Modest Expectations – The Sole of Bond Street

As the pandemic has ploughed on, there is a new collective noun for the experts clamouring for media exposure – an irritation of epidemiologists. After more than 15 months of COVID, the endless stream of epidemiologists called upon to express opinions on television have variously inspired and annoyed, but more often have provided a confusing opinion. For me, the soft-spoken Marie-Louise McLaws, whose family motto is “Spectemur agendo” meaning “we are judged by our actions”, is one such example. Marie-Louise is probably judged by her talking head television profile and she obviously has her fans.

Nevertheless, she has made a pertinent observation as to the vulnerability of Victoria, particularly Melbourne, to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. It is a matter of geography – the ease with which people can move around there as distinct from other major cities in Australia.  Others are chiming in with stochastic analysis, a fancy name to define randomness of these events. Perhaps she has been over-enthusiastic in emphasising some other differences, which probably don’t exist, but the geography argument is a strong one, and the outer suburbs of Melbourne do contain many migrant groups.

Take the Indian population, for instance; they are clustered on opposite sides of Melbourne, which is the favoured destination of Indian migrants over Sydney. If you believe the blurb, that is:

Indians living in Melbourne love:

  • living in Melbourne’s suburbs with safe, accessible transport
  • local supermarkets, Indian grocery stores and restaurants
  • Melbourne’s festivals, museums and cultural events 
  • Victoria’s world-class education system
  • dining out in Melbourne’s renowned restaurants.

All conducive to a very mobile lifestyle, and there are over 56,000 Indian-born Australians in Melbourne, thus about three per cent of Melbourne’s population. Sydney has a smaller population, and it is concentrated in Harris Park and surrounding suburbs in Sydney’s west.  In this century up to 2019, Indian migration was the largest in percentage terms. People should not be coy about country of origin, especially when so many still have strong family links to a country where the virus spread has been out of control. In the midst of a pandemic, such demographic information is important.

I always remember a description of Brisbane, “If Rome was built on seven hills, Brisbane was built on seventy-seven”. Sydney by its geography is also compartmented, and this was well shown in the COVID-19 outbreak on the northern beaches of that city in December last year. This outbreak was easily contained.

However, when the infected were allowed to move around in that well known stochastic process, Brownian movement, as they were from the disembarkation of the Ruby Princess in the middle of the city with access to multiple transport links, then one could call the process, the Berekjlian, after the presiding Premier of the time. But normally it is far more challenging to move around Brisbane and Sydney than Melbourne.

In regard to accessibility, take one suburb of Melbourne, Hawthorn. There are three tram lines running through it and a railway line with at least two stations serving Hawthorn. There are also buses, and the increasing use of private buses to ferry private school children to and from school, Hawthorn and the neighbouring suburbs are a large scholastic reservoir. Added to this Melbourne is very easy to move around inside the rapidly expanding perimeter. The only barrier is the Great Dividing Range which only provides a hurdle to travel in the Dandenongs component. Otherwise, all the other sectors have major highways radiating out from Melbourne, which mean travel is easy.

In Melbourne, some talk nostalgically about living in a “village” rather than a “suburb”. I would dispute that.

At last the Federal Government, a Federal Government dominated by one Sydneysider who lives in an enclave called the Shire, has buckled to the obvious need to have a custom-built quarantine centre in Victoria close to Melbourne. Hopefully more objectivity will be applied to the tendering than much of the scandalous way the Government has gone about business over the past three years. Whether Avalon is the right place or not, it is on pre-existing Commonwealth land and relatively close to Melbourne.

I wonder though if the invaders were not “micro-marauders”, not easily identifiable, would the Governments be adopting the seemingly leisurely pace to get this centre built. Maybe photo-opportunity trips will accelerate the process. In the Northern Territory or even South to Tocumwal in NSW, one can see how quickly facilities, hospitals, airstrips and even a highway were built when the Japanese were on the horizon.

Waleed Aly has waded into the conversation, questioning the validity of singling Melbourne out. As usual he writes persuasively, but I suggest that he reinforces the point that having hotel quarantine in the middle of city with the easiest means of spread of anything, be it people or viruses, is just asking for trouble.

Black Rock, near Melbourne, 1954

He singles out Black Rock as a Melbourne suburb where lockdown was not required. This suburb and the adjoining Beaumaris were developed later from bushland. They lie beyond the terminus of both tram and bus, and therefore have some the characteristics of the Sydney northern beaches suburbs. The distinguishing feature was its isolation. The way it was isolated had a distinct elite character and elitism discourages easy movement.

Despite the intervention of Waleed, as an epidemiologist, Professor McLaws, you made a good point, but in your enthusiasm to prove a point you probably went a wee bit too far.

Scars of 56

Since my Chinese exploits are receiving some interest, here is an excerpt of a book I hope to publish later this year subtitled, “When we were not too Young”. 

Over dinner my father continued to repeat that he wanted to “see China”, whatever that meant, and the only way to “see China” from his point of view was to take the train to the border at Lo Wu and stare across into the country. However, it became clear when he asked if that were possible that, although the train might go through to Lo Wu, all the passengers had to get off the train at Fan Ling, which was about four miles inside the border. Nevertheless, we bought tickets because my father said: “…you never know”. If nothing else, he was awake to serendipitous opportunity.

He had also thought of going across to Macau, which required an overnight boat trip. Macau was then a seedy remnant of the Portuguese empire. He wondered if it would be easier to get closer to China if he went there, but when he inquired about that feasibility, he was quickly disabused. There was a lawless element there and it would not be worth being exposed as a lone traveller. I thought I heard the word “triad” mentioned in the conversation.  

So here we were about to board the train to Lo Wu. The train with the steam-driven locomotive was regulation pre-war with cracked leather seats in the carriages and the views through the windows made even greyer by the grime on the windows. 

The carriage was empty apart from ourselves.

The city straggled away into the New Territories and into a quilt of paddy fields. There were distant mountains, which my father said were probably in China. He stood up and walked along the corridor hoping to get a better view. He came back and confirmed that the mountains were on the Chinese side of the border. I am not sure how he knew but, as always, he was authoritative.

Fanling Station

The train pulled into Fan Ling and the conductor came along telling us to get off. I could feel very clearly my father’s reluctance as he stood up, and slowly climbed down onto the station. At the end of the station, there were a number of Chinese soldiers in green jackets and trousers. They did not seem to be armed but symbolized a line of demarcation between themselves and the Hong Kong constabulary, who were fitted out like London policemen acting with the departing passengers as if they were directing traffic in The Strand.

The Forbidden Land lay beyond – the view entombed in the wintry sunlight.

However, there was one person standing on the station close to the train. He was wearing a hat, scarf and gabardine raincoat. The scarf was drawn up to partially conceal his face He looked across the station and, in an Australian accent, called my father’s name. My father looked up, startled at the recognition. He did not immediately recognize the figure, who lit a cigarette, for a brief moment illuminating his bespectacled face. My father strode up the platform. They shook hands and for five minutes they engaged in what appeared to be animated conversation, my father pointing toward the Chinese border. 

I was distracted by a middle-aged Chinese man, who sidled up to me with his bicycle. In broken English, he said he would take me to the border on his bicycle. It would not cost much; and I could see what China was really like. I hesitated. My father was still in deep conversation, and I looked at the bicycle. Was he going to “dink” me? There seemed to be no other way that I could get on the bicycle, unless I hired it from him. 

I looked out over the rice fields and through the line of houses, which clustered below the station. I could make out the road running north-south which presumably went towards the border.

 “Can I take your bicycle and bring it back?”

The man with the bicycle hesitated. Then he pushed it towards me especially as he saw that I had US dollars in my hand.

“What in God’s name are you doing, John?”

The border at Lo Wu, 1950s

“I thought you wanted to go to the border.”

“On that?” My father’s face split into one of his thin-lipped smiles, which you rarely saw unless he was about to launch into an invective against somebody.

The ferocity of the “On that” seemed to frighten the man with the bicycle, as he took a step back.

“So you are seen pedaling to God knows where wearing completely inadequate gear. If you don’t freeze to death, you are liable to be either shot or captured. John, I suppose you think that all that there will be is a bit of barbed wire and smiling soldiers. Does not work that way – and the last thing I want to happen is my son dead or interned. The last thing I need,” he repeated, “is for my son to be the centre of an international incident.” 

I thought my father was a bit over the top, but I suddenly felt very cold. After all, it was winter and the threadbare trees along the road towards China bent in the wind as if derisively waving me on in my fruitless endeavour.

My father gestured towards the retreating figure on the bicycle. There was no need to wave him away. He disappeared from sight off the edge of the platform.

My father turned and looked back to see the man with whom he had been talking climb onto the train. The Chinese troops did not move. 

My father gestured. “That John is a safer way of travel, but unfortunately you need to be credentialed, as Ted is. I believe he is off to Beijing. However mark my words, I shall get over the border in the next ten years – and more than once.”

We waited for the train to come back. My father was suitably vague about who Ted was, but he worked with a friend of my father who, like Ted, had been a lawyer and, if not a Communist, certainly was a definite shade of cardinal. 

My father was always very sure of himself, but I could never fathom his politics.

Postscript: My father did achieve his goal and did go to China – more than once. My father died in 1970 – so it was quite a feat in the 1960s to do just that.

Burning of the Books

Endless archives

Archives are people, and not the great people, but those who otherwise would leave no trace: the workers, the immigrants, the servicemen, the public servants, and, not least, the Indigenous. Of our collecting institutions, the NAA (National Archives of Australia) is the most truly democratic — of the people, by the people, for the people.

Record keeping, furthermore, is fundamental to the protection of citizens and the prevention of harm.

In a recent article in The Australian, a pertinent excerpt is reproduced above, Gideon Haigh has almost said it all about Assistant Treasurer Stoker and her disdain for retention of the archives – hence it follows who cares about the history of the nation? Should it be reduced to dust or why not to a bonfire?

I am reminded of the Futurist movement, which had its genesis in Italy before the First World War, with its disdain for the past and its concentration on the future with an emphasis on technology, bellicosity and patriotism. It is unsurprising given its behaviour that it was closely identified with the rise of Mussolini which they supported. When I say I am reminded of, I don’t mean to say that Assistant Minister Stoker is a simulacrum of the Futurists. Some of them had original ideas in the arts, a talent that the Minister hides under a bitcoin, having dispensed with that idiomatic past, the bushel.

After all, the Nazis refined this destruction of the past with the burning of 25,000 books in Berlin on May 10th 1933 including a significant amount of the Jewish heritage in Germany. Australia is in a delicate position where there are forces which are leading this country down an authoritarian pathway, where there is no collective memory. For years, elements of the Australian Public Service are to deny that any past existed, that corporate memory was a disease not to be confused with selective amnesia – and definitely to ensure the freedom of information was a joke that never existed. The Public Service treads the path of a Futurist movement in inked soaked quills of the Executive Porcupine – or in this country – the Executive Echidna.

David Tune, a former senior bureaucrat, was commissioned in 2019 to review the state of the national archives. He submitted his findings in early 2020; over a year later his review was released, in March this year. The report recommended the government fund a seven-year program to urgently digitise at-risk materials, for a total cost of $67.7 million. “Urgently” is hardly the word to describe Minister Stoker’s response.

Stoker’s attitude unwittingly has placed, even compounded, the Government into an untenable position.  The Treasurer, given his own heritage, should be more understanding of the destructive force Stoker is unleashing.  Frydenberg should reach into his cash box and find the money for the National Archives. Maybe such money would avoid this metaphorical burning of the Archives.

Stoker by name; stoker by profession? Surely not.

Backroad on the way from Normanton

It all started when I asked Dennis whether he could lend me the 4WD for the weekend. I wanted to check out the medical services in Normanton. There was a South African doctor who recently had arrived in the town, and there had been murmurings about the quality of the services.

To get there you needed to go down the main street of Mount Isa to the Barkly Highway and on to Cloncurry and then turn left onto the Burke Development Road. In the mythology of my family, it was said that my father recently graduated in Commerce from the University of Melbourne, had the opportunity to join a fledging Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, but it would involve leaving his girlfriend in Melbourne. Love won out; and the Great Depression tested that love as my father tried to find a path through genteel poverty and not on the wing so to speak. This day we did not stop to savour the nostalgia of the job that never was.

By way of explanation, Cloncurry was where the airline flew the inaugural flying doctor service in 1928 – the first commercial flight was generally considered to have been from Longreach to Cloncurry six years earlier.

However, this day we had a five-hour drive to reach Normanton. Normanton is not on the Gulf and there is a further 70 kilometres to Karumba on the Gulf, in those days a centre for the northern prawn industry. The prawns were caught, processed and despatched to Asian destinations direct from the Gulf. Her brother had worked on the prawning trawlers in the Gulf of Carpentaria twenty years before. Her brother in addition to working the trawlers always loved fishing, and barramundi were the prized catch in the Gulf.

Karumba

Karumba had its own link to the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services; in the late 1930s the town was a refuelling and maintenance stop for the flying boats of the Qantas Empire Airways.

Watching the sun go down sitting on the beach after 500 kilometres drive gazing out to sea evoked a feeling of thirst, and we were on the sand without beer. So we went back to the motel at Normanton, and watched the green tree frogs climb out of the umbrella holder in the middle of the table while we drank our XXXX. We were in the tropics!

The hospital was on the hill away from the township proper. We met the middle-aged doctor and his wife, immigrants from South Africa.  They were not in their comfort zone, and the wife was particularly fearful of the fact that there were “blacks” running wild in the town. They had grown up under Apartheid and I wondered why they had left South Africa. Perhaps it was to bring their children up in a predominantly “white” country. The majority of Normanton residents were Aboriginal.

Here they were, isolated from the town, with no intention to mix and looking for the earliest possible escape route. An irrational fear of dark people and an inability to identify – while courteous to us, the authoritarian attitude, albeit racist, can only be suppressed for so long. It was clearly evident in this case.

The trip enabled us to reach the Gulf in a far more pleasant way than Burke and Wills, who had slogged their way along the same route to get to the same destination but died on their way back.

There is another less comfortable route to Normanton from Mount Isa and that is via Lake Julius rather than via Cloncurry. Lake Julius is an important water supply and is a favourite picnic spot for those wanting to have some respite from the mining atmosphere of Mount Isa.

What was unexpected was coming across the small settlement of Kajabbi where, outside the Kajabbi pub, stands a cairn. This memorial in Queensland directly acknowledges the history of conflict, as one writer states, related to “the invasion of Australia by Europeans”.

Like many other plaques mounted on stone cairns, this one commemorates a centenary – 1984 was one hundred years since the slaughter of the Kalkadoon people at Battle Mountain, just southwest of this tiny speck off the beaten track. Charlie Perkins and George Thorpe, a Kalkadoon (Kalkatungka) elder, unveiled the plaque, which reads in part:

This obelisk is in memorial to the Kalkatunga tribe, who during September 1884 fought one of Australia’s historical battles of resistance against a para-military force of European settlers and the Queensland Native Mounted Police at a place known to-day as Battle Mountain 20 klms south west of Kajabbi.

The spirit of the Kalkatunga tribe never died at battle but remains intact and alive today within the Kalkadoon Tribal Council.

Kalkatunga heritage is not the name behind the person, but the person behind the name.”

The Kalkadoon or Kalkatunga were considered elite warriors, but a group of  early whitefella settlers, in particularly one Arthur Kennedy, took it upon themselves to kill as many of this warrior tribe as they could. Battle Mountain was the major skirmish; in all, about 900 Kalkadoon were killed in this protracted war.

The cairn is modest and I remember reading its inscription, and since I had known Charlie Perkins, whose people were from Central Australia, it was significant that he had journeyed to this remote place to unveil this plaque with a local elder. He obviously held the Kalkadoon in high regard and the timing was to celebrate the founding of the Kalkadoon Tribal Council.

It is sad to read that “native” mounted police were used to help quell the tribe. It was a common ploy to use Aboriginals from other areas to assist in helping the whitefellas. If you read accounts of skirmishes in Western Victoria in the 1840s, Aboriginal troopers were brought in from places like Tumut, hundreds of kilometres away. This usage of Aboriginal police for suppression of other Aboriginal people is a slice of Australian history which is not often ventilated.

After all it a small stone memorial in a remote hamlet on a dusty backroad, an uninviting series of dips and crests which heightened the remoteness of it all, and yet another reminder of a dark era in our history, a hundred years before when the cairn was unveiled.

Just like outside the township of Bingara in the Northern Tablelands of NSW, there is a memorial to another massacre – 50 Wirrayaraay people killed on the slopes overlooking the Myall Creek. I remember reading the last three words Ngiyani winangay genunga (we will remember them]. That atrocity more than one hundred years before. There have been more. Too many to mention here.

What prompted these memories, particularly of Kajabbi?

2021 was another centenary, that of the Tulsa massacre of black Americans in 1921. As if in response, the Washington Post printed a map of all the massacres of black Americans, which is reprinted. I wonder given I have been to other sites of aboriginal massacres, there is a similar map for this country, to remind us of some of the darker side of Australian history.

Maybe, Senator Stoker, it may be hidden in the archives.

Mouse Whisper

My cousin, Conte Topo has a piccolino aversion to us English speakers, who think that “simpatico” means sympathetic, a bit upper case pretentious, but unfortunately for those who like to dabble in using foreign words simpatico means “nice” not “sympathetic”. The Italian word for “sympathetic” is “comprensivo”.

In contrast, saying the obvious, the Italian word for empathetic is in fact empatico, if you wish to use such a flash word.

However, empathy and sympathy often are used interchangeably but empathy means experiencing someone else’s feelings.  It requires an emotional component of really feeling what the other person is feeling. Sympathy, on the other hand, means understanding someone else’s suffering without getting under the skin. In short supply among certain Australian politicians at this time when a little sick girl is the victim.

Conte Topo

Modest Expectations – Year

What a time to reach the anniversary! 

Given there are so many competing voices, one has no expectation that there is any audience but it provides the discipline of writing a diary. As instanced two weeks ago, I addressed the problem then presenting to a potential overseas traveller. The horizon was cloudy, but in two weeks, the world has battened down to ride out the coronavirus torment. The mixed messaged irrationality of the initial responses, plonked on a world inured to a social media prepared to publish blatant lies and worse the next level – “Trump lies” without intervening to insert evidence based comment.

Remember, it was not so long ago that according to Trump, this viral pandemic was a “hoax” and he blamed it on everyone except himself.

In my first blog, my first piece was about Prime Minister Ardern. I wrote:

“Now I am an old man, and seeing this woman, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, she is the first politician since Kennedy to cause me to believe, perhaps that to me she an exemplar against the fear and loathing that has characterised so much of what passes for political debate. I, like many, am just frustrated by the low level of debate. There is no longer any consideration in this Me All The Time rent-seeking political crop for policy discussion.

Yet Jacinda Ardern gives me hope. Her words – her demeanour of grace, compassion, resolve, her ability to call out the bully – the courage of making herself a target for all the “unspeakables”. She is indeed a paragon.

Just as I learnt from Alister, watching him succumbing to AIDS; now at a distance and not knowing the woman I think I have now adapted. Taken a long time, I must say. However, Prime Minister if I have the privilege of ever meeting you, please do not hug me. I am not a hugger.”

I see no reason to change my view a year later; especially in these viral times.

Her action in relation to this virus pandemic was decisive. It provided certainty for her people.

The headlined comment in Time this week said it all to its readership. In large letters, they reprinted Jacinda Ardern’s admonishment of Scott Morrison: “Do not deport your people and your problems.” This was a blunt response at a press conference in regard to this country’s “smart-ass” insistence on deporting foreign-born offenders, who have grown up in this country and have no relationship to New Zealand even though they may have be born there. They did not print the Morrison reply.

However, if this country wanted to deport a New Zealander of no particular merit to this country, why not add Brian Houston to the list? However, that probably would be the last straw for Prime Minister Ardern.

The Meaning of the Blog

So what is the point of the blog? It is more than just vanity press; it is the discipline of committing oneself to a particular position, or in the case of the overseas trip soliloquy two blogs ago, a testimony to how quickly the world changes. We didn’t have to make the decision about our trip. It was made for us, and the one thing to be learnt is not to attempt to “jawbone” the problem and immediately panic and cancel, with all the attendant costs; these don’t occur if the transport company does it for you.

The problem is that Australia is experiencing a community panic attack which, until this week, was fuelled by the uncertainty of the messaging, and therefore it also provides a chance to see if one’s opinion of a few weeks ago was right – and if not, it is in stark relief which no amount of bluster can expunge.

Looking back at my blog with its very select audience, it is a diary through my eyes enabling me to reflect in a contemporary setting on my life for what it is worth.

Babbler or Bubbler

Tower of Babel

The tower of Babel has been alive and well. Everywhere the publicity-shy “experts” on coronavirus have been pontificating, many of the vacuous statements suspended in the ether. Many messages are heavy on gravitas but confusing in fact.

I have suggested that in terms of the media, we should take a lesson from how we handled the bushfires by having single information source, as the ABC provided during the bushfires. It showed very clearly how many magnificent communicators the ABC has and who reported without any hysterical overlay.

The problem in this community is the lack in trust in whatever comes out of a politician’s mouth. So when the Prime Minister delivers a reasonable speech on Wednesday, it was at the end of a very confusing trail of information in relation to the epidemic. Whatever has happened to the “pop-up” clinics, a thought bubble from the week before?

Dr Brendan Murphy in this midweek media conference with the Prime Minister was far better after his disastrous appearance on the ABC program “Insiders” last Sunday where he looked uncertain, rumpled and his muttered response of “the situation is evolving” was a classic statement of uncertainty.

He has had a haircut and been generally tidied up, but even though his comments were far better, he is not an intuitively good communicator. There are all the unseen media coaches which can paper over the cracks but if you are a poor communicator having spent your life as an eminent nephrologist and esteemed medical manager, where bothering to learn the trade of communication has been seemingly irrelevant, then what should we expect. He comes from a world where patients and staff are told. It is not a criticism of Brendan Murphy himself; it’s a fact of being a doctor and a product of the systemic arrogance of the profession. In these stressful times you may need a good doctor for your patient, but if it is the community you need to be a good communicator.

The Prime Minister, during that same media conference, dropped his guard when reporter suggested the government website was not very good, to which the response was “that’s your opinion” rather than seeking constructive advice – and for an instant he was back into the “gossip, bubble,” defensive palaver, which has characterised his stewardship.

Ita Buttrose has been so right in criticising the response and comparing the current mess with the ordered response that occurred with the AIDS/HIV outbreak in the 1980s, with which she was involved. The way that infectious disease was handled, given how much underlying prejudice and stigma was rife in the community, was a model. At that time it was successful in getting the message across to the vulnerable and yet reassuring those who were not vulnerable. There were flaws but the messaging from the Committee chaired by Ita Buttrose and David Pennington provided a strong veneer of certainty.

The ABC has many excellent communicators and this was highlighted by some of performances in the bushfire. Norman Swan has an incomparable knowledge of health, which he communicates well. However, constant exposure to him without a counterpoint is liable to make one want to go to bed and, if there was such a drug, take enough to wake up in 12 months, such is the underlying pessimism of his message.

One doctor, in a letter signed by a couple of thousand of his medical mates suggests that by 4 April 2020 there will be 10,000 cases in Australia. However, are they 10,000 cases still in care? The acquaintance, whom I mentioned in my last blog, has now tested negative after 18-20 days. Freed from quarantine, and a journalist who kept a diary his writings may provide some reassurance. Because at this stage how many in the community know a person who has been infected and has become well again.

I think we should emphasise those who have tested positive and now are negative and publish that data, instead of the headline of how many deaths there have been worldwide. Knowing the number of cases is useful data, but just as there are more being tested positive, how about those like my acquaintance who now are negative – in other words do not have an active infection.

The big unknown is how long the immunity lasts. Having a cold, a suite of other coronaviruses, does not confer immunity for life. However, what this pandemic may do is to improve the overall hygiene in the community. It was thus excellent to hear both the Prime Minister and the Chief Health Officer reinforcing that message.

There is now a need to monitor the school closure situation – a fluid situation and one where false information will just compound the community uncertainty.

Also the community is now being inflicted by the term “modelling of the disease by experts”. As one knows from experience, such modelling is only as good as the assumptions, and I for one would like to see the assumptions.

The Premier of Victoria, among his comments on Thursday on opening up emergency beds and stocking the hospitals with the requisite equipment, stated there were only six people in hospitals in Victoria despite the increased number of cases overall. Six? What is going on? I would like to see the curve in relation to the number of hospitalised patients against time; the curve of those who have recovered.

Nevertheless from the sidelines, the ABC is without a national debate providing up-to-the-minute information; and Norman Swan being a regular feature provides the community with reliable lucid consistent information, irrespective of whether one totally agrees with him or not.

May I insert one small suggestion? Norman Swan is not going to be around forever; he is 67 years of age, already in what the Italians call “vecchio”; I would hope the ABC has a succession plan for Norman given how valuable a resource he has been before it reaches the next level of Italian old age delightfully termed “anziano”.

Already TV ratings are supporting the view of the ABC having that designated role.

However think about it, the ABC as the coronavirus station – it may cost more money but then it would well worth it. After all, the ABC is a public service.

Time to call Time

A pack of well-heeled Australian doctors and dentists on the 500 person M.S. Roald Amundsen off the coast of Chile is marooned in the ice floes of coronavirus. They cannot land in any Chilean port, and while one should not indulge in a dose of schadenfreude, it highlights one of the tax rorts, which should addressed by government.

I have no worry about these prosperous people taking holidays, and if they want some lecturers along the way to stop them from having the first whisky before noon, well and good. However, this is primarily a holiday. The taxpayers should not be asked to subsidise wealthy people’s holiday, even though confinement on ship has provided them now with learning about the physical and psychiatric consequences of being stuck in Paradise. They must be getting loads of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points.

However, I hear one solution proposed is to dock in the Falkland Islands and be flown home. This may be a helpful quote: “For most commercial flights, passengers are directed to the British Air Force base RAF Mount Pleasant. While the Air Force base is home to a small squadron of Boeing Chinooks, Eurofighter Typhoons and a single Airbus Voyager KC2, commercial operations are also welcome at the airport. Utilizing the airfield’s 8,497-foot runway, British-based AirTanker provides nonstop service to the United Kingdom for military members utilizing 300-seat Airbus A330-200s from the RAF.

The only commercial flights to South America from the Falkland Islands have been provided by LATAM, the Chilean based airline, which does have a non-stop flight to Australia in normal times, but conceivably if a plane of sufficient size could be chartered and could stop in Easter Island if there was a fuel problem in flying non-stop.

We shall see – but we, the taxpayers should not be footing the bill to get them back in Australia with the enforced quarantine period. The tax break for their conference should be more than enough if coupled with insurance taken out for such a contingency.

As they say, a meat worker in Wuhan was scaling a pangolin in China which results in 500 people of different nationalities being quarantined off the Coast of Chile – catastrophe theory at work.

I would hate to be in this predicament, but it would have been unlikely as (a) I believe these so-called education programs should not be tax deductible, and (b) I am opposed to Antarctic tourism anyway – it should not be an ecological plaything for the affluent.

Thus, when we Australians are faced with hardship, it is bordering on the obscene for the government to allow this tax rort to continue. Full stop! End of story. 

St Patrick’s Day

  fhéile Pádraig sona dhaoibh!

I always enjoy celebrating St Patrick’s Day even though I am not a tyke, as my great uncle Frank used to describe a Roman Catholic. As a Christian, I do not subscribe to the Irish version of Roman Catholicism nor for the Church of Ireland, which is so well represented within the Sydney diocese of the Anglican church. As I have reported earlier, on my mother’s side I come from a line of Co. Clare Egans and McNamaras. The family was all Roman Catholic until, as has been told to me, the priest was so drunk he did not come and give the final rites to a dying Egan child. This was in the first decade of the 19th century, and the whole family changed to the Church of Ireland overnight. The Egans have been known for their unswerving determination, whether logical or not.

However that is what I love about Ireland, it is the predictable unpredictability, and ultimately their successful struggle for independence. I’m sorry dear Uncle Frank, or Ponky as he was known, I don’t subscribe to your solution to the local Irish question – whenever the Roman Catholic Church and in particular Dan Mannix, the Archbishop of Melbourne, was mentioned you would growl: “they should all be boiled in oil.”

So this week I did not miss the Day despite the Virus. To support local industry, we went to lunch at the local pub with sanitised hands and social distancing. May I say my meal of a dozen rock oysters with Irish soda bread on the side was a brilliant start. They were an excellent substitute for Dublin Bay oysters; much better even though they were cloaked in that Kilpatrick concoction.

Why “Kilpatrick”? I love the apocryphal story rather than the actual one. The story goes like this. A fisherman called Patrick went out to sea and his haul of oysters was so large that in trying to bring them on board, he fell into the water and was drowned. The headline in the local paper next day said “Oysters Kill Patrick”. Silly!

However the main course was a generous beef and Guinness pie with a splurge of colcannon – mash of potato, kale and spring onion – on the side. Needless to say the meal was washed down by Guinness, which I realised is the right accompaniment on days like this when you have to sit apart and wait to hear the sound of the hoofs of the black steeds coming to get us.

St Patrick

If St Patrick was able to rid Ireland of snakes, what about asking him to do a job on the virus?

However, we eventually made our way back home, there – horror of horrors – no Irish whiskey. So, being an Egan, from the traditional brehon clan we issued the decree that our household – to wit the dining room – be designated an area where St Patrick’s Day was formally extended to midnight March 18. This enabled the bottle of Black Bush, as it is affectionately known, to be ushered in the next day and drunk with a Munster relish.

Mouse whisper

Even Topellino in his nest washes his hand with mouse sanitiser –three parts absinthe to one part pure alcohol – before he sits down for a meal of gourmet scraps and “micewine”.

Two reliable studies from mousenet:

A Chinese woman arrives late in the evening in the Tasmanian west coast town asking for a bed because the pharmacy was closed. What was she was doing in this remote location and yes, of course the pharmacy was closed, it was the weekend. She replied she was scouring Tasmania looking for clinical face masks to be sent back to China.

The second involved a lakeside town near Melbourne where a couple of blokes in a van drove up to the local grocery outlet and started emptying the store of toilet paper. This was a bit much for the locals, who surrounded the van, retrieved all the toilet paper except for a reasonable amount for the blokes’ personal use. The toilet roll raiders were then told to be on their way and they promptly did so. I am not sure whether they paid or received any monetary recompense for their exercise in black-marketeering.