Donald Trump Archives - Page 2 of 2

Modest Expectations – Shina Kanazawa

Where’s Albanese? After all, Modi’s there.

Bit of a Cheap Shot?

78, 70, 71, 73, 73-Five old guys not named Moe

No way

This is the Vecchi Five? Five Guys called Anzio.

Albanese at 56 is far too young to join this Group.

The Haley Comet

It is interesting to watch the aspirant Republicans striving for their Party’s nomination when all the pundits with the knowledge of the polls are predicting a runaway victory for Trump. The Orange Messiah has converted his followers under the name of the Republican Party into a cult.

There remains a thinking rump of the Republican Party who have disengaged – the Trumpian Atheists who do not like the fervour surrounding Trump and have disengaged. What can they do? There are fierce activist anti-Trump groups like the Lincoln Project, but I wonder how far they penetrate the Republican base, especially the marginal red States such as Ohio and Indiana.

In Iowa, Trump has almost assumed to be the winner, while the only two realistic challengers, Governor Ron DeSantis and former Governor Nikki Haley are denigrating one another. Nevertheless, in realistic terms are these two contesting the position of Trump’s running mate? I have incidentally dismissed the third remaining candidate, Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy. Nevertheless, in the crazy pattern of Republican politics, he may bob up a Hindu of Tamil heritage.

Haley has significant backing from Koch enterprises, which could be aiming for Haley being the running mate and thus having influence on Trump. If Trump comes into office, there is a chance that he could die in office or become mentally compromised, unable to govern. This has occurred before with Woodrow Wilson being the most obvious example. He had a major stroke in 1919 from which he never recovered; initially his condition was not told to the American people and his wife was alleged to have acted as the de facto President.

No one close to Wilson was willing to certify, as required by the Constitution, his “inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office.” Although some members of Congress encouraged his Vice President, Thomas Marshall, to assert his claim to the presidency, Marshall never attempted to replace Wilson, even though he had been Governor of Indiana. Wilson even tried to be nominated for a third term, despite being severely disabled.

A more recent, very public example is how long the Roman Catholic Church persisted with a Pope, who was so obviously “ga-ga”; yet nobody dared to question the fact that he should remain as Pope. It is ironic that the probable instigator of this retention of a demented Pope was Cardinal Ratzinger, his successor as Benedict XVI, who prudently retired from his Papacy before he went the same way.

I doubt if Haley could be compared completely with Ratzinger. He was never a Sikh.

Politico has opined: Haley has spent most of her campaign walking a fine line when it comes to Trump, alternating between opposing and praising him as she aims to appeal to both “Never Trump” Republicans and those who are open to the idea of voting for him again.

To influential backers Haley is an insurance policy against Trump going completely mad should he be re-elected as President. I am naïve enough to believe that the money people are aware of Trump’s health status, although Trump’s closest staffers would have tried to spread as much disinformation about him if his health is indeed in jeopardy. Just listening to him (if the newsclips are to be believed) Trump obviously is having problems with his mental state, which would be one reason he has bypassed the current round of debates, unlike his previous Presidential forays.

For instance, if Trump does have incipient fronto-temporal dementia, then faced with persons contesting his supremacy on national TV just may trigger Trump to not only unleash a stream of verbal abuse but also to exhibit episodes of physical violence. Just imagine him striking Haley on national TV – such an outburst may not trouble his base, but the whole of America is not his base yet. My vivid imagination? Perhaps, but remember when he was saner, standing over Hilary Clinton in their national debates was evidence of his brutal attitude towards women.

There are caveats. Haley may have already done a deal with Trump. She is completely pro-Zionist. One may remember what occurred so many years ago in relation to the American Hostages in Iran where the then Presidential aspirant, Ronald Reagan, was in “back passage” discussions with the Iranian Government, while the official inter-governmental lines were blocked. Reagan was not only in secret conversations with the enemy but served to obstruct the process by continually sabre-rattling and undermining President Carter until he became President and the matter was quickly resolved, “minutes after his Inauguration”.

I would not put it past Netanyahu to continue his destructive activities to emphasise to the American electorate that Biden is a completely weak, ineffective “tosser”. The go-between Trump and Netanyahu? Nikki Haley or her apparatchiks. Surprise, surprise. But I am only indulging in a conspiracy theory – or am I?

As the bloke in the Prometheus pub, butting his fag out on the floor said as he picked up his schooner: “That Haley, she’s one tough sheila!”. He drank his beer and looked out into the encroaching global desert where there was once a freshwater lake. He repeated “One tough sheila! Couldn’t care a fuchsia about anybody else, least of all Planet Earth.”

South Carolina Cuisine

There are many reasons to admire Southern Cooking in the Good Ol’ State where Nikki Haley was governor for six years. I have commented on the cooking when we have stayed on Fripp Island, a barrier island located along the Atlantic coastal low country part of that State. But nobody mentioned Hoppin’ John. I could not resist printing this excerpt from the New York Times. Anybody for pork jowls?

Hoppin’ John is a dish of the South Carolina low country, peas and rice cooked together and often served on New Year’s Day as a wish for a prosperous, lucky future. (The black-eyed peas are meant to represent coins. Some cooks throw a dime into the pot or place the coin under one of the bowls on the table.)

But as Toni Tipton-Martin wrote in her 2019 cookbook, “Jubilee: Two Centuries of African American Cooking”, there are many who eat Hoppin’ John on New Year’s Eve instead, as part of a Watch Night service in which the Christian faithful come together to usher in the new year. The ceremony dates back to “Freedom’s Eve” on Dec. 31, 1862, when enslaved Africans gathered in Southern churches to hear the news that the Emancipation Proclamation had set them free.

Tipton-Martin’s recipe for Hoppin’ John isn’t quite that old. She adapted it from one she discovered in “Aunt Julia’s Cook Book”, a collection of recipes from the coastal South published in the 1930s by the Standard Oil Company. (“For happy eating, use these recipes,” a line on the cover reads, “for happy motoring, buy at the Esso sign.”) She uses bacon to flavour the rice, but if you can lay your hands on some smoked hog jowls to use instead, you won’t be sorry.

Denmark – A Principality of Tasmania?

I loved this American comment, which was appended to the announcement that the Queen of Denmark was stepping down and appeared in the Washington Post among the other 1400 odd comments.

The nations which make up Scandinavia, with the exception of Finland (which has a different history) and Iceland (which broke away from the Danish Crown due to events in World War II) are constitutional monarchies. All of them are well run, their citizens are healthy and content, and in all cases the standard of living is amongst the highest in the world. By and large, we are a law-abiding, peaceful people.

But all of us have relatives in North America. In many places (e.g., Wisconsin and Minnesota) the population there is largely Scandinavian. And we are very family oriented – we do look after our own.

This is specifically for the Orange Fool and his ilk. We descended on North America once, if we have to, we can do it again.

You have been warned. Don’t make us come over there.

Yet when you think about it, what does one know about the history of Denmark?

Denmark now has an Australian-born queen who exudes an elegance no more so than when she was giving, in front of the Danish dinner audience, a gentle roast of her husband on his 50^th birthday. It was given in fluent Danish and without any trace of an Australian accent.

It was a strange situation, and normally one watches it for a minute or so, and then moves on. The then Crown Princess Mary was almost magical in how she controlled the room. The response of the future King was interesting in that he seldom moved from his vacuous affable look, which one would probably expect from one with Victorian blood rippling through his veins.

Being the home of Lego, Denmark has always been the toyshop of Europe to me.

We have been to Denmark several times, visited the Tivoli Gardens, paid my respects to the Tollund Man in his resting place in the Hovedgården museum, wandered around the fens of Jutland looking for Babette’s Feast, and stayed at the venerable Admiral Hotel, in Copenhagen on the quayside next to Amalienborg Royal Palace and opposite the modern Copenhagen Opera House. Of course, there are showrooms replete with Danish craft, and even hot Danish to eat and Danish coffee to drink. We have eaten my favourite pickled herring smørrebrød washed down with ice cold Aalborg caraway-flavoured aquavit.

Denmark is all very clean, all very flat, with bicycles with helmetless riders everywhere. Walking along the waterfront towards the little mermaid statue, as you watch the changing of the guard in their rig of bearskin, black tunic and blue trousers with its broad white stripe, you feel you have been absorbed into the top of a chocolate box. Well, what do you expect, this is the world of Hans Christian Anderson!

But the reality of Denmark has been a struggle to maintain itself as a small distinct entity with a distinct language when there are no barriers between it and Germany. The Germans took six hours to take over Denmark in 1940, but then left the Danes very much to govern themselves, such that the royal family remained in Denmark during the war. It was not until the concluding stages of the War, when the relationship deteriorated, that in late 1943, the Danish Government was dissolved and Germans established martial law across the country.

Denmark had been forced to cede Schleswig-Holstein, an area in the south of Denmark abutting Germany to Prussia and Austria in a short-lived war in 1864. There is a gradation from the north to the south of predominantly Danish to German speakers; in the central part people speak a dialect, predominantly German. After WWI, Denmark regained the Danish-speaking Northern Schleswig following a plebiscite.

I vaguely remember Schleswig-Holstein as surrogate for identifying difficult puzzling situations, since it represented the acme of such ethnographic confusion.

The Danes were not immune from colonisation, and in the Northern Hemisphere there have been Iceland (broke away in 1944 to form a Republic), the Faroe Islands and Greenland, now both self-governing but still swearing allegiance to the Danish Throne which, in the case of Greenland, presents a potentially interesting situation.

The Danes developed a mini-imperial excursion into Western Africa and the Caribbean, which I knew about. I had not realised that they also had trading posts in India.

The Christiansburg Fort in Accra appeared on Ghanaian stamps, and I remember attending a film festival where the film featured the Danish Antilles. The Danes were early into slave trading, but ultimately sold their overseas holdings to the British and, in the case of the Danish Antilles, to the United States, when it became the US Virgin Islands. Thus, when Trump floated the idea of buying Greenland, it was not altogether fanciful given the Danish vending history.

We moved on to Norway, but not before we visited Jellen Kirke, a nondescript whitewashed church, but the resting place of the Danish Kings – the revered place of Viking kings.

It reminds one that the Danes have form, as the implicit threat in the quoted comment above which got me thinking about the Danes’ contribution to civilisation: You have been warned. Don’t make us come over there.

It was about 500 AD when the Angles came from the Schleswig part of Denmark and the Jutes from Jutland to pillage then settle. The Saxons came from Lower Saxony in modern day Germany, but when these guys were around, borders were ephemeral depending on the extent of tribal influence. Hard to countenance unless modern day Denmark harbours a secret Viking yearning for another round of pillaging.

Five Guys named Moe

In 1967, Pontus Hultén (the director for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm) asked a writer, Olle Granath to help with the production of the Warhol exhibit, the latter was commissioned to write the program for the exhibit, complete with Swedish translations. Granath claims that after submitting his manuscript, Hultén asked him to insert the quote: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” To which Granath replied that quote was not Warhol, Hultén replied, “if he didn’t say it, he could very well have said it. Let’s put it in.”

This is a strange story of little moment, except that I was thrust into the spotlight for perhaps my fifteen minutes of fame. It happened in 1994. I have no memory of why I was in London. I still have my ticket which says that on Friday 16 September, at a cost of £27.50, in seat H12, I watched a production of Five Guys Named Moe in the Lyric Theatre located on Shaftesbury Ave.

I had been in America, and I was staying at the Skyline, one of those Heathrow pubs, so my stay was not expected to be a long one. Having been in America, it was probably cheaper to fly round the world than book a return flight to New York. Yet having said that, I probably contradicted that apparent frugality by upgrading to fly Concorde across the Atlantic as I did when I could.

The Skyline Hotel did not match that extravagance, nor taking the Tube into London. The only activity, I remember before going to the theatre was to go to Harrods and buy a present for my wife. I only knew that because I was carrying a Harrods bag when I went to the theatre.

Five Guys named Moe had already had a run in Melbourne and it was said to be fun. As I did not want to see anything serious, I had decided to go to see this jive musical, based on the coloured saxophonist, Louis Jordan, and his Tympany five, which had started recording in 1939.

My seat was on the centre aisle and was enjoying the music and the cleverness of these five coloured guys, each called a variation of “Moe”, (Big Little, Eat, Four-eyed & No – all Moe) when just before the interval, there was an audience participation number.

Suddenly one of the Moes jumped from the stage, and grabbed my hand, and the next minute, complete with my Harrod’s bag that I did not relinquish, I was on the stage jiving along with the cast. This was great fun and suddenly I was dancing on my own all over the stage. Then one of the Moes with a not too friendly face confronted me and hissed “put up your hands” and we did a sort of a high five, inhibited by my having to put down the Harrods bag. I had not realised that my antics had made the audience to laugh as I found out at interval. With or at me I didn’t know. I did not hear them above the music.

When I appeared in the foyer crowd at interval, this group of Americans were all convinced that I was a plant, they did not believe I was not part of the cast and ordered a champagne for me. Others came up to congratulate me with a laugh. I was nonplussed but went along with glow of being the unexpected talking point of the first half of the musical.

My fifteen minutes had expired.

The gong was sounding for Act 2. I left and went back to my hotel. I still had the Harrod’s bag.

Extinction

To begin with, there are more endangered and threatened species than ever before. When the law went into effect in 1973, fewer than 130 species were on the government’s list of domestic plants and animals at risk of going extinct. Today, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are well over 1,600. And just as the ESA has not prevented the endangerment of many additional species, it has not achieved its mission of bringing endangered flora and fauna populations back to health. All told, only 57 domestic species (3 per cent of those listed) have recovered, while 11 (1 per cent) have gone extinct. After a half-century under the stringent safeguards established by the law, 96 per cent of the endangered-species list is still, by the federal government’s reckoning, endangered. Boston Globe 3 January 2024

The above is a synopsis of what has occurred since the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was introduced fifty years ago. It has served as a scoresheet.

The epitome of American extinction is the ivory-billed woodpecker, one of the largest of its kind, which was last reliably seen in 1944 in Louisiana. The Australian equivalent s probably the Tasmanian Tiger, both being in sufficient numbers for there to be a denial that each have become extinct. There must be one somewhere, goes the conversation, almost a plea. The hunt for them has gone on long after the last time they were seen, now about eighty years ago. Is this continuing search long after extinction a grief response from a community which only yearns when all is lost.

At the same time, Hawaii in the past fifty years has lost eight bird species, and Guam has lost two species. Then there are a variety of mussels which have disappeared from the freshwater rivers.

On the credit side, there has been a huge increase in the number of bald eagles, down to a few hundred in the 60’s, now numbering 70,000. Californian condors down to single figures in the 70s are estimated to number 400, a modest figure but a significant number. The grey wolf, nearly hunted to extinction, now is estimated at a population of 6,000.

In Australia in recent times the discovery of the Lord Howe Stick Insect, the so-called “tree lobster”, was thought to be hunted to extinction by rats which came ashore from a wrecked ship in 1918, and wreaked havoc. The insects were thought extinct until three were found on a nearby island, Ball’s Pyramid and nurtured back to reasonable level through an Australian-based effort and reintroduction to the island.

Since 1788, it is reckoned that Australia has lost 38 mammals, and a total of one hundred fauna and flora. Nevertheless, there are a number on the brink, due to a combination of land clearances, introduced animals (cats, dogs, rats and foxes) and huntin’, shootin’, trappin’ Man. There has also been overuse of pesticides, but the ban on DDT has helped the bald eagle revival.

Despite apparent successes shown by the American Stocktake, the outlook remains very pessimistic.

In Australia, there is so much humbug. The post of a Threatened Species Commissioner has been created. The following an excerpt from government directory says it all: The Threatened Species Commissioner is a non-statutory position (it is not identified in legislation) within the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This position does not have a regulatory role in the operation of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

She may be the next extinct species, in reality. For a time, she may trail around presenting a smiling face and holding some small animal of no matter to the community at large. But of what relevance to policy determination?

The problem for the conservationist is that except for koalas, there has not been any semblance of co-ordinated preservation program. In the sea, there are always the whale lovers, but it is very convenient when these creatures appear to indulge in mass suicide but seem to be able to absorb such a tragedy by their very numbers.

If you happen to be in that serious cohort of conservationists, then the government treats you as some form of terrorist when you oppose flagrant destruction of habitat and the accompanying fauna and flora.

As the world moves to a domesticated homogeneity of dislocated suburbs with accommodation built to withstand nothing, replete with smaller and smaller gardens, the atmosphere reeks of climate change. Cities are constructed which get minimal maintenance, enhancing its citizens’ vulnerability to climate change, be it fire, flood, or pestilence – all accelerated by the destruction of the habitat provided by Mother Nature.

She has nurtured all the generations which have made Earth a liveable mess of wonderful heterogeneity. Now Governments of old men are destroying Earth in the name of machismo and mammon, leaving the masses increasingly at the mercy of Nature, now a merciless Fury rather than a Mother. But these Men who sought power will be dead, when Nature rebuffed leaves the children of the world, eyeless in Gaza.

Then who of my descendants will be covered by the Enhanced Species Act if they in the USA, or can rely for the Threatened Species Commissioner here? The smokescreen of bodgie legalisation or government positions is not just a controlled public relations burn; it is the genuine fire consuming the planet.

Mouse Whisper

Talking of Denmark…

Our household once went through a serious Georg Jensen jewellery purchasing phase.

Georg Jensen, the master Danish silversmith’s most famous quote was:

Silver is the best material we have. And silver has this wonderful shine like moonlight … a light taken straight from a Danish summer’s night. When covered by dew, silver can look like magical mist.

Modest Expectations – Ernst not Sebastian

But if you want my quick take on it, it’s this: Whether Trump is wolfing down Big Macs on the Mar-a-Lago golf course or bargaining for bootlegged tanning lotion in prison, he will be the GOP nominee. Don’t give into magical thinking and never stop the fight to beat him at the ballot box. First, the trial itself. It’s happening in Miami. A hotbed of Trump voters, MAGA radicals, skells (tramps), boat-paraders, and people terrified of dead communists and imaginary communism. (By the way, I love Miami, I really do. But I’ve got to call this place how I see it.) Rick Wilson June 2023.

Mar-a-Lago – bought by Trump in 1985 at more than 62,000 square feet, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, 12 fireplaces, three bomb shelters, and a 29-foot-long marble top dining table, the house is extravagant to say the least. It is the 22nd largest house in the US – the White House comes in 33rd place. – Not Alternative Fact

In response to Rick Wilson’s “By the way”, I thought I would write about my time in Miami at a time when Trump was still a two-bit grifter. Nor when Miami was the warlock’s crucible.

I have passed through Miami more than once – even taken a Concorde flight out of there to New York on my way to London. However, this occasion was the one time we had time to do some sightseeing. We had just come back from Cuba in an unmarked Delta airline plane – nevertheless a commercial fight. As the flight attendant said to us at the time, Delta flew to Havana every day. On arrival in Miami, having been duly warned that if we had any Cuban rum or cigars in our luggage, it would most likely be confiscated, we found that there was no-one from customs on the gate barring our way into Miami. In any event, we don’t smoke, and we had enough mojitos in Cuba to last a lifetime.

This time we had decided to go on to New York by train, stopping off in Savannah. In the meantime, we went for a stroll along 17^th Street downtown, the weather being perfect, to see some of Miami. We had lunch at one of those places where the food is barbecued rib, the drink is beer or bourbon, and the music is loud and country. More Texas than Miami, but Miami is cosmopolitan, a shelter against the winter for the aged, a playground for the rich and a refuge for the colourful.

As we walked down towards Miami Beach, we stopped by the Cadet Hotel emblazoned with Clark Gable memorabilia, remembering the time he was there as an instructor of the recent inductees in the air force. The year was 1942, and he was still mourning the loss of his wife, Carole Lombard, who had been killed the year before in a plane crash.

Gable went on to serve for most of WWII, seeing action in Europe. As we looked in on the reception area of the Hotel, there is no doubt that Gable had a charisma, which belied the fact that he had had all his teeth extracted and his leading ladies had to be inoculated against a cloud of halitosis. Still, I remember that film “It Happened One Night” which starred Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert and that it was the first of only three films which have won the five Oscars – best film, best director, best actor, best actress, best screenplay.

Clark Gable has always had a place in the lexicon of my memories because I saw the film “Soldier of Fortune” when I was in Hong Kong in 1956, the film itself being an adventure story of Gable playing the title role opposite Susan Hayward in a story where Gable rescues her screen husband, Gene Barry from the clutches of the Chinese Communists. I most remember the scene at the top of the Peak in Hong Kong where Gable is expressing ruggedly his love for Hayward. Imagine my chagrin to find out that Hayward remained in Hollywood the whole time the picture was filmed, and Gable was romanticising a Hayward double – her screen sosia.

Looking at the photograph of Gable, his distinctive expression walks the line between sagacity and salacity, but I was not the first to gaze. Judy Garland sang to his photograph in Broadway Melody – “You made me Love You”. Well, not that I sang, I might add; and my wife has never liked him. This is a slightly troublesome matter since Judy was only 15 when she recorded the song. But the teenage crush has history, and I would have preferred Grace Kelly, the first choice for the “Soldier of Fortune” heroine, but which she declined. Then I had only just turned 17 and Grace Kelly was 25 years old.

But let’s continue walking.

We stopped off on the lawns outside the Frank Gehry designed New World Centre where we listened to the New World Symphony rehearsing and the music being piped outside to those of us who stopped to listen. We did not expect to be listening to a piece of old world music in a beach resort not famed for its cultural attainment.

Well, back to reality. By that I mean Miami Beach – a wide strip of sand lined by fenced-off villas where the rich, the famous, the colourful and the pyrites reside. There is something foreboding about high walls, with palm trees and the white stuccoed storied homes poking their heads above the parapets. In the distance is the sea, a pale blue ribbon cast against an equally azure sky, with a wisp of cloud interrupting the blue.

Beguiling. Well, yes, but really depends on when one visits.

Here in Miami the 1926 Great Hurricane left its calling card, precipitating the end of the Florida land boom and the start of The Great Depression three years early. Miami was wiped out and it is salutary to think that a comparable hurricane today would leave little change out of US$250 billion. Despite Miami being recognised as one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to experience hurricanes, the only other one which has been classified as severe and centred on Miami was Cyclone King in October 1950, which caused severe damage but not comparable with that of 1926.

In recognition, the University of Miami has adopted Hurricanes as its nickname for all its sporting teams, but the touch I like the most is that the mascot is an ibis named Sebastian, since the ibis is the first bird to leave when a hurricane is imminent and the first to return after the hurricane has passed.

I wonder what the status of the ibis population is at Mar-a-Lago these days.

Antwerp

I have been to Antwerp twice, once in the early seventies when we were travelling through Europe and the United States, the first time, my then wife had been back to Europe from which she had come – from a British displaced persons camp in Carinthian Austria. Arriving in Australia she was unable to speak English but, as I found fluent in Slovenian and German with an Austrian accent. A medical graduate and PhD in pharmacology, she had her research papers accepted for several conference presentations, whereas I scored zero. No matter; it just meant I could track along without having to give a paper to a half empty theatre or back room. I remember that we went to Antwerp that trip, and it was somewhat comical walking through the Munich airport, past all the big planes, down the stairs, across the tarmac to the DC-3 – our air chariot dwarfed on all sides by its younger siblings.

My strange memory of that visit was having walked around a sculpture garden with all the shapes and forms representative of the interpretative impenetrability of some of this modern sculpture, I escaped from the park by climbing through a fence onto a major thoroughfare. Having been sensitised to the bizarreness of the display, the utilitarian throughway structures were replaced by my surreal vision of them. The street with all its tubular forms, interlacing overhead wires, lights changing like giant eyes – all the street architecture which we normally ignore or accept had, to me, become the workshop of the absurd. I hasten to add I don’t do drugs, nor had I been drinking.

I had spent several hours accustoming myself to these sculptural forms, and when I emerged onto the streets, it seemed to me just an extension of what I had been looking at. It was a sensation that I’ve never had since. I do not have the imagination to concoct the vision of the great architects, but I understand the meaning of “surreal”. After all, we may be induced to say something is “surreal” when it is just something that one has never experienced; whereas surreal is a departure in a different sensory experience. I remember looking at the overhead tram wires and the stanchions and thought what if these had been placed in the garden, dimensions changed or left as stark forms amid the wooded lawns where the rail lines would lead nowhere – a phantom silvery transport system hidden under a cascade of blue leaves. Then I shook my head and followed the tram line back to our hotel to find out how my wife had gone with her presentation.

The second time, my second wife and I ended up in Antwerp, because we were travelling to Cambridge. Qatar Airways had a “special return flight” from Sydney to Brussels. Having a few days to spare, we went to Antwerp by train. We stayed across the railway square in the Blu Astrid Hotel. What made this foray worthwhile was that the Antwerp Zoo was close to the railway station. The Antwerp Zoo has probably the largest number of okapi in captivity as part of a breeding program. The okapi is the only known relative of the giraffe and its natural habitat is the Congo jungle. Given that the Congo was colonised by the Belgians, it is not surprising that the first okapis were brought to Belgium. There were five or six okapis in what I thought was a generous enclosure. The total area of the Zoo is 10 hectares. However, zoos will always be imperfect, as animals are for all intents incarcerated so that we humans can stare at them.

The okapi, much smaller than its relative giraffe, was first discovered in 1901. It has a striking appearance, being almost burgundy in colour with striped legs. It’s also worthy of study, because its long term future may depend on its ability to breed in captivity. The female okapi is said to be choosey in her choice of mate, and there is not much choice in a zoo.

My wife does not much like zoos and having watched the okapi pacing around in a stressed manner, that was enough for her. She had spent a decade photographing wildlife in Africa, and hardly needed to visit an urban zoo. Okapi were an exception; she was not likely to see one in the wild unless she wandered through the Ituri Rain Forest in the Congo.

However, she does like flamingos, which we had seen in the wild, both in the south of France and in the salt pans of the Atacama Desert in Chile. Caribbean flamingos near the entrance of the zoo, attracted attention because of the noise and their vivid vermillion in colour – they seemed chatty enough.

Of other places in Antwerp, The Plantin-Moretus is a unique museum that celebrates the history of European printing through the 16^th century workshop and home of the city’s most celebrated printer, Christophe Plantin, which he bequeathed to his son-in-law, Jan Moretus. They printed books and maps – the cartography section being very impressive. There is a copy of the Gutenberg Bible lodged here, together with a collection of material tracing the evolution of printing up to the 19^th century when innovations were introduced as a by-product of the Industrial Revolution which rendered the printing work obsolete. Looking at ancient printing presses and some of their products is to marvel at how such a collection has survived in area where bombardment, siege, and troop movements would all seem to mitigate against the existence of such an exquisite place.

I suppose we could have sought out the Diamond district where it has been near the main square since the Middle Ages. Antwerp, through its Jewish population, developed some innovative ways in cutting and polishing of all grades of diamonds. It survived two World Wars. In WWI the Germans captured Antwerp early and held the city for the duration. While there was some hesitation in deporting Jews in WWII to preserve the expertise in diamond cutting, eventually a substantial number of the Jewish population were killed in the various concentration camps, and thus compromising Antwerp’s future.

The Sinjoren, as those who live in Antwerp are nicknamed, are certainly resilient.

I found it amazing that Antwerp was able to hold the Olympic Games less than two years after the Armistice, but given the survival instincts of the population, why should anybody be surprised. Australia was represented at the Games. The flagbearer, George Parker, born in Leichhardt, died in Five Dock, seems to have spent his life walking. At the Antwerp games, he finished second in the 3,000 m walk, beaten by an Italian. The only other Australian medals were awarded in swimming – a silver and a bronze.

And my lasting impression? Workers eating this green food with chips and mayonnaise. This is palint ‘n groen – eels served with a green sauce made with fresh river herbs and wild leaf vegetables, chervil, sorrel, spinach, watercress and wild garlic leaves. Tasted it – not too bad.

Pride comes before a Fall saith Solomon

When I was undertaking the National Rural Stocktake in 1999, I found it frustrating to arrive at a desert destination to find no-one there. I had to accept that the Aboriginal people spend a substantial amount of their time on “Sorry Business”, which took them away and thus they would be unavailable because one of their number had died. Travelling around Aboriginal communities, I often found a great amount of argument, dispute, aggression – and when I was confronted with stories about harassment and violence, I had to make a decision. Namely, I was not there to deal with the problems of the individual Aboriginal person, unfortunate as that may have been. That deserved a review of its own, and although I made incidental comments, my prime aim was to prosecute the case for developing clinical and public health education facilities in the bush, which occurred with funding allocated in the 2000 Federal Budget.

I was brought up in a whitefella world where Aboriginal people were labelled as “stone age” and hence patronised as if they should be kept in an ethnological zoo. It is not surprising therefore that the bulk of whitefellas just did not know how to communicate with Aboriginal people. At the outset I had not appreciated that being taciturn with whitefellas belied a highly complex system of communication, where verbal was only one of the means. Being able to communicate, whitefella to blackfella is a privilege, as I found out.

As background, I had become aware of the level of discrimination from a young age. It had been coated by kind paternalism. For example, when I was a child in the time of the “picaninny”, I received the Church Missionary Society news from the Roper River Mission in then far off Arnhem Land. The growth of missions, both secular and religious only served to emphasise the separation of the Aboriginals from their Land, which did not become recognised until Aboriginal artistic skill with all its complexity became recognised by whitefellas. When I had gone to Alice Springs in 1951, I came back with a large shield, which languished in the storeroom, because every time I picked it up, my hands were covered with red ochre. Over the years as I collected more Aboriginal artifacts, I began to celebrate the diversity, but not without making errors in walking the line of what was taboo and what not.

Afro-American emancipation grew out the 1960s’ cry for emancipation led by Martin Luther King and Malcom X and then the black Panthers, injecting an edgy defiance challenging the comfortable world of middle-class America. At the same time, until he was assassinated, King tried to persuade. His was an evolutionary approach, to which he harnessed public opinion for recognition.

Aboriginal advocacy grew alongside. Recognition of Aboriginal identity grew, dispatching the equivalent of “Uncle Tom” as contempt of the so-called the Aboriginal “coconut” – brown on the outside, white on the inside. Aggression has been the watchword, mixed with a litany of Aboriginal grievances such as the stolen generation and life expectancy being continually drilled into us whitefellas, some of whom have succumbed to guilt, preferring to give in; other whitefellas in power have just employed passive resistance. Rather than mollifying the aggressors, the level of J’accuse by the voluble few has increased with bombastic Noel Pearson as one of the leading Accusers.

From Whitlam onwards, governments sought to increase funding and opportunities for Aboriginal people, despite the opposition of some of the parliamentarians. As I have said, symbolism and metaphor are simple; real action is not. I was around at the time of the first aboriginal medical graduates. I saw many of the Aboriginal medical services (AMS) which arose from the Congress model in Alice Springs, and I looked for change. Many of the AMS were clearly dysfunctional, mainly because there was no continuity in the treatment objectives. Congress has been operating since 1975 and it has had a substantial amount of funding. It has had its vociferous defenders, given it has been the oldest Aboriginal Health Service. However, stripping away the “blah-blah” apologia, what has it actually accomplished?

It is a serious question when there is this push for an ephemeral Voice, as though there is a pot of gold at the end of the Indigenous Larynx. I see the ability of the Aboriginal people to contribute and shape our destiny, but I’m afraid I’ll not accept the pompous sullen uninformed Voice of a few Aboriginal people. Some people who should know better are attempting to gain cheap political acclaim, without thinking through what outcome is expected and what it means for the many Aboriginal people who won’t be part of the Voice. The Voice does not have a powerful Champion who can coherently unite an increasingly divided nation. Linda Burney is not that champion; unfortunately, she lacks the intellectual firepower, and those who spring to her defence further weaken her, only serving to exaggerate her deficiencies.

I would prefer Narelda Jacobs and Pat Anderson; but the male Aboriginal able to communicate with those tending to Vote “No” – the critical cohort I believe – should be a Rugby player in Queensland and an Australian Rules player in the West. But perhaps if the women’s football team is triumphant, Sam Kerr will trump every male.

When I undertook the Rural Stocktake, I tried to identify examples of what worked in relation to Aboriginal health, but such success could never be long term because of the harsh reality of the eventual failure to provide a plan for succession. It is not unexpected because so much of Aboriginal success depends on charismatic leadership, which does not necessarily translate to a long term success and is eventually swept under the sands of failure.

I well remember the activities of Geoff Clark and the fate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which he chaired. This fiasco has not come into the conversation about the Voice, even though Geoff Clark was never short of a word. In the end at a time in Australia when funding is short, homelessness is on the rise and where poverty has increased, to see affluent, mostly university-affiliated sections of the Aboriginal community continually meeting in a non-wintry part of the country and complaining about their lot, begins to grate. The Mayor of Broken Hill may not be the most subtle of individuals but in explaining why the Council would not in future pay for “welcome to country” or smoking ceremonies by Aboriginal elders made it clear when questioned responded: “Why should he pay for welcoming people to his Land.”

Grievances are met with counter grievance. As someone said, looking at the Aboriginal flag and the Australian flag flying alongside each other on the Harbour Bridge, why? The same person sees the Aboriginal flag as a sign of division and the Australian flag as an embarrassing relic – both to be replaced by a single flag for everyone in the country. Personally, I believe the Aboriginal flag should be the Australian flag rather than the colonial relic. But to me whose ancestors have occupied the country as part of the Celtic diaspora, the Eureka flag flown first by the Ballarat miners during their 1854 insurrection also epitomises that Australia is my Land – and let nobody forget that. I too have a Voice. That is precious privilege of Democracy.

Brisbane – The Novel

Having won the Solzhenitsyn Prize, the Big Book prize, and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award, as well as having been short-listed for the National Bestseller Prize and the Russian Booker Prize, Eugene Vodolazkin has emerged in the eyes of many as the most important living Russian writer.

I was thumbing through a recent issue of the NYRB and came across a review by the above author. The book was entitled Brisbane. Given that Brisbane and Russian literature are not ready companions, I read the review. On reading this, it seemed to be just an extension of my perspective of Russian literature, telling the Russian story where Death is an ever-present metronome of the various degrees of misery and cruelty which pockmark the whole literary Russian Treasury of the mysteries of life. These mysteries have always been palpable in the Russian Orthodox liturgy, and in its extraordinary church music, where it soars from the depths to the heights. Terra ad caelium.

Why is this novel called Brisbane? It is about Gleb Vanovsky, a celebrated Russian guitarist who, at the age of fifty, is diagnosed with Parkinsonism which not only inhibits his ability to play the guitar but also ultimately will kill him. He has a biographer named Sergei Nesterov who, offering to write his biography, sets about establishing this dual perception of Vanovsky’s early life from each of Vanovsky’s and Nesterov’s perceptions. The second part of the novel details what has happened since his diagnosis. It seems from reading that it is a novel about various interpretations of the meaning of life.

And what of the Brisbane allusion? Apparently Vanoksky’s mother was enamoured by the image of Brisbane as a subtropical Utopia and had an Australian male correspondent, who said she should come. Unfortunately, she was killed on the way to the airport by some thugs. So Russian!

Ah, the Russian tome called Brisbane. The author was born in Kyiv but has spent most of his life in Russia.

Premier Palaszczuk with her Polish heritage should be indeed interested in such a view of Brisbane as Utopia. But watch out going to a Russian airport.

Mouse Whisper

My mäusemaister has this obsession whence Melania Trump has gone. She seems to have vanished to Europe – no longer the lady hand in hand with the Trump. The prominent Irish author Fintan O’Toole, in a recent response to criticism of an article of his appearing in NYRB, has suggested that Cohen, the lawyer and once Trump confidant but who has now decamped from his side to be a pigeon with a stool, is one reason for the disappearance. He was told by Trump to pay Stormy Daniels and tell Melania that the payment was made to avert Daniels’ “fake story” about Trump himself.

As Trump was reported to have said, paying Daniels off was far cheaper than a divorce settlement, as Trump wanted his wife to be mollified. O’Toole opens up another front on the besieged Trump – the circus of a potential divorce. He is probably only saved by Melania not wanting her laundry aired, well at least not before it is appropriately washed.

Modest Expectations – Sestini & Ditta

The Budget has come and what has been delivered into the health budget reflects some of the long-held saws that political parties remember in the fog of their prejudices. Take the Pharmacy Guild and the pharmacy profession in general. There is a group of pharmacists who are academics and, by extension, work in hospitals far away from Mammon. But they are not the Pharmacy Guild.

The Pharmacy Guild represents the community pharmacists and in turn the maintenance of their extensive privileges. One of the interesting occurrences in my lifetime has been the evolution of pharmacy from its apothecary status – shop keepers on the high street, an apprentice system, changed to university-based pharmacy courses, with an academic program far more than what is still needed as being the community “purveyors of medicines … and much more”.

The Pharmacy Guild has been very successful over the years in getting what it wants in terms of remuneration for the provision of drugs under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. The Labor Party operatives could be forgiven for believing that each community pharmacy is a small business, the number and the wealth of same providing a base for Coalition support. The Pharmacy Guild Dinner in Canberra has been the public indicator of the power of the Guild to attract the influential. When the big retailers tried to break into the monopoly of the community pharmacist by attempting to place pharmacies in their supermarkets they failed, despite enlisting a pharmacist-turned-politician to lobby their cause.

This minor reduction in their privileged status – that of providing two months’ supply of drugs instead of one – saw the Pharmacy Guild President in tears being completely “over the top”; but then I remembered he lives close to where crocodiles are prevalent. The whole charade has been too much for Lloyd Sansom, a distinguished Adelaide pharmacy academic who was chair of the Australian Pharmaceutical Advisory Council from 1991 until 2000, and chair of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee from 2001 until 2012. This week he rebuked the Pharmacy Guild for its behaviour. Lloyd Sansom is not one for chasing publicity and, as I have found in my dealings with him, he is completely ethical.

I worked with the Pharmacy Guild for a period when it was trying to burnish its image. At that time there were still pharmacies that sold cigarettes; and the aim was to emphasise that the community pharmacist was a health professional and not a shopkeeper who had an incidental function to dispense medicines with profits underwritten by Government. Some were saying “Why set up the University courses when the major function of the community pharmacist is to sell cosmetics and soft toys?”

The proponents of an academic course had a basis in all the elements of pharmacology, which had also been added to the medical course curriculum in the early 1960s replacing materia medica teaching. After all, the traditional role of the pharmacist making ointments and creams, tablets and capsules was being replaced by pre-packaged medicines, so these traditional skills were rapidly becoming obsolete – hence pharmacy at the time was facing a crisis in its profile.

While there were colleges of pharmacy, they were outside the universities. In 1960, the University of Sydney instituted an undergraduate degree, but it was not until the late 80s that the movement to set up another university course in association with the Victorian College of Pharmacy set the scene for academic pharmacy.

Initially the plan was for the degree course to be set up under the auspice of the University of Melbourne since it was nearby the existing College of Pharmacy. The University of Melbourne, perhaps under the influence of the then Vice Chancellor, aborted the agreement which was then picked up by Monash University. This action by the University of Melbourne reflected the belief held by some members of academia who viewed the pharmacist as being little more than a technician. To counter this view, the establishment of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia in 1976 had followed their acceptance by the Australian Society of Professions (the Pharmacy Guild had been formed in 1927 and the Hospital Pharmacists had formed a society in 1941); the Society promoted the idea that pharmacy should be rated a legitimate profession alongside medicine.

Since the Victorian College of Pharmacy transition, there are 18 universities offering at least one course in pharmacy, which in itself has gone a long way towards enhancing pharmacy’s professional status and that of the Pharmacy Guild. John Menadue, writing after the 2019 Federal Budget, bemoans the fact that a minor change like the one which was included in the current Budget was blocked, because the then Coalition Minister Hunt reneged on the minor alteration under pressure from the Pharmacy Guild. Menadue, in his article which clearly sets up the privileged position of the Pharmacy Guild members, relates the incident of when, having been invited to speak to pharmacists in Brisbane, found the invitation was withdrawn because of pressure from the Pharmacy Guild.

Two areas which have emerged over the past 20 years or so which I find disturbing are:

the promotion of medicines with little proven value or promotion of medicines which do not need to be prescribed to the normal persons and even turning medicines into confectionery; and
the growth of the Pharmacy entrepôts.

The community is constantly being assailed by medicines that just do not have any effect on the normal person. The images in so many advertisements is of young healthy people, seemingly without a care in the world, carrying shopping baskets full of “stuff”. Particularly objectionable are the advertisements which seem to promote medicine as confectionery – for instance “gummies” which just look like sweets. At least the makers of “Smarties” have had the good sense not to make white Smarties, which would undoubtedly lead to more overdoses. I am not sure that I approve of pharmacies selling confectionery in the manner that the retail stores do to pander to impulse purchase by placing these near the checkout.

It is particularly worrisome that a pharmacy curriculum, where scientific evidence is a central point of the training, is essentially linked to these community pharmacists in practice who surround themselves with an array of “medicines” which have no therapeutic effects or are vastly over-rated. The apothecary of yesteryear selling the placebo indicates a reversion of community pharmacy to the apothecary rather than maintaining the image of a profession seeking evidence of the medicines it dispenses.

Nevertheless, we have seen the growth of the business model whereby the warehouse doors open onto a population inundated with advertisements which a vigilant government authority should have long since curbed. But there is gold in them thar walls of the pharmacy shelf – and consequently in what some purveyors call herbal or natural or homeopathic medicines – or just plain old quackery. This is the business model that the government is sustaining; and drowning out the advantages of the community’s access to the knowledgeable pharmacist, whose business model is aimed at ripping off the gullible for the benefit of some distant hedge fund in Singapore or New York, part of the industry of exporting the Australian health dollar overseas.

Therefore, there is a way to go yet for the government to prune the privileges exacted by the Pharmacy Guild. A cautious start has been started, but it will be highly dependent as he progresses along his portfolio, on what the Butler saw.

There is finally a postscript, called personal experience. It involves the ethical community pharmacist, as I have, who is in danger of being lost in this political scrum. After all, our family has been spending more than $200 a month on medications, and the most valued attribute after the friendly atmosphere is the accessibility and continuity of this pharmacy practice.

One anecdote is worth repeating – I needed an influenza jab. I booked into a general practitioner, was given an appointment time at which time I presented and after over one hour without any communication from the general practitioner, other than the information that there were still nine people ahead of us, we left. This occurred in rural Tasmania with a locum general practitioner. Contrast this with the appointment I made subsequently with my family pharmacist to give me the jab. I presented myself at the right time. No problem. No delay.

As I said above, it is important how broadly the Butler sees. Something about bath water.

Anita Hill

The 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee (chaired by Joe Biden) ducked its responsibility to the public by reverting to theories spun out of nothing… woman accusers were cast as spurned, prigs with vendettas, incompetent dupes manipulated by others, martyrs for some political cause, or gold diggers seeking attention. (p43)

“Given his condescending tone, Specter (then Republican Senator for Pennsylvania) was also mansplaining – trying to convince us all that he knows better than me how a woman experiences sexual harassment. Mansplaining was the technique, and gaslighting was the goal. Both are forms of denial employed to discount claims of abuse, and they deserve to be called out because they prevent women from being heard and believed when they testify about abuse. Both tactics foster self-doubt, coaxing victims into thinking that coming forward is pointless, that no one will care.” (p39)

I prepared myself to purchase and then read Anita Hill’s recent Book entitled “Believing”, an excerpt from which appears above. This woman was disgustingly treated in the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, whom she accused of sexual harassment, by a gang of legislators led by the then Senator from Delaware, Joseph Robinette Biden.

Thomas had engaged in discussing explicit pornography with Hill as she responded to questioning from Biden.

I told him that what was most embarrassing was Thomas’s discussion of pornography involving “women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people, or animals.” But in truth, I had no real idea how to determine what was the most embarrassing of the crude and obscene comments I had to put up with. Nor did I fully realize how my answer would be used against me. (p35)

She could not be much clearer than that.

Little did she realise that her complaint would be used against her; the premise by the Committee members was such that his action was just normal behaviour. She comments on the parallel hostile questioning of Dr Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 as Supreme Court Justice. His proclivity towards extreme sexual harassment of Ford was the issue; the response of the senators during the confirmation hearing was no different from 1991, despite 27 years having elapsed.

Anita Hill’s book is depressing in one way, in terms of the ability of her countrymen, in particular, to look away or fumble when presented with the prevalence of gender violence. Hers is a book of examples – of clinical dissection. As a male who has lived in this era of male dominance, I feel uncomfortable. The fact that even if most of us were not participants, we as men through the various stages of our lives have been bystanders.

We have tolerated the hypocrisy of people like Bill Clinton, who publicly advocated protective legislation but in private was a sexual harasser using the power of his office to dazzle and distract. In the end, Hillary Clinton, if not a partner in crime, certainly tolerated it. As Hill says, she had a conflicted role, on one hand declaiming at 1995 Conference in Beijing “Women’s rights are Human rights”, while failing “to step up and denounce Bill’s behaviour.”

When Trump announced his proclivity to grab women’s genitals, the Democrats’ response was strangely muted. Hill barely mentions Obama, but goes into some detail about Biden, who had himself been accused of sexual misbehaviour by one Tara Reade. Biden’s response is not recorded.

Eventually Biden apologised in 2019 to Hill after making a comment to a journalist two years before that he would apologise to Hill. As Hill disclosed, the rapprochement was in a 30-minute phone call from Biden, who mostly spoke “His words were carefully couched, though seemingly sincere.” He recounted his massive success in the passage of the Violence Against Woman Act, knowing that the Supreme Court had effectively gutted it subsequently. Yet Biden has continued to do penance by trying to provide legislative protection to women where Federal laws apply.

The whole theme throughout Anita Hill’s book is how endemic gender violence is in America, and the four years of the Trump presidency was an obstruction as Trump attempted to remove all protections against such violence. As Hill says when Kamala Harris was announced as the running mate for Biden, Trump’s son, Eric, called her “a whorendous pick”. Such crudity is repeated by other men who, if not role models, exert considerable influence.

Despite her book having the capacity to make the reader squirm, to be outraged, Hill does not come up with any real solutions. Her predator still sits, amid allegations of corruption, on the Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee is still racked with misogyny even if apologists try to reframe it as “just old-fashioned ideas”. Anita Hill’s book provides the information, but the provision of information does not alter attitudes, without behavioural changes in the community to make gender violence totally taboo. Anita Hill entitles her book “Believing”. After what she has experienced, the title is succinct testimony to an eventual optimistic outcome. Yet her book suggests unfortunately there is a long way to go, but it should be required reading for those who – like former Supreme Clark, Arthur Kennedy, who employed Kavanaugh as a law clerk – is reported as saying “boys will be boys.”

Trumptown

Tonight, CNN gave a massive platform to a man who incited an insurrection on the Capitol, attempted a coup on American democracy, and was just found by a civil court to have committed sexual assault. Make no mistake: this wasn’t a town hall. It was a campaign kickoff celebration, and Chris Licht sold out CNN — and our democracy — to chase Tucker Carlson’s viewers.

All you really need to know about the event is that CNN’s hand-picked audience laughed at Trump’s depiction of his sexual assault case (which he lost)!

We cannot normalize Donald Trump by giving him 90 minutes of uninterrupted airtime to rewrite history. Tonight is a firm reminder about the fight we are in: If our democracy is to survive, then we can’t allow CNN and the media to follow Trump down his rabbit hole for ratings.

The media is making the same mistakes as they did in 2016 and 2020. They’re legitimizing Trump in the eyes of the voters instead of calling him out for the lawless serial liar that he is. As he storms his way to the nomination, it’s only going to get worse. He’ll get more air time and more credibility as he continues to spew the same dangerous nonsense he did tonight.

CNN’s malpractice gave the most anti-democratic force our country has seen in ages a microphone and an evening of airtime. We can’t let this keep happening.

This release from the Lincoln Project says it all. Trump is not a conventional figure. He is a projected evil avatar from a comic strip which has been released into a world where normal behaviour does not apply.

As I have written in my novel “Marigold”, which has been written with licence of the novelist to plumb the supernatural.

“Those adversaries are trying it on again. They have cast us into a comic strip. It just can’t be real.”

The man had raised his shotgun and pointed it at us. Like a comic strip villain, he cackled. Like the comic strip villain, he fired. Red flashes of “Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam” before our eyes. Egrets rose around the cabin. A duck with a brown-feathered breast fell dead on the roof of our car. This was not my kind of comic strip. We scurried back in the car. The duck had slipped to the side of the road. The man with the shotgun was laughing – a huge hole of mouth and crinkled eyes. There was the last comic cartouche, as my character at the wheel of the car let out a frustrated maledicta of quimps, jarns, nittles and grawlixes as the car was slow to start.

Maledicta raining down without constraint accompanied by the canned laughter from his selected audience has proved a toxic mixture which Trump ladles out to an American audience. His immediate butt in New Hampshire recently was the CNN anchor, Kaitlan Collins. She is the duck, overwhelmed by the volume of lies and maledicta. She is constrained by the mores of civilisation, and thus not allowed by modern convention to rise up like the avenging woman warrior of the Old Testament, Deborah, and smite him dead.

Unfortunately, modern society does not know how to deal with this character, a simulacrum who has stepped out of a comic strip, where the morality is simple and binary – good and bad, black and white. Unlike the comic strip, Trump is less easily discarded.

The aim is thus to ensure that America laughs at him, not with him – to use the same artifices which he has used to fashion his cut out persona – look at all the ridiculous golden aura in which he has encased himself. Start the laughter – oh, for a Chaplinesque character to parody him; then pursue him back into the comic strip.

His other avatar, which may then emerge, is Trump the Messiah, where he has honed himself into being a religious figure of destiny. After all, 76 million people voted for him in 2020; certainly a large congregation. The apostles he put forward two years later were not much good at promoting the Gospel of Trump – but then religion has been caught up in the comic strip. It takes a real believer to seek redemption in a comic book character. That is essentially what Trump is becoming – the malevolent comic strip character full of vile maledicta with a grease paint golden aura re-imagining himself as the glossy Messiah, freed from his comic strip representation. One does not ridicule a Messiah without paying a stern price for doing so.

I have raised the question of Trump’s mental health before, but whether he is on the cusp of dementia or has some other pathology associated with unbridled narcissism, it should become increasingly obvious that in a rational world his support will inevitably evaporate. But how much will it evaporate? In his warped mind it is important to maintain irrationality by lying in such a manner that it blitzes truth. But such an approach must eschew ridicule among his erstwhile supporters. Once they start laughing at him not with him, he is finished.

But not quite!

When I look at Trump, unfortunately I think of the Jonestown massacre in 1978, instigated by Jim Jones. Murder-suicide maintained Jones’ notoriety – in his own dead eyes.

Trump’s tormentors – as the Lincoln Group are – in pushing him to more and more irrational acts, have to remember that his actions in relation to 6 January 2021 could only be a forerunner of a more extremist performance, catastrophic to the future of America. It is very easy to say he is mad; to make him a figure of ridicule. However, he is so full of hatred that he could try and bring the whole country crashing down in the name of himself, Trump Messiah. Instead he is the revengeful cutout villain of the comic strip or its modern successor, the video game. Except in Trump’s case, it is not a game.

Peter Byrne

You cannot find any mention of Peter Byrne, when people talk about those influential Melbourne cooks of the seventies, when people like Stephanie Alexander and the late Mietta O’Donnell were emerging as culinary heroines, in a field where to get a good meal, there were the fine dining establishments, the growth of the bistros and then there was Peter Byrne.

Peter Byrne was the quintessential Australian with an Irish heritage and a strong Labor Party affiliation. He had worked for the leader of the Victorian Labor Party, Clyde Holding. Holding was the silent partner in Waldron’s restaurant. Waldron’s was a restaurant in Bridge Road Richmond, and close to where I then lived. This night a party of four of us for some reason went to dine there. It was the late seventies and it was a BYO restaurant. There was only one other couple in an otherwise empty converted shopfront restaurant. The other couple I recognised as being Claude Forell and his wife. Claude Forell was the food writer for The Age newspaper (and later foundation editor of The Good Food Guide). He was there as the anonymous food writer. We recognised each other, and in short, the night was hilarious, the wine flowed, the food was excellent. Byrne joined in with his wife after he finished cooking. Rhonda was as cool as Peter was pugnacious. The end result was that Forell lavished the evening with praise, particularly the food, in his Age column, and the restaurant took off – from being empty it became full every night.

Peter was like many people of Irish heritage, complex and contradictory. He affected a brusque exterior, but was a very kind and generous man with a sense of humour which the Irish have and the non-Irish parody – mostly unsuccessfully. We would have political arguments, because like many of his persuasion they treated me as a member of the extreme right wing of a mythical Reactionary Party who still believed in the Divine Right of the Monarch. It was often the starting point but somewhere in the midpoint of a very long night when the alcohol was seeping through the soles of our feet, we would reach some denouement.

I was going through a bad period of my life in the following year and he accepted my voluntary offer to help out in the evenings at the restaurant, which gave it an aura of the eclectic while pursuing the dialectic in the kitchen.

Byrne and I became friends without ever prying into the circumstances of the other’s life. He liked my sons, whom he called the louts (because, as one son put it, he couldn’t always remember which was which). The elder son, Paul, at 14 years then worked there as a kitchen help during the holidays. It is somewhat ironic, that Paul himself has become a food writer. Eventually I went to Sydney to pursue my career. I lost contact with Peter for a while and during that period Waldron’s ran into financial difficulty as Peter succumbed to excessive drinking and mental stress.

As Forell put it in a subsequent piece in The Age writing in 1982, years after Waldron’s had closed, “Waldron’s has been a culinary oasis”. He was writing about Peter after he had moved to the London Tavern just around the corner in Lennox Street. Forell described the food at this new place as “Restaurant food at pub prices”. Forell went on “With entrees at around $2.50 and main courses from $4 to $5, it is remarkably good value”. He himself had tucked into a meal of Byrne’s own country terrine followed by venison sausages “with a sauce rich in fresh mushrooms.”

I saw Peter from time to time, including on one memorable occasion at an airport in India, but he was one of those guys who for a brief period in your life was an important anchor, even though he had similar frailties. I remember his famous Mao Pie – it was one of my favourites. Peter is long since dead, but retrieving this newspaper cutting kindled my regard; he certainly never sought the plaudits, but he was a very fine chef.

As for Claude, I don’t remember when I last saw him or whether he is still alive, but I think this anecdote about him told by the late Age Associate Editor, Peter Cole Adams is, well, priceless. “History recalls Claude’s celebrated 1988 exchange with Stephen Downes, a rival food critic and former Age colleague. Downes unkindly described The Age Guide as the ‘Turin Shroud of Gastronomy’. Claude’s riposte was to dismiss Downes as ‘the Reverend Ian Paisley of Gastronomy’. He was not a man to be trifled with”.

Mouse Whisper

You must have heard of the definitive proof that the world is not flat. If it was, the cats would have pushed everything over the edge.

Modest Expectation – The Deer Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Battle for Alice Springs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus goes Aboriginal elder authority.

Hog Deer, Anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

Modest Expectations – Aryamann Tandon

This maybe my last reference to the woman who has been background activity throughout my life. I have not watched any episodes of The Crown. To me, it is difficult to have lived a life without her intruding upon it, and I don’t need another’s interpretation. Hence the views contained in this blog.

I am an information omnivore with a photographic memory for trivial facts; I was at lunch yesterday and at it there was a bloke with whom I had been friendly at school. He recalled that I could recite every book of the Old Testament. Today, we agreed we would be hard pressed to go beyond the Book of Ruth.

Yet here was a person, under the cover of the “Royalty Tag”, who had structured her movements by the use of her handbag and her political opinion by the brooches she wore. These non-verbal communications may be the tip of huge tumulus of royal communications known to very few but enabling the Queen, even in death, to move seamlessly without having to give voice to any political opinions. Her brooches and other adornments could identify likes and dislikes. This was a life so scripted that even “times of spontaneity” were inked into the daily routine. The detailed code has not been published – as yet.

Nevertheless, if the leaking pen is any indication, non-verbal communication may not survive under King Charles III.

As a corollary of our mutual recollections on the pavement outside the lunching venue, I reminded him of the time he was driving home with his wife. I was in the back seat with my then wife. She had warned me that my friend was drunk, but with myself having a haze of alcohol casting a generous interpretation on his condition, we all got into the car.

Less than a kilometre on, we had just topped the hill, and there was a tram coming up the other side, its lights blazing, and the driver urgently ringing his bell. It did not seem to affect my erstwhile friend until the last second when he tried to avoid the tram, but to no avail. The tram struck us.

We were fortunate. We were struck almost at the terminus and as a result the tram was slowing down. Otherwise, who knows. Miraculously we were all uninjured; the driver’s wife gave him a dressing down – and up as well.

We did not stick around. There was a taxi passing which fortunately was empty. I remember looking up the newspaper the next day. There was nothing reported, and as we did not see them again, the question of accepting another lift never occurred.

Her Last Hurrah

The British do funerals extraordinarily well, and probably her funeral was the last and most telling of Queen Elizabeth’s non-verbal communication. The reasonable assumption is that she involved herself in the overall planning of this – even that, given the length of her reign, funeral arrangements would have to be updated regularly, especially with such a huge group of actors. The turnover of naval ratings drawing the gun carriage must have been just one example.

The fact that it was so meticulous, a “professionalism” showed when compared to that of her father’s and grandfather’s, confirms that this woman had a keen eye for detail.

Her father’s and grandfather’s coffins were taken to Windsor from Paddington by train, and the railway station is about a four-minute walk from Windsor Castle. Elizabeth preferred the motor hearse. Following the hearse along the Long Walk is a five kilometre forty minutes walk. Added to the three kilometres they had to walk behind the catafalque in London, she ensured that her children and grandchildren had a pleasant Monday walk of about eight kilometres; stiff armed with small steps which, in spite of the solemnity of the occasion, it was very reminiscent of a group of toy soldiers. Both Andrew and Harry had to walk the walk in mufti.

Her funeral had a distinctly Scottish flavour, with her Scottish bodyguard – the Royal Company of Archers – being very prominent. Scanning the two previous funerals, I could not detect them, at least not in a prominent place.

And the funeral procession itself dispensed with the gaggle of European royals and heads of State, who were ensconced in the Abbey without the obligation to walk.

At the funeral for George V and VI, there was only one service and that was at St George Chapel at Windsor Castle. In fact, the last time prior to Elizabeth II that Westminster Abbey was used for a Royal funeral was George II in 1760. This recent production thus provided a prime television venue at the Abbey, and then the smaller service at Windsor. In part this enabled the Heads of State to go straight to the Abbey and not provide a distraction, which would have occurred if they had marched. It was a two-part tableau.

At her father’s funeral, Elizabeth travelled in a carriage while the Dukes of Edinburgh, Gloucester, Windsor and Kent walked behind the gun carriage. The Queen had travelled with her mother and sister and the Princess Royal, cloaked in black with black veils covering their faces and heads. Looking at these shapeless figures, it is no wonder the Queen determined that when she died, the female royals would be clearly visible and not subjected to wearing “widders weeds”.

Yes, four billion people participated in this last great complex example of the late Queen’s non-verbal communication.

St Paul

I named my first son Paul. I am not a Biblical scholar, but St Paul always appealed to me because of his forthright personality. The King James version of the Bible demonstrates his eloquence in exhorting the early Christian Church to stay strong and true to a religion founded on the death and ascension of Jesus Christ about 25 years before. In fact I have read the letters he wrote to all and sundry.

Paul recognised that he had a limited time on this planet too. After all, his eloquent farewell in his second letter to Timothy attested to this: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” The rest of the letter is telling his followers what they had to do in regard to his unfinished business.

At the Queen’s funeral was Paul’s defiance in writing to the Corinthians – “O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?” (I unapologetically use the King James’ version.)

Yet his most famous exhortation was also in his writing to the Corinthians:

When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

It was not on the Queen’s list of favourite Pauline aphorisms, perhaps by his use of “man” rather than “adult”. St Paul was undoubtedly authoritarian in the way he ordered all and sundry to do the right thing. St Paul was big on obedience, and hence the accusation of misogyny is understandable; given his view of women, St Paul seemed at times to be a “pain in the arse”, and yet he was a brave, resolute person, just what the early Church needed.

After all, as its text the anthem at the funeral took an excerpt of Paul’s letter to the Romans which advocates an indissoluble bond between the believer and “the love of Christ.”

Prime Minister Truss, in the second reading, also quoted from Paul’s letter to the Romans:

“None of us lives for himself, and no one dies for himself: for if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord. And so in life and in death we belong to the Lord. For this is why Christ died and came back to life, that he might reign over the dead and the living.

Like everything this meticulous woman did, the Queen inserted St Paul’s views strategically throughout her funeral service. To have the Prime Minister read these words shows how far the Pauline instruction has drifted from the actual way Prime Ministers conduct their lives. The Queen could have anticipated Boris uttering and choking on these words.

Further, perhaps the Queen felt that St Paul very much reflected her husband’s forceful independent streak. Perhaps not; but we shall never know. She would not have left any note. That was not her way.

Komedy Korner?

I repeat this report in the Washington Post, without comment except to say I hope America can identify madness early enough as Germany did not. More prosaically, if it does not work don’t do it again. Ergo, consign Trump to the political dustbin of history.

Former president Donald Trump has set up his office on the second floor of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as part replica of the Oval Office and part homage to his time in the real White House.

On the wall during a visit last year were six favourite photographs, including ones with Queen Elizabeth II and Kim Jong Un. On display were Challenge coins, a plaque commemorating his border wall, and a portrait of the former president fashioned out of bullet casings, a present from Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called Trump of Brazil.

This has become Trump’s fortress in exile and his war room, the headquarters for the wide-ranging and rapidly escalating conflict with investigators that has come to consume his post presidency. It is a multifront war, with battlefields in New York, Georgia, and the nation’s capital, featuring a shifting roster of lawyers and a blizzard of allegations of wrongdoing that are hard to keep straight.

Look! Well? Feel! Well?

It is time to examine the evidence behind the medicines flogged on television by the entrepots, which specialise in the modern equivalent of snake oil.

Perhaps I do snake oil a disservice. Made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation, snake oil in its original form is alleged to have been effective, especially when used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The workers would rub the oil on their joints after a long hard day at work. The story goes that the Chinese workers began sharing the oil with some American counterparts, who marvelled at its effects.

From then the descent into chicanery commenced and one American, Clark Stanley, for no scientific reason substituted rattlesnake (the water snake being unavailable). Rattlesnake oil anecdotally was far less effective, and then in a further descent, Stanley’s Snake Oil was shown not to contain any snake oil at all. It was found that it primarily contained mineral oil, a fatty oil believed to be beef fat, red pepper and turpentine.

At least the American investigators as far back as the turn of the 20^th century had charted a pathway, and the judgement printed below is salutary reading.

Not that for one moment am I suggesting that the tonic and tinctures being flogged by these modern drug entrepots are all derived from heirs of the Oil of Water snake.

What is remarkable about these advertisements however is that first everybody pictured in these advertisements seems so very healthy. Yet we have the spectacle of basically young people with occasionally the obligatory child waltzing along a line of drugs with a shopping basket for God’s sake. How many pills, tablets or capsules are those depicted taking daily? In other areas of public policy, governments rail against the overuse and misuse of drugs. And yet here is its flagrant advocacy.

It is the very essence of the polypharmacy drug culture uplifted out of the gutter into some ambrosia-filled suburb of tree-lined streets. The people in these advertisement images are the last people who need any dietary supplements.

Now what are these spruikers, who seem to be bright, healthy and blonde women telling us to buy. There are the vitamins. In our society, there are more than enough vitamins in a normal diet not to need any supplementation. Having said that, I have developed a habit of taking vitamin D daily. This was due to a controversial measurement which tended to underestimate the level of vitamin D in the body. It has become a habit. As the Lancet opined “For those who ‘believe’, the lack of benefit found in most trials completed thus far can be attributed to issues including inadequate supplementation, testing of a population not sufficiently vitamin D deficient at baseline, incorrect formulation, underpowering, or insufficient follow-up.

However, the spruikers do not say what vitamins actually do, apart from inane slogans; or for that matter, what the next lines of placebos – the magnesiums, the zincs, the seleniums and other inorganic compounds. Obviously iron supplements are part of the treatment for anaemia, but not to be consumed as a spruiked lolly known as a “chew”.

Then there are the organic compounds – as they say, herbs, and spruikers are active here too. I must admit when a well-regarded doctor told me to take krill oil some time in mid 2013, when I had been progressively feeling something was wrong, I did; nothing changed. I just got worse.

In the end, I was diagnosed and placed on prescription drugs, which worked. I do not object to people taking anything which has been classified as herbal, as long it is not toxic. Herbs included in food are different from those sold as medicine. For instance, I do use two remedies – ginger tea for an ageing genito-urinary system and honey for a persistent cough. Each has some evidence of efficacy. Yet I like honey on my toast, and pickled ginger is a necessary condiment for sashimi.

Pharmacy has always built walls to protect its monopoly, which has also demonstrated the power of the pharmacy profession. I well remember when pharmacies were the only place one could purchase toothpaste – Ipana. However, it did not stop pharmacies from retailing not only the range of medicines which quacked but other goods. For instance, body hygiene and the “hypo-allergenic remedies” was equivalent to perfumes and cosmetics. It was only about 20 years ago, that some pharmacies still stocked tobacco products.

The drug warehouse is just an extension of using the screen of the pharmacist monopoly provisions to peddle all sorts of claims for their remedies, often with no or little evidence of their collective efficacy.

The Review into Pharmacy Regulation and Remuneration in 2018 stated the following, which was broadly supported by the Federal Government.

Community pharmacists are encouraged to: a) display complementary medicines for sale in a separate area where customers can easily access a pharmacist for appropriate advice on their selection and use; and b) provide appropriate information to consumers on the extent of, or limitations to, the evidence of efficacy of complementary medicines. This could be achieved through the provision of appropriate signage within the pharmacy (in the area in which these products are sold), directing consumers to ‘ask the pharmacist for advice’ if required.

Judging by the way these products are being marketed, the above recommendation arising from the school of personal responsibility or lack of same, broadly falls within the rubric of “laissez-faire”.

The problem with the Therapeutic Drug Administration (TGA) is to know what does it do; and more to the point why is whatever it does done so slowly. How can such a government authority watch such blatantly dubious advertising as is occurring on media outlets and allow it to go unchecked. Since the above recommendation by the Review ignores any suggestion of it being a TGA responsibility to ensure its implementation being policed, why not just yawn, roll over and go back to sleep.

Arryn Siposs

Now hands up if you have heard of Arryn Siposs. Well, he played 28 games with St Kilda, being delisted in 2015. However, as he was a prodigious kick, he decided to go off to America and try his hand (or rather his foot) at American football. He went through the College football grind at Auburn University in Alabama. He then had a difficulty, not unsurprisingly, in getting a place in the AFL or NFL, being on the fringe for a number of years before nesting with the Philadelphia Eagles. Even then he is the guy who holds the ball for the kicker.

Then, the other day, his time came, playing against the Minnesota Vikings. He was holding the ball when the kicker kicked the ball into the opposing team, and it rebounded. Immediately one of the Vikings corner backs raced away and picked up the ball for an apparently certain touchdown against the play.

Siposs, who had to give the corner back more than a few metres, ran him down and saved that touchdown embarrassment. His speed in picking up the player and tackling him, when one of his fellow Eagles failed and given he grabbed the ball carrier in less than 20 yards drew the attention of all the networks.

Siposs is very much one of the lesser lights, being on a contract of about $US850.000 for this year.

His remuneration very much fades when compared with two of his compatriot kickers, Mitch Wisnowsky (San Francisco 49ers) and Michael Dickson (Seattle Seahawks). Wishnowsky is reported to have signed a four-year extension recently worth $US13 million ($A19.3m) while Dickson is in the second year of a four-year extension of his own, worth about $US14.7m ($A22m).

Dickson is reportedly the highest paid punter in the league, while Wishnowsky’s new deal sees him move to seventh or eighth ranked and inside the top five highest paid Aussie players of all-time. Wishnowsky from Perth and Dickson from Sydney both played Australian Rules but at a far lower level than Siposs achieved. They went through the Melbourne-based Prokick program before being affiliated with colleges in Utah and Texas. Their careers, which commenced about the same time as that of Siposs, have been of a totally different trajectory.

Yet Siposs still has his Australian accent.

Mouse Whisper

So much written recently about the Cats – that Geelong Australian Rules football team which won the 2022 Australian Football League Premiership. On and on… I am just sick of all this adulation for a group of muscular leather chasers dressed up in blue and white. One former Cat once even changed his name to “Whiskas” for a week.

I tried to find out if any sporting team called themselves The Mice. A good robust name implying speed and resilience. But unfortunately not; not even the Rats. Elsewhere the Shrews are the nickname for Shrewsbury Town, a third tier League Club in England; but Shrews are insectivores; different tribe.

Modest expectations: Then off to Sydney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(a) everyone chosen has the opportunity to refuse,

(b) only expenses would be paid,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you are Young

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ngarrindjeri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Angel Falls if it ever existed outside Venezuela.

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

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

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

The migrants believed they were headed for Boston.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oak Bluffs is ritzy? Who knew?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

Modest Expectations – Brentwood

I am bemused to see Peter Dutton setting a confrontational course against China. He is charting a no-win situation. Whether the Chinese mainland invades Taiwan or not is an exercise in the pointless for our foreign policy. If we were to send any troops, which seems to be our knee-jerk reflex whenever the Americans call their allies to arms, you would just wonder why.

One of the many Chinese artefacts in Taiwan

Are the Chinese prepared to destroy a sophisticated industrial machine and repository of a large part of Chinese heritage in order to prove a point? Maybe they will, because if you take the long view, the Chinese may believe it to be a cleansing tonic. I always wondered whether they would be prepared to destroy all the priceless artefacts that were taken from China after the defeat of the Nationalists in 1949. My Chinese expert shrugged – he said he doubted whether they would care. The main game is to suppress a democratic Taiwan.

Chinese expansionism not for first time was into Tibet. Its system of repressive feudal theocracy which the Chinese overwhelmed has been sugar-coated by the long-lived effervescent Dalai Lama, who however has moved down from a Nobel prize winner eminence to a lamasery relic that nobody influential cares about. The price of living too long – “if you aspire to holiness, die young” is an aphorism which the Nazarene Christ showed.

It was easy for the Chinese to supplant Portuguese rule in Macau, which was coming to an end in the Far East as Macau had become a decadent gambling joint, sheltering criminals. Then there has been Hong Kong. I suspect the Chinese had never forgotten their humiliation by the British and the French in sacking the Imperial Palace.

The Chinese are there for the long haul. They have long memories. So they abided all the British pageantry, and then when they were ready, they tossed the 50 year agreement into the diplomatic rubbish bin, and took over Hong Kong lock, stock and barrel with the customary charmless brutality.

But I remember the fuss in the 1950s over Quemoy (or more commonly called Kinman now) and the Matsu Islands, which are within spitting distance of the Chinese mainland. Now 70 years later they still remain in the hands of Taiwan, despite in the intervening period the Chinese having taken over a number of disputed islands in the South China Sea and extended its commonweal to include both the Paracel and the Spratley islands between China and the Philippines. Having said this, after the savage confrontation in the 1950s, the intervening cordial relations between these islands and the Mainland have soured with the advent of Xi Jinping. For instance, the ferry service between Quemoy and the mainland no longer runs.

The Chinese have constructed missile arsenals, aircraft hangars, radar systems and other military facilities in the Spratley Islands on Mischief Reef, Subi Reef and Fiery Cross. It remains to be seen if China will pursue the construction of military infrastructure on other coral atolls in the South China Sea.

America has no claims itself but has deployed navy ships and aircraft for decades to patrol and promote free navigation in international waterway and airspace. Other countries – the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei – claim all or part of the sea, through which approximately $5 trillion worth of goods are shipped every year.

China routinely objects.

Hainan is almost the same size as Taiwan, but is a specific Chinese Economic Zone famed for its coconuts and tourism. It lies about 1,000 kilometres to the south of Taiwan, hugging the coast. There is no question of it not being part of China.

But this irritant Taiwan! Thousands of years before ethnic Chinese settled on Taiwan, aboriginal tribes were hunting and farming the land. They probably came from the Philippines and today constitute two per cent of the population. China held the Island until the Japanese acquired it as a result of the First Sino-Japanese War. From 1895 it was a very model of a community where the native Chinese and Japanese lived and worked together harmoniously.

Then, after the fall of Japan in 1945, the status of Taiwan became ambiguous, paralleling the ambiguity of the continued recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (R.O.C.) as the True China, despite the fact that he had been roundly defeated in 1948/49. He and the remnants of his army, together with a considerable amount of looted treasure, fled to Taiwan. In fact, he was just leading yet another invading force of Taiwan. He then set up a virtual dictatorship which, at the time being the Cold War, the Americans supported. Called the White Terror period, even though Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, the military rule extended to 1987.

I peripherally experienced this conflict in 1956 when I was on the crew manifest of the S.S. Taiping; well, for a time I occupied the assistant wireless officer’s cabin at least. I remember it well, the ship being “buzzed” by American Starfighters on the South China Sea, with the Matsu islands providing a background on the horizon. Let me say, they came in twice at funnel height – quite a performance.

Over the years, Mainland China took the permanent seat on the United Nations and reduced the number of countries maintaining diplomatic relations to 14 plus the Vatican State. Most of countries are in Central and South America plus the Caribbean; also a few of the Pacific microstates and in Africa, Eswatini.

Now all that remains is the independence of Taiwan – an enclave within the Chinese diaspora. If Taiwan had been maintained strictly as a Fortress for the R.O.C, with its own Potala Palace to remind the world of its oligarchic past – in one case theocracy, in the other a military junta – then Taiwan would be solely dependent on being propped up by the Americans as an anachronism. Taiwan is far from that – being a modern democratic industrialised country – anathema to China and yet lodged in an artificial enclave constructed by China.

The Chinese nightmare is for Taiwan to declare independence, and call the Chinese bluff. That is an important card in its hand. The only matter of importance is that war does not extend to Australia, with the Chinese community taking up cudgels for one or other of the sides.

The Chinese must look at the terrain of Taiwan and shudder, but as the Chinese Ambassador to Australia, in his speech implied, they have 1.4 billion people to lose (assuming that his assumption is that all 1.4 billion Chinese think as he does about Master Xi Jinping and his infallibility) and the Taiwanese only 22 million in any conflict, which could yet just go on year after year; and in the meantime the planet burns. Nature does not take sides. We all die.

John Knight

I started off with a mention of Dutton, elected as Leader of the Opposition, who has continued to behave as if he was still a Queensland copper. Yet he had been elected unopposed as Leader of the Liberal Party.

Whereas when Billy Snedden was elected by a margin of one vote to the position of the Leader of the Opposition after five ballots in 1972, it indicated that there was a solid group who voted against him. Among them, it was generally believed that he was a nice enough fellow but a policy boofhead.

After all he had been the Treasurer in the failed McMahon government, and McMahon had become an embarrassment propped up by the NSW Division of the Liberal Party. A familiar theme?

However, if you looked overall at the standard of Snedden’s office, the concept of “boofhead” did not quite gel, as he was considered to have recruited some smart individuals. At one time just after his first group of advisers had assembled, an office straw poll was held of those who voted for the McMahon Government in 1972 election, and the answer was no-one.

One of those recruited was John Knight, who was working in the Department of Foreign Affairs before Snedden appointed him as his senior Private Secretary. When John Knight had been originally recruited to the Department of Foreign Affairs there had been 400 applicants for 15 jobs. From the start he was potentially a high calibre diplomat and already had had one posting as a third secretary in the High Commission in New Delhi.

As he showed many times, his certain adroitness, his ability to grasp and magnify the positive elements of the conversation showed he had learnt well. Snedden asked him to see if he could organise a trip to China for Snedden. Since Whitlam was going later that year, it provided the opportunity to develop a bipartisan approach to China.

The initial spokesman for Foreign Affairs was Nigel Bowen, whose head was now in another space after his defeat as Leader given the exhausting exhaustive ballot. In 1973, Bowen retired from politics and was appointed as Chief Judge in Equity in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. He was appointed first Chief Judge (later Chief Justice) of the Federal Court of Australia in 1976 and held this until his retirement in 1990.

This in effect meant John Knight had very much free rein, which he exerted with discretion, but secured an invitation for Snedden to visit Beijing. John got on very well with Andrew Peacock, their progressive views matched. By the time Snedden went to China, Peacock had replaced the outgoing Bowen as Foreign Affairs spokesman.

There have been mixed reports about his visit, because it was not the play sheet that Whitlam wanted, given that he had already appointed his former adviser, Stephen Fitzgerald as the Australian Ambassador to China. Snedden visited, and while he did not meet Mao Tse-Tung, whom Whitlam did, his approach was in marked contrast from the previous Coalition government. When we were there, Fitzgerald could not have been more helpful, and in fact let us in on some interesting snippets he overheard pass between our Chinese hosts. After all, it was not the most stable time in China with the Gang of Four rampant.

However, a report of the visit is another story. As I wrote earlier, Snedden was convinced that the Liberal Party should recognise the P.R.C. governing China rather than the R.O.C. holed up in Taiwan, as Whitlam had formally done on behalf of Australia at the end of 1972 with ambassadors being exchanged between Australia and China in 1973.

John Knight provided the advice in relation to China. Watching Dutton stridently asserting an aggressive policy makes one wonder where he is getting his advice. Despite being still under thirty, John Knight provided shrewd progressive advice, as he did in facilitating Snedden’s visit to China. I still have a diary of that visit.

By August 1973, Snedden had been to China, met senior government figures and returned. It is agreeable to have a friendly ally, as I found out when the Taiwan Government sponsored my visit some years ago when I was involved with an international society concerned with the quality of health care. But in the end, the Taiwan trip was a junket. But does Dutton only want to be left with a bowl of whey as his China policy as I write this blog in August 2022?

Visiting China made me feel that I was a participant in a major change and, as a result of Snedden’s visit, the Opposition reversed its position and reconciled itself to a new order – a new order which had been precipitated in 1971 by the Government of China assuming its rightful place in the United Nations.

John Knight later went on to become the first Liberal Party Senator for the ACT in 1975; he was re-elected in 1977 but died of a heart attack while water skiing in 1981 at the age of 37. His memorial is a park in Belconnen, a 12 hectare area located on the eastern foreshores of Lake Ginninderra. He died way too young.

Malevich – a Ukrainian pathfinder

The effect of Malevich’s exposure to the new art was electrifying. In the three years between 1909 and1912 he went from being an unremarkable provincial painter to producing some of the major works of art of this century. In that time he assimilated the modern corpus, mastering it entirely, and he began to take his own direction in full consciousness of his powers. – Charlotte Douglas

Last week I related our pilgrimage to the Magritte Centennial Exhibition.

About eight years ago, there was an exhibition of Malevich’s work at the Tate Gallery in London. I well remember the trip down the Thames to the Tate Modern.

I came away with a memento.

I look at this figurine – a wooden model drawn from the quartet of multi-coloured figures in the Malevich painting entitled The Athletes, probably painted in 1931 and hanging in The Russian Museum.

The rendering of the human form as faceless, multi-coloured athletes was supposed to evoke how Russian saints are depicted in iconography. In particular, the shape and placement of the feet along a solid black line imitates the stance in the icons.

Kazimir Malevich was born in 1879 and died at the age of 56 in 1935. He was Ukrainian born in Kiev of ethnic Polish parents. He has become one of the most influential abstract artists whose work confronts the concrete concept of objectivity – the tools of the natural world.

Malevich went through an early phase of experimentation, often using peasants as subject matter, the yeoman stock of his Mother country. Then he entered a phase of cubism painting, before his signature Supremacist phase. Here he reduced his depiction of the human condition to geometric forms, one being a black square on a white background which seems to have mesmerised a whole generation of art critics. This time coincided with the Russian Revolution.

He is remembered through his painting conceptualising Suprematism “to access the supremacy of pure feeling” as he put it. His Supremacist painting is what makes Malevich standout. Essentially an exercise in decomposition he reduces the natural world into multicoloured images arranged in weightless space. Once you thus attempt to explain Suprematicism, you invoke visions of space where images are precisely organised into geometric forms; in many case it seems more reductionist than entering so supreme form – personally I do not understand why these paintings are associated with the Fourth dimension, which I always think about as the image of a man, holding an image of himself, infinitely repeated (see old Weeties packets).

Yet trying to intellectualise Supremacism does not detract from the brilliance of his painted work, without having to get into his mind and all its entanglements for an explanation.

Following the death of Lenin with the rise of Stalin, Malevich modified his paintings to show identifiable figures, while maintaining his basic supremacist analysis. The Athletes is part of this period. After his death, much of his work was destroyed by Stalin’s regime, but enough has survived, notably in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Perversely much of Malevich works are also held now in Russia; enough said.

Mal-a-Prop

When will it end? Below is an opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post. Alyssa Rosenberg writes about the intersection of culture and politics for The Post’s Opinions section. Rosenberg holds an Arts degree in humanities from Yale University. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times and many other publications.

This is one of an increasing number of articles where Trump is no longer perceived as a politician, but as the leader of a quasi-religious cult. Whether Trump is inciting a Jonestown scenario or not, you can be sure that he would not be present if Trumpland faced a Jonestown type Apocalypse.

Last week, a man whom authorities have identified as Ricky Shiffer was shot and killed in a stand-off with police officers after he allegedly tried to break into a FBI office in Cincinnati. Reports suggest that he may have been motivated by a strong devotion to former president Donald Trump and by anger at the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

On Thursday evening, The Post reported that according to sources, the search at Mar-a-Lago was aimed in part at recovering “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons.” Trump’s response? A post on Truth Social, the platform he founded, declaring, “Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax,” and a false suggestion that “Barack Hussein Obama” had done something similar.

But whatever we may learn about Shiffer’s motivations and the results of the FBI search, one thing is clear: The number of people who have died seemingly in service of an idol as unworthy as Donald Trump is tragic.

It’s one thing for Trump to relieve his followers of their money for dubious causes. The former president has raked in millions of dollars ostensibly dedicated to political work, when in reality what money has been spent has gone to Trump’s personal expenses.

But it’s different when people start dying.

Four of Trump’s supporters died at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol: Ashli Babbit, who was shot while trying to climb through a broken window; Kevin Greeson, who suffered a fatal heart attack; Benjamin Philips, who succumbed to a stroke; and Rosanne Boyland, whose official cause of death was “acute amphetamine intoxication,” but who was caught up in a crush of bodies on the Capitol grounds. Christopher Stanton Georgia died by suicide later that month after he was arrested on unlawful entry charges stemming from Jan. 6; he pleaded not guilty before his death.

Now comes the death of Shiffer, who was also apparently at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Some might be tempted to create distance from these tragedies through mockery, or by treating Trump’s devotees as oddities.

That impulse — to disparage or dismiss the weird and extreme — seems to undergird a 2020 New York Times profile of a widowed farmer in India who adopted Trump as a personal deity, then collapsed and died after taking to his room and refusing to eat when Trump tested positive for covid-19. It’s also the sentiment behind so much snide social-media chatter. For instance: “some dude woke up today and decided to commit suicide by cop because the former host of celebrity apprentice wasn’t allowed to keep the top secret documents he stole from the White House.”

It’s easy to scoff. But this sort of commentary ignores the sadness running through so many of these stories.

Ashli Babbitt was looking for meaning because her military career had stalled out, and her pool company was failing. The QAnon conspiracy theory — which presents Trump as a bulwark against a secret cabal of powerful paedophiles — gave Rosanne Boyland purpose and a framework for understanding the world as she struggled with addiction.

The absurdity and maliciousness (sic) of the cause for which these people have died only compounds the horror of their deaths. How is it that no one, no institution, could offer something more substantive than the manifest hollowness of Trump and Trumpism?

An essential part of Trump’s malign magic is its impermeability. Suggest that his followers deserve better — whether that is an actual infrastructure package or a leader who appeals to their best qualities rather than their basest — and you’re accused of exhibiting the very contempt that made Trump attractive in the first place. Suggest Trump is scamming his followers, and you’re a tool of the deep state. According to Trump and his many enablers, there is no evidence that isn’t planted or manufactured, no moral act that is disqualifying, no act for which Trump himself can be held responsible.

Even the people who seek to martyr themselves in Trump’s defence can be redefined and reinterpreted through this corrupt logic: On social media, Trump fans aren’t celebrating Shiffer as a Trumpist patriot. They’re dismissing him as a false flag planted to paint the FBI in a flattering light.

Those of us who live outside the boundaries of this mad realm may be tempted to count ourselves lucky. Still, we should be concerned for the residents of Trumpland for their own safety. And if that’s not enough, we should care because the people who die for Donald Trump may someday take others with them.

Mouse Whisper

As I sat under the breakfast table, I heard him ask, “what had Brendan Murphy as Head of the Department of Health known about the Morrisonian hi-jinks. It would appear inconceivable that he did not know about the arrangements, if his Minister Hunt knew. He should be asked as to what he knew, because this serious breach of conventions at the very least affects ministerial responsibility and that of the Head of Department. I shudder to think what would have happened if Morrison had been re-elected, given his recent statements. Would he have sought the Governor-General to also appoint God to the Ministry?”

He also wondered about the mental acuity of the Governor-General. “This guy after all headed the Australian Defence Forces. Did he show the same level of judgement when he was boss there as he showed with this secret collaboration?”

Well, I think that is what he said, reporting from my mouse pad.

The Health Minister with the Minister for Health

Modest Expectations – Nadia von Leiningen

I have learnt a great deal over the past fortnight about this infernal virus.

This whole incident started after we had driven from Sydney for a dinner in Broken Hill. On our way home we intended to stay with my wife’s mother, who at 96 still lives at home in Albury. As I reported in my blog two weeks ago, we all contracted COVID and we all took anti-viral drugs, despite some difficulty in accessing them. In all cases, the disease was mild, although mine has lingered with a post-viral cough.

On reflection, given how successful the antiviral treatment seemed to be especially with my 96 year old mother-in-law, I wonder why there appear to be limitations on access to these drugs.

For instance, President Biden, who is 79, received the antiviral drug, Paxlovid. In clinical trials, Paxlovid is said to reduce the risk of severe illness by 90 per cent. He has experienced a mild infection that he attributes to vaccination.

By contrast, when Trump contracted COVID in 202I, eight drugs, from aspirin to the antiviral Remdesivir, were given to Trump in what observers at the time called a “kitchen-sink” approach. Most of those drugs were probably ineffective. Trump’s infection was certainly not mild. He was lucky. Biden’s outcome is predictable, uneventful recovery. One problem is that Biden seems to have undervalued the effect of the antivirals.

When the two cases are compared there is no comment about whether there should be any restrictions on access.

Thus, why can’t the whole Australian community have access? Or is it the same case as it was with the vaccine availability, incompetent supply chain decisions covered up by a military uniform? Not enough being ordered by government is a familiar refrain. Is it another Department of Health stuff-up? Open government, Minister Butler.

We certainly had difficulty in obtaining the drug in Albury, where there were limited supplies. But this appears to be a common problem, even in capital cities. In the discussions, there seems to be a surprising degree of passivity in the community about the restriction in access without any objective clinical explanation, although that may reflect actual knowledge in the community of the existence of antiviral drugs.

Now, seeing both how our whole family benefited and how his doctors did not muck about with President Biden, who was immediately prescribed anti-viral drugs, why the restrictions on usage? On form, incompetence by the bureaucracy would appear to be the number one reason. But maybe I am too bleak. So please, what the hell is going on?

The second comment was that when the whole family has the virus, and you are away from home, how do you actually get the anti-viral drugs. You need a doctor’s prescription, and because of the current conditions for that prescription, you need to get your own doctor to prescribe. In both our cases, the practice was contacted, the doctor was busy but rang back and sent the prescription immediately by email or text. The difficulty then is getting the prescription not only filled but in our case, to also locate a pharmacy that had the drugs.

Nevertheless, the key response was that of our doctors – suburban Sydney and Albury. They promptly rang back. I have heard of the contrary situation occurring. In this case, the general practitioner did not return the call, not that day, not the next, when the prescription of an antiviral drug was essential. How often does that occur – a general practitioner forgetting the Hippocratic Oath? And nothing is done about it. How many people have died because the doctor did not ring back? One is enough!

On the Cheapside

It was a slow Saturday afternoon, and my wife was looking over a series of ship manifests seeking information about some of her relatives’ arrival in South Australia. She came across a series of ship manifests including one from the 621 ton barque Cheapside which left Plymouth Hoe on sixth July 1849 and berthed at Port Adelaide three months later on the tenth October 1849. The Cheapside was the nineteenth emigrant ship from England to arrive in the South Australian colony in 1849; it was reported in the three months voyage six babies were born and ten persons died.

On board was my grandfather John Egan, then aged five years, together with his younger brother Michael, then three and sister Mary aged one. My great grandparents were Michael and Bridget, specified as such on the manifest. Michael is described as a labourer originally from Co Clare. Bridget – nothing added – just the spouse of Michael. I knew she had been born Bridget Corcoran in Cappoquin in Co Waterford.

Strangely, I remember once standing on Plymouth Hoe and looking out to sea and trying to feel what it must have been like sailing from these shores, knowing that you would never to see them again. But then again, they had already trekked across Ireland to Plymouth. Their embarkation had been from Plymouth not from Ireland, where Queenstown (now Cobh) in Cork was the common embarkation point for emigrants. But to America not Australia!

The Egan family was numbered among the 242 emigrants in steerage. To give a flavour to the “passengers” on the other hand there were a Mr. Clisby and his daughter, Mr. Farmer, Mr, Hodgkin, Revd. Mr. Wood, his wife and five children and Mr. J. Ayre, late surgeon-superintendent of the Tasman are described as being “in the cabin”, 12 in all.

As has been described, for the “emigrants”, they were lodged below the main deck in steerage quarters converted from cargo spaces. This area would have been dark, crowded and close to the water line – when seas were rough passengers were often shut in with poor ventilation.

Added to this were probably the captain and 20 crew; so life was crowded.

On disembarkation, the Egans made their way to Kapunda, where the first commercial mine had been opened in 1842. It’s copper ore was some of the highest quality.

The township of Kapunda lies 80 kilometres north-east of Adelaide, just beyond the furthest reaches of the Barossa Valley, where a landscape of grassland and peppermint scrub here is gently undulating. That was the scene that confronted Michael Egan and his family – wife and two children – when they alighted from the bullock dray. It was early summer.

Michael had been attracted to Kapunda because he knew there were Claremen working in this newly-opened open cut mine.

Michael had always been restless. He had worked as a steward on an estate in Clare owned by the Blood family. He was still in his twenties when he left Clare and obtained work near Ross in Co Wexford, but 20 miles from Co Waterford. Here he met Bridget who was the daughter of a local farmer from Cappoquin, who had been forced into service.

They had married in the years before potato blight took hold and devastated the potato harvest across Ireland. Potatoes were an essential nutrient. As a result, the famine devastated Ireland, the first wave commencing in 1845 and by 1849 those who survived were fleeing The Emerald Isle.

And in the South Australian heat, here he was with his wife and children in November 1849.

But this was a mining community, unfamiliar territory where extraction and smelting of the ore was a task Michael had never encountered. He was rubbing shoulders with seasoned Cornish miners.

Yes, I have been to Kapunda and walked the perimeter of the overgrown mine which has been fenced off. Strewn around the site there remains clear evidence that this was once a copper mine. The tell-tale pale green cupric ore with tawny iron stains abound in the rock fragments. I souvenir a few pieces and turn away and go back to the car. The first chapter of Michael and Bridget Egan’s Adventures had begun.

For Michael was 35 at the time; he was to die 53 years later, a distinguished and wealthy Melburnian.

Taking a Taxi to Bethlehem

This is a story about my good friend, Chris Brook, who died suddenly in May. Chris was a complex person, where many facets of his personality flashed, often the light from one cancelling the other out. Yet nestling under the carapace of arch comments and disdain was a compassionate person.

He and I had gone to Jerusalem in 1995 to attend a conference where Chris was then the President-elect of the International Society of Quality Assurance (ISQua). The Conference organiser was a courtly Israeli, a long term member of the Society executive going back to when I had been President of the same institution six years before. He said very little, but I found out that he had been a veteran of the 1948 war. The veterans of this War split in two Israeli factions – Likud and Labour.

Yitzhak Rabin had been a brilliant soldier and strategist, and even though he was a hard man, he was a reasonable man. A member of the Labour Party, in 1995 he was in his second term as Prime Minister. Just over a year before he had negotiated the Oslo accords with Yasser Arafat, which introduced a period of comparative tranquility into the relationship between Israel and Palestine. For this he and Arafat had jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

We were lucky to go to Jerusalem during this period of peace. One morning, Chris and a colleague, Heather Buchan, decided to go with me to Bethlehem. It was a ten minute drive by taxi; negotiating the border was quick, unlike the time it had taken to enter Israel, being quizzed endlessly by unsmiling Junior Mossadista.

Bethlehem by and large is a nondescript town of little shade and rows of ugly yellow stucco buildings. Yet the taxi was weaving its way unerringly to the Church of the Nativity said to have been situated on the site of Christ’s birthplace. There is a photograph of us all in the Manger Square in front of the Church. On the edge of the photograph of us was a smiling lean young Palestinian, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Like many Palestinians living in Bethlehem he was a Christian, but unbeknown to me at the time Chris struck up a conversation with him. Chris said very little about him, but after we returned home Chris corresponded with him, and whether he sent money or whether he was prepared to help him migrate to Australia I am not sure. They continued to correspond. Then one day, he mentioned to me he had not heard from this young man. The silence persisted; Chris tried to find out what had happened. As far as he knew the young man had been killed in some street altercation with Israeli troops; but where, when or how, Chris never disclosed that information. Although he must have been affected, Chris never showed grief.

We had gone to Jerusalem when a calmness prevailed. We were freely able to visit Jewish, Christian and Muslim shrines. I particularly remember walking along the Wailing Wall amid the black robes and nodding heads. There was a cave at the end of the wall, where many of these Orthodox Jews were clustered. I had entered it, even though I was obviously a tourist. Nobody seemed to mind. One of these Orthodox Jews I clearly remember was one who lifted his beard to reveal a tracheostomy hole. It did not stop him launching into a crazy tirade. I listened to the invective – vicious invective primarily directed at Yitzhak Rabin for what he had done. I excused myself. When I walked out into the sun I felt I needed a shower.

Four months later, Rabin was assassinated by a right wing extremist, Yigal Amir, on 4 November 1995 in the Kings of Israel Square.

The Accidental Nobel Laureate

Due to their recent discovery and relative inertness, there have not been many clear establishments for the applications of fullerenes. However, there are predicted applications that are presently being tested – May 22, 2022

Dr Robert Curl died last week. Dr Curl shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

As recalled in his obituary in the NYT, in 1985, Dr Curl, a Texan, along with Richard E. Smalley, a Rice colleague, and Harold W. Kroto, a scientist visiting from the University of Sussex in England, showed a new configuration: 60 carbon atoms bonded into a molecule that resembled a soccer ball. They also found a larger version made of 70 carbons.

The finding was serendipitous because the scientists had been looking for something else. The chemists named the molecules buckminsterfullerenes after the architect Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. The name was later shortened to fullerenes or buckyballs.

What a great name to enliven an esoteric area – the concept of kicking buckyballs around the molecular framework. The problem is that no matter how enticing the name and how cute the carbon atomic configuration; they were unable to find a commercial use.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo in 1996, Dr Curl said inter alia

At the outset, none of us had ever imagined these carbon cage molecules. When we looked at carbon, the single astounding carbon sixty peak in the mass spectrum and the circumstances under which it came to prominence admitted no other explanation than the totally symmetric spherical structure, and suddenly a door opened into a new world.

The fullerenes have caused chemists to realize the amazing variety of structures elemental carbon can form from the well-known three-dimensional network that is diamond and the equally well-known flat sheets of hexagonal rings that are graphite to the newer discoveries of the three-dimensional cages that are fullerenes. We have learned that the cages can be extended into perfect nanoscale tubules which offer the promise of electrically conducting cables many times stronger than steel. Or the cages can nestle one inside the other like Russian dolls. Now that we have become more aware of the marvellous flexibility of carbon as a building block chemists may ultimately learn how to place five- and seven-membered rings precisely into a network of hexagonal rings so as to create nano structures of ordered three-dimensional complexity like the interconnecting girders in a steel-frame building.

The statement at the head of the blog was published in March this year.

Ergo, a Nobel Prize awarded for a discovery they were not looking for with a cute name but still in search of a function in the nanoworld of the molecules, let alone the ongoing search for their commercial application.

No Place for the Shamus?

I receive a great amount of stuff from the Lincoln Project, an extreme group of former republicans dedicated to destroying Trump and his acolytes. I receive regular communication because I purchased a print from them of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln with a tear in his eye. It is a powerful image. Those behind the Project are no saints; they are men who have been at the heart of the US government, insiders well versed in the “dirty trick campaign” and seemingly unafraid of using the same tactics.

The critical decision for the reader to make is to whether, if you read on, are you reading fact or “alternative facts”. It is important to factor in your own bias, if you have no idea of what is actually occurring. Yet the last sentence limply reinforces a paean which unexpectedly appears four paragraphs before about the Secret service being essential and valiant; a tincture of an apologia methinks! Rick Wilson the author of this below is what, in the terms of Cain and Chandler, may have been described as “hard bitten and cynical”. But then that is my bias!

Here’s why it matters that tens of thousands of you raised your hands and demanded answers about those deleted January 6th Secret Service texts:

If reports are to be believed, the Secret Service handed over exactly one – ONE! – message. That’s like writing “FU” on a blank cover sheet, crumpling it up, and throwing it in the general direction of Capitol Hill.

To get this straight: the Secret Service let the dog eat all their text messages during, wait for it, and this coincidence will SHOCK you, the two days surrounding the most calamitous threat to our democracy. Literally every possible agency with investigatory power has a duty to figure out just what the hell happened.

It matters that a Federal agency given sweeping powers of action and discretion has quite clearly engaged in a coverup to protect Trump and his coup plot. Stay with me here, because my mind is wandering…

1) The long-rumoured and discussed cadre of Trump Praetorians in the USSS needs to get aired the hell out. This just reeks.

2) The leadership and every single person on the detail and Uniformed Division that day needs to have their personal and work devices of every kind subpoenaed and examined. They must also be deposed.

3) I hope you’ll let the 1/6 Committee know you’ll tune in for “The Long Hot Summer” series. They absolutely should add this to the docket and make it so hot even the DOJ can’t ignore it. They can skip vacation “juuust” this once and crack some skulls.

4) I’ve noticed many Republicans get very livid lately when this whole scandal gumbo is compared to Watergate.

The Secret Service is a vital agency. Their unchallenged bravery at being the last line of defense between violence and assassination of U.S. Presidents and protectees is storied and written at times in blood. It is a brave and honorable duty. The core of their reputation wasn’t just a fearsome readiness to defend the President. It was also a cool, detached professionalism that served the office, not simply the political whims of the man who held it.

For months, Mike Pence’s refusal to enter the VP limo has pinged the edges of my radar. I couldn’t quite sort out his reluctance. He’s not a physically brave man, to my knowledge, so what was it? What else did he know or sense? If you ask me, I think Pence knew parts of the Service were compromised and put Trump’s politics over duty.

To go deeper down the rabbit hole: I’m no Presidential staff historian, but Trump’s elevation of hyper-loyalist Tony Ornato from the Secret Service into a political role at the White House (who later planned the photo op with the Bible, and the tear gas attack on peaceful protestors in Lafayette Square…) might have been a tell. I suspect he’s rather a key element here. We also know that when President Biden took office, he felt compelled to change out pro-Trump detail members. Putting all that together leads us to some unpleasant potential conclusions, to say the least.

This is not a matter where all of us – not the Committee, not the DOJ, not every American who cares about the rule of law and the vital role of the Secret Service – can sit back and be satisfied with one lousy text message. We have to pull at these threads and connect these dots.

The danger the Secret Service faces every day in the line of duty is real. Their sworn duty is an honourable one. But it’s starting to look like the MAGA rot runs deep here. Who knows how big of a role all of this played in the January 6th insurrection?

Yes, who knows. Jason Bourne is across it, and he was supposed to be flight from reality.

Mouse Whisper

If that human crowd have not had enough pandemic, Splendour in the Mud in Byron Bay may just be a catalyst for another, especially as it is not an uncommon event as exemplified in this British report:

Unusual transmissions of gastrointestinal diseases have also occurred during large scale open air festivals. An outbreak of Escherichia coli was reported during the Glastonbury music festival in England and was linked to mud contaminated by infected cattle. Heavy rain had turned the site into a quagmire, and attendees had high levels of contaminated mud on their hands and faces.

Also, those coming back from Splendour in the Mud last weekend should become acquainted with the one word “leptospira”. These nasty bacteria, the bane of sewage workers, are associated with my dirty cousin rats – in their urine which they sprinkle over sugar cane and banana plantations and which is washed away when the rains come and into the mud that forms around these bacteria.

Welcome to the disease world of the unprotected youth, acquiring a disease to remember where splendour is in the eye of the beholder as they cavort to the sounds of those masters of the music world. So, as you raise your glass with the muddy hand, do I hear you cry “Here’s Mud in Your Eye”?

No, that is a toast from another era well before Woodstock, in fact it’s biblical.

Modest Expectations – Leyland Sprinter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vera Putina’s little boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgotten Ohio Ukrainians rallying against Putin’s war

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

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

Albored Part IV – No Longer Unready?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maeslant storm surge barrier near Rotterdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rupert’s Quote of the Geek

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

Try Ukraine, Buster!

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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