Modest Expectations – Virat Kohli

True happiness, according to Epicurus, was not found in indulgence or excess but in the state of ataraxia – the untroubled mind, the freedom to focus and think with clarity. Ed Smith (former professional English cricketer & journalist) remembers being taught this principle at 18, when a cricket coach told him what makes great players distinct is that they are capable of “the absence of irrelevant thought”.

The smartphone is a machine for introducing it as often as possible. The business model that underpins it is that human attention must be broken, again and again. Silicon Valley has conducted a 15-year, unregulated experiment on the brains of most of the world’s children; Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, wants to call time on it. 

Haidt cites Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Harrison Bergeron”, which envisages an American dystopia in which being excellent at anything (and therefore un-egalitarian) has been made illegal. The preferred weapon of “handicapping” exceptionally bright people is to make them wear an earpiece which buzzes roughly every 20 seconds to sabotage sustained concentration. Stopping attention is the lever by which intelligence can be flattened.

The realisation that the use of smartphones has the dark side of being the vehicle for not only  pathological distraction, but also cyber bullying, has been well documented. It has been shown that confiscation of these phones when arriving at school and then returning them after school has had a positive effect. However, if you just ask the students to turn their phones off, but allow them to keep them whilst in school, then nothing much changes.

The importance of there being no exceptions means that the school must have a protocol for emergencies which much be continually reinforced. As for contacting parents via phone, the haven for manipulative bullies’ whining, then there is no reason why “little Johnny” cannot be filtered through a designated cohort of teachers.

As one source has said, “the stages of panic, grief and ultimately some level of acceptance” are the student reactions to such a ban.

Yet the dependence on a well-balanced teaching staff is paramount for successful implementation..

I have two anecdotes which exemplify the problem of teacher dysfunctionality.

The first was when I was in junior school, either ten or eleven years old. Our teacher, who was very emotionally labile, sent the whole class of about 25 boys to the Principal to be caned. I remember us boys, all clustered in front of the Principal’s study in a dark corridor. The Principal came out, took one look and sent us all back to the classroom. He then asked the teacher, who by now was a blubbering mess, to come to his study. The Principal was a very calm, authoritative man; he always showed understanding. The teacher left the school soon after.

The other time was when one of my sons, aged seven, was refused permission to go to the toilet on more than one occasion. My then wife and I confronted the teacher, whose truculence disappeared under some very tough talking, but still did not admit any fault. The then Principal, unlike my junior school Principal preferred to look away. That was the only time we ever intervened in our children’s progress through school. We did not have confront the teacher again despite the weak Principal.

Later when I ran a community health program, I remember the rationale given for having a school nurse.  One could monitor the pupils seeking school nurse support.  If, in the extreme example, large numbers from one class presented at the sick bay, it is an indication that such a class may be dysfunctional; on the other hand, if no children came to the sick bay, then was that undue denial by the teacher to seek the school nurse care, rather than believing it was a very healthy class?

One may question raising these extremes in teacher behaviour, but banning smartphones requires an acceptance across the community, despite differing attitudes and behaviour of school staff – until it becomes the community norm. In turn, this requires a very narrow “behavioural corridor” on how this ban is administered.

Otherwise, as I try to write, I can hear that intermittent Vonnegut-generated buzzing in my ear, but I refuse to be distracted. So should all children be afflicted by this seductive but essentially dystopian device in school. You know talking face-to-face is a way of confronting life and forcing the bullies out in the open.

I was bullied on my first day at school by a child who later became a respected member of the clergy. My father who came across this interchange, made an on-the-spot decision. He had me taught to box – never had to use that skill. Knowledge was enough. But what if I had grown up in this era?

Albanese – 2015

We’re used to seeing a few slip-ups and gotchas in Question Time, but yesterday Anthony Albanese shocked us with a particularly poor choice of words.

The Labor MP has copped some criticism over apparently urging one of his colleagues to “smash her!”, when rising to grill health minister Sussan Ley.
As member for Ballarat Catherine King rises to question the coalition MP, Albanese can be heard to casually call out the aggressive phrase from the front bench, with laughter from colleagues following.
The choice of words is at odds with the opposition’s current focus on addressing domestic violence.

Hot Copper may have reported this 2015 incident, but I have seen the video, which now seems to have disappeared from the Web. It is very unappetising spectacle of a snarling Albanese.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese again calling the troops to action?

From my simple point of view, this man who has publicly advocated a violent act against a woman is totally unacceptable to be Prime Minister of this country; neither he, nor those who laughed along with his unappetising snarler should be allowed to remain in Parliament by their electorates.

Thus, I do not buy the argument why single Albanese out when other Parliamentarians have an appalling record in this area as well. I agree one cannot ignore that. However, Albanese is the Prime Minister, and he is constantly saying that men should be respectful towards women. He has demonstrated in the incident quoted above to be anything but that. A Prime Minister should be called to a higher standard.

It is a challenge for the Labor women to have as their leader a man who advocated violence against Sussan Ley. I’ve been around long enough to hold the view that an outburst is unlikely to be a single episode, and was there any apology?

The Tragedy of Sydney

After consideration of all the material, I declared that it was a terrorist incident – NSW Commissioner of Police Karen Webb.

I penned this just after these two incidents and then put it away to see what happened after the acute reaction had subsided, and whether I would change much. The answer: not much. Shortened it and modified the invective.

I have witnessed the emergency responses to the horror which dogs every community when faced with the lone mad person, invariably male, who goes on a rampage killing multiple people senselessly.  In the case of the Bondi incident, he may have been a paranoid schizophrenic completely delusional, but he was killing people willy-nilly, until a senior policewoman in shirt sleeves shot him dead.

However, what struck me was these men resembling at a distance Michelin Men in black with very large guns rolling across the ground apparently after the fact. As the camera zoomed in, these guys were wearing black balaclavas, as if they were about to rob the Centre; and since they appeared to be made to look anonymous, I wonder how you distinguish them from terrorists or just well-organised thieves? Just a question of seeking information.

Then, on top of that, a 16 year old teenager stabbed an Assyrian Church priest. Subdued by the congregation, the teenager lost a finger in the melee. Belatedly, police turned up implying that they were there to sort out the situation when it was mostly over. All that needed to be done was to quieten the crowd which had gathered and ensure the safety of the injured assailant. Instead, it was reported that the police used tear gas.

The violence on that Monday night was as disgusting as it was perplexing, given the police were there to help Bishop Emmanuel and to investigate his stabbing.

The reason for this deployment was the responsibility of the accidental Commissioner, the former traffic cop, Webb. She declared this stabbing an act of terrorism whatever the logic, an over-reaction ensured.  Even the Premier seemed initially to admit her order was an over-reaction. The teenager was known to police and had convictions, Once the teenager was found out to be Muslim, then the story of this teenager being a part of a terrorist cell grew and in turn justified Webb’s order.

The Assyrian response

The Assyrian community, irrespective of which Assyrian church they followed, had gathered and suddenly the government had sent the police to presumably arrest the “terrorists”.  The reaction of the community was not one of submission but one of fury.

What happens when people in uniform arrive, for no apparent reason, to confront the crowd; unless there is demonstrable leadership it is not long before a crowd becomes a mob. In this case, there were injuries to people. People were taken to hospital including two police. The mob jumped all over the police cars, rendering half of them unusable. Why were there so many police cars (the actual number seems to vary); what was the reason, given it was supposed to be one lone teenager terrorist attack?

It seems some of the police were not dressed as black Michelin Men but still with their Perspex face shields and weaponry presented an ominous sight. Yet they appeared to be overwhelmed by the mob despite their use of tear gas, if the reports were true.

Over the following month, they hunted down the protesters displaying to the media that it takes at least five heavily armed officers to arrest one of these rioters.

I was faced with a potentially nasty situation in 1960. The annual end-of-term engineer-commerce students’ marbles match – an excuse for a sort of Eton wall game that was held on the Commerce lawns outside the University Union.

The Commerce lawns in a wet May were, to say the least, very soggy. The ground was once a lake and soon degenerated into a muddy confrontation. It was tolerated as a way for students to let off steam (remembering the University was then a predominantly male institution). The police kept away. However, on this occasion, some idiot smashed the fire alarm, and before long with bells ringing two fire engines arrived, bowling into the students spilling onto the roadway. This minor show of aggression turned ugly when one of the students tipped a bucket of mud through the window of the one of the fire trucks.

Then the confrontation threatened to escalate as these burly firemen got out the vehicle, some looking as if they were spoiling for a fight. I remember very well three of the student leaders, one of whom was myself, wading into the crowd to try and calm the situation down. I remember that the firemen were persuaded to climb back into their vehicles, and they left without having to call in the police.

Yes, we then had to go down and face a choleric fire chief, who dismissed our apologies. We all left, were interviewed by the media on the footpath outside and it was front page news the next day.  Then we all went on first term holidays and the furore died down. I don’t think these university students were considered terrorists. I was helped by my two fellow students in calming down the situation – one became a Supreme Court Judge and the other a Federal Court judge. That episode taught me a great deal. By the way, the University administration did not intervene; they left us to sort it out.

Thus, the local Federal Member for Fowler, Dai Le, seemed initially the most sensible in seeking to calm down the situation.  The local community has followed this course advocating reconciliation and peace. Yet the media persisted with the allegation that this was a terrorist attack.

The Assyrian priest forgave his attacker, the epitome of Christian behaviour.

Reading between the lines, the response of Burgess, the spy chief, seems to be ambiguous about this incident being a terrorist threat, but once someone in authority “cries wolf”, especially when she had been under serious criticism on other matters related to her lack of leadership, it probably does not help to directly criticise another senior public servant.

Invoking an incident as an act of terrorism can stigmatise a community and sow unnecessary anxiety and alienation from the instruments of government – the police being one example.

The Premier talks not about conciliation, unless it is his meaningless term “people of faith” but says he will confront the community with “the full force of the Law”. Well, if 50 police cars and the anti-riot squad are not the “full force of the Law”, what is? To my mind, it is the lone policewoman, who brought to an end the ghastly events in Bondi Westfield by confronting and shooting the murderer. That is the full force of the law, not all the other macho trimmings that seem to obsess governments. The policewoman exhibited two qualities – courage and an ability to assess the situation correctly; little information but with impeccable induction-deduction that led her to come to the right conclusion quickly.

Terrorists presumably are not banshees.  The terrorist groups must be known. In this instance, where was intelligence from ASIO, whose mouthpiece tells us they know everything, and should have a clear idea of the potential danger of what we may name ‘Teenage Terrorist Group”.

Otherwise, what value are Australia’s security services providing? Australia pays a high price for its security services. For me, we do not pay this money for scaremongering or “cloak and dagger” farce, but for a service which provides reassurance to the community without complacency. The question arises of why these terrorists are allowed to roam freely in the community, once identified? I can conjure up reasons, related the cost of incarceration. Yet Australia has had successive governments prepared to spend astronomical amounts of money on dodgy contractors to guard people who come here in boats and are then imprisoned. Are they all terrorists? How do these people contaminate Australia?

Another beached lugger

In 1979, when I was staying in Broome, there was a recently-beached Vietnamese lugger in the mangroves in front of the motel where I was staying. The Fraser government welcomed the Vietnamese refugees, and by doing so enriched our Australian community. Would Dutton have done the same, but of course he was only nine years old at the time?

I have tried not to make too many value judgements but ask questions. The paradox is of media alive with misinformation and not challenging what appears to me to be gaps in the logic of government, the gaps being filled with cliches, often repeated in this opaque shroud of not knowing what to do, but afraid to let the community in on that secret! Secrecy appears to be a cover for our leaders for inaction and hoping the whole matter will go away – or worse result in a cover up?

Boondoggle Stadium Hobart

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Boy Scouts at summer camps participated in the latest scouting craze in which boys braided and knotted colourful strands of plastic and leather to fashion lanyards, neckerchief slides and bracelets. Eagle Scout Robert Link of Rochester, New York, coined the term for this new handicraft, “boondoggling”. Chris Klein 2018

Arguably, the AFL should be first in line to fund the construction of an AFL stadium, rather than kicking in less than 2% of the proposed $800 million total. However, it can also be argued that the project will bring thousands of jobs, urban renewal, a massive tourism boost, a visible pathway for young athletes, and lots of footy for the fans.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a sitcom. Australia is facing a housing affordability crisis, and a cost of living crisis, both of which are compounded by rising inflation. As such, many Tasmanians aren’t over the moon about the announcement, and they’ve voiced their disapproval about the project publicly. Chris Sheedy June 2023

You can guarantee the sun will rise in the East. Unbackable odds.

Equally, once the Labor Opposition elected a bloke to replace a sheila as its Leader, it was London to a brick that the Tasmanian government would agree to build a new stadium at some exorbitant cost – any current estimate is just a number which will be exceeded.  No worries you blokes, see on the plans, the luxury lounge where we can watch the games in comfort, popping the corks and tasting the best of Tasmanian fare. Better than any Chairman’s Lounge.

In 2023 Albanese, in stumping up $240m of taxpayer money, tried to sweeten the sandwich by saying that the project would “include social housing and commercial and recreational spaces, but there was no extra information on how many houses would be built, or how a business centre would fit on the site and in the budget.

Crown land at Regatta Point will be developed through a private-public partnership, including affordable housing, housing for essential health workers so close to the hospital facilities here.” It is a wonder he did not promise a multi-purpose religious centre as well.

I would never say that the AFL is trying to blackmail Tasmania, nor that a “business centre” mentioned by Albanese be a casino. After all, all this extravagance must be underwritten by some source of revenue (aka gambling), unless they can induce one of the oil states or some hedge fund Croesus to sponsor the team.

After all, the intention is to play seven games a year in Hobart and four in Launceston. There is a time-honoured Tasmanian government bankrupting strategy, that if Hobart has one, Launceston must have one also. Seven games a year! What was the cost again for such a projected use? The cost the length of a piece of string is at the mercy of the builders and the construction unions.

The team, rather than being called the Tasmanian Devils, would be better called the Tasmanian Boondoggles, when the team enters the League in 2028, then for a decade to be the chopping block for all the other teams, while the country burns under the burden of climate change. And by the way, just check the projected sea levels at the construction site.

Mouse Whisper

Along a certain English road, there was a sign which read “Cat’s Eyes Removed”. An official sign apparently. The informal sign down the road read “Mice Very Happy”.

The Boss roared with laughter. What was funny about blinding cats even if they have benefited by English cousins? And why would they publicly announce such terrible things? But then, it is the same nation that made fun of three blind mice.

Modest Expectations – Melville has some Depth (+1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Tasmanian Response

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

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

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

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

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

Opium poppies in flower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reclaimed Huon pine

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

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

Sexual Violence Tra-la-la

Anna Neagle and Michael Wilding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting it Right

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

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

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

Some Like it Hot

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

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

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

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

FOR THE PEPPERPOT

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

… now the process

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

How it all started.

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

Symbiotic relationship – if that is the word.

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

But he still had his pictures.

Modest Expectations – Forgery

Iowa most likely ends the GOP race before it has had a chance to begin. The party will be weaker for it. Instead of subjecting the front-runner to a meaningful test, this odd exercise amounted to a layup. Trump overperforms in rural areas and among White voters. That’s Iowa to a T.

In the state’s empty reaches, he rolled up majorities worthy of a tin-pot dictator. Take a precinct of Kossuth County, north of Algona, near the Minnesota border. All of 38 voters gathered to caucus, and 33 of them went for Trump. Or the precinct of Appanoose County, down in the southeast corner of the state, that mustered all of 69 voters, with 55 of them choosing Trump. 

Huge margins among sparse populations gave Trump an appearance of invulnerability. But the closer the race drew to a population center — someplace big enough to have a Costco or a Chick-fil-A — the weaker he appeared. Haley, the preferred candidate of never-Trump Republicans and independent voters, actually beat the former president in multiple precincts of Des Moines, Iowa City, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport. 

Above is the Hawkeye snowy Capitol in Des Moines. The whole of the USA has been gripped in blizzard conditions with a wind chill plunging the temperature to minus 40º Fahrenheit. It probably affected the turnout for the Republican caucus, which was very low comparatively.

Then there is an excerpt from a perspicacious opinion piece in the wake of the Republican caucus, won by Trump. While many outlets described a landslide victory, The Washington Post was more circumspect, considering the low turnout of voters. Iowa is 90 per cent white and therefore hardly representative of cross-sectional America.

Yet it is the first on the electoral slate. Now that the circus has rolled through, it can be forgotten for the next four years. It only has six electoral college votes. It is not a very populous State, with the capital at Des Moines, which reflects its fur trader history as both the Missouri and Mississippi flow through the State.

In colonial times, the river was the conduit between French Canada and Louisiana. As one writer has succinctly put it: Beginning in 1682, France laid claim to the area of central North America which included the vast Mississippi River drainage basin. French colonists moved to the region near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers in the latter half of the seventeenth century. French fur traders, trappers, farmers, and Jesuit missionaries came from France, French Canada, and New Orleans to Upper Louisiana (la Haute-Louisiane).

The French had entered the land of the Iowa Tribe in the late seventeenth century; and were followed by a polyglot mixture of French and Spanish.  Iowa was part of Upper Louisiana. It was included in the Louisiana purchase when Jefferson purchased the French Territory for 60m francs in 1803 – the Louisiana Purchase. Des Moines itself means “of the monks” and it is suggested this refers to a colony of Trappist monks that settled in the area in the early eighteenth century.

Iowa is one of the major centres, together with Illinois and Minnesota, where soya beans are grown. As one anonymous commentator has said about these farmers, they are all individualist freedom advocates until it comes to ethanol subsidies for their soya beans and then they all become communists.

I went to Iowa in 2009 hoping to catch up with a guy whom I had met at university in the early sixties when he was on an exchange scholarship – it may have been a Fulbright. He was Malcolm “Mac” Rohrborough, and for a brief time we were friendly, even though he was nine years older than myself. He was an expert in early American history, and subsequently published prolifically about the American West, particularly the Gold Rush. I don’t know how we met, perhaps it was during my period as President of the Student Representative Council, and I do remember him in being at my 21st birthday party.

After he returned to the USA, he took up a post at the Iowa State University in Iowa City, a university town in the eastern part of the State. I said to my wife that we should go to Iowa and try to make contact with Mac after almost fifty years. A vain wish.  He had retired the previous year as “professor emeritus” and replied he had gone east to retire. No invitation to visit, so we took the hint.

Nevertheless, we stayed at the university hotel, more like a university college, a light airy place, comfortable and cheap – some compensation for missing Mac. Iowa City is not a Trump stronghold. It voted 71 per cent for Biden in 2020 election. By contrast, Iowa voted 53 per cent for Trump and 43 per cent for Biden. Iowa’s current congressional delegation consists of its two senators and four representatives, all Republicans.

In a strange footnote to his Iowan activities, former President Donald Trump thanked ex-hitman Salvatore Gravano for speaking highly of him, which has raised eyebrows on social media. Gravano, also known as “Sammy the Bull,” was an underboss for the Gambino crime family in New York City and worked with the United States government as an informant to take down mob boss John Gotti in the early 1990s. Gravano, who confessed to his involvement in 19 murders, was released from prison in 2017 after being sentenced to 20 years for running an ecstasy ring in Arizona.

I’m not sure how that will play out on the Hawkeyes, especially those who do not quite agree with the Proposition that Donald Is God. But he would not care. He can forget about them now.

Australia is a Foreign Land

Tasmania is the largest Australian island that I have visited. It made me think, as I was reading “The Tiwi of North Australia,” a book by Charles Hart and Raymond Pilling published in 1960 but containing observations about Tiwi Islander culture, that Hart experienced living with the Tiwi between 1928 and 1930 and Pilling in 1953 and 1954.

Macassan trepanger

Although I have visited the Abrolhos, Rottnest, Kangaroo, French, Philip, King, Bruny, Cockatoo, Bribie, Brampton, Magnetic, Dunk, Green, Lizard, Thursday and Mornington Islands, I have never visited Melville or Bathurst Islands, which the Tiwi people have inhabited for aeons. To put it in perspective, these islands are eighty kilometres north of Darwin in the Arafura Sea. Melville is the second largest and Bathurst fifth largest after the largest Australian island, Tasmania. They were the first port of call for potential invaders, and well before Cook they had contact with Europeans, as well as the Macassan trepangers.

This experience has given the Tiwi people their distinctive culture with plenty of space in which to roam and develop their cultural identity, which in past twenty years they have successfully commercialised. Yet there is no suggestion that they cultivated “gardens” in the manner of their northern neighbours.

The Tiwi saw the mainland as a foreign land. They were very ferocious in repelling those who dared to land uninvited. They had spears, but not returning boomerangs. The woomera – the spear carrier – did not exist. Nevertheless, they were expert in the use of their spears.

Their culture, as reflected in their artifacts, was highly distinct from other Aboriginal tribes. The Tiwi people are known for their burial poles and their woven baskets.  We have collected a wide range of Tiwi art which is characteristically decorated in cross-hatched, geometrical designs encasing dots – white, black and various shades of deep yellow into brown.  Ochre and charcoal are the basic materials for the colours, and while I have an ironwood bird, most of the modern sculptured birds characteristic of Tiwi art are now made of lightweight wood. The difference between ironwood and any other wood is very clear when trying to lift any sculpture made of ironwood.

Depiction of Ampitji by Jane Margaret Tipuamantumirri

What has bought the Tiwi people into focus was the dismissal in the Federal Court of the claim by three Tiwi who claimed that the proposed Santos gas line would disturb Ampitji, the guardian sea rainbow serpent; and given this serpent would appear not to take kindly to a competing serpent – the Santos gas python – she would inflict cyclones and disease in revenge, a serpentine apocalypse.

 

The idea that a mythical creature could have halted a major project by a major political donor would seem to go counter to all the neoliberal belief systems that have gripped the country with its own mythology – well who would have thought it!  Watch this space to see if there is an appeal to reconcile these myths of sea serpent and neoliberalism.

But then the Tiwi have always learnt a way of accommodating the intruders. As one research paper put it well: The Dutch had come in search of a land which might have possibilities for trade. They found a land which they thought was barren waste, inhabited by people who had no possessions of value for exchange. On Bathurst and Melville islands the Dutch found a people who had a rich and highly developed civilisation, but a civilisation which was so unlike that of the Europeans that the two people were too dissimilar to have anything to offer one another.

The Tiwi also had contact with the Portuguese settlers on Timor, and unlike the Dutch, the Portuguese found the Tiwi made useful slaves, especially when the Tiwi went searching for iron.

Then, before WWII, there was intimate contact with Japanese pearl divers.  The Australian Government attempted to prevent this co-habiting between Tiwi women and the Japanese.  This had occurred because the quantity of pearl shell inter alia in the Arafura Sea attracted a virtual fleet of Japanese luggers which berthed on the islands.  The Japanese provided food in greater and better quality than the Catholic mission – in exchange for young Tiwi women’s sexual favours. This affected the domestic arrangement which the Catholic missionaries, who had come to the Tiwi country prior to WWI, tried to foster among the people.

This situation ended with the outbreak of war with the Japanese in 1941. The islands were bombed, without apparent casualties but in anticipation of invasion by the Japanese military, the Catholic mission encouraged the Tiwi to go bush, very difficult since the Tiwi were now accustomed to being provided with food and tobacco.  The invasion never occurred.

The Tiwi people have thrived; and have produced a fine array of champion Australian Rules footballers, but even with their exposure to multiple incursions by Europeans, Japanese and Macassan, they have maintained a distinct cultural identity, which their island isolation had helped maintain while adapting to the whitefellas, who are constantly bothering them – nowadays for a price of being tourists.

Nevertheless, as I continue to think about the Tiwi islands, because of their sentinel position north of Darwin, what of the comparison of the Torres Strait inhabitants? The Torres Strait islands constitute an area of 48,000 km2 but their total land area is 566 km2. By contrast, Bathurst and Melville Islands (with a number of small uninhabited islands) cover 8,320 km2. The population is around 3,000.

The Torres Strait Islander population is more difficult to determine as there are data which seem to be different measures, but there seem to be about 5,000 living on the Islands. However, the 2022 Census seems to suggest that the total number of Torres Strait Islanders is around 60,000 – 70,000 in Australia, which means that there is a large population living away from the Strait.

The Torres Strait population is a mixture of Polynesian, Melanesian and Aboriginal.  Tiwi is over 90 per cent Aboriginal. How influential the Japanese have been in part of the heredity of both is a matter of conjecture; but I remember Japtown on Thursday Island and being driven around by a taxi driver, who admitted to mixed Japanese heritage. The effect of Japanese pearl divers has been significant, but how significant.

The point is we recognise the separate existence of the Torres Strait islanders. As for the Tiwi, the mainland was a foreign land. The Tiwi guarded their independence.  How many Tiwi live on the mainland? Enough for their independent recognition?

Theresienstadt

My companion and I decided to travel to Terezin in Czechia, along with Prague. It was to be the culmination of a trip to Eastern Europe. First we had a boat trip down the Danube from Romania, down to the Black Sea and back to Budapest, while stopping at ports in Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. Unfortunately, my companion became ill and although she survived the boat trip, we decided to cancel the Czechia leg and returned home from Budapest, which was just as well. But that is another story.

Theresienstadt (now Terezin)

I wanted to go to Terezin because it was the site of Theresienstadt, a concentration camp built by the Nazis to resemble a normal town. I wondered how they maintained the illusion – the deception. I wanted to see it at first hand.

This concentration camp was cast in the image of a town, with a “beautification program”, including planting 1,200 rose bushes, cleaning the streets and buildings, constructing a “child care pavilion” complete with sandbox, merry-go-round and wading pool. Food rations were doubled. There were concerts, cabaret and theatrical performances and a soccer match – all carefully staged and rehearsed.  This was all done to hoodwink the Red Cross visitors, who were either Swiss or Danish.

Unlike other concentration camps, Theresienstadt had been a garrison town under the Habsburg Empire with plenty of barracks where you could conveniently house the prisoners – an interim place to send those destined for the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald. Despite all the show, these barracks were squalid and there was never enough food.

Theresienstadt Barracks

Hans Adler, a Jewish Bohemian author, was sent to Theresienstadt, where he was incarcerated for two years and saw how the camp was structured. It was presented as a self-governing Jewish settlement, with an internal Jewish administration subservient to the SS. The prisoners were guarded by 150 Czech “gendarmes”; there were about 20 SS officers on site and mostly out of sight, yet they controlled Theresienstadt through the Jewish Council of Elders.

These Jewish inmates were granted privileges which the ordinary Jewish prisoners did not have. They lived as family, and they were given orders verbally by the SS. Nothing was written down between the two.

The Council of Elders determined who was to be transported to the gas chambers. Benjamin Murmelstein, a Ukrainian-born rabbi, worked closely with Adolf Eichmann in Vienna as the only surviving rabbi and then as the last chief elder of the Council who collaborated with Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He has been singled out for universal revulsion by the Holocaust survivors yet after the War lived in Rome never charged with any war crimes.  He lived long enough to see his boss, Adolph Eichmann, executed by the Israeli government. The chain of command descending from Eichmann ended with The Council choosing those to be transported to the gas chambers, according to the categories demanded by their Nazi superiors.

Rabbi Murmelstein was not the only one. There were indeed many members of the Council, a post which provided protection for their families. So, there were many others. In a review of Adler’s book about Theresienstadt between those years 1941 and 1945, the NYRB reviewer, Thomas Nagel, recounts referring to Adler:

The decision to hide the truth strikes me as comprehensible but appalling – though none of us can know what we would have done in the circumstances. Adler, who must have learned about it after the war, seems unable to come to a judgement about the Elders’ decision; he reserves his condemnation for individuals who, knowing the truth, not only tried to spare their friends but used the transports to get rid of people who were giving them trouble. For example, after Vladimir Weiss, a member of the “Detective Department”, sent the Jewish Elder Paul Eppstein a detailed complaint of flagrant corruption in the allocation of food, he and his family disappeared on the next transport. 

Yes, we hear much about the descendants of Holocaust victims but what of those who count this Council’s members as their relatives?

Hans Adler may have survived the War, despite being part of the protected group in Theresienstadt. However, he was eventually sent to Auschwitz near the end of the War. As was his wife, Gertrud, a doctor, deported there.  She refused to leave her mother and went to the gas chamber in late 1944.  Adler did not join her.

In all, Adler lost sixteen members of his family – a survivor to live out his life in a “community of guilt” With how many others?

I am not one to visit former concentration camps, but the whole account intrigued me.  That intrigue about Theresienstadt has not dimmed.

Dutton in January

In the end, the “cost of living” isn’t about the prices on grocery shelves, it’s about the distribution of income. In Australia, income has shifted from wages to profits and from low- and middle-income earners to those in the top 10% of the income scale and, even more, to the handful of “rich listers” whose growing wealth has outstripped that of ordinary Australians many times over. – John Quiggin Guardian Spotlight 19 January 2024.

One of the political axioms, at least when I had a handle on the production of political party policy, was to float ideas in January when political activities were light. I remember for instance that we floated the idea of a deferred interest mortgage to test how acceptable it was to be incorporated into the Liberal Party housing policy.

Other policies were tested at other times; under the influence of John Knight, later a Senator for the ACT, Bill Snedden reversed the China policy of the Liberal Coalition which existed under Prime Minister McMahon. That resulted in Snedden being invited to visit China, which we did in July 1973; so much was positively achieved that whilst we were there a late invitation came for Snedden to meet Chou-en-lai, then having his own difficulties with the Gang of Four who were very much in the saddle then with the blessing of Mao Zedong. Whitlam came to China later that year. So instead of an ongoing pointless ideological conflict, there was agreement on both sides of Australian politics.

Contrast this with the footprints of Dutton. He wheels out the commercial decision not to embroider Australia Day with Jingo Kitsch as a reason to imply that it is a sacred festival. January 26 was a convenient holiday because it signalled the end of summer holidays, when industry had shut down. All January for staff holidays. That it was no more; no less.

Vandalised statue of Captain Cook in St Kilda, January 2024

After all, it is only a celebration of Arthur Philip founding a convict colony which he called New South Wales on that day in 1788. If that is worth celebrating once stripped of its being a convenient marker, then we invite all the mindless controversy that people like Dutton wish to provoke. There are influential people who hanker for an imaginary white picket fence Australia. It never existed, but these people bristle when the monarchy is threatened, alteration of the flag promoted and the sanctity of Australia Day and Anzac Day disputed.

I remember these were issues of the Liberal Party Coalition when they were trudging through the policy desert. Once, when reporters listened to me and asked me what was to be discussed at the upcoming Liberal Party meeting, it was a time when the Parliamentary Party had spent the previous meeting discussing the Flag. I replied it was discussing the party policy on heraldic symbols. This did not make me many friends, but metaphorically that is the territory where Dutton is grubbing around.

John Quiggin has raised a reasonable point, which impinges on policy considerations at a time when the Labor Party until this week continued to commit to make the rich even richer with taxation concessions and when there seems to be idolatry of the petroleum and mining industry while Planet Earth is going down the toilet. It is a time when Dutton has selectively singled out trivia to widen community divisions rather than address community concerns when political collaboration is needed urgently.

Forget his divisive utterances, which only emphasise unnecessary cracks in the polity and which we could do without; and go about devising a policy which adopts the Quiggin analysis as a starting point.

At least, the Labor government have caucused this week, to ratify the Albanese Cabinet decision to make the taxation changes more equitable, rather than giving the wealthy an additional polo pony.  Predictably, the bleat of broken election promises goes up from Dutton and his cronies, fresh from return from being “duchessed” by Gina Rinehart.

Dutton, you should grow up, and address measured analyses such as that projected by John Quiggin as the Government seems to have done; instead of roaming around devising the heraldic symbols on the Dutton shield. A pineapple rampant?

Mouse Whisper

 I owe this one to the Boss. There is this Virgin Airline advertisement with this vivacious flight attendant being wheeled across of the tarmac aboard a gangway with a horde of people in pursuit. Not a plane in sight. What a metaphor!  A virgin airline is one never to be violated by an airplane?

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 – At 70 degrees north, no Pines beyond

The first Royal Commission commenced in August 1902 and ended two months later in October 1902.  The Royal Commission was established to inquire into and report upon the arrangements made for the transport of troops returning from service in South Africa on the S.S. “Drayton Grange”.

Drayton Grange

The Drayton Grange, a 6600-tonner, was a troopship chartered to return Australian soldiers from the Boer War in South Africa. With more than 2000 aboard, the ship was overcrowded and unsanitary, with inadequate medical facilities.

By the time the ship docked in Melbourne on August 7, 1902 at the end of a month-long voyage, five were dead and another 12 died subsequently.

From the ship docking in Melbourne to enactment of the Act, to appointment of Chair, to handing down the results of the Royal Commission took two months.

There were no specific recommendations. But this paragraph apportions a level of blame, “We find that the responsibility for what, under the circumstances of the troops and the nature of the voyage, was undue crowding of the vessel, for the insufficiency of hospital accommodation, and for the defects in the deck sheathing, rests with the Imperial Embarkation authorities in South Africa; for the non-landing of the sick with the authorities in West Australia; and for the failure to improve, and the unnecessary aggravation of, the undesirable conditions in the vessel, on the Officer Commanding Troops and the Medical Officer in Charge.”

Royal Commissions take a considerable time. Perhaps Mr Justice Toose, who undertook an investigation into veteran affairs in the 70s, set the exemplar for the timeless Commission. He asked for several extensions, and there was often a tone in ridicule about this Inquiry which extended for five years for 800 pages and 300 recommendations.

Toose’s exercise has been dwarfed by $600m spent on the Disability Royal Commission; the Government’s response is not to implement the 222 recommendations in its 6845 pages, but to set up a Taskforce of bureaucrats to respond, thus delaying any implementation by at least 18 months.

Why the length? To justify the Royal Commission, which remains divided in its recommendations and service. Think about the time and cost for a split decision.

Given it was headed by a former Federal judge, Ron Sackville, once described as a law reformer, his Commission’s major recommendations just tread the familiar line of a new Act, a Disability Commission, and a complaints mechanism. Big deal; could have taken a good dinner to come up with these recommendations.

Recently, at the Australian Legal Information Institute (AustLII), the Attorney-General, Minister Dreyfus, made a lukewarm comment ending in a crafted ambiguous conclusion, where “clarity” would not be the word I would use.

None of this is to say that royal commissions should necessarily be a government’s ‘go to’ option when a difficult issue arises. Most areas of public policy are best dealt with by the ordinary work of policy development by Ministers and their Departments, and even when an inquiry is merited, a royal commission might not be the most appropriate kind. Very often, matters concerning the operation of government will be best dealt with by an ordinary administrative inquiry.

Nonetheless, it is certainly clear why royal commissions have occupied such a significant role in our system of government over such a long period.”

Dreyfus had recounted, prior to this excerpt, that Royal Commissions had advantages. These were independence, information gathering, and to hear vox populi. All are relative. How independent can it be when the government selects the commissioners; information gathering can be subjective, as can listening to the people, although this takes a bleak view of government. But why not? This current government, increasingly prone to secrecy, does not make me more supportive of royal commissions, expensive exercises in marching on the spot.

The major problem with Royal Commissions is that they raise expectations.  The government looks for the recommendations with which it broadly agrees, and often these are the most trite.

To me, a useful Royal Commission should make recommendations, which are not “feel-good” waffle, but should isolate the changes which could be made, theoretically from the next day.  Key recommendations must be coherent and limited in number. It helps if one happens to be reductionist in approach. It provides that clarity which Dreyfus advocates.

Fashionista

Brunel, along with numerous young models, was a frequent passenger on Epstein’s private jet, according to flight manifests. The agency owner also allegedly received $1 million from Epstein in 2005, when he founded MC2 with his partner, Jeffrey Fuller; although Fuller and Brunel denied any such payment from the billionaire pervert in 2007, when rumours started swirling, Sarnoff got confirmation from a former bookkeeper at the agency. Whether the money was a secret investment in MC2, or a payment for Brunel’s services as a procurer, is unknown. Brunel also visited Epstein in jail.”

Now there is one industry that needs to be examined – the fashion industry. Not only does it create a great amount of detritus, but the question is how many occupational health and safety rules does it violate?

For instance, a modelling career for women starts between 14 and 16 years and is over by the mid 20s. It is an industry which cultivates the “stick insect” look and emphasise that ugliness by forcing the models in very high heels to traverse the catwalk in that uncomfortable stalk, which seems to be de rigeur.

For example, in one instance more than half the models in a US survey found were told they wouldn’t be able to find any more jobs if they didn’t lose weight. So, not only are models being pressured to lose weight, but they’re being told that their livelihood depended on it. As the writer said, “this immense pressure to lose weight in order to protect your ability to make a living is unacceptable. It’s incredibly damaging to models’ mental health and their overall safety and wellbeing.”

Health professionals are always concerned with anorexia and bulimia as well as body dysmorphia in young females. Once you step into the malnutrition zone, then there are consequences, not the least of which is osteoporosis. The overlay of mental health in these women, especially when they are discarded for a younger wave of aspirants, undoubtedly leaves a legacy.

The 2017 movie “Straight/Curve: Redefining Body Image” was made by an Irish born US film maker Jenny McQuaile. It reveals how beautiful pictures in magazines or TV shows in the fashion industry have actually affected the current generation of women and young girls.

In a comment on the film: it linked the exposure of images of underweight air-brushed female bodies to unhealthy eating habits and decreased self-esteem, so poor body image can lead to even more serious consequences. Overweight status, self-perception found that girls who were unhappy with their appearance were at a significantly higher risk for suicide. The evidence is overwhelming.

Against this, there is the further depressing statistic that Australia is  the second largest per capita consumer of textiles in the world, after the USA. Indeed, the average Australian consumes 27 kg of new clothing a year.

Revenue from the Australian apparel market is expected to reach $20 billion before growing by slightly more than two per cent per year until 2027. The industry contributes 1.5 per cent to the Australian GDP, generates $7.2 billion in exports each year, and employs more than 489,000 people – 77 per cent of whom are women. There lies the kernel for the case for government not interfering in the catwalk disease. It creates income.

The other resistance would come from the “social X-rays” that form the catwalk audience. It beats me how one could not be repulsed by seeing these emaciated nymphets in the flesh, unadorned by the photographer’s illusionary tricks to emulate images of unattainable perfection; instead, they look as if they have been released from a concentration camp decked out in grease paint.

The racing industry relies on dieting in jockeys trying to keep weight down to 54kg, above which life for most jockeys’ rides is limited unless they are in the top echelon or are a jumping jockey, and in this later instance their races are confined to Victoria and South Australia.

You just must see such jockeys in their forties with their sunken cheekbones and hollow eye sockets – excessively thin and also liable to osteoporosis. Unless you are dwarf, this prospect awaits. Some of the jockeys on the tiny side have an extraordinary physique with disproportionate limbs, but it is a more dangerous occupation – falling off a horse at full gallop in the middle of a race is more so than marching down a catwalk.

A study in Victoria in which jockeys completed an anonymous questionnaire, resulted in 75 per cent reporting routinely skipping meals and 81 per cent restricted food intake in the 24 hours prior to racing. Sauna-induced sweating was used by 29 per cent of respondents and diuretics by 22 per cent to aid in weight loss prior to racing. Smoking is less prevalent and induced vomiting and the use of laxatives are more in the realm of the fashion industry – not to mention use of the peacock feather.

At least, the racing industry has made token recognition of the problem with raising the minimum weights in most races. There are well-placed photographs of the champion jockeys with judicious use of healthy diets and strenuous exercise. But then, have they metaphorically been air-brushed?

Hence the need to evaluate whether Society is aiding and abetting an unhealthy lifestyle, which nevertheless suits a cohort of influential people. Moreover of course, there is the view that an individual has the freedom to do what they wish; but does a fourteen year old have that unfettered right to condemn herself into a life of starvation and slavery? I think not.

In a Brown Study

Millennials come in for scorn from the dealers I meet. Millennials don’t want things; they want “experiences,” according to opinion surveys. Many dealers are befuddled by this attitude as well as by millennials’ texting and tweeting. Antiques are not easily translated to the digital realm. They’re not part of the point-and-click universe. They’re not Instagrammable. Look at us on this brown couch! And look at this thumbtack Windsor chair from 1825 in faded yellow paint. It has such a rich “patina,” the touch of history. Nope. That’s just a worn-out old chair. – New England magazine

I remembered one of my contemporaries was besotted with brown furniture. He lived in one of those large Victorian mansions with high ceilings, poor lighting and faded wallpaper. The fittings, the staircase all brown – and moreover the furniture was brown – different shades of brown, but nevertheless very brown. If it was not mahogany, it was French polished or varnished, all to a high-quality brown.

Mahogany is exotic – Cuban or Honduran was always part of the description. There is an Australia hardwood eucalypt, which is called among other names, Australian mahogany.  Another major contributor to this brown diaspora was the native cedar, logged from Queensland forests. I have a red cedar desk which my great-uncle owned and used daily in his work as a well-known early Melbourne architect. There was a what-not which he purchased, always mentioned to me as Chippendale. It was not.

Thus, I had inherited from both my maternal and paternal lines a considerable amount of brown furniture, to which I added further items when we moved into our terrace house in Balmain in 1987. Then it was not cheap, and in fact the bookcase was very expensive, being beautifully made with inlaid decoration.

In one of our storerooms sits a round walnut table, used for many years for dining. Walnut is brown enough to be unwanted, as this is.

But that was another era. Now brown furniture is shunned. The current open space house with few interior walls encourages a light and airy existence with clean cut steel and corian kitchens. Then there are glitzy bathrooms where the standalone brilliantly white bathtub made of fibreglass and stainless steel reinforced with polyester resin, stands in the a room bordered by wash basin, shower recess and toilet. Here, use of brown tiles would be somewhat confusing.

And after all, who has a brown car in their double garage after you walk through the laundry where, if you are hunting for brown artifacts from a lost Brown Age, it is there you may find such relics. But probably not.  Even the cleaning equipment is variegated in colour- and “whitegoods” are just that, unless the essential utilities are now with facades of blue-grey steel -be it a washing machine or refrigerator.

Now left on the footpath, sideboards, chiffoniers, tables, cupboards line the roadside. The markets have crashed; the word “antique” is increasingly anathema. “Vintage” is now substituted for “antique” in those fairs where period pieces were once sold.

I have looked at this brown study from a home-owner’s perspective, but then there is the various young generation’s perspective bought up on IKEA, where furniture is not decorative. It is purely utilitarian.

I remember when I was in a University College I took a Victorian vintage nursing chair into my study, because I thought it would provide a convenient place to rest to read a book or to just “crash”. I left it there when I left College. Initially, I regretted leaving it there. But time has confirmed the correctness of the decision. It would have been very expensive to store.

Maybe the nursing chair has remained in the College, souvenired, or more likely it has ended up as firewood, very much the fate of so much of this brown detritus from another Age. Years on, it may have survived awaiting to be recovered, a sombre counterpoint to the hedonistic modernism, a symbol of a world browning in the change in climate.

There is one solution that my wife has used. We had a very well- constructed mahogany chest of drawers, very chestnut. My grandparents had brought it back from Britain in 1919. Thus, it had lasted a long time. My wife decided she needed some storage and rather than throw out the solid brown chest and buy a new one she asked the painter to give it a distressed blue finish. He did an excellent job, and it now complements the back room, where an equally distressed painted bookcase faces it – but the aforementioned brown cedar desk still occupies one corner of the room, as a quiet reminder.

In Search of the Native Beech

Great Western Tiers

Nestling hard against Tasmania’s Western Tiers, at the end of a gravel road winding through the tall eucalypts, is Habitat, a native plant nursery. We drove there after disembarking from the car ferry at Devonport. It is at the back of Deloraine on the other side of the Meander Valley. The Valley itself which was massively flooded at the same time last year was now brilliant green, its pastures covered by the dots of sheep. The ewes had been lambing prolifically. This tableau was Acadian, there being barely a cloud in the sky.

Our destination was near Liffey, but not on the road to the Liffey Falls. We were instructed to turn left and follow the bush road. Habitat appeared to blend with the bush, but this is where for 21 years they have harvested seeds and grown the plants from this seed.

They had closed their retail outlet earlier this year, now “growing to order” and have sufficient orders not to take any more until the end of 2024. Then the owner said she would be taking a “sabbatical” with her husband in 2025, and then they would be taking orders again from 2026.

Even though there is temperate rain forest at the bottom of their property, they had been ordered to evacuate their property because of nearby bush fires twice in the 21 years. They are in a high risk area with one narrow exit road lined by tall mountain ash and an understory of dense bush.

We were there to pick up five native deciduous beeches which we had ordered in March (and which I wrote up in an earlier blog). These had been left over from the previous year’s orders.

She said that the two most difficult plants to cultivate are the Tasmanian waratah and the native beech, which incidentally is the only native deciduous tree. In Strahan, there are numerous Tasmanian waratah bushes, all now in flower. So much for difficulty – once they like their surroundings.

But what of the beech?

She gave us tips about where to plant the slow growing beeches, in damp half shade, well-drained soil, and a protective wire cage around each to keep the wallabies away.

So here goes!

Rich with pollution – So much for Reducing Emissions

Need I editorialise …

Executives at Suffolk Construction have used the Boston-based company’s private jet nearly 250 times since last year to fly from Hanscom Field to destinations such as Aruba and Aspen, Barcelona and Rome, Martha’s Vineyard and Napa Valley, according to a new report.

Gulfstream Aerospace 550

Suffolk’s 19-passenger Gulfstream Aerospace GV-SP 550 flew every two or so days, its Rolls-Royce Pearl engines pumping out an estimated 2,329 tons of carbon emissions, the report said, which catalogued the climate pollution from flights to and from New England’s largest non-commercial airport.  First appeared in the Boston Globe.

Mouse Whisper

There was recently an interview conducted by Michael Rowland, the personable ABC breakfast presenter. He was talking to the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, who happened to be in Winton in the far west of Queensland. There is a certain irony of the symbolism – especially when the discussion turned to the Qantas decay.

Winton was the place where Qantas was founded in 1920, which meant it is the second oldest airline in the world. KLM, the Netherlands airline, was founded the year before.

Winton was also the site for the last commercial plane crash, when, as reported on 22 September 1966, an Ansett Vickers Viscount 832 aircraft on a scheduled flight from Mt Isa to Longreach caught on fire and crashed approximately 16 km from Winton, Queensland. It struck the ground at the edge of a clay pan and was immediately engulfed in flames, killing 20 passengers and four crew members.

Modest Expectations – James Phipps

So many of the antics around the Voice “yes” case are classic rent seeking. The more the whole argument proceeds, so the clarity of the rent seeking basis of the promoters’ “Yes” case become. I have hesitated to muse out loud, but there is still nothing substantive for those who are thinking about their vote to hold back on disclosing what this exercise has become.

I have read the news for the last week, and positive outcomes have occurred in one case specifically and in another generally without waiting for the Voice to happen.

During this last week, the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation in South Australia has the Federal Court ruling in its favour in relation to a nuclear waste dump. The Federal Education Minister has opened the universities to essentially positive affirmation for Indigenous people. Then Michael Mansell, whose playbook is that of protest, comes out with a reasoned argument to call off the referendum all together and start negotiating a treaty. At no stage has there been any impediment because Aboriginal rights have not been incorporated into the Constitution, and with all respects, what happened this past week epitomises policy development.

At the same time there is negative news. In the Northern Territory, as reported by the ABC, the Gove bauxite mine will close by 2030 and other major mines have either ceased or are set to finish up in Jabiru and Groote Eylandt. This will see millions of dollars in royalties evaporate from regional economies across the NT.  As further reported by the ABC, author Richard Trudgen, who has been living and working with Yolŋu in north-east Arnhem Land for half a century, many people aren’t even aware the royalty payments are coming to an end.

The aboriginal landowners have received $700 million in royalties over 42 years from the Rio Tinto Gove operation. As reported by the ABC, “flash cars and grog” have consumed much of these royalties, plus the cost of bickering by the landowners over the rightful division of the royalties. Enter at this spot, the lawyers and the anthropologists, and they have, as expected, carved a proportion of the royalties away.

The money has provided investment in a sawmill, and the ABC reported that it had been productive; yet on the day the ABC reporters visited, there was only one worker on site, the rest were on the local version of “sorry business”. So, what’s new? To think that these Aboriginal mobs having had the chance to invest the royalties are talking about going back on welfare mocks the very essence of the “Yes” case.

The problem is to define any objective except that of a few well-placed Aboriginals having a go at bluffing the Australian people into this rent seeking exercise, which is essentially a sophisticated form of “sit-down” money. The arguments on both sides are as crude and as ill-thought through as one another.

The “No” vote is being hijacked by the community racist element, which lies very close to the surface of Australian society. Given the flimsiness of the “Yes” case as presented to date, this has allowed the racist element to gain far more currency than it should have had. The “Yes” case should have been framed to support constructive evolution and admit the failure of the current funding model.

Unfortunately, the “Yes” campaign is bereft; it could have been built on what has been accomplished, given the amount of funding being sunk into Aboriginal affairs. Having seen waste, having seen success in Aboriginal policy, I would have recommended that the Voice should have recognised what works and used the Voice as a logical progression instead of the attempt to exacerbate guilt among whitefellas, most of whom with all due respect have never spent time with Aboriginals, and are in a quandary because much of Aboriginal policy has been confusing, if not frankly incoherent.

Still, no way can I align myself to the racists overtones of the “No” case. 

Death of the Boondoggle?

The value to Sydney after the Games has been minuscular – loaded with unusable infrastructure – stadia that are dismantled or provide a haven for weeds.  Cycle paths through a wasteland are not a big deal. Such disasters writ large in both Athens and Brazil. All the while the IOC provides the world with specimens such as John Coates, immersed in formalin jars of the past.

By 2032, an Australia Olympics may find itself drowned by a Viral debt, rising seas and irrelevance, through a lack of sponsors and tourist attractions dying from global warming. I believe this is not too much a dystopian view given what’s happening, looking around the world and seeing the ecological disaster being played out well beyond the horizons of this current euphoria.Modest Expectations, 30 July 2021

It’s a comprehensive let down for the athletes, the excited host communities, First Nations Australians who were at the heart of the Games, and the millions of fans that would have embraced a sixth home Games in Australia.”

The multi-city model for delivering Victoria 2026 was an approach proposed by the Victorian Government, in accordance with strategic roadmap of the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) … beyond this, the Victorian Government wilfully ignored recommendations to move events to purpose-built stadia in Melbourne and in fact remained wedded to proceeding with expensive temporary venues in regional Victoria.

Craig Phillips AM, Commonwealth Games Australia Chief Executive Officer – 18 July 2023

Australia is fast becoming the dumping ground for unwanted sporting events. I identified the Brisbane Olympic Games as a potential boondoggle about two years ago but missed writing about the extravagant Andrews’ offer to fund the 2026 Commonwealth Games and in the proposed involvement of regional centres that were being showered with kudos for being – Drum roll – “inclusive”. Then it was all about Andrews getting votes in the Victorian regional areas to win the then forthcoming election, and indeed crush the hapless coalition.

Jeroen Weimar is a very smart man, and Premier Andrews fortuitously put him in charge of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee. He would have done the sums, because one of his briefs would have been to predict the real cost and the real benefits. Then, enter the inevitable consultants and the rubbery cost accounting which these firms have allegedly used. They would have constructed a number of scenarios, and they all came up with a brick wall of massive debt. Andrews could then be criticised as being a “mug lair”, a show pony who on occasions has had to be rescued without representational scars, this time by Dr Weimar with one or other of his collections of metaphorical lifebuoys.

Nevertheless, the figure of $7 billion is about as fanciful as the other figures; it was a big enough “alternative fact” – allegedly – as all the other figures are, but enough for Premier Andrews to unequivocally justify the cancellation. If the figure had been, say $4 billion, then there would have been the quibbler brigade, but $7 billion slammed the door shut.  Not that it has any effect on my agreement with the decision to cancel. But to reassure the public, with a straight face, I would suggest all the cost accounting for this Games be released with accompanying assumptions.

On the other hand, Phillips AM is very much part of the Coates Hoodwink. He contradicts himself; and forgets that nobody wanted the Games after Durban was stripped from holding them, because it could not afford the extravagance. He conveniently forgets the proposed 2030 games, which are to celebrate 100 years since the first British Empire Games were held in the Canadian city of Hamilton. Hamilton has indicated that it does not want to hold the 2030 Games – nor does any other Canadian city.

We have come a long way from Premier Fahey jumping around like a dervish when Sydney was awarded the Olympic Games in 1994. Coates seems to have sniffed the winds of change in relation to the Commonwealth Games, because his reaction was that of dancing the Edging Away.

It is inevitable for someone to disclose the lack of policy raiment these jingoista in pursuit of fool’s gold have. During the games, the media obsesses with the progressive medal tally – have we more gold medals than England?  Has Australia won more gold medals than anybody else? Really, who cares when we wake up next morning, except the individual with the medal. The crowds are gone and facilities built for a two-week event lie empty.

Percy Bysshe Shelley put it perfectly:

My Name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Ozymandias – wrecked

Time for the Commonwealth Games Federation to face the inevitable. The Boondoggle has burst. 

What about the Olympic Games?

My original comments were directed towards the 2032 Games, which nobody wanted. As the time draws closer, the value of the commitment will become clearer. In the meantime, the 2030 Winter Olympics need to be sorted. Ostensibly there seem to be four applicants – Sweden (venue not yet revealed), Sapporo in Japan, Utah (presumably Salt Lake City, where the 2002 games were held and were the biggest to date) and a late entry from France.

The latest information this month: Utah taxpayers have spent nearly $92 million on the state’s Olympic facilities in recent years, a total that could exceed $140 million as they’re readied for another Winter Games as well as for continued community and athlete use.

Utah announces its bid

Salt Lake is thus the only unequivocal bidder, but would prefer 2034, so as not to overlap Los Angeles’ bid to raise the required funding for its Olympic Games. Sapporo seems to blow hot and cold, because of scandals surrounding the Tokyo games; plus, the Sapporo residents have not been particularly keen.

Sweden is in a similar situation of the Swedes blowing hot and cold, but at this stage of the cycle they are apparently positive. France has indicated an interest – late but the IOC obviously welcoming the fact that two Alpine districts are interested. Vancouver pulled out because of financial considerations. So, to say the situation is fluid at the present is to ignore the possibility that everything will be washed away. And, of course, will there be enough snow anyway?

It should be remembered that the 2024 and 2028 Olympic Games were awarded in 2017, and the World has changed mightily since then. The Paris Games are scheduled to start on 26 July next year. Will Europe be as hot then as it is now?

Discovering Fire on the West Coast

I have spent a great deal of time in Broken Hill and it was a privilege to work there as I have said many times, especially when I had a bloke like Clyde Thompson working alongside of me. Clyde is a guy so different from me that once we knew how to communicate, he became one of my most admired persons to cross my path.

Mundi Mundi Plains

Just down the road is the settlement of Silverton, where life had centred around the pub. If I drove out further to the end of the macadam, below were the Mundi Mundi Plains stretching out West as far as the eye could see, a beautiful place to watch the sunset while drinking a flute of champagne.

Silverton has been the site of many Australian films, and the road out to the Mundi Mundi plains was where the early Mad Max films were made.

I have referred to the time my son was bumped off the then Eastern Airlines flight from Mildura to Broken Hill, by a film team shooting a Coke advertisement on the Plains.

It was the time when the desert loomed large in Australian films if, in that other scenario, stunt riders were in cars and not galloping horses at breakneck speed across the Alpine landscape.

So, when we saw the trailer for the new Marta Dusseldorp TV drama, Bay of Fires, we immediately recognised it as Zeehan, just down the road from Strahan.

The actual Bay of Fires is on the east coast of Tasmania, whereas Zeehan is not, which is mildly confusing.

Zeehan’s main street

Zeehan is an old West Coast mining town, and it had been not only wealthy once but also at that time the third biggest settlement in Tasmania after Hobart and Launceston. It was also known as Silverton and, lying as it does on the one of most mineralised areas on the Planet, was rich in ore. Both silver and gold were originally mined, but now just outside Zeehan there’s a nickel mine and in the area considerable zinc mining. It’s difficult to assess how much, but what we do know is that Australia has the largest deposits of this element, and is the third largest exporter. Then, to the north, there are the tin mines which extend around Rosebery, and then Queenstown down south, where the Mount Lyell mine has produced one million tonnes of copper ore as well as considerable amounts of silver and gold.

This mineral background has nothing to with the plot of this drama, but its establishment has provided the sets for the drama, in the faded yet still ornate Victorian and Federation buildings which line the very broad main street of Zeehan.

Very few people now live in the town permanently and during the filming, which occurred during the height of the COVID pandemic, the film crews were able to sequester the whole population indoors while providing them with food and the other essential needs.

If you get the angles right, Zeehan achieves what the producers wanted to project – foreboding. It rains on the West Coast on most days of the year. In winter, snow periodically blocks the Murchison Highway which bypasses Zeehan; however, from Zeehan there is another good road to Strahan, which is the only port on the West Coast.

Strahan, located on Macquarie Harbour which is bigger than Sydney Harbour, was where the ore was taken to be shipped. Railways preceded roads. The modern road to Strahan from Zeehan is an easy drive, whereas the Murchison Highway to Queenstown ducks and weaves through the undulating land where rainforest creates many blind corners.

Zeehan, from the right camera angles, epitomises the isolation of a faded township surrounded by this mass of deep green brooding forest which, in parts, has existed in a form not much different from when the dinosaurs roamed. Rivers flow dark because of the tannin washed into them from the button grass on the high meadows, which lie above the forests of blackwood, myrtle and sassafras, not forgetting the native pines. Man ferns abound, and the ground underfoot is marshy. The beaches are windswept, this being the land of the Roaring Forties – icy winds that sweep in from the west, and sou-west.   There are pine plantations, there are huge dunes, and there are stripped slashes of earth where pine plantations have been cleared. The eye of the camera sees that the overall atmosphere projects suspense – something in the dark gloom about to happen. Welcome to the world of an Australian Ingmar Bergman – perhaps not by this “Bay of Fires”.

The old hospital, Strahan

In relation to the “Bay of Fires” eight-part series, I hope to watch all of it to see how the film producers use these surroundings to develop the plot. The house where the characters played by Marta Dusseldorp and her two children live is the old hospital at Strahan, which lies not far from our property. Unfortunately, when you know a place as well as I do, I can’t help trying to spot the actual location, and see how much script licence has been taken. The problem is that you tend to lose the plot in more ways than one.

These refugees are kept awake by Tasmanian devils. I suppose this spices the plot up, but I’ve never heard them, let alone have them keep me awake.  They do not substitute for wolves.

Anyway, the plot seems to have a certain similarity to others of that ilk – good people being pursued by bad men into a community where there are dark secrets. I can visualise many of the places here on the West Coast, where dramatic cliches can be very well enacted. At the end of the first episode our heroine, having crashed through the house floor, sees something growing under the house … which the second episode confirms is a marijuana crop.

The second episode extends the sets to a Queenstown motel, distinguished by the characteristic bare peak of one of its mountains peeping over the roof of the motel. The location of the final scene seems to be at Nelson Falls on the other side of Queenstown, where the Dusseldorp character finds the body of the local real estate agent, who has been murdered. I’m now getting more and more involved in the story, rather than just analysing the background.

What you find on YouTube

Arturo Toscanini

In 1944, to honour the Allied victory in Italy, legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini–a refugee from Fascism in his home country–decided to conduct a performance of Verdi’s “Hymn of the Nations”. “Hymn” is a composition that Verdi originally built around the national anthems of Britain, France, and Italy. In order to honour all four of the major Allies, Toscanini decided to add “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the U.S. and “The Internationale” for the Soviet Union.  

The music was performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, with the Westminster Choir and the great tenor Jan Peerce as soloist; conducted by Toscanini. It was filmed as a featurette to be shown in movie theatres, and was narrated by Burgess Meredith. In the early 50’s, at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, U.S. censors excised the portion of this performance that featured the “Internationale”. For years the sequence containing The Internationale was considered forever lost. But recently a copy of this missing piece of film was rediscovered in Alaska. So now this rousing rendition of the Internationale–together with chorale and orchestra under the direction of a great conductor–can be enjoyed again.

Mouse Whisper

North of Zeehan is the Pieman River. There is a car ferry to enable travellers to cross the river and the cost given that I could, on a good day, swim across was for years $10. (Recently increased to $20 for a three-minute crossing.) When you think about it, it’s an outrageous fee scale. In the $10 days, there was an additional hurdle to cross the river.  If you pressed the call button more than once, the ferryman at the time – as punishment – would not come out from his hut in Corinna, the tiny settlement on the northern side of the river. Thankfully he has gone.

In relation to the name, Pieman, the legend is that there was a convict who escaped from the penal colony at Macquarie Harbour with other convicts, and as they all starved, he killed them serially and turned them into meat pies.

Not true, but a good, if gory, story. This man, Alexander Pearce was in a fact a serial cannibal.  The actual pieman was another convict, who also escaped from the same penal colony at Macquarie Harbour. He was indeed a pastry cook, but not a cannibal. There is no record that the two ever met and exchanged recipes.

But awaiting us is the film, perhaps Pie are squared.

Pieman River

Modest Expectations – We’ll drink champagne in Udine

Look, I’m not one for a Grudge …

To him, been just given the Nudge

I shall not, I will not, deliberately Fudge

Nor will I Budge

Yes, he said I did robotically Bludge

Then pushed me back into the poverty Sludge

Who? You guessed it, he was known as Alan Pakenham Tudge

Yes, some say he has left quite a Smudge

But whom am I to constructively Judge

As broken, defeated I onwardly Trudge

The Little Red Citroen

This is one prime example of the unexpected consequence. For years, when we have come to Tasmania, we hired a car. But with COVID and even before that, hiring cars was becoming prohibitively expensive in Tasmania, and at busy times of the years, the car hire companies introduced limits on the free kilometres.

Thus because of both this and increasingly wanting to stay longer in Tasmania at any one time, we made the decision to take the car ferry, the Spirit of Tasmania. Let’s say, that its disabled passenger cabin is excellent, even though it is a long corridor away from the lift, but the crew are solicitous, and one seems always at hand. On this occasion, travelling across from Melbourne to Devonport was uneventful, and we went down the West Coast to our property at Strahan.

When we decided to return, the rain had come to Northern Tasmania – flooding rains but some of the major roads remained open, even though much of the countryside was completely under water. However, the major unexpected consequence was that the level of the Mersey River at Devonport rose, floating the Spirit of Tasmania upwards, such that it was impossible to load cars and trucks. Therefore, with several cancelled ferries, and no confirmation of a new departure date for at least 48 hours, and a departure date delayed for effectively at least four days, we saw the uncertainty that bad weather introduces.

As we were due to go to Vietnam at the end of the week, we had no choice but to leave the car in Tasmania. Fortunately, we have good friends south of Hobart with space in their yard for a car. So we drove the car down from the North to their place, where we left the car and flew back to Sydney.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. Back in Sydney, preparing to travel to Tasmania to pick up the car. Then we were both laid low by a very nasty respiratory virus, not COVID, but may as well have been – how sick we both were. The upshot was that the car was marooned in Tasmania for another month.

Then “the cavalry” came to our rescue. Number two son said he was prepared to go and pick it up and bring it back to Melbourne – flight to Hobart, pick up the car our friends had conveniently left at the Hobart airport, then drive it to Devonport, overnight to the new Victorian Spirit of Tasmania destination, Geelong; thence up the Princes Highway and home.

By this time we were fit to travel, and as we had business in Albury, another friend offered to bring our car to Albury and meet us there. Number one son picked up the car, re-fuelled it and dropped it to our friend’s place. One-way hire of a modest sedan from Sydney to Albury cost about $1,000. Our friend having dropped our car returned to Melbourne by train, a trip which enabled him to read a book and which cost $20.

The exercise would have not been possible without this chain of friends and family. It makes us realise we are not alone on this planet – and we thank you all.

Medicare and the Constitution

Australia is consumed to a greater or lesser degree by the prospect of incorporating recognition of the Aboriginal people into the Constitution in a nebulous concept known as the Voice. 

Meanwhile, the Government is flailing around wondering how to make Medicare work.

Medicare is made possible, because it is based on providing a range of patient benefits for a number of defined responsibilities.

1946 – Prime Minister Chifley – action

In 1946 the following was passed in a referendum of the Australian people, an amendment to Section 51, namely:

(xxiiiA.)  The provision of maternity allowances, widows’ pensions, child endowment, unemployment, pharmaceutical, sickness and hospital benefits, medical and dental services (but not so as to authorize any form of civil conscription), benefits to students and family allowances:

The Commonwealth does not have any constitutional power to regulate prices and incomes; and that is the greatest misunderstanding of how Medicare works. Hence doctors can charge what they believe is fair and reasonable; and only individual States can determine otherwise. Thus, of all health professionals, only doctors and dentists are able to receive Commonwealth funded patient benefits for their professional services. When the amendment was passed in 1946, the explosion of other health profession numbers had yet to occur, plus these professions being deemed to be in private practice. Patient benefits can only accrue to doctors working in private practice, although this has been systematically undermined by public hospitals “privatising” some of their clinics – in essence promoting double-dipping. Here the Commonwealth has been weak in its response.

In 1974, optometrists were given access to a limited patient benefits scheme where the profession accepted the benefit in effect as full payment; and they were deemed “medical” – a sleight of hand because at that time there was an unusually large number of optometrists as members of parliament. The other means of providing patient benefits is to provide a medically supervised patient benefit for a health professional group. In areas such as diagnostic imaging, radiotherapy and pathology, there has been a long term recognition that the benefit contains not only a professional component for the medical service but also the payment for technicians and scientists essential for the delivery of the services which are incorporated in the technical component of the medical benefit.  The other component is the capital component, which acknowledges the level of capital expenditure to deliver the medical service. This last is a vexed question because it has not been universally agreed, and for instance, there is a separate list, from which prostheses are costed.

Recently, there is a clamour by various health professional groups for direct access to patient benefits, but despite the above stratagem, it should be ruled to be unconstitutional.  As reported in the Persons with Disability and the Australian Constitution monograph, that:

In 1944, The {Pharmaceutical Benefits} Act was challenged by members of the Medical Society of Victoria with the support of the Attorney-General of that state. Publicly, the society objected to its members being co-opted into the scheme and having their professional judgment limited to only prescribing the free drugs from the Commonwealth scheme. The challenge before the High Court rested on two points. The first was whether the scheme that required doctors and chemists to act in accordance with the regulation was authorised by a legislative head of power in the Constitution. In short, did the Commonwealth have the power to regulate medical services? The second point was whether the Commonwealth scheme was in fact merely the appropriation and spending of funds authorised by the Parliament, and thus supported by the incidental powers under the Constitution.

The challenge was upheld by the High Court, but indirectly led to the future constitutional amendment in 1946. Effectively by adjudging the distribution of £30 million for the provision by the Commonwealth of free drugs to be unlawful constitutionally, it provided ammunition for that future constitutional amendment.

As a parenthetic comment, pharmaceutical benefits are directed towards providing a benefit to pay for medicines, and these are contained in the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule, not for pharmacists to provide independent professional services, however defined. This is a major pressure point, but it effectively confuses two roles. The pharmacist often knows more about the drug; the doctor, the reasons behind the prescription. Currently a pharmacist may provide health advice, for which there is no patient benefit. The doctor provides health advice for which there is patient benefit.

The pharmacists receive a patient benefit for dispensing medicines, their administration and the potential side-effects but not for dispensing health advice.

2023 – Prime Minister Albanese – who knows …

The Commonwealth Government has different means of handling this. Already it is strangling Medicare and effectively passing the funding as sickness benefits under the NDIS system. The Constitutional amendment by including “sickness benefits” codified Commonwealth funding in the disability sector. It is unfortunate but the AMA has been asleep at the wheel for decades, as the value of Medicare benefits to the patient has been eroded. In response, specialists have just raised their fees, devaluing in effect the value of the medical benefit. Increasingly, GPs have abandoned bulk billing and are charging fees that leave patients with significant co-payments over and above the patient Medicare benefit.

This solution is not that easy for general practitioners. They have been fooled because every time the Commonwealth initiates a review into Medicare, it just puts the whole question of increasing patient benefits on hold. Stratagems such as reducing time with patients, so the doctors time spent is little more than a greeting, a cursory look and then dismissal has been one response. As one wag jokingly said, in some practices, one doctor spent so little time with the patients that they had to be fit because they were required to jog through the surgery to sign the benefit form at the exit.

The central agencies shudder when they hear suggestions that all health professional services should attract a patient benefit – essentially an unlimited payment scheme only constrained by the Commonwealth’s willingness to ascribe a benefit. Currently, the Constitution stands in the way, but if judged by the legal challenge against pharmaceutical subsidy back in 1944, a referendum to change all that would surely be in the gunny sack of every populist Australian politician.

Ironically, amid this agitation, under the Constitution a dental benefits scheme could have been set up long ago. None has ever occurred, despite the concern over the dental health of the nation. Why? The dentists traditionally have not wanted it. This says something about the “influencer”.

Dental influencer

Parramatta 1973

Back in September of that year there was a byelection. This was the first under the Whitlam Government and was caused by the resignation of the local member. This local member was Nigel Bowen who, after the 1972 election, had lost the leadership election of the parliamentary Liberal Party to Billy Snedden by one vote. In 1973, Bowen was appointed as Chief Judge in Equity in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. This meant his resignation from Parliament, thus precipitating a byelection. Nigel Bowen in 1964 was elected to Parliament to succeed Garfield Barwick, then on his way to be Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. The Parramatta electorate at that time was “the Menzies gift”, as though he was propelling distinguished jurists into Federal parliament to emulate himself. It did not work out, although as Attorney General, Bowen produced some enlightened proposals, but not enough to be drafted in as Opposition leader.

The Hon Nigel Bowen

As a distinguished jurist, facing years in Opposition, he decided to resume his career, not unexpectedly, especially as he was 61 years of age at the time. Snedden was fifteen years younger. For the Parramatta byelection, the Liberal Party preselected a young Liberal, direct from conservative casting, his father was a State MP, Philip Ruddock.  Philip always danced from one end of the Party to other, but he had a certain resilience. He trounced his Labor Party challenger with a swing of nearly seven per cent.  Ten other candidates, mostly independents, contested the seat.

This was the first Federal election in which eighteen-year-olds were eligible to vote, the voting age having been lowered from twenty-one earlier in the year.

As was expected Bowen did not involve himself in the campaign. Snedden did, and although he was a poor public speaker, he was a good grass roots politician. Whitlam on the other hand made a declamatory speech which canvassed the forthcoming prices and income referendum to be held later in the year. As with the by-election, this referendum was soundly defeated. It had been a triumph for Snedden and helped to consolidate his shaky hold on the Party, especially in NSW at that time.

Peter Dutton, the acclaimed Leader of the Liberal Party, is now faced with a by-election in the first year of a Labor Party government, as was Snedden. The recently retired member, Alan Tudge has been a conspicuously poor performer involved deeply in the Robodebt imbroglio. Let us say, he is hardly the person Nigel Bowen was. In 1973, Snedden was campaigning in NSW whereas his natural base was Victoria. Likewise, Dutton will be campaigning in Victoria, where his normal habitat is Queensland.

Nominally both Parramatta in 1973 and Aston in 2023 were and are safe Liberal seats. The expectation would be that the Opposition Party would achieve a swing as this is the expected outcome after the election, thus strengthening the hold on such electorates. In Parramatta in 1973, Ruddock achieved this swing, and had no need to go to preferences.

Dutton wants a female candidate. He’d better choose wisely, because I hate to see a dead bird floating among sheets of unread Murdoch papers – lose the byelection and you are a dead duck paddling, mate! It will be interesting to see if a wild duck, disguised as a teal is pre-selected. And what of the Labor Party? Can’t lose many feathers contesting; and as a bonus gives an idea of whether it has made inroads into the teal vote.

Thus, what of Aston, where, despite a swing against him at the 2022 election, Tudge held the seat comfortably.  Can Dutton emulate Snedden?

ChatGPT – So you want to Cheat; go right ahead

Lawrence Shapiro is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is coy about his age, but he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, so he must be cognitively still vital.

He writes very calmly in the Washington Post about this artificial intelligence tool which has been heralded as a means of writing essays and assignments without even thinking about it – albeit a means of cheating.

This opinion piece is a very clear appraisal of the tool. He seems very relaxed. After all, he has recently published a second edition of his book Embodied Cognition which a reviewer has hailed as an outstanding introduction for those unfamiliar with but who would like to explore this movement. As the reviewer continues: It clarifies the very idea of embodiment, elaborates the central themes of embodied cognition, and evaluates theories of embodied cognition against standard cognitive science. 

I think I will stick with this general appraisal. 

ChatGPT

ChatGPT has many of my university colleagues shaking in their Birkenstocks. This artificial-intelligence tool excels at producing grammatical and even insightful essays — just what we’re hoping to see from our undergraduates. How good is it, really? A friend asked ChatGPT to write an essay about “multiple realization.” This is an important topic in the course I teach on the philosophy of mind, having to do with the possibility that minds might be constructed in ways other than our own brains. The essay ran shorter than the assigned word count, but I would have given it an A grade. Apparently ChatGPT is good enough to create an A-level paper on a topic that’s hardly mainstream.

Universities are treating the threat as more dire than an epidemic or even a budget reduction. The most obvious response, and one that I suspect many professors will pursue, involves replacing the standard five-page paper assignment with an in-class exam. Others expect to continue with the papers but have suggested that the assigned topics should be revised to focus on lesser-known works or ideas about which a chatbot might not “know” too much. 

Good luck with that. If ChatGPT can pen a solid essay on multiple realization, an issue on which I happen to be a world authority in good part thanks to lack of company, I doubt it would have difficulty constructing essays about lesser-known Shakespearean sonnets or unremarkable soldiers who fought for the Union Army. Besides, if we’re going to demand deep thought from our students, shouldn’t it be about the more important stuff? 

Here’s what I plan to do about chatbots in my classes: pretty much nothing. Let me say first that as much as I value the substance of what I teach, realistically my students will not spend more than a semester thinking about it. It’s unlikely that Goldman Sachs or Leakey’s Plumbing or wherever my students end up will expect their employees to have a solid background in philosophy of mind. Far more likely is that the employees will be required to write a letter or an analysis or a white paper, and to do this they will need to know how to write effectively in the first place. This is the skill that I most hope to cultivate in my students, and I spend a lot of time reading their essays and providing them with comments that really do lead to improvements on subsequent assignments. In-class exams — the ChatGPT-induced alternative to writing assignments — are worthless when it comes to learning how to write, because no professor expects to see polished prose in such time-limited contexts. 

I should emphasize just how desperately my students need formal instruction in writing. My wife confirms that I’m noticeably crankier than when I first started teaching 30 years ago. Everything today seems worse than it was back then: traffic, TV news, macaroni and cheese. But I don’t believe that the deterioration in writing quality that I see is a consequence of age-tinted glasses. I read too many papers from upperclassmen, from students who have taken other writing-intensive courses, in which only one sentence out of five is not grammatically or stylistically defective. I would be failing these students if I let ChatGPT discourage me from teaching them what might be the most essential competence they can gain from me.

But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot).

Here’s an idea for extracting something positive from the inevitable prominence that chatbots will achieve in coming years. My students and I can spend some class time critically appraising a chatbot-generated essay, revealing its shortcomings and deconstructing its strengths. This exercise would bring a couple of rewards. First, analytical writing, like any skill, benefits from seeing examples of what works and what does not. While students might reasonably object to having their own essays made a target of public inspection, chatbots couldn’t possibly care. Second, given that chatbots are not going to fade away, my students might as well learn how to refine their products for whatever uses the future holds.

I urge my colleagues not to abandon writing assignments for fear that some students will let artificial intelligence do their work for them. Instead, let’s devise ways to make chatbots work for all of us. Truly, the cheaters are only hurting themselves — unless we respond to them by removing writing assignments from the syllabus.

Mouse Whisper

He has been reading this book The Amur River which relates to Colin Thubron’s recent travel from Mongolia, reaching towards and eventually along the Amur River which divides Russia from China to its mouth. Fascinating book, he announced to all and sundry, and me. He could not refrain from telling us about Kim-Jong-Il, the original poisonous North Korean puffball. Kim-Jong-Il was not born in some celestial nursery but in a tiny Russian village near the Amur River and was swept up in fighting the Japanese. But Thubron recounted this description of this high born North Korean dictator – his tastes I doubt were developed along the Amur. How, I ask you do such nutters get these gigs – no mouse would ever be allowed to indulge in such a display?  {Sic}

Despite his propaganda, he was mundanely earthbound, and frightened of flying. He travelled only in a luxury carriage of his own armoured train. On a secret journey to Moscow, his Soviet escort described him eating fresh lobsters airlifted in every day, with roast donkey and champagne, while his people starved.

Amur River