Modest Expectations – Gustaf’s Little Impurity

It is a crazy situation. The Coalition is wheeling out an old codger who, in the end, could not hold his own seat, to try and burnish the credentials of a Prime Minister who has been described in very unflattering terms by a succession of women. While there hasn’t been any suggestion the Prime Minister will lose his seat, if I were in his electorate of Cook I would be interested in the credentials of his opponents.

Yet Albanese, in the same spirit of that same old codger (just a younger version), when the old codger was running for Prime Minister in 1996, decided to create himself as a small target to frustrate Keating. It worked, but the community had tired of Keating. Despite his intelligence, his vision, his achievements, in the end he scared people. Keating was also an anomaly because he never identified with sport, despite encouragement. In the end, he was also a good hater, although Howard was on a par – and in Australian politics to hate your opponents and their policies is a strong driver.

Morrison has no policies apart from feeding those who sustain his power, a dangerous tactic in a democracy. Albanese on the other hand has no vision, apart from his log cabin story told with a bowl of minestrone. As John Edwards, a former Labor operative sneered about the policy flourish of the Coalition in the Snedden period – “policy by Penguin Books” he called it. In other words, policies copied without discussion to disguise a vacuum of thought. One of the problems in Australia is the shortness of the electoral cycle. Thus, the governments are endlessly campaigning, brandishing the chocolate box of instant gratification without any long term commitment to improving the State. Rather it is about enriching oneself and one’s buddies.

Far more insidious is to advocate policies which have been shown not to have worked in the past, often because they are easy to promise. There are always missing components, selling a chassis without the engine. One of the missing components is always the translation of the effective use of funding to the actual situation. In other words, most policy announcements concern inputs – easy to throw taxpayer money around without worrying about outcome.

Perhaps the most insidious is funding projects when in effect the government is just transferring funding to a pack of rapacious rent seekers who happen to own the real estate and label it “nursing home” or “child care centre”.

Many years ago I had experience, when I was Chair of a Co-operative, of setting up a child care centre out of enlightened self-interest. In the mid-1960s it was unusual for both parents to be working full-time, but my then wife decided that she, along with a few like-minded parents, would establish a childcare centre within a co-operative framework. The centre is still operating.

There were major obstacles, not the least of which was that the woman’s place was regarded as being in the home, and if she had to work, then the family would have to look after the children. That in itself gave some clue as to the dilemma of childcare. During WWII so-called day nurseries were established with government subsidy to enable women to enter the wartime workforce, but still bear children. At the same time, at least in Victoria, there was a very strong kindergarten sector which catered for the middle class, and worked on the assumption that the educational aspect of childcare commenced at three years of age. The challenge is to formalise that learning into childcare arrangements that may begin in infancy.

At that time in the 1960s, there was no funding link between the two sectors but there was one advantage in Victoria, which was later abolished (because ideologues believed it should be so, even if it was shown to work), namely that the broad field of “infant welfare” and “kindergarten” were in the same Ministerial portfolio.

It was a great advantage when early childhood education was included in “community health”, for which I was responsible for five years in the late 1970s. I was constantly assailed by accusations of being dedicated to the “medical model”. This catchcry was led by social workers trying to usurp a doctor being in charge of the project – and a man to boot, figuratively. It was a form of reverse discrimination. Men were OK as paediatricians on the medical periphery, but women had the core expertise in matters related to early childhood development. This term “medical model” has become difficult to sustain as the medical workforce has become increasingly female.

The childcare model that we constructed was funding by a co-operative under the parents’ control. When I was directly involved in childcare, there was a strong antipathy to government intervention. There was no tax relief as there was for private primary and secondary school education. Childcare was “women’s business”. Even from birth, the father was excluded – fathers being present at the birth of their children was a “no-no.”

Regulations were harsh, partly to discourage childcare centres. A ghastly fire in 1957 at Templestowe, a suburb of Melbourne, where a child minding centre caught fire and infants were burnt to death, underlay this. There is no bigger disincentive than over-regulation to providing such service. Some of the regulations were just plain foolish. Most over-regulation is unenforceable, but the one regulation I best remember was the dimensions required of a dining room in a childcare centre. Accommodating more than ten children in such a centre diminished the space requirement, presumably on the grounds that as children increase in numbers they get smaller. Such is the inanity of regulation.

The major problem is the appropriateness of the staff and the underlying training requirements. Before the pandemic it was tempting just to import cheap labour from overseas and any training was left to the rent seeker entrepreneur owner – essentially, take the money without any serious value addition by way of training.

Our co-operative structure worked well, but its viability even then depended on the co-operative securing capital funding and raising fees that were based on predicted use; thus assuring certainty in the income flow. Even then, 10 per cent of children in the Centre paid nothing. (Only the management of the centre knew who they were.) The use of childcare as a convenience without planning and then expecting that the cost for such behaviour should be borne by the childcare centre was something that a co-operative can disabuse.  Financial viability is closely intertwined with the actual provision and because of parent involvement, shared responsibility.

The one element of a well-functioning co-operative where care is involved – at the extremes of life (and separating out disability) – is that it mimics the family, especially now that fathers are more likely to share responsibility – even being the prime carer. Thus, under this model, care is not designated solely to an employee as it used to be among the wealthy – the nanny employed to remove responsibility from the parents followed by the children being sent to boarding schools, or the model of the grandparents looking after the children.

In June 2021:

  • There were 7.3 million families, an increase of 1 million since June 2011,
  • 1 in 7 families were one parent families (15.0 per cent) of which nearly 80 per cent were women
  • There were 1.4 million jobless families (19.5 per cent)
  • Of the 6.1 million couple families, 1.6 per cent were same-sex couples.

Out of the jumble of statistics, can we pick those elements of the family which can be transferred to cost-effective childcare? After all, from the age of five years, most schooling is provided by the State.

Years ago, we found that for childcare, co-operatives worked; moreover, at a time when it was fashionable for childcare to be the responsibility of the wife, I was incited into involvement in the management of childcare – even to the extent of developing some knowledge and spending time in the centre among the children, that is, taking my turn in providing care as part of the co-operative effort.

This is very commonplace now that more fathers are more closely involved with their children. I have always believed that the co-operative framework is the best way to mimic the family ideal of care and early childhood education. In our case, the State subsidised us with the capital, after the university provided the basic building, providing what I call the technical component that relates to the educational and welfare components needed to modify the building to facilitate compliance.

Then the question to be answered is what are the staffing requirements to mimic an optimal home environment? There should not be a large administrative structure and the training program should be designed for neither self-aggrandisement nor unnecessary expenditure. I have always believed that the co-operative framework provides that ability for the parents to determine how much “professionalism” is required.

Rather than just throwing money into the private sector, if I would be asked to review the area, given my bias towards the co-operative framework, I would seek out what has been successful – see if the template we fashioned so long ago still applied and build on that. In the meantime, the parents should be subsidised to the theoretical level for best practice, with or without a means test. The aim would be to maximise the growth of the child, within an extended family loosely termed “co-operative”, given that the word does have a legal meaning – the aim would not be to maximise profit.

When in Knead during a Pandemic

The Boston Globe reports that the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into the industry of “alternative spirituality,” where customers rely on readings and reiki-charged candles for guidance. Businesses sprinkled around Boston are experiencing a spike in interest and revenue that has yet to taper out.

Crowds flock to Open Doors, an eclectic Braintree storefront stuffed with chakra bowls, lion statuettes, and images of Egyptian deities. Open Doors has 18 readers, who saw 25 percent more business than in pre-pandemic days…

The increase may be due, in part, to boredom. With the pandemic limiting entertainment options, many were on the hunt for something fun to do, something new, something novel: video games, crafts, gardening, and of course, the sourdough bread baking movement.

The sourdough bread baking movement in the US has received a fillip with the pandemic. Without an opportunity to bake a traditional loaf of bread while stuck inside at home, people started turning to another bread option, sourdough. Unlike other types of bread, sourdough doesn’t require dry yeast, which was in short supply during the early days of the pandemic. Sourdough requires “wild yeast”, which is present in all flour.

I spent a week at Yale a few years ago when the head of the Berkeley Divinity School, Andrew McGowan, an expert baker, had integrated his love of bread making into discussions of its biblical significance. I learnt then that when one combines flour with water, sourdough “starter” will eventuate. As someone said, neither flour nor water are going anywhere during a pandemic. In the course of my Yale time, I found out about kneading and needing to have a great deal more practice. I felt very much of entering a farinaceous novitiate, but it is always enjoyable to participate in a program where one starts with zilch knowledge. There are no expectations.

A prosforo seal

Not only sourdough but also banana bread have, during the pandemic, attracted devotees. I did not expect people to be soothing themselves with sourdough. I must have missed something during that week at Yale. Maybe I had never progressed from the novitiate. Not completely true, but making the leavened bread, prosforo, used by the Orthodox Church, foundered in the face of other things to do.

The pandemic has not finished; so perhaps we should encourage the invigoration of my farinaceous novitiate, being ultimately “well-bread” as a result of the pandemic, as it were.

By the way, during the isolation, the Ganesh on the mantelpiece kept the Virus away. Not that we indulged in any of that occult malarkey; Ganesh after all had been our protector for years – the equivalent of the Roman lares and penates.

The Orthodox Church

John Anthony McGuckin is not the name you would expect of a Romanian Orthodox archpriest. As I have always been curious about the Eastern Churches, I obtained a copy of his recent book, “The Eastern Orthodox Church”, which purports to be “a New History”. It is not that the author is dismissive of the Western Christian tradition as epitomised by the Roman Catholic and Anglican Church. It is more resentment since he believes that the Roman Catholic Church undermined it, when the Orthodox Church, apart from the Russian Church, was losing all its authority.

The Greek Orthodox Church survived under Ottoman rule linked, as it was, to Byzantium, later Constantinople. The other three original Eastern patriarchates shrivelled. Interestingly, the author is more favourably disposed towards the Anglican Church because the relationship has not suffered the effects of the original schism from Rome. As McGuckin says, in fact it may be because the two churches went separate ways from Roman Catholicism which enhanced the relationship between the Orthodox and Anglican churches.

The Russian expression of the Orthodox Church came with the Slavic conversion in the ninth century “as also in Serbia, Georgia, Bulgaria”. Much of its claim to being the church with true Apostolic succession resides on the concentration of the book on the consolidation of Christianity, before the assaults of Islam on those areas where Christianity was embodied in the four original patriarchates of the Eastern church – Jerusalem, Byzantium, Alexandria and Antioch.

The Orthodox Church bore the brunt of the early turmoil of both heresy and schism. “Heresy” was where one strayed away from the authentic beliefs of Orthodox Christianity and “schism” was where there were doctrinal and power struggles but within, not outside the Orthodox Christianity polity. There were periodic ecumenical councils in the early Church, which today may seem somewhat narrow doctrinal arguments tossed back and forth. However, it led to the separation of Non-Chalcedonian Churches of Egypt, Armenia, Syria and Ethiopia from the ongoing Ecumenical council after that of Ephesus in 431. The Assyrian Church had separated earlier.

At the end of the first part of this book, I had been introduced to a large number of clergy, saints and early Christian worthies of which I had little knowledge. Some of the differences of doctrinal interpretation seem so esoteric, yet those churches which believe in Apostolic succession have been crucial.

I still recite the Nicene Creed exemplifying inter alia my basic belief in the Trinity – this ephemeral group of Father, Son and Holy Ghost – which in itself, without doctrinal education, is a pure article of faith, otherwise impossible to fathom. In the end, why am I reciting the codified belief system, first enunciated in 325, when the Orthodox belief in the Trinity was being challenged by both Arian and Nestorian heresies?

Despite the argument about doctrine, the Nicene Creed survives today demonstrating how robust the Church is.

Even so, the Roman Church, without consulting the Eastern Church, added “and from the Son” (Filioque) to the Nicene Creed. Also, the Eastern churches resented the Roman enforcement of clerical celibacy, the limitation of the right of confirmation to the bishop, and the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist. This led to the schism between the Western and Eastern churches in 1054.

My recitation of the Creed includes “Filioque”. I take unleavened bread as part of the Eucharist, but in the Anglican church, where celibacy is a matter of choice and the Patriarch of Rome does not lead our Church.

There is a chapter on what one can expect if one enters the Orthodox Church. I remember a somewhat different experience – my first exposure to an Orthodox service. I stumbled upon such a service in the steerage area of a ship bringing Russian emigrés, who boarded the ship in Hong Kong, to Australia. It was 1957. I remember wandering down to the lowest desk having been attracted by the muffled chanting.

There they were, in the dimness of this area of the ship abutting the forward cargo hold. The dark shadow of the priest in dark robes partially illuminated by a shaft of light; the indistinct features of a congregation, all standing, and the liturgical chanting in an atmosphere, heavy with incense.

I have since become interested in Russian church music, particularly in the oktavist, who can sing an octave below the conventional operatic basso profundo. There are a number of these Russian oktavists, who sing yet not grumble this extraordinarily low register, including one named Glen Miller (who is actually American), whose rendition of Chesnokov’s concerto “Do Not Reject me in my Old Age” I find magisterial while others may find it turgid, especially when he explores the lowest notes. I do not understand Russian but absorb the strength of the voice. To me, the Orthodox Church is an emotional experience.

Tchaikovsky’s “Hymn to the Cherubim” brings back memories of that experience on the ship which seemed so simple – so close to Eternity. As the composer himself said “Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music. Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul’s moods.”

In recalling that day on the ship, I could have stumbled equally in another age into the Early Church tucked away in some cave in the Eastern Empire, in a world yet to break out into liturgical disputes and worldly appropriation. This was Christianity close to the time of the Apostles, which is the strength of McGuckin’s book, where the extremely difficult concept of the Trinity was being played out against a temporal background. There is so much darkness.  God only knows what would have happened if Christ had been confronted and asked why there were no female Apostles. But maybe he was and it was not reported – or it was suppressed. Such is questioning why I profess to be an Anglican.

Rather than questioning, it is a tragedy that the Orthodox tradition has been traduced by a small person called Putin, whose only reference point is a mythical Slavic empire laced up with the superficial gaudiness of ecclesiastical trappings. Yet he is not the only one. Misplaced crusades have enmeshed Christianity ever since the meaning of the Trinity was too difficult for universal acceptance. Factionalism developed. War follows.

McGuckan, by his emphasis on the doctrinal struggles of the early church, does not make for light reading as I indicated above, but without the steadfastness of the Orthodox beliefs of the early Church, maybe we Europeans may not have ended up venerating a Palestinian or Jew or whatever – immaterial when You are an integral part of the Trinity no less.

Overheard

The Licorice Pizza

When The Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw was asked which film he had tipped to win Best Picture this year 2022, he paused. “Coda has crept up on me. I feel like it might just take it. Then again, I adored Belfast, Licorice Pizza and Drive My Car – I gave them all five stars.”

“Don’t Look Up was a little smug and hectoring for my liking … Dune was wonderful as a spectacle, deeply involving and exotic. Timothée Chalamet , who plays the messianic Paul Atreides in Dune has superseded my man-crush on Adam Driver.”

Adam Driver is a former Marine who is also apparently featured in three films in 2021, The House of Gucci, The Last Duel and Annette. Anyway, I am not sure what a “man-crush” is; sounds a bit crowded to me.

Film watching has been a casualty of the pandemic. I used to get my dose of films on long haul flights, but since 2019, that has disappeared; and I’m sure that this is yet another change, which until I read the list, has rendered me ignorant – and yet I have not missed any of them. Yet!  Must be age.

The Island – Part III 

This is the final instalment of the northern adventure of that doctor called Bill, based on my experience over 40 years ago. I have repeated the last paragraph of Part II to improve continuity in recounting Bill’s return trip from the Port.

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

Every sign was keenly sought. He began to concentrate on the sides of the road to see if he could detect the reflection of the headlights in the eyes of animals — red eyes for cattle, blue eyes for sheep and he was buggered if he knew what colour eyes kangaroos had.

It was easy to resent the car. Like all Australian-made cars, he thought, a souped up tin can on wheels. Big engine in this one; and on an empty road, difficult not to put the accelerator to the floor. But the car was his island of light.

His concentration was interrupted by an impression of something slithering across the road. It was probably a python, or some other snake. Not a goanna. No, probably a snake, but a pretty big one given the thud as he hit it.

The headlights glared ahead as the road rose through the blackness. The signpost indicated the Intersection. This was the start of the difficult area, he remembered Graham saying. He tried to fiddle the radio to give himself some company. The static mocked back and he quickly gave up.

Then he saw the red reflectors — there was a slow car up front. He wondered whether he could just sit behind it and follow, letting it take the brunt of the night. He slowed down, but his impatience got the better of him. He was a creature of habit. The highways near Perth at night were what he knew, and he always drove in the fast lane. He pulled out and raced past. The other car receded, and he was on his own again.

Anxiety about encountering the unexpected kept his back and neck muscles tense. The Spirits had certainly decided to give him a hard time, Bill thought. When the cattle did come, he was expecting them. There they were, two bullocks blundering out into his headlights. He slewed the car past the first one, the tail of the car whipped around so it was like a crab skidding towards the second one. Bill felt the tail clip the bullock and the car reeled back. Bill was no rally driver. He might be able to gun a car down a straight expressway, but here, Bill was a captive of the Spirits.

The car slid onto the gravel. The brakes locked and, for a brief instant, the car shook as though about to roll, then it stopped. The car had not gone into the bush, or hit a tree or gone down a culvert or up an embankment. It just ended up at right angles to the direction of the road, part of the back wheels still touching the macadam.

Then came the adrenalin outpouring. He perspired; the fear and fright reaction had kicked in. Wide-eyed, dry mouthed and a feeling like his heart was about to pump its way into his neck. He shook uncontrollably. Voluntary action was slow to return. He had slumped forward and he sat back and slowly twisted the steering wheel. He switched the ignition off, and then on. All the needle indicators came back. Encouraged by that, he wondered whether the car would move. It did. He reversed it over to the edge of the road to give himself room to turn and point the car in the right direction.

He wondered why the slow car had not caught up. Not that he needed company. He climbed out to survey the damage. There was dent in the rear left door and mudguard. He rubbed his hand over the dent; the tail light was smashed, but no metal had been pushed against the tyre. He looked back for the bullock, but there was nothing — not even a low moan of an injured animal; there was no sign of life.

For the first time, he felt the touch of the night.

He leaned against the car and tried to adapt his eyes to the limits of his night vision; but as he did, he felt the sense of closeness, so tactile that it caused him to straighten, as though finger pads were gently but relentlessly pressing into his shoulder blades. The Spirits had come down the escarpment, from where the Aboriginals had drawn their likenesses. Bill was the vicarious outsider, challenging the night. He had been warned and was now bidden to go. He had been allowed to survive.
Bradshaw figure
But what of the Bradshaw figures — what would these aliens have to say? Would they come and oppress him?

The open car door allowed a pool of light to spill onto the road. The car was Bill’s ship of urban identity. He drove away. There was no further interference in his progress back to his civilisation. He once or twice caught the reflection of other animals’ eyes, but they stayed off the road. He passed the trail to where the rock paintings lay. He had tried to mark it by a nearby concrete bridge. He wondered whether he would come again to see the paintings — to pay his respects. He had been privileged. Privileged — was that only a word to ward off the darkness?
It was all a bit of an anticlimax. 

The lights of the Town on the Dam came into view and he felt himself relax. He knew where he was; no longer in unconnected darkness. There were cars on the road; there were even stray pedestrians. There were lights on the dam. At the motel, he wiped the sweat from the steering wheel before he went into the bar and ordered a whisky. Fuck being privileged — he had only spooked himself. He drank the whisky and ordered another.

He called Avis and a small peroxided woman in pink halter top and shorts came and inspected the damage. She advised him not to drive it; perhaps someone could show him the sights. Bill said that was a good idea. 

In the end, Bill preferred to sit around the pool, reading Alistair McLean, and not going too far from the air-conditioned bar. And when he did go out he went to the souvenir shop and bought a bark painting and a couple of large pieces of zebra rock. The souvenir shop owner, said: “These are unique; you don’t get them anywhere else — except on the floor of the dam.”

The owner tossed in a couple of postcards for good measure. Bill sent the postcards to his friends saying how great the weather was and that he would be flying back in a couple of days. In time, he wrote, for the dinner next week — or was it only cocktails and canapés overlooking the Swan River? He said nothing about the night and his island of light. They would think that it was all bullshit.

Mouse Whisper

I have been told that Nadine Gordimer was a very good writer. In fact she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1991. This extract below from her recently-read book “A World of Strangers”, first published in 1958, written about South Africa during the early Apartheid era, says it all. The initial description is of living as a black person in Sophiatown, contrasted with the privileged white in Alexandra in the early 1950s – all in the city of Johannesburg.

The reality was nearer the surface. There was nothing for the frustrated man to do but grumble in the street; there was nothing for the deserted girl to do but sit on the step and wait for her bastard to be born; there was nothing to be done with the drunk but let him lie in the yard until he’d got over it. Among the people I met with Cecil (the woman the author’s hero was living with at the time), frustrated men threw themselves into golf and horse racing, girls who had had broken love affairs went off to Europe, drunks were called alcoholics, and underwent expensive cures. That was all. That was the only difference.

Boredom is universal, independent of race – and gives meaning to “meaningless”.

As for we mice – we tend not to be black or white – more grey; unless of course, we are born in the fields with a rural russet hue.

Now where is my white mouse mate, Branco. Oh, there he is – a completely boring mouse – into the its Holeyness, the Swiss Emmenthaler.

Sophiatown c1950

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

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

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

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

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

The Political Leak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Albright

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

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

Below are random quotes mostly garnered from the Boston Globe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Floods – The Clarence River

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

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

Lismore floods

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Island Part II

The view of the Gut from Five Rivers Lookout

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rupert could not have said it better

Ketanji Brown Jackson

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

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

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

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

Final Question

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

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

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

Modest Expectations – Indium

Before the age of blogs I used to listen to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, in which he would take a current situation and tie it into past lessons learnt, and in such a way that each letter was a beautifully crafted piece of writing with a beginning and an ending – a complete expression of his view, with a moral woven into it. An Englishman, he had gone to America before War II and became a US citizen in 1941. He not only had this gift as a writer but also as a TV and documentary producer and presenter. His insight into the American way of life was his core expertise, and he wrote it. His voice, with its perfect diction and ghostly tone with a slight tremolo, was particularly engaging, because of his distillation of intimacy. He may have been broadcasting to the world, but as you listened you felt he was speaking directly to you.

Alistair Cooke

I would have liked his life as an intellectual commentator but writing a “Blog from America” for 58 years … I wonder. As for emulating his TV career – no.  I would have been hopeless. The smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd makes me throw up, so phobic I am of the TV studio.

Forty years plus ago I went to the Kimberley and wrote several short stories centred on the places I visited. The story reprinted below entitled “The Island” recounted most closely my experience, while stretching reality into a yarn. It was the first time I felt the unspoken force of this country, without being privileged to have Aboriginal heritage. I have divided this story into several parts, and the first part introduces the Wandjina.

As background to the story, I searched throughout the various places I visited in the Kimberley looking for a bark Wandjina. Apart from a few images in books, I knew very little until I saw images of Wandjina on rock walls.

I managed to find one small bark Wandjina for sale in Kununurra, which I gave to my elder son. Since then, my wife and I have acquired several Wandjina painted by the Karedada sisters – Lily and Rosie (the Karedadas were the family with the responsibility at that time for painting Wandjina); a small bark painting by Waigan and one where the provenance was unknown as it was created in the mid-1960s when such bark representations of the Wandjina were new. Most of these bark images came from the Aboriginal people living at Kalumburu, a settlement on Mission Bay about 230 kilometres north of the Gibb River Road turnoff in Western Australia. Here the Spanish Benedictines had established a mission in the early part of the twentieth century. One of my teachers had said that during WWII, when he was in the Australian navy, he had been stranded there. The priests only spoke Spanish and he not; therefore, they communicated in Latin. No mention in any of his anecdotes of contact with the Indigenous people; such were the times.

Anyway, here is the first part of the story; the eyes are those of my hero, Bill:

In the Northwest of Western Australia in the winter of 1979, the sun starts to set before 5 o’clock. In fact, in that season, it sets at the same time every year. It’s a big country, Western Australia. Bigger than Texas. And the clocks are set to Perth time, even when one is far from the comfort of having a second martini and enjoying the broad sweep of the Swan River. The clocks of suburbia determine that the sun sets prematurely in the north country where the gulfs in the dreamtime were torn out of the coastline and waterfalls run horizontal.

Sixty kilometres up one of these gulfs lies the Port. The expanse of water it overlooks is called the Gut. It vaguely resembles a flaccid stomach.

In the pale purple twilight, the hills brood over this tiny town with its shacks distinct from the new fibro-cement houses on the other side of the hill.

Bill surveyed the car in the fast falling light. Parked on the rise outside the police compound, it had two flat tyres.

The lady from Avis had said that he could have the car if he could get to the Port and pick it up. It was the only hire car available. She said it would be very recognisable because it was iridescent purple — just a medium-sized sedan.

However, as he surveyed the car, he could see it had no protection — none of that ugly but highly effective steel tubing, the so-called roo bars, nor chicken wire to protect against stray rocks through the windscreen.

And there were the two flat tyres.

The Port began to twinkle with ship and house lights. The timber shop fronts threw pools of yellow light onto the street.

But back to Bill. The highly qualified Bill.

Bill, the centre of his own rather inconsiderable space, was a medical practitioner in his early thirties. His family was “old money”. He had mixed his profession with research. His days were spent closeted in a laboratory, occasionally venturing into the antiseptic stretch of the ward to teach a few students and to pronounce on the inmates’ futures, for a price. Bill had reached a steady kind of existence, punctuated by dinner parties, the game of squash, the odd casual affair, and cultivated displays of intellect at conferences, seminars and workshops.

Holidays were spent in expensive resorts. That is to say, generally. This year, Bill had decided to come north and have an adventure of sorts. Bill was accustomed to pre-booked travel, accommodation with deferential staff and a car readily available, with a driver if necessary.

When he had flown into the Town on the Dam, he expected the same, even though his arrangements had been made in a hurry. “No way!” she had said. Cars were at a premium. You can try other hire car outfits, but you’ll get the same answer. She had paused. There was one option. “The only car is up the Port, and if you can get up there, it’s yours.” She paused again and then went on. “It’s got two flat tyres you’ll have to get fixed.”

No wonder it was stuck there, he thought. Didn’t know whether he could do it — make the Port. But when he got back to the motel, he noticed a group preparing to leave. He recognised one as a prominent ear nose and throat specialist from Perth. The specialist was heading a team charged with doing good. He wondered where they were going. He asked. They were going to the Port. He was offered a lift, and straight away accepted.

These guys knew the north — they had spent the latter part of their professional lives coming back and forth at least twice a year to treat the local Aboriginal people and the whites alike. Ear infections were rife among the Aboriginal kids — needed grommets in many cases.

They were good blokes, with a sense of enjoyment of the Land. They had an easy familiarity with the sweeping majesty of the country, where the Cloud spirit was still in control and white people only visited. She had bestowed her grace on the black people, which reflected from the deep pools in their eyes. Look into their eyes and see the arcane. It was Aboriginal country. They walked free in the country without compass. They defined their ownership and boundaries. Bill listened to this explanation. Maybe it was a white man’s interpretation.

Bill had sat next to the specialist surgeon who was leading the team, and who had provided his view of what he called “the blackfella”. It was all so unfamiliar to Bill. He had hopped from town to town, seeing the sights, seeing the Aboriginal people roaming the streets, but he had no experience of communicating with them.

Their driver was identified as a Ngarinyin man who knew the country. They called him Stanley. He was a broad chested man with an equally broad smile. He wanted to know whether Bill wanted to see some rock paintings on the way. The leading specialist thought it a good idea, that it would give Bill an experience — probably “teach you something.”

“Sure” said Bill.

The sun was pleasant. It was June. The company was convivial. Even when they stopped and walked, it was exhilarating. There had first been a track which could be negotiated for some way with the four-wheel drive, but in the end it was easier to walk through the deep sands of the dry creek beds. This was Stanley’s country. The guide shaded his eyes and indicated the rock face.

The brown cliffs where the paintings were, he’d explained as they’d walked, were thankfully not well known and the track, although not particularly difficult to walk, was sufficiently far from the main road to deter any casual defiler. There was always some idiot wanting to scratch his name on the wall — any wall. Weaving in among the woollybutt eucalypts, the track moved up and then downwards. As they walked, the day was imperceptibly vanishing. The shadows were lengthening as they picked their way along the rock face where the figures were displayed.

There were large fish — here a snake — there a hand, an impression in red ochre dust. Tasselled dancing figures. He was told they were called Bradshaw figures, and there were doubts about their authenticity. They were not Aboriginal figures, unlike the wandjina. He had never seen them before. The wandjina were cloud spirits — images with eyes and speckled brows. Their heads were surrounded by radiating lines, which completed an aura. This wandjina was a wellspring of sacred images for the Aboriginal people, unlike the Bradshaw figures.

Some of the paintings were high on the cliff walls; some under overhanging ledges. The gallery ran for hundreds of metres around the cliff until it reached the point where a waterfall flowed in the wet season. The artists had stopped here; the mural was complete. The rock pigeons, their fusty brown feathers giving a sense of an age past, were coming in to roost as the day began to wane.

“Better get going. Still got a way to go.”

The voice broke the stillness, as they had said little, as if in church. The others had seen it before; they had pointed out features in quiet, clipped tones. Bill had nodded and absorbed as much as he could. He wondered at how irrelevant had been his experience in Downtown Perth on a Sunday afternoon, sipping the art gallery ambience. He had really not particularly liked Aboriginal art — bark painting. There was not much of it that he could remember anyway.

But here, in a brief moment, he had got some sense of the art, some context for it — a fleeting insight only; not the meaning that Stanley possessed. (to be continued).

Door County

Door County is a spit of land separating Lake Michigan and Green Bay in northern Wisconsin. Green Bay, the city, lies at the gateway to the peninsula, and has been settled since the seventeenth century when it was a base for fur traders. It is now known for paper manufacture, of being the toilet paper capital of the world – and the home of the NFL Green Bay Packers, so called because a meat packing company gave them $500 for uniforms when they were founded.

Anyway, we bypassed the city of Green Bay, which gets its name from the periodic algae infestation of the Bay. Yet Door County, once you clear the environs of Green Bay, is one the memorable places we have visited.

Memory of that time was bought on this week by the news of a three generation Ukrainian heritage family that has been mass producing candles in the Ukrainian colours (sale proceeds going to the Ukrainian cause) which, unsurprisingly once this was published on national television, elicited a strong demand for the candles across America.

It was Halloween when we visited Door County; pumpkins were everywhere, and the normal crop of witches, faux cobwebs and skeletons and things that are supposed to go bump in the night was very much in evidence.

We stayed in the traditional white clapboard Ephraim Inn, overlooking Lake Michigan. When we went to dinner, we had an unexpected shock. I asked for the wine list and was informed that Ephraim was “dry”. If we wanted a drink with our meals we would have to go down the road to Fish Creek. Fortunately, Fish Creek was well served by restaurants and the Coho salmon fished from the Lake was so good it enticed us to order it two nights in a row.

Since our visit, I believe that Ephraim has lifted the 163 year old ban on alcohol sales which was imposed in 1853 within this Moravian community, where its church with its delicate steeple still stands on a green knoll overlooking Ephraim.

Honeycrisp apples

It was the end of the apple picking season, and there was an abundance of places from which to buy apples. The Gala apple was a familiar variety, but there were at least 20 other varieties and we chose the Honeycrisp, a hybrid noted for its juiciness and crunchiness. But there were many more completely unfamiliar to our Australian palate such as Ginger Gold and Courtland.

We drove the length of the peninsula through the small seaside towns, beside orchards, around windy cliff roads. To me, village America always has its gentle attraction – so different from the dusty flood plain called Australia. As for Door County, even though it seemed to be an endless excuse for Bing Crosby or Doris Day songs, we said we would be back, but we have said that about many places – plans that the Virus has impaired if not totally destroyed.

Anyway, we must get a candle making kit.

Need to Ramp Up

In The Monthly two months ago, Russell Marks wrote a very prescient article about South Australia opening its borders at the time the Omicron virus hit and now has followed the B.a.2 variant.

Simply stated, the Premier, Stephen Marshall, opened the SA borders prematurely – at a time when the Omicron variant first appeared on the scene. The SA Chief Health Officer hurriedly changed her mind when she saw the rapid increase in the number of cases, and recommended the borders be closed again. The Premier did not take her advice. He deferred to the select audience of the Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello media and its impatience with public health measures.

It was the people of South Australia who could see what damage the Virus was wreaking. This was particularly reflected in the disruption to the health services, and the so-called ramping.  In other words, there was the number of ambulances lying idle unable to discharge the patient into the hospital’s emergency department.

I have reviewed extensively two major ambulance services in Australia and have a fair idea of the problems, which extend far wider than the problems that a pandemic introduces. The pandemic has only emphasised these problems.

Against that background of a State under public health stress, the Premier said that he would prefer funding a basketball stadium and a convention centre which only compounds the politico-pathological requirement to build monuments. Once it was hospitals and universities, now it is modern day colosseums where the pork barrel stops.

Despite the media in his favour, Marshall was soundly defeated; and yet elements of the media still say it doesn’t necessarily translate into a Federal electoral defeat for Morrison, despite him being invisible during the campaign. The sight of John Howard being rolled out in the last days showed how far the Liberals were tapping the bottom of desperation. One question – never to be answered – would a Morrison intervention counterpointed by Dutton and Frydenberg, a modern magi, have helped? The locals thought not, but presumably when they do turn up during the Federal election the public will be able to have a direct say in how much it likes the frankincense.

What will be more interesting is how the new Premier will approach the Virus.

I am confused by what the current approach to the Virus is. It seems that the Governments have given up – the public health response is exhausted. Who are the public health champions? The public health talking heads have subsided with the media’s apparent loss of interest. One of public health’s weaknesses is how ineffectual the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine has been and yet two decades ago it led the Australian campaign against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific until the French stopped their tests.

I would have thought that there would be a clear approach. On the one hand there are no restrictions, until a person gets the Virus and then you go into isolation until you test negative. Politicians are scared solid by lockdowns, and the core of preventative measures – social distancing, hand sanitiser and masks – are increasingly a matter of choice.

Vaccination has proved effective up to a point, but now there are no penalties for not being vaccinated, and the relentless anti-vaccination advocates leave a confused community. If this new variant is as contagious as measles, then without due precautions that will mean the whole community will contract it and for a substantial part of the community, the experience will not be a mild one.

The difference with measles is that once infected, once immunised, measles will not recur. No such guarantee exists for the Virus, even if the experts decide it is less virulent.

In public policy terms, I have been advocating dedicated quarantine centres. But once that line of defence is breached, then the next lines of defence are dedicated infectious diseases hospitals with an equally dedicated transport service for those who need hospitalisation. 

Hardly the Little Match Girl 

They buried Kimberley Kitching this week. A Senator from Victoria, she had been parachuted into the Senate under controversial circumstance in 2016 by Bill Shorten when he was ALP leader. She died prematurely at the age of 52, and from then, she became a cause célèbre – a woman harassed to death by unfeeling female colleagues.

As reported in some quarters, it was as though Senator Kitching was the “little match girl”, judging by the ferocious story being constructed around her demise.  She was married to Andrew Landeryou, once joint owner of a palatial home “Wardlow” in Parkville; friend of Chloe Shorten since school days and embroiled in the Health Services Union known for its shenanigans while she was general manager.

The Little Match Girl, Norman Rockwell

Unlike the “little match girl”, Kitching came from a privileged Brisbane private school background. Her father was a university professor, and she benefited from a time in France to becomes fluent in French. She seemed to be a very quick-witted woman. Nevertheless, like many ambitious people she carved out a career never far from controversy.

In 2000, she married Andrew Landeryou, a scion of the inner ALP circle which his dad inhabited. He too has had his moments, from the time of his presidency of the Melbourne University Student Union (formerly, in my time, the Student Representative Council), where he apparently tried to commercialise aspects of that student body. It is strange that when I was President of the same body there were moves, ultimately squashed, to have the Council purchase property at Venus Bay, then an undeveloped collection of sand dunes. I remember looking at it and saying thanks, but no thanks. SRCs were not structured to be land developers. In any event, in his case it did not end well for young Landeryou.

Later he popped up in 2005, with a venture financed by Solomon Lew in part – and when it failed he decamped to Costa Rica leaving Kimberley, portrayed as the victim wife trying to deal with the remains. The suggestion was that Kimberley had been deserted, but whether that was so, they had been swiftly re-united even though Landeryou was bankrupted.

From December 2012, Kitching was employed by the Health Services Union and she was never far away from the controversy which surrounded the criminal behaviour of the local secretary of the union, the recently convicted Kathy Jackson, and the other national officers of the Union, also convicted. Whatever her role was, she obviously was close to some sordid shenanigans and her name was mentioned often in despatches.

For instance, in 2016, the Senate voted 35-21 to note that she, although its newest member, was found to have provided untruthful evidence to the Fair Work Commission. The Greens joined the Coalition in backing the motion, which also received support from three One Nation senators and Victorian senator Derryn Hinch. Quite an introduction!

The conservative Tasmanian Senator Abetz noted in a media release at the time, The fact that Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has backed Kitching so strongly in the face of findings against her from a body that Bill Shorten oversaw for two years, for conduct undertaken while he was the Minister responsible, that she was “untruthful and unreliable” in evidence speaks volumes about his personal and Labor’s standards for public office.”

Ironically, Kitching worked with him in the Senate to introduce a Magnitsky law that allows the government to seize assets from people who have abused human rights around the world.

This was no poor little waif as the media and a few of her mates are trying to portray now. She dined with persons who had clearly shown themselves to be enemies of the ALP, and thus one of the problems for a networker as aggressive as she apparently was, with all “the form” behind her, was whether she could be trusted.

To be able to do what Kitching, herself apparently conservative (in very much as I remember some of the Democratic Labor Party members were), was trying to do, is a particular art form, if one tries to balance on the barbed wire division of an adversarial political system.

Her colleagues who voted against the condemnation of her in 2016 were worried by her free-wheeling approach, whether right or wrong. She was not bullied; she was ostracised – however, the use of “bullying” is more emotive. Ostracism is a favourite ploy in politics.

She dies, and the conservative side of politics well known for their Salem approach to female opponents were on the job. The real target seems to be Penny Wong, as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, who has been a courteous brick wall. She made one exasperated comment which has been turned into a causal relationship with Kitching’s death despite occurring three years ago and eliciting an apology from her.

Morrison wants to run an election based on sabotage and camouflage and if Senator Wong can be discredited so much the better, especially given her appearance and name – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

I suppose last Sunday’s ABC Insiders Program took the proverbial cake. I generally accept bias as part of politics, but this… Australia may be going to Hell in a handcart, but there they were, all over the Kitching case – at least Samantha Maiden and Spears Interruptus were.

Greg Sheridan played the avuncular role, his views laced within his long time association with Santamaria and the National Civic Council – a fading reminder of the strife within the Labor party, particularly in Victoria, generated by Santamaria and certain elements around Archbishop Mannix so many moons ago, but still apparently latent.

Mark Kenny, knowing he was in a setup, just let it flow apart from a few comments drowned out by the Interruptus.  Australia is entering a time of a new form of Government – Murdocracy – a neologism to describe rule by the media.

Now, to the next phase – Albanese portrayed as the weak leader in the grip of three women – each of whom portrayed as having a doubtful allegiance to Australia. Yes, Murdocracy indeed.

As a postscript, I was interested in the association of sudden cardiac death and thyroid disease. Obviously I have had no access to Kitching’s clinical notes but it is worthy to note that in a 2016 cohort study in The Netherlands, an association was sought between thyroid disease and sudden cardiac death. This was an extensive population cohort and it was shown that raised levels of free thyroxine were associated with an increased incidence of sudden cardiac death, even when the patient was “apparently” euthyroid (in other words in the normal range).

It is well known that the thyroid hormone derived from the thyroid gland in the neck is a major component in the regulation of metabolism. For example, in thyrotoxicosis tachycardia is often present, as in hypothyroidism bradycardia is evident. However, The Netherlands’ paper could not establish any causal relationship for the phenomenon of sudden cardiac death, which incidentally also occurs in the autoimmune Hashimoto’s Disease. There was no mention of “bullying” or “ostracism” in this analysis

Mouse Whisper

In response to the article on banana boats last week our Swedish correspondent has informed us there is a job available in Stockholm for a banana ripener. The incumbent has recently retired after 33 years during which he has assisted the ripening of 55,000 bananas per year. Sounds a succulent job. I may apply. The Swedish text books with a tipple of Aquavit beckon.

Modest Expectations – Daniel Boone

This week the blog registers three years – every week for the past 156 weeks, including this one – not missing one. All my life, I have more or less written stuff, some published, mostly not.

Much of the blog has wandered  through my stock of memories, within which are those of my life misspent; the goals I attained and most that I did not – but gave it a good shot. I am not “a shed person”, but fortunately my wife is. I have never been particularly good at any sport. I do not have any hobbies – but I write and advise – and have been very much an observer these past few years.

That has not always been so.

I have attempted many things I have not been much good at, but I have survived. I hope I have the courage to leave a clear documentary visit around myself. The reason? We all have a story. The headstones on graves each conceal a unique story.

Unlike most people, who may have had a worthwhile tale to be told and yet did not, I increasingly write mine as a chronicle, as idiosyncratic yet shamelessly manipulating my biases.

I have always wondered how else one’s legacy can be recorded. If your genes hold your heritage, is it possible for your senses to unravel the heritage locked up in your genes?

Here your life lies recorded, and that of my ancestors upto the conception of my next round of forefathers (and five mothers). It is a huge reservoir – however it can be stored. That is a real question lying inside my hypothesis, for which I cannot even conjecture at this time, but does not, by itself, invalidate my thesis.

The Burren

Once I was walking on that extraordinary wasteland – the Burren – in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, whence my ancestors came. In fact, the Burren is not a wasteland, it is just that from afar the limestone pavement resembles concrete. However, as you get close you see its uniqueness, because wedged in the limestone is both temperate and arctic flora. It is in the pavement cracks where life endures.

Suddenly, as I was walking along, I was seeing the land through the eyes of a young boy. From the change in the surroundings, I must have been of that age. My ancestor, as I presumed myself to be, was running, which I started to do also. In that instant of a previous time on the Burren and in this example of déjà vu when I reflect upon it, my sensation was of gliding into a landscape where my perspective was not that of a grown adult but that of a young boy. Then I glided out of this, with no sensation that any time had passed, except it had started to rain. Running to find shelter. Was not this a déjà vu phenomenon – I was trying to find a dry place, which I did in one of those Neolithic shelters that dot the Burren. This has been the only time where the sense of being in a place in a previous life was strong, even though I had never been there. In this case, the feeling passes quickly as though I have scratched an itch.

To me, if there is a so-called paranormal, it resides deep in my genes and therefore the further back in my genetic store, the less likely it is to flare as a fully formed sensation. Maybe it only occurs when the genes are aligned in a particular way and resonate in such a way that the stored memory can be tapped.

Thus, in chronicling my life I have provided a limited legacy. Unfortunately, with death dies what I call my genetic delusion. I can only have inherited the legacy of my mother and father up to the day of when my genetic trail was formed. However, the same resides in my offspring and all along the “Begat Trail” – a transferable library until your line is no more.

I suppose I should have returned to the scene, but let me reiterate, it is not a vision; nor a hallucination. It was nevertheless so very curious.

Albored Part V

As a friend of myself has said, Albanese is the most impressively unimpressive person who he can recall as striving to head this nation. He is not the only doubter. Crikey has said the same in more words, with an added apparent Freudian slip for spice.

If the old Albanese wasn’t good enough for the job of prime minister, why would the new version be suddenly suitable?

The election will put a possibly unprecedented focus on the character, competence and deportment of the leaders of the major parties. This in part is a consequence of the absence of a detailed policy competition — it threatens to be a policy-free electron (sic).

I remember working for a politician who was considered unfairly a lightweight, and no amount of media grooming could change that view, other than in the short term. Therefore, I have experience with such characters and seriously considered, when young, going to Yale to study psychopolitics.

Albanese is not the leader that Australia needs; from my perspective it is as simple as that.

There is a need to jolt the system and then re-assure them that you are the person for the times. In government, you must determine what you do on every day of the first week – and rehearse it with your closest advisers who should have expertise rather than personal ambition. That is what Albanese needs – not someone like his shadow minister at the weekend who said something about accomplishing electoral promises in the first four months. This a variation of the catchcry – of the first 100 days. Apart from the American jargon overtones, it is a cop-out.  Hit the ground running; remember God got it right – he rested on the seventh day – not the first.

The agenda – forget about vanity projects – fireproof and flood proof the country; put corrupt politicians behind bars; and remember Ukraine is a prime example for defending our country – be an inspiration to the population.

The country burns, the country floods, the aged are treated like excrement, the education system is starved and yet the country wants to pander to a corrupt body in Lausanne for a couple of weeks of pole tasselling in 2032, because a small group of people with an overweening sense of entitlement, who identify themselves with the Davos crowd and can be seen sprouting from the recent AFR luncheon (we being told that in times of suffering, greed is good) think it is a good idea. Fine, just as long as you are part of the select few.

Albanese, you addressed them, but see how the Murdoch Press tried to mangle you? As the Robot’s catchcry in Lost in Space goes: “Warning, warning, warning!” Rather apt, I would think – on many fronts!

Portrait of a Ukrainian

This article about President Zelensky comes from The Atlantic. It would have been much more convenient for the USA’s “Craven A” team if he had fled the country, and become the noble leader in exile. Then the media, after initial applause, would have moved on. The Western leaders could retreat to the vapid exercise of Davos and its ilk to make sage comments about the Goddess, Inertia or Entropy, the God of Pinhead Rearrangement.

After all, the World has been treated to the spectacle of the odious ruler of Belarus committing atrocities on his own people. The woman who actually won the election, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, is now in Lithuania, her husband in a Belarus gaol for the next 18 years. Brave couple – while the leaders of the free world bluster.

“Who?” “You know, the good-looking woman – what’s her name?” and so she vanishes off the front pages very quickly. Name too difficult for the media to pronounce. The leaders of the Free World breathed a sigh of relief, “an invasion not confronted”.  Belarus remained as a satrap of Putin’s and Putin emboldened, used it as another springboard for the attack on Ukraine. Never underestimate the ability of the West to bully when they believe they gain an advantage in the continuation of their colonial past, cloaked as the Coalition of the Willing or some such bombast. But a War in Europe is a different matter.

Now to the edited article. Nothing of any consequence to the truth of this narrative has been removed.

President Zelensky

The World War II leader whom Zelensky reminds me of is the one who chose honour over surrender and who fought for an idea of his country even when the reality was impossibly bleak. Today, Volodymyr Zelensky exhibits some of the traits that made Charles de Gaulle great and saved France.

In May 1940, France was lost, its armies overrun, its chances of victory hopeless. De Gaulle escaped and made it the mission of his life to erase the shame of his country’s capitulation and collaboration—to the point of making absurd and often offensive falsehoods about France having won its freedom alone. Zelensky’s conduct, and that of his compatriots, during the opening days of this conflict means Ukraine has no shame to erase. Still, Zelensky, like de Gaulle, is fighting for the idea of his homeland as well as its liberty, for its right to be free and dignified.

Analogizing a contemporary figure such as Zelensky by looking for parallels in World War II is necessarily limiting, and, as a rule, WWII analogies can be overused and should be avoided. But Zelensky’s defiant spirit, whether Gaullist or Churchillian or something else entirely, does not only reveal his own character—it teaches us about the character of the West too.

There can be something a little distasteful about Western onlookers (myself included) cheering on Ukrainians for a cause that our countries are not willing to join, a stance that risks raising the price of a peace that will be paid only with Ukrainian blood. Nevertheless, it is possible to recognize this, to be inspired by what Zelensky represents, and then to be shamed by his example.

Here is a nation and a leader willing to sacrifice so much for the principle of independence and the right to join the Western world. And yet, much of the West is jaded and cynical, apparently devoid of any such mission, cause, or sense of idealism anymore.

What is it that the West believes in now? When you think of the great liberal heroes of our age, Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, say, they are actually deeply pragmatic conservatives, constantly hedging, calculating, and balancing interests with little grand vision or cause to pull their policies together. There is much to be said for this type of governance: As Helmut Schmidt, the former chancellor of West Germany, once quipped, “Whoever has visions should go to the doctor.” Visions led to the Iraq War, for example. Yet conservative pragmatism is also deeply limited, allowing adversaries like Vladimir Putin to take advantage, exploiting caution and shortsighted selfishness.

De Gaulle was not unique in articulating and fighting for an idea of his country. Many Western leaders during the Cold War had a certain idea of the West: Margaret Thatcher believed in a Europe whole and free; Ronald Reagan in a struggle between tyranny and freedom. You don’t have to agree with their worldview to understand that such ideas are powerful, inspiring people to do things that no “rational” person would dream of.

A senior European defense official told me recently that the West needed to find a way to reimagine itself and its role in the world, to avoid slipping into the trap of either pretending that nothing has changed or concluding that nothing can be done about it—that, Merkel- or Obama-style, leaders must simply manage the fallout and avoid becoming entangled in it.

This official said he was struck by how this sense of resignation was reflected in our culture as well. Movies and TV shows now rarely depict a heroic, grand visionary, “only a never-ending struggle for supremacy,” in the words of the official I spoke with. Instead of Cold War heroes such as Rocky, we have the cynical characters in Game of Thrones, Billions, and Succession, channeling our new cynical reality. Our imaginative understanding of the world has changed. The West has killed off the idea of itself as good. Does it still even recognize a baddie, this official asked, or has it concluded that countries such as Russia or China are no worse or better? This, in fact, is the Trump view of the world, largely shared on the far left too.

Perhaps this is why Zelensky is so inspiring. Western countries don’t have this type of leadership anymore: unembarrassed, defiant belief in a cause. So many people in the West have given up on the fairy tale of their own superiority because they understand how badly the West has behaved over the decades, from wars for colonial control to the War on Terror.

Yet perhaps the other reason Zelensky is so inspiring is that suddenly we can see that he is right. Vladimir Putin is a monster whose cause is unjust and immoral. In standing up to him, Ukraine is articulating a certain idea of itself that is righteous and dignified and heroic: virtues we long ago dismissed as old-fashioned. How tragic it is that Zelensky’s idea has to be attacked for us to be reminded of ours.

Wayne Gretzky has his Say

Ice hockey is the favourite sport of Vladimir Putin. In fact, according to Putin himself, he is one of the greatest ice hockey players never to have mastered the sport. In exhibition games in his own beloved Sochi, he has scored eight goals, some without the help of the goalkeeper. In a triumphal lap of honour video, images have been shown of his tell-tale celebratory sign of stumbling and falling onto the ice – a manoeuvre that he is intent in perfecting to a full frontal sprawl.

Alex Orechkin

Outside himself his favourite player is Alex Orechkin, who is the captain of the Washington Capitals. There are a number of Russians playing professional ice hockey in North America. Orechkin is thought to be close to and a favourite of Putin. He has tried to distance himself from the Ukrainian invasion, but the tentacles are strong and crossing Putin may mean a stint captaining the Siberian Tundras.

In the most recent outing, the Washington Capitals were playing the Edmonton Oilers. As you would expect, Orechkin received a hostile reception. The Edmonton Oilers won. This team was Wayne Gretsky’s old team.

Gretsky led them to four Stanley Cups in his 20 year career. Now 61 years old, he is still revered, particularly in Edmonton where it is said that there are 135,000 of Ukrainian heritage. He was the greatest player ever – a comparison with Shane Warne would seem appropriate – on the rink, but he was never had that nuance of being a drongo off the playing arena.

Gretsky has always identified himself to be of Ukrainian heritage after his mother’s side, but the Gretsky family had large landholdings in Tsarist Russia, which include estates in modern-day Belarus. The Gretsky family was forced to flee Russia at the time of the 1917 Revolution. Gretsky’s father nevertheless became a very wealthy man in Canada.

Gretsky may just have the moral suasion to be sent back to help centre  Putin perfect his full face sprawl. But who is listening?

“It’s not about punishing the Russian kids. What about the Ukrainian kids that are being killed daily? The Ukrainian kids that are 12 or 14 years old, going to war. I don’t want anybody to be punished. I just think it makes common sense that we shouldn’t compete against this country right now, while they’re at war against an innocent country.” 

Pen Nibs No More

Pieman River, west coast of Tasmania

My school class was asked to research a topic. It must have been geography and for some reason I decided to undertake a project on osmiridium, which led me to dusty volumes of mining of the metal alloy in the Western area of Tasmania. My interest was probably sparked by the fact that osmiridium was the preferred metal used in the manufacture of pen nibs.  Anyway, as I dug into the project I found out that the West Coast was a lode of minerals.

As background for my interest in the alloy, the following is reprinted here – namely, osmiridium is a popular name for a naturally occurring alloy of the metals iridium and osmium. Corrosion-resistant, it is used in the manufacture of a variety of articles from pen nibs to munitions. First recognised in the 1880s as an undesirable impurity associated with alluvial gold in western Tasmania, it was discarded by the miners. A penalty was imposed by the Mint for its removal from gold.

In 1909 a dramatic increase in price created a boom for the metal, with a rush of miners moving into a number of western Tasmanian mining fields. The collapse of the Russian industry as a result of war and revolution saw prices continue to rise. By 1920 the price reached £38 per ounce and that year the Pieman fields produced 2009 ounces with a value of £77,104. Tasmania had now become the world’s largest producer.

A second osmiridium rush followed in 1925. In that year £105,570 was paid to miners, but by 1930 the boom had passed with only £16,235 paid to all the miners in the state. Production of osmiridium continued until 1954, by which time more than 881 kg had been mined.

A few nights ago, we raised the question of whether there was still osmiridium mining in the area. One of my dinner companions knew exactly what I was talking about. It is not a topic that I expected anybody to know much about. Not this guy, he knew exactly what I was talking about. He had grown up knowing that there were mines behind a tiny settlement called Lowana near Macquarie Harbour and was fossicking for it, while I was probably still only reading about it in the library.

There was even a settlement deeper into the bush now almost completely disappeared called Adamsfield, where the osmiridium was alluvial. Here was the site of that second rush in 1925. A 4WD will take you now, but nothing much is left of a mining settlement which once housed 1,000 people at its peak in the second decade of the last century – for a short time, osmiridium was more valuable than gold.

The Osmium nib

Osmium is the densest metal known, being twice as dense as lead. If you have held a sphere of osmium the size of a table tennis ball, you will immediately know what dense means! Iridium on the other hand is the most corrosion resistant metal known. it is used in various important alloys, unlike osmium which, with the demise of the pen nib, has few other uses. Together with platinum, iridium is included in the standard metre bar which is housed in Paris.

So, there you are. Project complete, sir, but 70 years too late.

Daylight Come and He Want to go Home

In my historical novel, The Sheep of Erromanga, I mention a ship which left the then New Hebrides with a shipment of bananas bound for New Zealand. By the time they reached New Zealand all the bananas were rotten. I thought nothing of it – just poor stevedoring. I dismissed it as nothing more than that.

I had known that if you place an unripe avocado in a brown paper bag with a banana, the ripening of the avocado is accelerated because of the ethylene emitted by the banana.

Bananas are also said to emit methane and, in an enclosed cargo hold, that could be lethal. The other unpleasant fact is that spiders love being among the bananas – a tarantula being among such stowaways.

I read an article this week where the captain, finding that his passengers had bought bananas on board, threw all of them into the sea (the bananas that is). The fear of bananas on boats is also associated with the knowledge that with bananas, other fruit which could ripen could also over-ripen, and eventually would rot. This was a major concern when fresh fruit on board was essential as a preventative health agent against scurvy.

Banana boat

As Harry Belafonte sang, there were banana boats. His song was that of the dock workers loading bananas in Jamaica. They were very fast boats because they had to get bananas from Central America and the Caribbean to Europe very quickly – until refrigerated ships were commissioned in the early part of the twentieth century. Modern banana boats tend to be reefer ships or other refrigerated ships that carry cooled bananas on one leg of a voyage, then general cargo on the return leg.

Mouse Whisper

Heard on TV just after half time … BREAKING NEWS: “SR was taken to hospital with suspected fractured ribs.”

OK, but small things do amuse small minds.

Modest Expectations – Leyland Sprinter

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

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

Strahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vera Putina’s little boy

The Winter War – Finland v Russia

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

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

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

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

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

Destruction caused by Putin’s war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgotten Ohio Ukrainians rallying against Putin’s war

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

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

Albored Part IV – No Longer Unready?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maeslant storm surge barrier near Rotterdam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rupert’s Quote of the Geek

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

Try Ukraine, Buster!

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

Mouse Whisper

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

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

Modest Expectations – Jack Nicklaus

Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad.

Mr Putin, we shall tear up Kaliningrad.

Maybe, we can teach you the lines,

Mr President.

When Hitler swept across Poland, a similar terrain to Ukraine in the autumn of 1939, it took 38 days for Poland to be subdued. Hitler had help from whom else? Of course, the Soviet Union, which joined in the feeding dismemberment on 17 September; while the hyaenas were members of the Slovak Nazi militia, a by-product of the same process the year before when Czechoslovakia was occupied by Hitler.

Now Putin is out to emulate Hitler by invading the Ukraine to satisfy his imperial megalomania. Thirty-eight days is the target, Vladimir.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, the new Leader of the Free World

Putin calculated that if America did not intervene, then he knows Europe won’t because which of the NATO states will deliver the first blow. When Putin’s forces occupied Crimea, the Ukrainian reaction was to remove his ally as President, Viktor Yanukovych, who not unsurprisingly came from Donesk. Ukrainians elected a TV comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, who seems to have more intestinal fortitude than many of his ilk. The caption on a recent photograph – “Leader of the Free World” – might have been intended irony, but much of irony can be ascribed as truth.

Nevertheless, the circumstances which enabled Putin to develop his strategy, whether complicitous or not, were due to Trump. Without the chaos Trump caused, coupled with his hatred of his own country, it is doubtful where Putin would have accumulated the resources to enable the invasion.  In addition, he fed the foetal Trump ego.

Already in the “Free World” there was too much of the appeasement mentality throughout the past two decades. Both the Bush and Obama Presidencies passed by, where the underlying determination and hatred for America by Putin lay undetected.  Even in this past week, the spokespeople from the State Department were still whimpering about diplomacy.

Before the rise of Putin, the Balkan war in the 1990s was a nasty European prelude, but it happened when Russia was a weakened remnant of the Soviet Union. However, the thugs then in the ascendency in Serbia were intent on genocide of their Muslim brothers and sisters – not to mention the Croats. All separated by religion, but basically the same Slavs with a common spoken language. Nevertheless, the Greater Serbia looms large in the mythology of Slavic dominance, allied as it is to the Orthodox Church mysticism – and another front for Putin mischief.

The spring thaw is coming in Ukraine and then the ground will turn to mud. It is black soil – lovely to drive on when dry, but when wet, it turns to mud, and then it is a nightmare to navigate, as I found out on the black soil plains of Northern New South Wales.

Poltrava

Despite the black soil, expansion of Russian power has been helped over the centuries by the various despot rulers having exceptional generals going as far back to Peter the Great.  It was here that Prince Menshikov’s cavalry, and in particular Count Boris Sheremetev’s infantry and artillery, was crucial in the destruction of Swedish influence at the Battle of Poltrava in 1709, thus changing the whole power relationship of northern Europe.

The obvious Soviet playbook end point for the Ukraine is a puppet state with a secret police full of sociopathic killers – but there is a cost which Russia’s economy may not, in the long term, be able to sustain. Areas where Russia derives its income will be sanctioned by the EU, Great Britain, USA and others.  Unless Putin has the capacity to further loot, where will the funding come from now? In Europe he has only Moldova, Finland, Sweden and some of the Balkan countries that are not members of NATO. Looting Belarus would be like robbing your cousin’s two-dollar store.

However, this heir to Poltrava needs many more resources to continually expand his imperial obsession – but wait, there is Serbia, a natural ally. The Serbs in Bosnia Herzegovina are restless – talks of secession in the air. More destabilisation – more misinformation.

I do not believe that NATO is sitting on its hands. It is hesitant, because even if Russia has a comparatively small GDP (look around and see what you have that is Russian), Russia does have a considerable nuclear arsenal.

You see, The Economist put forward a perfectly logical outcome to this adventurism. It was written prior to the invasion; but do we have a new logic?

Mr Putin cannot revive growth, for that would require structural reforms that would destabilise politics. He cannot reverse the brain drain, because that would require taming his security services. He cannot deal with the demands of the young or the regions, because that would require him to quit. An isolated, bored and ageing leader, increasingly reliant on a small coterie of similar age and KGB background, he prefers geopolitical posturing and war games, where results are visible and instantly gratifying. He is reconciled to ruling by fear, not guile and the cultivation of common interests; if he understands Mr Greene’s 17th Law of Power, he has failed to master the 18th: “Do not build fortresses to protect yourself—isolation is dangerous”.

Yes, but so is Putin a dangerous brooding person, who seems not to conform to any reasonable expectations. Eventually, if he survives, the Chinese will find out in Central Asia – but first “I have to destroy Western Europe”.

Good one Murdoch

The Lincoln Project has released an indictment. What it is stating, without committing to print. “Go, verify yourself, Murdoch?”

Personally given the influence of Murdoch over our government, I am affronted. Do we Australians still want to associate ourselves with this Organisation which employs such a person as Tucker Carlson?

You know what England did with the Hitler’s propagandist, the New York-born Lord Haw Haw, in 1946.

I don’t know whether being born in San Francisco would grant you an exemption, Carlson, when ultimately retribution will be handed out.

And on record, I abhor capital punishment, but at times… but let’s read what the Lincoln Project has to say.

American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines here at home and deployed around the world are being bombarded by enemy propaganda.

That’s because Fox News is the official channel airing on U.S. bases around the world.

Recently, Fox News and Russian propaganda media have been working from the same exact playbook, pushing the same anti-American and anti-democratic propaganda. 

Don’t take our word for it; the Kremlin is using footage from Tucker Carlson and the Fox crew right now to justify their invasion of Ukraine:

It would be one thing if this was the mandatory viewing at Mar-A-Lago or the halls of CPAC. Fox is the default news network at U.S. military bases across the world…and our troops deserve better. 

Kremlin propaganda is being piped into the minds of our very own U.S. soldiers while they stand ready to defend our country. It’s time for the Biden Administration to take action.

We can’t let our soldiers be victimized by pro-russia, pro-Putin Fox propaganda. Add your name so we can give the White House the support it needs to help us to #BanFoxFromBases now.

While this was alluded to on Media Watch this week, let’s delve deeper. The magazine Vanity Fair has revealed that this Carlson, this Fox opinionate, now is trying to break the land speed back-pedalling record

Prior to Thursday, Carlson was this-close to inviting Putin on his show and asking him, “Any chance we can get you to run in 2024? I know it’s a long shot but…I’d love to see it.”

Yes, if you missed Carlson‘s most recent shows, a quick recap of commentary he’s offered on the situation:

  • It’s “not un-American” to support Putin;
  • Democrats will find you guilty of treason if you don’t hate Putin;
  • The whole thing is simply a “border dispute” ;
  • “Ukraine is not a democracy”;
  • Ukraine is a “puppet of the West”; and
  • Our personal favourite, “that unless Vladimir Putin has personally had you or one of your family members murdered, you really don’t have any right to criticize the guy.”

I hate to say it, but what is the brown stuff on each of the Sky News commentator’s shirtfronts. I guarantee it is not Vegemite.

John Landy

Central Park is one of those leafy multipurpose places which are the touchstones for a garden city like Melbourne. It was very much a part of my childhood where we used to have a Sunday picnic and where, if you lived in Darling, as my family did up to when I was twelve, one walked through Hedgeley Dene to get to the Park. Later I played cricket on one of the Park’s ovals.

John Landy, the great Australian athlete, used to train there in the days when running was just a pure expression of maximising your ability.

As a boy, Landy would have been a contemporary of Rupert Murdoch at Geelong Grammar school, both of whom turned out to be men of strong will – one of whose major goals was accomplished before the other had begun.

I met John Landy several times socially. He was not a person in such an environment to make you look twice.  He was quiet and unassuming, with a curious habit of bending forward and clasping his hands before his chest when making a conversational point, as one writer observed.

It was another matter when that lithe athlete strode onto the running track. His rivalry with Roger Bannister to be the first sub-minute miler was one of those challenges that concentrated the collective mind in the early 1950s.

When Landy ran onto the track, he became a different person. He tended to run from the front and in doing so demonstrated his mastery in middle distance running. Yes, Bannister beat him in bettering the four minute mile and then because Landy looked over his left shoulder at the Vancouver Empire Games mile in 1954, lost momentum and was beaten in the last hundred metres by Roger Bannister.

I saw Landy in one of the greatest runs of his life and that was in the 1500 metres final at the 1956 Olympic games. Landy was not a tactical runner in that he liked to be in front and the others had to catch him.

In the 1500 metres final he was shuffled back and was forced to make his run on the outside of the field. I never forget this lean figure sprinting on the outside just before the turn into the final straight. The commitment was absolute; the style was flawless; he was trying to stay away from a bumping duel. Then he had gone past, and all I saw was a pack of runners at the winning post. For an instant I   hoped Landy had got up to win – but it was not to be. His was a bronze medal. The gold medallist was an Irishman named Ron Delaney, then a student at Villanova University in America. Second was an East German and then Landy. It was a magnificent run by a magnanimous man.

John Landy running at Turkü

A few years ago, I had a spare day in Finland and we were staying near the Helsinki railway station. I said to my companion, “Let’s go to Turkü.” It was quite effort – having to change platforms and Finnish train doors are uncompromisingly automatic. For disabled people this is a challenge and to avoid being wedged, you have to throw yourself on at just the right moment, crutches and all. Then when we got to Turkü, we alighted at the far end of a long windswept platform; fortunately, there was one taxi on the rank that had not been taken.

Turkü is a very pleasant place, particularly famous for its mediaeval castle. My only souvenir was a felt trivet in the shape of Finnish traditional rye bread with a hole in the centre. (ruisreikäleipä).

What had this trip to do with Landy? Well, it was a sort of pilgrimage. I had always wanted to go to the place where Landy broke the world mile record in 1954 registering 3.57.9 on a cinder track, a record which stood for three years.

At the time of his death recently, the world mile record had been progressively reduced to 3.43.13, which has stood since 1999, run by a Moroccan, Hicham el Guerrouj.

But nobody can remove from my memory that grainy photograph of Landy breasting the tape in Turkü, some 58 years ago. Just going to Turkü fulfilled a promise I made years ago that I would one day go there. Landy was just that important to a once teenage Australian.

The Oklahoma Panhandle

If you had the urge to travel around five States in America you could start on the Oklahoma panhandle – a tongue-like intrusion between Texas on the south side, Kansas and Colorado to the North and (as we have done, entered Oklahoma) on the western edge from New Mexico. Here there is very impressive sign telling you that you have entered Oklahoma.

The Panhandle is a very dry area, which in the thirties became the dustbowl from where the farmers, termed Okies left. It was a classic result of not looking after the environment. Even today, it is flat bleak landscape and as we were driving towards the main township of Guymon, a tornado warning came over the car radio. This strip of land is part of tornado alley, which stretches north from the Gulf of Mexico until the warm and cold air stream collide to form tornadoes, mostly in late spring and early summer.

On this day, the tornado warning mentioned Guymon, towards which we were driving; but after some consternation, there was relief when the tornado was moving away from ourselves on the other side of Guymon.

I had never heard of Sanora Babb until my attention was drawn to a newly published collection of essays about her: “Unknown No More” subtitled “Recovering Sanora Babb”.

Sanora Babb

Sanora Babb herself was born in 1907 in Oklahoma and died on the last day of 2005.

Then I read Sanora Babb’s autobiographical novel – An Owl on Every Post. It is a beautifully written tracery of Sanora Babb growing up with her sister, father and mother in her grandfather’s dugout. Alonso, her grandfather, is sharply drawn.

The description of childhood poverty is matched by her optimism, her sharp eye for detail and her eventual emergence being able to attend school. This emergence and her adolescence and awakening in terms of realising the importance of gender is crammed into the final chapters of the book.

Her family was forced, because of the penury caused by her father’s gambling, to move from Oklahoma to the altiplano of Eastern Colorado, where her grandfather scrabbled an existence out of growing broom millet.

If the crop failed, then they had no money and little to eat. Yet this is not a self-pitying book; one feels the impression of a life lived in an unforgiving environment where the winter was savage and the cry of coyotes a reminder of the wilderness in which they subsisted.

The family lived through the death of a brother in childbirth and their mother’s slow recovery. It was part of the self-contained existence. You survived; there were no nuances, learning to read from a Kit Carson book and Denver Post newspaper cuttings pasted on the dugout walls. There was Bounce the dog and Daft the horse, in its free-range gallop, which ended tragically in him falling into a ravine.

Then they are given a lifeline to move from the dugout to Kansas, to the township of Elkhart, which my wife and I remember passing through 70 years later. It is difficult to forget, because along the southern border where the railway line runs, so runs the Oklahoma border. That evening we stayed close by at Liberal, Kansas, but that’s another story.

There is no memorial to Sanora there, but then she had largely been forgotten. The fact that she was a Communist may have had something to do with it; others said her literary achievements were overshadowed by those of John Steinbeck. But who knows? Taste in literature is a very ephemeral matter.

As Alan Wald wrote in an essay entitled: Sanora Babb in Her Time and Ours, “In my view, however, the reconstruction of Babb’s entire career is still very much in progress … Babb may have commenced as our plebian Jane Austen of the plains with a motive of committing acts of earnest witnessing. Over time, though her art increasingly suggests a socialist Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life from angles, odd and slanted …

Craft conscious as well as class conscious, Babb’s writing can be bittersweet, elegant, and faintly wistful, sometimes with a grim documentary frisson. She can pour herself into nooks and crannies of her characters’ contradictions, even as her vision is undergirded by a Marxian awareness of the structure of oppression. The result is that she pushes the boundaries of empathy to value humanity as undivided and seemingly the zeitgeist of at least two ages – the Great Depression and the New Millennium. No wonder the faces staring out from much of her fiction at times have a startling immediacy.”

I wonder why I found Sanora Babb so entrancing, even though I have only read one of her books – I never thought of her providing me with a link between Jane Austen and Johannes Vermeer, both of whose works I greatly admire. Learn something every day.

Helô – It’s St David’s Day

In March, Paddy’s Day gets all the attention, with creatures in tall green hats and foaming glasses of Guinness searching for their Irish heritage throats. Last Tuesday, it was St David’s Day, the national day for the Welsh. Yet it is a day that goes unnoticed by most of us.

St David, with a white dove, his emblem

St David is the patron saint of Wales and St David’s Day falls on 1 March, the date of his death in 589.  It is not a national holiday in the UK or even a bank holiday in Wales, despite numerous campaigns. After all, the English first tried to suppress Wales and its language in the Act of Union in 1536.

The feast has been regularly celebrated since the canonisation of David in the 12th century by Pope Callixtus II. Callixtus was a Burgundian of noble birth. An enlightened pope, he initiated canon law decrying anti- Semitism (as well as laws forbidding simony and concubinage by the clergy).

St David for his part set up monastic communities in what is now Devon and Cornwall as well as Brittany; and his ascetic existence would have not been the most attractive as he harnessed literally his monks to plough the fields.

St David’s Day has been celebrated in Australia since at least the 1840s, as has been reported. In Melbourne, for instance, the 1865 festivities had the then Cambrian Society President B. G. Davies, MLA fulminating: “I am aware that many taunts and jeers are directed at Welshmen for so warmly adhering to the customs and traditions of their motherland… The English have their Shakespearian festivals, the Scotch their meetings in memory of Burns, and the Irish delight in commemorating their St Patrick… so why should not the sons of dear old Cambria meet in honour of their patron saint, and hold converse in the immortal language he so nobly uttered.”

So why not?

Well, it could be said the Welsh do have their Eisteddfod, and we could have Welsh choirs singing ‘Land of my Fathers” and have people dolled up in traditional Welsh dress cavorting the landscape and watching re-runs of “How Green was my Valley” or readings from Dylan Thomas.

To celebrate St David’s Day I wanted to have cawl – the Welsh national dish, but she who is the cook said she was not going to stand over a cauldron of lamb stew, replete with swedes, rutabaga, mangelwurzels, potatoes and carrots for a day and a half. Anyway we did not have access to Caerphilly cheese, an essential ingredient.

In the end we settled for Welsh rarebit and bara brith (speckled bread), leaving laverbread, and Welsh cakes for another day. Then there is always the vegetarian Glamorgan sausage where leeks are an essential ingredient. (We did have leeks cooked with Welsh balsamic vinegar and olive oil for dinner).

Laver seaweed (porphyria purpurea)

Laverbread makes the difference if you want a Welsh breakfast rather than that of a full on English breakfast. Laverbread is seaweed, dried, peppered and salted combined with oatmeal, and the best apparently comes from the Pembrokeshire coast.

So next year we shall be better prepared and we may even invite people who do actually have Welsh genes.

And talking of drops – beer seems to be the Welsh drink of choice but there is cider, perry and a form of mead named metheglin, this last predominantly a Yuletide intoxicant. But then given that the Welsh are “chapel”, we tend not to raise our voices too much when mentioning alcohol, melodious though these voices may be.

A proud brave young Australian

Below Isabella Higgins was reflecting on where she came from in a piece written three years ago. Now she is the ABC face in the Western Ukraine.

Many of us know that acceptance, inclusion and respect between black and white Australia is possible, because we’re the walking, breathing proof. Take my family for example. We’re proud Torres Strait Islanders, but we also have German and British ancestry. We are an embodiment of multicultural Australia. My great-grandmother came to this country as a WWII refugee, raised in Nazi Germany.

Mouse Whisper

Australia wants to assist the Ukraine, because the rhetoric from our political leaders is full of it. The problem we have is the technology to keep the lettuce leaves warm enough for them to reach President Zelensky is proving troublesome.

How about doing something which will hurt, and blockade the Russian bases in Antarctica, for contravention of the Antarctic Treaty of which both Australian and Russia were original signatories in 1961. There is prohibition on a number of matters, mostly related to militarisation (except for research) and disposal of nuclear waste – a case for preventing “putridisation”

Seriously, here is an area where Australia could pressure Russia, especially as Ukraine is also one of the signatories. After 61 years, it would appear to be a time for a review on the legitimacy of those countries which have established bases in Antarctica. Russia is showing that it has no legitimacy wherever it has plonked down its flag.

If Australia wishes to really cause Russia pain, the Antarctic is just the place.

But then again, I am just a humble mouse who occasionally dines on warm lettuce leaves, but I have stopped drinking Russian vodka. Putin must tremble when he hears that. 

Russia’s Antarctic base

Modest Expectations – Harry & Izzys

Old Geelong Grammarians?

What on earth prompted the Prime Minister to label Richard Marles the Manchurian Candidate. He doesn’t look a bit like Laurence Harvey. But then again, the trailer to the film says that if you come into the film five minutes late you won’t know what it is about. Sounds familiar.

Look, we all know that Richard Marles did go to Geelong Grammar School, and he is the member for Corio. A Cambridge blue scion amid the dark blue singlet brigade of Corio, but known to have actually eaten Beijing duck in Beijing. That must have been the clue which triggered off Marco Morrison, with his rendition of Frank Sinatra.

Now you must know something, Prime Minister, who is this assassin you alluded to because, as you know, the Manchurian candidate was programmed to kill, and the trigger was the queen of diamonds. Are you sure that you are not the target, and who plays the part of the wicked Angela Lansbury as Eleanor, or moreover Janet Leigh then fresh from her Psycho scream?

In a way, the film ended up with there being no Trumps, but you’ll have to see the film to understand exactly what I mean.

Remember the advice above. Don’t be late. Watch the 1962 film before you, caro Scott, utter the words again – if ever.

Pity that Albanese hadn’t seen it either.

The Mammoth in the Room

Mammoth – looking for a room

I read Crikey. The problem is that it has become an exposé for the incompetent and corrupt.   One gets the aroma and taste of a foetid Australia. After all, it is an unpleasant business sifting through the garbage to find something worth recycling. I do not know what keeps Stephen Mayne cheerful, given that he would need a gas mask for most issues he crawls through, the Murdoch detritus in particular.

I have already written about John Elliott, and Rundle got it mostly right. The preservation of bluestone warehouses as an Elliot legacy may not read as well as the “Jam Factory” effect, when one sees what happened to those former bluestone warehouses transitioning to “gentlemen’s clubs” at the Yarra end of King Street.

I was not going to go on record about Andrew Peacock, because he was never a serious figure in Australian policy development. Except to say that if he had become Prime Minister, he could have been very good. Andrew was intellectually lazy, but superficially affable with the ability to recruit very good staff. Vanity and a need to be loved always needs therapy, but until Andrew and I spectacularly fell out because of my diatribe directed at him, we had a cordial relationship; however, it was always very ambivalent, even at the best of times.

But contrary to Guy Rundle’s commentary in Crikey, they are not the only remnants of that era. There is still Lloyd Williams to carry the flag for, among other matters, the building and commissioning of the Crown Casino in Melbourne, before an expletive-laden Kerry Packer stepped in to bale out the project.

It was early times but even then the customers were allegedly urinating on the Crown Casino floor rather than give up their spot at the poker machines; and for which persons were sacked for not using “alternative facts” to deny that it happened.  Nevertheless, there seems to be an axiom in Australian public life that success in horse racing will forgive any transgressions, and the more so in the number of Melbourne Cups your horses win, the higher one rises in the hagiography stakes. Williams has won seven.

And finally, there is Rupert Murdoch, another alumnus of Geelong Grammar School. Rupert seems to have never spiritually left Melbourne, because even in old age he has the trophy – the trophy that avenged the treatment the “Melbourne establishment” meted out to his father, and originally only left Rupert with a small Adelaide paper as the legacy. The “Herald” may be no more; the “Sporting Globe” may be no more; but son, we will still have the “Herald Sun”.

The mists of time may have meant some lessening of his attachment, but when you say that the old generation has evaporated, I believe it cannot be underestimated how much effect Rupert’s eventual passing will have on Melbourne. None of his children have any reason to venerate Melbourne.

As part of that generation who is disappearing, I grew up in a Melbourne with three morning newspapers and one evening newspaper, which appeared in multiple editions.

I may live to see a time when there may be no Melbourne newspaper, but who knows how many years Murdoch will remain relevant; his last words will not be Rosebud like Citizen Kane, aka William Randolph Hearst, but maybe Langwarrin.

Cruden Farm, Langwarrin

The Slivers of War or Putin’s Lebensraum

His alliance of autocrats would also have a psychological cost inside Russia. It would demonstrate Mr Putin’s dependence on the siloviki, the security bosses who see in Ukraine’s democracy and deepening ties with the West a threat to their own ability to control and loot Russia. It would be a further sign to the liberal capitalists and technocrats who are the other pillar of the Russian state that they had lost. More of the best and brightest would leave; others would give up. Stagnation and resentment would build into opposition likely to be met with heightened brutality.  The Economist

A conventional view. Here we have a little ageing Russian secret police agent invading Ukraine to destabilise the world order to satisfy some tortuous agenda. He has had some previous so-called victories in predominantly Russian areas of Ukraine such as Crimea (now plunged into poverty) and along the Ukrainian border in some of the poorer areas where Putin’s war can be cynically described as slum clearances.

Kiev

Putin may weave and feint, but this is not the Hitler bloodless annexation of the Sudetenland. The Ukrainians are not prepared to embrace their Russian cousins. As he proposes to go deeper into the country, Putin will encounter – while presumably destroying – increasing signs of affluence, towns and cities increasingly becoming costly rubble until he reaches the peak of his ruinous agenda to destroy Kiev, the spiritual capital of everything he professes to hold dear.  Icons smashed among the rubble of centuries old tradition. All to satisfy a smirking crypto-maniac full of venom. What have the Russians to gain?  Germany found that out in the ruins of 1945 as another maniac met his fate.

So, assume Putin’s troops blast their way to the Polish border into increasing hostile territory, their casualties rising.  While the invasion is happening, NATO would be freed from the accusation of aggressor, apart from the bleats emanating from the Russian hackery, but now freed, able to respond. Troops begin pouring over the Belarussian border from Lithuania. The Russian exclave, Kaliningrad is an easy target for missile attack; the new Polish corridor destination.

The ripples of War.

Then what?

But before answering that question, consider this comment in the NYT this week:

The die was cast. The clock has been ticking since then, with Mr. Putin taking enough military action in Georgia and Ukraine to freeze the countries in strategic limbo, as he awaited his moment to avenge the perceived humiliation of Russia by the West after the Cold War’s end 

This refers to the aftermath of a NATO summit held in Bucharest in 2008 when it was breezily stated that Georgia and the Ukraine would eventually become part of NATO.

Putin was not amused as he showed us on February 21 this year. Russian troops moved into the disputed area of Eastern Ukraine. This was accompanied by the Russian recognition of the Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, population about 2 million. The recognition of another Sliver Republic. Putin has done it before – for instance, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova.

Putin has found out that there are initial protests but then these tiny slivers are forgotten, but then they become buffer zones. He seems now to have done it again in Ukraine, and created a buffer zone in a part of  Ukraine  that NATO are not going to give up their comfortable existence to contest.

OK, there are sanctions, which seem not to be particularly effective, as Germany would remain very dependent on Russian natural gas; others less so, even though NATO is recommending its member countries introduce sanctions on Russia. Germany has refused to sign the agreement to start the flow.

One difference is that while both Moldova and Georgia have small populations, the Ukraine is 55 million against Russia’s 150 million. By his antics, Putin’s chances of quietly re-installing his puppet as Head of the Ukrainian Government are gone especially as there are strong incentives for Ukraine  to move to a Western-type democracy.

On the other hand, Belarus is inevitably going to be absorbed into this sliver approach. President Lukashenko grew up to run piggeries and he has learnt nothing. To him, Belarus is just a larger piggery , a mixed metaphor for the rust bucket industries of the lost Soviet Union, as are these new sliver companion tin pots in Eastern Ukraine which also retain  rust bucket remnants of the old Soviet order.

Soviet nuclear expertise … Chernobyl

It is a wonder that Putin has not taken over Chernobyl as one of his Slivers. It shows what one can do with Soviet nuclear “expertise”, and already as an unexpected  consequence provides a buffer between Belarus and the Ukraine.

Of course, there may be another reason for all this. Putin may have just flipped his switch and spends most evenings scheming with Peter and Catherine. “Great, aren’t both of you? Now where is Poltrava exactly?” 

May I introduce Q fever

Some years ago, when I was working in North-East Victoria, a transport driver responsible for collecting the waste water from an abattoir in the Ovens Valley presented with a flu-like illness. It took a substantial time for him to be diagnosed with Q fever.

Sir Macfarlane Burnet

The challenge presented by Q fever is to recognise it, caused as it is by a rickettsia-like organism called Coxiella burneti, named for the Australian scientist, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, who discovered it.

Q Fever is contracted through the inhalation of air or dust from contaminated animals and their environments. Therefore, hazard prevention circulates around respiratory equipment and reducing stirring up sediments in the yards. Sound familiar?

There has been much deliberation over the mandatory vaccination of the population against COVID-19, a cost of which is largely taken up by the Federal government. In contrast to COVID, there are no state or federal subsidies for the Q fever immunisation program due to the low prevalence rate for Australia’s population. In Queensland around 300 people are diagnosed every year. In fact, the symptoms of COVID-19 and Q fever are similar, with high fever and general malaise, including the flu-like illness.

The cost of the vaccination ranges from $150 to $450. It’s not a large outlay but with seasonal staff and low industry retention rates, it adds up. Currently there is no legislation that mandates workers to be vaccinated against Q Fever. However, a business owner is required to manage risks to workers under most workplace health and safety legislation.

If unvaccinated staff are allowed to work with farm animals, appropriate management strategies need to be implemented and provided to employees, for instance PPE, masks, changing from a high pressure hosing system to a low pressure, dust controls in yards, hand washing.

In short, employers are responsible for immunising their staff, otherwise appropriate risk mitigation and prevention strategies need to be implemented. As for this transport driver, whose diagnosis was initially missed, and who developed the chronic form of the  disease; he became much more difficult to treat.

At various times, there have been questions about the long term efficacy of the vaccine. But it has been accepted by the industry as being better than nothing and augmented those industries with high health and welfare standards.

Q fever is a disease of the workers, but Australia has not experienced the same scream of the lumpenproletariat shouting “Freedom forever”, their ugly face sprouting from the social media. The worker in question had not been vaccinated against Q fever; and now was destined to a long period of chronic disease and disability.

Australia has yet to reap the full legacy of “Long COVID”; but let me reiterate, as a legatee of a chronic disease with a recent relapse, I would not wish it on anybody.  I cannot be vaccinated against my disease, and thus will never have freedom from it – think about it if you are one of those unvaccinated  COVID-19 idiots wrapped in your yellow rags, while you rail against vaccination. You at least can gain protection from the disease. For the unfortunate it may become chronic, when sometimes you may wish for the freedom of dying as preferable. You can be assured that will be “forever”.

Ground hog days in New Hampshire

On the way up

Most skiers were pacing between 42 and 50 minutes per lap, but at 6 a.m. Monday, I walked lap 44 with a 34-year-old from Ohio named Brody Leven who identified himself as a “professional human-powered skier” and had been hitting 39 minutes a lap like clockwork, always at the front of the pack.

“I seek out testing myself. I live for this,” he said, reading off the vertical gain from his watch, now showing 46,771 feet. “I’m competing against them, but I’m competing against myself. And I have no intention of stopping.”

This describes what one of the 100 skiers were doing near Jackson New Hampshire on Mount Black, with “The Last Man (sic) Standing” being the ultimate laurel. This event occurred over a few days recently, when these blokes apparently had nothing to do but indulge in an endurance event of uncertain length. It just depends when the last person is skiing the ultimate run down the Mountain.

Brody Leven happened to be the eventual winner. Sixty-five times he skied up the 1.25 miles to where the vintage chair lift was the marker for the turn for descent. The time allowed was one hour and Brody did it in about forty minutes. Thus, he had twenty minutes to recuperate.

He thanked the journalist for accompanying him because he had stopped on a previous run to help a bloke who was bending over a car only to find out that the man was talking to a rock and a tree. This tendency towards hallucinations makes night time skiing treacherous, but it doesn’t deter these enthusiasts. The Olympic Games may be held contemporaneously in China, but there is other madness abroad.

I thought it must be very lonely on that last ski run when you are on your own and that tree and rock you are trying to avoid is actually a bloke bending over his car.

How long before this practice hits Australia?

Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital has agreed to pay $14.6 million to settle a federal lawsuit alleging it fraudulently billed government insurers for surgeries performed by trainees without proper oversight because supervising surgeons were working in another operating room.

The settlement marks the third time since 2019 that the renowned Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital agreed to pay millions of dollars to resolve a claim stemming from the controversial practice known as concurrent surgery, or double-booking, in which surgeons juggle two operations simultaneously. The three out-of-court settlements total $32.7 million. 

Beyond contempt, as reported by The Boston Globe. Dodgy practices like this have been rumoured to occur in the bottom feeding area of the health industry, but at the Mass General!

What Bird is That?

February is the best time to be on the west coast of Tasmania. In fact, it has been much drier than normal. This has not deterred the New Holland Honey Eaters from feeding off the kangaroo paws, which thrive under the north facing windows. At the side of the house, the leatherwood tree is in full bloom, and smelling the delicate white flowers provides a honeyed fragrance. This is the time of the year when the bee boxes are everywhere, and near Mount Arrowsmith there is a particularly dense stand of these trees. The jar of leatherwood honey on the kitchen bench is testimony to this intense period of apian activity.

Red browed finch

Then my wife came in one morning and said she had seen a bird she did not immediately recognise. We are not bird watchers; I for one do not have the patience. Anyway, a bird that is a visitor to our bush lined property is intriguing. The bird she had seen was small but had a distinctive red tail. After some research, we agreed it was a red browed finch. Being a female, it lacked the red brow, but otherwise the bird picture seemed to confirm that she was that finch.

A hairy wren’s nest

On further reading, it so happens that this bird is found where fairy wrens live. The underbrush on our property is very conducive to being a wren habitat and they share the title to the property. I was having my hair cut outdoors by my wife and the silver strands were going everywhere in the breeze. Our mate said: “Don’t worry about sweeping the hair up. The wrens will come along and line their nests with it.” I was glad to be of service.

Mouse Whisper

Our household always reads the Washington Post’s Voracious Eating. (We have the special rodent edition of Nibble Voraciously). Good word “voraciously”!  There is a variety of recipes, many of which have a Central American heritage, and they frequently embody recipes unusual here in Australia.

The commentary attached to each recipe is often entertaining. The following from one distinguished cook may cause the fire brigade bosses to splutter over their lemonade: “The pan is going to get very hot, and when you add liquid to a ripping hot pan, it’s going to sputter. Fear not! If you’re not regularly setting off your fire alarm at home, you’re not really cooking, (Though, you may want to have a splatter screen handy!)

Modest expectations – A Gas station in Rain Man

There is a small group of people trying to unravel the connection between the number and the title of each week’s Modest Expectations. Last week was almost impossible, as I strive not to repeat myself.  Some have been obvious which, for me, maintains the diversity, although the search for titles which do not repeat the same theme presents an ongoing challenge. For instance, there have been 266 Popes, but I have tapped this source only once.

The gas station

On several occasions, I have counted wrongly, which explains why I was not a good “numbers” man. I am pleased with this week’s puzzle. Not that it is very hard but demands a modicum of powers of observation.

Albored the Unready.   Part 111

People want a prime minister to just do their job.

That’s my commitment. To do that job properly. To each and every day do my best. And make sure we have a government that actually plans properly and looks after the interests of the Australian people. Anthony Albanese this week 

As I predicted, the Murdoch press has started the attempted demolition of Albanese. However, in a week in politics with the ineptness of the current Government firmly on show and growing, manifested in disastrous polling in NSW in four State by-elections, maybe it does not matter if there is a demonstrable unreadiness. Even so, I just hope Albanese does not try to play “Blue Moon” on a triangle.

Directing the dance floor

If Labor wins the forthcoming election, addressing the absence of a Commission to root out corruption at the Federal level – which seems as bad as the worst of any of the States at any time – will be a massive job for Albanese. The establishment of this Commission should already be in draft legislative form ready to be placed before Parliament immediately on a change of Government.

Unless it swiftly isolates the major players in the corruption, the Commission will be entangled in legal brambles and then eventually lost from sight as these “bramble bushes” cover it.

Openly responsible to the Parliament, the manner of selection of the Commission members must be an open process also.

The problem is that Albanese has grown up in a factional NSW environment where the hotel industry lobby in all its forms is a highly-protected species.  Therefore, Albanese, who is one of the longest serving members of the Commonwealth parliament, must reflect on his manner of conducting his business to maximise objectivity in government – a far from easy task.

In his progress towards a clean government, he should examine the amount of money consulting firms shovel into their pockets through “sweet deals” with government. I know exactly what goes on. Much of the work, which should be undertaken by bureaucrats with assigned responsibility and expertise, is done by recent MBAs full of theory but devoid of knowledge, which they then pick up at no cost to themselves as they flounder on in a consultancy, which does not need these “content free” consultants. “Reading my own watch” is the term used to describe this flagrant practice.

This is the great disaster of public administration and goes hand in hand with the corruption of parliament. I have been employed as consultant many times where the recommendations have had an impact; but in others where the recommendations have been ignored and ended as a “dust shelf file”.

Albanese needs a strong independent bureaucracy so that when the consultant firm Piranhas come calling, they have to earn the meat hanging from the bureaucratic fishing lines. The problem is that while the TV series “Yes Minister” was very funny, (Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have loved it), its long term effect has been to corrode the politicians’ trust in public administration as witnessed by the growth in ministerial staff and reliance on mates in the consulting firms, some of whom were colleagues before politics and before the politicians take their lucrative pensions and flee Parliament  to become outside “consigliere” – sorry “consultants”.

Big challenge to rein in this practice – and not one for the election trail.  However, it will be symptomatic of an inability to govern if Albanese fails to follow the Machiavellian dictum and does not tackle it hard and early.

Now for Part IV – if you are still awake. Climate Change and Albored under the Bed. 

Cisgender

I have observed the machinations about the Religious Discrimination Bill with an air of disbelief. I doubt whether I am the only one, given how many far more important challenges are facing Australia.

For most of my life I have watched as technical surgical skills have improved such that personal identification can be aided by physical operative change to the appropriate gender

I remember one of my medical tutors put us males in our place by saying that every human is destined to be female until a few vectors appear which direct embryonic to foetal to post-natal existence towards being male.

After all, there are a number of chromosome and sex hormone disorders, which are often rare or beyond the then scope of knowledge, and which may be reflected in extraordinary prowess, particularly of women in sporting competition.

Babe Didrickson

One of the most remarkable athletes of all time was the American, Mildred “Babe” Didrikson. She was able to beat top athletes, both male and female, at sports ranging from bowling to diving. She earned Olympic gold medals in the hurdles and javelin in the 1932 Olympic Games, all-American status in basketball, dozens of golf championships, and is on ESPN’s list of top ten North American athletes of the century.

She lived at a time when there was not the will or the science to determine whether she was a woman or had a chromosomal abnormality where she might look like woman but was in fact a male. She was not the only one to raise questions. There were two Olympic gold medal winning female sprinters in the 1930s who also looked masculine and one, Stella Walsh, an American who when shot dead many years later, was revealed by autopsy to indeed be male.

When the Russians came back on the Olympic Trail, they brought forth a number of oddities, even before the systematic doping with androgens began.

There have been “female” athletes discovered to have Kleinfelter’s syndrome. The first to be publicly accused was Ewa Klobukowska, a Polish sprinter who received a gold medal in the 1964 Olympic Games. People with this syndrome have an extra “X” chromosome but have the “Y” chromosome as well – which defines them as male.

Thus, when a South African female athlete Caster Semanya looks a bit masculine and then is shown to have a hormonal abnormality, discrimination is attested loudly when she was either excluded from competition or forced to take androgen suppression. There was no suggestion of religious discrimination in any of the discussion here.

Yet here is a nationwide imbroglio which grew from Israel Folau’s intemperate behaviour, which became a kernel for every bigot in the community to swarm around his profile as an extraordinary sportsman, and then  try to parlay this prowess into some sort of seer of faith.

In my early blogs, I wrote about Israel Folau but I underestimated how his bigotry has gradually graduated to this religious discrimination bill, which a Pentecostal Prime Minister has tried to foist on a nation which, on matters religious, kept on the “cis” side of not mixing belief with the political wedge.

The problem with Morrison and his mates is that they have tried to impose their “transwedge” as it flew across the Alps of Intolerance.

It almost ended up a discriminatory Transgender Discrimination Bill, and fortunately there have been enough politicians prepared to scuttle this ridiculous pandering to fringe groups, with social hang ups on show amidst the happy clapping and forced jollity.

Hence, if people insist on a stigma of transgender on a number of seriously conflicted young people, then since I do not identify myself as one of these, I shall stigmatise myself thus – as cisgender. In the end, you must have a gender, whichever way you describe yourself. However, it is your own private decision not to be paraded in a travesty – called parliamentary debate.

Questions of toilet and bathing facilities are a matter of societal convention, not a matter for government legislation. When my university college became co-educational, the college’s change of facilities was hardly a major topic of conversation in the pubs of Carlton.

Given that “cis” is the antonym of “trans”, it took the serious students in this area until 1994 to coin the term. But there is more.

What about the Infrasexual?  This refers to someone “who is not parsex, meaning someone who is strictly dyadic and protosex. They are not intersex nor altersex.” Succinct, if nothing else.

What a dilemma. Do we ban the infrasexual but allow the altersexual?

Meanwhile the World in burning.

Wasabi

The wasabi that comes in tubes and packets and is familiar to many diners is actually a blend of wasabi and horseradish dyed green — or contains no wasabi at all. In Japan, chefs at higher-end sushi, soba or grilled beef restaurants grate fresh wasabi at the counter, so customers can experience the acute assault on their nostrils and the unique flavour that lingers for just a moment on the tongue.

For hundreds of years, wasabi grew wild in mountains across Japan, blooming near forests and huddling alongside streams. About four centuries ago, growers in Shizuoka started to cultivate wasabi as a crop.

Wasabi plants sprout in spring water that flows down from the mountains, helping to foster gradations of pungency and hints of sweetness. The most well-known Shizuoka variety, called mazuma, tends to sell for 50 per cent more than wasabi from other parts of Japan.

Over time, local growers say, the spring water has deteriorated in quality, compromised by an abundance of cedar and cypress trees.

Recently, in a substantial article, the New York Times highlighted the parlous condition of the wasabi grower.

From childhood, I remember that horseradish was an accompaniment to the Sunday roast beef at my grandmother’s place, complete with roast vegetables and the obligatory Yorkshire pudding.

Now, as that wizard green fingered jardineira, Vicki Sheedy, says dismissively, horseradish is a weed. You have to grow it in a pot and not let it get control of the vegetable patch.

However wasabi, its Japanese cousin is, as Vicki says, very picky. One Tasmania grower put it this way: “Wasabi is like a 15-year-old. When conditions are perfect and everything is how they like it, they thrive, if something starts to go wrong though they will just sit there and sulk.”

In fact, commercial growing can ideally occur in Australia only in Tasmania, where there is plenty of water and the climate is temperate-on the cool side. The plant is harvested between one to two years. As Vicki further points out, this little plant is a cousin to horseradish and mustard, hence why its heat hits you in the nose rather than setting your mouth on fire like chillies do. It’s also known as Japanese horseradish and she has assured the conditions for its growth.

Currently Vicki’s plants are about 15 months old and she says that on a beautiful property overlooking the D’Entrecasteaux Channel in Southern Tasmania she will soon be able to harvest it. Already she has been using the stems and leaves, but they are much “tamer” in regard to heat compared to the root. At present she grows it in small quantities in a raised garden in the shade near the kitchen so she remembers to water it. Keeping a watchful eye on it, she knows the plant doesn’t like humidity, direct sun or in relation to water – the Goldilocks effect – not too much or too little.

With the production being increasingly compromised by the urban spread, the contamination of water and the decline of the cedar forest and its resultant shade, production in Japan is under stress as the NYT article says

The price of wasabi is rising.  It is not a quick return, but as they say, big things from kitchen door plots grow.

The heat is on, Vicki.

Iris Hoffman as she was then, remembers 

Janine Sargeant, guest facilitator

We are encouraging my mother to write down her memories of her youth, as she approaches her 96th birthday. She and Queen Elizabeth were born close together in that year – 1926.

Sixteen years old at the time, Iris Hoffman reminds the reader of a time when the Japanese were coming. It was 1942.

Tocumwal Airfield – previously known as “McIntyre Field” by the USAAF

The war was getting worse and town councils were ordered to send some employees to go to Tocumwal to help build an aerodrome there as American air troops needed it. Dad was sent! At home in Culcairn and other towns we were trying to get accustomed to being swooped over by American Kittyhawks. They would come in low and scare the hell out of us; they buzzed every town and homestead in the area we were told. At last the airfield was finished, Dad came home and resumed his job with the Culcairn council.

Then Dad decided to move to Gippsland. We would be primary producers on a dairy farm near Maffra with 80-90 cows to milk, twice a day. We did it. Our war effort. My eldest brother, Percy was already in the army, and the youngest, Trevor, was in the airforce, so there we were, Dad and my brother and sister, Keith and Lorna and myself, in the land army – and Mum at home to look after us all. 

“McIntyre Field” was established by the USAAF on the NSW/Victoria border, near the Newell Highway. It originally covered an area of about 25 miles square. Named after Captain Patrick W McIntyre who was killed in a crash of a US bomber on 5 June 1943, the field was home to 54 Liberators, 11 Vultee Vengeance, five Kittyhawks and an Airspeed Oxford. Four thousand five hundred RAAF men  and 400 WAAF  women were based at Tocumwal. It was also a storage and repair depot for aircraft including Boeing, Lancaster, Mosquito and Spitfire. After the RAAF left Tocumwal in 1960, over 700 aircraft were scrapped.

It should be recognised that having a German-sounding name when, in two World Wars, the enemy was Germany, had a negative effect in the community at large, spurred on by the jingoists.

The Lutheran diaspora had settled in the rural areas around Albury. These were people who fled Silesia, from the Prussian Calvinists who persecuted their Lutheran community. Many came to Australia and are concentrated in certain parts of Australia, including areas around Albury. The township of Holbrook, north of Albury, once was called Germantown. The name of the township was changed in that flurry of jingoism which accompanied Australian participation in both World Wars, but particularly in the early stages of the First World War.

In the 1840s my mother’s family came to Australia from Katowice, which is a major Polish town today but was then Prussia. They settled first in the Barossa Valley but with a shortage of land available there, they walked with their wagons, from South Australia to settle in southern NSW. My maternal mother was a Schröeter. My mother would have been a wonderful subject for “Who do you think you are?”

Now she still has a store of memories of being part of Australia, including beating Margaret Court once at tennis. No matter that Margaret Court was a teenage prodigy. But still, a win is a win.

But is A Win a Win?

The Russians are completely and utterly over the fence. There they are, continuing their gold medal dominance in sports cheating. The Washington Post teed off this week and below is part of that article from its ferocious correspondent, Barry Svrluga.

As of Monday afternoon here, the Russian Olympic Committee team had won 18 medals, the second-highest total behind Norway. But maybe there should be a new category for its medals? “Provisionally won?”, “Won … for now?” “Won, pending further info?”

Even in the exceedingly unlikely event that these Games aren’t tainted, it was impossible to watch Russian cross-country skier Sergey Ustiugov grab an Olympic flag as he skated the final meters of the men’s 4×10-kilometer relay on Sunday, winning by a huge margin, watch him celebrate with his teammates, without wondering, “Who’s finishing second — and how long before they’re awarded gold?”

That’s not damning of Ustiugov and his teammates specifically. It’s how the IOC and its cronies have forced us to think. When the iron was at its most scorching, the IOC failed to execute the kind of forceful ban that might have effected actual change in the Russian system. Instead, it demanded what amounts to a change of laundry for Russian athletes (their uniforms cannot bear their nation’s flag here) and swapped out the CD for their celebrations (no Russian national anthem, either). But the show goes on, so the mind wonders whether any of it is legitimate.

That has been true for more than a decade now, and the shame of all this is that when the flame is extinguished here Sunday night, the results from so many competitions still should be sketched lightly in pencil.

Athletes who depart China with suspicions about the fairness of their competitions can’t be offered much encouragement, either. American high jumper Eric Kynard, for instance, won silver at the London Olympics in 2012. He was 21 and beaten only by Russian Ivan Uhkov. CAS later determined that Uhkov and 11 other Russian track and field athletes had been doping. The IOC rejected Uhkov’s final appeal — in November 2021. By then, Kynard was 31. Maybe he stepped onto a chair in his backyard and played “The Star-Spangled Banner” to celebrate.

Spread the blame for such a mess around, but good luck sorting out precisely how to divvy it up. There’s so much inbreeding among governing bodies here that it’s difficult to differentiate one organization from the other. CAS claims on its website that it is “an institution independent of any sports organization.”

The President of its board is John Coates, an Australian lawyer who has been an IOC member for more than 20 years, a period of time in which he has been on the IOC’s executive board and served as a vice president. That’s independent? The World Anti-Doping Agency was founded by Canadian lawyer Dick Pound, a former Olympic swimmer who was first elected to the IOC in 1978. WADA’s 14-member executive committee includes four current IOC members.

How to tell any of them apart? As American skeleton racer Katie Uhlaender told my colleague Adam Kilgore last week, “How do we really know what’s going on behind the scenes?”

Uhlaender has the right to ask. In 2014, she finished fourth in her event, all of four-hundredths of a second behind Elena Nikitina of — you guessed it — Russia. When Russia’s Sochi scheme was exposed, Nikitina was among more than two dozen Russian athletes banned from the Olympics for life — and Uhlaender appeared to have her medal. On the eve of the 2018 PyeongChang Games, Nikitina was reinstated.

That there has been no significant punishment to the entire Russian delegation in the eight years since both boggles the mind and tugs at the heart.

Uhlaender is clear-eyed about it. “It’s not independent,” she said. “None of this is independent. It’s all run by the IOC. It’s really hard to have faith in a system that failed so hard in 2014.”

Particularly because it’s continuing to fail. According to long time Olympic historian Bill Mallon, the Russians have been stripped of 31 medals in the five Games dating from 2012. That doesn’t count winning Russian teams on which more than one athlete was disqualified, nor does it account for disqualified Russian athletes who didn’t medal. The evidence suggests there will be more here. This isn’t a witch hunt. The witch has been identified.

(Those who can be bothered can watch the 15 year Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva compete despite having been clearly doped, the court has ruled.)

Kamila Valieva

Whether it will eventually have consequences for Valieva is impossible to say. What’s certain: The women’s short program will be held Tuesday, and she will skate in it.

In explaining the reasons CAS will allow Valieva to compete here going forward, Matthieu Reeb, the panel’s director general, cited, among other things, “serious issues of untimely notification of the results” from a test that was reportedly taken on Christmas Day — but that wasn’t reported as positive until after Valieva had competed in the team event here.

Whose fault is that? Well, the Russian Anti-Doping Agency said in a statement: The reason for the delays in the analysis and reporting by the laboratory was another wave of covid-19.” [When in doubt, blame the pandemic.]

What a mess. It’s a mess that, at the moment, falls at the feet of a 15-year-old athlete who is demonstrably the best in the world at her craft. If there’s ever a medal ceremony in the women’s figure skating event, her presence on the podium will be questioned. That’s not her fault. It’s the IOC’s, for creating and sustaining a system in which every Russian medal must be met with suspicion — looking both back, now and into the future. 

Mouse Whisper

I could not have said it better, referring to a tweet on the Super Bowl result last Sunday:

Imagine if the Bengals didn’t accept the final score, stormed the field, sued the NFL, and protested the 2022 NFL season calling it fraudulent.

Bengals, Bengals, burning bright …

 

Modest Expectations – Jeffrey O’Brien

We had a bushfire the other day up the road at Tullah. It seems not to have been deliberately started, but a stray cigarette or a spark from an exhaust would suffice as explanation.

Tullah

Next minute, fire crews were working on the outskirt of the Tullah village through the night and had the blaze on the nearby Mackintosh Dam Road contained by Sunday morning. In the meantime it burnt down one vacant property and a number of sheds. It was contained, but the resources that were thrown at the fire early were spectacular, drawn from all over Tasmania. The fear was that it would get in the pine forests and then it would have rivalled the mainland fires of two years ago. The other danger was fire getting into the peat, which lies at the base of the button grass meadows that constitute so much of the West Coast. Then it could burn for a very long time.

Tullah, by way of explanation, describes itself as a village on Lake Rosebery. It was a settlement built by the Hydroelectric Commission when one of their schemes was to dam the Tasmanian West Coast (or was it damn?). It would have culminated in the Franklin River being dammed, which would have had a great impact on the region.

Returning to Tullah, the older part of this township lies directly on the Murchison Highway. An old silver lead mining area, it consists of a pub and a few houses and displays one of those famous locomotives now cast onto an Australian coin – Wee Georgie Wood. It was used to transport the ore before there were any roads and was in that part of the township threatened by the fire.

Having had experience some years ago of a fire initiated as a “burning-off” exercise by the Department of Parks and Wildlife (laughingly referred to then as that of Sparks and Wildfire) on the ridge behind our house in which we lost a shed containing most of our stored linen, it was great to read how much the fire fighting service has picked up its game.

One of the newer residents of Tullah, who runs a microscopically-sized café with excellent coffee (and a resident alpaca), was obviously relieved when the fire was halted on the outskirts.

Tullah is on the edge of the West Coast wilderness area, which has some of the most undefiled temperate rain forest in the world. Because of the high   rainfall, an average of 240cm a year, it has been thought of as somewhat protected from fires.  Ironically the wettest place is actually Tullah, with an average annual rainfall of 280cm. So this recent blaze serves as a warning. Climate change is coming – I’m not clever enough to calculate how quickly and how selective will be the change. Yet the forests of the West Coast and South-west are vulnerable. Whether one believes that the forested wilderness is little changed since the time when the dinosaurs walked the earth, it becomes all so academic if this part of Australia catches alight as has occurred periodically in NSW and Victoria.

Ubertas et Fidelitas

An interesting datum. The state which has the highest identification of its inhabitants as Aboriginal people is Tasmania (close to five per cent). As a person who grew up believing the last Tasmanian was Truganini, as I have grown older, I have been surprised by the number of Tasmanian Aborigines who emerged from “among the Huon pine”.

A Dulcie Greeno maireener shell necklace

We have purchased several traditional Aboriginal Maireener shell necklaces, with their characteristic iridescence. Much of this art form is concentrated on the Flinders Island in Bass Strait. We have other cleverly executed pieces of Aboriginal art with a Tasmanian tag – but seemingly made in the last 20 years. My problem is connecting them to a tradition that shows areas of petroglyphs and middens on the shore which have survived the often violent storms which characterised that part of Tasmania for millennia.

To celebrate Tasmania Day in 1986, a collection of papers from the early days of Tasmania was published, including that of Captain James Kelly’s voyage, which commenced on 27 December 1815.

Then James Kelly sailed out of Hobart in a five-oared whale boat, with four men, John Griffiths and George Briggs, who were described as native to the colony and two others described as “European” William Jones and Thomas Toombs, the last named’s previous occupation being listed as“bushranger”.  King’s aim was to circumnavigate Tasmania and, as part of this voyage, he discovered Macquarie Harbour. This harbour, the third largest in Australia, has a treacherous entrance, which was later christened Hell’s Gate. The weather was very compliant as they came into the Harbour under the smokescreen from the Aboriginal fires at the Heads. They reckoned that enabled them not to be seen initially.  They spent some time and made contact with a number of Aborigines, warriors with whom they developed an uneasy relationship.

However, when leaving the newly discovered Harbour, which Kelly named after the then Governor Lachlan Macquarie, (whose territory then incorporated both NSW and Tasmania), the fury of Hell’s Gate kicked in and they were lucky to survive.

The insights into Aboriginal life and the interaction with the whitefellas is expressly discussed under the heading of “female sealing”. Seeing how they went about harvesting the seals obviously astonished the diarist. The women showed a distinctive methodology, as though they had to commune before killing the seals. It shows how important the description of Aboriginal life, when the only chroniclers of the day-to-day activity came from these early reported interactions, at a time before extermination became government policy with the inevitable destruction of the social fabric.

The recent literature trying to show that the Aboriginal tradition progressed from the hunter-gatherer society to one of adopting the tenets of the agricultural revolution as its origin is promoted by a number of Australians who claim Aboriginal descent and are clustered around the University of Melbourne. From what I have read, I do not believe it to be so. Take this excerpt.

The description of female sealing in the Bass Strait islands is a prime example. No mention of herbs and spices in cooking the young seal. Having personally been one of those who have tasted seal, I would suggest it is not among my top ten gustatory phenomena.

“We gave, says the journal of the exploring party, the women each a club that we had used to kill the seals with. They went to the water’s edge and wet themselves all over their heads and bodies, which operation they said would keep the seals from smelling them as they walked along the rocks. They were very cautious not to go to windward of them, as they said “a seal would sooner believe his nose than his eyes when a man or woman came near him.” The women all were about nine or ten seals upon each rock. Lying apparently asleep. Two women went to each rock with their clubs in hand, crept closely up to a seal each, and lay down with their clubs alongside. Some of the seals lifted their heads up to inspect their new visitors and smell them. The seals scratched themselves and lay down again.

The women went through the same motions as the seal, holding up their left elbow and scratching themselves with their left hand, taking and keeping the club firm in their right ready for the attack. The seals seemed very cautious, now and then lifting up their heads and looking round, scratching themselves as before and lying down again; the women still imitating every movement as nearly as possible. After they had lain upon the rocks for nearly an hour, the sea occasionally washing over them (as they were quite naked, we could not tell the meaning of their remaining so long) all of a sudden the women rose up on their seats, their clubs lifted up at arms length, each struck a seal on the nose and killed him; in an instant they all jumped up as if by magic and killed one more each. After giving the seals several blows on the head, and securing them, they commenced laughing aloud and began dancing. They each dragged a seal into the water and swam with it to the rock upon which we were standing, and then went back and brought another each, making twelve seals, the skins of which were worth one pound each in Hobart Town. This was not a bad beginning for the black lakes (sic), who now ascended to the top of a small hill, and made smokes as signals to the natives on the main that they had taken some seals. The smokes were soon answered by smokes on the beach. We skinned the seals and pegged them out to dry. The women then commenced to cook their supper, each cutting a shoulder off the young seals weighing three or four pounds. They simply threw them on the fire to cook, and when about half done commenced devouring them, and rubbed the oil on their skins, remarking that they had a glorious meal.

As I said above, food for thought! 

Reflection in the Pool of the Land of the Anziani

I suspect that the aged care portfolio has caught up with the politicians because when it is part of the health portfolio, it tends to be cast into “the too hard basket”.  Yet with the increase in longevity and the growth of the private nursing home sector as a lucrative business for the owners, government responsibility should have increased not lessened in maintaining our aged through the time of life when a person becomes increasingly dependent on others. Once into the nursing home it is very much one way, but it should not be a nightmare.

When I had my 70th birthday, I half believed the axiom “that 70 was the new 50”. Three years later and that concept went into the rubbish bin.

For myself, the acute phase of the disease took a long time to settle into a chronic burn, and as the years have passed the co-morbidities have accumulated until now I can no longer live independently. In previous times, there may have been an array or servants, but in the modern world this not feasible without wealth.

I had two aunts who entered nursing homes in their nineties, wealthy women who were able to afford a nursing home where all the “creature comforts” were available and provided. What struck me was the number of Filipino and Nepalese nurses, both male and female, and feeling of optimism in this establishment. But it was at the high end. They were both dead before the Virus struck and surveying the conditions in that nursing home gave no reason for me to worry about their care, even as one increasingly succumbed to fronto-temporal dementia.

The Virus has taken a toll in other ways. I used to go to hydrotherapy twice a week. The hydrotherapy pools where there are supervised programs have vanished, as the pools have closed because of the Virus. This gets no coverage, but when one depends essentially on allied health professional services, the Virus has curtailed them, and with any such program, once they cease so too do the levels of personal fitness and social interaction decline.  Gyms get all the publicity, but circumstances for the aged are probably worse once you lock people in their rooms with staff barely having the requisite nursing skills let alone those of allied health professionals.

Some of the drugs required for my treatment, such as the corticosteroids are essential but impose complications. I had the rapid development of drug induced cataracts, both of which have resulted in new improved lens (no longer any astigmatism). Otherwise I have eschewed operative intervention. Some of the operations had the potential to make life worse, and I value the fact that I can still communicate.  The bottom line is that if I did not have my wife, who is a very caring individual, I would be facing institutionalisation and all the uncertainty that entails.

My sleeping arrangements have been modified, so I am close  to the toilets.  I still have been negotiating stairs.  My fall a few months ago emphasised the line between having my immediate daily care and then having to wait face down for someone to come after nearly two hours. I have learnt to curb my impetuosity, since change is now a one way trek, but the nursing home looms as a prison, with the likelihood of solitary confinement.

And a Minister in charge of this crisis who goes to the cricket for three days! He has either given up, or else needs a cognitive test to assess whether he needs the pity for a person with early dementia. Or is he just callously insensitive? I cannot believe that this man is functioning normally; but then the last people who are considered to have such pathology are those with the public relations machinery of denial. Morrison has demonstrated himself to be a Prime Minister with zero human relations skills but with a formidable expenditure on public relations.

Having experienced Bronwyn Bishop’s hair-raising approach to any portfolio in which she was put, I thought that disclosure of kerosene baths in nursing homes under her watch would have elicited a positive reaction for reform. There was the predictable furore and then nothing. Even Royal Commissions do not move the dial, because the people trapped in nursing homes have virtually no say.

The idea of little children mingling with the elderly as gleaned from the ABC TV program has long since been suspended because of the Virus, but it is ironic to see a photograph of myself at two years of age with the wide gait; and realise that I am not that much different now because of loss of proprioception.

I remember a child staring at me from a stroller; I was in a wheelchair.

“Don’t worry son, you’ll be here soon enough.” He was too young to understand, but it certainly brought home to me the irony of existence. His parents did hear me, and laughed. Vulnerability is the product of the child in the stroller and the guy in the wheelchair.

The role of government intervention in both areas has demonstrated the difficulty, because childcare and care of the aged have both been exploited, and over a long period. The failure of the religious institutions in these areas has been shown, and in many areas, disgraceful exploitation has emerged – yet these institutions keep their charitable status in regard to taxation

The whole failure of government intervention has been compounded by the laissez-faire approach to looking after the elderly – maximising profits by exploiting the elderly is a spreading stain on the Australian community.

I can only watch the stain come closer because I have no confidence in the area being afforded the priority it needs and which one only realises as 80 is the new 80.

Yet during my professional life I have sought solutions, but many of the schemes in which I have invested myself have reverted after I have gone. Some have survived.

Is there a solution?

Over my professional life, one way or another, I have had considerable contact with care for the aged in its various forms. The problem with being old as described above is that nevertheless it is not a homogeneous product. People age with different disabilities and hence needs.

The problem with age is that it comes at a point when nothing more can be done for you, but to ensure you are comfortable, pain free, not isolated, able to use the toilet facilities, and that your medications are regularly reviewed, and you have enough to eat and drink and to operate at the higher end of your residual competency.

To accomplish this properly requires both a high level of management skills and continuity of these skills; thus the competency of a clinical manager of each facility should be recognised and rewarded appropriately and succession planning encouraged.

I am a great believer that credentialing and privileging should be undertaken not only in health services but also in nursing homes. I am a purist as I have retained “credentialing and privileging”, whereas others have replaced “privileging” with “scope of practice”. In fact, the process has four stages –

(a)   Credentialing is self-evident as it is based around the qualification.

(b)   “The scope of practice” is what is requested by the health professional, but

(c)    privileging depends on the capability of the health service and confidence of the director of clinical services (or equivalent) that the requested scope of practice is appropriate and safe given the resources of the health service.

(d)   approval of the board on the recommendation of the credentialing and privileging Committee

All recommendations to the Board must involve the director of clinical services and if the terminology is correct, the nursing home manager who should be a nurse.

To me that is a very simple statement of intent, and I was able to successfully implement such a process among a number of small health services over a decade. To me, it satisfied the requirement of the clinician and the administrator and it made those involved take it seriously. In the private sector, that includes the owner (or representative).  In my health service experience the hospital board was very visible, but in the nursing home sector, who knows in the tangled web of business resulting in the lack of oversight in this sector. And with the obscenity of some of the owners with more concern with having the latest Lamborghini, it is a massive task to permanently change the culture when the government is basically uninterested.

When I suggested that the nursing homes be included in the regional credentialing and privileging scheme, the pushback from the Commonwealth Department of Health was fierce. The nursing home was the person’s home; it was not a quasi-health institution, it was said. The residents could have whomsoever they wanted as carers, without interference from government, and certainly by such a scheme which attempted to codify standards. God, no.

Yet there is an unfortunate strain of authoritarian behaviour which I have seen in the transition stage between hospital and nursing home. In the acute hospital, for some of the staff, an old person admitted is an old person to be get rid of, because of his or her occupancy of an expensive acute bed.

As the hospitals move from metropolitan teaching hospitals, the pressure on the bed is not as great. Nevertheless I once was faced with an officious nurse who was attempting to threaten me because I believed my father-in-law needed more time in the acute bed before being sent to a so-called “sub-acute care” environment. She attempted to stand over me by threatening to have him placed in a nursing home in a far-off town where he would have no-one able to visit him easily. After a strong word, that option was removed and he stayed in the hospital for some further period until he was well enough to be transferred. Nevertheless influence, like information, is asymmetric.

The fiction that a nursing home is a domestic situation is nonsense, because of the nature of the residents, who need personalised care but which is often left wanting because staff levels are squeezed for a number of reasons – profit margins, COVID-19 restrictions, poor pay and conditions.

Some nursing homes are attached to the public hospital. Therefore, I was in a position to influence the rules for visiting doctors. My initial approach was to look at the drug charts of each resident as this gives one an idea of how often the resident is reviewed by a doctor. The need for documentation is as essential as regular visits by the local general practitioner, and each nursing home should have access to a consultant geriatrician or specialist in rehabilitation medicine (and ensure one or the other visits regularly).

The requirement for allied health cascades from this overall need to ensure that in a world of specialisation and constantly improving technology, the aged are not deprived of the benefits of these advances.

In the health area where there is increasing specialisation, the pool of generalists in all fields becomes limited. The concept of nursing staff in rural areas acquiring some of the basic skills of allied health professionals has been regularly canvassed. Whatever the current state of this move to develop generalists should accommodate that some of the generalists will develop special area on interest and hence expertise.

The suggestion of “care finders” adds another layer without any improvement. To establish a new professional group is to establish a new bureaucracy, not necessarily improve care of the aged.

I well remember the country hospital which was converted from a general practice procedural hospital to one concentrating on geriatric treatment. The “driver” was a doctor who persuaded the staff to re-train from the theatre to treating the aged. He was successful and well-liked but did not want any limelight – and presumably this pilot program died with him.

However, successful models abound. The problem is each requires a certain discipline, dedication and time to implement and maintain. To change the culture is not just taking a pill. Governments, when pressed, can be reasonable at getting the input right through the multitude of ways enquiries can be organised.

Government falls down in the implementation. Many of the ministers and the bureaucrats think that fussing over the nature of enquiry is enough, and unfortunately too much of the intellectual capital is invested in the initial enquiry and its report. In fact, the report is only the start; but too often it is the end point, gathering dust with so many others.

In the end it is the clinical management standard that counts.

One question, what is the best private nursing home in Australia; and what is the best public nursing home?

In such a search, the common feature I postulate will be the ongoing standard of the clinical management team. Appropriate credentialling and privileging should be able to validate that approach.

In the end I want to know what works; and what has worked over a generation at least. Imprecise, but once you see success, you know what it is. To achieve this insight, experience helps.

Mouse Whisper

Just two items for Trivial Squeaksuit (obviously in a cat-free environment – pur is a palavra proibida).

  • Who is Dorothy Gale?
  • Who is Barbara Millicent Roberts?

Dorothy, the heroine in the Wizard of Oz.

Barbie doll.

Simple really.

Modest expectations – Man with a Tail

I have always liked writing. I was encouraged to write by Alister Brass. He was very much my mentor.  He died of AIDs in 1986. He was a great guy. I have kept writing. He had taught me a lot about myself, and how someone who was a little older than myself could have lived a fuller life than mine.  I miss him every day.

I always wonder where Murdoch fits in all this. Alister’s father, Douglas, was one of Murdoch’s first editors. I think he had a big effect on Murdoch, in the days when his world may have been that of the idealist.

 However, I worry about all this technology that has sprung up in an unregulated space and where the forces of good and evil are constantly doing battle. Can I, for whom my first written words required an inkwell – when even the biro did not exist – adapt.

I find myself living in a world in a space which is getting smaller because the demands for instant everything have become the norm – money and fame are generally high on the instant agenda. Words are airbrushed away.

So, why bother to write? Because I want to, and I have little time left. So here goes.

I wrote my first blog at the end of March 2019.

Now this is the sesquicentenary of that first blog, which has been written every week for 150 weeks. That means that in six blogs’ time I will have reached three years of essentially vanity press. Perhaps I have ten people who regularly read it, but unless you hover over your statistics, who really knows. But it soon occurred to me that I like writing – in fact these are my memoirs, one way or another. My attitudes are on show. As I started serious writing under the tutelage of Alister Brass, that relationship enabled me to enjoy the company of a polymath before his life tragically was cut short.

The first blog praised Jacinda Ardern, and I received the rounds of the contumely by a mate, who saw her as a fraud. Thinking about what has happened since that time, I was closer to the mark.

In the last blog I, who once was a tall poppy but tried to dance with the “wolverines”, gave some advice based on this experience. I once knew a person who, like Grace Tame, had a strong profile (at one stage being pictured on every evening edition of the Melbourne Herald depicting the successful beautiful young professional) and saw later at firsthand what she endured.

As for my advice to Grace Tame, another friend expressed with disdain from his Araratic heights why would I bother. Well, I did and hope she ends up more Eleanor de Aquitaine than Jean d’Arc, with that antagonistic segment of our population either repentant or neutered.

Opinion or opinionated. Well, a blog is a legacy. I notice over time I have altered the blog; by and large I have dispensed with guest writers, become more prolix and recognised how technology has enabled me to dip into the international media. The downside is that those magazines, the delivery of which depended on the US Postal Service, have virtually dried up in COVID times.  The Guardian Weekly and The Economist subscriptions fortunately have not been interrupted, although I also receive them online.

Exhaustion

The problem with the persistence of coronavirus in one form or another is that the Australian population is exhausted and, despite their bluster, governments have given up, except Western Australia which remains defiant.

Lockdown indicated that the governments of the Federation were prepared to fight the virus, the fear of which prompted a strong vaccination response in the adult community. In the first wave before vaccination was available, there was an appreciation across the community of the need to lock down, with a ban on almost every movement. At that time, there was a high rate of acceptance of this strategy by the community. Thus, when the Virus spread to nursing homes, the media swooped on the relatives waiting outside with their plaintive complaints.

How life has changed, with daily deaths mostly no longer getting even the perfunctory acknowledgement which they once got at the daily news conference. Borders were a weapon in illustrating how much one State was performing better than another. The only consistency through all this has been the complete ineptitude of the Commonwealth Government, which refused to accept that Constitutional responsibility for quarantine was its – and its alone. That is one reason there should not be any electoral forgiveness.

It allowed that stupid sophistry about personal responsibility to be let out of the Pirouette’s ideological kitbag. Underlying such a statement is a belief that information in the health sector is symmetric – time and time again this has been shown not to be so.

The various responses, whether to children’s vaccination, boosters, wearing of masks, social distancing and the use of hand sanitisers, show differences depending on demographics.

What is the present state of play?  Personal responsibility has degenerated into a fervent wish that Australia must have passed the peak – however that is defined – of the pandemic.  Booster and child vaccination are lagging because there is no spur.

Another variant …

Pity that another variant has appeared.

The Canoe Tree                         

Canoe tree

There are many canoe trees scattered throughout Victoria, South Australia and NSW and one wonders, given the revival of many old traditions, why more bark canoes are not being made and the craft celebrated. After all, the popular smoking ceremonies were adopted from the American Indians who were here during the Year of the Indigenous.

One area in Southern Australia where there do not seem to be canoe trees is Tasmania, although there has been publicity surrounding bark canoes recently being made with intention that they be part of the biennial wooden boat festival. It is one thing to mimic the past, but the construction should demonstrate the authenticity of being able to float an agreed distance, bearing a person using a spear as a paddle, especially down the D’Entrecasteux Channel.

In 2011 Major “Moogy” Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri and Kauma man, crafted a bark canoe on Ngarrindjeri land, the first recorded in over 100 years. These people live at Raukkan on Lake Alexandrina and move between there and Port Pierce on the Yorke Peninsula. Major Sumner has been photographed standing on the canoe with the spear/ paddle, and therefore the assumption was that the canoe was waterproof and navigable, at least on the lake. His people are river people and before “trouser time” they existed on a diet of littoral birds, eggs and vegetation such as samphire.

Moogy’s bark canoe

Sumner later said that creating his canoe reconnected his communities with the traditional art of canoe-building. There does not seem to be much evidence of modern bark canoe manufacture beyond this effort. In such a riverine culture a bark canoe was an essential item, and as such it is surprising that revival of the art has not received more attention.

It may be argued that stripping trees of bark would have severe consequences, particularly on the river red gum and stringybark population. The Aboriginal people live in harmony with their environment, as we all know and thus this would not be a problem.

In his book about Australian Aborigines, Thomas Worsnop describes the construction of the bark canoe in Southern Australia:

In constructing a bark canoe a suitable tree, generally a large red gum, is selected, and always one that was bent, or that had an outward bulge on one side. On that side the bark is marked out or cut by painted dots, or by notches in the shape of an elongated ellipse, approximating as nearly as possible to the shape of the canoe itself, after which by pressing the wooden handle of a tomahawk and a pole between the bark and the wood the sheet is carefully removed. The outside roughnesses of the bark then are pared off, leaving the thin, hard, and woody inside shell, and the sheet is placed over a fire of red hot ashes to cause the ends and sides to be gathered up and brought together.

These canoes are of very light draught. With one or even two blackfellows, the draught is seldom above 3in or 4 in. Some that I have seen on the River Murray will carry a considerable load; but, being quite round on the bottom and without any keel, they overturn with the greatest ease imaginable.

Later he describes the Montagu Island canoe:

Bark canoes were used by the coast natives of New South Wales; they were from 6ft. to 10ft. long, and 2ft wide. A sheet of bark of the desired length and breadth was stripped from a straight stem and the two ends scraped until they tapered to a very thin edge. These thin ends were then raised by being creased into ridges, and gradually pressed close together. A peg was then driven through the folds at each end, and the bark twisted round to keep the sheet from slipping back. The sides were kept apart by sticks sharpened at each end and placed across the canoe, and it was ready for use. It was propelled by sticks used like paddles, or by small sheets of bark held in the hand; the largest of these canoes would carry five or six natives safely across the strait, about two miles wide, which separated Montagu Island from the mainland.

Ironically, the best recent depiction of a bark canoe construction was shown in the 2006 film, appropriately named “Ten Canoes”.  “Ten Canoes” was inspired by a photograph shown to film director Rolf de Heer by David Gulpilil. The picture was of group of ten native men in their bark canoes on the Arafura swamp in East Arnhem Land. The photo was taken by anthropologist Dr Donald Thomson, who worked in central and north-eastern Arnhem Land 70 years earlier, during the mid-1930s.

Among the old men of the tribe, the film makers found some who remembered the craft and were able to make the canoes. There is no mention of whether the canoes were made with stone tools or with more modern equipment. Nevertheless, in the film they seem to be very functional. Again, this film seems an isolated tribute to the bark canoe.

Canoe in the Arafura Swamp

Yet the canoes made in the Northern Australia were generally dugouts, either in the manner of their Melanesian neighbours or were seen to have prows fashioned after the Macassar canoes. So, the bark canoes that were featured in the film negotiating the Arafura Swamp would seem unusual.

It seems difficult to work out why the Aboriginal people are loath to make bark canoes in the manner of their ancestors Thus there is one challenge in Tasmania – build a bark canoe that can reach Montagu Island as your forefathers did. Go to it. If a whitefella like Thomas Worsnop in 1897 has set down clear signposts, so should the tradition be still handed down among the Aboriginal people, rather than exist in a few isolated pockets.

Maus

A guy called Art Spiegelman has written a children’s book about the Holocaust called “Maus”.  My Swedish friend has pointed this piece of censorship out to me.

To ensure the book will be a best seller, the McMinns County Board in Eastern Tennessee, known as the Midge State after its Senator, has banned the book.

The Board said by way of explanation (sic):

“One of the most important roles of an elected board of education is to reflect the values of the community it serves. The McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the graphic novel Maus from McMinn County Schools because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide. Taken as a whole, the Board felt this work was simply too adult-oriented for use in our schools.  

We do not diminish the value of Maus as an impactful and meaningful piece of literature, nor do we dispute the importance of teaching our children the historical and moral lessons and realities of the Holocaust. To the contrary, we have asked our administrators to find other works that accomplish the same educational goals in a more age-appropriate fashion. The atrocities of the Holocaust were shameful beyond description, and we all have an obligation to ensure that younger generations learn of its horrors to ensure that such an event is never repeated. 

We simply do not believe that this work is an appropriate text for our students to study.”

I have published the whole piece, including the last paragraph written by the resident weasel. “Maus” is about the Holocaust – it depicts violence and suicide. Well, your forefathers were very fortunate in settling in the shadow of the beautiful Smoky Mountains. And as for profanity – eight words; and nudity – a naked mouse!

To be fair I have not read the book, but I have ordered it to see what the fuss is all about. I am not a fan of censorship, except in the case of demonstrated sedition.

By the way, the county seat is Athens, somewhat ironically named.

The Nickname

Michael Rowland from ABC Breakfast has done us all a service by refusing to refer to either the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition by their nicknames. This is not to say that these names will not still have general usage in the bar at the Kembla Grange races. Even Menzies had a nickname – “Ming” – but it was not in common usage when discussing his everyday activities in the public media. His enemies dubbed him “Pig Iron Bob” because of his unfortunate advocacy of iron being exported to Japan before the Pacific War. But in the political commentary it was Menzies and successively Chifley, Evatt and Calwell – maybe first names were used – but not Mingo; Chifo, Evo or Caldie.

It’s all a matter of perspective. I find it confronting when a youngster calls me by my first name because for me the divide in how I’m addressed should reside within myself. A Christian name implies a degree of licence, not to be used by all and sundry.

Thoughts on a coaster …

However, if the Honourable Antony Norman Albanese or the Honourable Scott John Morrison want to dispense with any of their given names or titles and be known as Scomo and Albo, no wonder some may think that they write their policies on the back of a beer coaster or a tithe receipt.

As a postscript, I read the comments of a journalist attempting to devise a smart comment about “Albo”. Obviously, as a child, the journalist had done a couple of lessons in Latin and equated “alb” with white, since the Latin (and incidentally also the Romanian word) for white is “albus”. However, in Italian “bianco” is white, “alba” is dawn and Albanese “Albanian”; in Latin “aurora” and “Ilyrii” respectively.

There is a strong link between Albania and Italy which goes back to Roman times, but I seem to have drifted a long way from Michael Rowland’s timely comments. Still, the association between Albania and Italy is worthy of another blog.

The Virtuous Cycle

Over the next four years, the Morrison Government will invest more than $13 billion through the Education portfolio alone to support research in Australia, including $8 billion in research block grant funding. 

“This includes the Trailblazer Universities program recently announced by the Prime Minister. Trailblazer gives four universities access to more than $240 million to build world-class research commercialisation capability.”

So runs the media release from Minister Robert this week. It came at a time when the Boston Globe has produced a comprehensive article on the biotechnology research around Boston, which I have reproduced in an abridged version without distorting the content of the original article. It should be remembered that, in the context of the article, New England has a population of 15 million, so it provides a significant comparison with this country, where all the biotechnology expertise has also been concentrated in a select number of institutions.

I participated in the Wills Medical Research Strategic Review, which Michael Wooldridge commissioned in 1998 and which resulted in a report with the optimistic title of the Virtuous Cycle. One of the areas of recommendation was the commercialisation of research – and with a somewhat wry smile, I note the new jargon, the Trailblazer Program. Back in early 2002 it was the Flagship program launched by the CSIRO, as if in response to the Will’s Report. I’m not sure “what oceans the Flagships are now plying”, but perhaps the trailblazers will find out.

Now back to New England and what the Boston Globe has to say about the matter. No flagship has been reported off Cape Cod, but perhaps nobody was looking, except that “Flagship” is part of the title of Moderna’s venture capital offshoot.

An electronic billboard along Route 128 in Norwood advertised for jobs at Moderna in May 2021

It’s almost like Massachusetts has too many biotechs.

The industry is hotter than ever, with companies routinely raising millions of dollars in venture capital, startups blooming on a weekly basis, and developers planning more lab space seemingly by the day. But the pipeline of qualified workers to fill all of the added jobs can’t keep up with the burgeoning demand.

The market for biotech talent in Massachusetts has long been robust, but lately the crunch has turned critical. That’s causing some in the industry to worry that it will not only inhibit growth, but also affect the quality of work as key positions become harder to fill and lower-level workers jump from company to company in search of a better compensation package.

Hiring “is definitely more competitive than it was a few years ago, there’s just no question about it,” said Michael Gilman, chief executive of Waltham-based Arrakis Therapeutics, which more than doubled its staff during the pandemic.

The surplus of startups reflects investors’ desire to pour more money into the world’s leading biotech hub. But with every new company that comes out of stealth mode or a mega-funding round that comes with mega-hiring goals, the people problem has gotten worse.

According to the latest report from industry association MassBio, nearly 85,000 people work in the state’s life sciences sector, up 55 percent from 2008.

Most of the hiring is happening in Cambridge, where companies posted more than 2,630 biotech job listings

Large companies, such as Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Takeda Pharmaceutical, as well as Moderna Therapeutics and its venture capital backer Flagship Pioneering, were seeking the most workers during that period.

Turnover is on the rise, too. About 16.5 percent of life sciences employees in Massachusetts voluntarily quit their jobs last year, a recent survey from research firm Radford found, up from 13 percent in 2018. Both figures are high enough to affect a company’s effort to grow.

Naturally, one way to recruit and retain people is to keep paying them more.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary in Massachusetts for chemists and scientists was about $100,000 in May 2020. But biotechs are finding that historical data and closely watched benchmark surveys from Radford quickly become outdated.

“One of my companies realized they had fallen behind in some positions by more than 10 percent,” said Tony Mullin, a biotech human resources executive. “They offered $130,000 and were losing candidates because they were getting $145,000 or $150,000 from other companies.”

Executives said some firms seem to be aggressively outbidding each other for candidates, though most agreed it isn’t a sound strategy.

There’s also a sense that employees are easily swayed by “title inflation,” a phenomenon that occurs when people climb the corporate ladder faster by bouncing around.

There’s a short-term satisfaction with getting a bigger title, but then along with it comes expectations of success.

Beyond compensation, biotech firms are also paying close attention to perks and benefits. It’s not uncommon for companies to have ping-pong tables in their offices or to provide catered lunches Silicon Valley-style.

Dyno Therapeutics’ new office will have a rock climbing wall. Relay recently began offering employees free diapers for the first year of a child’s life. Pet insurance is becoming more common.

One option in expanding the talent pool beyond Massachusetts is an “easy way to kind of simplify the problem for yourself” in a tight labor market. But hiring too many remote employees to fill job openings could be a quick fix that forever changes what it means to work in the biotech epicenter of the world.

When it comes to culture and career development, it has been found that being local is really important, both for the company and the employee.”

Adam Koppel, managing director of Bain Capital Life Sciences, said he often gets asked about what could slow the momentum of the Cambridge-Boston biotech ecosystem.

“The proliferation of new companies has created somewhat of a supply and demand mismatch in the marketplace for skilled managers,” he said.

Koppel said the talent pool has not matured enough to fill key areas from the C-suite and clinical development, all the way through to the commercial launch of products. And, he said, there is increasingly competitive intensity in the industry due to many “copycats” that are “going after the same targets.”

“The ecosystem could benefit from a certain degree of consolidation,” he added.

At least for now, though, executives seem to believe that the biotechnology business in Massachusetts will keep expanding, regardless of its hiring and retention problems.

“It is conceivable that all the capital dries up in our industry, companies shut down, lay off scientists, and they have no place to go,”  Gilman said. “I don’t see that happening anytime soon, honest.”

Mouse Whisper

Welcome to the Year of the Tiger. Watching the Cincinnati Bengals reaching the Superbowl reminded me of a discussion I overheard while I was tucking into a piece of manchego that one of them had dropped on the floor.

It concerned a blind tiger, and apparently my Mäuseherrin has a T-shirt with a blind tiger featured on it. She acquired it in a downtown Cincinnati tavern from the owner, who had an Australian boyfriend and given they had wandered into her joint about midday when business was slow, she had time for a chat and told the Australians about the name of the tavern. “Blind tiger” is one of the nicknames for a speakeasy, during Prohibition. The joke was that you paid to get in to see the blind tiger – and the drinks were free.

I wonder how long that ruse lasted before the police moved in.