog – 105 being the non-emergency contact number for the police in New Zealand, and “non-emergency” at the head of this piece in Maori. In my case, have I lost the inclination to keep writing? Mine is not writer’s block. I know what “writer’s block” is. I have stopped writing for months while I have wrestled with not being able to see the logical or credible path forward. It is not that I have run out of ideas; it is just that there is a spaghetti junction in my mind, and which strand is the best to follow is not immediately clear.

I always admired Alistair Cooke. I listened to his “Letter from America” for years until his death. Yet when I re-read them, many are covered in the crustiness of age. Not all; some remain very relevant. Nevertheless, I always wished to emulate Cooke. There is always in him the adventurous, curious, cultivated mind. There is always something or somebody you wish to emulate at any point of time. That is the nature of civilisation, and dare I say, democracy.

This is a soliloquy in working out whether by writing this blog, I have said all I have to say to myself. After all, a blog to me is an aide-memoire before old age murders my facility not only to remember but also to make some sense of the trail that has twisted and turned in front of me for so many years. Generally, it depends on whether your map has coincided with that in front of you – and whether, if ever, you lose your nerve. However, unlike my friend, the navigator, you need a clear rear vision mirror and not one clouded in bulldust.

Our St Patrick’s Day

I have Irish ancestry; in fact, since my grandfather was born in Ireland, I am eligible for Irish citizenship. I looked at what is involved some years ago and said why would I do that at my age? I am Australian; I do not need a dual nationality, irrespective of what ephemeral advantages that might bring, such as the national anthem. The Irish national anthem is one forged by fire in 1911; Australia’s doggerel was composed for a concert of the Highland Society of New South Wales in 1878.

I have been registered to practise medicine in the Republic for years and like all good unionists joined the Irish Medical Organisation and even attended some of their conferences. I am shedding membership in Irish organisations of which I am a member. I have done courses in Irish, both contemporary and Old – and nothing has stuck. Except I can pronounce Niamh and Saiose.

Thus, what is left to us is acknowledgement of St Patrick’s Day. Gone are the days of faux leprechauns decked out in four-leaf clover (I was reminded this week that the world record for a stalk of clover is 56 leaves). However, blarney is what those blessed with Irish genes are contained in each Bushmill drop.

Why is it that on one day of the year Irish whiskey becomes palatable, but that is a trifle harsh, especially when it is 10 years’ old malt. The Irish drink Guinness; the elderly elsewhere call it stout. To me they are equally to be avoided. I dislike the creaminess, which spills over to many of the other Irish beers. Yet after the first two pints, it does become more tolerable.

Now Irish cuisine is another matter. It has the breadth of experience of a mashed potato abetted by cuts of meat, including mince, a step up from offal – some of which incidentally I like, as long as it is not brains, heart, lungs or sweetbreads.

In any event, we sat down to a meal of shepherd’s pie with red cabbage and apples. We did have enough potato not to add colcannon and enough cabbage not to need corned beef – other staples of Irish cuisine! Potato bread was piled up on a separate plate.

As it coincided with my Portuguese language class, I offered a toast to the class with green coloured water. You see, the Portuguese have a variety of wine which they called vinho verde. Actually, it is not green, it is straw-coloured. In fact, it is a white wine from that eponymous region of Portugal along the River Douro. I don’t think my teacher got the joke.

My celebration of my Irish heritage thus is reduced to an annual meal of modest proportions and a certain latter-day sparseness in my quaffing.

I am not one for Bloomsday, although at one of those pub celebrations, I once saw across the bar somebody who in profile uncannily resembled Katherine Mansfield. She is one of several women in history who have always fascinated me and whom I wished that I could have met.

I have shivered in the Celtic Twilight and stood in homage of William Butler Yeats and his wife, George, at their grave in Drumcliff Co Sligo. As the Irish Times reported at his final interment in 1948, he having died in France in early 1939 and his remains transferred after WWII to Ireland.

THERE WAS a veil of mist over the bare head of Ben Bulben yesterday afternoon when the remains of William Butler Yeats were buried in Irish soil. Soft grey rain swept in from the sea, soaking the Irish tricolour that lay upon the plain wooden coffin, as the body of the poet was laid at last in the churchyard of Drumcliffe.

Ben Bulben

But strangest of all my experiences in the Emerald Isle was the day I was striding across the Burren in Co Clare and I began to run because it had started to rain. I then had the strongest feeling I have ever had of déjà vu. A small boy also running, a boy in shreds and patches. No, I’m not completely mad; just Irish.

Let me fish off Cape St Mary’s

It is just a matter of my association of St Patrick’s day and the Western Australian election. It is tortuous but let me explain.

Western Australia has just witnessed the biggest rejection of being an Australian that one could ever imagine. I immediately thought of the landslide elections which have taken place in Queensland in 1974 and then in 2012. It was a matter of personalities, and if Queenslanders take a set against you then it’s “good night nurse”, as multiple “Mexicans” have found out.

However, the genesis of the Western Australian terramoto is different. The population has embraced secession with an unbridled intensity.

What WA thought of us in 1933

While the victory may partially be attributed to the current strength of the Western Australian economy, with the iron ore prices being high and Brazil being a “basket case”, the root cause lies in secessionist sentiments. Premier McGowan has been able to pull off what his State tried to do by legislative changes in the 1930s. He has seceded from the rest of Australia by just closing the borders when the Virus appeared, continuing it well after it was justified on public health reasons, thus thumbing his nose at the Prime Minister. His course of action was endorsed by the Liberal Party wipeout at the recent election.

Yet if there was one incident that set McGowan off, it was the Ruby Princess affair. He was incensed by the NSW Government’s cavalier handling of that incident, and he has used Premier Berejiklian as a punching bag ever since when it has suited him. Berejiklian seems to evoke this visceral response from other Premiers. They see through her “goodie-two-shoes teacher’s pet” persona.

The border issue made some sense when Australia was working out the adversary Virus and NSW was allowing the Virus to rip through Australia via the Ruby Princess debacle. Then progressively as Australia worked out a uniform public health response, it made less and less sense in any public health interpretation and more to political animosities to keep the borders closed.  The pain in developing this uniform strategy should not be underestimated nevertheless.

Border closure became an overt political device by the less populous States, none better manipulated than by McGowan.

It is interesting to note that during the 1890s the group that pushed Western Australia towards Federation were Eastern Goldfield miners around Kalgoorlie. Given that gold had not been discovered until a few years before, it showed how quickly a mining group could gain an influential position. Western Australia then had a small population located in a huge land mass, where cattle occupied grass castles; grain was been grown in fertile south-west; whaling was concentrated around Albany; a pearling industry had been started around Broome; and for a time, sandalwood was the major export.

Some voices suggested that New Zealand would be more relevant within the nascent Federation, but in the end by 1901, Western Australia had joined but New Zealand had declined.

Nevertheless, secessionism always close to the surface. If the Federal Government had paid heed to the history of the Western Australian secessionist movements, it would have recognised the dangerous course McGowan has pursued. It is extremely difficult now to achieve actual secession constitutionally, as the path to this was effectively closed during the 1930s. The border closure issue remains and will persist as long as the Federal Government fails to confront the situation.

Now why would I connect this secessionist movement with St Patrick’s Day?

Iceberg alley, St John’s

Whenever I think of the Irish, apart from my Australo-Irish heritage, I think of Newfoundland. When one goes to Newfoundland, one realises that Mother Nature is Irish. In the St John’s harbour on the first day of summer, there are icebergs still. Well, actually summer begins on 16 June when the trees have burst into foliage, and then there is a two-week moratorium before the mosquitos emerge, and the battle is joined.

The other factor in my memory was how Irish Newfoundland felt for me. The “Newfie” accent has more than a hint of the brogue, but it was the music which confirmed that Newfoundland was part of Irish diaspora. To hear the group, the Irish Descendants, singing Let me Fish Off Cape St Mary’s is to hear the heart of the diaspora. The cliffs from which this fishing port overlooks the Atlantic Ocean could be part of the West Coast of Ireland. It was ironic when I was there that fishing for cod, once the mainstay of the fishing industry, was prohibited so far had the fish stocks fallen. The ban came in 1992, and it was 20 years before the cod returned in numbers. One could still get cod’s tongue, a local delicacy but then it came from “aways”. I think somebody might have said Iceland.

And what the hell has this to do with Western Australia? Well, Newfoundland had been created a separate dominion apart from Canada in 1907. In effect it was a separate country. At the same time in 1934, while certain elements in Western Australia were agitating for secession, the Newfoundlanders were doing the opposite. The Great Depression had sent them perilously close to the financial wall, and so they joined the Canadian Federation giving up their self-governing status and adding Mainland Labrador to form the present province. The fact that Newfoundland is much the same distance to Dublin as to Ottawa did not influence the “Newfie” intent, but then it is not in their makeup to calibrate distance as a sign of loyalty.

Both in Australia and Canada shift in status has depended on constitutional recognition. In the past when there are concerns of disease spread, the methods of quarantine including border closure are constitutionally the responsibility of the Federal Government. Setting up a public relations manoeuvre and calling it a “national cabinet” in the end showed that the Federal Government was just shifting its constitutional responsibility to the States so they could cop the blame if matters went wrong as they did in Victoria.

McGowan is in the favourable position of being able to have the same advantageous GST position, as heading a State of the Commonwealth of Australia.

However, he is perceived as having had a landslide electoral victory when he shook the secessionist tambourine for all its worth, Western Australia the de facto nation holding as hostages many of the electoral Federal foes including the controversial duo of Porter and Reynolds. Moreover, Western Australia in all likelihood will lose one of the seats in coming redistribution, and therefore the already nervous Liberal Party will be forced to play “musical seats”. Thus, an already factionalised Liberal Party has all the ingredients to tear itself apart

McGowan now knows that if the Federal Government holds back GST money from Western Australia or take any other perceived discriminatory action, it will be beaten up electorally there.

McGowan knows that the Federal Government is not willing to stop him meddling with the borders. He does not need any constitutional change to effect secession without metaphorically “leaving the building”. He has effectively done so, and any arcane legal processes were brushed aside when he effectively usurped the quarantine power of the Commonwealth, which unequivocally is a constitutional power of the Federal Government.

Therefore, the Prime Minister is faced with this situation, first enunciated by Bishop Morton, of Morton’s fork.

Ironically, one of the Prime Minister’s strongest acolytes is named Morton, a Pentecostal blow-in from NSW who was in charge of the WA Liberal Party, who inherited Tangney, a very safe Liberal seat along the Swan River. No longer if the recent State election is any guide.

What happened in the 1930s was because the Federal Government of both Australia and Canada held the cards. The constitutional barriers were too great in Australia once the deed had been done in 1901; and Newfoundland simply could not afford being a separate nation.

But as they say in the native argot, McGowan is “giving it a red hot go” to create his own nation.

Oh, not another transparent bureaucrat

“At ASIO, we’re conscious that the names and labels we use are important,” he said. “Words matter. They can be very powerful in how they frame an issue and how they make people think about issue.”

Thus, spake Mr Burgess, the head of the Australian academy of spooks. He is “friendly” Mike to us punters. In a recent media interview, we get the full story of the poor boy from a migrant family who was the first in his family to go the University and moreover to undertake electrical engineering. Before the image of the “log cabin” childhood is further invoked, he outs himself as being a cyber nut, and thus he lives in a world where his simulacra in other jurisdictions try to out-hack one another.

Nevertheless, there is a cloaked anecdote about the “nest of spies” that his outfit has been able to quash or whatever – there is no detail; just an enticing tit-bit for the writer. Spooks must invoke mystery and plot right back to Walsingham.

One of the most concerning situations is when somebody in the spook business embarks on this sort of exercise, because those who run the organisation can try and present themselves as an ordinary person, you know the football team follower, has a dog et cetera and that – at the same time at budget time invokes all sorts of horror befalling the nation if the “Spook Budget” is not increased.

The security services exist to keep their rival services at bay, foiling disablers of major computer networks, and preventing such anti-community activities such as the recent Neo-Nazi gathering at Hall’s Gap.

The essential ingredient is to have a critical evaluation of the effectiveness of such activities. Burgess in the comments quoted above also maintains that no longer will they reveal whether the dangers are from the extremist right or left wing groups or delineating whether the terrorist groups are linked to ISIS or whatever. He said that his service will restrict itself to saying that such activities will be characterised as being “belief or ideologically based”. It is subtle, but in fact he is saying he will be further constricting information, but generalising the threat.

I wonder, as I pass through the airport screening how useful testing for explosives has been, because some mad guy tried to detonate explosives in the heels of his shoes on a Miami bound flight in 2001. How many copycats have been detected at Australian airports, at what cost, given also that there is a large group that is not tested anyway?

The January episode in Washington showed how useful security is when a crowd is determined to riot to the point of insurrection.  Mostly not at all.

I want to be assured that our security services don’t spend their money on profiling their operatives. I would like to believe that given the Australian security service has a history of conservative political association, this has dissipated and been replaced by a politically neutral service. Parliamentary surveillance needs to include people able to contain the secretive authoritarian technocrat that Burgess embodies.

Brigadier Sir Charles Chambers Fowell Spry CBE, DSO

Attempts were made to recruit me when ASIO, under Brigadier Spry, was a political action committee for the Menzies Government concerned with “reds under the bed”; and riddled with proto-fascist operatives such as elements of Moral Re-Armament, the leader of which Frank Buchman openly praised Hitler.

Charles Spry himself was an affable chap, with a penchant for Scotch whisky which he shared with the Prime Minister. However, behind that persona was a very determined anti-communist and where scruples could be left on the dressing table as if they were cuff links.

Whitlam set up the Hope Royal Commission in 1974, the report from which has formed the basis for the modern-day intelligence services. A raid on ASIO as ordered by Lionel Murphy, then the Commonwealth Attorney-General in 1973, would today be unimaginable.

In a very perceptive thesis on the organisation published in 2018, Coventry concluded:

Intelligence and security have become second nature to Australians and anyone else in the US ‘hub and spokes’ system. To argue for the abolition of ASIO in the present time is unpalatable; for good reason. The neoliberal phenomenon of globalisation means that targets of terrorism are, as Nixon feared, ubiquitous. Any citizen or corporation or NGO located overseas can be seen as an extension of a targeted government; all it takes is a careless comment by a public official. It is often overlooked that governments have a clear role in provoking terrorism, including within in society, though many may wish to believe this threat comes purely from the mental illness, barbarity and jealousy of others.

In 2010, the former director general of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the Chilcot Inquiry that she had warned the Blair Government (1997-2007) that involvement in the Iraq War would result in higher levels of home-grown terrorism. She was of course vindicated. It must be said that ASIO has done well so far to keep the Australian Government and citizenry from the kind of harm exhibited overseas.

That last comment is reassuring, but that was written before Burgess became the ASIO Director-General in 2019, and he is running the line of foreign interference and espionage being the paramount dangers (rather than terrorism) which suits his technologically-driven agenda. He reminds me of the old “cold war warriors”, himself ideologically driven as far as his background has given meaning to that word (or words).

Australia needs an Attorney-General to withstand Burgess’ undoubtedly very powerful personality coupled with his wide access to information. To believe that Australia’s security organisation does not actively participate in cyber warfare would be incredibly naïve.

I am now an avid watcher of the activities of Mike Burgess. I look forward to his first interview with Crikey.

Mouse Whisper

I never did like that skunk Pepe Le Pew. His characterisation gave rodents a bad name, but he is the latest casualty in the war against the predatory male. Looney Tunes have shown him the door.  The comedian, David Chappelle, who once said that the famous can always become infamous but not unfamous, says of the skunk: Pepe, whom he laughed at as a kid, later through an adult lens makes him realise: “What kind of … rapist is this guy?” 

Wait a minute! I stand corrected. Skunks are not rodents; they are of the same ilk as Tim Wilson’s cabal of wolverines.

Pepe Le Pew, about to be cancelled

Modest Expectations – Dalmatians

“The label racist is not one I would apply like that,” Garland said evenly — without a hint of are-you-a-dolt? in his voice. “Implicit bias just means every human being has biases. That’s part of what it means to be a human being. The point of examining implicit biases is to bring our conscious mind up to our unconscious mind and to know when we are behaving in a stereotyped way. Everybody has stereotypes. It’s not possible to go through life without working through stereotypes. Implicit biases are the ones we don’t recognize. That doesn’t make you a racist.”

Merrick Garland

In his current Senate confirmation hearings for Attorney-General, Merrick Garland shows in this above response to one of those rubber red-necked Republicans what an acquisition he would have been to the US Supreme Court if it had not been for the Kentucky Kernel, Mitch McConnell refusing to let his nomination be considered. Yes, the sobriquet kernel. Is that not a nut case? 

The Sewers of Canberra are not Backchannels 

And less welcome sexual attentions in the form of sexual harassment also have been a standing problem. In decades past there was a discreet backchannel operating between the prime minister’s office and the opposition leader’s office to keep sexual misconduct in check. Each side kept an eye out for rogue behaviour by members of the other and duly alerted the leaders’ offices accordingly. That system fell into disuse years ago. 

I was surprised reading that piece by Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald. Given that I was very senior in one of those offices, the “backchannel” must have been sealed up at the time I was there. I knew of no conversations. It was a time when Parliament House was much smaller, and there were few offices which were not the size of shoeboxes; people lived cheek by jowl. Yet it was a time when there was considerable fraternisation across all political parties and the media, with the non-members bar the central meeting place. Parliamentarians came down rarely.

The Lobby was the place where there was considerable mixing, and I remember one prominent journalist supressing his laughter. Something was happening at a table behind us. Judi Morosi was feeding Jim Cairns. Well known non-relationship, as there was considerable smokescreen about extra marital calisthenics. I was not around during the Ainslie Gotto saga, but hardly a time I thought when Gorton would have been exchanging notes with Whitlam. These were the few associations then which attracted notoriety in the media.

The number of staff was far smaller, but even so, there were not many inglenooks in the old Parliament House where inappropriate behaviour would not be discovered. In fact, given the intimate environment, not much was unknown around Canberra. There were a number of consensual arrangements, but drunkenness was more the problem.

King’s Hall

It was also somewhat ironic that in those days, having finished in the office when I left Parliament House often after 1.00 am, it was just a wave to the guys on the reception desk at the King’s Hall entrance. King’s Hall was a very open space – especially at 1.00 am. Any antics would thus have been on a large stage.

The advent of security, presumably at the Ministerial entrance of the new Parliament House, did not save Brittany Higgins; as has been reported the security even facilitated the entry into the Ministerial office, although it must have been clear that she was too drunk to sign her name properly.  These days it would appear that there is a very short backchannel between security and coverup within the burrows of government

Facesaver?

To my everlasting shame, I have never used or looked at Facebook. I must have missed something judging by all the furore. Facebook is a free service. I choose not to use it. I remember when Facebook first came into prominence at a time when Zuckerberg had not yet worked how to make it profitable. It was originally a means by which a kid in college could communicate without the distasteful business of actually meeting somebody face to face. There was more than a hint of misogyny in the original motivation for Facebook.

Zuckerberg introduced advertisements into Facebook very early on after he launched it in 2004, but not until 2007 did he launch the first co-ordinated advertisement campaign.

He said at the time: “The core of every user’s experience on Facebook is their page, and that’s where businesses are going to start as well…The first thing businesses can do is design a page  to craft the exact experience they want people to see.”

Before he even made money, there was a film made in 2010 about Zuckerberg called “The Social Network”.He was only 26. Aaron Sorkin, the guy who wrote “West Wing” wrote the screen play and promulgated the Zuckerberg myth – the socially awkward nerd who created the greatest social communication platform the World has ever experienced. To put that into perspective, Rupert Murdoch was a running a small Adelaide newspaper when he was 26.

Zuckerberg did not start making money on Facebook advertisements until 2012, and apparently the business has worked. He never promoted Facebook as a news channel. It just happened that organisations jumped on it because of the popularity of that and other platforms the company acquired. In initially opposing the Australian law, Facebook argued that publishers willingly post news to its site, which helps them reach a larger audience. It says that the model differs from Google’s, as publishers don’t voluntarily provide articles that appear in the firm’s search results. The Australian proposal penalises Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for.

As the Facebook boss in Australia went on to say – “The proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content. It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia.

In the Washington Post this week, Roger McNamee, in reviewing “the current state of play today with the tech industry” has stated “Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter aided the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and have contributed to the slow national response to a deadly pandemic. The algorithms on which the firms rely amplify hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories, and their recommendation engines manipulate behaviour because doing so is good for business.”

Has Facebook learnt from the experience with Cambridge Analytica, which shamelessly stole data and manipulated data as part of the Trump 2016 election?  Arguably Facebook served to amplify such behaviour and this remains an unanswered question in the reports of this feud the Australia Government is having with Facebook.

Facebook pulled the plug on the news pages, and there was the predictable response of those deprived of a free service. However, it gave Facebook an opportunity to see in the real world what the response was. In fact, the news media responded very quickly, by setting up alternative pathways to Facebook. Therefore, in a far-off country, Facebook was able to sample the reaction and appear to give the politicians a victory.

Zuckerberg is obsessed with maintaining his monopoly. He believes he has the “old media” covered, but by his actions, in a few hours he set up a “wildfire” of innovation to compensate for the loss of Facebook. If this goes on long enough, the next raft of innovators will appear to challenge the Facebook sovereignty.

On Monday, Facebook agreed to the Australian government’s added amendments to the proposed code. That included a two-month mediation period, giving the two sides more time to negotiate commercial deals that could help Facebook avoid having to work under the code’s provisions.

In other words, Facebook has not lost – not by a long shot. They have bought time, and to Zuckerberg, what does he care if Morrison and Frydenberg claim victory. “To me, victory in always unconditional”, Zuckerberg might say.

I still believe that if Facebook is making such big profits in this country, the Government should tax them more than the current 2% for the benefit of the community; not push them into a Mafia-style protection racket to benefit a lot of old men who are on the obsolete side of history. Just the normal lazy politicians not prepared to confront the need for an equable tax.  And what they said originally probably remains true. Facebook is expert in gathering data – and they certainly gained some this week in the response to their actions, which they will already be dicing and slicing to work out what is what. Has the Government collected the same data to use in future negotiations?

Quids from Quarantine

Anonymouse

You always know there’s a quid to be made when the big players start to throw their hats in the ring, and in the past few weeks we have had the Wagners in Queensland, Lindsay Fox in Victoria, and now Sam Shahin in South Australia, all wanting to get into the quarantine business.  The Howard Springs facility has shown the effectiveness of a low-tech facility offering separate cabin accommodation, individual air conditioning, access to fresh air, and importantly, little requirement for staff to enter cabins while they are occupied; worker accommodation on site is an added benefit. Re-purposed it might be, but it’s turned out to be a good solution. Nevertheless, it is subject to the vagaries of a monsoonal wet season

Wellcamp Airport outside Toowoomba has ‘abundant’ room for the proposed 1,000 bed quarantine facility, with another 300 beds for staff.  As noted in an earlier edition of this blog, a Boeing 747 can land at Wellcamp – it was designed for large scale cattle export, avoiding the need to move the cattle through Brisbane. Unlike the backward planning endemic in government circles, Wellcamp has much forward capacity – its terminal is large and there is plenty of space. International flights can go direct to Wellcamp.

The Wagner Brothers own the land around the Wellcamp airport so they could start work immediately – and seemingly they already have the blessing of the Queensland Government.

Lindsay Fox’s Avalon Airport proposal already has the imprimatur of the Victorian Premier, which might well see a sod turned for a facility for up to 1000 international arrivals before the others.

Mr Shahin’s proposal to develop a “purpose built” facility outside Tailem Bend was very promptly booted by the SA Government which then announced the opening of a dedicated CBD hotel for positive COVID-19 cases. The SA Health Minister said the Tailem Bend plan lacked a hospital in good proximity. Tailem Bend’s hospital is not the “level” of hospital required because, according to the SA Health Minister, “If someone develops COVID, they can very rapidly develop to the level that they need an ICU and isolation – Tailem Bend doesn’t have an ICU.” Tailem Bend is one hour from Adelaide on a dual carriageway. The problem with health care perspectives in South Australia government is that it is a health care wasteland once you lose sight of North Terrace. For goodness sake!

All of this raises a few questions:

  • If the Commonwealth plans to continue keeping its hands off the quarantine reins, why did it commission a report by former Health Department Secretary and Crown Director, Ms Jane Halton AO PSM, into hotel quarantine?
  • Is there an agreed position on the optimum template for quarantine facilities and is there agreement on how long they will be required – something the Australian community isn’t being told?
  • The figure of 40,000 Australians wanting to return home has been quoted for months. Why is this number not falling? Given the difficulty of getting an exemption to leave Australia – unless of course you are a celebrity or ex-politician – who are taking up the hotel quarantine places if not returning Australians?
  • What is the optimum location for these facilities? Do they really need to be in the middle of the city a block from a tertiary hospital?
  • What percentage of COVID-positive cases in hotel quarantine end up in hospital, and of those, what percentage require ICU (and tangentially, if ICU is such a pressing requirement, why not upgrade ICUs in regional hospitals where quarantine facilities can be located)?

Hotel quarantine is now the single source of any new COVID infection in the Australian community.  “Escaped” COVID has caused problems in Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia, with a greater or lesser impact. Currently Australia faces a hiatus with no new cases. The media is focussing on vaccination. Even with the vaccines rolling out, no one knows how effective they will be at large scale prevention of COVID (as opposed to prevention of serious illness). Quarantine is here to stay for the foreseeable future and is likely to remain the key to opening Australia’s international borders to business and tourists and allowing the Australians overseas who want to return to do so. But it needs to be more affordable and the metropolitan hotel-based quarantine has lost any lustre it had. Did Halton comment on affordability, talk about fair and reasonable charges? See above questions?

The States do not appear in any hurry to hand quarantine back to the Commonwealth; on the contrary, it is the States looking to develop permanent quarantine facilities, presumably with funding by the Commonwealth.

Which brings us back to the National Review of Hotel Quarantine and the point of it all. The sum of the recommendations was that States and Territories should have quality assurance mechanisms and continuous improvement. There needs to be information available to travellers, quarantine options developed for National Cabinet, travel bubbles, and finally the Commonwealth Government consider a “national facility for quarantine”. Did we need this Review to tell us any of this which is just stating the obvious? The undated report was released around October 2020. The author’s name appears only once, in an appendix.

The report did highlight one thing however, and that is the lack of a comprehensive set of data on hotel quarantine.  Then, as now, there appears to be no single accessible source and the daily data are just that. The data provided in the National Review report are as opaque as they are revealing; they highlight the fact that no one knew what was happening with flight crews (we know that now), or exemptions, still a matter of extreme annoyance to the general population who have been serving their own time locked up, and the lack of demographic and hospitalisation data on quarantine inmates. Together with the total number of beds and quarantinees, this is the information most relevant to planning.

What is interesting however, is how difficult it is to find out something as fundamental as how many quarantine places there are – what is Australia’s current quarantine capacity (even the maximum and minimum based on a sliding scale of demand)? Phone calls to State health media elicited no information:  for example, NSW Health – send us an email; Vic Health – we don’t run quarantine, email the Department of Justice; Qld Health – talk to State Disaster Management, Health doesn’t run quarantine; SA Health – send an email; NT Health – has no media contact and no one on the only phone number knew who knew anything … and so it went on. Tasmania was the standout though – there is a media page, headed “Media” – it’s blank. More next week, if any information is forthcoming.

After a year of COVID the matter of quarantine is still being bounced around – a dedicated series of regionally-located facilities (as recommended in this Blog #76 and 78) could have been constructed and commissioned by now, but perhaps doing that lost out in the economic rationality of providing an income stream to the hotel industry while tourism has been shut down. But without the data that show the vaccines are very effective in preventing transmission of COVID, quarantine is here to stay. They may be expensive to develop, but the need for dedicated facilities should not be taken off the table in the current excitement about vaccinations. These facilities can be mothballed and then rolled out again (as with Howard Springs) for the next pandemic – or even a variant of the current – which, as those who analyse these things have said, could be just around the corner. And after all, Ms Halton did recommend a national quarantine approach. 

Déjà vu

I was alerted by the recent activities of that Texan, Senator Ted Cruz … his antics this week reminded me very much of those of another politician early last year, much closer to home.

Let take up the story of Senator Ted. As been reported, the weather in Texas has been appalling – it has taken out the energy grid for the simple reason that the State does not invest in infrastructure, it is a mighty big land mass and the State is run by a group of climate change denialists, including Senator Ted.

So, there is no heating, but further, there is more.  Water pipes have frozen, burst, or the water has become contaminated. In other words, much of the State is without running water; and in any event where it can be tapped, it needs to be boiled.

Pictures of pileups on the interstate highways compound the chaos.

Senator Ted Cruz took a trip out of Texas because his alliterative children, Caroline Camille and Catherine Christiane wanted to go to Cancún in the middle of a Catastrophic pandemic.

As he is alleged to have said, “Look my wife Heidi said to me our children are freezing, let us get out of the hell-hole and go south to Mexico.” As the newspaper said “Also, way to throw your kids under the bus, senator.”

In contrast, as the paper went on, “most responsible parents would have told their tweens that the closest they’re getting to Mexico these days is a chalupa from a drive-through at Taco Bell.”

Instead, the Swift Family Cruz packed a suitcase “the size of a steamer trunk”, left their poodle, Snowflake, behind and dashed off for fun in the sun. This action contravened what CDC has recommended for nearly a year, i.e. that US residents should avoid travel to other countries. The advice was ignored but that it is the way of the Cruz. His problem virtually duplicates that of Australia’s Prime Minister, who disappeared to Hawaii, did not let us in on this voyage north, and all this while Australia burned. The American media, which is less controlled (and apparently more observant) than Australia got onto Cruz almost immediately and there he was, scuttling back to Texas mouthing a number of mutually-conflicting self-serving reasons for him going to the Mexican Resort in the first place.

The American media has shown its public service usefulness (without recourse to Facebook). “There’s no need to reiterate the extraordinarily poor timing of Cruz’s trip while Texas froze. That burro has been beaten to death, shamed, and then beaten some more. This is a look at a man who should be setting an example for the millions of Texans who are aching to travel. But in order to be able to see their families and friends again safely in the future, they’ve followed Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice and stayed home as much as possible. They’ve worn their masks, practiced social distancing, and washed their hands diligently.”

But not our Boy, Ted.

The Prime Minister apparently has stopped asking his wife Jen for advice, at least publicly. There is a political playbook, where “mistruth” is very much part of the narrative – an uncaring narrative which Trump over the years exploited even beyond the wildest nightmare of the original Florentine Editor.

Politicians who flirt with the edges of the narrative, hide in the marginalia, indulge in palimpsest or have their own scriptorium where their life becomes an illuminated manuscript finally have to face that question – are they up to the task of being a genuinely caring person, sensitive to their constituencies? Let’s face it, most aren’t. Unfortunately, the community elects images, not the sordid reality.

By the way Prime Minister, when did you last go to the bushfire ravaged communities to see evidence of the fruits of your Government’s response?

This quote below sets out the damage that Trump has done, and how an insidious callousness has invaded the proto-narcissist political mind, and unfortunately the Cruz scenario will increasingly play out, especially when nobody is told or worse ignored. 

As Jennifer Rubin wrote incisively in the Washington Post in the past week: “Incompetence is not the purview of one party. But when you view politics as theater and grievance-mongering, chances are you are going to shortchange governance, elect a president with no public-sector experience, no interest in learning, no desire to hire competent people and no ability to accept responsibility, and you get something like the covid-19 debacle. Moreover, if your party is hostile to government and exercising regulatory power because it is beholden to a donor class and right-wing ideologues, you will not be prepared for disasters when they strike.”

How very true!   

The King lived; the Prime Minister died

And the Answer is…

a red dawn

where laid

morula upon blades of green

urgency to become

spiky quilted ectoderm

sprouting

teal topknot

emergent wave to

a new world

where neighbours in serried ranks

wave back

until

with swelling yellow belly

we stand among the green detritus

of yesterday

proud that we alone know the answer.

I have a particular reason to remember my time in eSwatini. My wife has a friend who has a large plant nursery in Malkerns in what was Swaziland when I last was there, but is now renamed eSwatini. The Swazis have their own country, ruled by a king who has a penchant for wives. Once a British protectorate, eSwatini is a tiny enclave wedged into a corner between South Africa and Mozambique. It is one of the last absolute monarchies in the World. The capital, Mbabane, lies in the Highveld (1000+ metres), whereas Malkerns lies in the Midveld, (770m), a fertile valley where the mountains form a distant hazy rim.

This is the country like so much of Southern Africa when you leave the coast, the climate is milder, less humid but nevertheless tropical. Behind her property stretched a huge expanse of pineapple cultivation, which prompted me to write the verse which heads this piece.

Our friend’s property was unusual because close to the house she had a large dam, constructed to provide a reliable water supply for the nursery. The dam also attracted hippopotamuses, who would wander up from the river in the nearby Mlilwane wildlife sanctuary, through the pineapples, to spend quality time in the dam. Then they would leave. Several years ago, a worker accidently got between a mother and calf and was trampled to death. Otherwise, the pilgrimages have been peaceful.

More recently, a large Nile crocodile came to share the dam. Crocodiles apparently intermittently appear. This means that going outside is a hazardous exercise, especially for Suzy, her large black dog, which had to be kept inside until the crocodile was captured and returned to the river. Hippopotamuses and crocodiles will happily co-exist, but this crocodile’s presence has acted as somewhat of a deterrent to the Hippo Walk.

What I remember clearly was that the day before we left, my wife and I went for the longest walk that I had done for months because of my progressive tiredness. I knew even then that all was not well, but the walk enlivened me. I felt more freedom, less stiffness, the weakness had evaporated and the pain in my legs had been reduced to a dull ache. The pineapple stroll had been recuperative – or so I thought.

The pineapple stroll

The next day, the pain, the weakness, the stiffness had come back with a bang. For the first time, my denial fell away. I knew that there was something wrong. Fortunately, the bathroom was well supplied with therapy aids which had been installed during my wife’s friend’s husband’s terminal illness.

However, it was not for some weeks later that I saw the doctor on return to Sydney, who immediately diagnosed me and ordered tests, which confirmed the diagnosis. I had seen or been close to a number of doctors in the preceding three months – and this was the first doctor who diagnosed me. Yes, the diagnostician was an orthopaedic surgeon.

As a footnote to describe the headline, King, Mswati III, has just recovered from his COVID infection. His Prime Minister was not so lucky. He died in December of the Virus. Currently, the number of infections in eSwatini is nearing 17,000 with 13,500 having recovered and there being 645 deaths. eSwatini brought in strict anti-COVID measures very early on. In perspective, the population is 1.14m. Infections seem to be dropping as the second wave rolls on.

Mouse Whisper

Tegestologists and labeorphilists. Now there are words which you don’t often use to describe obsessive losers.

Tegestologists have a great excuse to spend time in bars since they collect coasters or beermats. They should probably team up with labeorphilists, or collectors of beer bottles. Having decried the above, I must admit to souveniring the odd coaster, but as for beer bottles, I have transitory labeorphilia but only when they are full of beer.

The object of transitory labeorphilia