Modest Expectations – Melville has some Depth (+1)

Taffy Jones died at the end of last year. Taffy Jones was in my year of medicine. Moreover, he was in Trinity College at the same time as myself.

When we graduated near the bottom of the year, we found ourselves as first year resident doctors at Box Hill & District Hospital, then an outer suburban hospital where it was considered a training ground for general practice. It was in the days before intensive care or coronary care units, before emergency physicians existed, before all the accumulated rules policed by nurses bearing clipboards in the name of “Quality Control”.

We all shared Casualty duty – all six of us. One night when Taffy was on duty a man in his thirties presented with acute chest pain. Fortuitously, Taffy thought he may have a ruptured oesophagus, an uncommon condition where the pain mimics that of cardiac pain. Taffy was right. In those days, the operation to repair the oesophagus was undertaken locally. To-day, he would have been admitted to a major teaching hospital. The chances for survival were not good, but Taffy looked after him literally day and night. One day when Taffy was sleeping in the same room, obviously not the patient, some over-zealous nurse tried to do his four-hour observations. Knowing Taffy’s innate affability, I’m sure he took it with the good grace any exhausted doctor being woken up in the middle of night to have their blood pressure being taken would. The patient recovered.

I was reminded of this when I recently went the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH)with a 36-hour nosebleed, which had been imperfectly staunched. I was deposited in a wheelchair to wait six hours to be attended while subject to the torture of the clipboard mania laughably called “quality control”. I, the patient vanished under a pile of protocols, even being admonished at one interval for having the temerity to question the need for blood tests when I had had them done only two days prior

Eventually, I was seen by the emergency physician and her trainee sidekick. Well, what do you know! They did not have the instruments to stop the bleeding. So, I was transferred to the ear, nose and throat (ENT) clinic late in the afternoon, having been in the emergency department since mid-morning. I was the last patient in the clinic. All the ENT specialists had left. There was no-one else but the ENT registrar. Again, I waited – after about a further 20 minutes, the registrar emerged. She treated me; she was very competent. It took 20 minutes, if that. By the way, there are four ENT registrars all of whom could have seen me during the course of the day. She did a good job, and I have had only one small bleed since; it is part of my disease spectrum.

It happened to me this week again; I, an immunologically compromised person having to wait two hours to be seen, when this time I did have a designated appointment time. This time I was very angry; the oncologist apologised. He said that the hospital administration, whom they never see, just keep loading him up with patients. Predictably from being in this poorly ventilated hospital three days later I developed what I initially thought was an upper respiratory tract infection, but then tested positive for COVID.

I was once a senior medical manager in a health service the size of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, admittedly some years ago. I always made a point of being seen around the hospital, listening, encouraging efficiency and effectiveness and at time criticising when I thought it warranted. The only place I failed but still developed a mutual regard was with the head of the eye clinic, which we maintained until his death some years ago. He was an interesting case study.

The administrator who remains office bound, giving a semblance of business by always being at meetings, at conferences, on days off, is more the profile these days. It is even worse now since the pandemic; apparently, they work from home. It is about time the government woke up and see who is ostensibly running the hospitals, looking after or ensuring that health professionals can work in a way that the patient, such as myself, feels satisfied and safe. The RPA has always been near the bottom of the pack, at least since Dr Don Child retired in 1987.

My Tasmanian Response

Somewhat impetuously, I said that I would write a piece about my Tasmania, in response to the tourist blurb distortion which appeared recently in the NYT, and which I found projected a very limited view of Tasmania.

But when I calmed down, I realised over the nearly five years I have been writing a blog each week without a break – this week at blog 255 it’s just five away from my fifth anniversary. Mostly I write about 3,000 words, including the various quotes and outside opinion which is baked into the blog. Generally, my wife waves much of my writing through, with variable degrees of editing.

Here even with so many words clocked up on my blog, my wife pointed out that my first draft wasn’t up to scratch, particularly as there is such a great amount of material to be written about this island and which I had barely touched upon. She was right.

Now, I first came to Tasmania, to Hobart in 1950, when I stayed with my parents at the Wrest Point Hotel when it was an art deco creation at Sandy Bay, an upmarket part of Hobart. So, I have a long association, but only acquired a property here 20 years ago.

I learnt over the years that it is the land itself which makes the whole of Tasmania attractive not just one small segment on the north-east coast, however beautiful. Despite the action of us white people, there is enough remaining Tasmania upon which to marvel. Tasmania is not only one particular walk through a confected culture.

Opium poppies in flower

Strangely, I like this island because the blend of exotic flora seems to augment the attractiveness of the island in addition to the underlying uniqueness of the local fauna and flora.  There are the tulips in bloom in October; the month that the red Tasmanian waratahs are in bloom. The next month it is the fields of opium poppy with its distinctive, delicate mauve blooms; and then it is time for the clouds of lavender to take the stage. Also at this time in the early new year, the leatherwood are coming into flower, its pollen harvested by the bees ending up as the eponymous dark honey. Down south, there are the cherry orchards stretching across the hills to the west of Hobart; then in January, the berries are harvested. Raspberries, never better.

But let’s get rid of the dark side of the Island originally peopled by convicts and their guards in the south, Port Arthur as a grim symbol. Then as one of the monographs from the Launceston Historical society states in the north “Anglo-Indians (in its nineteenth-century sense of the British in India), leaving India and emigrating to Australia wished, it seems, to escape, not recreate, architecturally at least, the oppression of India. In Van Diemen’s Land they could build an English cottage, not a bungalow, although a verandah may be useful. To these immigrants the concept of ‘home’ was still English – not Indian – although they chose not to return to England.” They quickly outnumbered the Aboriginal population and the story of their elimination is one of the less savoury episodes in Australian history.

Thus, despite all the efforts to promote continuity in Aboriginal heritage, it is unfortunately largely confected, as I’ve written. After all, Milligan writing in 1890 estimated that there had been only 2,000 Indigenous people when colonisation commenced. Truganini, traditionally the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, had died in 1876.

As has been well-reported: When Truganini met George Robinson , the chief Protector of Aborigines in 1829, her mother had been killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers, and her fiancé brutally murdered by timber-cutters, who had then repeatedly sexually abused her.

Then there was the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger, and the years of guilt-ridden search for them and then the hope one could rescue enough DNA from a formalinised specimen to somehow clone the animal. Arrant nonsense, the whole scenario.

Yet the Tasmanian Government never learns that there is more money in tourism, including ecotourism than the rapacious destruction of the forests and remote areas. Now it proposes allowing logging in the habitat of one of two rarest parrots – the swift parrot.

The other parrot, also migratory, the orange-bellied parrot is critically endangered. There are very few orange-bellied parrots left in the wild. Their last remaining breeding site is in the moorland and button grass around Birch’s inlet on the west coast of Tasmania. We once went searching for the parrot in this location; saw a great number of blue-winged parrots but sadly nothing with an orange belly – at least not a parrot.

Then there are well-recorded attempts of buggering up the Tasmanian environment by government’s insistence on damming every river in sight and cutting down all the old growth forests and a cavalier treatment of the Wilderness, including its refusal to stop the spread of invasive species – gorse being a case in point. Mining on the West Coast around the town of Queenstown still shows the scars in the surrounding hills, and the King River and the Macquarie Harbour contain a toxic cocktail of arsenic, cadmium, mercury and other metals. Sulphur coats the King River banks and then along the Harbour foreshore; one should not disturb the delta of the river which is rich in cadmium. Two hundred years may rid these waterways of the pollution.

Having lost Lake Pedder with its unique pink quartzite beach to inundation for a dam, the battle to conserve Tasmania has been robust, heightened by the spectacular efforts of Bob Brown and his supporters in scuttling the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam project in 1982.

This is well-known but sometimes you need to retrace such a well known series of events, which ended up largely preserving the South-west temperate rain forest for now.

This win and the preservation of these rivers in their pristine state was brought home to me when we were flown by a friend over these rivers flowing through the Southwest National Park, the wilderness area. The Franklin and Gordon without a concrete abomination to dam them. At South-west Cape, we turned east and flew along the coast and then up the Derwent estuary, re-fuelling in Hobart. We then flew following the Derwent River until we turned to the west over the Walls of Jerusalem and across the range, over Queenstown before proceeding to land in Strahan – the airport located on a hill above Macquarie Harbour. That day, it was a perfect, cloudless day – no wind.

It is a flight to see the wilderness where the adventurous slog through or climb up or kayak down, taking days if not weeks to experience whereas we had seen it all from above. I’m afraid I did not feel guilty because there was no pain in our achievement even not being close to elemental nature; it was still a magnificent experience.

After all, living in Strahan there was the walk to Hogarth Falls, a trail carved through the rain forest where myrtle, sassafras, and celery pine grow. There is little or no Huon pine; it has long since been logged from along the rivers, but there remain a huge number of logs retrieved from the rivers and which lie in a woodyard in Strahan.

Reclaimed Huon pine

Our house is a timbered pole house – the poles are blackwood except for one  pole of King Billy pine; the floors and window frames are celery top pine; the kitchen Huon pine and the panelling mountain ash. The bathroom door is cedar, a somewhat anomalous Queensland intruder. The house which we bought is built with both new and recovered wood.

All very personal – so lucky to have this tribute to Tasmania – so lucky – surrounded as I am by Tasmanian artifacts as I write this blog.

Sexual Violence Tra-la-la

Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding

It is a strange sensation when you see revival of the mannered films in which actors such as Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding starred in the 1940s to realise you grew up when that era was ending. Pretending to be bright young man and woman in love was very much of a stretch in their very popular Maytime in Mayfair. Anna Neagle was 45 and Michael Wilding 37 years when the film was made.

They were impeccably dressed according to the times.  She wore a long flowing gown; they both smoked; she wore a corsage; he wore a dinner suit; they drank champagne from those shallow wide bottomed glasses introduced in the Prohibition era in America to disperse the bubbles so champagne was always drunk flat to fool “the fuzz”, they danced the dances of the age.  I remember learning at dancing class to the sound of a reedy voiced crooner. “Quick…quick…slow”.

Twenty-one was still the age of majority, and it was a time for a celebration. It was all Maytime in Melbourne, but on one night in 1961 I revealed the imp in me, an unfortunate trait that comes out when I’m bored and sober. The woman’s magazine reporter came up to us at this 21st shindig at the then exclusive location in Darling Street in South Yarra. My then fiancé was beautiful, which attracted “her gushiness,” and when asked my name, I gave the name of the Warden of the University College in which I was residing at the time. Where did I come from? I said Trawalla, which was a suitably upcountry location on the edge of the Western District.

I thought no more of it, but the photo of us appeared in the magazine complete with the alias. It was not long before the mother of the bloke whose 21st celebration it was wrote me a letter apologising for the error, which she had made clear in no uncertain terms to the magazine editor was unforgivable.

I heard nothing from the Warden; I was not the first to take his name for such an alias.

I have reflected on this piece of what I thought at the time was just me being clever and I used to regale people over the years with this anecdote. But really was I betraying an unfortunate attitude to women? Would I have done the same if the reporter was a male from a daily newspaper?

I had never thought about this until I was seeing this frothy comedy, with musical interludes. At one stage Michael Wilding bursts into the room and forcibly planted a kiss on Anna Neagle’s lips, at a time when the film storyline had them alienated. Then he departs gaily, and Anna Neagle instead of a normal reaction to being thus assaulted just simpered.

While it could be passed over in the entirety of the film, that action would be unacceptable these days in any script to picture a woman unaffected by this encounter. The arraignment of the former head of Spanish football for an uninvited kiss on one of Spanish woman footballers demonstrated at least universal distaste for such sexual violence.

Back when I made that gesture, what was sexual violence? Nothing to do with “me and my mates”?  Oh, really!

Getting it Right

Once when I was the medical administrator at a country hospital it was reported to me that an international medical graduate(IMG) from China, who had been assigned to the hospital as part of his registration process, was accessing pornography on hospital computers. Unlike the normal run of risk averse medical administrators, I neither did nothing nor did I “handball” the case to central office so they could organise the normal investigation.

Instead, I asked one of the staff very conversant with computer usage if he would accompany the doctor, who admitted that he had been accessing computers after hours. What he was doing was trying to find one where he could contact his sister in China. She wished to come to Australia to undertake a nursing course. He showed my colleague the computer which he had found enabled him to contact his sister in China, and the so-called porn glimpsed by the passing nursing staff was in fact pop-ups of Asian women in lingerie, incidental to his access. He had been successful in finding an appropriate computer, but I asked to see him.

I said in future not to do any further activities without asking permission, especially after hours. He was just not wanting to bother us, he explained. Nevertheless, he got the message. 

Some Like it Hot

Shamar Joseph has burst onto the cricketing scene from a shack in the back blocks of Guyana to win a test match for the West Indies, despite nursing a very bruised big toe. The amazing fact about this very fast bowler is that he is small for such a task. Standing alongside Steve Smith who is 176 cm, he seems to be slightly taller; and the source which says his height is 178cm seems to be the most plausible figure.

I thought the following recipe for Pepperpot would give the reader a touch of Guyana.

Now for the recipe, which appeared recently in the NYT, and has been modified. Cassareep, the essential ingredient is available in Australia.

Warm with sweet orange peel and spices like cloves and cinnamon, Pepperpot, a stewed meat dish popular in Guyana and the Caribbean, is traditionally served on Christmas morning. But one can make this version any time you want to celebrate. What gives it its distinct taste is cassareep, a sauce made from the cassava root. If you can’t find it, wiri wiri peppers or Scotch bonnets or a mixture of pomegranate molasses (1/3 cup), I tbsp of soy sauce and I tbsp Worcester sauce will work. Whatever you do, don’t forget to serve it with thick slices of white bread, or rice to sop up that delicious gravy.  Scotch bonnets, supposedly shaped like a tam o’shanter, are very hot chilis, ten times the Scoville unit measurement for jalapeño peppers. Apparently they are the go-to chilli of the Caribbean; but be warned!

FOR THE PEPPERPOT

4 pounds bone-in stew meat (oxtail, beef chuck, goat
or mutton), cut into 3-inch pieces
Kosher salt and black pepper
2 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 Scotch bonnet or habanero peppers, chopped, plus
more to taste
1 large yellow onion, chopped
6 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup cassareep (or substitute)
¼ (lightly packed) cup brown sugar (dark or light)
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1 tablespoon whole cloves
3 medium cinnamon sticks
Peel from 1 medium orange
4 spring onions, cut into 4-inch lengths.

… now the process

Step 1
Prepare the green seasoning (onion, garlic, pepper, chives, coriander, thyme, basil): Add all ingredients to a food processor. Blend, adding water a few tablespoons at a time, until you get a thick purée. (Makes 3 cups; keep any extra in an airtight container in the refrigerator for 2 weeks.)

Step 2
Season the meat with 2 cups green seasoning, 2 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper. Marinate at room temperature for 1 hour or overnight in the refrigerator.

Step 3
Heat the oven to 190 degrees. In a large Dutch oven over medium heat, add 2 tablespoons oil and transfer the meat into the pot, leaving behind any excess marinade. Brown the meat in batches. Transfer to a plate.

Step 4
Add 1 tablespoon oil to the pan, if necessary. Add Scotch bonnets and onion; sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, another 30 seconds.

Step 5
Add in the cassareep, brown sugar, ginger, cloves, cinnamon sticks, orange peel, spring onions and bay leaf. Add back the meat and the juices from the plate and add water to cover the meat. Let come to a boil over high heat.

Step 6
Cover the pot, transfer to the oven and cook, covered, for 2 to 2½ hours, until the meat is tender. Skim as much fat as possible from the top.

Mouse Whisper

When I got in my car at the Grand Marais Airport in rural northern Minnesota, where I’d left it, I noticed something peculiar: tiny footprints across my dust-covered dash.  Washington Post

How it all started.

The photos show what happens when a wildlife photographer finds that a white-footed mouse has decided to squat in his car. He named the mouse Morticia and she stayed there. She was more than just a subject; she was his resident model. Then she brought in a mate.

Symbiotic relationship – if that is the word.

There were rules. No food left in the car. No wires chewed in return. Mouse droppings cleaned away. Photos taken. Then the mice were gone sometime before his car had reached its time to be scrapped. Auto death at 250,000 miles.

But he still had his pictures.

Modest Expectations – Organesson

After not being given sufficient time to explain my remarks re Brett Sutton last night on Q&A what I wanted to explain is that he is not an Epidemiologist and it is on his medical advice to Govt that we continue to have shut downs. If I have offended Prof Sutton my apologies.

Q&A is a pulpit. A woman called Susan Alberti AM, AO, AC, a stepping stone queen of Order, developer extraordinaire, professional philanthropist and general Liberal party lady about town cast a nasty aspersion against the Chief Medical Officer of Victoria, Brett Sutton, on that ABC program this past week. She said he was not a doctor – a sotte voce interruption when Tom Elliot was in full flight. Now I have never watched Tom Elliot, because he is a Melbourne phenomenon, or perhaps I have had enough exposure to his father to last a lifetime.

However, I was directed toward this excerpt of the program, which I rarely watch. It brought back memories. Here Mr Speers was conducting this meeting of the Coalition with a guest from the Opposition.  He seemed to be acting as President of this newly-formed Q&A Branch of the Liberal Party, where Tom Elliot had been invited as the main speaker. I had heard of this chap as he was at university at the same time as my offspring.

I had known his father from his days at the University of Melbourne, where he was several years behind me but had a refreshing Baptist School old boy attitude to beer, billiards and of course fags, however defined.

It was refreshing to hear all the nostrums with which his father used to amuse us. Listening to Young Tom I had never realised his father, Old John, was such a fine ventriloquist. Moreover, Old John did not appear to be in the room – what a feat.

What I objected to however was the lack of immediate correction about Brett Sutton. Speers should have stopped the meeting and corrected Alberti immediately. Even in her apology, she says he is not an epidemiologist. Well, Alberti, not all epidemiologists are doctors—and to be Chief Health Officer, he does have to have a medical degree and has had extensive overseas medical experience, just not restricted to counting the dollars in the fields of Dandenong and Hallam.

Her sidekick, The Moroccan Soup Bar kid, Hana Assafiri OAM, had chimed in at the same time with the same comments, but also scrawled some sort of an apology: “unequivocal apology on getting your title wrong! The intention was to convey that you are not simply a doctor, that you heave (sic) a wealth of expertise guiding this state through the pandemic. Obviously didn’t translate the way it was intended.” I do hope, Hana Assafiri, that your pigeon pastilla does use icing sugar not iodine – sweet not bitter taste on the pie.

Stop the frolic! David Speers as a balanced chair of an ABC program, I’m afraid you are a disgrace. Full stop.

And as for Susan Alberti, my total contempt, made worse by your awkward misstatement, which is in no way an apology.

Dr Brett Sutton, Chief Health Officer

Brett Sutton is the hard man; he is one who is identified with the lock up strategy, whether fairly or unfairly. The above comments are not the only ones floating around about him. In crisis situations, you need hard men and women who can differentiate self-interest from legitimate criticism; who have a clear view of the end point. Often a lonely job.

Toilers from Homes?

A cognitive scientist by training and a working mother, has been warning about the unintended consequences of workplace flexibility, including the mental toll on mothers who still do the brunt of the housework.

The scientist stresses that managers can’t just leave it up to workers to figure out the right balance. Companies, for example, could decide there are certain times when everyone is in the office as a way to head off problems arising on work-from-home days when employees are out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

Employers could also decide not to schedule meetings at certain times of the day — such as before 9 a.m., between 3 and 4 p.m., or after 5 p.m., allowing parents (note change from above) to make school drop-offs and pick-ups, and to prepare dinner.

This expresses concisely the sentiment for developing a hybrid model of working both at home and in the office that has become the preferred option for services where front of house or on-site physical activity are not required. This describes much of the so-called gig economy.

The quote above concentrates on women to the exclusion of men.

The hybrid model is constructed with women in mind, given they inevitably are primarily responsible for children and the domestic arrangements, which all need to be sustained when she is at work. It also recognises the increasing number of women at all levels of bureaucracy – they are not just the stenographers of yore. Nevertheless, for many women the nature of their work does not give them the option of a hybrid model of remote work.

So the tug-o-war now applies to the bureaucracy however defined and be it public or private sector, responsible for delivery of product without need to be on site. The recent addition of teachers to that group as “remote learning” becomes easier to set up is an added complexity.

However, does the person in the street benefit when seeking advice or resolution of their particular concern if the hybrid model becomes generalised?

The problem is in the implementation of what could be construed as “new” bureaucracy. For the person who, by the nature of his or her job, requires a large amount of time to think, create or write, the wish to work without distraction is understandable. After all, Silicon Valley is always quoted as that – of having the libertarian approach to workstyle.

But even here, to quote a CNN source: The tech industry might seem well-positioned for remote work indefinitely but it has also spent years building a culture of collaboration and innovation that it will be loath to give up, spending untold billions on huge offices and perks like free food, gyms and nap pods that convince employees to spend more time there than they do at home.

But this above is not conventional bureaucracy nor is it one which is female dominant. Or is it just the vanguard of a “new” bureaucracy created by the pandemic where a larger proportion are women?

It may be reasonable to postulate that most people working at home have a need for ongoing communication – in no way different from working in the office.  Thus, “rules of engagement” need to be clarified. The last paragraph of the cognitive scientist’s assessment needs better definition. There must be discipline imposed on the environment where children need to be picked up and domestic duties resumed. Does domesticity take priority over the requirements of the job; one unpredictability being illness in the children – as one of my colleagues once said, “young children are bags of virus”.  It is here that the father is introduced into the hybrid model discussion.

This is the contingency which needs to be addressed if working at home is accepted as part of the hybrid model. These gaps need to be patched in the structuring of rules. In the office situation, employees take carer’s leave, or sick leave to deal with these situations, or negotiate short working days.

As soon as rules are established there will be exceptions. If the rules become the subject of an industrial award, work flexibility becomes beset with the legal rigidity of industrial contracts – with the temptation of putting in place “one size fits all”.

The problem with work flexibility is that communication becomes increasingly difficult.  Over the years, unless you happen to be the person of influence, to get in touch with “the responsible bureaucrat” in the office can be bad enough, but away from the office can be a nightmare when you want urgent resolution. There are so many reasons for having a day off and thus the decision-making is even further delayed or even forgotten.

When this is added to the actions of paranoid Government departmental heads who seem to keep their staff on the move until the corporate memory becomes totally attenuated and thus is finally lost. Then “the wheel has to be re-invented” and the same mistakes are liable to be repeated.

How many times have I had to face bureaucrats with no sense of what has gone before; who are unaware of what works and what doesn’t work? That is the problem with much of bureaucracy when it loses its corporate memory – there is a tendency to start the same process all over again, especially when there is a change in government.

Now introduce into that mix working from home without rules.

How often do you try to contact a person only to be told he or she is working from home? This is said in the sense the person is incommunicado until he or she returns to the office. The person may as well thus not be at work. So, if working at home becomes accepted as the new norm, then the bureaucrat needs to be contactable at home and must be prepared to sacrifice the privacy of the home as an “inviolate castle of domesticity”.

Where flexibility of the hybrid model is maintained alongside strong productivity, I suggest it is due to the leadership – what Max Weber called “charismatic”; but such leadership is difficult to sustain, because so much of the work pattern is determined by the leader, and the quality of that leadership. The charismatic leader leads, and then does the hybrid work model revert to a bureaucracy? I am not sure that the hybrid model has longevity; because long term “charismatic” leadership is the exception in the life of any bureaucracy – longevity is not its strong suit.

A somewhat sarcastic Bartleby opus in The Economist suggested that working from home on a Monday or Friday is a joke. On the latter day, as Bartleby writes, managers may call to listen out for tell-tale signs of the beach or golf – a comment, both sexist and ageist. Bartleby’s point is made about ageing men.

Yet if the hybrid model becomes an object for gaming and maximising “slacking”, then the above article has a set of tips. If hypothetically two days at home working are allowed, then there are ten combinations – and Monday and Friday may just raise suspicions, if not hilarity. Again, gaming is not restricted to one sex.

In the end, like the cognitive scientist’s thinking, I suspect the office environment will win out against the hybrid model, because as the final paragraph of the opening quote implies, the home environment will breed conflict within the job framework – unless the office can be made totally separate and distinct from “the hearth”.

Yet there is at least one more elephant in the room, and that is the increasing resistance to people coming into the office with an upper respiratory infection. I suspect that a population which has come through lockdowns, mandatory masks and forced compliance will be less tolerant of anybody who challenges the health of the office by coming into work, even with a common cold.

More thought needs to be given to childcare services provided under the aegis of the State to mirror the new workstyle of those who need to use them.  It is worth more than an addendum to an apologia or not of the work hybrid model.

Schools work on fee-for-term model, so that the fees make allowance for absences. When I was chairing a childcare co-operative, until that “term” business model was adopted, then the income of the childcare facility suffers from the vagaries of domestic problems – child illness being a big slice of that.

With the increasing discussion, albeit demand for a hybrid model, then childcare services usage may have to change to reflect that change in work practice.  That is another topic to be explored in a future blog, when reminiscing over personal experience, admittedly many years ago, which nevertheless may still provide productive comment.

I knew it well, Dunmunkle

As I promised, I write my take on the three towns which once were the three Townships of the Shire of Dunmunkle in the Victorian Wimmera, north of Horsham.

I used to know this area reasonably well since I was asked to resolve an issue around the delivery of health care in the 1980s at one of these townships, Minyip and went back over the next decade or so. The other two townships are Murtoa and Rupanyup. Minyip traditionally is a Lutheran town, part of the Protestant German diaspora which is layered across Southern Australia from the Barossa Valley to the NSW Riverina around Albury. By contrast, Rupanyup has Scottish Presbyterian heritage and Murtoa, Irish Roman Catholic.

Rupanyup lies on the Dunmunkle Creek, which flows into the Wimmera River. Murtoa lies on the major Melbourne-Adelaide railway line. Minyip is surrounded by wheat cropping, and once was on a spur railway line.

The Stick Shed, Murtoa

Watching the “Backroads” program on the ABC, I was fascinated by one item, and wondered why I have missed it. The second was the fact that Murtoa was ignored while, the program concentrated on Rupanyup and Minyip. That puzzled me, especially as the most interesting item in the program was the huge Murtoa grain store built in four months during World War 2 at the end of 1941, which is the only one left in Australia – the so-called Stick Shed, because it has 560 mountain ash poles supporting a galvanised iron roof structure, the building spread over four acres, and held up to 92,000 tons of wheat. The sloping roof was built in the way wheat grain naturally stockpiles itself. A majestic bush building but working inside must have been a major industrial hazard.

The other puzzle was why Murtoa was otherwise ignored. After all, it was the birthplace of Mary Delahunty, one of the most well-known ABC faces and the ABC tends to identify and remember its own. Therefore, the puzzle is why the program ignored Murtoa until almost the last frames, given that it is also the biggest of the three towns.

The tactic of the “identity” is the method of packaging the half-hour program, which inevitably gives a caricature of rural life; so different from the rural program “Landline”, which is genuinely informative about rural life. In fact the segment on Rupanyup, which is the one township struggling to survive, concentrated on chick pea production and its diverse uses, and could have as easily segmented into “Landline”. This diversification into pulse legumes around Rupanyup starting in the 1980s with field peas extended to many of the other crops, in particular lentils and chick peas, the latter most visible in the supermarket in the form of hummus. But what does that have to do with Rupanyup, the few views of the township are a tableau of peeling paint and empty shops?

I got to know Minyip when they closed the local hospital in the late 1980s and replaced it with a community health centre, which for many years had the advantage of continuity in its administration. The closure of a hospital, even a small one as happened in Minyip, made me realise that when you close a small hospital, as I have written “it is like a death in the family”. The community traditionally was born and died in the hospital. When services are rationalised even when a community health centre was constructed and proved to be excellent, the community’s grief can be underestimated.

I suspect it is less so now, presumably with dilution of the Lutheran influence. After all, in 1935 the congregation decided to move the Lutheran church with dimensions of 16 x 8.5 metres including the 19m high bell tower, 50 tons in all, a distance of 10 miles to Minyip. The congregation jacked it up onto a 12-wheel jinker and by means of a steam traction engine moved it to its present site in the township. The trip took three days. Would it happen today?

Moving the Lutheran church in 1935

The other anecdote worthy of note was in the early days of settlement when they decided to put the shire hall in Minyip, the Murtoans came across at night and took it to Murtoa. Minyip retaliated by taking it back, in a clash of the jinkers. Then it burnt down; and for years there was a residual animosity between the two communities.

Generally, the animosity or rivalry, however defined, is worked out on the football field. In 1995, with a declining pool of players, old grudges were forgotten; the Murtoa and Minyip teams amalgamated and the jumper was redesigned to absorb the colours of the two football teams. Rupanyup has been the outlier, in that its football team dropped out of the Wimmera League and down to the Horsham and District league.

The other characteristic of townships such as Minyip is that they provide cheap lodging, and therefore the problem of the traditional farming town becoming a refuge for welfare recipients and again as the community ages, the elderly members are loath to leave and they retire into towns. These towns become wellsprings of rural poverty.

At least that was my observation when I was a frequent visitor. At the time I wondered whether this continued to feed the sustainability of these tiny townships. There were pockets of rural poverty scattered across rural Victoria. The extent of the poverty could be titrated by their closeness to provincial centres. Whether that holds now in these centres, I know that for other small towns with which I have been closely involved in the intervening years, the answer is probably yes, but immigration and other social movements have changed the 1980s profile of some of these small townships, including gentrification.

Now what was Minyip to “Backroads”. The impression given was that its continued existence due to it being the set for the Flying Doctors series, and then as a convenient backdrop for other films, The Dry and the Dressmaker. Eric Bana on the first floor veranda of the local pub was not Minyip, any more than the war memorial to commemorate the Relief of Mafeking in the main street is. They are props – but they are not Minyip.

Backroads is undoubtedly entertainment, and rural Australia does have its identities, its eccentricities but it is pity that the series provides no thread, no clues to the reasons for their survival – and Australia has about 14,000 settlements with less than 1,000 people.

The diversification of cropping – is that the reason for Rupanyup? The occasional movie set – for Minyip?

Or else is there a more general reason for the persistence of settlements that you would have suspected to have outlived their reason to being, and yet not obviously changed their role? 

El Obrero 

I have become immersed in the Portuguese language, which is a somewhat schizophrenic pursuit. Most of the teachers – in Sydney at least – are Brazilian; my initial teacher has been a Portuguese national. There is a strong representation of both cultures through the respective communities in Sydney.

Portuguese Community Club, Marrickville

Therefore, I was intrigued for us to get together for lunch at the Portuguese Community Club, which is sequestered in the industrial area of Marrickville, an inner suburb of Sydney. The club is signified by a fading sign directing our car along a potholed pavement. The club has a grass area in front of the entrance resembling an old bowling green, but the building is squeezed between two railway lines, yet access is easy. No problem parking here, unlike most of suburban Sydney can be always very problematical

Inside the club it is very plain, and those at lunch were workers, some in their steel capped boots and hi-vis vests. Voluble in exchange in Portuguese it was just what it purported to be – a working man’s club. Our group of four were the interlopers, two were woman. Our garçom was a Nepali with a good grasp of Portuguese learnt paradoxically in Australia.

The food belied the surroundings. It was superb – my steamed clams – amêijoas also with an Italian label “vongole” in the menu, followed by grilled quail with the signature vinho verde to wash the food down.

El Obrero, La Boca, Buenos Aires

The spare surroundings reminded me of another worker’s restaurant we were introduced to in La Boca in Buenos Aires. We had asked the driver if we could go to a place to eat which was typical of the “working La Boca”. He said nothing but just dropped us off in front of the nondescript building. After all, La Boca is a substantial port area, although it is known for tourists wandering the narrow streets with the gaudily painted buildings, street dancers performing the tango and stalls covered in cheap knick-knacks.  All Porteno kitsch!

So different from the unprepossessing place with the barred windows, four-panel brown door and the old washed-out Coca Cola Sign juxtaposed against the green restaurant sign above the doorway.

Such a modest entrance, but once inside, the dining area was long and expansive. The walls were covered in photographs, including the obligatory one of Maradona. From the ceiling had been hung football shirts, from teams all over the world, like an international clothes line. We were early for lunch and were ushered to a table on the side where we could see the incoming tide of workers, who quickly filled up all the tables.

The Italian influence is strong in the menu; agnolotti, parmigiana, calamari – but the carafe was the local tinto. Nobody spoke English, but in the hubbub, it was easy to indicate what you wanted. We seemed to be the only tourists there; at least we seemed the only diners to be using sign language rather than just gesticulating.

Argentine dining is associated with the parilla – the Argentinian barbecue where it is all beef and firebox. El Obrero like the Portuguese Community Club are authentic restaurants– being able to settle down into a meal which is a cultural experience can never be topped. Yet then again I wonder whether it is possible, as a tourist, to ever be authentic, the truth of which I tried to verify as I riffled through my memories of countries where I have been. I wonder how many times you have to dine in a place to be authenticated – if that is the word.

Mouse whisper

Our surname, he said, was originally ascribed as Mac Aodhadáin around the 12th century. This family are stated to be no ordinary people. They were bardic scholars and brehons – the interpreters of Irish Law. The extravagant statement that without this family, there should have been lost a precious part of Irish history. It was a name that percolated into eighteen Irish counties.

As the author of this family monograph opined “It has been said that a person’s own surname is the key to a doorway on the past. This is because one of the most interesting ways of gaining some insight into history is to follow the pathway of your own names through the maze of documents still preserved in various sources.” 

Maybe, but as I found out, my Swedish mouse relative is known as Kyrkligaråtta not Kyrkomus as written in the last blog. A genuine erråtum, I’m afraid.

Kakwkylla, venerated in Sweden as a protector against rats and mice.

Modest Expectations – Twenty of dark chocolate

Neale Daniher

Neale Daniher is a very brave man. I admire him greatly as the epitome of all that is great about being an Australian. He fully deserves the Order of Australia recently bestowed on him; he also deserves to be invested with it as soon as practical while he can still walk.

For seven years his health has progressively deteriorated. He has motor neurone disease (MND), yet he has maintained a defiance against this progressively incurable disease.  Today, he has almost lost his ability to speak. It is a terrible disease, and I know that when I developed my own disease one of the differential diagnoses, soon discounted thankfully, was MND.

The symbol for what Daniher describes as “The Beast”, with inadvertently or not its Biblical imagery, has been the ice bucket, the ice bath, the ice pool – a plunge in order to raise funds for research.

The problem is that research into the cure for motor neurone disease is at the same level as it was when I was born. Getting nowhere substantially is not restricted to MND.  I have known researchers who have spent their lives trying to develop a malaria vaccine or find a cure for Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy – to no effect. Honourable failures – the dilemma for those seeking more money for such research. That is problem personally I have in contributing money for research into this disease – poor return on investment.

Lou Gehrig

Around the time I was born, a famous baseball player died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of motor neurone disease. The disease was given his name, Lou Gehrig. He too was a brave man; a film starring Gary Cooper was made of his life. Lou Gehrig died about three years after the onset when he was only 37 years old in 1941.

Now 80 years on Neale Daniher, in his time a very gifted footballer whose playing days were foreshortened by knee injuries, is dying of the same disease. The onset of his disease was when he was 53. Over seven years survival is testimony to something innate.

Increasingly, auto-immunity is being ascribed as the culprit. Auto-immunity, the tendency of the body to destroy itself when the immune system goes rogue, is the battlefield. It is an area where the disease has been victorious up to now, particularly in the case of this disease, which causes the destruction of the nerve cells that control voluntary muscular movement.

There are a few inconclusive drugs and conservative measures which may prolong life; and as long as Neale Daniher remains optimistic, then his will to live deserves every support. After all, more than 2,000 people have the disease in Australia, and the total cost of therapeutic support per person averages out as $1m. Two are diagnosed every day; two die every day of the disease.

When there is no longer Neale Daniher around fighting against destiny, let us make sure those with this terrible disease do not die alone, paralysed, slowly suffocating. In other words, strengthen palliation, help strengthen family support but do not – I repeat – do not raise false hopes of a cure.

A muddy Saturday

This is a very simple story about a group of University students who, in 1958, won the Juniors Premiership in the Victorian Amateur Football League. It was a time when there was only one university in Victoria and therefore most of the teams that we played reflected the division between “town” and “gown”, even though the diversity of the team list reflected the normal cross-section of society. The only bond between us was a desire to play football and being under 19 we were consigned to the Juniors.

The two adult teams were the University Blacks and Blues, which were in the top grade and produced a number of players for the pinnacle, the then Victorian Football League (VFL) where you got paid. The other University team for those who just wanted a game was the University Reds.

There was a hierarchy; even as 18 year olds there were a few university students who just played VFL. which, in those days, had an Under 19 nursery as well. They were just too good to play amateur football. Many were in fact champions, not just making up the then “twenty”.

There also was the Victorian Football Association which headed a cascade of suburban and country teams where footballers who had had enough of the paltry returns from playing under the then Coulter Law in the VFL, left to play and/or coach a country team. These players would receive a generous wage and were often set up as the licensee of the local pub.

Then there were the “lily-whites” – the amateurs. In the University hierarchy, this was the place where the cohort of youngsters who were not drafted into the Blues and Blacks played. Some went straight into the top teams; some oscillated between the top teams and the Juniors.

Nevertheless, the Juniors won the Grand Final, and three members of our winning team climbed onto the roof of the University Union Building. They were said to be in a jolly state when they climbed up and affixed the Premiership flag. As one said later, they did not know how they managed to climb onto the roof given the ethanol haze that surrounded them. The flag was returned early the next week neatly folded and nothing more was said.

After that year, the team went their various ways, but one person stuck in my mind and obviously the minds of many of the others, who had known him better. He was a few years older than us and had played for the University team. He was always immaculately dressed, with his signature furled umbrella, given the grounds we played on barely afforded any shelter from the Melbourne winter. He was in direct contrast to the coach, Peter Kelliher, who was a knockabout fellow who acted, as all coaches do, with a mixture of encouragement and invective.

Ian Hamilton Munro was different. He was almost the pastoral adviser to the team – a very kind and compassionate man who was always around when you were injured, when you were having a lousy game. He was a counterpoint to the coach – one person I could always picture on the side lines – often a solitary spectator on a windswept oval.

Somebody suggested that, as we approached the 50th anniversary of the Premiership, the survivors of that year should meet annually for lunch. The first, in 2005, was deemed such a success that it was decided we would have one every year, so that has occurred every year, including 2020. This cohort, then in their youthful sixties when the lunches started are now in their eighties. Our coach, having had a stroke a decade before, was an infrequent participant from early into the lunch cycle.  The immaculate Ian Munro was a regular attender, until he fell victim to old age several years ago – and then he too was gone.

Such a small group, men now who are bonded by a football premiership gained so long ago and all accepting their mortality, has now decided to establish the immortality of their achievement and to honour their paterfamilias by donating a cup in his name for annual presentation by the Melbourne University Football Club for an annual match between the now two Melbourne University Juniors teams.

The cup is made from spun brass, silver-plated. It sits on a dark tallowwood plinth around which is collar of silver-plated nickel with enough space to engrave the annual winners for the next 80 years. It was made by the silversmiths and goldsmiths that make the solid gold Melbourne Cup each year for “that race which stops a nation” – the first Tuesday in November; these same trophy makers also create the trophies for the Australian Tennis Open; they are the last such company in existence in Australia.

Munners Cup

Ian Munro might have been embarrassed, like all good generous persons who give much, but never expect recognition. However, he would have liked the enamelled crossed furled umbrellas – one black, one blue – under his name on the trophy – the Munners Cup.

Even to us well aged, he was still always Munners – not Ian Hamilton Munro. However, that name is the cup’s pseudonym inscribed on the reverse side of the plinth. A simple story with hopefully a long nostalgic tail.

Morrison – A Description in One Word

What struck me was the stony-faced Prime Minister who had been persuaded by his Mate, Mat Cormann, to attend a West Coast Eagles match. The boos around the ground when he was introduced were universal. As part of a meet and greet in the morning, he had been persuaded by one of his consigliere, the irrepressible Mr Forrest, to partake in morning PT. It was a more typical photo-opportunity to show off his eminently “daggy” self.

He does not like to be booed. I notice that he has not turned up at any of the football matches in Victoria.

The other fact about the Prime Minister is that he is not that intelligent; yes, smart in the ways of the Molonglo swamp but not particularly well read or thoughtful. Like all people not blessed with any real sense of personal identity, he is totally versed in public relations, and therefore takes the temperature of his quarry – be it Liberal Party pre-selection or Australia before doing anything; hence he leads from the rear.

His problem, and his is not unique in this regard, is to have as the rule of thumb that you never have any Ministers and advisers more intelligent than he is.  The Prime Minister has succeeded in that endeavour, with one exception. That is the recently departed German-Belgian-West Australian, a chameleon of great skill, Mathias Cormann. There is a genus of politician who, when the master rings a bell, will argue without any shame but on cue that black is white – and too many do it persuasively, all the time knowing where the career escalator is located. Cormann has shown himself to be such an engaging man.

Morrison does not brook dissent; he just cannot take it. Part of this is explained by his reliance on a Christian belief system that does not take criticism easily. Much of the Pentecostal beliefs are couched in uncompromising, simple terms, which require no thought but a belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible. This is a Book where the ambiguities of the authors have been reduced to cartoons. His father was one such believer, and here is a person who has been coached in what some would say is a heretical belief system.

Morrison’s trip overseas has been not unexpectedly revealing. The Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, gently chided him about his aggression in relation to China; and even in the matter of mask wearing he seemed to guide our uncertain Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has been hoping to amble the world stage but having been relegated to a landing slot at an airport distant from the G7 meeting it should have warned him at the start. There are no better people than the Poms in insulting one and then being able to smooth it over once everybody recognises that the insult was deliberate, if nuanced.  The perfect word for British diplomacy – nuance!

The daggy “Scomo” image which he believes is the basis of his rural popularity – in Queensland and New South Wales – seems not to have translated as well into International Prime Minister. Here is a guy who not only threw himself at the feet of Trump but has an old friend with connections with the dark side of the web – one of those peddling those conspiratorial beliefs, which are so much of the Trump madness.

If he were to have someone close who is visionary, with ideas that he could sample, then he may not be in his current predicament – and if he did not have an adviser called Stewart.

Biden has proved not to be the doddering front man that some of us wrongly feared, but at the centre of some hard-nosed advisers, who probably worry that Morrison is a security risk – hence the intrusion of Johnson into the Biden-Morrison meeting. It would be a problem for our relations if his words “ritual sex abuse” get wide currency in the corridors of the White House. Can Biden trust that anything he says to Morrison will not appear somewhere as an unacceptable comment?

When Howard extracted special treatment in the Kyoto Protocols for our fossil emissions, the United States owed us for our support in the Bush War Coalition of the Willing; Biden owes Morrison nothing.

In relation to the domestic scene, obviously if your Government’s handout to Big Business is essentially little more than to further enrich, then the recipients of such largesse have every reason to support the current regime. It is not an unusual situation when both sides of politics are compromised, but there is a limit which the community, however rendered compliant by the Virus, will tolerate. Australia sliding into plutocracy is not a pleasant sight.

It is also helpful for Morrison that the Murdoch newspapers’ unceasingly support him, bolstering him in a constituency of flag wavers for fossil fuels and where the environment is being progressively degraded by climate denialists.  For the moment these Murdocistas are spooking the rest of the community.

However, this strange remnant from the Trump days has found the world stage somewhat guarded. As one would have expected, he was greeted in France with all the warmth that the appalling submarine contract with the French can muster. Whatever he may think privately, Macron has been polite; it will be interesting to see if he speaks to Morrison through an interpreter – or in English.  If the first, and from afar hard to know, Macron is maintaining distance so that any communications between the two can be properly interpreted, n’est-ce pas.

Another problem for Morrison is that not all the electorates in Australia are obsessed with maintaining coal mining. There are certain electorates in Queensland and NSW where urgent steps must be taken to transfer the workforce to other industries, not to bolster coal which has to be phased out if the world is to survive beyond the end of this century.

Unfortunately, Australia has a Prime Minister who is only concerned with his re-election, and his only response to climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions is an underlined word “technology” – as if Technology is a God like Baal to be worshipped not defined. Here a throng of happy clapping followers with arms outstretched towards this Solution and repeating over and over again, “Technology. For thine is the Answer.”

Maybe I’ll wake up and blame all this on something I ate.

Aduhelm 

“I had no sense of where to turn for help, support, or even how to express the diagnosis with family, friends or co-workers. I was lost and crept further inward. There is no single handbook one can read to prepare; each journey is different, each course of the disease takes different, meandering turns—no two are alike, the experts will tell you, an observation that is clearly numbing in so many ways.”

The drug is called Aduhelm. It has just been given the all-clear by America’s Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to be prescribed for people with early Alzheimer’s dementia. As one correspondent said, for many people Alzheimer’s disease has passed through the early stage of memory loss and is not recognised until the cognitive abilities have declined significantly.

The quote above is from Mary, the wife of a journalist, Greg O’Brien who has written On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s, which follows his own decline from the early onset of the disease. Her cry is clear; and there is no wonder that those families where there is Alzheimer’s disease in their midst want a cure. No wonder that news of a drug with any prospect for improvement will generate clamour for its availability – now.

Much of the excitement generated by this drug is that it is the first since 2003 to show any promise and it has cleared a path through the FDA, not without controversy, which resulted in some members of the committee overseeing its approval resigning in protest. The method of approval has also instilled a feeling of uneasiness in this blogger.

The drug is supposed to attack amyloid-beta, the protein which appears in the nerve tangle of the Alzheimer brain. However, nobody really can say whether it is the amyloid deposits which cause the disease or whether they are waste, the result of a process which leaves this protein functionally inert in the brain. Amyloid disease is one of those differential diagnoses for unexplained disease which my generation of doctors grew to know about and recognised with its distinct histological appearance on staining.

The problem is this drug, which is defined as an amyloid-beta-directed antibody reducing the number of plaques of amyloid, is that the benefits are minimal against its downside.

This is where the drug company, Biogen, which is set to make a “motza”, begins what I call the drug company gavotte. Immaculately arrayed in elaborate steps the gavotte dancers move around in intricate steps, a spectacle of elegant circles, arms waving, legs crossing, all to produce a mannered tableau.

Even the drug company’s paid expert, in a beautifully executed twirl, said the drug “potentially prolongs patients’ independence by several months, even a few years, as demonstrated in long-term study”. She said it is a “stepping stone for our next advances” gracefully executing a series of fluttering steps.

The consumer is transported into a trance, ignoring any side-effects, asking the government to make it universally available. Biogen proposes a charge of USD4,312 per infusion “for a patient of average weight”, or USD56,000 per year.

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, in a somewhat bizarre statement, has said Aduhelm should cost no more than USD8,300 per year, given the “insufficient” evidence supporting its benefits in clinical trials.

Dancing the gavotte …

Biogen has defended its pricing strategy, noting that the U.S. dishes out about USD600 billion in direct and indirect costs for the disease that affects roughly six million Americans. Now that is a beautiful sideways gavotte movement by the drug company.

Biogen plans to target between one to two million patients with early onset symptoms, executives said last week. The company, generous to a fault, says it won’t raise the price over the next four years.

It should be noted that this drug can only be given as an infusion in a healthcare facility; and then there are the side effects of brain swelling and bleeding, all factors to be integrated into the patient’s health status, a patient status which is directed only one way – down.

When the gavotte is transferred to Australia, it will be greeted by a solid history of successful lobbying for drugs of questionable benefits. First, there is the special pleading, which is always highly personal as one would expect. Ron Walker, the flamboyant businessman, was an influential example of this in his quest to have an experimental drug, Keytruda included for the treatment of melanoma, of which he was a sufferer. His influence on the then Minister saw the placement of this drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) for his particular indication at a per patient cost of $4,500 every three weeks for two years.

He achieved his goal; he died in 2018 with the benefit of an average life expectancy increase of 12 months over the cheaper chemotherapy. Not sure about the quality of that life extension. Nevertheless, the drug can now be prescribed to other cancer patients following the largesse of the current Minister, who provides a taxpayer subsidy of $120,000 annually per patient so entitled. Has Ron Walker’s intervention been cost-effective – or just costly?

The drug companies and their shareholders have a different requirement – profit at all costs. Lobbyists hang round drug companies like flies round questionable food, as one of my less than kind associates has said, ever ready to help with selling the product whatever its effectiveness; whatever its cost to the community.

Objectivity is the casualty. Hopefully, the Aduhelm saga will not get to his level, but sometimes I wonder whether governments have lost their sense of smell.

However, the cry from the wife still echoes. Yet will her husband, the author of On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s, take Aduhelm?

My mind drifts back to Neale Daniher, and the need to ensure that while we wait for a cure the palliative services are not ignored, nor the family, and most importantly, that even the person with lowest profile dies with someone holding his or her hand.

Mouse Whisper

In recognition of my friend from Dalarna, Kyrkomus, I am reminded of Carl Linnaeus, the great Swedish botanist, who sometimes got it wrong. He said that potatoes were poisonous, because he noted that the vegetable was related to deadly nightshade. However, the first woman inducted in 1748 into the Swedish Academy in Sciences, Countess Eva Ekeblad, was so recognised by showing that potatoes were essential in the manufacture of wig powder, and more importantly that cool liquor, aquavit.

Skol!

Countess Eva Ekeblad

Modest Expectations – Stumps

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

Sometimes He gets it Right

Anonymouse

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long ago did Halton write her report? 

Concept village – mining, quarantine …

The Inglenooks of Age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Drums are beating

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

Essential Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godolphin Blue

Tasmania – the place where it counts

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

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

I was once elected to office by a similar system.

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

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

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

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

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

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

South-west wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peruvian goat herder

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

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

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

Sarah Island, Macquarie Harbour

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

Mouse Whisper

An unguarded comment?

As one of his colleagues recently remembered:

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

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

Modest Expectations – Iris

It was 1814, the Capitol in Washington was stormed. Then, the British not only stormed the Capitol but also burned down the White House.

Protesters scaling the wall of the Capitol building

One of the scenarios I predicted many blogs ago is that Trump would foment insurrection. I said he may set fire to the White House which, with two weeks of his gangster presidency – as one person has defined it – still leaves the metaphor to be converted to actuality. However, essentially Trump is a bully and thus by definition a coward. In his twisted mind, he wants the Biden Inauguration to be limited so that he can say he attracted a bigger crowd at his inauguration in 2017 as if that has any relevance to anything.

Trump predictably incited, and then the mob did what mobs do when they are allowed to act without adequate law enforcement. However, it could be argued that pictures of storming the Capitol, vandalising the Constitution in the name of this would-be despot, will galvanise the response of the lawmakers.  The only saving grace was that Trump had not organised an armed militia to back his activities.

However, a cynical person would believe that an undermanned police force being overwhelmed initially provided the horror of this unbridled mob, whereas the optics of a massive law enforcement force beating up legitimate protesters may have provided unwarranted sympathy for the Trump “stormtroopers”.

The award of the Legion of Merit should be returned by Morrison before it becomes his Millstone of Dishonour.  I am sure the award will be noted by the incoming Biden administration, and as the charge sheet against Trump increases this year, comparisons between Morrison and the corruption which has flourished under his stewardship with his mentor, Trump should increasingly become front and centre of the political debate.

Yet a year ago, who would have thought that the Democrats would have won both the Senate seats in Georgia. Biden has confounded me by his Presidential response to the Trump rant. He has stepped up.

Who will stand up for Australia?

Giving In without a Kelp?

This first blog blot of 2021 was prompted by an article on seaweed in a recent December issue of the New York Review of Books (NYR). I start in a laneway of Helsinki. We had just emerged from a crowded bar, where although we had booked, we were subject to the Finnish way – the people in the sitting before us were lingering and we could wait, couldn’t we, until they had finished? It was not a particularly friendly interchange, the restaurant was noisy, the atmosphere had that scurry of youth, and persons of age were regarded as somewhat out of place and thus there was nowhere to sit – and nobody moved to give us room to sit down.

Hence, upsticks literally and off down the lane to the harbour. Here on a summer’s day when you can buy cloudberries it is beautiful place to saunter in the warm sunshine, along its quay where a multitude of colourful vessels of different configuration and size are moored. But now my days of sauntering are over. Using two sticks is a very inefficient way to saunter.

This day, on turning a corner, there was a restaurant. Given that it had begun to rain heavily, it was more haven than gastronomy which drove us to enter. Instead of a noisy crowd, there were tables set in a way which beckoned the discerning diner rather than us sodden accidental tourists.

The staff were solicitous as there were few if any other customers.

We looked at the menu as something to do, and one of the waiters told us there was fresh asparagus – new season white asparagus. This dish has stuck in my memory ever since. White asparagus do not have the robustness and stringiness of the green variety; there is a certain delicate taste to them, and the way they were presented in a light coat of butter was as though we were eating the first picked.

This year as the Australian green asparagus harvest appeared, I wondered whether white asparagus would be available. At the same time, I remembered it was the time sea asparagus was harvested. Sea asparagus or samphire was somewhat of a fad a few years ago and was available around November for a limited time. It had a vague resemblance to asparagus and like much of seashore plants harvested had a salty taste, while otherwise the taste was unremarkable except that it was different from asparagus.

It was told to me that if one went to Kooweerup in Victoria, the swampland home of the growling grass frog and southern bandicoot and also home for asparagus, would be where you would find the white variety. If one went along certain Victorian foreshores where samphire was said to grow in abundance, then my lust for this delicacy would have been satisfied. However, Victoria was a prison due to the Virus at harvest time for these two commodities. Nevertheless, this year I tried to obtain some.  Being locked away in a different state leads one to yearn for that which proved, like the Holy Grail, to be unobtainable.

These are products where water is essential, but they exist very much on the edge of the western community palate. What about seaweed then?

When I buy sashimi, the accompaniment is wakame seaweed salad. The Japanese also use the black paper nori seaweed to wrap the sushi rice up with its various ingredients.

As for me, in the 1934 film “Man of Aran” that I wrote about earlier, the islanders grew potatoes in the bladderwrack, kelp left in the cracks of the stone in that harsh land.  Then “When the potatoes failed, they survived on Chondrus crispus or Irish moss.”  I once bought some carrageenan, a derivative from this red seaweed, back from Ireland. It hung around in the pantry with a ban put on it – the one which says: “if you want to cook it you can do it for yourself”. I succumbed to the blatant discrimination and eventually this vegan substitute for gelatin was thrown out unused.

Monterey kelp forest

Then there are the magnificent kelp forests. One the most spectacular is the 8.5m high one at the Monterey Aquarium, which occupies three floors of this building in this Californian coastal town made famous by Steinbeck in his writing about Cannery Row.

In the article “The Oldest Forest” Lucy Jakub who, as one would expect lives on a beach, reviews four books where seaweed is the hero. One of these books lists all the products from sunscreen to fertiliser where kelp is used. In fact, the author, Ruth Kassenger, adopts “a speculative theory, that early man had a diet rich in iodine and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) derived from algae through a number of secondary sources, which resulted in our larger brain”.

Seaweed in East Asia is a $6 billion a year bonanza, and its commercialisation was due to a British biologist Kathleen Drew-Baker, who showed in 1948 that the red seaweed, Porphyria, grew in two cycles – in the deep ocean releasing immature spores which settle closer to shore when right to propagate. (As a result of her work), Japanese scientists, in the midst of famine in US-occupied Japan, learned to pre-seed lines of nori in the lab and bring them to the ocean to grow.

Yet the article does not see any advocacy for further commercialisation. Attempts to propagate seaweed commercially as a substitute for fossil fuel in the USA have proved disastrous or viewed as Exxon’s investment as “greenwashing”. For instance, in the past decade, Exxon has spent $1.2 billion more on advertising than it has on biofuel development. After all, the Germans used seaweed as a source of potash, and the British for acetone for wartime use (WW1) when other materials were in short supply.

Yet growing seaweed is seductive as it is able to control the microblooms of the toxic algae by absorbing the fertiliser runoffs and moreover cattle fed seaweed produce less methane. However, among the experts quoted by the author, there is a consensus that where algae are grown commercially, it should be done so on small independent ocean farms. Overall, one writer Josie Iselin is quoted that we should: “leave the algae alone to do their own thing, heal the oceans as they can, and let them be, as the profound ecological engineers they are, not another for us to figure out how to manage.” After all, already “kelp forests naturally sequester 11% of their carbon in the sea”.

The NYR writer, Lucy Jakub is very perspicacious, because the prospect of worldwide famine is no longer an idle thought from a bunch of learned scientists gathering as the Club of Rome was in rediscovering Malthus. As she writes: crises lead to a search for silver bullets, in the hope they can be averted with unimaginable sacrifice, and in a spirit of optimism… (that can take) an algal-central perspective to envisioning the solution.

Just like the quest for white asparagus and samphire?

Life with the Bubble

Some years ago, I was in Brisbane staying in an upmarket hotel. I had just come in from a run along the Brisbane River. I came in, picked up a can of Diet Coke, ripped off the top and drank what would be considered a large gulp. Then, catastrophe. Let me say that it was the only time I have this intensely painful tearing sensation retrosternally. The intensity of the pain lives in my memory.

Cardiac pain has been described as a crushing pain in the same region, but one of the differential diagnoses is damage to the oesophagus mucosa, including oesophageal perforation. Perforation of the oesophagus is a potentially fatal condition as the pleural cavity and the mediastinum do not respond well to a flood of dilute hydrochloric acid or for that matter enzymic rich saliva and regurgitated gastric content.

After the acute pain, I was left with a dull pain. I rang a doctor friend, and before long I was in the intensive care unit of a major Brisbane hospital.

Fortunately, the chest Xray revealed that there was no perforation, and I was saved from a gastroscopy. The major discomfort and difficulty in swallowing meant fluids for a few days. After a few days, it settled down and I was discharged, wiser perhaps.

I had a “bit of form” as an acquaintance reminded me later when he showed me a photograph of me in a Barcelona restaurant pouring a porron of wine down my throat with the beginner’s luck in the amount of spillage being minimal.

Pouring the porron

However, I had no such luck on this occasion.

As background, spontaneous oesophageal perforation was first described by the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave in 1724. Boerhaave’s syndrome is a form of barogenic rupture caused by a rapid rise in intraluminal pressure when there is sudden distension of the oesophagus in a closed space.  The original case described was one of explosive vomiting.

Rapid ingestion of the cold beverage with bubbles can led to spasm of the distal oesophagus followed by expansion, resulting in a sudden build-up of intra-oesophageal pressure. The vast majority of perforations occur in the left lateral wall of the distal oesophagus, 3–6 cm above the gastro-oesophageal junction, as this part is particularly weak.

What prompted this reminiscence is the latest Coca-Cola advertisement where these jolly young things are shown irresponsibly attacking these beverages, with one complete numbskull leaning backwards and pouring the drink down her upside down throat where the forces of gravity mean the fluid has to flow uphill against them. Not like our famous Prime Minister with his imbibing a yard of beer where the beer could at least flow downhill, given presumably that Hawke, like all bright bored students, had spent time when learning this party trick to also learn how to control his oesophageal reflexes.

This particular appalling example in the obviously American advertisement was the young woman who needs to use her oesophagus musculature to ensure that the Coca Cola could flow uphill. She was obviously a performer, who had trained herself to do so. Perhaps, the whole scenario was fake, concocted. In the event of those who would dare to “copy-cat” this manoeuvre, will Coca-Cola assume responsibility for all the potential incidents that may happen?

Youth have no fear, youth will push the limits. Coca Cola is the driving force. That is always the message – derring-do with a bottle of Coke.

After all, who was the person when I was young who taught me how to open a bottle with my teeth.

Fortunately, St Paul had a message for me (sorry the political incorrectness) which I heeded through cracked teeth:

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

Well, not completely. However, I do tend to learn from my mistakes.

 Tea for Two

Ceylon is always associated with tea. Just after the start of World War 2

Great Britain purchased 80 per cent of the Ceylon and Indian tea crop. Australia was left out and tea was rationed here during the War. Tea plantations in Ceylon had been associated with Lipton but together north-east India (Assam and Darjeeling) with China being there the earliest Australian source. During the War, the Australian largely garrisoned Ceylon, because the local Ceylonese were not trusted. In fact, Ceylonese troops in the British Army rebelled on the Cocos Island wanting to surrender to the Japanese, with the result that after the rebellion was quelled, three of the rebels were executed, the only time during the War that British troops were executed for treason.

Then after the War, when your relatives went “Home to GB” by ship, the first port of call was always Colombo, the tell-tale memento being the carved ebony elephant on the mantelpiece.

The other attractions of Ceylon for a young eye were the stamps. These were large rectangles with the portrait of the sovereign in the upper right quadrant. They were informative because the plates had been so finely engraved. The commonest stamp of the set sent on mail was the 20c, with deep blue engraving of coconut palms bending in an unseen wind, but distant was a two-masted boat, presumably at anchor because the sails were furled. Several years ago, I bought the 11-stamp series, admittedly with King George V’s head in the corner. Each of the stamps features one idyllic scene which is far from the current situation in Sri Lanka. The stamps nevertheless illustrate the diversity that was Ceylon.

Until 2016, I had only visited Colombo airport en route from Singapore to London on Air Ceylon in 1971. The next year the name of Ceylon, derived from the old Portuguese name, was changed to Sri Lanka – “Resplendent Island”.

Sri Lanka had been a place where there were many religions. The Buddhist Sinhalese dominate the South, and at one time the Hindu Tamils were in control the north. Independence was accompanied by a debilitating war between the two populations, and in 2016 the tourist trail was well insulated.

There are many Ceylon burghers in Australia, those the results of miscegenation with the Dutch or Portuguese; they had been emigrating to Australia post-war. This was the closest coloured people were allowed as migrants from that country while the White Australia Policy was in force. They are predominantly Christian.

Then there were the Muslim Sri Lankans. I had involvement in counselling one, an international medical graduate who was both Muslim and a Sri Lankan national. I had not realised up to that time that Muslims form a significant minority in Sri Lanka. I found out that they control the gem trade.

The other association I have made with Ceylon was its sapphires. Those whose jewellery containing a Ceylon sapphire knew it to be so because of its intense blue. However, as a change on this trip I bought a green sapphire, together with an aquamarine. The choice in that emporium in Kandy seemed endless.

Kandy

Driving to Kandy, the old capital and then driving to Galle could not be more different. They are both about the same distance from Colombo, but driving to the old Capital, Kandy was like driving along a ribbon shopping strip for 120 kilometres, without any break between the settlements for countryside. Beyond Kandy in the mountains are the terraced tea plantations where women were harvesting the leaves and placing them in a bag, the holding straps of which were firmly stabilised by the woman’s forehead. The technique is portrayed in the 9c pre-war stamp of a tea picker – a woman of course.

Galle, after a minor bottleneck in Colombo, is a four-lane drive away.  Until they started playing test cricket there, I had never heard of it. Then the tsunami came on Sunday 26 December 2004 after the massive earthquake under the sea north of Sumatra.

In the words of one of Galle citizens who was watching at the time:

A long stretch of Sri Lanka’s coast was devastated by these killer waves, with more than 40,000 dead and staggering 2.5 million people displaced. Although 1,600km from the epicentre, the waves struck with huge force and swept inland as far as 5 kilometres.  Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars and even a train with 1700 passengers.

One of the worst hit areas was my home city Galle, the capital of Southern Sri Lanka. The water came from two sides to Galle town giving no chance for many people who were going about their daily life…

This happened while civil war was being waged – a 25-year civil war between Tamil and Sinhalese that did not end until 2009. An estimated 80,000-100,000 people died between 1982 and 2009. The deaths include 28,000 Tamil fighters, more than 21,000 Sri Lankan soldiers, 1,000 Sri Lankan police, 1,500 Indian soldiers, and tens of thousands of civilians.

Here we were seven years later in a country that had papered over so much trauma in its community fabric, and we, the Australian visitors, were travelling around as though Sri Lanka was still the Pearl of the Orient. As our driver in Galle said, those who were within the walls of the old Dutch fortress had a far greater chance of survival when the tsunami came.

When we visited, Galle exhibited few scars and the cricket ground, where Shane Warne achieved his 500th Test wicket, looked as though nothing had happened, but then 12 years had passed before we visited.

However, one major reason to go existed beyond Galle when the road reverted to type and we travelled through seaside villages until there they were, the men stilt fishing, their bodies entwined on a pole with a cross bar several metres above the water and at the same time fishing. No fishing in waders or from a wharf. Fishing this way enables them not to disturb the water. The tsunami curtailed this form of fishing; the stilts have returned, but not to the same number.

So many recollections associated with this country, with all its various names suggesting serenity, yet so little has the community strife had an impact we could have been traveling on a magic carpet far away from all that horrendous backdrop. Life on our magic carpet seemed so welcoming and tranquil.

How far from the Truth?

As I written about the injustice meted out to them, the Tamil family, Priya Murugappan, her husband Nades, and their two Australian-born daughters – Kopika now aged five, and Tharunicaa aged three imprisoned on Christmas Island, do not think so, even though the Australian authorities seem to make sure that the horrors awaiting them are not lost in a welter of government generosity and kindness. They get none.

Unlike the time Minister Dutton laid a wreath on the altar of St Sebastian’s in Colombo in 2019. How touching! The crocodile tears were flowing everywhere as he placed the wreath for those who had been killed in a suicide bombing on Easter Sunday of that year.

Sri Lanka is not the Pearl of the Orient any longer, and certainly if you are Tamil – or apparently Christian – or Muslim.  In the previous year, those Muslim shops in Kandy that we visited were burnt down by what were described as Buddhist mobs. Muslim burial is forbidden. Nothing like a bit of religious zeal and intolerance.

You’ll Never Walk Alone

Gerry Marsden died this week. I saw Gerry and the Pacemakers and Brian and the Tremolos when they performed in Melbourne in the mid-1960s. It was around the time of the Beatle frenzy and a young lawyer mate of mine got free tickets. I was even then a trifle too old for pop concerns, but we went along. Nothing much I remembered beyond “Ferry across the Mersey”. They were Liverpool Lite, managed by Brian Epstein but without the Beatle panache.

Over the years, the song “You’ll never walk alone” was associated with Gerry Marsden and became the signature tune of the Liverpool Football Club.

However, I remember the song almost a decade earlier when it was sung by Julie Jordan in Rogers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, as a hymn to her lost partner, Billy Bigelow, killed in an industrial accident.

When you realise that Carousel opened on Broadway on April 19, 1945, just before VE-day, and ran for 890 performances. Its London rn began in 1950 and was just as successful. Every one of those audiences included dozens of women who lost husbands or sons or fathers or brothers in WW2. This song was for them, as someone wrote.  I wonder if Marsden went to his grave realising that it was more than a disembodied dirge in the 60s, but a song which comforted those who had suffered loss at the most personal level and for whom the words had a deeper meaning than a feel good Scouse anthem.

As a postscript, in 1999, Time magazine named Carousel the best musical of the 20th century.

Mouse Whisper

The taxi driver recounted the story of the famous Australian cricketer who promised $50,000 towards the reconstruction of the Galle cricket ground since it lay outside the fortress walls and was completely destroyed by the 2004 tsunami. The amount promised was modified several times and when we asked how much this cricketer eventually had actually given, the driver signalled with his fingers – zero.

A different type of gall I would think.

Galle Cricket Ground

 

Modest Expectations – David Owen and Norman Cowper

For those who want to follow the sordid details of the former Member for Wagga Wagga, Mr Darryl Maguire’s shenanigans while he was a Liberal Party member of the NSW Parliament there is plenty in the media about his questioning before the ICAC that I need not repeat, including his close relationship with the Premier.

However, when his conduct forced his resignation from Parliament, at the 2018 by-election, Joe McGirr was elected. Joe was then easily re-elected at the 2019 poll. Joe is an Independent, and first challenged Maguire in 2011 with his major policy to upgrade the local hospital. He achieved a swing against the entrenched member Maguire who was, at that stage, the Liberal Party Whip; the miasma had yet to rise and cloud his parliamentary career.  Joe had not stood in 2015.

Joe McGirr

Joe McGirr has a strong ALP connection and his great-uncle was Premier of NSW. His grandfather was Minister of Health in NSW when James Dooley was Premier. Joe is resolutely independent and has resisted blandishments to join any Party.

Joe McGirr came to Wagga Wagga as a junior doctor and remained there, undertaking a number of roles. He is married to Kerin Fielding, the first female orthopaedic surgeon in NSW (and only the third in Australia in what is very much a male club). They have four adult children.

Dr Fielding is a cordon bleu cook, and she and Joe have a retreat in the south of France, which unfortunately I have not savoured.

Over a period of time I have had contact with Joe, as I undertook a number of jobs in Wagga Wagga, and I encountered him from the time he was a young doctor on the way up. During the time when the first rural clinical school was being planned in Albury and Wagga Wagga, which had its moments because of the traditional rivalry between the two cities, Joe was always eager to assist. It was unsurprising when he became Associate Dean of the then new Notre Dame Medical School.

Joe has been reported as saying that: “My views on social justice were formed by the Jesuits during my education, with the Jesuit approach linking justice to action and love. I have seen through my work, many areas of rural disadvantage that create problems for the whole of society as well as those directly affected. Social justice is an important part of our medical program and should be a part of every doctors calling.”

This view on social justice has been translated across into his diligence in parliamentary life.

With Joe, you know what you’ll get.  Brutally honest, in a sea where there so much parliamentary squalor, just look at whom he replaced. A premier swain, no less – and high on the Dodge.

The problem with anybody who runs as an independent for parliament in a country electorate, it helps if you have local “cred”; for Joe it counted for a little at the first tilt, but not enough.

He persisted.

When I have advocated for an Integrity Party, sometimes you wonder if you talking to an empty stadium. However, Joe McGirr is a very useful role model for future candidates, even if he is an avowed Independent.

Oh, by the way, his first major electoral policy has been accomplished.  And there is more – the local Wagga Wagga hospital has reached stage 3 of its redevelopment.

A Casual Comment which the Conservatives will probably ignore – for the time being

Barry Goldwater

In 1995, Barry Goldwater warned the GOP that they would rue the day they welcomed the religious right into the party.

It is a pity it took him until he was 85 years old to say that.

However, maybe an Australian somebody of a similar age in the appropriate part of the Australian spectrum will have the guts to say that – because in the end ignoring the Goldwater axiom will savage the credibility of genuine conservatives.

David Owen visits

In 1982, the Australian Institute of Political Science (AIPS) reached its fiftieth anniversary. The Institute published the Australian Quarterly and held annual Summer Schools where people from all sides of the political spectrum used to gather to mingle socially and discuss matters politic.

The pioneering Cowper Family crest

Norman Cowper was one of the founders of the Institute. Of the pioneer families five – the Cowpers (arrived 1809), the Streets (1822), the Stephens (1824), the Windeyers (1828) and the Fairfaxes (1838) have produced representatives, prominent in public life, over the succeeding four or five generations.

Thus Norman Cowper, a lawyer in one of the biggest Sydney law firms, was hardly a radical. However, in the 1930s he was very concerned with the rise of fascism, as he was of communism. In founding the AIPS in 1932, he saw it as a bastion for the political centre where the reasonable left and right could converse across the policy divide. Therefore, the Board and contributors represented both sides of the political spectrum – then United Australia Party and the Australian Labor Party. Gough Whitlam used the Summer School to test some of his policies in the years running up to the 1972 election.

While the AIPS was Sydney-centric, it had a Melbourne Committee. However, it was not until I moved to Sydney that I was asked to join the AIPS Board. The Institute survived on modest grants from some of the large companies and the proceeds of the Summer School. However, by the 1980s as politics became more ideologically driven and coverage of politics in the media expanded, the influence of the AIPS began to decline.

Although we did not know it at the time, the fiftieth celebration was the last hurrah for the bipartisan flavour that the Institute had attempted to inject into public debate. I was entrusted with organising the anniversary.

Norman Cowper was 86 at the time, and everybody wanted him to be there. The family was enthusiastic and so it was important that the anniversary honoured him. However, I had the disadvantage of being a newcomer to the Board, essentially an outsider who had to work around the sensitivity of a Board that had known better times. The sun was setting on what the Institute had been constructed to be, a bulwark against the extremes in politics.

David Owen

At the time of the celebration it was before the Falklands war, Thatcher was on the nose and Reagan was still to make his impact. I thought that it would be an idea to have speakers from each of the decades. David Owen, as co-founder of the newly-created Social Democratic Party, provided a model of the centre. He was a doctor, and he was friendly with a prominent English surgeon who I had met the previous year. I was able to enlist his support in having David Owen accept the invitation.

Unlike speakers today, David Owen did not charge for his attendance and through my contacts, a first-class airfare was arranged gratis; that left the Institute to pay for his accommodation.

I had the idea of having a relevant speaker for each of the decades from the foundation of the AIPS to describe what was happening in terms of the politics and policy.

The speakers were Nugget Coombs, Bill Snedden, John Button, Anne Summers and Patrick Cook, with Max Walsh as the Master of Ceremonies. The talks, including the inaugural Cowper Oration given by David Owen, were scattered across the dinner which was held at the University of Sydney.

In addition, I persuaded the guys at Movietone, who had their archives in Balmain at the time, to put together a traditional newsreel, together with the highlights of 50 years. So it was a jampacked evening. Anne Summers was a great help in getting the program together, particularly persuading Nuggets Coombs to reminisce on the 30s and Patrick Cook to round up the speakers’ list.

I remember asking Paul Keating whether he would attend, but anybody – no matter who they were who deserted the Labor Party – was a “rat”. David Owen had been elected as Labor Party member for Plymouth Devonport and was part of the “Gang of Four” that had broken away from the Labor Party in 1981, and at the time of the Oration he was very much the flavour.

We were both doctors. We spent an interesting week together, and he told me that he had not had a better “minder”, but I said I had done it before – and had learnt a great deal about being the essential shadow. He gave me one piece of advice which has been imprinted in my memory ever since – never be caught in the soggy political centre.

I’m not sure whether he followed his own advice.  My view is that the centre is not definable; it shifts around like the Magnetic Poles.

Later I was to become the Chair of the AIPS and suffered an attack from the right to take it over. This time, the Centre proved not to be soggy, and the attack from the Victorian right was defeated. I learnt a lesson – if you naively believe that a centrist political position has a future you need resilience and deep pockets – and wait until the stench from the political miasma becomes too much, even for the most complacent, and the community pleads for a climate change.

Re-setting the cuckoo clock

Guest Blogger:  Janine Sargeant AM Master of Public Health

“No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.” So says the 1949 Geneva Convention.

No wonder Victorians, and Melburnians in particular, are sick of both lockdowns and being treated as pariahs judging by the statements from the smaller States. This is particularly the case for the border communities. NSW fares little better when it comes to treatment by these other states, but at least has avoided the harsh Melbourne lockdown. Yes, group punishment is alive and well here in “good ol’ democratic Australia”.

Premier Palaszczuk is the stand-out serial offender here. Anxious to present herself to her electorate as the defender of Queensland against the “marauding plague” from the south, her offensive comments about locked down Melburnians have just added to their misery.

When the Queensland border opens up to the plague-ridden southerners they could be forgiven for rejecting her blandishments to come and spend their hard-earned money in this Mendicant State of the North. Opening day: likely to be just after the election. Surprise; surprise. The fact that her fellow Queenslander, Pauline Hanson is the prime practitioner of xenophobia, she as the inheritor of the Barcaldine tradition should be bloody well ashamed of following the Hanson line. The Deputy Premier, Stephen Miles has exhibited arrogance verging on boorishness in his contempt for the southerners.

Palaszczuk and Miles shouldn’t underestimate the extent to which their endless ill-considered commentary about not wanting those “diseased” southerners in Queensland has made the past three months even worse (apart from the purveyors of football games and others she has exempted). Don’t underestimate the impact of the longest, toughest shutdown in the world on the mental health of those in its midst.

And what is the latest advice from those who apparently encouraged hoarding of food to combat the swine flu epidemic? There is a rumour about gunships on the Brisbane River to repel invaders from the south although this one is difficult to confirm.

28 days of no community acquired cases and then, after a couple of weeks, NSW has three cases of unknown origin, 48 hours to find the origin or else!  Or else what?

Queensland re-sets its cuckoo clock on the border re-opening. Now it seems it is community transmission of unknown origin; talk about moving the AFL goalposts.

The current outbreak in Shepparton again demonstrates the challenges this country is facing, particularly when individuals think guidelines don’t apply to them.  It highlights again that public health in every state must have strong contact tracing and clear directions in relation to targeted testing and expanded self-isolation. There is no excuse for this not to be the case; the health departments have had months to get this right. Contact tracing will allow all states to keep outbreaks suppressed – and there will be outbreaks.

But not to cynically use disease for a blatantly political exercise.

Thus, memo to you Premier (for the moment) Palaszczuk – having no COVID cases when your State is hermetically sealed doesn’t get you any prize; the real test is when the country opens up, which it must do. So, where is the agreed national plan to safely open Australia’s open borders in which you are participating? Where is the plan for affordable quarantine to bring business travellers and tourists back? Or do you plan to lock out the world until it can demonstrate 28 days without community transmission?  Good luck with that one.

Memo to those other Premiers, Gutwein, Marshall and McGowan, read the memo to Palaszczuk and take a memo yourselves; the fact that you might be keeping your borders closed, or you dream up bizarre rules like the current one about not lingering in Mildura for petrol or taking a comfort stop at the side of the road as you drive through from NSW to SA (via the main road at the north west of Victoria) if you want to avoid 14 days quarantine, your actions are seriously dividing a country that is struggling and needs to be pulling together.

A bit of advice to the fiefdoms, look up “mendicant state” and remember that Australia is one economy but the larger State economies support the smaller ones. It is about time the Prime Minister rounds up the Premiers and directs some mature thought about Australia behaving like an adult nation – not a collection of infants in the playpen they rule for the moment.

Bud Wiser

Driving along we had just crossed the Lachlan River on the road through Darby Falls, beyond a line of trees there it was in a field behind a gate sardonically labelled “Railway Crossing.”

It was a Budd railcar – still recognisable – a silver cigar-shaped carriage sitting out in the middle of this field.

In 1950, the first of three Budd diesel powered rail cars was bought by Commonwealth Railways for use in the Iron triangle of South Australia.  I remember being on one of its first trips between Port Pirie and Port Augusta. For a young boy, this gleaming motor train with its rippling silver stainless steel frame shouted “I’m American” and resembled the Pullman cars that were featured in American films and magazines at the time, albeit without a locomotive. It was very exciting. I almost thought I would see a man in a peaked cap and appropriate livery there to assist us onto the car. In the American films of the time they were always black men. This was well before Afro-American replaced the subservient descriptions of the slave state.

Three rail cars were shipped to South Australia, manufactured by the Budd Rail Company in Philadelphia. The rail cars were said to be able to attain speeds of 90 mph, and I remember that day in May 1951 climbing aboard, and finding myself hit by cold air. Air conditioning is taken as a given in today’s world, but not in 1951.

There were two compartments, originally with the luxury of padded seating for forty-nine and forty-one respectively, buffet facilities being fitted still enabled 70 people to be accommodated.

The reason I was on this train was that it was the link service which enabled us to join the “Ghan”, the train originally named after Afghan camel drivers that worked across the Territory. The train travelled between Port Augusta and Alice Springs. The contrast between the slick Budd railcar and the venerable steam train labelled the “Ghan” was amazing as though one was climbing back into a past century. In those days, the “Ghan” wended its way through the Flinders Ranges and then North through the desert, but through that part of the Simpson desert which was liable to flash flooding.

The rail cars because they were swift and relatively noiseless and ran on the unfenced railway also had a propensity of striking wildlife, in particular kangaroos.  Twice on level crossings the rail car tangled with trucks, and on one of these occasions the rail car driver was killed.

Four of the cars were built under licence in Australia for NSW railways later, but by the 1990s all the rail cars had been retired.

One obviously ended up on this property, but it only shows there is always something around to remind you that you have been on this planet far too long.

Roger Dunn

He was my oldest friend, but our pathways deviated far away from one another. It was in the past few years when these now old men re-started the relationship we had at school. Some of the magic which is deep friendship remained. Roger was a successful scriptwriter for shows like Bellbird, The Sullivans, Homicide. He was a great watcher of human frailty, even though probably a bit too much was seen through the bottom of a wine glass.

He was not a bad artist and learnt part of his trade from John Brack who, for a time, was our art teacher. The ever-alert Roger noted that Brack had a separate room into which he would vanish, often with a young lady; in the romantic parlance of Dunn at the time this room was dedicated to our teacher’s trysts. I was too naïve to notice. After all, ours was a boys’ school.

Anyway, Brack found time to do a pen and ink caricature of Roger which now has pride of place at the school.

I penned this piece below which Roger’s eldest son, Lachlan read at his funeral last week.

Name?

Roger McLeod Dunn, Sir

Two small boys stand forever captured in navy blue shorts and butcher blue shirts, unbuttoned blazers; but not forgetting the cap on head. From home to school and cheering events, the cap jammed on head was the essential ingredient for everyday living.

Two small boys living close to the same railway line. Trains thundering past – a mutual lifeline to wild distant lands of Kooyong, Darling and Jordanville.

Two small boys joined by their love of words. Once they both entered a competition at school – one with delicate touch described the feathery fairy penguin; the other wrote about the awkward grumpy cassowary. The boy with the light touch won, the youngest ever winner of that prize.

The two boys endured that school; had a friendship held together by that love of literature where even in daytime they both could see the stars.

Vale good friend. The fairy penguins will be dancing with you.

And you? John Barton Best, Sir.

Mouse Whisper

The guy from Old Man Gunyah Creek said as the vehicle passed by the hill, the afternoon sun casting a sheen on its purplish-blue colour: “You know,” gesturing towards the hill, “It is always a matter of perspective. Some call it the Riverina bluebell, while others – Paterson’s curse.”

Having been in England in early spring where bluebells dot the country often in the dappled shade of trees with their new foliage, it is a sight immortalised on many a painted teacup. From a distance, you might gain a similar impression as you drive through the Australian countryside, especially where the weed may be seen growing in gullies shaded by gum trees.

Obviously, Jane Paterson thought so when she bought cuttings back from Blighty in the 1880s to plant in her garden on the family property. She did not think it a weed.

Then the weed escaped. Mrs Paterson’s name is not recorded among our female pioneer heroines.

For Australian farmers who have experienced the spread through much of the East Coast and Tasmania, it is Paterson’s curse. It can be used as fodder, by animals with a rumen, but it caused consternation by those driving by when they saw a number of horses in a large patch seemingly feeding on it. It can kill horses.

However, as a footnote there is a suggestion it was not her fault -well not totally. The number of phenotypes found here are greater than found in Blighty; but sorry that does not let her off the hook.

Somebody had to be the first. Oh, I remember it is success which has many authors, but then I remember – the weed has another name. Salvation Jane.

Jane, Paterson or Bluebell

Modest Expectations – Telephone Pole on Ardmona

Fillet of a fenny snake;
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

I must be living in a parallel universe.  Nobody has commented how much like Wonderland it all is. Illness with Trump becomes a circus act.

Two lines of people in white coats troop down the stairs of the Walter Reed Hospital. In my many years I have never seen doctors emerge from a hospital as if they are members of a marching band who have forgotten their high stepping band major twirling a baton.

At that stage, I wondered who was looking after the President – he was conducting a photo-op to convince everybody he was working; yet he looked ill. So, I presume the crew of that little masterpiece he was filming were physicians who doubled as camera crew.

Then he is out on the streets, denying every protocol relating to the Virus, bar one, he appeared to have his lower face covered. But he is a bag of contagion, for God’s sake.  He is being driven by men in masks and white coats, but the strait jacket is nowhere to be seen.

Back in the hospital, he has a tantrum. “I wanna go home” is the insistent refrain. Back at the White House, it is plain that he is short of breath, struggling to maintain his posture. Next frame in this farce: Trump has seized the narrative from his medical staff and is now reporting his own condition. The cameras do not switch to the White House lawns to show his staff playing croquet with flamingos as mallets with Virus balls.

The head of Trump’s medical retinue is an osteopath. Sure he was titled an emergency physician, but what does that mean in the term of this guy’s experience? He demonstrated a level of inexperience, which could be attributed to nervousness or incompetence.  As has been observed, “There are innumerable examples of sycophants rising to a level of incompetence where they are finally ‘revealed’. When that happens, the kissing up no longer matters – now reality demands competence.”

The question remains: what does his osteopath know about infectious diseases? Not much.

The President is being given a weird concoction of drugs, and one of the ironies is that if this unpredictable infant negotiates the illness, then the cult worship will intensify.

Is Trump taking a calculated risk in leaving hospital and returning to the White Burrow, whilst ensuring a screen of twitters? Or have the hinges completely come away from the door?

Zigzagging all across the landscape, he knows that the media are fascinated by his serpentine movements. The media is the helpless rodent in front of the snake, mesmerised by these movements.  Perhaps more the Komodo dragon rather than snake, given that saliva is the medium for contagion, and that saliva is an ooze coating his White Burrow. So beware the Kiss of the Komodo, Ivanka.

But then young Komodos climb trees to get away from the cannibalistic adult Komodo – they, like Donald, are too heavy to climb trees.

And as a postscript question to the hapless Dr Conley, can the King Komodo still smell the hamburger and chips he is gobbling?  Or would that be too much like being a clinician to answer that? 

A future President of the USA writes to the incumbent…

It is ostensibly January 31, 1829. Martin Van Buren picks up his quill in New York and writes to President Jackson. He is alarmed. 

“The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ‘railroads’. The federal government must preserve the canals for the following reasons:

One. If canal boats are supplanted by ‘railroads’, serious unemployment will result. Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed in growing hay for the horses.

Two. Boat builders would suffer, and towline, whip and harness makers would be left destitute.

Three. Canal boats are absolutely essential to the defense of the United States. In the event of the expected trouble with England, the Erie Canal would be the only means by which we could ever move the supplies so vital to waging modern war.

As you may well know, Mr. President,’railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of fifteen miles per hour by ‘engines’ which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.”

The problem with the letter was that it was a (in Trumpian Capitals) HOAX. Jackson had yet to be sworn in when the letter was purportedly written and no original of this letter has ever been found. Yet this example of absurdly protectionist fears, written in such a manner that it would be greeted by outrage and derision, is still given currency.  I remember hearing about the supposed letter when I was a teenager. It had been shown to me in all seriousness. I was duped. This hoax letter is still doing the rounds. How many are still duped?

I wonder whether any of the Trump sputacchiere will have currency in 200 years from now. But then, as those reading about the climate hoax on the parchment of the Murdoch past, it just may be a remnant of civilisation living in a world resembling the remains of a Texan barbecue in an ocean of blue-green algae learning to love aloes, hemlock and bitter melon by then.

An Australian Centre for Disease Control Thought Bubble

A mate of mine received this ALP splurge from the Shadow Minister of Health Bowen.

Australia went into COVID-19 unprepared. We are the only OECD country without a Centre for Disease Control. Our nation went into the coronavirus pandemic with less than one mask for every Australian in the National Medical Stockpile, an overreliance on global supply chains, and badly stretched aged and health care systems.

Future pandemics are a certainty and we can’t be left playing catch-up again. We can’t afford another Ruby Princess, or another tragic disaster in aged care. Our health, our lives and our economy depend on us getting our response to future pandemics right.

That’s why this morning, Anthony Albanese and I announced that, if elected, a future Labor Government will strengthen Australia’s response to future pandemics by establishing an Australian Centre for Disease Control.

Establishing an Australian Centre for Disease Control would mean that Australia will be better prepared to avoid the mistakes we’ve seen from this government so far.

This is one of the most contestable announcements that has emerged from the Opposition. I always remember one Government staffer deriding Opposition policies as “Policy by Penguin Book”. In other words, somebody thinks he has a bright idea, and then reads stuff which supports his claim without discussing it with anyone with experience for confirmation of the assertions.

What the ALP are advocating is that Australia centralise the public health to one centre, as the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA which, over the years because of good leadership up until Trump interfered with its succession planning, enabled its high academic reputation to be maintained. Now the CDC lies wounded, maybe mortally. There is no back up.

The media release says Australia went into the COVID-19 pandemic unprepared. Yet theoretically perched on a board of an international organisation dedicated to epidemic preparedness was a former head of the Federal Department of Health. This person watched while a number of abortive epidemics denoted by colourful acronyms rolled across our country.

What did she do not only heading Health but also then Finance? Emulated Sir Humphrey, if her performance on the “4 Corners” program was any guide. The “4 Corners” program seemingly was supposed to remind everybody of her grasp of the subject but instead showed how content-free she actually is.

There was no significant increase in the funding for public health under her stewardship and, at the end of her reign as the Government might have said, “we were shovel-ready to cop the Virus”.

However not to be diverted, back to the ALP announcement. Nothing wrong with that first sentence! This writer plunges on.

However, how are the OECD countries travelling? The media release says that Australia is the only OECD country out of 36 members without a Centre for Disease Control. That is a stretch. I am unaware of New Zealand having such a centre. USA with its CDC has 7.3 million COVID-19 cases, whereas the Australian total without a CDC is 27,200 and New Zealand 1,858. How does the author regard the use of the particular statistic to bolster his case for an Australian CDC?

Then the non-sequiter in the release – “few masks, an over-reliance of supply chains and a vulnerable aged care sector”. So? That is not a responsibility of a CDC.

The success of the Australian health system, despite being starved of funds for public health over the past 20 years, coinciding as it did with the Halton stewardship, was that NSW had set up a decentralised contact tracing system in the early 1990s as part of a generalised devolution of public health responsibility regionally. Hence in NSW, disasters in nursing homes and the Ruby Princess were resolved, messily but nevertheless resolved without huge numbers of cases and deaths compared to the later Victorian experience.

Even though I advocated that in NSW heads should roll because of these disasters, the basic strength of the public health system saved them. The Premier has never fully acknowledged the authors of that program – and it was certainly not Dr Chant, as she has herself acknowledged.

The Parkville Precinct

Victoria on the other hand never had an organised public health system, and the reason was that public health funding, beyond the training programs, was sacrificed on the altar of Parkville aggrandisement.

The result was that Victoria was completely ill-prepared to be able to handle the contact tracing requirements of this epidemic. What has saved Victoria is not some esoteric centre in Canberra, but a realisation by Andrews and some of the public health specialists that something had to be done to save the situation. Let’s face it – he closed down Victoria to allow the public health system to be upgraded and a de facto regional approach created.

By shutting Victoria down he enabled the street fighting with the virus to be undertaken with minimum street casualties, and the hand-to-hand combat in nursing homes where the Virus had sheltered to be contained and then has been steadily rooting it out, even though innocent people unfortunately have been caught in the “crossfire” without any protection.

A regionalised public health system has many heads and, unlike in America where CDC relevance and responsibility has been decapitated, thus is harder to destroy.

Ergo, mark for Master Bowen: D-…  A poorly thought-out essay.  Please resubmit after getting advice from somebody who knows.

Appointment with a Telegraph Pole

I was badly injured. Yet as the car which I had been driving a few minutes previously was being incinerated, I found myself laughing. I had got out of the car. I remember releasing my seatbelt and opening the door. Now I was watching the car – a rented Holden Calais burning. In the distance but coming closer I could hear bells ringing.

Charon and the River Styx

Then blank. The next picture imprinted on my memory was of opening my eyes and looking upwards into a hairy face. I did not care, if this was introduction to a hirsute Hell then so be it.

Then I heard my name being called – distant but distinct. Since I was not wearing glasses as I usually did, I had to focus. No, it was not the representative from Hades customs seeing if I was bringing anything illegal to burn, but my cousin’s son Owen.

My cousin, Margaret, and her husband Bill, lived in Shepparton at the time, and that evening I had intended to go to her 50th birthday party there. Bill was the city engineer at the time. Owen had a sister, Jill, who I do not remember playing any role in the drama.

It had been an ordinary Saturday, and I had had an uproarious lunch, with a few drinks. I assessed myself able to drive the three hours to Shepparton. The problem being June, the weather was foul, but I arrived in Shepparton at about five o’clock in the evening. Given that the party was not going to start until after eight, instead of going to the motel, I decided to go and see another mate who had a parish in a nearby town. No matter that this was the eve of the shortest day of the year and the sun had set. The rain had come again.

I did not get far, and fleetingly remembered the car aquaplaning and sliding off the road up a narrow muddy pathway.

So much for any more festivities.

Then blackness before the image of fumbling for the door handle.

Having got out of the car, I could not walk for two weeks. While I had considerable soft tissue damage, the only fracture was a rib broken by the seatbelt as I went from 100 kph to zero in a second or so.

It took me a long time to recover so I could return to work. I needed plastic surgery on my face, where my chin had imploded on the steering wheel. Fortunately, that was skilfully done, but then if you need plastic surgery for disfigurement rather than vanity, Melbourne has traditionally been the best place in Australia. So I was fortunate in more ways than one.

Now 40 years later I have extensive osteoarthritis in spine, knees and shoulders. That is the price of the impact. It is unsurprising that until I developed an autoimmune disease related to the arthritis, I coped. In the years after the accident I competed in many misnamed “fun runs”, and while finishing in the ruck, it convinced me that I had enough mobility to do so.

That I have described elsewhere.

There was one major change that I noticed about six months after the accident, but have I never talked much about it.  Probably because it is so subjective. As background, I had extensive head injuries, and the area between skull surface and the thin muscle layer, the galeal aponeurosis, was a lake of blood. This fluctuant spongy mass stayed for several weeks, but I did not have any intracranial bleeding.

I went back to work. The Italians call it garbo – it is an untranslatable Italian word, but it is the way I was treated – trying to suggest I had come back prematurely but not telling me directly; garbo. Courteous pitying, you might translate it.

My insight was such that I was oblivious to hints for a longer time in convalescence. I was never sat down by my peers and specifically challenged – and even if I had been there is always someone prepared to make allowances, and in split decisions, the benefit of the doubt generally prevails. I presume that occurred in my case, and I solved the problem by being perceived as eventually returning to “normal”.

Yet there was one  change in my personality that, unless you had followed me as a boy, adolescent and young man, you may have missed.  Before the accident, I had been prone to periods of dark depression; yet not despairing enough to be suicidal.

After that head injury, I have never again had these episodes of deep depression. At that time, there was not the same attention being paid to head injury – particularly on the sporting field.

Yet there is now an increasing reportage of traumatic injury of combat, although it has been around since Cain punched Abel.

Having mental infirmity was just a hidden phenomenon, and in an era of “stiff upper lips” as the shorthand for not showing any weakness, you did not talk about mental frailty. If you were laid out, you shook your head, got back on your feet and went back into the fray. There was never any talk about head injury, unless there was obvious loss of function.

In my case, whatever happened to my brain circuits in the crash, I emerged with a change of which I gradually became aware. I was able to cope better with setbacks. The dark moods were largely gone. Had the accident changed my circuitry? The obvious answer subjectively was “yes”. However, there was no one able to judge whether I had changed.

I am not advocating for people to improve their lot by banging their heads against walls, but what I am saying is traumatic injury is very much a lottery, and never should be ignored. Concussion is one thing, but is important in having someone who is able to detect any long-term change from head trauma, especially repeated. The problem is it takes time (and in this world who has the time or the level of care) to stop the episode ending up as a death against a telephone pole on a country road in the middle of a tempest. Some survive; some do not.

Putting Meaning into ExHume

Conditions not complied with or enforced (currently under review). State government approval conditions require 80% of ‘reservoir gas’ emissions (3.4-4 million tonnes each year) from the Gorgon facility to be captured and pumped underground (geosequestration or CCS) delivering a 40% reduction in the project’s total emissions.

Chevron received $60m in federal funding for the geosequestration project. It announced geosequestration had begun on August 8th, 2019, more than two years after production commenced. Delays were due to ‘ongoing technical problems’ and Chevron has also been accused of deliberately mismanaging the geosequestration project. No penalties were imposed by the WA government for emissions not sequestered over this period, and alternative offsets were not provided by Chevron despite State conditions requiring them in the event the geosequestration is not successful.

A review is currently underway by the WA Environmental Protection Authority to examine and clarify the intended start-date for the geosequestration condition at the request of the WA Minister for the Environment. There is no federal requirement for sequestration ….

Chevron geosequestration project

Australia has had a Carbon Capture and Storage Development Fund since 2009. These carbon technologies are supposed to trap the carbon dioxide produced by factories or fossil fuel power plants before they are emitted into the atmosphere where they contribute to global heating.

Once trapped, the greenhouse gas can then be piped into permanent underground storage facilities or sold to buyers who can use the carbon to manufacture plastics, boost greenhouse crops and as one boosting media release said even “help make fizzy drinks”.

As one insider has written, when the Australian fund was established for carbon capture in 2009, crude oil prices were just recovering from a sharp but very brief decline. Then Chevron decided on the final investment decision (FID) for Gorgon. The world was awash in natural gas then as it is now. Chevron made a decision on a projected $30bn LNG facility with a cost model in which high hydrocarbon prices would bail them out.

The cost overruns made Gorgon the most expensive LNG facility per unit cost ever of more than $50bn and the raw gas stream from the field already contains 15% CO2.

Today, carbon capture (CCUS) facilities around the world are capturing more than 35 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Apparently that is equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of Ireland, whatever relevance that may be. Recent announcements and commitments have the potential to more than double current global CO2 capture capacity. But the International Energy Agency’s Sustainable Development Scenario, which charts a path towards achieving the world’s stated climate ambitions, calls for a 20-fold increase in annual CO2 capture rates from power and industrial facilities in the next decade.

Most activity seems to be taking place in Norway and the adjoining fields in the North Sea. Norway built the first large scale carbon-capture project at the Sleipner gas field in 1996, and since has been storing nearly 1 million metric tons of CO2 each year.

Against the above estimated optimal requirements, that seems small, and Norway is where carbon capture is reckoned to be the most advanced. The current situation is a long way away from the ideal, and despite government investment in the technology,

For someone trying to find out what is going on, the area is full of obfuscation. The quote from the WA Conservation Council at the head of this blog segment has not been denied. The problem is that Government uses “carbon capture” in its recent policy announcement as though it is being shown to be a settled solution. There is one facility in Australia where carbon capture is supposed to work. It is a long way away from scrutiny – the Gorgon LNG project on Barrow Island in the middle of a nature reserve.

At least one matter is to be settled and that is that this natural gas field contributes more carbon pollution than any other facility in Australia.  In addition, the fate of the Gorgon CCUS plant has been racked with problems and even now it is not fully operational while the parent Chevron facility spews out pollution.

So there is a price. Now if the technology is going somewhere, fine, but if it is just a disguised handout to help a business mate or mates, then it should classify as assisting new technologies

It is difficult to work out how much has been wasted as distinct from being spent wisely. The Morrison government has indicated it will contribute another $50 million into carbon capture and storage technology, following more than $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies and investment from the fossil fuel sector since the early 2000s. Teasing out how much has been contributed by either sector may provide a different figure but in the end, we mug punters foot the bill. For what?

Back in Canberra, there is a major structural problem in policy direction, and that is the country is run by a public relations man. He is spin, not substance. It has been an unfortunate trait in Australia in recent times that major political roles have been filled by people of his ilk – journalists – more interested in feeding the news cycle than doing anything to improve the lives of Australians and more generally the world.

NSW suffered from Carr; South Austalia from Rann and Australia, Abbott – although the Abbott is more an aberration and thus harder to classify as a giornalista. Wistfully we may look back when journalists who became Prime Ministers were men of substance – John Curtin and Alfred Deakin.

Added to this mix is Minister Angus Taylor who leaves a dubious trail of politics mixed with self-interest rather than any real commitment to what is one of the greatest challenges – climate change. Frankly, he is not up to the challenge. That is why I suggest that the Minister, the member of Hume should exit, lending himself to a slogan – Taylor to ExHume. In fact, he should be dismissed – no longer be in any equation.

If carbon capture was the only energy boondoggle, perhaps I would be less vehement…but it is not!

I worry about a country where policy is predicated on being generous to your mates. Still, there is always a day of reckoning.

Finally, a pertinent comment from an insider made in relation to those executives in the oil and gas industry, who form a Praetorian Guard of Mates around the Prime Minister:

“They are stuck in their ways, which worked for the past decades and made them and their shareholders very rich. Now they can’t do anything else.

According to API the average age of an employee in the oil and gas industry is 51 years, only surpassed by the average age of employees in funeral homes. The average age of the managers and decision makers in the industry is even higher. 

Right there lies the problem, in plain sight for everyone to see. The decision makers in O&G are all solid, hard-working and amply educated individuals. Sternly conservative due to a lifelong paradigm of analogous thinking such as ‘proven design’ in this once wonderful adventurous industry.”

In ten years, the current lot will mostly be dead, dripping with honours and never having to pay the price they may have inflicted. So shall I be, but is not going to deter me from encouraging Australia to sleep only when the moon is no longer red with pollution.

Mouse Whisper

The Lewis chessmen are about my size. I sat in the back stalls watching a program on this extraordinary cache of figurines, which was a Viking hoard found in the sand dunes of the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis in 1831. Most of the 93 artifacts are in the British or Scottish National Museums. When the hoard was deposited, the Outer Hebrides were colonised by Norwegian Vikings.

The figurine which attracted my attention was one of a Bishop, with his right hand administering benediction. With the thumb opened, in the early church, the three open digits came to represent the Trinity (The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), while the two closed digits represented the dual nature of Christ as both man and God.

However, the Bishop’s hand in one of the figurines resembled Duputyrens contracture, which is a disease predominantly of the palmar fascia, the connective tissue beneath the skin which, as it thickens, pulls the fingers into a flexed position. The disease generally affects the little and ring fingers first.

Further, it is a disease which originated in the Vikings, it is a disease which affects males and is associated – among other things – with a love of alcoholic beverages.

Just an observation, but an interesting one?

Modest Expectations – Spitzbergen

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice. 

Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government.

Ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess?

Oliver Cromwell on getting rid of the Rump Parliament

Cromwell

In the first weeks of working for Bill Snedden in 1973, I remember the office in Canberra was visited by a delegation of Myall Lakes’ miners. At the time, Myall Lakes was a major source of mineral sands, the source of the then new wonder metal – titanium. They were concerned with the intention to close the mining. It seemed genuine and that they were not proxies for the mine owners since they had a union representative with them.

In their minds there was no consideration of the need to preserve the beaches and dunes that constituted part of the landscape. It was understandably all about their jobs, a familiar theme. A very relevant theme now that there is an intention to close some coal mines in the region.

Hawks Nest

I knew about the Myall Lakes at close quarters because a decade later, after the mining had been closed down, I and three others walked the colourfully named trail between Mungo Brush and Hawks Nest. It was a very varied walk through coastal rainforest before emerging upon dunes and then back into scrubland and wetlands. It was a superb if challenging walk, the last part of which was through a marsh where there were supposed to be blocks of wood forming a boardwalk. This had collapsed in places and we were forced to wade through water up to our waists, and then at the end of the walk to rid ourselves of the leeches. However, on that day, I was very much a conservationist.

The miners thus had come to Snedden as a last resort, because they had been told that even the union was not supporting the sand mining being retained. Yet this was not far from Newcastle, where the ALP is electorally entrenched.

What could we do about it?

Snedden chose to be publicly sympathetic. He realised very clearly that there is a political divide in this country, where one side saw representing its task of protecting labour, including here the role of the State, as paramount. Any support in any case would have been seen as opportunistic and fleeting, while alienating traditional supporters.

On the Liberal side, which Snedden led at the time, essentially the policies were around encouraging individual enterprise and the development of wealth, independent of the State, yet not entirely disregarding that the State had a crucial role. It provided certain services, which had been shown or were deemed better to be public enterprises. The problem with such a separation is that in a democracy, such attempts at differentiation are riddled with inconsistencies, paradox not to mention conundra.

Disaffected union members thus do not easily fit with the so-called Liberal side of politics when a basic two-party adversarial system forms the basis of this country’s democracy. The adversarial system has been distorted by the alliance of the protectors of free enterprises with the agrarian socialists who, in their purist ideological form, have been known to ally themselves with the ALP briefly.

There are other elements. The sectarian division in the ALP, which has resulted in once defenders of worker rights, albeit with more than a tincture of Roman Catholicism, separating themselves into the DLP. They crossed the political divide, were regarded as renegades by the ALP and eventually were destroyed as a Party. Elements remain as a core reactionary Falangist rump now embedded in the conservative side of politics far away from their traditional roots. Their ideological basis aligns more easily into the “new liberalism” which has evolved.

The other political party, which probably has progressed beyond the charismatic individual, is the Greens party, but there is no discounting the effect of Bob Brown on promotion of environment protection in Tasmania.

However, a proto-anarchic party, which paradoxically has blind beliefs as a substitute for reasoned policy, is doomed to irrelevance. As was shown in Western Australia hugging trees wearing a twinset and pearls does not win a constituency.

In the end, political parties which do not progress beyond the individual who sets them up or the individual who works the Senate system, primarily but not exclusively a Tasmanian phenomenon, exists so long as they exist. Who still remembers Brian Harradine and the antics he inflicted on this country to secure largesse for Tasmania? So in your lifetime, you were influential, but that Life of Brian, your legacy?

I believe very much in the definition of conservatism that to change your view can be done by persuasive evidence-based reasoning. However, such logic seems to be in short supply these days.

The problem with politics in Australia as I have written elsewhere, is that vested interests typified by the urgers, rent seekers and mercantilists on both sides of the political spectrum have emerged to distort and compromise the political process. They have one basic belief, irrespective of what side of politics they profess, and that is: “Government is an ATM. All I need to have is a password; that is a politician in my wallet”.

Vested interests squeeze out those who have a belief that the political party of choice will take account of your views, if you are a member.

It was salutary watching the 2010 documentary of the GFC debacle and how Wall Street and an array of “respected” academia were involved in almost destroying the world’s financial structures. What happened to them? Many of the perpetrators ended up not only with handsome dividends but also as faces among Obama’s trusted advisers.

Was anybody prosecuted as a result of the Wall Street shenanigans? Nope. No wonder Obama paved the way among the deprived for the ascension of a “saviour” who has avowed to clean the swamp with a broom, he himself infected by fake news and conspiratorial theories.

The Haynes Banking enquiry in this country showed the extent of our diseased society, but already the Government are unravelling the structural cures so recently put in place. Symptomatic?

Don Chipp had the right idea when he used the slogan “Keep the Bastards Honest” as his party’s brand. Unfortunately, Chipp did not have the intellectual capacity to articulate policy arising from what was a strong call for change and, most importantly, integrity.

However, 40 plus years on, with ongoing corruption so evident across the political spectrum, the demand for a “National Integrity Commission” is the perfect way in which what seemingly is a simple issue could become the centrepiece and rallying call for a national party. The issue should be attractive to most of the independent members in the House of Representatives. It seems a single issue, but it is not.

A simple single issue upon which to campaign has the potential to focus the electorate – an Integrity Commission – so much to say about how to promote such a body; so many reminders of integrity lacking in the current crop. Contemplate a party with a pristine white banner with a blue “I” one way-intersecting at right angles with a blue “I”. Maybe throw in a few stars as well.

Eureka may at last have a long term meaning.

The problem with any centrist party is that it has to have a structure, funding, and a strategy attuned to that. In an earlier blog, I suggested a Haircut Party aimed at reducing the entitlements, perks, and the overstaffing which politicians are afforded – something which would test those already within the “parliamentary tent”.

Being a member of Parliament as I identified in articles I wrote years ago when the entitlements and perks were far from what they are today had a number of challenges and bogeys. Staffers then had legitimate policy roles, rather than just harassing bureaucrats and playing puerile undergraduate one-upmanship scherzi. The individual targets such as the choleric Craig Kelly are many, but need to be franked in terms of lack of integrity.

I mention this just to assure those who do glance at this blog, that the two notions are not incompatible – a good haircut gives one a good view of integrity.

However, I am also mindful that after Cromwell died, five years after he uttered the above exhortation, the Rump resumed and needless to say, they exhumed Cromwell’s body and hanged him.

Says something for cremation – but also about embedding policy so that it has no single author.

The Spectre of Parkinsonism

The discussion about post-infective sequelae to viral infections should not surprise anybody. However, those people who carelessly disregard history should at least take notice that the possibility exists.

I had an uncle. He was a very active, successful businessman who built his father’s agency into a profitable business. He was closely involved in attracting Roger de Stoop and his Belgian enterprise in high-end fabric weaving to set up a factory in Melbourne.

However, during the 1930s as a young man my uncle contracted encephalitis lethargica, the aetiology of which has never been worked out beyond an influenza-type pathogenesis being suspected. It was also known as “sleeping sickness” because of the severe alterations in sleep patterns. Within the family, I was told that my mother helped nurse him.

In any event he seemingly recovered and was fit enough to serve in World War 2. However, in the late 1960s, he began to show neuro-psychiatric symptoms, which were initially diagnosed as “anxiety attacks” for which he was prescribed chlorpromazine. That just made him worse, and soon after he was diagnosed as having Parkinsonism, which rapidly progressed – the trembling hands, the mask face, the rigidity. It was the time that levodopa had just been introduced and to that was added the then experimental dopa decarboxylase inhibitors to try and dampen down his movement fluctuations. In hindsight, once his prior medical history was disclosed, the association with his prior disease was made.

The disease progressed and he eventually died, not the death that such a previously active man would have wanted. Nevertheless, even though I was never close to him, I have two strong contrasting memories of him. One was the uncompromising man with a fierce expression in his late forties telling me off in no uncertain terms when I was barely twenty-one – and rightly so; and the man 12 years later in a wheelchair barely able to talk. We two were alone briefly then. I got up to leave, shook his trembling hand and said good-bye. It was the only time I have ever touched anybody on the cheek; his brother, my father, had died years earlier when I was not allowed to see him until he was dead, cotton wool already stuffed in his mouth. But that needs more explanation at another time.

However, the spectre of Parkinsonism is real, especially if theoretically there was a long life ahead of you before the Virus came. I wonder whether it will be associated with a loss of smell, one of the symptoms of the Virus infection, because that may suggest an entry point into the brain along the olfactory cranial nerve, which is not only the shortest cranial nerve but also originates in the brain itself (rather than the brain stem, unlike all the other cranial nerves, except the optic nerve).

We shall see.

There is always a solution

It was a Saturday morning. The phone rang. It was my son. I was working in Broken Hill at the time and coming to visit me, he was in Mildura. He had been booked and had a ticket to travel on the Eastern Airlines Cessna 402 flight. However, he arrived in Mildura at the same time as the camera crew, with its baggage, which was about to film a Coca-Cola commercial outside Broken Hill.

The tiny settlement of Silverton outside Broken Hill had served as the image of the Australian Outback in multiple films, and the road out to the Mundi Mundi plains was the backdrop for the early Mad Max movies. The Mundi Mundi Plains are flat land stretching to the South Australian border, and sitting on a rock overlooking the plains watching the sunset makes one realise how lucky you are to be an Australian as long as it was not a set for Mad Max.

Mundi Mundi Plains

Coca-Cola was rumoured to have a set somewhere on the plains where they shot commercials, and who was this young man with a ticket to stand in the way of a commercial eulogising dark fluid which looks like haemolysed blood but a tried beloved method of stacking on calories for many generations of the world’s youth.

Anyway, son was bumped, and when he rang he presented me with the problem. There was one fight on Saturday; none on Sunday. He enquired whether there was anybody flying to Mildura that day who could pick him up for free. There wasn’t. We quickly dismissed the idea of him hiring a car to drive the 300 kilometres between the two cities. The cost would have been prohibitive for someone of his then age hiring a car under “remote” conditions. Hitchhiking: forget it.

However, there was one outfit from whom I could charter a plane and pilot. They said they could accommodate me – at a price. The pilot had to be roused and when he arrived unshaven, I ignored the fact that he drank a whole bottle of milk immediately.

All systems go.

I phoned the Mildura airport and let them know to tell my son that I was coming down to get him. I went with the pilot, who still stank of alcohol. Despite all the signs, it was uneventful; an hour down and an hour back. I cannot remember the type of small plane, but it was adequate to fit at least four. Flying to Mildura and back on a clear morning as this was before the thermals made their presence felt was diverting. It was a time when the waterholes were filled after substantial rain. When that occurs, it took about a year or more for them to dry out, if there was no more rain – and the farmers used to sow them – it was a harvest of pocket money. Generally, two harvests could be obtained. A tremendous sight.

Yes, I remember clearly this morning and these vivid spots of green, distinct from the unending blue grey of the saltbush, blending as it does into the ochre of the desert.

I always remembered this morning as one in which a potential disaster was so quickly solved – at a price. My son was given a taste of why Broken Hill is what it is – a place that everyone should see before they die. It is the essential Australian whitefella legendary Outback.

My son met Pro Hart while he was there, said he was broke, and did Pro Hart have anything he might have for free. Pro Hart probably thought he was an urger, but generously remembered he was probably the same when he was my son’s then age. The son still has the purse with the Hart dragonfly painted on one corner.

In a way, it was a variation on that wonderful “The Gods Must be Crazy”. Here the Coke bottle stayed in the plane, and bumped my son onto the tarmac. Never thought that I was a bushman or my son was a surrogate for the Coke bottle.

Andrews – a Career going North?

The future is not about his response to COVID-19. Andrews made the wrong decision, just as he narrowly avoided a similar debacle had he allowed the Grand Prix to go ahead in March. If he had done that, and it must have been a close call, Melbourne’s “first wave” may have been as bad as the second. So I hope he remembers who gave him that advice to pull out. Otherwise he would have been cactus.

The Health Minister, Jenny Mikakos, recently resigned and conveniently, being a member of the Upper House, her resignation will require no by-election to fill her vacancy and thus few ripples. Depending on the media, she will become a footnote and then forgotten like so many. However, the parliamentary election of her successor may generate a platform for some of the more infantile in the Opposition.

Ultimately no matter how softened, Andrews will be tainted with the decision to hire the private contractors. Whether it was out of contempt for a Department over which he once ruled or not, Victoria was ill-prepared for a major public health emergency. The problem with Victoria, and Melbourne in particular, is that the politicians are continually being told how wonderful medicine and medical research is in Victoria and thus there is a belief that Victoria can weather all ills because of the Parkville precinct. It is more the Parkville rather than the Stockholm Syndrome. Generation after generation of politicians and business leaders have been lulled into believing this.

In this sea of self-congratulation, public health was a casualty. Now public health is very central, and what is happening clearly has been painful for those within Melbourne in particular; but are we witnessing what has to be done when the Virus calls. It is obviously shambolic elsewhere in the world where the Virus is rampaging. Does it need politicians with the resolve of Andrews and his tactical skill to control the outbreak?

Andrews tried the carrot but needed the stick to bludgeon the Virus out of the community. Victoria has surely seen a winter of discontent, but Australia faces a summer far better placed than elsewhere in the World, where the Virus has already conquered and colonised. Here the Virus is being forced into the underground – a terrorist force nevertheless, which will break out. Think ISIS; think Virus – a smaller form, but nevertheless terrorist.

Thus, the challenge for Andrews is to know when his anti-terrorist support is strong and reliable, able enough to be maintained, so that he can “declare a peace” and free his people, who are now knowing the anguish of wartime.

Are the lessons learnt in Victoria generalisable? What time is required to suppress the Virus once it is rampant? What is important is that Andrews has overseen a bungle, responded decisively, and did not cave in despite some attempts, particularly by some elements of the media intent on giving him a permanent pariah status. The legacy of these decisions is yet to be known in full; the Virus has been suppressed – but at what cost?

Reponsibility has been handpassed from Department to Department. But we all know. Of course, who caused the stuff up was the Channel-9 cameraman.

Penitents in Holy Week

In the end, scherzi aside, let’s face it, if you stand out there as the Premier has done, enduring all the slings and arrows day after day, recognise that this is an act of penance. Soon, the penitent can remove the purple drapes, forgiveness has been given? Who knows whether the electorate will give absolution. In the meantime, Victorians, you should move on. There will be no Pallas Revolution.

Mouse Whisper

“Thanks be to God,” Father Ted was breasting the bar of the Balaclava pub in Whroo when he heard.

He remembers when his mate from school, George Pell, could not travel back to Australia because of health problems.

In 2016, supported by a two page medical Report, “Cardinal Pell’s office in Rome issued a statement at the time saying his heart condition had worsened, making it unsafe for him to travel.”

In 2020, glory be, miracle of miracles, a medical report unnecessary because of such a miracle, Cardinal Pell did not issue a statement that his heart condition four years later has improved to such an extent, he was able to scuttle back to Rome on Qatar Airways.

Or perhaps the clouds of civil cases have begun to gather.

Modest Expectations – It’s Time

Two weeks ago, it was horror stories coming from Victoria about people being locked up in tower public housing blocks, and I expressed a concern as to whether locking people up in tower blocks should not be accompanied by a warning about the risk of fires and how this would be managed if the buildings were to go into lockdown. In fact a number of residents were evacuated to hotel quarantine.

It seems that threat has abated in the public mind in the face of the rising horror stories of the private nursing homes and the circumstances whereby the residents are caught up in the rising tide of community transmission.

This involved families, staff and “persons unknown” unwittingly spreading the virus to a group of our elderly population incarcerated in a system where financial profit is paramount and the operational arrangements seem far from being able to combat a pandemic. However the problem, while systemic, is not only rampant in certain postcodes and not in others but also completely contained within the private sector.

The Premier, Daniel Andrews, tries to be measured, never raising his voice and refusing to apportion blame to any sector of the population when it is probably plain to himself when reviewing the data that certain sections of the population are more susceptible to “amoral familism”, which I have mention previously. That one of the biggest outbreaks is in an aged care facility linked to the Greek Orthodox community has not elicited as yet any finger pointing in the community is testimony to his control of the situation.

The problem with “amoral familism”, which is not limited to a Greek village upbringing, is that it promotes the mindless protection of the family unit above all – the State can go hang. It is the product of an upbringing where the education levels are low and unfortunately the society in which many of the people have grown up is male-dominated and authoritarian, and often where sanctions are not enforced by the gentle remonstrations of the reasonable man, as Andrews is. Ignorance of English does not help.

Therefore, when it seems nobody is watching this group, even when COVID-19 positive, it is unsurprising if these people do not heed warnings. If I were isolated in a foreign village with no knowledge of the language, could or would I heed any warning?

Hence not having the language would be an excuse if the individual were an isolate. However, it would be rare for this to occur. Spokespersons for particular communities bob up all the time. Instead of ensuring that these potential “purveyors of death” are quarantined, these spokespersons seem just to offer a variety of excuses; they did not understand, they did know that what they were doing was criminal and the excuses flow on and on.

Andrews has a difficult job, because if he names the miscreants then he runs the problem of stigmatising whole communities for the sins of the few. Andrews also knows that these “hotspots” are in his electoral bailiwick, but given that many of the Labor parliamentarians in these electorates have migrant backgrounds, you would think that the Premier should not have to bear the full load. Some of the political actions are somewhat like those gossamer Green parliamentarians posturing in front of the locked-down housing towers, full of sound and fury, as is common with Greens, signifying nothing.

So it is easier to implement rules that disadvantage the Victorian community, moving to the second-highest category of restrictions – Stage 4. Unlike America, most Victorians know more about the Virus than they did in March when it first came to notice and are thus better able to run relatively normal lives, while appreciating the need for social distancing, hand washing and now masks. Most people have shown that they are prepared to work within increasing limits – as shown by the imposition of masks, which has been almost universally accepted.

The percentage of self-serving exhibitionists and just plain “wackos” seem to be mercifully small, but having identified themselves they could form a nucleus of inmates of the quarantine facilities that I have advocated should be constructed where those who are invited in serve a true “quarantine” period – that is, 40 days and nights. They would be joined by those deliberately flouting the government directives. After all, each of those COVID-19 positive individuals roaming the streets in a wilful manner is a “potential murderer”. Harsh words, but think about the logic. Who actually killed grandpa and grandma in the nursing home?

The other problem with Victoria is that it has always lagged behind NSW in its investment in public health, particularly in contact tracing. Victoria has been known to have under-resourced public health training for years.

That advance goes back to the work of Dr Sue Morey who, under the Head of the NSW Department of Health the late Bernie Amos, set up a comprehensive program in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Many of the current senior cohort of the NSW public heath physicians, as does the State of NSW, benefited from the program Morey established and owes her a very great debt.

The inability to find out the source of all the cases occurring in Melbourne also relies on people telling the truth and not incriminating themselves for whatever reason. Having said that, the present inquiry presumably is expected to reveal the chain of infection from case zero.

Those three young women flaunting and flouting through three States, refusing to co-operate, destroying their mobile phones and probably denying they are Nigerian are just extreme examples.

However, as with criminal activity the more the rest of the community is law-abiding, the more time there is for policing the extreme cases. As with vaccination, there is a reliance on having a high proportion of the community vaccinated – the vaccinated group provide a buffer for the unvaccinated.

There is also another “wee” problem that may be overlooked when the pandemic is distracting attention. The Ministerial retinue has returned from America. Like those who have flouted the pandemic in Melbourne, the government has not offered any advice on their whereabouts. However, the “cat may be out of the bag” when a so-called “consular officer” returning from overseas turned up in Maroochydore and then Toowoomba yesterday with a dose of COVID-19. Coincidence?

Apparently, “not actually a Consular officer” quibbled DFAT, but he was still carrying a diplomatic passport or the equivalent. The arrogance of holders of red and green passports knows no bounds, but at least the Queensland Premier has called this exemption out; however there is no mention of the whereabouts of the two Ministers. Again, there are exemptions for the few.

Clive Palmer – The Rose of Bulgaria or a Dangerous Furbo? 

I think that this son of Bulgaria, alleged owner of property in Sofia, and expert in its national sport of Split Squat has been wrongly characterised. Here in the damask fields of the Rose Valley of northern Bulgaria they talk of nothing else – but Clive.

He is up to all his Bulgarian tricks again. He has a case before the High Court challenging the Western Australian Government’s right to the close its borders.

His arguments are based around section 102 of the Australian Constitution, which states:

On the imposition of uniform duties of customs, trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free. But notwithstanding anything in this Constitution, goods imported before the imposition of uniform duties of customs into any State, or into any Colony which, whilst the goods remain therein, becomes a State, shall, on thence passing into another State within two years after the imposition of such duties, be liable to any duty chargeable on the importation of such goods into the Commonwealth, less any duty paid in respect of the goods on their importation.

Most of the words in this section relate to the immediate transitional arrangement following the enactment of the Constitution in 1901 but the key clause has centred on what States can or cannot do about imposing barriers between themselves. Legal arguments have waged about what it all means and many lawyers have had their waistcoats filigreed in gold as a result.

The Attorney-General, Christian Porter, probably as a proper lawyer had the normal reflex. Since there is a challenge to the Constitution, therefore the Australian Government must take an interest. This is such a fundamental issue. Does State border closure present a challenge to the Federation if unilateral action is taken by a State to close the borders? Does Clive Palmer provide a challenge to the Australian Constitution?

The Federal Government was emboldened by the initial encouragement of the Prime Minister to keep supporting the Palmer initiative. There, in the background, would be the normal cheer group that thinks supporting Clive’s challenge a “jolly jape”. These are parliamentarians gathered together under the standard of a skunk-like animal with adolescent behavior rituals and bearing aloft an icon of Christopher Pyne. They can’t help irritating the Australian community from their seats of privileged opulence.

The Prime Minister has had second thoughts, hopefully not only because of the backlash in Western Australia to the Palmer challenge. It should be remembered that Palmer was born in Victoria and spent most of his formative years on the Gold Coast, where he made his first fortune in real estate. So he is not a genuine Western Australian – “he just ain’t one of them”.

If Clive wants to stir up the Sandgropers over this issue of secession, of which border closure is a subsection, then they might just take it out on the Liberal party at the next Federal election. Hence, Morrison backing away may have been because he realised that Palmer was trying to “tar baby” him.

One obvious solution is to form a pro-tem barrier away from the accepted geographical boundary. Cross-border regional arrangements are everywhere. To me, working in the Victorian border town of Cobram on the Murray River, meant that I had to cross to the NSW river town of Barooga more than once a day.

One has only to live in a border area to know that indiscriminately shutting borders is group punishment, unnecessarily unfair and at times unwittingly dangerous.

These are communities of interest, which have grown up over a century or more, where the border is just irrelevant to normal social and economic intercourse.

Therefore when this Virus is eventually contained there is work to be done in this area of “communities of interest”, so that if borders have to be closed then there is a fully developed plan that minimises the disruption and can be put into immediate effect. As has been said on more than one occasion, cross-border arrangements have diverse benefits and opportunities for managing a shared resource.

In any event should the adopted son of Bulgaria win his case in the High Court, I am sure that Western Australia could move its lockdown zone един метър inside its actual border with South Australia and Northern Territory. Clive, with your solid knowledge of Bulgarian, you would know what that means.

After all, Clive you are not the only gander in the “Gooserie”.

Hafnium (Hf)

I was browsing through an old New Scientist and came across a world map, which indicated that among a series of metals, Australia had over 50 per cent of the world’s hafnium.

According to the map legend, it was estimated that Australia had the biggest deposit of hafnium in the World. Hafnium does not occur independently in nature.

Even though predicted by Mendeleev it was not discovered until 1923 by two chemists Dirk Coster, a Dane, and George Charles de Hevesy, a Hungarian. The Dane prevailed. Hafn was the mediaeval name for Copenhagen. The Hungarian just shared the glory of having isolated this last natural occurring element.

Apparently, one of the major problems is that hafnium is tightly linked to zirconium in a ratio of 1:50, and exists in a group of three naturally occurring elements with titanium the lightest and hafnium the heaviest with an atomic number of 72. Lying between is zirconium. However, as far as can be obtained, the amount of hafnium produced is small, and until recently it was a considered a waste product, removed in the purification of zirconium. Zircons are renown as jewellery substitutes for diamonds, but zirconium has a multitude of uses, and put simply it is everywhere – its industrial use is in hardening alloys and ceramics. It is also anti-corrosive.

Recently, Hafnium has been found to have a number of amazing properties and it can be used in almost any industries where the word “advanced” is the prefix.

The special properties of Hafnium oxide have recently permitted further miniaturisation of microprocessors, enhancing processing speed while eradicating overheating problems.

Resistant to corrosion, the metal its oxide forms extreme temperatures. Consequently, hafnium is used in plasma cutting tips for welding, and is essential to the advancement of the aerospace industry. 

Added to this, hafnium carbide is one of the highest temperature resistant and hardest materials with melting point of 3,900 degrees Centigrade which potentially suitable in a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) for faster spacecraft propulsion.

So writes the hafnium enthusiast linked to the company proposing to mine a deposit south of Dubbo when extolling the element’s virtues.

Despite its global market being about 70 tonnes annually, this enthusiast predicts the demand will double by 2025, and Australia could produce 200 tonnes a year. So far I am following the trail to Hafnium.

This is a small amount given that the Dubbo mine is proposed to be an open cut operation that will extract 19.5Mt of ore a year from a 32m-deep open cut mine.

The extracted ore is crushed and further reduced in size by grinding circuit. Sulphuric acid will be used to convert the material into sulphated ore, will be leached in water and sent for solvent extraction and precipitation, and onwards the final product.

Extraction of these elements and the associated pollution is increasingly being factored into political considerations when the mining spruikers are abroad. However, there are further chemical processes to separate the hafnium from zirconium.

The technological description states it is “a liquid–liquid extractive separation between hafnium and zirconium from thiocyanic acid medium using the mixtures of diisobutyl ketone (DIBK) and di (2-ethylhexyl) phosphoric acid (P204) as the extractant was developed.”

A metallurgist could answer the question of how much this extraction method damages the environment. 

It is almost as an afterthought, that process residues are treated before dumping them into storage facilities. The disposal of residue when there is a potentially such a big hole in the Dubbo landscape is far from a throwaway line.

Water will be taken from the Macquarie River, but the amount proposed is nowhere stated. In the description of the extraction of ore no amount of water is mentioned and the description hurries onto the marvels of the proposed mine.

OPAL’s lightwater pool

There is another problem with zirconium mining – the deposits often exist with radioactive elements – thorium and uranium. Small problem with an open cut mine only a few kilometres from a regional city! I find it interesting that there has been an experimental extraction plant at Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) since 2009. Hafnium is used in control rods in the nuclear reactor core.

Currently, China produces 75% of the world’s zirconium supply and hence hafnium. “China’s stranglehold on the supply chain of this material essential for advanced technology weakens the economic and political security of other nations”.

Metallurgy is one of the professions that, from the outside, smells of alchemy – there is a magical aspect to the extraction of these uncommon elements and their increasing relevance with advancing technology demanding these metallic elements with their special qualities. Then it is promoted to an essential component of our lives. Lithium has been one such metal.

However, the “green lobby” faces the whole “strategic development” lobby, where self sufficiency is increasingly important, and moving rare elements around the political game board are important chips in being able to game, with more strategic element chips than other nations. At present, China seems to have the greatest variety of these chips in the greatest quantity.

Australia has quantity in two particular chips – iron ore and coal. But that is a different game board. Given the amount of these being mined, then the impact on climate change is a constant.

However, too often the question from the local politicians when confronted with the prospect of a mine in their electorate is concern about how many jobs will be created. The Dubbo project bosses does not explicitly answer that question.

As far as one can gauge prices, the price of hafnium is in the region of USD6million a tonne; whereas zirconium is priced at USD10,000 a tonne.

To get a comparison, Australia produces 900 million tons of iron ore at about USD110 a tonne.

What progress has been made on the Dubbo mine project? In February 2020: Alkane noted that Export Finance Agency’s (EFA’s) financial support would be subject to finalisation of due diligence, acceptable financing structure and eligibility and credit requirements. As Australia’s export credit agency, EFA is mandated to support businesses, which are seeking to develop new export market. 

I have been one of those converted to the climate change lobby and I am particularly worried about the wasteful use of water in what, apart from Antarctica, is the driest continent.

I read about hafnium; the notion of there being the greatest percentage of the world’s supply in Australia has intrigued me. I have searched to find out what is its proper place in the Australian economy. Political leaders are often confronted with such decisions when they have little intrinsic knowledge of the subject.

The giraffes are watching …

However, if I were in a position to make a decision, I would be immediately worried by the massive water requirement and the fact that there would be an open cut mine where radioactive minerals are being mined close to a major regional city, the Western Plains Zoo and the Dubbo Observatory. However the dilemma is, as with all mineral extraction, how can the metal be purified with the least pollution. Unfortunately, when in doubt the large powers with a monopoly of the chips kick the game board over – and everybody loses.

Paraphrasing Einstein, who never said a truer word when he said the fourth world war will be fought with rocks, some of which may contain hafnium.

All Souls

All Souls, Oxford

I suppose being invited to dinner by Max Beloff with the academic Fellows at All Souls was an honour. Great Britain that year was sunny, and when that occurs the summer is always beautiful. Off to Oxford the three of us went one evening to have dinner.

Max Beloff was an eminent modern historian who, at that stage of his life, was tramping from one side of the political spectrum to the other. The young socialist Beloff, now in middle-age having marked time as a Liberal, was moving determinedly to the right at the time, when he invited us to dinner.

Beloff had been a Fellow since 1957, ensconced as he was in this group “at the pinnacle of British academic hierarchy”. He had attained this position much earlier than when he had pursued this neo-liberal journey, in the process setting up a private university and then later absorbing imperial honours that were piled on him by Thatcher.

When we arrived we were ushered into a reception room where pre-dinner drinks were served; I had the obligatory dry sherry as the clever repartee started. The problem with clever repartee is that it is essentially hierarchial; if the young man (it was not until 1979 that women were admitted as Fellows of All Souls) wanted to announce his presence in such exchanges, it seems dressing flamboyantly helps. The “look at me” mien serves as an entrée card.

I was well versed in the social rules of these establishments, having been an undergraduate in a residential College, which replicated much of its social mores from those of Oxford. Therefore, I shut up and only replied when spoken to by some Fellow who had not the slightest interest in whom I was.

However, the call to dinner came and there is nothing like a College refectory – long high table, paneled walls, high-backed mahogany chairs. Beloff welcomed us – the Boss thanked him. It was all so polite, but it was an experience – probably once in a lifetime. Although for them not; just three Australians to be humoured in exchange for a meal.

I was seated next to Michael Howard, the military historian and we chatted about his topic. My contribution when the Franco-Prussian War was mentioned was that I had inherited a full set of skeletal bones from my father. It was widely thought that many of the skeletons used by aspiring doctors pre-war had come from soldiers who had died in that War. They were highly prized for the muscle markings, which were very distinct on these bones. However, apart from that I cannot remember the other Fellows beside and across the table. The talk was just that – inconsequential chatter as the Fellows on either side of the table carefully updated themselves on one another, given that there was a young foreigner in their midst.

Dinner was traditional English fare, which was better than the College roast to which I been subject every night more than a decade earlier.

Once dinner was finished it was off to another room for fruit, nuts, digestive biscuits and the central cheese. The obligatory Stilton round had pride of place, and the port was passed. Then it was off to the terrace for coffee and brandy.

The night was absolutely still and balmy, the sky a curious lavender grey. Across the terrace was the impressive Codrington Library building, built in the early 18th century on the back of slavery and a sugar cane fortune amassed by a Christopher Codrington.

It highlights the problem of applying 21st century values to the funding of a building like that. The Christopher Wren sundial installed over the entrance is a spectacular reminder of the versatility of the man, and Wren himself was a Fellow.

Oh, so different from the environment of the All Souls College of Christopher Wren, outwardly becoming more sensitive to its survival after the radicalism of 1968 which threatened its existence, when it was sneered at as “a weekend home for port-drinking members of the London Establishment, grown fat on the rent of farms it owned since the Middle Ages”.

Had we had dinner in an Anachronism?

Then it was back to London. I still remember the golden glow drenching the car, and my thoughts drifted to the recently-released Joe Losey film “The Go-between” and I, projecting myself as the young man in search of a romantic interlude in the same rural saffron softness of the film.

I have often visited Oxford since, but never again had a brandy with the 42 Fellows outside on the terrace.

But then again I would have preferred to meet Julie Christie. 

Mouse whisper

A scrap of paper plastered against my mousehole. That is the problem about my mausmeister. He is always cutting out what he considers wise sayings and leaving them on sticky pieces of paper. When I scraped the piece off my “hole way”, it read:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand or more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

Very sage advice; but I was thinking of putting in a new entrance to my mousehaus to make a closer access to the pantry. I’ll have to think about it now.

Modest Expectations – Barry Marshall & Obey

Pauline has parked her grandstand in the News Ltd car park, where she is advocating a High Court challenge to border closure. This is a normal Pauline stunt, unsurprising given that the Queensland elections are imminent -and there is nothing like a confected confrontation magnified by that shrill tone of hers.

One concession you have to give to this lady, she plays “victim” very well. One of the ploys when I used to be an official visitor to psychiatric hospitals in New South Wales was the way the inpatients could produce someone who had been “victimised” and ask me to help “save”, usually, a “her”.

My companion visitor was a wise woman, who unlike myself had long practical experience as a psychiatric nurse. She warned me not to be “sucked in’’, but listen to the complaint and investigate. However, she said – maintain rationality –don’t be get caught up emotionally as these people are very clever, since it was a practised scenario, and they try you out.

Whenever I watch Pauline, I am reminded of this advice, since whenever she is pushed into a corner the voice becomes quavery and the tears well up.

The one hand clap, Pauline.

But back to reality.

How much is this High Court challenge going to cost, Pauline? $300,00? More? For what, Pauline? A failed challenge? Of course, the victim.

However, who is going to pay? You, Pauline? No way. I’m afraid it is going to be us mug punters, of course; the real victims.

Telehealth – Look Mother! No hands

I was brought up as a medical student to believe that the essence of being a doctor was to take a full history from the patient and then to do a full examination.

That was a message. The face-to-face consultation was the basis of consultative medicine and the skill was to make the correct diagnosis – or if unsure, to provide a set of differential diagnoses based on what you had elicited as symptoms and signs of the patient’s condition.

However over the course of my medical career technology has intruded upon the “maestro” doctor able to diagnose the patient before he or she sat down. Observation to me remains a very important element as it was to Dr Arthur Conan Doyle, who invested his sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, with the same or enhanced degree of observation he had as a doctor.

The astonishing array of technology and increasing differentiation of care has been something I have witnessed through my long career. Sometimes I have watched and sometimes I have been closely involved, for example with the introduction of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) into the private sector and its recognition by Government – not always the most tranquil moment of my career.

There has always been agitation from the medical profession for reimbursement for non-face-to-face consultations. With the corporatisation of medicine, where the bottom line is everything, this agitation has not lessened. “Money for jam”, as the old saying goes, many jars of which will inevitably be transferred offshore.

Having watched telehealth progress through phone conversations to uncertain video links through to more reliable technologies such as Zoom has meant that technology has challenged traditional ways of medicine.

My only hope is that the government, which is increasingly strapped for cash, monitors it use.

I have used telehealth as a patient, and for a person with limited mobility it has been particularly beneficial. I have found that the doctors have been more punctual, but that anyway may be because of the lower volume. Telehealth acts as a screen. For the plastic surgeon, you can send a picture of the lesion, and get an opinion over the phone and in my case, yes it looked as though it needed to be removed; then a regular check up with the rheumatologist reviewing my pathology, a critical aspect in my ongoing chronic disease. More importantly in talking to my neurologist, he listened to my history, and said yes, it was important to see me, but I should have a cervical spine MRI first.

Two of the three telehealth consultations required subsequent face-to-face consultation. My general practitioners friend said that with the modern video technology, it is possible to diagnose simple conditions, such as a strained muscle, by observation and prescribe a treatment without seeing the patient in the rooms.

My appointments to see specialists could only be undertaken by face to face consultations – removal of a lesion from the face, assessment for cataract removal, neurological examination for the particular set of signs.

As someone who developed an auto-immune disease insidiously, after my diagnosis it was apparent that I needed not only a good general practitioner but also one who would provide continuity of care.

Being a doctor myself, I am in the worst category in regard to regularly seeing a doctor. I can do all that general practitioner stuff – but of course I cannot. It is impossible to have an objective view of yourself until, as I found out one night, I knew that I was dying. Hypochondria is one thing; a sense of impending death is another.

I survived the night, and because of the pain and stiffness and overall weakness, I went back to my orthopaedic surgeon whom I had consulted a dozen years earlier for my acute painful knee.

At this time, I had no regular general practitioner although most days I was surrounded by them at work. However, the orthopaedic surgeon knew what it was, but orthopaedic surgeons treat by operation and not by drugs and so he flicked me over to his trusted rheumatologist. Now rheumatologists are gentle ruminative folk, but have long lists of patients; so waiting for up to six weeks is not uncommon for an appointment.

Miraculously I saw the doctor that afternoon. He prescribed tests and drugs, but I was not to take the drugs until the test results came back.

The starting line could not have come sooner; within 24 hours after taking the first tablets, my condition improved dramatically.

Unfortunately dramatic improvement didn’t equate to immediate cure, but that’s another story.

What is interesting however, in a story about telehealth, is how do you diagnose this sort of disease. As one of my general practitioner colleagues said to me that this is a GP diagnosis – you ask: “Can you roll over in bed?”

This was very much after the fact. I had already been diagnosed and was being treated. However, I had not noticed it before; he was right, I could not roll over in bed.

Theoretically, if the doctor had been as astute as this Scot, who had seen cases before, a telehealth diagnosis might have been made.

But then again I still would have had to see him in a face-to-face consultation. Telehealth is not a panacea and I would caution government and suggest once the COVID-19 pandemic is controlled, to review its application closely, especially the biggest users and then ask why? As I know too well, governments are reluctant to wind back largesse for fear of vested interests squawking about compromising people’s health.

Telehealth is a bonanza for the corporate health business, where throughput is everything, and health care a by-product.

Nevertheless, far more insidious is the large health conglomerates where the owners are dependent on government payments to profit, inevitably providing donations to political parties to keep the tap turned on. Donations after all have a wonderful effect of assisting politicians to roll over – not necessarily in bed.

Hey, Pellegrini, whatcha doing with that test tube?

A new study shows coronavirus patients who took hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 had a higher risk of death than those who weren’t given the drug.  

The study, published Friday in the medical journal The Lancet (22 May), also found that COVID-19 patients were more likely to develop serious heart arrhythmias if treated with hydroxychloroquine, or its closely related cousin chloroquine.  

Arrhythmias can lead to a sudden cardiac death, the report said, but researchers did not associate the study’s fatalities with adverse cardiac affects. 

Even though it’s only an observational study – not the gold standard double-blind, randomized, controlled trials – experts say the enormous sample size makes it compelling.

The study comprises of 96,000 coronavirus patients from six different countries who were hospitalized between Dec. 20, 2019 and April 14, 2020. Nearly 15,000 patients were treated with hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine alone or in combination with an antibiotic.

When I heard that the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research (WEHI) were about to embark on a trial to enlist 2200 health workers into a trial to test the efficacy of the drug being a preventative agent against the virus, I checked the date. No, it was not April 1st.

Professor Marc Pellegrini is employed at the WEHI with one of those expansive titles, which suggest he is important. On television, his justification for the trial is that the drug kills the virus in the test tube. So, I might add, does bleach.

I wondered how this experiment has come about.

This modern day Lancelot has given his project a grandiose title – COVID-19 Shield. Here I wonder whether you need a diploma in public relations rather than a science degree in this modern world purporting to be medical research.

I have not the seen the protocol except it seems to be a randomised controlled trial; but one important report I would like to see is that of WEHI Ethics Committee on the proposed study and the reasons for approval.

In the latest bulletin of WEHI, there is a coy mention of this trial without naming the drug and the brief comment that it is being funded by the Australian Government. There does not seem to have been the award of a peer-reviewed grant as one would expect for such a potentially dangerous activity.

The problem for the Australian government is that there is pressure coming from the non-medically qualified – especially from such a medical expert as Clive Palmer.

In response to the above Lancet article, the WHO is reported to have put on hold the hydoxychloroquine arm of review. However, the report has all the hallmarks of the WHO walking away (or should I say “crabbing” away), without losing face.

But WEHI seems defiant. At least Professor Pellegrini is. May I suggest it is time you retire the Shield, Sir Lancelot.

Finally, as The Washington Post noted – as I have – who says Trump has been taking the drug. Has anybody seen him take it? This person who lies, lies and lies. Why would his statement of putative self-administration be any different? In any event, he now says that he has stopped taking the drug. Come on, Donald, which is the lie?

The time I under-dosed with Chloroquine (Plaquenil)

It was about 30 years ago and we went on a tour of Africa. Among measures to be taken were the mandatory yellow fever vaccination and a prophylactic antimalarial, then hydroxychloroquine, which was marketed under the name plaquenil.

It was a wide-ranging trip, which excluded South Africa, then in the grip of the apartheid Afrikaans. However, in many ways it was defining as it led to us, especially my wife, returning almost yearly to the continent.

We had previously been to North Africa – Morocco and Tunisia – but this was a month long roam through Southern and Eastern Africa. The trip incorporated the island of Madagascar, the French Département of La Réunion and then finally the Seychelles. 

We spent some time in Madagascar, both in the jungle near Antananarivo, the capital, and the island of Nosy Bé looking for lemurs and indris. After leaving there, we flew to Saint-Denis, the capital of La Réunion, where the intention was to climb La Fournaise, the volcano at the end of the island. The year previously we had reached the summit of Yasur, on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. This is one of the only active volcanoes in the world where you can stand and look down into its fiery cauldron. La Fournaise presented another opportunity to do so.

Le Piton de la Fournaise, Reunion Island

However, while having a drink at the bar of the hotel on arrival, I started to feel unwell. I went to bed, and then passed out. As described to me I began to get very hot, and my temperature was apparently swiftly rising, and as my wife said I became quickly delirious. She did not know quite what to do except keeping sponging me to try and reduce my temperature. She told me that her plan was to phone a public health physician acquaintance in Paris, in the event that I needed to be admitted to hospital because, as she said, her French wasn’t up to an emergency admission. However, about one in the morning, suddenly I was a bundle of sweat. I woke up; my temperature was dropping. My pyjamas were absolutely soaked with perspiration

How could this be; I was taking the plaquenil regularly, but then I reviewed my dosage – it was below the prophylactic dose. God knows even to this day how this happened, but it was obviously my mistake. Fortunately, my wife did not succumb. So even though I felt lousy and confused, I increased the dose to therapeutic. The worst residual symptom was a terrible headache behind the eyes. I have never had one like it before or since.

That was it, except I felt lousy for over a week, but I did not have another crisis – nor have I had a recurrence since that day.

However, I always take Malarone, the current anti-malarial drug of choice whenever there is the prospect of contact with a malaria-bearing mosquito overseas.

But back to La Réunion, we did see around the island, including the Cirques, tropical remnant of extinct volcanoes but we never did climb La Fournaise.

No, I did not have a test to confirm – not malaria – confirm my anserine status.

But at least after that experience I can swear by hydroxychloroquine – for malaria!

Just a lurk

COVID-19 causes massive inflammation boosting cytokines, which increase the liver’s production of clotting factors, explains Beverley Hunt, medical director of Thrombosis UK and a practising clinician. For example, fibrinogen levels in a severely ill COVID-19 patient are 10-14 g/L, compared with 2-4 g/L normally and 5-6 g/L in a pregnant woman. “A COVID patient’s blood is enormously sticky,” she told The BMJ.

“All patients in critical care are at increased risk from clots because they are immobile, and when you are sick you have sticky blood,” says Hunt. Studies of venous thromboembolism rates among non-COVID patients in critical care show that rates of thrombosis can be as high as 28% if patients are not given any prophylaxis. Among patients given prophylaxis the rates are halved. So, we seem to be seeing significantly higher rates of thrombosis in COVID patients. 

“Thrombosis is definitely contributing to the high mortality rate from COVID,” says Hunt. “Not only can it lead to a pulmonary embolism, which can be fatal, but there are also higher rates of strokes and heart attacks.”

In this report in the British Medical Journal, a United Kingdom medical specialist is musing on COVID-19. Now at the outset one would have thought that the only experts interested (or consulted) would be emergency physicians, anaesthetists and respiratory specialists. However, this is a doctor expert in blood clotting which has arisen as a major COVID-19 complication, especially as the amount of anti-coagulant to be given seems to be unsettled. Moreover, there there are reports of late onset deep vein thrombosis. My Swedish correspondent mentioned COVID-19 toes, which appear to be a severe form of chilblains, pointing to this being the virus being an instigator of widespread disturbance in blood clotting.

What is further intriguing and indicates the widespread effect of the virus is loss of the sense of smell as an early sign. In humans, the olfactory cell location measures 9 cm2 and lies on the roof of the nasal cavity.

With the common cold when there is swelling of the nasal epithelium non-specifically, sense of smell is impaired. However there are reports that this COVID-19 virus infiltrates the sustentacular (supporting) cells which, together with olfactory cells, constitute the pseudocolumnar epithelium underpinning the nasal cilia and microvilli. Among other functions these cells have an effect on how odours are perceived by the olfactory cranial nerve.

It was interesting looking at the histology of the nasal lining, and its complexity. The olfactory nerve and its connections are one of the most neglected areas in medicine, because the sense of smell is more related to lifestyle rather than considered a major marker of disease. However, if it is indeed an early marker of COVID-19, attention should be paid to the way the nasal swab is taken to assist early detection, especially if the olfactory area of the nose is where the virus may lurk first.  This infiltration indicates how profound this virus may be in invading the body.

This virus is not going away soon and while Australia has, up until now, done an excellent job in suppression, “lurk” is probably the most concise way to describe it.

The Hungerford Games

We camped on the Queensland side of the fence, and after tea had a yarn with an old man who was minding a mixed flock of goats and sheep; and we asked him whether he thought Queensland was better than New South Wales, or the other way about. 

He scratched the back of his head, and thought awhile, and hesitated like a stranger who is going to do you a favour at some personal inconvenience. 

At last, with the bored air of a man who has gone through the same performance too often before, he stepped deliberately up to the fence and spat over it into New South Wales. After which he got leisurely through and spat back on Queensland.

Henry Lawson wrote thus about his experiences in Hungerford in 1893, when he had walked there with his swag from Bourke. The expectorating man’s name was Clancy, that familiar ‘loveable larrikin” character alienated from officialdom. Sorry, that is my ironic interpolation, and on the contrary Henry Lawson was not impressed by him.

There was no Pauline Hanson around in those days, and anyway she would not have been able to vote or stand for any of the colonial Parliaments in Australia at that time.

The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) periodically does medical clinics in Hungerford – this population speck, which straddles the border of New South Wales. This settlement is about a three hour drive along the Dowling Track from Bourke. I have always hankered to go there since I worked with the RFDS, for no other reason that it is there and like so much of western Queensland it epitomises my image of the laconic yet irreverent stoicism of the Outback.

We have years ago thought to drive there, but there had been heavy rains and the road beyond Bourke was impassable. The road is still unmade, but even though it is not the first place one would think to cross the border, my hankering is still strong. So I thought I would find out more.

The problem is that the Royal Mail Hotel is on the Queensland side of the Queensland-New South Wales border, which is defined by the wild dog fence. There is a border gate at Hungerford.

To get more intelligence on the current situation, I rang the publican at the Hotel. The news was grim. The gate is locked; the coppers have the key and even if I could he said it would inadvisable to try and climb over the gate. Anyway we would be aliens from New South Wales – waratah cockroaches invading the land of Cooktown orchid cane toads. So we could not stay at the inn.

So Premier Palazczuk, I promise I won’t make a High Court challenge if you open the Hungerford gate and allow us to stay in the pub. I’m not sure about the High Court challenge – however I believe there is a class action being mounted by a consortium of wild dogs to remove the fence between the two States. And it is only an unsubstantiated rumour that Clive Palmer is funding their challenge.

Muri Succursus

Mus Virgilis “destillat ab inguine virus”

We mouselings, as you know, pay homage to our celestial creator, Rodentia Nora. So we have knowledge of Latin – one of the greatest bard being one Mus Virgilis.

Given how much used the word “virus” is, we had a peep at its derivation.

“Virus” is a rare second declension neuter word for “poison” or “slime” and that attracted me to see if there was a plural form, “vira”. But the word has never been found in a plural form in Latin literature. Thus “viruses” is acceptable – even though the “es” suffix is generally associated with third or fifth declension Latin words.

And certainly do not say “viri”, which is Latin for “men”.