Category: Russia

Modest Expectations – Bungsberg

Bill Belichick

Doppelgänger? How Bill Shorten may look at 71 when, under the alias of Bill Belichick, he has come to the end of his tenure as one the most successful managers in American football.  He coached the New England Patriots to six Superbowl victories. Well done Bill whoever you are!

The Rise of the Lumpenproletariat

Rick Wilson’s recent experience is reminiscent of Germany just before 1933. Hindenburg, the President, was 87 years old and soft in the head. Hitler was 43 verging on madness. Biden is 81 years old verging on something, but watch this space grow; Trump is not twice Hitler’s age, but certainly as soft in the head, having substituted speech for spewage.

As a resulting of leaking spewage, Rick Wilson, one of the architects of the anti-Trump Republican Lincoln project, has been subject to gross harassment, even a trap being set for him to be destroyed by “friendly fire”.

The related worry is the growth of the sniper culture as epitomised by the Israeli Army, where the expert sniper can target the influential without the messiness of the bomb. The rogue sniper has always existed, but the systematic endorsement by government of a sniper whose role is simply to kill the person who disagrees with you, under the cover of a manufactured war, is yet another example of the hypocrisy of those who bleat about law and order while doing the reverse.

Journalists – beware of walking through canyons of ostensibly underused buildings, which now house the consulates of diplomatic immunity with panoramic views of the city, short-term leases, and persons who are very accurate with the telescopic sight.

Rick Wilson

Now here is what Rick Wilson has related: 

As I write this email, I’m tired. Why? Well, it’s not because I ran a marathon yesterday. It’s because I woke up to a SWAT team pounding on my door at 3:00 am. 

It was alarming to say the least, but it wasn’t my first rodeo. After slipping out of the classic jump-scare panic, I knew exactly what was going on. Some MAGA terrorists had placed a fake 911 call claiming there had been a murder at my home.

The goal? Besides scaring the hell out of my family at 3:00 AM, it was to get me killed.

The terrorists set up these calls hoping that I’ll think my house is under attack and run outside with a gun just to find a SWAT team ready to shoot me dead.

I’ve been dealing with stunts like this since 2015. It’s nothing new. I know better than to roll out the door with a weapon. Besides, I could see a caravan of 10+ SWAT vehicles on the street. 

So there I was, at 3:00 am, walking onto my porch in boxers and a t-shirt with my hands in the sky (it’s not as sexy as it sounds). Once it became clear to officers that this was a swatting call, they were courteous and helpful. 

This was also not their first time responding to a swatting call at the Wilson residence. So, to the MAGA terrorists who will seemingly never stop in their quest to kill me, I’m sorry to let you down. I’m still alive. And I’m still not going to hold back in my fight against Trump. 

A Strange View of Tasmania

An American travel writer, Nora Walsh, has written an article under the rubric of Tourism:

Venture outside and help protect vulnerable species in Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state, with several new guided walks. Tasmanian Walking Company, in partnership with the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, offers a three-day trek across rugged Bruny Island to map flora and collect seeds for the garden’s seed bank.

To get a taste of the island’s Indigenous culture, join members of the local Palawa community on multiday treks through the powder white sands of Wukalina (Mount William National Park) and orange-lichen-covered rocks of Larapuna (Bay of Fires). Or to get an actual taste of the island, forage for ingredients like wattle seeds and pepperberries with guides from Palawa Kipli, a company that is Indigenous-owned and operated – the experience ends with a tasting menu that includes smoked payathanima (wallaby).

Locavore menus are the norm throughout Tasmania, and the chef Analiese Gregory, a wild-cooking expert, will be showcasing ingredients like hand-gathered abalone and sea urchin at her yet-to-be-named restaurant set to open early this year.

I was intrigued as everybody, with the inbuilt naivete that I have, when, the NYT listed Tasmania and Brisbane as preferred destinations to visit in 2024.

I am also very fortunate to have a facsimile edition of “The Aborigines of Tasmania” by H. Ling Roth, first printed in 1899.

I also know a bit about Tasmania, having a property there.

I turned to read this piece. First of all, the writer has obviously not visited Tasmania. This is becoming increasingly common where travel writers just rewrite public relations blurbs from afar. If that is what the American market wants, well this article gives it to them in spades.

Walking Bruny Island is just one of many rambles, and there is no doubt Bruny Island has its charms, but there are many others, because the Island is a walker’s paradise. Tasmania is an essence of where Nature has resuscitated itself from the 19th century European invasion.

In the course of the invasion, the Tasmanian Aborigines were exterminated. There was a European called George Robinson, who herded the remaining Aborigines onto Flinders Islands, an archipelago off the North-east coast of Tasmania on the edge of Bass Strait. Here there was a degree of miscegenation with passing American and European sealers and whalers. Hence the blue-eyed Palawa of today. The walk around the beaches of north-east Tasmania feeding on lemon myrtle, pepperberry and saltbush flavoured wallaby, of having a go at eating the oily mutton bird is just about this group trying to reconstruct what has been lost.

As for recommending a restaurant yet to open, just confirmed the pitfalls when an author writes from a distance- even if the proposed restaurant is locavore.

Palawa trail

Tanya Gentle, who actually walked the Palawa trail, and stayed in the lighthouse keeper’s quarters and drank Tasmanian wines, saw no artifacts except for what sounded like a very difficult to sustain description of a midden. Middens tend to be predominantly mussel shell dumps of Aboriginal detritus. They are not found on open beaches where the storms would have washed away any pile of detritus very quickly. Having seen middens where the predominant component is mussel shells, located beyond the highwater line, I would suggest if you wish to undertake such a confected walk, that’s fine as long as you take all the Aboriginal backgrounding with a grain of salt.

The interesting fact is that along this trail there is no mention of any Aboriginal artifacts – not even peckings which the Tasmanian aborigines carved to indicate some site with special significance.

Maireener shells

The maireener, commonly known as the rainbow kelp shell, was originally the only shell traditionally used to thread into necklaces. Yet there is no mention in the article of the unique marieener necklaces, the shells with their iridescence displayed by the laborious scaping of the shell covering.

The manufacture of these shell necklaces is unique to the Flinders Island, the seat of the Palawa people. Why no mention? The walk is probably a male interpretation of the Palawa culture. Women make the necklaces, of which my wife and I have two as treasured possessions.

And for food, I would suggest the Aboriginals rebuilding their culture turn to page reference 95ff of “The Aborigines of Tasmania”. Unfortunately there is not a mention of saltbush, pepperberry or lemon myrtle in the cooking in this history – but many other greens, tubers and seaweed are mentioned, as well as edible fungi as part of the food cooked or eaten raw.

Finally, the oysters. Were these wild oysters carved off the rocks by the Aboriginal guides, or purchased from a nearby commercial oyster farm? Tasmanian oysters, essentially Pacific oysters, are as good as found elsewhere. Australians in general are spoiled by the variety of oysters, so long as they can afford them. In the Ling book, crawfish, oysters, mussels and crabs are mentioned as part of the diet. The Tasmania Aborigines did not fish.

As for wallaby, it can be bought in the Tasmanian supermarkets.

This article is a distortion for any reason to visit Tasmania. Not that I have any quarrel with the description of the scenery, which like so much of Tasmania is amazing in its diversity. As for the restored Aboriginal culture, do a bit more work, Puganna or are you, Weiba.

In the next blog, I’ll write of why I love Tasmania, even though I am a Mainlander by birth.

By the way, I think I will miss the Brisbane piece extolling it as one of the other NYT most favoured destinations for 2024. I’m sure it is as persuasive as this one above is about trudging the beaches of remote Tasmania.

Moscow Nights

This intriguing article, which I have partially reprinted from The Economist was written by Kate de Pury, a journalist who lives in Moscow and who has reported on Russia for thirty years.

What I find interesting is her description of the playgrounds of the Russian rich that are not being disturbed by modern warfare. Russia is allowed to devastate Ukraine while those ostensibly NATO Ukrainian supporters have intervened; but not to the extent that would disturb the caviar and champagne set’s lifestyle.

There is thus no such entity as total war if you are the powerful invaders and can bomb and destroy with impunity. There may be food and utility shortages to be borne by the ordinary Russian citizens, but the wealthy and well-connected and those that service their needs remain largely unaffected. That is the message which emanates from the Pury article. War can be waged so long as it does not materially affect the ruling class. Yes, inconvenience can be borne, but these days can one not ski in Dubai?

After all, supporting Ukraine does have limits.  One cannot have any ripples in the eggnog.

“They know they won’t be allowed back to the French Alps for 25 years. Until then they can go to Dubai or party here – it’s pretty wild.”

Winter in Moscow is a time for parties. A friend told me recently about a particularly lavish one he went to in a nightclub. DJs played hypnotic psychedelic trance, champagne flowed and red lights strobed across the heaving dancefloor. Nearly two years into the war in Ukraine, Muscovites seem to be recovering their capacity for hedonism.

As Russia enters 2024, and the campaign for President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable re-election heats up, the regime is keen to tell a good story about the country’s ability to withstand the war. It can muster a surprising amount of evidence to support this case.

Through such elaborate manoeuvres, Moscow elites have succeeded in keeping life reasonably comfortable for themselves. Not long ago I went to a party in a penthouse. It was a picture-postcard Russian scene: a blizzard swirled outside huge windows and Prokofiev swelled through the speakers. The guests sipped French and Italian wine, filling their plates with Russian caviar from the buffet.

The atmosphere among this posh group could be characterised as patriotic-lite. Some of them were old enough to remember Soviet times and instinctively avoided any talk of politics. Those who didn’t used a tacit code. They wouldn’t criticise the government but, unlike some of the crowd in the nightclubs, they didn’t speak in jingoistic slogans either. No one mentioned the war, though it was implicit every time one of them referred to the arduous flight connections they have to make these days to visit grown-up children in Italy and Britain.

This is a constituency Putin has to keep on side for the long haul, and not all of the guests were happy with his vision of Russia’s future. “I am trying to decide if my kids will be educated in the UK or the US,” said one executive. “It definitely won’t be China or Russia.”

Parrots

Australia has fifty-five species of parrot. My grandfather for a time had a farm at King Parrot Creek in Victoria until he was “eaten out by rabbits”. The King Parrot is nevertheless a very pensive parrot – green wings and red face and belly – not as common as it once was.

The rainbow lorikeet is a brightly coloured chatterer that has found city living very congenial, and they are where the trees provide suitable food. They are known to push other birds off the balconies where food for birds has been placed. Therefore, a glimpse of parrots is not uncommon for any Australian, living anywhere on the continent.  These lorikeets were introduced into New Zealand and have threatened to become an exotic species which has got out of control and thus has needed to be managed.

Kakapo

There are supposed to be eight species of native parrots in New Zealand, one of which is the grass parrot, the kakapo is my wife’s favourite parrot, and also once a favourite item on the rat menu. She is unlikely to see any of the 200 kakapos which are now nurtured on a rat-free island off New Zealand. The parrot that I have actually seen in NZ mountainous regions is the kea, more a raptor than a conventional parrot.

Back in Australia, in rural areas there are the grey wing, pink belly galahs, the sulphur crested cockatoos (parrots with a quiff) and the pink-eyed corellas all snacking on seeds of all varieties, the scourge of farmers who have just planted their crop.

Closing in on the deserts are the Major Mitchell cockatoos, crested red flecked argumentative additions on a land where saltbush dots the red and ochre landscape of Sturt’s Desert Varnish.

Then, going into the desert and especially after it has just rained, there are the flocks of budgerigars. As they exist in vast numbers in captivity, most people do not realise they are birds of the outback, beyond the proverbial Black Stump.

Then in the morning in the Tasmania forests, in the early morning, there are the distinctive cries of the yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and the sight of these large birds framed against the sky is a wonderful waking experience for me.

There are others, which I could describe, all magnificent in their own right.

Nevertheless, my favourite parrot is the macaw, a bird of the Americas. The experience of standing under palms in Costa Rica with a flock of scarlet macaws bombarding us with half eaten nuts is not forgotten.

Such was the level of falling missiles a discreet withdrawal was required to a place where one could observe these birds feeding without danger of being hit on the head. The birds hold the nut in their claw and break it open with their formidably curved beaks.

I have read that parrots have an upside-down sense of taste, which is one of their fascinating characteristics. Although they have taste glands at the back of their necks, the bulk of their taste buds are on the roof of their mouths.

Macaws are a bird too often kept in captivity. There is a picture of a blue-yellow macaw perched on my shoulder attacking my glasses. Such birds are used by an itinerant gypsy, in this case not unsurprisingly a guy dressed as a pirate complete with bandana and gold earring. This happened in Dubrovnik, and I forget how much was paid by my companion for me to be so immortalised.

But it was the flock of macaws high in the tropical canopy of Costa Rica that did it for me.

Need I say anything? Apart from Disgusting

Data collected by government contract analysts Tussell shows 197 public sector contracts have been awarded to Fujitsu since 2012, and it is hard to find an arm of the British state in which it is not involved: the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, HM Revenue & Customs, Transport for London, HS2, Scottish Water, Thames Valley Police, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Land Registry, NHS England, local authorities across the country – the list goes on and on. The Conservatives, for all their talk of a small state, have overseen a historic increase in spending on private companies, from £64bn in 2010 to £222bn last year.

From the New Statesman.

 It was Fujitsu which created the defective computer program that saw the prosecution of more than 900 workers falsely accused of stealing money from post offices. This disgraceful episode which has resulted in legislation being brought in by the UK Parliament to overturn the convictions, was brought to light by a TV program, not government investigation.

Simon Blagden, who is a prominent Tory donor and former director of Fujitsu was appointed chair of the Government agency for delivering the government’s broadband rollout in 2022.

His generous contributions to the Tory party included a £350 hamper to Boris Johnson. He was non-executive director at Fujitsu UK during the evolution of the scandal. He should exchange notes with our fiasco of Ministers Morrison, Payne, Turnbull, Robert and Tudge who concocted and implemented the robo-debt scheme to see how he has emerged seemingly in a pristine toga while these others skulk awaiting appropriate retribution.

Come to think of it, why is Blagden still a commoner? He has certainly contributed enough to be a peer.

Mouse Whisper

Giovani Botero, the 16th century Savoyard Savant, wrote:

The Prince not only lays his hands on the people and draws blood from them… having drawn their blood with taxes he destroys their spirit by taking from them every chance of profit which might enable them to pay their taxes.

This quote from Botero’s major work (The Reason for the State) in which he disputes the Machiavellian description of the Prince was on the white board in the Boss’s office for years. Sounds that he was a bit of a Bolshie. Botero that is.

Modest Expectations – San Xavier del Bac

We spent three days talking about the language of the NATO communique. I couldn’t think of something less consequential to the result of the counteroffensive — and the most important goal: winning the war. Josh Rogin, Washington Post

The charade in Lithuania has come to an end.  NATO met and decided to let the Ukrainians continue to take the brunt of Putin’s madness.

The American playbook is that of before. Let the Russians exhaust themselves against an American surrogate foe that, once balanced and fed sufficient arms, will never surrender their homeland. An independent Ukrainian homeland was once a fiction, just as under the reign of Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus is once again a satrap of Russia. But not Ukraine.

The inconvenient fact that the Ukrainians must face is that Crimea was handed over to the Ukrainian SSR in a fit of pique by Khrushchev.  Then it did not matter. Russia had absorbed the Ukraine in the early nineteenth century, and Crimea was very Russian, especially given what Stalin had done to the Crimean Tatars and other minorities.

The three Baltic states, even though they have been squeezed into NATO, continue to be nervous. In the case of the Estonian Boot, a road connecting two parts of Estonia goes through Russia, and there have been strict rules for Estonian usage, which could be revoked.

South is Latvia, where a significant part of the population is Russian speaking; when I visited four years ago, our driver was particularly stressed when I asked him to stop so we could photograph the Russian embassy.

The third Baltic country is Lithuania. As we were sitting out in the sun in Vilnius having coffee, the Lithuanian High Command cars parked in front of us and drifted into our hotel for a meeting. At that time coincidentally, Belarus had loosened requirements for flights into Minsk. The land border between Lithuania and Belarus was still a pain in the backside, restricting the crossings in true Russian bureaucratic tradition, but accessible. No longer.

Danzig
Memel

One of the problems with this part of the world is the constant presence of socio-geographical anomalies. After the Treaty of Versailles, it was the Polish Corridor, and the free port of Danzig. Then there was the sliver of land called Memel, between Lithuania and East Prussia. All of these added to the combustible nature of the region between the two World Wars.

Kaliningrad, once the Eastern Prussian city of Königsberg, remains. It is an exclave of Russia, where it stores its Baltic fleet during winter and which bristles with all the hacking devices that Putin can stuff into this former part of East Prussia. NATO could occupy it tomorrow, but the nuclear threats from Putin inspire fear among all the NATO crowd not to do so.

It is fascinating to watch this assortment of European governments, always under the American flag, (or in the case of Korea the UN) willing to pick a fight with the brown and yellow – first Korea, then Vietnam and finally Iraq and Afghanistan. Australian governments like the faithful drover’s dog keeps running alongside the Americans wanting to be rewarded for our faithfulness. It’s a form of “look at me”, and then we participate in Wars that the Americans do not win.

With one exception, in which Australia did not participate, and that was the “shadow” war that drove the Russians from Afghanistan – at a cost. America provided sufficient weaponry and logistic advice for it to be used against them when the Taliban shifted from being ally to enemy.

Now it is clear that Zelensky was not expected to be the strong man that he has become, given his various predecessors’ weakness in being susceptible to Russian interference. The pathetic responses of some of the NATO members saying that the Ukranians should be more grateful. For what? Hissy fits do not help – just shows a whiny weakness.

I believe NATO should be thankful for Zelensky because it is the ultimate ceasefire, if not peace, which will need a strong and canny leader. Ukraine will be in ruins and much of its youth dead or maimed. Whether the outcome will advantage Ukraine and move the Russians back beyond the borders will be difficult, given the rules of the game, devised probably by “those smart ugly Americans”, whose simulacra lost the Vietnam War.

Zelensky will keep requesting the weapons to defeat the Russians or to forge a stalemate. There is no doubt as to that because he has not been given the aircraft he needs to challenge the air superiority afforded to the Russians. Drones are cheap, and increasingly sophisticated in avoiding detection and killing people. What must be most galling for Zelensky is the attempts to make him a puppet, to do what the ossified brains want, these bureaucracies like NATO, where the original intent had been lost in a whirl of paper and high living by “the braided bunch”.

War was the last thing NATO want or expected, because the threat of a nuclear holocaust was sufficient deterrent for the Cold War to be anything but a giant charade. So they thought.  Unfortunately, Putin came along, with all the mythology which seems to be entwined in Russian Orthodoxy with delusions of Peter the Great. This is Putin the Great – and greatness comes out of conquest.

The commentator in The Washington Post makes prophetic sense in attempting to define the end game

That line is going to have to be on Ukraine’s 1991 internationally recognized borders. I don’t think anything short of that is going to be sustainable in the long term. Although I would put an asterisk on Crimea. I think that there is a potential for a deal on Crimea if the Ukrainians can take back Donbas and the rest of the Russian-occupied territory. They could say, “We’re not going to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, but we’re going to live with it for now.”

A solution canvassed is the so-called armistice arrangement as pertains to North and South Korea with the line drawn at the 38th parallel. Given that it is almost seventy years since these arrangements were set in place, a line drawn across Crimea delineating Russia territory from Ukraine may provide a solution. The Dnipro River may have been such a line, but the Ukrainians have allegedly crossed it, even though the Kharkova dam destruction must have altered the geography to some extent, probably enough to encourage the generals to draw new lines.

Aftermath of the destruction of Kharkova Dam

Peace will inevitably come in some form or another, but for Zelensky this will pose problems. Here I assume he will be still in charge of the country, when that time comes, and assuming the Americans continue to provide enough resources to prevent any successful Russian counterattack. However, wartime leaders in democracies have a tendency to be voted out at the end of hostilities – and unless Zelensky is superhuman, the adrenalin will drain away – and he will be looking for a place to sleep. Yet I admit my comment is totally speculative, like backing a nag in a horse race. Even worse – not knowing the odds.

There will be at least two major challenges to win the peace before the bureaucracy proceeds quickly enough for Ukraine to be incorporated into NATO.

The first is to make the fertile plains, where the war has been waged in Eastern Ukraine, safe. Russia and Ukraine contribute over 25 per cent of the world wheat exports, the largest amount shipped by Russia. Ukraine contributes seven per cent, a greater amount than Australia exports. One notable fact is that in 2001, Russian export of wheat was one per cent of world exports. In the intervening period, Russian exports have risen to provide a critical amount of an essential part of food security. The Ukraine contribution is also significant.

Therefore, there awaits a huge potential cost of removal of mines and unexploded bombs, which will be made worse if cluster bombing is introduced. Talk about Killing Plains!

Another problem for Zelensky is to rid the country of the endemic corruption, which slinks just below the surface. As reported the Ukrainian oligarchs are sitting out the War in places like Monaco, plotting and planning how to exploit the chaos of a truce, armistice, surrender, whatever. Hopefully, Zelensky has their measure.

Overall, Ukraine will need a Marshall Plan assistance, not only to restore the damage, but also to ensure the Ukrainian identity and cultural independence, which the War has shown are so important. As one example, whether the Ukrainians dump the Cyrillic script, as some other Slavonic countries have done, would be one consideration for the Ukrainians to emphasise their difference from Russia. Then there is the whole debate about religious differences.

Also, there is a need to assure stability in the nuclear energy industry. The War has shown how vulnerable these facilities are, and how madmen try to insert them as pieces on the Wargame Board. Chernobyl lies within Ukraine, testimony to nuclear disaster turning the power station into a concrete bunker surrounded by a wasteland, a scenario in full sight. Thus, given the Chernobyl experience, it makes sense for nuclear facilities to be supervised by an international organisation especially in the case of the Zaporizhzhia power plant, currently under Russian control and ten times bigger than Chernobyl.

I am sure that Zelensky views the whole mess into which his country has been placed with the satirical edge of the comedian.  Maybe his insights into the frailties of the human condition will be just the quality needed to survive the peace.

Unless Trump is again unleashed on the World in 2025.

Does a Stone Skip or Bounce?

In an article in a 2002 issue of the New Scientist there is an analysis of stone skimming. Here, this pastime of stone skimming has been reduced to a mathematical formula. At that time the world record for stone skimming was 38 skips on the Texan Blanco River by one Jordane Coleman McGhee. Since then, in 2013, Kurt Steiner set the Guinness World Record for “most consecutive skips of a stone” with 88 skips. The record was achieved at Red Bridge, near Kane, Pennsylvania. For someone such as myself, who reckons five skips is not bad, what a difference!

A French physicist, Lydéric Bocquet, was intrigued with the physics of this phenomenon while watching his son. So as the article said, “he tinkered with some simple equations describing a stone bouncing on water in terms of radius, speed and spin and taking account of gravity and water drag.”

It was unsurprising that theoretically the faster the spinning stone, the more it will bounce. Maintaining the spin prevents the stone from tipping over into the water. He then took the current world record at that time and he predicted the stone would be travelling at 40 km/hr and spinning at 14 rotations per second.

The current world champion, Kurt Steiner, has relied on empiricism and, believe it or not, he has collected more than 10,000 “quality rocks” and has sorted each according to its type, to prepare for the best possible throw. He looks for stones “that weigh between 85 and 230 gm, are very smooth (they don’t have to be perfectly round), flat bottoms and are between 6-8 mms in thickness.” It sounds as if he does not have much of a life in Kane, which is a small township in northern Pennsylvania. But what wrist strength this guy must have as compensation.

Bocquet added that he was just re-discovering a piece of history. Barnes Wallis must have done the same sort of mathematics and experiments when designing the “bouncing bomb” for the Dambusters squadron during World War II. 

Culinary Dystopia

In the wonderful quest for new experiences, I have three where this initial experience, if not completely horrendous, verged on gustatory nightmare.

I was reminded of the first by this long article in The Guardian about borscht. I advisedly spell it the Yiddish way because it was presented to us one Friday night at Shabbat. As I understand it, heating the food for Shabbat is not done, so when we sat down we were presented with this blood red beetroot cold soup. For those of us not used to such soup, including myself, I felt as I sipped it, my stomach immediately rejecting it and that going down was met by that coming up. I was not alone. There is no etiquette for vomiting at the dinner table, especially when presented with a signature dish. There was a certain embarrassment, but the gefilte fish attracted more positive comments. I must say that I have eaten borscht since, but always warm – not that I have a phobia about cold soup. Iced gazpacho on a hot day is a magnificent culinary antidote on such a day.

The second disastrous introduction was to the avocado. One night, we had been invited to a dinner party. It was sometime in the early 1960s. The hostess produced this unfamiliar green fruit, which vaguely resembled a pebbled-skin pear. However, nobody had told her that they had to be ripe to eat. Hence, we struggled with the yellowish flesh surrounding the central seed. Unripe avocado flesh, as we found out, was like concrete, and after hacking pieces of this flesh, it proved completely inedible. Nobody had thought to read anything about the fact that avocados had to ripen – and as we were already well lubricated, the avocados were swiftly destined for the rubbish bin.

Several years passed before the avocado was revisited. The first avocados attacked were probably Haas, but the one I purchased from a barrow in central Sydney changed my whole notion of avocado. It was a smooth skinned variety, plump rather than lean like the Haas. Its flesh was ripe, closer to orange than yellow. It was the best avocado I have ever eaten, but I’ve never seen another one like it again, presumably because this variety ripens too quickly or lacks the commercial resilience of the Haas variety, which seems to dominate the avocados on sale.

With familiarity comes the elegance of shoving the unripe avocado into a brown paper bag with a banana, the ethylene emitted from it accelerating the avocado ripening.

The third disastrous introduction was to the persimmon. There are two varieties of persimmon – those that are astringent when not perfectly ripe and those which are not. This time the particular hostess proudly presented us with persimmons as a treat at the end of the meal. Unfortunately, they were the astringent types, and I referred to my mouth after eating a sliver as being like having an Axminster carpet lining my mouth, so great was the astringency.

Nothing since has created this buccal environment to such an extent. Since then, most persimmons on sale have been of the non-astringent variety, until last week when the Chinese greengrocer chuckled his warning that my wife had purchased the “old ones”. We immediately knew what he meant, and let the persimmon ripen until it was so ripe as to be soggy. Persimmons in this state are very pleasant, but best eaten over the sink.

In the end, it demonstrates the adage, you live and learn – so long as the offering is not poisonous rather than just inedible. One wonders with so much cooking material published across all forms of media, that the ignorance we showed then would occur to-day.

Just One Invasion Day 

It has become fashionable among some of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters to classify us whitefellas as invaders. But we are an essentially homogeneous “mob” of colonisers – the only invaders who stayed. We are British with a Celtic spine.  Australia had just one single coloniser, despite being originally known as New Holland and the name of the Island to the South, Tasmania.

Explorers from other European countries came, saw the Australian coastline and did not remain. The colonisation of Australia was neither Africa nor Asia or for that matter the Americas. It was essentially monochromatic – British imperial red.  We Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent did not have to either fight other colonial powers or buy part of the Continent from another European coloniser.

Too hostile an environment …

It is ironic that Australia, now a popular tourist destination with magnificent beaches, was rejected by these early European explorers who saw it as too hostile an environment to colonise.

I would have said that the Aboriginals just invaded some time before when land bridges made movement easier. It is interesting that the original mob came without animals, in particular they lacked horses – and also the wheel.

The dingo was brought by the Macassar traders about 4,000 years ago. The trade between these Sulawesans and the local Aboriginals in sea cucumber existed until the early years of 20th century.  They came down to fish but not to stay, taking their catch back when the winds changed and blew them back home where they sold the dried sea cucumber product to the Chinese.

Yet the Torres Strait Islanders are a potpourri of Melanesians and Polynesians admixed with Aboriginal people. I have witnessed the discrimination of Horn Aboriginal islanders by their Torres Strait Islander neighbours even though they all have been recognised as part of the Australian indigenes. Yet the Torres Strait Islanders have never moved southwards to settle on Cape York Peninsula nor the islands in the Gulf.Luis Torres, himself was a Portuguese in command of a Spanish ship, sailed through the eponymous Strait in 1606, without stopping (that we know of), on his way to Espiritu Santo in what is now Vanuatu.

However, in all the Voice debate, it is to a heterogeneous world of multiple Aboriginal mobs who, in the long term, only needed to deal with one European power – us British with Celtic overlay, who have facilitated a debate about the Voice rather than a conglomerate of the Voix, Stem, Rолос or Voz. Imagine getting a world of multiple colonisers to agree on what it means – would the Aboriginals thus be so lucky as to have to deal with only one set of “invaders”.

Ourselves to Know

“Then I won’t pursue the subject, but you believe that a painter is restricted by three dimensions? Those of his canvas and the third one, imaginary, his fear of his mediocrity?”

“I didn’t say mediocrity! A man can be first-rate and still have that fear. Oh, indeed! The great ones have it earlier and later than the fourth-raters, they always have it. Their greatness is in going on and on until they know they’ve gone as far as they can, then they still go on doing their best work, sometimes for a year, sometimes for ten years. Then, if they’re lucky, they die. If they’re easily frightened, they kill themselves while they’re still able to do their best work, with some left undone.”

“Would you ever commit suicide?”

“How could I? I don’t care that much about anything. And I’ve protected myself by engaging in a large assortment of activities, so that if one thing ceases to interest me, I have others that will.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you care very deeply about some things.” 

“Then that’s the most intelligent observation you’ve ever made about me,” said Chester Calthorp. “I care greatly about a great many things. Have you always known that?” 

“I guess so.” 

John O’Hara

John O’Hara is now not the most fashionable of American novelists. He wrote “Ourselves to Know” which was first published in 1960, to much acclaim. The dust jacket echoed this regard when there was written about this book: “… at the height of his powers John O’Hara has produced a masterly study of a man and his destiny.”

This above exchange is between two young men when they were in Paris – Robert Millhouser (later convicted of uxoricide as the book tells us) and Chester Calthorp (who is revealed as homosexual), both affluent. What seems weird to me is how much I understand what this exchange is about while not knowing whether my interpretation has coincided with the author’s intent.

Most of us are pedestrian but we struggle under the delusion we can do or become better. Some do claw their way to the top of whatever pile they have seen from the valley of ambition and want to scale. Then, wherever one is on the slope, there is always the doubt, the failure, the suicide of compensation. To guard against that we should diversify our ambition in order to combat obsession with just one goal, but only if one has the capacity to care, which O’Hara writes lifts one to a higher plane. Metaphorically, look around and see if you are alone. If so, then you will never have the capacity to care.

This is my interpretation, and I wish I could express it as well as O’Hara. But at least I recognised something which is embedded deeply in my psyche. After all, the novel is long, and I am not the type of person who reads every word. But this passage has stuck in my mind.

Mouse Whisper

John O’Hara wrote the book for the musical Pal Joey, which was set to music by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart. The book came from a series of short stories in New Yorker about a con man and night club performer, Joey Evans.

The lead role in this 1940 musical first performed at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York was Gene Kelly, then little known.

To say it received “mixed” reviews would be somewhat kind. But probably one of the most famous quotes came from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times: “Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”

Modest Expectations – 530 miles and What do you Get?

Good Friday is the day of the year when my belief overrides my scientific logic and training.

An Abbey Homage

William Butler Yeats died in 1939, 337 days before I was born. I have had a contemplative regard for Yeats, who interpreted the magic of Ireland, to which only those with Irish heritage can relate. I recently acquired a commemoration number of The Arrow which was published in the Summer of that year, with a price of one shilling (in today’s terms approximately £2.60). It was the occasional publication of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and “occasional” was the watchword. The last Arrow had been published 30 years earlier. So Irish, but explicable in that Yeats had edited all five of them.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

Yeats was the last surviving founder of The Abbey Theatre, which he had set up with Edward Martyn and Augusta, Lady Gregory (she was referred to as the greatest Irish woman of letters) in 1904. Married to an Anglo-Irish baronet, Lady Gregory’s home, Coole Park in Co Galway, gave its name to this nest of Irish nationalism and advocacy of the Irish language and folklore. Edward Martyn was the fervent President of Sein Fein, but neither Lady Gregory nor Yeats was Roman Catholic.

This slim panegyric is beautifully written by 12 contributors. There are illustrations by five artists including Yeats’ younger brother, Jack Butler Yeats (Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland’s first medallist at the Olympic Games in the wake of the creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats’ painting The Liffey Swim won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming). There is a facsimile scrawl of a Yeats letter, which one needs an expert to decipher. Among the advertisements in the publication there is one for “the collected and definitive edition of the works of W.B. Yeats – the Coole Edition priced at sixteen guineas (now £1,350) in eleven volumes”.

Each of the writers deserves a separate section of my blog to themselves and some of the language used to praise Yeats would seem somewhat out of place in today’s world. I will restrict myself to a quote from Oliver Gogarty, the Irish doctor, writer, bon vivant who was Joyce’s model for Buck Mulligan. He wrote about Yeats: “I thought of his ancestry from Cornwall where the names Yeats, Gates and Keats are originally one and where there is Phoenician blood with all the magic of the men who brought strange knowledge from the bright strand of the East to the Shadowy Waters of the far West – men who gave Merlin to King Mark and Yeats to humanity.

Such imagery.

Maud Gonne

On a rainy miserable day I visited Yeats’ grave in St Columba’s graveyard in Drumcliffe in Co Sligo. Unfortunately he was initially buried in France and was not reinterred until 1948. The problem was that in the intervening period the French cemetery was dug up and the bones jumbled, so at best a Hybrid Yeats lies there. But his wife, George, resides alongside him.  She was the woman he married when he was 52 and she 25. She was a remarkable counterpoint to match the Yeats’ genius and assisted him to get over his lifelong unrequited passion for the fiery Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne.

WB and George Yeats

Together, George and the Hybrid Yeats lie:

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,   

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago; a church stands near,

By the road an ancient Cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase,   

On limestone quarried near the spot   

By his command these words are cut:

 

Cast a cold eye   

             On life, on death.   

               Horseman, pass by!

        

And now I have read this remarkable issue of The Arrow, where the horseman can dismount and pause for a moment. In so many ways, Yeats was the Voice. 

Clearer Yet One Day Shall Ring The Song Our Land Shall Sing

Vlinoe Hakkila, Speaker of the Diet, broadcast the proclamation in the name of the government and said that “we believe the civilized world … will not leave us to fight alone against an enemy more numerous than ourselves.”

“To all the peoples of the world!” said Mr Hakkila. “The Finnish people, who always have tried to work with all other nations, have founded their future on their peaceful work. Today they are the victims of brutal aggression from their eastern neighbour without having given any cause for this aggression. 

“We have no choice. This struggle has been forced upon us. The people of Finland fight for their independence, their freedom and their homes. We are defending our fatherland, our democratic regime, our religion, our homes and all that civilized peoples hold sacred.

“So far we are fighting alone against an enemy that threatens to invade our soil, although it is in reality a struggle for all that humanity holds most precious.

“We have given proof that we wanted to do all we could in this struggle, but we believe the civilized world, which has given us testimony of its great sympathy, will not leave us to fight alone against an enemy more numerous than ourselves.”

The New York Times provides what it describes as a Time Machine whereby you can tap into any day and find what was reported on the particular day, and this occasion “the tap” was the date of my birth on eleventh day December 1939 when the conflict between Finland and Russia attracted the front page headlines. Later that article mentions that General Mannerheim, who had defeated the “Bolseviki” in 1918, was assuming command of the forces. Eventually, the Russians defeated the Finns and, in two land grabs, took substantial parts of Finland into the Soviet Union including the second largest city, Vyborg. The problem the Finns had at that time was allying to Nazi Germany, and certainly General Mannerheim fostered that link. In fact, at the end of WWI, the Finns had endeavoured to strike a separate treaty with Germany well before the Armistice.

Now the situation is very different. For a period in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Finns and the Russians lived in a symbiotic relationship. Finland had been ceded to Russia from Sweden in 1809, due to the Russians victory in its war with Sweden. Nevertheless, there remains within Finland a large number of Finns with Swedish heritage. The Grand Duchy of Finland was created under the rule of the Russian tsars, but with the advent of the Communist takeover of Russia, Finland in the ensuring chaos declared independence in 1917, a year before the Mannerhein-led victory mentioned above.  Its independence was confirmed under the Treaty of Versailles.

The Mannerheim Line was built from 1931 onwards as the Finnish defence on the Karelian isthmus facing what was then the Russian city of Leningrad. This was the obstacle the Russians had to overcome when the war broke out on 30 November 1939. The NYT headlines reflected the sparring phase. Because Finland was perceived to be close to Germany, they ultimately received no support from the Western allies, so that the Russians were eventually able to win. Once the Russians brought in heavy artillery that was that; the early superiority of the Finnish infantry, especially in the snow, was neutralised.

In visiting St Petersburg (reverting from Leningrad), one realises just how close the Finnish border is. Nevertheless, even though we were on the Finnish train, crossing the border from Finland into Russia, as we did in more friendly times, it still meant we had to endure the Russian border police with their Siberian smiles.

Finnish Russian border

Times are different in 2023. Finland has completely abandoned the neutrality status that it took as part of the price it paid after its defeat in order to maintain its independence, albeit presiding over a depleted territory. The Finnish/Russian border is now closed. The Russians now have a 1,340 km hostile border with this newest member of NATO. Before Putin’s bellicosity became the driving Russian force, I knew a public health specialist who was undertaking population health research in Karelia, a region which embraces both countries. She was able to freely cross the border to undertake her research project. But now? I suspect the snowshoe is on a different foot. Or more colloquially: a strong will takes you through the grey stone – Luja tahto vie läpi harmaan kiven.  One Voice of Finland!

Galarrwuy Yunupingu

In 1988, the Australian Institute of Political Science held a dinner to celebrate the Bicentenary of Arthur Philip’s landing in Sydney Harbour to commence the colonisation of Australia as one of the red daubs painted on the map of the world. The British were voracious colonisers. Australia Day has not always been celebrated on 26 January. It was first celebrated on 30 July in 1915 and it wasn’t until 1935 that all Australian states and territories used the name “Australia Day” to mark 26 January. It was in 1994 that 26 January became a national public holiday.

The problem with a national day, and we ensured that the Dinner was not on any particular day connected with vicarious symbolism, is that it has been really settlement day, and that of NSW. After all, the Constitution acknowledges that Australia is a Federation, and each of the States has its own unique settlement day. This is what separates our acknowledgement of the Day from that of India, whose Republic Day falls on January 26 also. It was the day in 1947 when the Indian Republic was proclaimed – our nominal birth as the Australian Federation occurred on 1 January 1901. That is an inconvenient date for celebration as it would be overwhelmed by the New Year festivities, unless stage managed – with the probability that would be perceived as “faking it”. After all, the day of Federation is depicted as a starch-ridden affair with a British monarch-in-waiting as the centrepiece of a ghostly diorama of elderly men in frock coats. Hardly the image that would grab the future nation – the spectacle with loosened apron strings but still in the downstairs scullery of the British Empire. Hence January 26 is what was determined as National Day, and 1988, the Bicentennial Year. There was yet for us to feel the fevered crescendo of that date be renamed Invasion Day.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu

Hence, when the Australian Institute of Political Science determined to celebrate the Bicentenary with a dinner at the University of Sydney, it needed to have distinguished speakers who reflected our heritage. One was the then Governor-General, Ninian Stephens and the other Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who turned up in a not-to-be-forgotten powder blue suit. He was still a young man. He had the charisma; he said little but gave a powerful speech. Galarrwuy was not one for small talk.

Gondwanaland, then at the height of their fame, provided the music, and my lasting memory of Galarrwuy was he “jamming” on the didgeridoo with Charlie McMahon.  Charlie had founded the band seven years earlier.  Later in the year, as recounted elsewhere,  Gondwanaland performed at the Tomita Sound Cloud in Sydney – Hymn to Mankind, a AUD$3 million light and sound opera spectacular held on Sydney Harbour as part of the Australian Bicentennial celebrations. The concert attracted an audience of over 120,000, then an Australian record for a live music event. Recently there have been media reports about the remarkable Charlie McMahon, especially in relation to the emergence of the Pintupi nine; his exploits have been reported in my early blogs.

I never met Galarrwuy again, and during my rural travels, I have only once visited Arnhem Land, apart from my visit with Bill Snedden to Kakadu in 1973. I’ve never been to the Garma Festival. When I was undertaking my Rural Stocktake in 1999, that was the first year of Garma and has been described as being no more than a barbecue for the local mob. It has grown from that time.  Galarrwuy was smart – he was able to extract money from Rio Tinto, which he was able to distribute to his talented extended family. Eventually he succumbed to that array of diseases to which Aboriginal people are prone. He received, as with Charlie Perkins, a kidney transplant. Even when it was evident that he had multiple co-morbidities and was increasingly succumbing to them, he never lost his relevance and ruled with majesty, which entailed Australians from the Prime Minister down to show homage to him. They came to him; not him to them. Maybe that is the Voice – an Aboriginal monarch.

A Cough or a Voice?

As I listened to the Prime Minister, with his trademark snarl, in defending the Voice against the Dutton-Ley decision I wondered how many Australians have read the Uluru – Statement from the Heart. I assume this statement may be considered as Day One of the progression towards the referendum to give recognition to the Aboriginal people in the Constitution. It was a ceremonial clearing of the Throat. Having read it, and wondering how many others have read it, it is a most underwhelming document. The only substantive objective I gleaned to begin to understand the motivation is the following with one assumption crashing against the next:

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.  

To me, if you strip away the reasons and do not succumb to the blame games, and the background theme that “it’s everybody else’s fault”, it seems that too many whitefellas have not paid much attention and have not understood how to communicate meaningfully with Aboriginal people. Therefore, they (both whitefella and blackfella) become swept up in the slogans, without considering how to set priorities which the previous and ongoing funding has failed to deliver.

I have always marvelled at the fact that, for such a long period, Aboriginal people divided into its various mobs have roamed this continent, for so long mostly undisturbed, although there is no doubt that there have been periodic incursions.

Trading with the macassars

There were Macassars from Sulawesi in search of trepang and sea cucumbers in the waters to the north of Australia. Then there is the presence of Machado Joseph disease in Aboriginal people on Groote Eylandt off Northern Australia. This is a neurodegenerative disease which originated in the Azores and has a Portuguese genetic signature.

While Dutch ships were wrecked on the Western Australian coast, with the Batavia attracting the most attention, I believe the fate of the survivors of the Zuytdorp, presumably destined to live with Aboriginal people, must have left some genetic imprint. None of the Zuytdorp complement survived to return to Batavia to tell what actually happened to the survivors.

But the one single event which has always intrigued me was the Mahogany ship story, whether it was a Portuguese caravel stranded on Killarney beach near the Victorian township of Port Fairy. No one can find any trace of it now and it seems to be the stuff of legend, including the claims of the mahogany being used in local buildings – the question of Portuguese adventurism remains.

Nevertheless, in large part the Aborigines lived alone for eons, developing their unique culture that we whitefellas did our best to eliminate – euphemistically called assimilation with an overlay of the policies which led to the “stolen generation”.

They lived for generations as a pure outpost of H. sapiens, the modern human race of which we all are members, which had seemingly emerged from the Rift Valley in Africa. As Rebecca Wragg Sykes has written, H. sapiens encounter with Neanderthals nearly led to H. sapiens extinction about 70,000 years ago.  H. sapiens reaching Australia was made feasible by the land bridges. It’s noteworthy that some of aboriginal lore refers to the end of the Ice Age about 10,000 years ago. Sykes made the assertion that the genetic makeup of the Australian Aboriginal show traces of the Neanderthal race, unsurprising given how far this H. sapiens offshoot travelled across the globe, only to be isolated by the end of the Ice Age.

This was a unique people who lived for those eons without the wheel, without bows and arrows and, despite the assertion to the contrary, never embraced the Agrarian Revolution. Yet they were close to the Indonesian Archipelago and the Melanesian Island of New Guinea, where the people did have “gardens” and bows and arrows, and where the Torres Strait islanders seem a mix of many people from the South Pacific. The Aboriginal people live close by on Horn Island; the Torres Strait Islanders are different.

The Aboriginal people had an intricate oral tradition and intergenerational transmission as the way the culture survives. One of the difficulties is that western H. sapiens has long abandoned the oral pathway; and where the Aboriginal people lore has been transcribed, it has been done by whitefellas with the co-operation of each of the local mobs.  But so much remains a matter of conjecture.

Recognising the aboriginals by throwing money at them has not worked if you believe that the only substantive matter in the Statement of the Heart is the rate of incarceration. Aboriginal culture is under threat because education and the whole pressure of social media, television and even substance abuse is homogenising Aboriginality. There is no one First Nation in Australia; there is a huge number of strands, of a folk lore, of customs, men’s and women’s business – and frankly I do not know what to believe in terms of what is heritage and what now is confected. How can I? I’m not Aboriginal and, by their own admission, many Aboriginal people themselves have lost contact with their heritage. The one realisation I have through my contact over the years with each Aboriginal mob, is that each has its own traditions – just look at the art and other cultural expression.

If the Voice is to have any impact, it must not be a Whine – and the preservation of Aboriginal culture, with a basis in the elder inheritance of the lore. This must be combined with lifting the Aboriginal people out of the conditions we consigned them to in the past 200 odd years. This oral culture is all very fragile, and prone to self-serving distortion. Because what does Voice mean? Nobody can articulate it – except to enshrine Aboriginality in the Constitution. If that statutory recognition does that, then that will be an achievement. But if it is a cynical political manoeuvre to settle old scores, to try and exacerbate white guilt or to give a small cabal of Aboriginal politicians an enhanced platform and heaven help us, delusions of grandeur, well then what is the point? It will not bring about the change that Australia wants.

Prime Minister, you have cleared the Throat, now let’s see how melodious is the Voice. It is up to you. Otherwise, it is in danger of being overwhelmed by the Noise.

Mouse  Bipartite Whisper

Part 1:

In her recent book “Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love Death and Art” – Rebecca Wragg Sykes has written:

Moreover, despite disbursing populations obviously spreading all the way into Australia by 65ka – adapting to arid deserts and wet mountain forests even an ocean crossing to Indonesia – there is no clear sign of H.sapiens in central or western Europe until 20,000 years later. Perhaps that land was already taken, and the Neanderthals were successful enough, at least for a while, to prevent others coming in.

Part 2:

A recent article in the New York Review of Books, entitled “Finland’s turn to the West” shares an interesting fact:

“I guess you know that Finns invented the Molotov cocktail, which was named after Stalin’s foreign minister Vyascheslav Molotov and used by Finnish troops to deadly effect against Soviet tanks during the Winter War( 1939-41).”

Presumably they are now hatching up a Lavrov cocktail to match that attributed to his predecessor – stirred not shaken?

 

 

 

 

Modest Expectations – Anno Quattuor

∞∞∞∞∞∞

There’s a difference between psyching yourself up and misrepresenting yourself, and the latter is where “fake it” has gone too far. We need a reset, and to find a way to once again prioritize and reward diligent, honest effort over faux success. Government needs to return to enforcing meaningful financial regulation; politicians and entrepreneurs who deceive their supporters need to face consequences. And we need to be less credulous and stop falling for the next shiny thing. – Helaine Olen, Washington Post

So here we are the end of my fourth year writing a blog each week.

Sometimes I feel like the Beatles’ Father MacKenzie – writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near; look at him working, but then it goes on to something about darning socks in the night when apparently everybody has deserted him, but he yet retains a priestly insouciance. From this chiaroscuro cell of mine, may I thank Frank Meany for his encouragement in ‘mousing’ my first one in 2019. My socks remain undarned.

Nevertheless, Ms Olen’s observation remains very pertinent to me every time I pick up my mouse. I publish one blog a week; they have grown to over 3,000 words, but it has meant I read widely, and republish with acknowledgement information I find interesting. I write a blog as now I have the time to write.  Now I have time to reflect I can leave a legacy for what it is worth. So here goes into my no. 208.

I was talking to a friend of mine who had returned from a very comfortable dinner. I mentioned to him the breakdown of the refrigerated truck bringing food, in particular meat, to our village. It is a 45 minute drive to the next towns – one was over the range; the other over more undulating territory. We were expecting friends for dinner, and my wife happened to be at the only supermarket in town to hear the news that explained the empty fridge shelves. She was able to snaffle some chicken legs, but there was not much more to be had.

The weather was unexpectedly bad for this time of the year. Low weather fronts coming through, rapidly dragging thunderstorm, rain and gusts up to 100 km/hour. At about two am, the power went off. There was a pole fire nearby. This day was cold; there was no heat. Despite the house being built as a wilderness pole house, there is no chimney. A gas fire better heats the house; you do not have to cluster around an open fire trying to keep warm. But it needs electricity to create the spark to light the gas and run the fan.

Fortunately, we have a gas stove and could cook; and with battery and candle, we survived 18 hours without electricity. Having listened to what my friend said that he feared that there would be more outages, his prediction seemed self-fulfilling. True to his prediction, next morning, another outage shut down the Sydney rail system; the day after it was the turn of two large public hospitals in Melbourne. In neither case was it thought to be due to a malignant cyberattack.

Meanwhile, the flooded Kimberley region is running out of food – not just one lorry broken down as happened to us. All the roads are now cut off; and then next day, it was the turn of Mount Isa and all the rivers that flow north of the Selwyn ranges are now in flood.

We went for 18 hours without heating, and it was very cold. But think of the deprivation that so many people across Australia have suffered alongside COVID-19. Sure, I have had a bout of long COVID, but we’ve not been flooded or burnt out – yet! Our deprivation this time was really a nothing compared what else is happening and has happened over the past few years to so many people.

Thus, our deprivation was just an irritation and perhaps a harbinger of things to come; but look at the government priorities! Nuclear submarines for God’s sake! Moreover, the sabre-rattling group assembled by the SMH was predicting a war with China in three years.

As reported in the SMH: “Former Defence Department deputy secretary Peter Jennings estimates the eight boats will eventually cost taxpayers the equivalent of 1 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product or some $20 billion each year.

That’s roughly the combined annual revenues of Australia’s wheat and beef industries, or more than the cost of the NDIS last year. The problem is, the submarines are not expected to arrive for 15 to 20 years, which could be on the other side of a war with China.

“On the other side of a war with China.” What does that mean?

Admiral Chester W Nimitz, Fleet Admiral, United States Navy, former leading US Navy authority on submarines

As part of the agreement, the United States and Britain will rotate nuclear-powered submarines into port in Perth by 2027. One such submarine, the U.S.S. Asheville, is already there now on a port visit, before the formal schedule of rotations.

At that time, I must have dropped off to sleep because I dreamed a dream. Somebody nudges the March Hare to wake him up.  Meanwhile, the dormouse strewn with marigold flowers has arrived at the table and pipes up being asked to defend the purchase of these expensive toys, said: “This is about jobs … and Adelaide in particular will be a big beneficiary of this announcement, as well as Western Australia in particular”.  Just before being shoved into the AUKUS teapot, somebody watching asks aren’t the nuclear submarines about the defence force capability. The answer is lost in the gurgles, but the word “capacity” does get a mention before the dormouse goes down for the third time. I shake myself awake; was that a dream?

Call me the HMAUKUS Pinafore

Before contemplating further let us consider whether we have combatted our internal challenges. Our ability to cope with floods has come up short. Too much of our domestic and commercial infrastructure is built on flood plains and, with climate change heralding more extreme weather, there are large infrastructural costs awaiting Australia. Promises are easy, but nothing much seems to be done, given it is estimated that one million homes are at risk from flooding by 2030. Brisbane and the Gold Coast local government areas are the most vulnerable in numbers, but the Greater Shepparton area in Victoria has the greatest percentage of such homes (56%) with nearby Wangaratta not far behind (43%) – a total of nearly 3,000 homes. Increasingly such places are uninsurable, which leaves only we, the mug taxpayers, as the reconstruction funder.

Australia does not have the equivalent of the US Army Corps of Engineers, which, among its many functions, is flood mitigation, and although there were criticisms for the levee construction in New Orleans, there is consolidated expertise. A recent report in 2022 noted that “Seventeen years after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has completed an extensive system of floodgates, strengthened levees and other protections. The 130-mile (210-kilometre) ring is designed to hold out storm surge of about 30 feet (9 meters) around New Orleans and suburbs in three parishes.”

Even so, Nicholas Lemann, writing in The New Yorker, was not so sanguine.

After Katrina, as after Betsy, such plans were drawn up, but nobody wanted to pay for them. New Orleans had to settle for levee enhancements that fell far short of providing invulnerability to a Category 5 hurricane, and wound up returning to something not too different from its pre-Katrina state. The city is an irresistibly alluring place that does far better by its white citizens than its Black ones. Life is sweet when it isn’t tragic. Lodged somewhere in everyone’s consciousness is the knowledge that what happened in 2005 is going to happen again.

Eleven months after the Lismore floods, a Northern Rivers Reconstruction Authority has been set up and $800 million promised, but nothing much seems to have been done, which is visible to the community. Somebody might echo Lemann and say it will happen again because no government is prepared to spend the money to 100% guarantee waterproofing the current Lismore, but as with Lismore residents nobody wants to move away.

Cockatoo Island Sydney, once a ship builder, then a submarine repair yard, now an art precinct and “glamping” site

Now as the sabre-rattling group would insist Australia faces war with China. Do we wish to contemplate that? An old doctor in conversation with me years ago told of when World War I was declared, there were celebrations in the streets – he remembered hats being thrown in the air – excitement was everywhere. War was a jolly adventure in exotic places. Then, Australia was not threatened directly.

The last time Australia was directly threatened was 1942 – the population was mobilised – the dread when the postman came with news that your father, son, close relative had been killed. Food and clothing were rationed. But bombing of urban areas of Australia was restricted to Darwin and Broome – northern Australia. The Japanese onslaught was halted, they suffered mortal wounds as the War was washed north.

Volodymyr Zelensky has proved an unexpected obstacle. Given that we were fed a diet of Ukraine being corrupt, essentially a Russian satrap, and the line of least resistance was taken in relation to Crimea. Putin anticipated; NATO anticipated that Ukraine would just fall into the Russian sphere of influence.  Conventional early wisdom was that Ukraine would be partitioned with the Russians ceded the eastern fertile black plains, while the truncated Ukraine would retain Kyiv and the Polish border areas – at least pro tem.

But Zelensky had different ideas, and he inconveniently precipitated NATO leaders out of the cocktail circuit into a world bereft of Louis Vuitton and Dom Perignon. Zelensky has created the nightmare; he stood up to Putin. It was not expected that a comedian had transformed himself into a resilient warrior.

Nevertheless, the Americans always seem to have a war on the go, dragging us with them. However, none of the recent Wars have the European backdrop Ukraine has provided. So, destroying a country where the infrastructure is notably European is thus enough to put the fear of God into the Europeans. It is they which, even with the diminishing number that directly experienced the horrors of WWII, see it now being re-run in the Ukraine.

Forget the power of the people; unless they inconveniently have the power that Zelensky has. Looking around our leaders there is no-one who reminds one of this man. There seems nobody else who can lead a popular revolution.

And what of China? They assumed control of Hong Kong, breaking the terms of agreement with the United Kingdom.  There were street protests. There have been draconian measures put in place. There has been no urban warfare from those who opposed this take over. The sun still shines. The horses still race at Happy Valley and Sha Tin.

Power means control of the security forces. The street protests of the sort seen 40 years ago have been studied by those in authority and measures implemented to contain the people; these measures are increasingly perfected with more and more sophisticated brutality and repression.

The Chinese have not participated overtly in any war, apart from border skirmishes and the annexation of Tibet about 70 years ago, while in that same period the Americans have been in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan – for what reward? I forgot Grenada, which the USA invaded in October 1983, a conflict which lasted four days before the Americans declared victory over a country of 113,000 people.

In fact on March 9 it was reported: that Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) announced on Thursday that air routes between Taiwan and 10 Chinese cities will be reinstated on Friday, with 13 other Chinese cities selected for cross-strait charter flights. Starting on Friday, flight routes will be re-established between the Taiwanese cities of Taoyuan, Taipei and Kaohsiung, and the Chinese cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Fuzhou, Qingdao, Wuhan, Ningbo and Zhengzhou.

Ok … but that statement does not suggest war footing. The Americans were not part of this decision, I note.

So, what is the point of all this purchase of extraordinarily expensive toys of war? Can anybody in words of one syllable tell me how the current expenditure will help defend this country? The Taiwan response – a video of a young woman running with rifle, stumbling, with her helmet falling over her face, and then giggling. War footing? More like slippage.

Yet Taiwan has the perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare, but has anybody got the stomach for a war? What is Taiwan’s appetite for war? The Chinese would prefer a compliant Taiwan commercially strong, but avoiding a potentially destructive conflict with China. Where does Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines in the mid 2030s fit that scenario?

There is thus a possibility that China and Taiwan will reach an accommodation that avoids outright war. Nevertheless, some Chinese with assets are moving them to Singapore and elsewhere including Australia. Yet let us not be under any illusions that the Chinese diaspora is anti-China; some estimated that the pro-Chinese element in Australia would be about 80 per cent.

At the 2021 census, 1,390,637 Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry, accounting for 5.5% of the total population. How is the Australian Government planning to deal with them in case of direct conflict with China. Internment? I think not. Think of the expense… but then again, those advocating building more and more sports venues, maybe they will have a secondary use. After all, the Melbourne Cricket Ground was requisitioned by the Americans and Australian defence forces between 1942 and 1945 with up to 200,000 troops using the ground facilities as barracks. Would we need it again – but now for an internment camp?

In any event, the last sentence in Helaine Olen’s opinion piece quoted at the beginning of this blog is particularly germane.

Billy Graham with a Pole

Bob Richards has recently died in Waco Texas aged 97.

Bob Richards

His would not be a familiar name today to anybody in Australia unless you, like myself, were a spectator at the Melbourne Olympic Games in 1956. He had been the Olympic champion in the pole vault in 1952 in Helsinki and had come to Melbourne in the USA team to defend his title. Pole vaulting was an unfamiliar sport in Australia, and I remember being seated close to the action. Australia had two competitors, but they had been knocked out in the preliminary round, finishing last and second last respectively.

Richards had not vaulted very well in the preliminary round, but in the final, he won with an Olympic record. As he freely acknowledged, even though he was able to surpass his Olympic record by pole vaulting over 15 feet many times, he was never able to surpass another American, Cornelius Warmerdam, a Californian who had set the World record in the early 1940s, but whose exploits were overshadowed by WWII. Warmerdam used a bamboo pole, which replaced the early solid ash poles; but by the time Richards was at his peak, the technology of the pole had moved to poles made of tubular aluminium.

Today’s top male vaulters, with refined techniques and springy fiberglass or carbon fibre poles that bow almost to U shapes, routinely soar over crossbars set above 19 feet (5.8metres). The world record is held by Armand Duplantis, an American-born Swedish athlete known as Mondo, who recently vaulted 20 feet 4-3/4 inches (6.22 metres). That height surpassed his own previous five world records, all over 20 feet (6.1 metres) and all set since 2020. From the Australian point, from the dismal performance of 1956, our standards have risen markedly.  An Australian, Steve Hooker won the Olympic pole vault at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

It is the one event, where it seems that there has been no brake put on the technology; and how far will such technology take man and woman into the ether. Hooker eventually jumped a height (6.06m), which remains the fourth highest height ever attained; in the end he lost his head for heights, who wouldn’t but anyway what a career!

As it was with Richards. With his etched looks he reminded me of Billy Graham and was, to some extent, much the same evangelical as he was ordained into a Brethren when he was only 20. He was given the nickname of the “Vaulting Vicar” by some, but all I  knew was that he was a pastor for one of those evangelical Christian churches, which find the Southern American States such fertile ground. Sagebush piety, cowboy strong face enabled him to be, between 1958 and 1970, the face on the General Mills “Wheaties” packet, the  cereal known as the “Breakfast of Champions.” He became director of the Wheaties Sports Federation, founded in 1958 after President Eisenhower called for a national physical fitness campaign.

So he was, his pole vaulting seemed to be a symbol of his form of Christianity where an aluminium pole and a bar being raised set against the sky were his basic Assumption.

An Added Thought from the Vault

Women’s pole vaulting does not easily fit into the Bob Richard narrative. Currently Australia has the number two rated woman pole vaulter in the world – Nina Kennedy. Last year she won the Diamond League title with a vault of 15ft 1.5in (4.61 metres) slightly less than her best, but would Australia ever know.

The first recorded woman’s world record holder was a Ruth Spencer, an American who vaulted 4ft 9in (1.44 metres) in 1910.  The height is testimony to the change in times, when modern female athletes would high jump way higher than that. The current world pole vault record was set in 2009 by Russian Yelena Isinbayeva with a vault of 16ft 7in (5.06 metres). She held sway in the first decade of the 21st century, and with arched eyebrows, one can say that her record has not been challenged in the last thirteen years – but she was Russian.

Women’s pole vaulting attained prominence when first introduced as an event in the Sydney Olympic Games, when Tatiana Grigorieva, a Russian-born Australian, unexpectedly won the silver medal. During the 1990’s repeatedly breaking the then world record, Emma George was dominant.

Emma George

I remember for many years driving into Beechworth, her name was emblazoned on her hometown signage. But her dominance ended in tears, as the stress induced by pole vaulting caught up with her.  She vanished even before the 2000 Olympic Games with a mess of chronic injury without any comment on her mental health.

In fact, she has become the mother of three boys, seemingly happy, still greatly attracted to the outdoors as judged by her profile in the media, where she acts as a free-lance journalist – a world which I once knew as that of a stringer.

A Sense of Theatre

Col Hodges

My eye caught the following on Twitter. “Race caller Col Hodges lives in flood ravaged Forbes. After having a cold shower this morning Col hitched a ride on a fire truck to get to a boat which took him to within 50 yards of the other side where he waded in knee deep water to get to a borrowed car to travel to Bathurst {to call the races}.”

Race callers are so much part of the heritage of the country.  They all have their individual ways of learning. No University course here. Col Hodges started shooting marbles around the backyard pretending that they were racehorses. I knew one other bloke who started calling matches floating down a gutter.

When you note how many race meetings there are, it means that while the race callers in the city seem to form a kind of Establishment, there are many other meetings that need to be called. On this periphery are race callers like Col Hodges. I note that he called his first race meeting in a tiny place called Fifield, which lies between Trundle and Tullamore in the Central West of NSW with its hotel known as the Pub in the Shrub. We stopped there once just up the road from what looked like an old boarded up mill; yet as I noted in an earlier blog, there was a late model yellow Ford parked out the front and an array of expensive solar panels on the roof.

Col Hodges called a race meeting there in 1971. As he recalled “It was a picnic meeting at Fifield on Easter Saturday. It was a dirt track, there were fields of between six and 10 to describe and around 500 people were in attendance. In those days a lot of tracks didn’t have photo finish cameras. A lady in the crowd called out after a close finish that I was trying to influence the judges. I went to a lot of meetings that didn’t have photo finish cameras so that’s where I learned to be pretty diplomatic in photo finishes. If I’m sure I’ll call it but there’s that many different angles, I call at about 30-35 race tracks, and some tracks you’re right on the line but unless I’m pretty sure I’ll just say it’s between this horse and that horse. I’ll have a go if I know the angle of the track and I’m confident but I don’t like letting people down by taking a guess when I’m at a bad angle just for my own glory.”

Yet Col Hodges was the last to call a triple dead heat in Cowra in 1997, and even ventured at the time that it might be the result. This was rather adventurous given that there have only been four in the whole history of Australian horse racing since the introduction of the photo finish camera. It took the stewards 30 minutes to declare the placings.

As is said, race callers need to have a sense of theatre.

Such sadness

Last week I recalled our time in southern Malawi.  To quote local sources this past week: Heavy rains that triggered floods and mudslides have killed at least 199 people in Malawi, authorities. President Lazarus Chakwera declared a “state of disaster” in the country’s southern region and the now-ravaged commercial capital, Blantyre. Some 19,000 people in the south of the nation have been displaced, according to Malawi’s disaster management directorate.

This suggests that the Satemwa tea estate, a source of employment for many Malawians, which is only 43 kilometres South of Blantyre could not conceivably have been unaffected by Cyclone Freddy, to say nothing of the thousands of Malawian subsistence farmers whose farm plots crowded the river floodplains. Another country needing our help.

Mt Mulanje in southern Malawi in calmer times, now with floodwaters to the north and south

Mouse Whisper

He was complaining about the comment that bushfires had been reported as having decimated the ozone layer by five per cent. Five per cent is one twentieth. So, it is hardly “decimate”. Well, add this word to vocabulary to kill only five per cent – vicesimumate. In other words, we are going to be merciful – we are going to vicesimumate you lot.  Instead of two for the chop, you lot will only lose one.

∞∞∞∞∞∞

OUT NOW!

35 Poems by Jack Best

An illustrated collection of poems

Order your copy of 35 Poems now – $30 plus postage.
Email to cameo@iimetro.com.au for your copies. Any profits will go to the Ukrainian cause and Malawi relief.

Jack’s poetic side finally gets an airing in this, his first book of poems. Described in the foreword by John Bevins as:

“… a joy … indeed, hoped-for gifts beat surprises. In one of Jack’s deeply personal poems (some are jolly folly), we learn his Father urged him to read Xenophon. ‘The sweetest of all sounds’, Xenophon said, ‘is praise’. Well, this body of work — with its own sweet sounds, ‘sounds sizzling in the wires’ — gets my praise. All the more so because of Jack Best’s courage to say what he feels in a way that allows us to feel what he says”.

 

Modest Expectations – Elizabeth

Our kitchen benchtop is Corian, a synthetic material composed of acrylic polymers and an aluminon trihydrate extracted from bauxite.  Marble too has negligible silica, but natural granite and its synthetic offshoot Caesarstone has a variable amount up to 90 per cent silica. Corian is cheaper, but not so resistant to stains and chipping apparently as Caesarstone.

I have a friend whose grandfather and another relative were gold miners. Victoria had many gold mines. These blokes were dead of silicosis before I started as a medical student.

As a medical student, I learnt all about silicosis.  It was a common occupational disease among those who worked in dusty environments such as quarries and in gold mining and everywhere workers were working with quartz. At the time I was a student, preventative measures such as covering nose and mouth were becoming accepted practice, so that over the next 20 years deaths from silicosis halved.

Remember that was a time when cigarette smoking was more prevalent – nothing like dust covered fingers holding a fag, and then tucked between one’s lips.

Further, it was a time when there was still residual tuberculosis in the community.

Thus, it is hardly a new threat, even though Minister Burke tried to characterise it as the “new asbestosis”. So, I am surprised by this Ministerial statement “We have now tasked Safe Work Australia to do the work to scope out what regulation is required for workplaces that deal with silica dust and to scope out, specifically, with respect to engineered stone and engineered stone benchtops to do the work starting now, on what a ban would look like.”

I would have thought there were adequate regulations, given that silicosis is hardly a new occupational disease. The question is, why the casual attitude, unless one of the jurisdictions is being resistant. I would think, license the countertop makers, and mandate wearing suitable preventative gear – both of which should improve the defence against silica dust, notwithstanding that full face respirators have been available for years. Silica is so prevalent, singling out one industry for a complete ban given its history would seem extreme. The conglomerate, Caesarstone, invented in Spain and Israel in the 1980’s became very popular in the last decade.

As one would expect, given the long association of silicosis and lung disease, the recommendation to lessen the exposure whenever possible – cutting, grinding and shaping when wet – should be a given.  Ventilation and filtration systems should be used to collect silica-containing dust at source.  If these engineering controls fail to eliminate the risk, then use an approved N95 respirator at the very least, and this includes whenever adjustments are required on site where cutting and grinding in a suitable wet environment is unlikely to be possible.

So, what’s causing this haggling among the Ministers for action when making countertops is just another industry dominated by working with quartz?

Colour me Malawi

I like Malawi. Some years ago, before COVID, we went there and I recalled part of that experience in a previous blog. I find tea plantations restful – the glossy greenery of camellia sinesis and the way the plantations are so ordered that they give the impression of cascading over the slopes of hill country, where the air is clean, the morning mist clinging to the vegetation. Yet here is a very labour-intensive industry – and the fact of exploitation nags at my thoughts.

After the First World War a Scot called McLean Kay set up a tea plantation of nearly 900 hectares in Southern Malawi. This estate is called Satemwa, in the centre of which is Huntington House, the residence of the Kays. We spend a couple of nights there. It is not the main tea picking season, but we pass a line of men plucking tea leaves and placing them in shoulder baskets. Here both men and women share the load, unlike earlier in the year, where I had seen in Sri Lanka near Kandy tea leaf being picked by women with their baskets supported by a headband around their foreheads. Here the baskets were supported by the shoulders and the Malawi terraces were not the precipices of the Sri Lanka tea plantations where goats, let alone women with heavy baskets, would be hard pressed to cling. Malawi was way more considerate in the way the tea had been planted for the workers.

The flight, followed by the long drive, tired me out. So, when we reached the House, and had been welcomed and had admired the manicured gardens with the borders of flowering bushes and trees, we were shown to our room. This was one of five – but this one special because it was where the original founder of the estate used to sleep from the time when the House was built in 1935 to when he died in 1968.  The house could be coloured as lived in – all colours turn to “faded”.

However, the bed was comfortable and soon I was asleep. I awoke in the late afternoon and found that when I tried to turn on the lights, there were none.  There was nobody around as I tried every light switch, every lamp – to no avail! It is a strange sensation to wake up in a completely silent world where there is no electricity; and then trying to sweep away post sleep confusion.

I padded round the house; it was deserted. There was an office, but nobody there. It was all too gloomy, so I moved to the front door. Restful has turned to restless.

Oh, how mystery builds.  However, the mystery collapses when I call out to my partner and she emerges, camera in hand, around the far side of the veranda. She laughs at my situation says she is sorry that she did not wake me to tell me that there would be a power outage until 10 pm that night – load shedding.  This is a common occurrence in Malawi and although the House had its own generator it was missing a vital part to make it work.

Colour the dinner dark with flickering blobs of red and amber candles and hurricane lanterns.  The cognoscenti have headlamps, as does the son of the founder who comes by later in the evening to say hello. He introduces himself as “Chips” Kay.  Chips is 85 years old and has grown up in Malawi. His accent betrays the fact that he was schooled in Cape Town and says he did not speak English until he was six years old. “Chips” is short for Cathcart and every Kay has Cathcart somewhere in their Christian monikers.  They are of Scottish lowland stock, from Ayrshire yet have strong links to the outer islands being also Clan Maclean.

Even though he is a small man in off-white shirt and trousers, his is the demeanour of the white children born in what was once Nyasaland, but since 1958 called Malawi.  He has lived through the transition from colonial authority to self-determination and prospered.  He is married to Dawn and they have four children – at least they have been incorporated into the Kay family succession planning.  He remains British, although he is slightly annoyed that the Malawi Government has not given him citizenship. Thus, he lives there somewhat as an outsider.

He tells us that winter rains are essential for good tea, as is the altitude. I wonder if I drew blood from him whether it would not be the colour of tannin, so immersed and knowledgeable he is on the subject.

In the morning the baboons caper across the lawn and rock lizards slide along the terrace concrete. Salmon pink is the colour of Malarone, the tablet we take each morning since malaria is endemic to Malawi and we are taking no chances, even though it is the dry season.  Our defences are reinforced by repellent and mosquito nets over the bed at night.

A tea plantation would not be authentic without being invited for tea tasting. The tea tasting room is long and spare, located in the factory, a set of oblong buildings in what can be called “working white”. The room where the tea is to be tasted is off white, so as to give the impression that the tea that we shall drink has been created in a hygienic atmosphere. The factory is working full bore, with the furnaces providing heat required to dry the leaves The furnaces are fuelled by blue gum logs cut from trees, dotted as small coupes around the plantation. Blue gum can be harvested after seven years so rapid is its growth.

Brown is the tea in its various shades although we are invited to spoon teas labelled white, green and black.  Familiar names like Earl Grey, Lapsang and Oolong are mentioned –and the last tea is red. This is hibiscus tea, but nobody likes the taste much.

Lake Malawi

One afternoon we drove down towards the Mozambique border. Malawi is like a gash in the Mozambican body.  It is the commencement of the Rift Valley and later in our stay we would stay on Lake Malawi, a gigantic spread of water, along the line of the Rift, increasingly accompanied by the mountains towards the Tanzanian border. I have described this part of our trip in an earlier blog.

We did not cross over into Mozambique. Perhaps we could have, but flouting the rules is not a clever thing to do in Africa. Sometimes, the impression in Africa is of a lackadaisical attitude, but I wouldn’t have bet on it.

COVID changed everything in relation to Africa. We had to cancel a trip to West Africa; not whingeing but the bloody Virus has a great deal to answer for, as well as those who for one reason or not facilitated its escape into the world.  We miss Africa. We miss Malawi.  Given everything that has happened with us, has the World in sepia, learnt anything? Yes, some have, but the narcissists who have allowed this New Age to emerge have not.

The Amur River

“We thought we were a European country,” said Deripaska, who is founder of Rusal, the biggest aluminium producer outside China. “Now, for the next 25 years, we will think more about our Asian past.”

I have just finished reading The Amur River by Colin Thubron, an English adventurer, who recounts his journey from Mongolia, where some of the tributaries of the Amur River rise, then along the Amur River as it divides China and Russia, crisscrossing the border many times, and finally along the last stretch of the River through Russia to its mouth as it flows into the Okhotsk Sea, opposite the northern Sakhalin Island.

He catalogues with clarity this arduous trip – all the more so because at that time he had just turned 80.

Retreat of Cossacks, 1685 – after the siege, the Qing troops force Russian colonists to evacuate Fortress Albazin, on the North Bank of the Amur River

The Russians and Chinese have been in confrontation across the Amur River for centuries. In the 17th century, the Manchus, after a prolonged war ending with the siege at Albazin, then a settlement on the northern loop of the Amur River, were victorious. The Manchu let time destroy the besieged Cossacks, though as much due to disease as to war wounds, until only 20 defenders were left to surrender.

The Manchus then negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk and one of the conditions was the destruction of Albazin, after which the Manchu influence spread into Russia. There are quirky happenings relating to the Treaty and its aftermath. The Treaty was written in four languages (Latin also Russian, Manchu and Chinese). Then there were the Peking Albazans, who looked Chinese, dressed like Russian peasants and worshipped in Russian Orthodox churches. These people are presumed to have arisen from Cossack stock who deserted to the Manchus, built churches, even had an Orthodox monastery, and then were swept away by the Bolsheviks centuries later. The rise of Stalin was the time of the Siberian gulags where people were exiled into a terrible darkness, where the light of freedom was extinguished. Just to contemplate this is excruciating, and the West deigns to dine with the representatives of this savagery, as if Tolstoy and the Bolshoi ballet are sufficient compensation. But who am I to cast the first stone; it is just Thubron’s insight that made me shake my head.

Thubron is an Englishman who sees the beauty in this harsh area of the planet, admittedly though he was there at the best time of the year.  His descriptions of the landscape are beautifully evocative – these landscapes are diverse visual seams, an essential art form for successful travel writers. To him there was a certain familiarity as he had travelled across the same territory 20 years ago when the political situation had more political fluidity in the pre-Putin and pre-Xi Jinping eras.

Russian Amur River bank

Yet the condition in this part of the country does reflect the overall politico-economic situation of the country. When the central government is weak, and the other relatively strong, then it is reflected in the respective local economic activity on either side of the Amur River. Currently, the Chinese are building large cities, whereas the Russian side of the river is impoverished.  Here are the signs of a time when Russia once held sway of the region for some time after the Treaty mentioned above. China became weaker and moreover was preoccupied by restlessness in the South of the country and Formosa for a long period. Then later the war with Japan debilitated China further, far more than Russia. Times change. His overall  current description is of Russian decay.

The two countries may not have much in common culturally, but today it seems the two countries have tacitly agreed there is no point warring over the territory. Power is economic, not military. This has been asserted by the Chinese – the Russians do the menial work moving the Chinese-made products across the river. Yet it was only in 1986 in Vladivostok that Gorbachev asserted that the countries were confined to the banks and the border was the navigable Amur in between, and his assertion remains as a given. In other words, cultural conflict has not necessarily been translated into armed conflict, apart from a few cross-border skirmishes.

The river itself is partially navigable but before World War I, there were comfortable boat trips along that part of the river. Thubron describes a boat trip made in 1914 by an Australian woman, Helen Gaunt, who relished the boat’s velvet upholstery and mahogany panelling with lunches of sturgeon, chicken and red caviar ‘spread like marmalade on an English breakfast table’. Nevertheless, the hope that the river would provide a trade route opening up Siberia to the Pacific Ocean was dashed by the shallowness of the river and particularly at the mouth of river there are many sandbanks.

Russia has concentrated its port facilities 800 miles south at Vladivostok.  The Amur may be three miles wide at its mouth, but he describes it as “running at five knots of silvered mud”. And as always he outlines the Siberian conundrum of “unblemished hills that fall in spurs of forest light” on one side of the river with walks along a jetty on the other side “the carcasses of iron barges lie sunk under its water, and its shingle is heaped with fallen bricks and concrete, tangles of wire and chains”. Ah, civilisation in all its brutality.

The book ends there.  Was the voyage worth the difficulty, the hardship? I suppose getting to the finish is in itself an achievement and his contemporary insights must be unique for a European journeying in an Asia, where Russia obviously is a player, but seemingly subservient to China. Nevertheless, the insights of his journey are very complementary to the ruminations of the Russian oligarch at the head of this blog. 

Superannuation Taylored?

Taylor is one of seven Liberal MPs in the 46th Parliament of Australia who have obtained degrees at an Oxbridge or Ivy League university, the others being Alan Tudge, Josh Frydenberg, Andrew Laming, Dave Sharma, Greg Hunt and Paul Fletcher – Wikipedia entry. 

The Hon Angus Taylor MP

I watched Angus Taylor on Sunday. I always thought that this Shadow Treasurer was a garrulous “cockie” whose diction had been caused by having a silver ladle in his mouth for too long a time. The above excerpt from his long entry in Wikipedia is amusing as it seems to outline the March of the Duds. Unlike most Wikipedia biographies, which can be interminably dull, his entry is engaging and lists all his alleged malfeasance.

I had never before watched him in a long interview. Despite his mien, he is not dumb, and his acrobatics with the truth absolutely magical; but the ease with which he does it shows that his education at The King’s School and Oxford has not gone for nought.

He can talk nonsense with the surety that the viewer knows that he knows that is nonsense.  He is at ease with this paradox of the smart man hiding behind his public school interpretation of Crocodile Dundee, as anybody could be. If he can avoid being found guilty of any malfeasance, he is assuredly the next Coalition Party leader – nor will the current National Party crop be able to stand up to him once the time comes for him to make his move.

His comments on superannuation made me think. The Prophet Taylor tells all what their superannuation package will be like in 50 years, a time relevant to my grandchildren.  I started to rack my brains about my attitude to superannuation when I was their age, an age when Taylor warns young people are going to be indexed out of their retirement funds because of that Jim Chalmers, the one that Albanese cannot drown in his endless pot of political molasses. I didn’t give superannuation a thought in my twenties.

In my thirties, because I moved around in salaried appointment, I did not accumulate any pension/superannuation funds. There was no reciprocity. My father died early in the 70s and left me some money, which was subject to inheritance tax, now abolished.   At the end of the decade, I gained employment where there was at the time a generous superannuation scheme so that, after five years, I could take the whole amount including the employer’s contribution. It was useful to access it at that time.

Having done my five years  I, with another bloke, formed a consultancy, and my superannuation thereafter was paid from the company that employed me. Thus, from the mid-eighties I did not benefit from the wave of entitlement that the politicians in cahoots with the public service controlled what they could take from the system without being called “rapacious”.

I remember the cries that went on about “getting better people into Parliament if they were paid more”. One does not hear that now the entitlements have soared, yet the standard of politician has not improved. Imagine some of them running a business? Angus Taylor stands out as one who could. Yet he defends the current superannuation arrangements rather than agreeing to a modest tax designed to improve the Government’s ability to pay for a country progressively rotting under the effects of climate change and the coddling of the Australian plutocracy, which had been so rampant when he was in Government.

In 1992 the then Prime Minister, Paul Keating introduced the policy of compulsory superannuation contributions under the Superannuation Guarantee scheme. Since this time this has grown to over $1.5 trillion and is argued as one of the key drivers of Australia’s national saving rate. This has become an asset, and like all assets, where a tax is fair and reasonable, a tax such as proposed seems to be so. Therefore Angus Taylor, you know how confected your opposition is; we do too; and judging by the polls so does the general populace.

Or perhaps it is all your working with cows in the dairying industry, that Mr Taylor, you are having difficulty in recognising caic tarbh. Surely not.

A Crackling Good Idea

The following dermal delights appeared recently in the Washington Post. I normally stay away from recipes, but what next? Omentum? (Black pudding ingredient among Austrian Southern Tyrolean yodellers) Tendons? (Chinese of course, slow cooked beef tendons) 

Suddenly Tim Ma had skin in the game.

The chef behind some Washington restaurants was recently in Austin in Texas and was making a simple pork skin chicharrón. “We just could not get it to puff,” he recalled. “We scraped off the fat, dehydrated it, fried it at the right temperature, and it just wouldn’t puff. But then we tried another batch that looked exactly the same, and it puffed up immediately. So we stared at it like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ It’s a whole other world of science. I blame Texas humidity.”

Ma is not alone in his embrace of that other world of science. Chefs across the country are showing more skin: in everyday chicken skin salads and cow skin stews as well as fancy turns of, say, salmon skin chicharrón in Los Angeles. Or casual eats like the Chinese-Cajun cracklin’ in New Orleans and the curry noodle sandwich with crispy guinea hen skin in Durham, N.C. Even José Andrés’ grilled vegetables are skin-on. Every skin everywhere all at once.

“It’s cool to take something apart, treat each piece differently and put the pieces back together,” Ma said. “It’s a technique thing, but it’s also a good way to introduce different flavours, different textures.”

History does not celebrate the first skin-eaters, cultures around the world now enjoy skin recipes — whether Canadian scrunchions (pork rind), Indonesian krupuk kulit (beef skin), Jewish gribenes (chicken or goose skin cracklings with fried onions), Mexican cueritos (pork rind), Slavic cvarci (pork crackling) or Vietnamese tóp mo (fried pork fat). 

At The Mary Lane in Manhattan, chef Andrew Sutin keeps reinventing his menu’s trout dish with skin: first with a dried-skin crumble, then with playful curls of fried skin on sautéed fillets and now layered between sliced leeks in a potato soup topped with trout.

“It’s a fresh approach to something that’s already there,” he said, comparing it to a “bonus track” on an album. “Your creative landscape is doubled.” Sutin compared skins’ moment in the sun to the rise of aioli and yolk-heavy pasta, which came in tandem with the popularity of egg-white omelettes and egg-white cocktails earlier this century.

“We’re trying to push the envelope into interesting adventure,” he said. “It’s delicious. It adds texture. And it’s not too far out there, really. I don’t want to serve something weird for the sake of weirdness.” 

Skin is not magic. Celebrity Chinese chef Zhenxiang Dong built his whole menu around duck skin so delicate that it easily shattered. His American debut flopped, despite counting Michelle Obama among its duck skin fans. There are also limits to what diners will stomach: Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods”, once recalled with revulsion that he was almost served a human baby’s foreskin in Madagascar.

Even in less-extreme circumstances, a reluctance bordering on squeamishness around eating skin is not uncommon. “My dad loves making kilawin with the cow’s skin or goat skin,” said Sheldon Simeon, a Hawaiian chef with his own recipe for Ilocano cow skin. “Not something that I do in my restaurants, though.” Asked why not, he declined to answer.

Inspired by cotenne (an Italian pork skin crackling) as well as bì heo (Vietnamese shredded pork skin noodles), New Orleans-transplanted-to-New York chef, Dominick Lee makes a roast beef tagliatelle, with a gluten-free option of pork skin noodles. He also uses dried skin as a kind of furikake-style flavour bomb with rice. It can be a tough sell. “It’s not often someone wants to talk about skin,” he said. “You’re either extremely interested in food or you’re Buffalo Bill.” 

In Savannah, Ga., Rob Newton credited ketogenic eating with a rediscovery of skin. “Keto diets have really helped the eating of skin,” he said. “You can eat chicharrónes or fish skins in cured egg yolk. People want their crunchy, salty thing without a potato or corn, and pig skin has really stepped into that role.” He’s currently developing a kind of terrine he saw in Mexico City that incorporates pulverized chicharrónes.

A desire for zero-waste sustainability helps, too. “We want to honour every bit of the animal,” Newton said. “We don’t waste the bones, the feet, the ears, nothing. This is a way to help do that. And that makes us feel good, like we’re doing the right thing, because we are.”

Mouse Whisper

From To a Mouse

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion, 
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal! 

Better late than never for Mr Burn’s annual day, and belatedly remembering to drink the classic smoked fish soup and nibble the essential haggis, neeps and tatties – all rounded off with a traditional clootie dumpling and a dram of whisky.

Cho sona ri luch ann an lofa

Haggis, neeps and tatties

Modest Expectations – An Atlanta Fruit Tree?

Reflecting on our experience on a ship where there were around 300 crew and passengers, before we boarded, we all had a supervised RAT (Rapid Antigen Test) in Vietnam, as I previously reported. Everyone initially needed a negative test to be cleared to board, although that requirement has now been abandoned. When one of the crew was detected positive, he or she was isolated and the rest of the crew were masked for the whole time. It was interesting that the only member of the crew who had difficulty maintaining his mask was the maître d’, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Peter Dutton, even down to the abruptness in manner and the stoop. He was Belgian, quite an uncanny resemblance!

Majestic Princess

But the large “plague boats” are back, with all the protestations that all has changed – or has it? Now, this is the Majestic Princess not the Ruby Princess.  Same problem? The Majestic Princess, which berthed recently in Sydney, was carrying 4,000 passengers and crew and about one in seven contracted COVID.  Very similar number of infected compared with the Ruby Princess. The cruise information states:

If you opt for the former {RAT}, all you have to do is take a photo of the negative RAT result displayed next to a government-issued photo ID, such as your driver’s licence or passport, as well as a clock showing the time the test was completed. This could be a wall clock, mobile phone screen or a wrist watch. Once you have the photo, make sure you have it stored and ready to show upon request at the terminal.

Prefer a pre-departure PCR test? You’ll receive a text message from the relevant laboratory or health authority and all you have to do is show it on request before you board the ship. Spot checks will be carried out in all cruise terminals across the country. Fail to produce proof of a negative Covid-19 test result and you will have to undertake a RAT before entering the terminal. Test positive and you will be denied boarding.

This “advice” in its laissez-faire form suggests that chances are that probably nobody will bother you, and we accept with a straight face that everyone will be uniform in taking appropriate personal responsibility to have the test. When the Ruby Princess passengers in 2020 were disembarked so surprisingly quickly, my blogs at the time expressed my disbelief at what I believed was an unforgivable breach of public health requirements that had been facilitated by Government, with components of both Federal and NSW State shirking responsibility. It was a time when social isolation, contact tracing and hand hygiene were the only weapons against the pandemic. At that time there was neither vaccine nor test, let alone anti-viral drugs and there was no offical support for mask wearing.

Then, the rules were based around lockdown to facilitate social isolation, hotel quarantine and international and state border closures. These no longer apply since the Premier highjacked the public health agenda for advocacy of personal responsibility. It is no longer mandatory for NSW residents who test positive for COVID-19 to self-isolate. However, NSW Health strongly recommends those who are sick or who have tested positive to stay home until their symptoms end and do not visit people in aged care, disability care or hospital for at least seven days. The Chief Health Officer appears occasionally to exhort, but effectively she is muzzled.

Quarantine is unequivocally a Federal responsibility but the then Prime Minister Morrison, in his normal response to anything difficult, took the route of “divide and rule”, which meant that a chance to have a uniform national policy was lost.

Now the cruise liners are back, and despite the community having better tools to combat the Virus, these Carnival Cruises seem not to have learnt anything much.  There they were, the ambulances today lined up to take away the sickest (two identified), and the others were packed off home with masks and a recommendation that they isolate themselves and avoid public transport. There seemed no consideration as to how these persons were actually going to get home. In fact, it is reported that the infected mingled with the non-infected as they disembarked. As someone commented, good time to avoid the trains north. Now where were the public health and quarantine officers to supervise the disembarkation. Once one goes down the gangplank most cruise companies divest themselves of all responsibility. The terminology is somewhat cloying as “passengers” have become ship “guests”.

Putting this disaster into perspective, NSW reported 19,800 new COVID-19 cases last week. Question is, at what order of magnitude would we find the real number since positive RATs are no longer reported – 10, 20, 50, 100, 500?

The unofficial Government apologist, Deakin University Epidemiology Chair, Professor Catherine Bennett, said it was likely that only a fraction of the 800 cruise cases would have been detected had they been onshore, dismissing any notion the outbreak will have an impact on the State’s case numbers. In other words, she was saying that 19,800 was an underestimate, as contact tracing and positive case reporting have long gone. But fearlessly she did place an estimate: “We are probably only counting 10 per cent of cases at the moment,” Bennett said. “Not only that, but the ones we are really unlikely to be testing are those asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic cases”. An immediate comment. How does she come to a figure of 10 per cent, which suggests that there were 200,000 cases last week in NSW? Further, mild and asymptomatic cases can lead to long COVID; no infection is trivial!

“These cases [on the ship] have been detected through mandatory testing, and now they are being masked up and told to be careful. This is a known, small risk in a sea of the largely unknown.” If you read the conditions, it is difficult to claim it is mandatory if you do not police it. Were they sure that nobody was harbouring the Virus when they boarded – the Virus does need a vector – and it seems no attempt is made to try and work out that problem. The ship was going to be deep cleaned, whatever that means in terms of its effect on numbers. Presumably the ship was “deep cleaned” before the recent trip – problem is, are the passengers and crew deep cleaned as well?

Then another expert weighed in. Associate Professor James Trauer, a respiratory consultant physician who is the Head of Epidemiological Modelling in Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine, agreed with her.

“I don’t think it’s anything to panic about for the rest of Sydney … it will be a drop in the ocean, really,” he said.

He then goes on to counter the “ocean drop” argument by saying “the main concern would be if those on the cruise, who are generally older, go on to visit vulnerable people, such as aged care residents, while infectious.” But mate, they should be at home until they are COVID-negative, and by the way was everyone on the cruise given COVID testing kits when they left the ship?

These comments were drawn by the SMH from two academic bystanders – from interstate. Why them? Where was the NSW government response? Where are you, Dr Chant?

Who is Reprehensible, Gentlemen?

The Cipher Bureau was shuttered in 1929, shortly after the arrival of Henry Stimson as the new (US) Secretary of State. Apparently, Stimson thought this type of surveillance was unethical, and he issued what is perhaps one of the best foreign policy statements ever:

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

I thought of the above when Australia was recently consumed with indignation with the Optus followed by Medibank hacks. How dare they?

Russia has shown that it can invade Australia without putting a foot in the country. We constantly expose ourselves to retaliation from those who see us as a small bellicose nation that will go to war now at the drop of an American Flag – where once waving the Union Jack elicited a similar knee jerk response.

Sure, Putin is an evil bastard, but he knows what he knows and that is fighting dirty. He poisons his opponents; he has strangled the opposition, but he has developed a cyber apparatus which has shown Australia to be full of hicks. Just as the Japanese, with their sophisticated Zeros, that shot down the aged Australian Wirraways over Darwin in 1942 had emphasised our technological lag. How dare they have superior technology without telling us, protested the Colonel Blimps over their Scotch and water.

Again, we find Australia has been flailing around. I would suggest respectfully that it is equally reprehensible that the management of these companies is not investing in the appropriate defences to combat an attack from these Russian legions. The Russians are doing what is their job, however distasteful. The idea that we are going to expose them, pursue them and bring them to justice is certainly a challenge for a Federal Police Force, which has never shown itself to have the capacity in so many fields, in so many instances. What are they going to do now in response? Bomb the Kremlin. Shirtfront Putin. What does “we shall hack the hackers” actually mean?

The hackers may systematically try to hack each health fund in turn; perhaps also Medicare. This obsessive Government needs to keep identified information from being vulnerable and raises the question of whether we need such a vast amount of identified information.

What is more dangerous is if de-identified information is thrown away in this affronted panic. Such information is vital for understanding the health of the population – if anybody cared for such evidence-based facts over their opinionated biases and conspiracy theories, which have characterised the Plague Years, if not before.

But then our governments always have difficultly distinguishing between baby and bath water.

Where is the John?

  • An alert from The Washington Post:

 A new powerhouse is emerging in the U.S. Senate — but this one has nothing to do with politics.

John Fetterman

In January, exactly 10 percent of all U.S. senators — ahem, 10 out of 100 — will be named John or Jon. Sen-elect John Fetterman (D-Pa.) will be the latest addition to the John/Jon phenomenon, which was noted on Wednesday by Grace Segers, who covers Congress and politics for the New Republic journal.

It doesn’t help that 11 members of the House are also named John. The Senate’s John/Jon ranks include members of both parties. Even though it is a common name for American men, it is still overrepresented among the senators. 

Come January, the number of Johns and Jons in the Senate will surpass the current number of Hispanic and Black senators. In the last century, fewer than 5 per cent of babies have been named John, according to the Social Security Administration. Census data from 2020 shows that Latinos make up nearly 19 percent of the population and Black people about 12 percent.

The Social Security Administration tracked the most popular names for births in the last 100 years. John was ranked No. 3 with more than 4.4 million babies given the name, behind James and Robert.

Ian Hamilton. Who?

Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton died on October 3 this year. I read about his death in The Economist. He was 97.  He was a different hacker from those above, but his hacking of the Stone of Scone prompted outrage in the British Press at the time causing even the English border with Scotland to be closed. Hamilton was the ringleader in a band of young Scottish Nationalists who hacked the Stone of Scone from its place in Westminster Abbey – and took it back to Scotland. I remember reading about it in 1950 as a ten year old. In the affronted accounts of the robbery, the stone hackers were accused of treason.

The Economist obituarian sets the scene (sic): As treasures went, this one was no beauty. It was an oblong block of red sandstone, 26 inches long by 16.7 wide by 10.5 deep, rough-hewn and chisel-pocked. One face was incised with a crude cross, and two iron rings on chains were set into the ends. By young Ian Hamilton’s estimate—for he had borrowed book after book on it from the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, where he was studying law at the university—it weighed four hundredweight: in fact it weighed 336lb, or 152 kilos. It was also crammed tightly under the ancient wooden coronation chair of the kings and queens of England in Westminster Abbey. All this made it difficult to abscond with. But that was what he meant to do.

It took a number of attempts to hack the stone from its resting place during which time the Stone broke in two. The Stone had been ripped from its place in Scone Abbey in 1296 by Edward 1 and although there was a promise to return it, nothing was done and the Stone remained under the Coronation Chair. According to Scottish Nationalists like Hamilton the stone should have long since been returned.

Led by Ian Hamilton, then a young Scottish law student at the University of Glasgow, with three other fellow law students he took the Stone from Westminster Abbey on Christmas Eve 1950. The Stone broke in two, and they hid the pieces before taking them to the ruined Abbey of Arbroath, where they lifted them onto the altar, covered the pieces with the Scottish flag and left them there.

After four months, the Stone was discovered and the two pieces were joined together and then returned to Westminster Abbey. Hamilton and his crew were prosecuted but then withdrawn. Eventually the Stone was returned to Scotland in 1996, with the proviso that it be returned for any coronation of a British monarch.

In many ways, this act – symbolic of his Scottish nationalism – was what he was always associated with in life; and now remembered in his obituary. His career as a lawyer brought a certain further notoriety. What he did, in the words of the obituary writer: [In] 1953 he was already famous as a second petitioner in a landmark case, MacCormick v Lord Advocate, over whether Queen Elizabeth II should be plain “Queen Elizabeth” in Scotland. The first Elizabeth, after all, had never ruled there”. He lost the case but nevertheless exposed deficiencies in the Act of Union of 1707.

The Stone of Scone

A film was made of the exploit; he was known as “the Stone Man”; he was revered by the Scottish Nationalist Party although he was never elected to parliamentary office. The Economist rarely if ever publishes an obituary about insubstantial figures even if, in the vast majority of cases, nobody outside has heard of the Stone of Scone – “no it’s ‘scoon’ you heathen!”

The Economist did not get it wrong this time either. Ian was quite a hacker!

Mouse Whisper

Monaco has three national animals – wood mouse being one of them. The other are the hedgehog and the rabbit. I suppose that they are the appropriate size to fit into such a micro-country. But where is the wood in Monaco? There are ten parks and gardens in Monaco, although I doubt whether these omnivore relatives of mine would be welcome in some of them, even though they do wear the national insignia – red and white. Beware, the Monaco and Indonesian flags are very much the same, although some would say, the Indonesian flag is more a scarlet red than that of Monaco.

As a piece of associated trivia did you know that at the 1936 Olympic Games, Haiti and Liechtenstein paraded with same flag? These have since been modified to create what is now a marked difference. Incidentally, Haiti’s only athlete in 1936 pulled out with injury, and the Liechtenstein team came nowhere in athletics, road racing and shooting.

Liechtenstein has in fact won 10 Olympic medals in Alpine skiing; none in the summer Olympics; whereas Haiti has won two – a bronze in 1924 for shooting and a silver in 1928 in the men’s long jump. During this time, Haiti coincidentally was occupied by the American military.

Chubby, my Haitian twisted tooth mouse, once told me all about the mix up with the flags, confirmed by my other Liechtenstein relative, Saffron, the yellow necked mouse – and you know when we mice get together, we do talk about the “miceties” of life.

Monegasque’s National Wood Mouse

Modest Expectations – Building a B-B-Q

I am somewhat bemused that John Howard keeps being rolled out by the Liberal Party. I suspect that knowing Johnnie, he would be quietly – with that telltale lip quiver– badgering his colleagues to remain in the limelight. After all, he did not have the elixir of political life, being the second Prime Minister to be ejected by the voters from his electorate. Hardly, what you would call success.

John Howard 2000

Sure, Howard won a landslide election in 1996 from a smart guy who was too smart for his own good. Then he survived – just, against Beazley, one of the most over-rated political party leaders ever; and then won against the authoritarian Latham. The authoritarian personality is that dangerous individual who is happy to be on the political extremes, as far away from democracy as you can find. The syndrome is often combined with extensive gazing at one’s reflection in the pool among the other Narcissi. But Latham was just plain nasty, with a zest for appropriating other people’s ideas.

But come on, ye Howardophiles, he gets rubbed out by another strange character, whose basic insecurities were concealed under a filo of flaky puffery. The puffery was soon dissipated into an unelectable cloud of irritant, but remember Rudd did knock off Howard comprehensively.

The problem with the cohort of those of us who have passed the age of 80, such as Howard, is that those who are used to own the limelight now struggle for relevance. Most of us do not care. Some have hobbies or indulge in what they have aways wanted to do but did not have the time. Some write blogs. They have done what they had to do, and now separate themselves from their previous careers.

From my own perspective one notices subtle changes in personality of one’s peers – the lack of sharpness and increasingly where experience and the biases hang off like fairy lights and overpower  any residual original thought.

Regard for Howard’s legacy will diminish with time, but if I were he, I would not accelerate that process. Him flogging a major resource, our natural gas, to overseas interests for a pittance is one item. One problem with his Party is, I suspect, that there are a number of people of similar age to Howard still wielding undue influence.

John Howard 2022

What do you do with a group of octogenarians and beyond who are unable to give up power. There is only so much biography the world can digest. And there is only so much plastic surgery that can conceal the temporal ravages of the skin, but not that of the brain.

Halibut and Homer

I must say I quite enjoy travelling Alaskan Airlines. They are a friendly mob, unlike the hard faces that welcome you on the average American airline. Still, Alaska is a long way from Los Angeles, and a near six hours in a Boeing 737, even at the front of the plane, tests the friendship.

Anchorage was the destination and we were booked into the Captain Cook Hotel. Captain Cook visited Alaska on his final voyage looking for the North-West passage. On 29th August 1779, Cook reached the Siberian coast, but then abandoned his plan to look further as he deemed it too dangerous. He set sail for the southeast to escape the rapidly approaching ice to Norton sound in Alaska, remembering that at the time Alaska was Russian territory.

It is an odd experience staying in a Captain Cook Hotel so far from home. However, it gave us the opportunity to review our acquaintance with the Alaskan king crab. This crab is harvested from the cold Northern Pacific, particularly Bering Strait. Red king crabs can reach a width of 28 cm, a leg span of two metres and a weight of about 13 kg.

To catch them is apparently one of the most dangerous occupations. Hauling up lobster pots, which may weigh up to a tonne, from a stormy sea results in a high death and injury rate. But the season is short; the returns are attractive; the show must go on.

As far as I know of there are three types of halibut – red, blue and brown. I have only seen them cooked, and to state the obvious, all lobsters are red in the pot. I had eaten them in a seafood restaurant, which once was located across 57th Avenue from where we used to stay in New York. It was a rite of passage after arriving to book into the Buckingham Hotel, with its dark art deco reminder of a New York from the 1920s. Up and across the street was Carnegie Hall; next door was the Steinway Building, with the grand pianos in the window.  A historic block, the seafood restaurant was just so convenient to the tired traveller.

There, I always seem to order oysters, which reflected the diversity of the various beds along the Atlantic Coast mainly and then the spectacular king crab with those gigantic claws. To tell the truth, I always found the crab as a gustatory as distinct from the visual experience to be disappointing. I suppose I expected a distinct taste, such as the one found in our mud crab. Nevertheless, whatever its diet, the crab flesh reflected bland feeding habits – “nice” would be a correct word for the taste. It was no different that day in the restaurant in the Captain Cook Hotel.

Tonight’s dinner

As part of recollections of memorable fish meals this one occurred in Homer. As with much of my travels, there was always a sense of the serendipity hanging around. I had an interest in the Russian settlements of Alaska, and one of these Russian groups were the Old Believers who sought religious asylum in Alaska. There was an Old Believers township of Nikolaesvk on the Kenai Peninsula near Homer, which itself is about 350 kilometres from Anchorage. Their story is a separate one, but along the way has yielded to the discovery of halibut.

Nevertheless, we needed a place to stay and there was no accommodation in the Old Believers’ village. In addition, my wife reminded me that this was an area where we could see bald eagles, which she wanted to photograph – so the trip had many objectives, but a meal of halibut was initially not one of these.

Coming upon a fish meal of halibut was accidental. Halibut is a large fish, which resembles flounder, but can grow to over 200 kg. As I found out later, the name halibut was derived from the Old English for “holy flatfish”, as it was a favourite with the mediaeval clergy for Friday repasts. It must have been the original monkfish.

When we arrived in Homer, we were told at the motel we must have a meal of halibut. For some reason, I had always associated halibut with English fish and chip shops and hence of little consequence. How wrong I was!

Homer is located on Kachemak Bay and has breathtaking views of the volcanic snow-covered Kenai Mountain Range. Homer itself is located on an old moraine jutting out into the Bay. There are still seven glaciers which actively drain into the Bay.

Homer itself was flattened by an earthquake in 1964, an earthquake separated by a large chunk of the Kenai peninsula jutting out into the Northern Pacific Ocean, but since it was 9.2 on the Richter scale, its effect on Homer and the surrounding countryside was that of massive subsidence accompanied by a tsunami – and the gravel spit of land upon which Homer was perched had to be re-constructed.

Now near the end of this spit are located a clutch of restaurants where we went for a meal. I think it was called the Harbour Grill, all brown timber and cosiness. Homer faces Halibut Bay. From a fisher’s point of view this is where the large halibut are abundant. It was a simple meal as I remember, with chips.

Fresh halibut fillet –with its glistening white flesh. That is enough. It was a meal to remember, but unlike wine, there is no surrounding gustatory and olfactory nonsense about a hint of vanilla or a whiff of honeysuckle as one finds with some wine connoisseur musings.

Just luscious but simple – or do I sound too much like Rick Stein?

Homer and Kenai Mountain Range

Add the twilight view across to the mountains with its celestial feeling. Does God eat halibut on Fridays?

Borders are Edgy

Sometimes when you drive the back roads of the nation, you come upon settlements where rural poverty is pronounced; houses at the dilapidated end of town where the casual passersby wonder just where the line of unliveable lies.  Often it is the shops that are closed, with cobwebs coating the edges of a dirty window where the For Sale sign has faded.

It is somewhat surprising when you drive past what appears to be an empty shop next to an unprepossessing house to see it surrounded by a high metal fence and bristling with a substantial array of power lines and CCTV cameras. There are other buildings on the property, including a large shed at the rear, and any windows seem to have the blinds down. There are limbs of animals hanging from trees dotting the property. A warning?

Parked outside this well fortified property were two modern SUVs and two motor scooters. It all seemed strange in such dilapidated surroundings.

Nevertheless, there is a pattern of small hamlets off main roads where there are multiple exit roads, where one can find such  “improvements”. I remember another small town near the South Australian border where there were the same such “improvements”.

Maybe this observation is a one off. However, a Victorian police officer commenting on the activity of bikie gangs, of which there are at least a dozen across Australia, some years ago made this classic understatement: “If there’s not been a presence in a regional town and all of a sudden there are (bikie) clubs expressing an interest, we need to look into why. They’re not setting up babysitting centres.”

The Overlanders

Last week, in the afternoon, I watched a screening of The Overlanders, an Anglo-Australian film released in 1946 which was based on the cattle drive from Wyndham to Brisbane, when 1,000 cattle were moved south to escape any Japanese invasion in 1942.

The film was in black and white, and the camerawork reflected the period, but it was still compelling. Filmed in the Northern Territory, it borrowed from the American Western themes of cattle drives, somewhat drily called a “Meat Pie Western” – that is the Australian version.

The film introduced Chips Rafferty, who received £25 a month for five months, but the film launched his career. You can see in some of Chips’ the facial expressions that Paul Hogan “inherited”.

Helen Grieve

What attracted my attention was the juvenile lead in the film, a fresh-faced teenager called Helen Grieve, who had been born in 1931 in Sydney. She was to appear in one further film, “Bush Christmas”, made in 1947. This was a bush adventure story about nasty men who steal the children’s horses. They are eventually caught; the children win out. I saw it; like many children of my age.  It was a great film. I well remember the Aboriginal boy introducing the white children to the witchetty grub, which he ate with relish, to the horror of the white children.

After “Bush Christmas” Helen Grieve gave acting away to do science. The proposed sequels to that film never eventuated, and film work in Australia had dried up.

My curiosity was tweaked.  There was little further information about her. She had died when she was rather young, at 49 years, in 1981. Then I discovered a note in the society pages of The Bulletin that she had married a David Joseland in 1955 at All Saints Woollahra.

The wedding report disclosed that her father was Herbert Ronald Robinson Grieve. He was a prominent medical practitioner with a general practice in Eastwood (but who lived with his family in Vaucluse). Dr Grieve was an influential meddler in the politics of health care, so much so that he was ultimately knighted, being a mate of Earle Page. Conservative in politics he may have been, but he still had enough energy to marry thrice.

David’s mother was a member of a pioneering pastoralist family near Canberra, and her husband, John Joseland had been absorbed into the Crace family when they married. She died in 1933; he too died in 1937.  David Joseland was thus orphaned and at the age of six he was consigned as a boarder at Cranbrook School.

As his daughter later said: “After seeing The Overlanders, Dad’s dream was to meet my mother, work on the land and have that rural life.” And he did all of that.

How they got together is for someone else to fill in. Sydney was far smaller then, and if it is assumed that the two of them were products of the privileged eastern suburbs, it would not have been that hard for young Joseland to fulfill his quest to find his Helen.

He was well connected despite his tragedy. His grandfather was a well-known Sydney architect with incidentally a deep love of fishing. His father had been a pastoralist near Canberra. David spent his vacations at Belltrees, the famous property of the White family in the Hunter Valley, still then a very large fragment of a huge landholding selected by one James White who had come to the colony in 1826, and was given a free hand it seemed to put together a half million acre holding extending from the Hunter Valley to the Manning River, and which was subdivided among his seven sons and daughter when died in 1842.

Helen Grieve was a science student at The University of Sydney while David  had left school to be a jackaroo on the Everard Park Station near the South Australian Pitjantjatjara lands. Theirs were not exactly overlapping careers, and hence ardour of David Joseland must have been the overriding factor.  When you see a photograph of him in his later years, he had the face of a very determined man, not unlike that of Reginald Williams of leather fame.

Their marriage was followed by the couple moving to the Mittiebah Station,  a pastoral lease operating as a cattle station in the Northern Territory of Australia.

To give some perspective, the station occupies an area of about 7,000 square kilometres on the Barkly Tableland, about 320 kilometres east of Tennant Creek and 285 kilometres north west of Camooweal.  The Joselands raised a family there. Helen died prematurely and her grave in Alice Springs is inscribed with a minimalist: “Her life was devoted to the outback and its people.”

Seven years after her death, David relinquished the lease and moved to Tumut in 1988. He died there in 2015.

It was a story worthy of Luhrmann’s “Australia”, rather than his faux-view of the Outback. I doubt if Nicole Kidman would have made a suitable Helen Grieve. But you never know, the name Kidman is also associated with cattle.

An Unexpected Consequence

Helen Grieve’s second film “Bush Christmas” was a resounding success in Great Britain in 1948, when rationing was still very much in force there.

The unexpected consequence of portrayal of the Aboriginal boy, Neza Saunders eating a witchety grub, in front of famished white children seems to have resonated with a hungry British upper class wondering whether grubs and snakes could alleviate food shortage.

Putting the Queue on the Rack

I hate queueing, but then it is an orderly way of accessing scarce resources, whether the scarcity is absolute or relative – or contrived.

Gripped for decades by neoliberalism Australia has developed, for those with the key to the executive toilet, a taste for monopoly and/or cartels. The aim is to eliminate risk in accumulating the dividend. The area of transport has not escaped the wondrous fingering of these people with the key.

Toll roads are one area where the gouge is well and truly cemented as part of the culture. Toll road owners seem immune from political vicissitudes; if the tolls get to “extreme outrageous”, then the politicians ante up with a subsidy for the drivers, while money keeps jingling into the toll road shareholders’ bank accounts.

But we have benefited by the Irish export of the flying leprechaun, Alan Joyce. An aggressive homunculus, his history with budget airlines should have forecast his contribution to Australian aviation. Drive down the costs and maximise the subsidies from government. With the pandemic, Qantas has mopped up a total of $856 million from Jobseeker and Jobkeeper and showing it had also taken substantial sums from other government support programs. Qantas has been supported through seven separate government programs so far, including refunded charges under the Australian Aviation Financial Relief Package, and subsidised flights to repatriate overseas Australians and maintain critical routes.

In future, the airline will benefit from a $200 million international aviation support program, which will outlay wage subsidies for its international crews, as well the Domestic Aviation Network Support (DANS) and Regional Airline Network Support (RANS) programs. And so it goes on…

In return, Joyce pampers those who fly up the front of the plane, with Captain’s Club and all the associated frills. The irony is that most of these beneficiaries are flying on Qantas on our taxes – namely the politicians of all hues.

What has Australia received? An industry dogged by contrived scarcities driven by shareholder greed and Irish blarney and caic tabh.

I hope that Qantas, reputed to be the safest airline in the World, does not have to be shaken from its price cutting frenzy by Australian lives.

And this above provides a foreword to a Washington Post analysis of what is happening in America currently, with a few eucalypt driven asides.

In the past two months, 2.2 percent of flights by U.S. carriers have been canceled and 22 percent — or 260,000 flights — have been delayed. The pattern is by no means limited to the United States: 52.9 per cent of flights departing from Toronto Pearson International Airport were delayed between June 1 and July 12; London’s Heathrow Airport, where 40 percent of flights were delayed, announced it would restrict the number of departing passengers to 100,000 daily.  (Sydney Airport came in at number six in the top 10 worse airports for cancellations, after it clocked a 5.9 per cent cancellation rate over the last two months. Australia’s largest gateway was also named number nine in the list of worst airports for flight delays, with 34.2 per cent of all flights delayed in the last two months)

Much of the problem stems from an industrywide labour shortage. After the aviation industry was decimated in 2020 by covid-19, U.S. airlines received $54 billion in pandemic aid (Qantas received an estimated AU$2bn and Virgin AU$1.2bn). Overestimating how long it would take for travel to scale back up, they offered older employees retirement packages and gave many workers temporary leaves of absence. Now they are struggling to train and certify new pilots quickly enough. Federal data suggest (more than suggests!) (The US Transportation Department data shows air carriers were directly responsible for about 41 percent of delays through May, a figure on par with last year but higher than before the pandemic. Late-arriving aircraft — another problem mostly attributable to airlines — accounted for an additional 37 percent of delays.) that the airlines were the biggest reason for flight delays in the United States from January to May, and are responsible for a significant number of cancellations. 

Most organizations working in air travel had to cut back on staffing or pause hiring in 2020. That has led to shortages in airport staff, baggage handlers, security and more. Employers are trying to rapidly hire and train workers, but many airport positions require security clearances. The air traffic control system has also experienced staffing challenges in certain high-volume areas, caused in part by covid-19 outbreaks and a halt in training before vaccines were available. Because air travel is deeply interconnected, issues in one airport can lead to delays and cancellations downstream, overwhelming the system.

The Transportation Department have been urged to use its powers on consumer protection to crack down on air carriers. In fact, the department has opened 20 investigations into airlines for failing to pay refunds efficiently. Authorities should enforce rules if any have been violated, but investigations take time and might not always produce the desired results. (The Australian Competition & Complaints Commission is not a complaints handling body, but we can choose to take action where there are systemic breaches of the ACL. The warm lettuce leaf response.)

In a June meeting, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pushed airline executives to ensure summer flight schedules were operable. Airlines, to their credit, have cut their schedules by 16 per cent since the spring, and flight cancellations have decreased since mid-June. Yet that does not address the longer-term questions of capacity. 

Airlines, airports and authorities must work together to fix the structural issues exposed by this summer’s disorder. The pilot shortage was a concern even before the pandemic. Carriers and the federal government should find ways to lower the barriers to entry to training programs and certification, which are time-consuming and costly.

It’s also time to look closely at recruitment and retention in airport and ground services, jobs that are often low-paying and labor-intensive with unattractive schedules. 

The air travel industry, like much of our economy, was unprepared for the disruption from COVID-19. By acting now, it could be more resilient in the face of future crises. (Difficult to know unless it is a direct assault on patient safety, whether the Australian Government has the appetite to challenge the powers of the airlines and airport management.)

Mouse Whisper

I understand that for the Gay Pride round of the National Rugby League next year, Manly will not change the name of its side to Binary.

Ian Roberts

Modest Expectations – Lionel Messi

The recent visit of the Prime Minister to Makassar in the Sulawesi, reminded us of the links of the Makassan traders with the northern Aboriginal people well before European discovery. It is a neglected area in the study of the cultural influence of these people.  Thus, I thought it interesting to reproduce below a bark painting which I bought some years ago on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. You be the judge of the cultural influences at play in this painting. 

In a tortuous vein

I had a pleasant surprise the other day. This is a lesson in clinging onto a view of what you think you know, and what is in fact reality. You may be dying, but you think tomorrow you will be better. I was reminded of the time leading up to the diagnosis of my underlying disease nine years ago. There was a delay in instituting therapy, and I was largely to blame – but not totally.

This time, my legs have been beset by increasing peripheral oedema, two swollen angry red calves and feet, compounded by the sub-fascial swelling on the soles of my feet.

Overnight, the swelling has always decreased, but the level of that reduction in oedema has slowed since the start of the pandemic because of weight increase and closure of hydrotherapy facilities. I dislike exercise especially if it is painful. Hydrotherapy provided a relief from the pain. My legs began to become more and more oedematous. Nobody offered the panacea I was looking for.

Over this period, there had been mention of vascular specialists and compression stockings but, as I now realise, I need for those who advise me to be assertive and not be ambivalent. The latter gives me an excuse for inaction.

I visit a plastic surgeon, who regularly checks me for skin lesions. I mentioned my legs; and once he saw how bad my legs apparently were, he said he had a vascular surgeon colleague whom I should see urgently.

Nearly ten years ago, it was an orthopaedic surgeon who looked at me, ordered tests, and by the next Monday, due to a fortuitous cancellation, I was able to see a consultant rheumatologist, who immediately confirmed the diagnosis the orthopaedic surgeon had considered, but which had been missed by a variety of other doctors. I might add I had seen another orthopaedic surgeon a week or so before and he offered to replace my knee joint almost immediately without any tests. That is the danger of being referred to a specialist, who may be technically brilliant but would have most certainly have ensured a very stormy post-operative passage for myself.

On this second occasion, it was a Thursday afternoon, and by Monday morning first thing, I had an appointment to see the vascular surgeon.

Now this vascular surgeon is young. He shares a clinic with three others. To the best of my knowledge he is not owned by an American hedge fund. He is actually into the business of helping people, not trading a commodity for financial gain.

Vascular ultrasound image

Under one roof, I had an ultrasound of my lower limbs’ vascular system, a consultation where the specialist did not expect to sit across a desk in a consulting room – inspected, interacted with the allied health professionals, recommended compression stockings. These and the applicator were on hand and my wife was taught the optimal way the stockings should be applied. As she said, looking at me meaningfully, she did read the instructions and watched the video in addition to the initial demonstration.

All in less than two hours – a one-stop shop. We had the compression stockings and the applicator.

Here was a local product where any Medicare benefits paid remained onshore, able to be reinvested. How different to those diagnostic imaging and pathology companies allegedly repatriating Medicare payments overseas.

Over 20 years ago, the Australia Institute in a discussion paper analysed the growth of corporate medicine foreshadowing the decline in standards as the profit motive became the prime driver in health care.

As the growth of corporate medicine grew so did Medicare become the ATM, not only for private entrepreneurs but also for the States, which were up to their filing cabinets in cost-shifting. As many of the purchasers were underwritten by overseas investors, the consequence increasingly will be that Medicare funding, which should remain in Australia, ends up in overseas tax havens.

The problem is that the medical profession has ceded control and hence independence to its corporate masters. As somebody who was involved in the various Inquiries in the regulation of the Medicare Benefits Schedule, I have always regretted that the AMA gave up this privilege, which meant that there was not any regular mechanism to alter the Medicare benefit, which was constantly misrepresented as a fee rather than a financial patient benefit the government provided for payment to the doctor.

During my time at the AMA, the discrepancy between the Medibank (then Medicare) benefit and the fee charged was symbolised by the AMA annual recommended list of medical fees. This was a guide, not an instruction by the AMA. Nevertheless, it maintained a relevance, which has only persisted after the introduction of gap insurance when the private health funds, initially prohibited, were able to re-enter the medical insurance market.

John Deeble, Medicare pioneer

After 1984, when the AMA abandoned the regular fee for Medicare benefit Inquiries, it became a matter for every medical specialty to negotiate for themselves. The problem for some of the medical specialties was a function of what happened following the Nimmo Inquiry in 1969 into health insurance which was that benefit relativities were based on what were the fees charged by each specialty; and these relativities naturally created distortions in the market as technology made a number of items of service much cheaper to perform. In 1977 it was clear that technology advances with automaton replacing manual testing was enabling pathologists to make a bonanza from Medicare payments. This Inquiry into the Pathology Medibank Benefits was the first instance of government intervention into these relativities.

The AMA, through the Inquiries, had effectively maintained control over relativities. It provided a form of “flawed order” even though some of the Medicare benefits were well in excess of the underlying cost of the service while some other areas of the profession had done badly.

Thus, from an exercise where the AMA and the Government were in an edgy if not directly confrontational relationship, then there was none.

As I found out henceforth from the AMA relinquishing its position, it became a matter of having a good cost accountant to negotiate with government. With the growth of technology, while the value of the professional component of the medical service remained important, in some areas of the service there were both a substantial technical and a capital component. The “technical” component includes the cost of the scientists, the technicians, the allied health professionals including nurses required to provide services which were not medical, and “capital”, such as the cost of linear accelerators, MRI facilities and so forth.

Not all capital costs are covered. For instance, disposables were inherent in the delivery of the professional component, and not differentiated into any of the other Medicare benefit components. In fact, most of the cost of these has been borne by the hospital. Even now re-usable devices and prostheses lie outside the cost of the service.

Enter the world of the entrepreneurs, more interested in cash flows and profit rather than patient care. Some of the first were medical graduates, like the criminal, the late Geoffrey Edelsten, who gave the whole area a bad name; but it is the multinational companies that have moved behind a wall of cost accounting to dissect the Medicare schedule to exact the greatest profits, and in so doing, to enable Medicare funding to be sent to tax havens overseas.

Some may say how outrageous such a comment is; but the easiest way to deal with Medicare funding is to prohibit any profits that those companies who benefit in any way from exporting those profits.

This vascular surgeon, whose expertise spreads far wider that just advising on varicosities, demonstrated the one-stop shop advantages, which I frankly did not expect, and another fact – you don’t need to run late if you are a doctor.  And you do not need to be a multinational corporation; his rooms were modern and located within a religious hospital.  Good God, on second thoughts, located in a multinational corporation!

Such a thought in no way diminished my satisfaction with the service.

I, the Cryptosexton

I read about this complicated thing called Cryptocurrency. After riding the Algorithm Hobbyhorse around in my Virtual Nursery, I realised that cryptocurrency must be like a bit of barter behind the tog room at school. Hidden from the authority, a packet of Senior Service for two packets of brown Capstan; but not requiring the electrical power requirements of a small city to accompany the transaction.

But this cryptocurrency surely must be more complicated than that, and thus have more benefits.

Apart from plugging cryptocurrency into the cyptocharger, I decided to call it Tulipcoin. I was tempted to use “Lillionarcissus-coin”, which was the name for “tulip” before this Turkish corruption of a Persian word for “turban” was adopted. But that name was too long, would use too much power.

I thought by calling my cryptocurrency after such a famous flower, irrespective of the corruption implicit in the name, I would honour a previous occasion which may have arisen in a crypt.

Jan Breughel the Younger’s view of tulipomania

The whole saga of the tulip bubble was well expressed years ago in the 1999 book “Tulipomania”. The basic cause of the exorbitant prices which the tulip bulb reached in sixteenth century Netherlands was somewhat eccentric. A Flemish merchant found tulip bulbs in a cargo of cloth from Istanbul, thought they were onions, ate most of them and planted the rest.

The resultant blooms were overwhelmingly beautiful and attracted the eye of wealthy Dutch burghers.

The tulip is thus the most captivating of flowers, and like so many products of the Levant, this was the favourite flower of Süleyman the Great, who not only cultivated the wild variety but also initiated the science of breeding hybrids.

Thus when the tulips bloomed, the Dutch, who had the time and were a very wealthy nation due to their trade in the East (the Dutch had a monopoly on nutmeg for instance), were intoxicated by the flower; and the tulip became the signature of these prosperous people.

As was written in Tulipomania: “In 1633, the flowers served no economic purpose other than relieve the cold wet spring with petals that promised a change from the grey mist”.

Initially they were not only desirable but scarce. They attracted gardeners and the few connoisseurs, where scarcity was compounded by the search for perfection. At one stage when a skilled worker could expect 250 guilders in a year, a single tulip bulb was traded for over 5,000 guilders. A small basket was worth more than an Amsterdam mansion. It took three years for the bubble to burst, which it did in a spectacular fashion in 1637.

One of the reasons for this was that many of the tulips had been infected with a virus, which did not necessarily diminish the spectacular colours but certainly lessened the life of each infected bulb. What’s more by that time trading in bulbs had spread throughout the community into every tavern across the country. One of the supposed benefits of cryptocurrency is to be able to bypass “stodgy banks”. Just like being able to buy a cheap TV at the local pub.  But here it was the tulip bulb.

The value of the bulb during this hectic three period provided a way to extricate oneself from, if not poverty, at least to being able to afford a decent house -only if you sold early.  However, given where many of the transactions took place as the author of Tulipomania wrote: “The trade was conducted for the most part in a haze of inebriation.”

How appropriate! My Tulipcoin placed into such a market – drunk with power but where the mist has yet to lift?

Reprise

I wrote the following italicised in my blog on 15 January 2021 in a vain attempt to promote Craig Reucassel to stand against Falinski. My sentiments yet have been reflected in the deserved dumping of this Morrison sycophant, despite all the protestations.  Subtly, my choice reveals my deep-seated prejudice, born of over 80 years in a male-dominant world. I suggested that a high-profile male with a formidable record in climate change and waste management should mount the challenge. I discounted the fact that he lived far away in the Sydney inner west.

Dr Sophie Scamps MP

I congratulate Dr Scamps (pronounced Scomps), who has been a high-achieving, very well qualified general practitioner who both lived and practised in the electorate, before successfully challenging Mr Falinski in the recent Federal election. My sense of his vulnerability was correct, but I got the gender of the new Member for MacKellar wrong.

I would suggest one of the New South Wales’ seats held by one of the Trump neophytes would be perfect for him, given that upending Abbott showed the way to do it. Maybe Falinski, whose seat is MacKellar, would be the way to go. Falinski is the typical Liberal Party hack toeing the party line.

As Falinski said in his maiden speech full of the pieties expected:

And so a politician is accountable to their community – I am accountable to you.

Mr Jason Falinski

Wrong, he is beholden to his masters, never voted against any government.  He has a voting record which would please Donald Trump – he should be vulnerable to somebody with the Reucassel values. I would love to see them debate why, for instance, Falinski has inter alia disagreed recently with the proposition:

“The Prime Minister to attend the House by 2 pm Tuesday 8 December to make a statement to advise the House whether Australia is speaking at the Climate Ambition Summit and table any correspondence with the summit organisers relating to whether Australia is speaking at the summit.”

This is but one example, but Falinski’s voting record is reprehensible to any person who is genuinely Liberal.

Reucassel is genuinely concerned with climate change and the world becoming a rubbish dump. He should be elected to Parliament to pursue this goal and hold the government to account.  Falinski seems unwilling to do so. Is it Mitch* Falinski, or is that your second name?

*Mitch stands for that annoying Kentucky Senator, who pleads propriety but unquestionably has supported Trump. Dr Scamps reminded the electorate of the false nature of the so-called moderate Falinski’s voting record.

Janus was an EU Politician with the head of Boris Johnson

As an impotent observer of world affairs, I fret over the ambivalent attitudes of politicians over the fate of Ukraine. Angela Merkel defends her legacy in stalling the entry of Ukraine into NATO by saying that, at the time in 2008, the Ukraine was controlled by a pro-Soviet Government.

The root problem was that most governments wanted Zelensky to disappear into some hedonist exile, and he has proved to be very inconvenient.  He wanted to defend the sovereignty of his nation. Suddenly, the Ukrainians had a leader, an uncompromising charismatic leader who, in a matter of 100 days, has differentiated a country from the neighbouring Russians. The ferocity with which the Ukrainians have responded to the Russian invasion contrasts with the bloodless coup where Russia took Crimea back from the Ukraine eight years ago, and have defined a country, which no matter the outcome will never again be just a “Little Russia”.

Zelensky has thus created that which most Ukrainians have always believed; and that is Ukraine as an independent nation. He has ensured this affirmation occurred in the full glare of the World spotlight.

Putin has been revealed as a primitive hominid intent on destroying the world’s energy and food supply as he dresses up as Peter the Great, an absurd travesty of the human condition.

The New York Review of Books provide a comparison of sorts in critiquing yet another book about Anne Frank. The contention is that if only the same courage epitomised by Zelensky had been on display during the time leading up to Anne Frank’s death in a Nazi concentration camp, she may have survived. As has been pointed out, because of the lack of any ongoing focus on Dutch Jews in particular, she was always in peril.

Anne and her Diary

As part of the analysis, a harsh judgement was made about Queen Wilhelmina in that she failed to stand up to the Nazis and fled to Great Britain. She had maintained Dutch neutrality during WW1; but the only indication of her attitude to the plight of Jews was she insisted a Jewish refugee camp prior to WWII be moved further away from her summer palace than it was originally planned.

The American Government declined to give the Frank family a visa to travel to New York via Cuba in 1941. It provides an unsettling view of a country, with a quick trigger for invading non-European countries, and yet basically ambivalent against European aggressors. President Biden’s halting support of Ukraine could be the USA in early 1941. The Allies did not bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. A matter of unimportance in the scheme of things!

Russia seemed to have infiltrated the top levels of government, politically, socially, financially, corruptly – a passage facilitated by Trump and scattered within the Conservative Party, those that worship the Infantis Johnson. However, there would not be a country in Europe where the malign Putin influence has not infiltrated.

As a result, maybe NATO could imprint the head of Janus as an emblem in acknowledgement of this influence given the way they have responded to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Mouse Whisper

I was on a field visit when I heard a regional ABC reporter talking to a local farmer about the cost of a box of cauliflowers. He was selling them for $80 a box.

“What was the usual cost?” she asked.

“About $20 a box.”

“Oh, they’re double the cost then.”

Good to see the ABC is maintaining its standards.

Great value at twice the price, or is that four times?

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

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

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

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

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

The Political Leak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Albright

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

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

Below are random quotes mostly garnered from the Boston Globe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Floods – The Clarence River

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

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

Lismore floods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Island Part II

The view of the Gut from Five Rivers Lookout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rupert could not have said it better

Ketanji Brown Jackson

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

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

Final Question

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

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

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

Modest Expectations – Leyland Sprinter

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

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

Strahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vera Putina’s little boy

The Winter War – Finland v Russia

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

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

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

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

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

Destruction caused by Putin’s war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgotten Ohio Ukrainians rallying against Putin’s war

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

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

Albored Part IV – No Longer Unready?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maeslant storm surge barrier near Rotterdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rupert’s Quote of the Geek

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

Try Ukraine, Buster!

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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