Modest Expectations – Sepoy Khudadad

I remember the world changed when I woke up around 3.00 am on 12 September where I was staying in Adelaide on this day 20 years ago. The television was on; I moved to turn it off. A plane was flying into a skyscraper. God, why do they run disaster movies at this hour, I thought. Then I realised it was real…

9/11 Memorial

I do not generally acknowledge anniversaries…

I leave my wife to do all the heavy lifting in this regard. Yet like all people who pretend that such milestones can just be shrugged away, I am secretly moved by spontaneous expressions of affection. Father’s Day this year was a day I will remember because of the interaction with my two sons, and the way the family, their wives and children provided background sensitivity to this old blogger, heavy with hoar.

This memorable interaction was capped off by the Aylesbury duck for dinner. I can’t remember whether I have had Aylesbury duck before. Because of its quintessential association with the United Kingdom, I may have; but no special quack sticks in my head.

Our local Rozelle restaurant has gone through many changes but has survived and is now called Le Coq. Owned by a Frenchman from Réunion, it always provided an uncomplicated “un plat de jour” accompanied by a sightly upmarket “vin ordinaire”.

With the lockdown, the restaurant had crossed the Channel and was providing Aylesbury duck as one of the options for a “cook at home” Dad’s dinner. In other words, the restaurant prepared the raw materials, complete with an orange sauce accompaniment.

My wife is a marvellous cook, but the instructions were simple. Just pre-heat the oven to 200oC and place the duck in the oven for 45 minutes. Take the duck out of the oven, add the Kipflers and Brussel sprouts and then put everything back in the oven for 15 minutes; complete by reheating the orange sauce on low heat for five minutes. Even a Kooking Klutz like me could do it (but I didn’t).

Brilliant, brilliant meal, even if the chestnuts were water chestnuts!

No, I don’t think I had Aylesbury Duck in Aylesbury, but I have enjoyed its relative in Peking, as it was once called.

A small plane flew over the Caribbean Coast and I never noticed

I don’t generally keep correspondence, but I still have one letter from Greg, written on Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation notepaper, dated 17 December 1971 and, as he said in his letter, he would have sent a Christmas card except that “the millionaires of La Jolla have revolting taste and I can’t find any I like.”

That was Greg – just a tiny explosion out of nowhere.  Presumably that is why we took such an instant dislike to one another when we first met. We were too much alike – I, a pathology registrar and he, a laboratory scientist.

Greg developed a relationship with another laboratory scientist, a beautiful Chinese woman called Neva, who came with impeccable Shanghai heritage, and had a serenity which counterpointed Greg’s impetuosity.

Neva was friendly with both of us, and it was a time which I recounted in an earlier blog, about being feted in a particular Chinatown restaurant. I have a recollection that we came together for a very good night. Greg and I, previous adversaries, bonded. Maybe it was another time, but the point of this narrative is that we became friends. His wider circle of friends was different from mine, as instanced by his taking all of us up to Dunmochin, the property owned by Clifton Pugh at Cottles Bridge in that artistic quarter of outer Melbourne.

Then Neva went to Canada; and Greg left Australia soon after, but not for Canada. As he said in his letter, he had crossed the Pacific on a slow boat, and from Panama he had flown to Bogota, then by “a very dangerous small plane” to Leticia, the only Colombian city on the Amazon River, where three countries intersect: Colombia, Peru and Brazil. Boat to Manaus took seven days down the Amazon; and then that seemed enough on the river because he hitched a ride with the Brazilian air force to Belem, near the mouth of the Amazon, and then took a bus via Brasilia, motoring down to Rio de Janeiro.

He worked in a “dreadful little clinical Laboratory” there for 100 days, before he decamped to Sucre and Potosi, the baroque colonial past in Bolivia. It did not mention whether he enjoyed Potosi, about 4,000 metres above sea level and Sucre, at a more comfortable 2,800 metres above sea level. Sucre was where the Spanish conquistadors preferred to live in sub-tropical splendour in summer. At the same time their solid silver lifestyle was being mined in the surrounding Andes.

Then he went on to La Paz. He did the obligatory pilgrimage to Macchu Picchu in Peru, up the coast to Ecuador and back into Colombia via Cali to Bogota. Not a mention of drugs, but I knew Greg liked an odd joint or two.

Then one line in the letter transports him up to the Colombian Caribbean Coast, which must have been quite a journey, especially when catching a small boat to the Panamanian frontier, and then a small plane to Panama City. I took this part of his travels at face value – still do, although some might read the words twice.

When I pause in re-reading this letter 40 years later, I realise in a paragraph how great was the experience gained as he purchased a motorbike to ride through Central America towards California, the end point. He rode through Guatemala, with its magnificent Mayan ruin at Tikal, and Mexico gets a mention. You would think that was by motorbike – a sort of Easy Rider. However, somewhere along the way, the motorbike was ditched and he wrote that he had “a marvellous time travelling mostly on the backs of trucks, hitchhiking and in trains”. Countries are not differentiated; some people are marvellous. The letter from the ever-optimistic Greg ends in California.

At the time of the letter he was working as a technician, the parenthetic comment being the scientist’s rank without a PhD. He was working in the laboratory of Ralph Riesfield with three Italians, one German and three Americans (all unnamed). Riesfield had just arrived at Scripps, already a well known and successful scientist who, as a young man searching for a career, had consulted Einstein. Einstein had probably recognised Riesfield as a fellow refugee from Vienna, escaping as he did in 1938 with the Gestapo a street away. In itself this may have attracted the interest of Einstein, who may have recognised the family name.

While at Scripps, Riesfield distinguished himself as a pre-eminent immunologist, involved in the development of immunological agents to treat cancer.

Greg hoped to work another year at Scripps and then get on with his quest, heading off to Africa then to Europe, hoping to get work, then back through Asia and home.

I hope he had a good life. I never heard from him again. I wonder whether he ever saw Neva again. But I kept the letter, because I wanted to remember a time when there were guys like Greg whom I knew and who, even for a short time, made my life richer.

The Hotel Pattee

The train don’t go through Perry no more.

However, I get ahead of myself.

We decided once we had got to about 35 States of the United States of America that we should make an attempt to visit them all.  We had friends and acquaintances who lived in America.

I recalled one guy who had been a post-graduate at the University of Melbourne. He was always Mac to me. I don’t know how we met, but I remember him as tall Yankee, a member of the Democratic Party. We lived in those heady times of John Kennedy and, for a time, we all had hope of a new world in which Kennedy would play a central role. We loved his sense of informality, the informality of youth. Mac told me about a friend of his who worked on one of the Asian desks in the State Department; his phone rang and it was Kennedy on the line. He wanted some information and so he went straight to the guy who had it.

In those days we didn’t have many savvy Yank scholars in our midst – especially one who was young, a budding historian, and who had served as an officer in the Marine Corps. He was eight years older than me, but I think he found me interesting, perhaps because 1960-61 was the period of my Presidency of the Student Representatives Council. Occasionally in your life you enter a circle in which, for a while, you are influential and attract attention before fading back into the ruck.

Mac was very much an Ivy League product, a Harvard graduate, who was returning to a post at Princeton after his year in Australia. He married soon after he returned to the US. I know that much.

Fast forward to 2009, and I knew from desultory correspondence with him, that he had ended up at the University of Iowa where he stayed for his whole professional life, building up a formidable reputation as an American History scholar. I later found out his area of research included the Appalachians, which had always interested me, as has westward movement of the white settlers into Indian territory with the dispossession of the indigenous tribes, which became such a stain of what is referred to as “civilisation”.

Iowa city is the University town where Mac lived for most of his career. As we had never been to Iowa I decided to write to see whether he was still there. He replied to say he had retired from his academic post the previous year, assumed the title of Emeritus and moved back to the East Coast where he was born. The bare facts; no mention of wanting to catch up – after all what was there to talk about after over 50 years since last contact.

So that was that – no reason to go to Iowa City. No reason to go there, but we did. It is a three hour drive from Chicago, where we were staying with friends. Chicago is one of my favourite cities, but that is in a raft of other stories.

Iowa city was like many of its kind, owing its existence to the University; clean, respectable, middleclass-familiar. We stayed in the University hotel overnight, nothing much to do so we ventured out into the wilds of Iowa.

I remember that scene in the Hitchcock film “North by Northwest” where Cary Grant’s character in the film was being pursued in the corn field by a crop duster plane. For some reason I always thought it was meant to be Iowa; in fact it was supposed to be Indiana but was actually filmed in California. Anyway, if one wants to see flat plains covered in soya beans, Iowa is the place – with or without a vengeful crop duster plane.

Hogback Covered Bridge, Madison County, Iowa

We headed out into rural Iowa and spent the day driving around Madison County looking at the six covered bridges, which had been highlighted in the eponymous film a decade before with Merryl Streep and Clint Eastwood playing lovers.

To get to Perry, we needed to bypass Des Moines. The covered bridges are scattered, which meant considerable driving over unfamiliar backroads to find them. Thus, we were a bit tired when we reached Perry.

We stopped outside one of those Beaux Arts buildings with the vaguely Italianate style, which reflect the wealth of turn-of-the century America. This was a hotel, which announced itself on its green portico as the Hotel Pattee. As we found out, it had been built in 1913 when Perry was a thriving railway town, but had fallen into disrepair until resurrected by a lady who had been born in Perry, remembered the heyday and was determined to renovate the old hotel. Renovate was not quite the word, because each of the rooms had been meticulously renovated in a certain style. For instance, there was a Swedish Room, an Irish room, a Mexican Room, even a Quilt room – different motifs for a host of different rooms (but no Australia room).

There is even a Chautauqua room, although for those getting misty-eyed about that eponymous racehorse, Circuit or “tent” Chautauqua refers to a movement seeking to bring self-realisation and self-improvement. The first Circuit Chautauqua appeared in 1904 and travelled to 15 towns in Iowa. The goal was to deliver educational, spiritual, and cultural stimulation to rural and small-town America. Theodore Roosevelt described Chautauqua as “the most American thing in America”. Chautauqua is an Iroquois word that was used to describe a lake in western New York where this movement started.

However, we ended up in the Italian room with the ornate iron bed, lush drapes and hangings from Assisi and Fortuny silk chandelier. There were other reminders of Italy, for instance in faux-lava wall cameos; the illusion of a room in an Italian villa was created. There was even an Italian version of the prie-dieu complete with kneeler. No photos exist of me trying it out to see if She was around.

Hotel Pattee’s Mexican Room

While it was exotic, there were some tell-tale signs that a blanched pachyderm had stalked the lobby. There was a reconstructed Diner, which was closed except for breakfast.  Even now, one can see how many times the hotel has changed hands, but remained open. Nevertheless, the pachyderm still hovers.

As we found out, the woman who had extravagantly, if imaginatively, renovated the property has been forced to sell it three years before, and it had just re-opened when we stayed. There was a quality of impermanence in the air, because the rooms had been so carefully tailored to reflect this woman’s idea of a particular culture. The Italian room ostensibly celebrated that many Italians worked on the railroad. As as we walked around the town, we saw it was not a folly.

This was a workers’ town, not a tourist re-creation despite the exotic Hotel Pattee. There was still an active foundry in the centre of town, belching smoke into the air, the doors open so we could see the furnace; and we were lucky to find a laundry behind the hotel, where the women owners were very friendly and did our accumulated washing very quickly – we promised to send them a clutch of clip-on koalas for their trouble.

When experience is weighed, that day was one of the most unexpected. Covered bridges are another part of our American adventures; maybe one of us will write about it, because you must squat and have a slice of American pie after walking through each of those structures.

The Hotel Pattee was one extraordinary structure enough for one day, a day which started the day years before I first met Mac.

Never Drop Your Guard

Erin Goodyear, 28, is recovering from a breakthrough (COVID-19 vaccine) infection contracted after traveling to Arkansas for a 10-year high school reunion while cases were spiking.

She felt secure enough to attend the reunion, held in a well-ventilated venue, and to stay with her vaccinated parents. Goodyear does not regret her decision because of the opportunity to reconnect with old friends. But she wishes she had avoided certain activities, such as the drag show in a poorly ventilated and packed basement bar she attended after the reunion. 

After returning home to the District, Goodyear experienced an illness she described as a two-day cold that left her weak but not worried enough to get a coronavirus test until a friend suggested it. She also was concerned she might have infected her parents, who are vaccinated and did not become sick. Now, she has her guard up and plans to wear a mask, socialize outdoors and skip bars.

“Maybe my risk tolerance will change in the fall and winter when I’m lonely and want to see people, and I may have to do that inside more,” said Goodyear, who works for a non-profit. “The physical recovery and mental and emotional recovery did take a toll, and I just don’t want to go through that again either.” – from The Washington Post.

This is another reminder that social life is a viral challenge for the young mobile cohort, even to those like herself, who have been either fully vaccinated or have endured the disease full on, or both.

I have written about breakthrough earlier as a warning that it occurs. I agree with the approach of the Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, that these should not be overplayed, but on the other hand, the experience of those who have suffered breakthrough should not be discounted either. I have already quoted one in an earlier blog and in this case of a young woman who travelled to Arkansas (a largely unvaccinated State) for a 10 year reunion. This visit included a packed underground bar late at night. You can imagine the roistering going on – a perfect climate for the Virus to have a field night. Even for someone fully vaccinated, it was obviously not enough. She had a mild COVID-19 episode, and now had moved on, leaving this anecdote behind.

It reminded me of my days when we would be packed into hotel bars, often with low ceilings, with the air thick with cigarette smoke, and I being one of the smokers. Most of us weren’t taken immediately to the nearest hospital with respiratory disease.

Okay, in our student days we would wake up the next morning with a hangover and in the colourful parlance of the time – a mouth like the bottom of a cocky’s cage”. However, fast forward in time, and those who persisted in smoky environments, still smoking (the equivalent risk of being unvaccinated), and eventually the hacking cough of chronic bronchitis compounded by cancer of the lung led to be a hospital statistic, whether or not in ICU.

Social distancing by igloo

We have not eliminated smoking, but here in Australia smoking is contained, but not zero, and moreover has fallen out of favour as a social transactional tool. Maybe the same will happen to enclosed bars and night clubs until the community adopt a social distancing standard equivalent to the smoking ban in such areas.

Therefore, the Virus should begin to elicit the same response even if, at the moment, there are places in Australia where it has been suppressed. Victoria is battling it, NSW has given up, the other States must determine the rules which will allow lotus land to be preserved – yet not in aspic.

Let us be under no illusions.  Nobody has a clue how to safely navigate this country out of this muddle. I feel very sorry for Paul Kelly, the only bastion of sanity in Canberra; “the only rational squeak in the Morrison bubble”, as one wit put it. When I get the chance, I listen to Kelly very closely since he has been very clear-headed and remarkably outwardly calm during this whole crisis.

As I wrote very early in the Virus invasion, Australia should have built special quarantine centres in each State. However, I assume nobody in this country wants to admit anybody carrying disease. I could imagine Barnaby Joyce’s mob screaming if he said, “let all the cattle or their products in without quarantining them for foot and mouth (FMD) disease”. We have not had any FMD, a devastating disease in cattle, on this Continent since 1872 – I think that makes the point. Victoria and Queensland seem to be going to produce bespoke quarantine centres, but not NSW.

Determine the regime for vaccination and determine now (not in some Morrison future) the optimal time for boosters. This chopping and changing around only confuses even those of us with some knowledge.

Determine which age you commence the program. I hit upon 12 years of age in a previous blog. It may be earlier, but whatever the age, remember that this Virus seems to use children as an efficient Vector.

Why do I keep banging on, because some governments seem to be possessed with the infantile notion that either we can live locked up or that it does not matter that the health system may collapse under the weight of cases (we’ll just adjust our model to remove that assumption) – because in the end, folks, it’s the ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or, may I say it, the blood of Jesus Christ which will save us. Just ask the Texans.

Mouse Whisper

It is called the Armenian Fallacy. Here am I, propped against my mousehole door, looking at some person who looks very serious and is called Susan Pearce. She apparently has drunk from the same bowl as her Boss because she has switched from daily totals of increases in vaccinations to a weekly average, because the rate of vaccination has slowed, inevitably.

In the meantime, the number of people being tested is increasingly a meaningless statistic. After all, it is mandated for those living in the uber-locked down LGAs who work in essential jobs in the community. Therefore, if it is compulsory, then most people obey and the bigger this cohort with in turn a required frequency of testing will dictate the number of tests parroted each day by the government. Yes, compliance;  but nothing to do with health status.

The other statistic she used was that 90 per cent of people with the Virus are being treated outside hospital. Even a little mouse like me would think that misleading – it is the actual number in hospital which counts when measured against existing resources.  Morrison used the same fallacy when using percentages to downplay the effect of hotel quarantine breakout.

The day of reckoning is upon us, but I can retreat into my Mousehole, and pretend I am in Cornwall.

Modest Expectations – Renunciation of Citizenship

The Potala

If Australia is the hermit kingdom, what does that make the Lodge in Canberra?  The Potala?  It is not particularly helpful for two of the most powerful politicians to lock themselves away. Perhaps if they were creative geniuses such a juxtaposition may provide positive outcomes; but in the end, with men without such a spark, Australia ends up with a scene of reinforcement of similar attitudes and behaviour – an integral loop brewed around eggs and bacon and lox and cream cheese. A daily diet of fuelled fossils and property developers complete a depressing taste sensation of these eremites.

It is an ironic tableau given the Prime Ministerial shift in stance on the national lockdown.

Cameron Stewart made a shrewd observation on the Insiders program on 20 August to the effect that much would be revealed with Victoria’s ability to get the number of COVID-19 cases under control. The outbreak in the Albanian community in the Shepparton area, which is linked to the Caroline Springs cases, reflects the infectivity of the Delta Variant and the ease with which the virus spreads through families and the various workplaces. Unlike NSW the numbers were “grumbling along” in Victoria – until recently. There is doubt that the Victorian government wants the number lower. Nevertheless, with a lockdown, the numbers were initially contained – with the fear that with any loosening of restrictions the situation would mimic that of Sydney.

If Victoria had forced the daily case numbers down, even if not to zero, then Australia – except for NSW – would have the prospect of emerging from lockdown. NSW is still left with its population in some Berejiklian limbo, supported by an isolated NSW Prime Minister and a Victorian-based Treasurer, being slowly braised on the tip of Morton’s Fork.

The dilemma is that Australia can then be unlocked, except for NSW – the pariah State surrounding the equivalent of wartime Switzerland, called the Australian Capital Territory, providing succour to the war-fatigued refugees from the NSW War Zone, now garrisoned by the Delta Variant.

NSW inhabitants will be seeking refugee status, waving vaccination papers at the border seeking access to a COVID-19 free State. Its health system has collapsed under the load of COVID cases, with everybody wanting their elective procedures to be undertaken interstate because of the compromised status of each of the major NSW hospitals and their depletion of staff.

When anybody is used to being able to more or less control their activities, mostly by using devious tactics laced with lies, the Virus does not buy any of that. This is being shown by politicians hiding away, emerging only for controlled appearances with the media, at best having fragmentary knowledge of health to spread political half-truths. Underneath, the only Federal government strategy is wishing that the Virus would go away – and given his Pentecostal beliefs, the Prime Minister no doubt prays that “Jesus will directly intervene.”

If you want to stop the spread, you have to stop the vectors – people moving around in a disordered fashion (Brownian movement) – for at least two weeks. That is not going to happen in NSW – and, as has been proved elsewhere, vaccination helps, but achieving even 75 per cent is a challenge, not only because of the anti-vaxxers, but also  the unvaccinated  young who are spreaders.

A few weeks ago I set out a plan and inter alia suggested that as school was one place where you can capture the cohort, vaccination be provided at age 12. Vaccination may have to occur at an even younger age. However, that debate has yet to be had, as this Prime Minister’s mental energy is consumed in wedging poor hapless Albo.  Really, is that what governing Australia has been reduced to?

The point is, will Australia open up with NSW locked out? I am sure the other States are sick of Berejiklian and that NSW cabal called the Prime Minister’s office. A Treasurer held hostage because, in the end, plaintively he cries from the overgrown Lodge tennis court, a metaphor for Australia:

I coulda’ been a contender …

“You don’t understand! I coulda’ had class. I coulda’ been a contender. I could’ve been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am – let’s face it.”

Maybe he will, because Cameron Stewart has proved prescient. Andrews has not got the Victorian State’s daily average down to 10 cases a day. As the week has progressed the attainment of Andrews’ goal seems unlikely to occur. Andrews is now not a counterpoint for NSW’s abject failure. Andrews now needs to recalibrate without seeming to become another Berekjiklian – the quintessential flailing, failed Premier, being pursued by the hounds of  Queensland and Western Australia. Basking to Baskerville?

Morton’s Fork

To-day everyone has to pay the heaviest taxes in our history, but whereas in former times nobody liked paying taxes, now (let us I hope) we willingly do so, for we know that our money is helping: the fight for freedom. But this willing spirit was not shown in the reign of Henry VII, whose method of taxation produced a dilemma known as “Morton’s Fork.”

His officers of taxation did not hesitate to exact forced loans from people of property. They acted in accordance with the theory that if a man lived economically he could not have failed to have saved money, and was, therefore, in a position to make his Sovereign a handsome contribution.  

Likewise, if he lived extravagantly he evidently possessed means, and was also in a position to assist his King. No wonder we inherited a dislike for taxation!

Most revolutions have originated from the excessive taxation of the common people, such as the American Revolution, which was fought to escape English taxes, and the French Revolution to end the crushing impositions of the ruling classes.

This rather quaint letter the Sydney Morning Herald published in wartime 1940 almost irrelevantly invoked the concept of Morton’s Fork. Here then there was no hint of the dilemma which Morton wilfully created when hunting for extra revenue for Henry VII, after he had come to the throne following the energy sapping War of the Roses where Morton had played an important role.

Cardinal John Morton

Although he was a Dorset man by birth, Morton had hitched himself to the Lancastrian cause, and survived during Yorkist imprisonment with his head still intact on his torso. Between being Bishop of Ely and Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, he did have a stint in Tower of London – more a Morton roller-coaster than a fork. Moreover, Morton was always close to the Church, even though he first appears as the principal of Peckwater Inn, which had been given to an Augustine Priory several centuries before. It later became the site of Christ Church Oxford, but publican to priest gives Morton a special cachet.

Berejiklian is facing her own version of Morton’s Fork if she “lets it rip” and dismantles the lockdown; in all probability the State will collapse, as already clearly exemplified by a health system under extreme stress and NSW would attain complete pariah status within the Federation. If she intensifies the lockdown, then she is a form of Armenian toast with her Liberal Party backers, in a way never seen before by those unaffected in her Statewide constituency.  If they cannot protest in the streets, NSW voters have that alternative in 2023, unless there is revolt and cries for secession from the unaffected parts of the State well before that time.

There has already been the Tweed Heads Secessionist Movement, and what should have occurred at Federation, with all NSW south of the Murrumbidgee River being ceded to Victoria, may emerge as a local sentiment.

Then she would have to put a complete lockdown on the affected areas, allowing for no movement out for at least four weeks. Vaccination – who knows – may be her “opium of the people”. Let us face it, already we have evidence from elsewhere of the short-term effectiveness of the vaccines; but we have no plan to bolster up the very satisfactory take up to date, to include boosters even though Australia is still a long way from Shangri-La.

The World is based on getting your assumptions right

Covid-19 has exposed Australia’s economy for what it is.

We have a large, clean land and good weather. We dig dirt out of the ground which we sell as iron ore to China, which turns it into steel to build often vacant apartment blocks to pump GDP growth. We dig fossilised trees out of the ground which we also sell to China as coal to make that steel, and to burn in Japan for electricity while their nuclear reactors slowly get back online after Fukushima.

We sell immigration dressed up as education, mainly to China, which is now Australia’s third largest “export” market at $32 billion per annum – which is now halted. We are completely dependent on China which is now in a cold war with the US, possibly turning hot – where over one third of all merchandise exports go.”

So where to from here?

Technology and the elaborate transformation of our raw materials into sophisticated products with higher margins and a greater global market is the answer.

The fastest way to get there is to do everything we can to educate the nation with higher skills.

I would be paying people to go to university or TAFE in the right areas instead of sitting around in zombie companies on Job Keeper, use the spare capacity from the drop in international students to educate our own citizens and dramatically ramp up the sophistication and skills base taught at TAFE to make it a world class trade school.

My first assumption is this writer is not particularly friendly to the Morrison Government. However, like all assumptions, I could be wrong.

He is a prolific Twitter user, often commenting on subjects outside his areas of expertise, including the Sydney lockout laws, COVID-19, Politics of the United States, Donald Trump, Economic policy and many others. This has resulted in criticism from various circles including investors, who strongly suggest he should spend more energy growing a profitable company instead of constantly posting on social media.

This comment is inserted at the base of his Wikipedia biography, and my assumption is that the subject of the criticism did not insert that excerpt.

Again, I may be wrong.

Matt Barrie

The subject is Matt Barrie, self-described entrepreneur and IT expert. He has inserted himself into the “Doherty Model” debate with a very long criticism of the Doherty Institute’s modelling. He challenges the underlying assumptions of the model, and his criticism is peppered with annotations such as “garbage”.  I assume that he is calling into question the veracity of the Doherty model.

Parenthetically, when such a report as the Doherty one is commissioned and one can assume when the Government has predetermined the outcome, it politicises the findings and hence any recommendations in the Report. Here is the further parenthetic assumption that the Morrison government is following its normal pathway of creating a scapegoat, in this case in the form of Professor Lewin, if the whole Report goes “pear-shaped”, is discredited joining the $8m COVID-19 app which detected as it did only 17 cases – on the policy scrap heap..

It is part of my assumptions that the Government, which has made a number of appalling decisions, including prematurely congratulating the NSW government on successfully “quashing” the viral spread, has yet to learn.

The concern I have is how any of the models of the outcome of this Virus have factored in its transmissibility by those vaccinated, and the effect of the virus becoming endemic in children. The community has tolerated children as spreaders of that other coronavirus – the common cold – with its seasonal fluctuation. There is no vaccine, but we live with it because it is so mild in comparison with other infections and people are not hospitalised.

I am making the assumption that the AZ vaccine will be phased out as the mRNA vaccines, with their improved methods of production including the ability to be modified,  become the vaccines of choice. In itself this will present the Australian government with a number of problems in setting the policy agenda, including the substitution process, having invested so heavily in the AZ vaccine.

However, the assumption can be made that the shortages of vaccines will pass, and therefore the debate about whether Australia has booster doses or whether we help the disadvantaged countries achieve optimal vaccination also will fade as an issue.

Nevertheless, there remains the unanswered question of if, and when, boosters are required, and how young one needs to be to receive the first vaccine injection. Still questions that need to be answered, I assume.

Needless to say, it is poor form when asked to reveal the change in the modelling, Professor Lewin says she cannot. The assumption may be made that she has something to hide. The Doherty modellers should be asked to explain their model in front of their peers – publicly.

Whether he is right or wrong, Matt Barrie shows how debatable some of the assumptions underlying the report are, and therefore we do have a number of existing media forums where this can be debated, providing that the Chair of any such debate is knowledgeable and talented enough to lead the debate into objective territory. But that again is an assumption in many respects.

Hey Gladys. Where’re You Going This Weekend?

This is a story for you, Gladys.

There is a family we know in Tasmania.

They wanted to go on a holiday to Kakadu, but first they needed to visit relatives in Adelaide.

They boarded the Spirit of Tasmania with their car and were able to drive across Victoria and then stay in Adelaide with their relatives before flying to Darwin, where they rented a camper van and went to Kakadu, whence we received a text to say they were enjoying themselves. Very good people, and really good for them, not only to see their relatives in Adelaide but also to have a holiday in the Tropics during Tasmania’s chilly winter.

Then they drove their rented camper van from Darwin to Adelaide and then went home the way they had gone, in their own car.

What is that about lockdowns here? None.

The point is that the rest of Australia, especially if the smouldering Victorian outbreak is controlled, is leading a normal life, albeit a bit more hygienically than before.

A long time ago we booked a flight to Broome, having already booked on a cruise along the Kimberley coast, which would have also enabled us to go to Tiwi country, ending in Darwin. We anticipated the cancellation (which ultimately occurred) by flying to Broome early so that we could change to an alternative plan of driving to Darwin.  Having been to the Kimberley and the Northern Territory multiple times over the years we  knew what remained on our tourist agenda. However, along came the limo driver and the Berejiklian response, which has left the State locked down, with no demonstrable way of anything changing before the end of the year – if then.

Of course, none of the above  was possible for us, because of the Berejiklian stuff up. Nor any ability to go to Tasmania, nor to see our family in Melbourne.

I fail to see this adulation for the NSW Premier opening us all up for a picnic in the park or Dr Chant teaching us baby steps. Unfortunately, NSW has Berejiklian, who would be seen as an aberration in any other State. She has no strategy except vaccination in the face of the escalation of cases and a stressed health system.

Can I remind her of one thing? During the War, outside Tocumwal, they constructed an airstrip and nearby a 1,000 bed facility for war casualties, effectively taking them out of the firing line. The only way to deal with this crisis is to separate the infected, the virus vectors, until they are no longer vectors. A tent hospital would do it, because although the airstrip at Tocumwal still exists, the tent hospital has long gone and the land restored. The point is that rapidly setting up a fully functioning facility has been shown to be feasible and implementable. And a long way away without being a long way away. The wartime planners understood the apparent paradox and dealt with it accordingly.

Similar sites are available to NSW. What about some of those coastal golf courses in Sydney? Requisition these. Show some guts.

A suitable place for a quarantine village…

Watch what happens at Wellcamp when you have people with a real record of creating an airport and industrial park, as the Wagner brothers have shown; now given the task of creating a bespoke quarantine facility. In three months that will be operating.

However, you need courage to build such a facility in the face of Morrison the underminer. NSW needs a blueprint; the other States have provided various and the only unfortunate shred Berejiklian has in her policy patchwork is if Victoria has failed to reduce the number of cases. How threadbare can you become!

A Distant Mirror

I remember back in 1978, when I was reconstructing my library, I read a review about this new book titled A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. I remember sending a note to my friend in America asking her to buy me a copy, such were the times then in getting new American books. She bought a handcut first edition, which beautifully encased the views of one of the most influential historian of the 20th century, Barbara Tuchman.

The Distant Mirror metaphor drew attention to the parallels in the phenomena extant in both the 14th and 20th centuries.  On the surface there is Voltaire’s interjection of “history never repeating itself, man does” which may seem relevant, but where does it take one?

Back to this very extensive narrative of the 14th century.

Tuchman noted that there was a tendency of historians to skirt the 14th century, perhaps because of the disastrous consequences of the Black Death plague 1348-1350 “which killed an estimated one-third of the population living between India and Iceland.” She felt this a difficult age for historians as it was an interruption in the story of human progress.

Even now, over 30 years since her death, her thoughtful analysis is worth reading.

How delightful, southern France in summer …

In contrast, read the airy twitter post from the anachronistic Alexander Downer, having got an exemption to travel to France no less. Downer is chortling on about how lovely France is at this time of the year in summer – away from the Australian Oubliette – no lockdowns; just a France with 17,590 cases recorded yesterday and a “trivial” 74 deaths.

Reminiscent of Pope Clement VI during the stint in France away from that infested place called Rome, the papacy lodged in the south of France at Avignon at the height of the Black Death.  He was ordered by his doctor to sit between two fires in the papal apartments – during the summer. Rather than avoiding the miasma, the fire discouraged the fleas, the vectors of the Yersinia pestis bacillus. Also, the Pope had the added benefit of his doctor insisting on him being socially isolated, despite the Pope losing a third of his cardinals, most of whom were some relation in some shape or form to him anyway.

Better than lockdown, milord! Especially when you have no cardinals to worry about.

Now this is Freedom (Thanks to The Boston Globe)

What we are missing by having the lockdown.

“For legions of island residents and visitors, traveling to and from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket has always been a bit of a headache.”

“But this summer, the ordeal of snatching a coveted reservation on heavy travel days, and navigating the maze of buses, cars, and general commotion at the terminals has gone to migraine level, fuelling a season of discontent on the islands and mainland alike.”

Summer crowds at Martha’s Vineyard

“A fresh wave of tourists, along with an influx of new full-time island residents fleeing COVID, have packed ferries with thousands more cars, requiring travellers to book reservations weeks in advance for peak times.”

Mouse Whisper

The reward for reaching a record number of COVID cases in a single day – we can have a picnic outside – le déjeuner sur l’herbe or,

emulating Tom Lehrer’s picnic in the park:

“All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon
When we’re poisoning pigeons in the park

…or a squirrel or two…”

Lots of ideas. Time for me to get some fresh air.

By the way, Is Tom Lehrer still alive?

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe

Modest Expectations – A Rock in Utah

On the 9-10 May 2001, the House of Representatives met in Melbourne to celebrate the Centenary of Federation Commemorative Sittings. Twenty years on, only five of those who were sitting as Members that day are still members of Parliament.

One is Kevin Andrews, a somewhat desiccated hangover in the Coalition, who is about to be consigned to “feather duster” status, after an undistinguished 30 years in Parliament and after losing preselection.

Warren Entsch and Bob Katter are from the wilds of Northern Queensland. Both have been able to ensure election without regard to any political affiliation. Katter is part of a dynasty, and both have fiefdoms. Intervention in any issue of national importance is incidental; neither is in a position to be national leader; and indeed, do not want to be so. They both want influence of their own choosing, even as they have become old men.

The other two who were there that day? Antony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek. Each has represented inner Sydney electorates for the Australian Labor Party for that period of time; in fact Albanese was elected in 1996 and Plibersek 1998. Frankly, I thought there would be more than just five, but these latter two are still very relevant to Australia as we move towards 2030.

Yet what have they done to move the needle towards ensuring a better life for Australia?

When Whitlam came to power in 1972, he gave Australia a mighty jolt. He had foreshadowed significant change during the vindictive years of McMahon and the alcohol-stained Gorton incumbency. “It’s Time” rang around Australia.

So dangerous was Whitlam to the bunyip aristocracy that eventually, with the connivance of the Royal household and the American security service, a coup was engineered in 1975 which led to Whitlam being sacked by a drunken popinjay called Kerr, dripping in the lard of an antique post and aided and abetted shamefully by the then Chief Justice Barwick.

However, the people showed very clearly that they were tired of Whitlam.  I was a spectator in these exciting times because, whatever could be said of these years, Australia threw off its bunyip ossification.

What followed was instructive, and the fact that the current government is as bad as it has ever been has given me cause to reflect. The decade post-Whitlam saw some of the most important policy made at a national level which brought us from a narrow Poujardist, sectarian-ridden country to one where the economy and the social structures bloomed – until this past decade.

Howard, for all his conservatism and his unconscious comic talent, strangely was the last remnant of that age, during which the mood of the country reverted to that previous xenophobic jingoistic time.

Malcolm Fraser came to power in 1975 in a landslide, which could be interpreted as a rejection of progress, and he was then successively re-elected until he was voted out in 1983. Fraser was a “curate’s egg”. For instance, his approach to economic reform was that of nineteenth century Victorian protectionism. His attitudes here with the morning-suited Eggleton whispering in his ear, set back our progress a decade.

However, despite the whisperings, he did make a number of decisions that can be attributed to his government having worthwhile impacts. I have tried to think of what Albanese and Plibersek have accomplished given that they have held ministerial positions and been in Cabinet over the past decade.

The reason I am musing about this was the discovery of an article in the Guardian Weekly written 13 years ago. The title “Harpoons Down – Australia’s Last Whaling“. The last whaling hunt happened in 1978. The last whaling station was at “Cheynes Beach” near Albany, a city on the southwestern coast of Australia. It was closed that year. At the time, there was a great deal of concern expressed as to the fallout in that community; the normal talk about the loss of jobs and of a city under stress given its isolated location.

Cheynes Beach whaling station near Albany

I remember visiting the station six years earlier when it was fully operational. When we arrived, the whales were being cut into huge slices. We weren’t worried about the smell. There is a lot of blood, but my children eagerly touched the body of the closest whale carcass.

My sons haven’t forgotten that experience since. People may abhor the slaughter of whales – whaling was so much part of our heritage as watching them has become today. My sons had grown up spending their holidays in Port Fairy, in a rubble walled stone cottage built in 1848. Port Fairy, together with other settlements on Victoria’s southern coast and the offshore islands of Tasmania, owed much of their origin to whaling. The cottage was named for Ben Bowyers, himself a whaler, who built it.

In April 1979 Malcolm Fraser pledged his government’s “total commitment to protect the whale”.  It was said that he was heavily influenced by his daughter, Phoebe. Nevertheless, a total ban on whaling in Australia and the development of policy for the protection of whales further afield in international waters followed. For this, Fraser could claim that he had achieved a major change in Australian policy and attitudes.

The cessation of whaling did not convert Albany into a ghost town. I think of an ongoing prosperous city today when, across the Continent, there are coal mines dotted all along coastal New South Wales. Yet Albanese and Plibersek, if not cowering under the assault of the coal mining industry and their union collaborators, are certainly not indicating a co-ordinated program to reduce coal mining either.

That is the worrying problem. That if Australia is faced with ridding itself of a corrupt government prolonging the moral desert, do we need a timid alternative with a blank record dedicating itself for minimising change, thus retaining a compromised bureaucracy with a carousel of consultants looting the country? Moreover, where is the plan to rid the coastal strip from the Illawarra to the Hunter of coal mining? After all, I am old enough to remember the despoliation of the beaches in the same area near Newcastle by sand mining and the bleat about loss of jobs. No sand mining in the Myall Lakes now. Loss of jobs? Not that you ever know whether these sand miners were ever reduced to penury.

Do we trust a government led by any NSW politician of any political colour? When last in power in this State, the ALP government was full of corruption, as we the community are being reminded as we watch the fall out still be played out in the courts.

More spine, Albo. Dig up the “goat tracks”, as Eddie Obeid so colourfully described the trail of lobbyists and hucksters wandering to and around the Parliamentary Executive Offices!

Additionally, a small piece of advice, get yourself or at least one of your trusted lieutenants to become fluent in Health as Neal Blewett did. The lack of appreciation that Health has a separate language leaves any politician such as Plibersek at a disadvantage. Certainly it did when she was Minister.

When I met her some years ago it was clear that she and her advisers spoke a form of Health creole. However then, speaking fluent Health was not as critical as it is today, especially in the misinterpretation of the meaning of vaccine percentages.

The Mystery of Jane Halton

Vaccine advances, including the remarkable success of mRNA technology, made it possible to develop jabs for a previously unknown pathogen in less than a year, rather than the decade or more it would traditionally take. But as much as we improved, the delivery of vaccines still took far too long. In the future, our goal must be to roll out vaccines in just 100 days. This goal, first articulated by CEPI, has been adopted and championed by the UK Government as part of its G7 Presidency. Achieving it could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars should we face another pandemic threat. – Richard Hatchett – June 2021

Richard Hatchett is the Chief Executive Officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the Oslo-based organisation formed in 2017. The following blurb, even suitably abridged, sets out the objectives:

CEPI works to advance vaccines against emerging infectious diseases…and establishes investigational vaccine stockpiles.

CEPI also funds new and innovative platform technologies with the potential to accelerate the development and manufacture of vaccines.

CEPI is working with partners across the world on the development and manufacturing of a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19 and is seeking US$2 billion from global donors to carry out this plan. 

Australia has given CEPI a relatively small amount of $13million (half of which has already been provided) towards the $2billion. In addition to governments, notably the UK, the Gates and Wellcome Foundations have each given $100 million.

Richard Hatchett has had a remarkable career and it is outlined most relevantly in a recent book by the prolific Michael Lewis titled “The Premonition – A Pandemic Story”.  In short, Lewis focuses on a group of scientists and doctors who spent years trying to ensure America was prepared for a deadly pandemic. A medically-trained epidemiologist, Hatchett is first mentioned in the book as having being recruited by one Rajeev Venkayya, a relatively junior medical graduate himself part of a group planning for governmental response to pandemics.

Serendipity is often but not invariably associated with momentous change. Dr Venkayya arrived at the Bush White House at a time when Bush, as described in the book, was “pissed”. Bush had been at the helm when 9/11 occurred; there had been the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina – and he did not know what to do. In fact, my personal memory from afar at the time of 9/11 was of the dazed, uncomprehending look on Bush’s face when he was interrupted reading a story to pre-schoolers, to be told of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Yet there, in this book “The Premonition”, it was said that in the summer of 2005, Bush read a book about the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak and the devastation wrought. The book influenced Bush to such an extent that he wanted a plan to prevent this happening again. Bush had had many plans pushed his way on a number of matters, a number of which yielded catastrophic situations occurring, for instance, in Afghanistan.

Yet this proved different.

At the time in 2005 we had the outbreak of avian flu H5N1, and dire predictions of massive loss of human life, which never eventuated. Yet in the previous two years, the world had got its first spread of the SARS coronavirus, the forerunner of the COVID-19 virus.

Bush listened to Dr Vekayya, who wrote down a sketchy plan – 12 pages “which amounted less to a plan than a plan to have a plan”.  Bush asked Congress for $7.1 billion to spend on this three-part pandemic sketch plan, and Congress gave it to him. It was an insight into how Bush governed by instinct but, on this occasion, he was mostly right. Yet the business of getting a policy into place, which was little more than vaccinate and isolate, proved very difficult, given that it crossed the influential Centres for Disease Control (CDC) way of thinking.

To the Vekayya group another doctor was recruited, Carlton Mercer. He came from the Veterans Administration and over time this little-known figure became, with Hatchett, the vanguard for turning the Vekayya sketch into a defined course of action, namely when a pandemic appeared imminent, in the absence of a vaccine it was to go quickly and hard in locking down the community, close schools and social distance people from one other. The problem with people who genuinely drive change is that there is always the research/medical establishment prepared to cast aspersions. In this case, this was the CDC.

When Obama came to power, he stopped listening to these Bush appointees and their accumulated experience. He was bolstered in 2009 by predicted dire consequences of the swine flu pandemic – caused by another influenza virus H1N1 – that did not eventuate. Mexico had followed their guidelines; so what! America did not; and nothing much happened.

COVID-19 was yet to come.

Richard Hatchett in 2017 ended up running CEPI, which was a critical position as related in the book, because it was able to redirect substantial funding in the development of vaccines, particularly Moderna and AstroZeneca, when the pandemic struck and the Virus was isolated. Funding was also provided by CEPI to the University of Queensland for its ultimately failed vaccine. Considering the hype surrounding this group, perhaps more reliance was placed on its success than should have been. In any event, it left Australia with very few vaccine paddles, later in 2020. At that time Australia was basking in its success of suppression of the Virus.

Since leaving the advisory role to a President who had stopped listening to him, Richard Hatchett has been very active nevertheless.

The mystery of Jane Halton? Given her position as Chair of CEPI, which she is always flaunting, the question has been asked as to why she did not influence Australia in its acquisition of vaccines by Australia in 2020, given the directions being taken by CEPI, given the obvious international standing of the CEPI CEO, Richard Hatchett. I would have thought she would have told the Government what to do, as is her wont. She certainly should have known about the efficacy of the various vaccines under development around the world, including that of the University of Queensland, and the need to stockpile a range of vaccines, not just one.

Very strange, almost as mysterious as why she is the Chair of CEPI in the first place.

Sprod 

A drawing of a Grecian urn. The athlete on the urn being offered a laurel wreath. The caption – “no thanks I’ll take the money.”

The children on the beach watching a Punch and Judy show. The sign against the beach stage read “Now in its 290th year”.

An exercise in whimsy.

George Napier Sprod was an Australian cartoonist who, for much of his working life after the Second World War, worked in England. A cartoonist who signed himself Sprod? Who would believe the name was not just a humorous pseudonym? But George Napier Sprod was indeed born in South Australia.

As has been written elsewhere, in 1938 at the age 19, George Sprod left home without notice. He had decided to ride his bike along the Murray River en route to Sydney. He got as far as Hay before selling his bike and continuing by train. Once in Sydney he set up residence in Kings Cross and started freelancing as a cartoonist and working as a street photographer.

World War II intervened. He joined up, became a gunner, was sent to Singapore, was captured and then was a POW in Changi until the end of the War. During that time he teamed up with Ronald Searle and the two of them edited a paper called “Exile”. It must have been difficult for the Japanese to comprehend, given their distinctive styles. Searle in fact had a marked effect on the Sprod development

After the War he went back to Australia, worked for a time on the Packer papers, the Daily Telegraph and Womans Weekly, found out he was not a political cartoonist and went to England, where he hit paydirt, particularly with then Punch Editor, Malcolm Muggeridge.

In the “Introduction” to a collection of Sprod cartoons, mostly ones that had appeared in Punch, published in 1956 under the title “Chips off a Shoulder”, Malcolm Muggeridge described Sprod’s drawings as very funny, with a gusto, an earthiness. “The inherent absurdity of human life positively pleases him, and his bold and uproarious situations convey this pleasure. I would say he was in no tradition at all, but just Sprod.”

Muggeridge, later on the Introduction, opined on why Australia produced and nurtured more humorous artists than anywhere else. He suggested it may have been the harshness of life and the vastness of Australia, which elicited the wry smile as the readiest and most natural response, as Muggeridge so elegantly puts it. Muggeridge mentions a number of Australian cartoonists, but lumped David Low in with them. Low, probably the most acclaimed political cartoonist of them, was a New Zealander, who did work for eight years in Sydney before spending the rest of this life cartooning in England.

Just before I left running the community health program in Victoria, one of my nursing team, as an impromptu gesture presented me with a first edition of “Chips off a Shoulder”. The year was 1979, the book having been published two decades before. On the fly leaf, she had written my initials and under these the words “A sense of humour” and then below at the foot of the page “Best wishes, always” followed by a long dash. I remember once she did ask what I would like as an epitaph. I don’t remember how this matter came up, but I remember my response, “I tried”.

It is funny what you treasure and would never sell. After I left the job, I never saw her again. Her name was Beryl.

But then I never went searching for Sprod, who by that time had retreated from England back to Australia because of some messy domestic relationship there. He died in Marrickville in 2003, I know that much and that he did go on to publish a number of other books of cartoons.

Where has All the Influenza Gone?

Influenza is very much part of the discussion swirling around the COVID-19 discussions. Reference is continually being made to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic; and reference is made to the fact that people have died of influenza in the past and we did not lock down Australia.

One can speculate about this. My view is that the Australian community has become used to the winter appearance of the virus, and there was always at the outset of “the flu season”, the Australian representative of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Reference on Influenza appearing to warn us of its dangers.  Australia was thus well placed. Scientists at the Centre in Melbourne—one of six such centres globally—faced an imprecise predictive process because of the variability of the various strains. This explained the vaccine’s varying effectiveness year to year as the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory (CSL) tried to make the most effective vaccine to counter this shifty virus.

Thus, there is a yearly vaccine, and there were established rituals. Those working in the health sector were encouraged to be vaccinated, and each health centre, generally as part of infection control, provided a systematic approach. In any event the prevalence of influenza waned as the country emerged from winter.

People died, and in fact up to 2020, every year from 2014 onwards the number of people who died increased, almost reaching 1,000 a year – until 2020 when the number dropped to 36, and then this year nil. The average age of death was 88, and hence influenza mortality was conventionally believed to be confined to the very old.

This year the community was advised to space its influenza and COVID-19 injections. I had the influenza injection first, when it became available. This I did because early in the year the COVID-19 virus seemed suppressed and the Delta variant had yet to emerge as the scourge it has become. So, in my case, “vaccine hesitancy” was an artefact, because of the expert advice to space the injections.

There is much speculation about why this apparent extinction of influenza mortality has occurred. The first is that it is only a lull in the disease progression and it will come roaring back with enhanced infectivity. Others suggest that the measures taken in regard to the current pandemic, such as social distancing, better hygiene and school closures have contributed.

Whatever the core reason for the current situation of zero mortality, the course of the influenza virus should be closely monitored but, from this unexpected effect, it does suggest that the hard approach is working.

In 1918 the community was hit by the influenza pandemic which, some say, never really went away. It just became attenuated; but there have been pandemic years. I remember the Asian flu pandemic in 1957 because I ended up in Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital. There have been outbreaks since, all caused by descendants of the Spanish flu virus, generally milder and seasonally self-limited. In summary, seasonal influenza has tended to kill the oldest and youngest in a society but has been less virulent since the 1918 pandemic – roughly half of those who died were men and women in their 20s and 30s, in the prime of their lives.

Why does the community not get so worried about influenza? First, I suggest it is because of its predictability. This is reflected clearly by the ritual of flu vaccine injections. Yet have the measure that have been put in place over the past two years fatally suppressed the flu virus? An open question.

Secondly, the coronavirus is different. The common cold is a coronavirus; the conventional wisdom – we don’t die of the common cold. But this is different, and the world was unprepared for this relative of such a mild disease to rear up and become a dangerous lethal virus, initially with no vaccine and then, as if in response to the emergence of vaccines, the more dangerous delta variant appeared.

Influenza has a predictability; this virus has not, especially as the messaging changes almost daily. These changes have increased the uncertainty, whereas the rules to deal with pandemics from a pure public health context have always been simple and unequivocal, with perhaps the added use of masks. Social distancing, school closure, restriction of all movement, personal hygiene, use of hand sanitiser, the importance of the reproduction factor – all well known.

Thirdly, another difference compared with influenza is the way this current pandemic has been handled in Australia. This is the politicisation with the inability of politicians not to interfere. The failure occurs when politicians panic, want instant solutions, unfortunately showing both ignorance and weakness at the same time. Politicians always seem to know better, especially when it interferes with business and political donors.

Ignore the public health rules, as is happening at present in NSW, and how long will it be before it is not only Afghani seeking refugee status in States with low rates of infection. One person, being a proponent of the “Let it rip” school of dealing with the Virus, said to me that he wanted to leave the country. Don’t worry. Currently, NSW is the place for you.

Mouse Whisper

Michael Kirby is an illustrious man of the people. He is known to deliver newspapers. Yet he has 30 honorary doctorates – quite a collection. There are 23 from Australian universities. Shame on the University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland. You are real laggards. But has anybody else got more honorary doctorates than our Michael K?

What a fancy dress party Michael, the Thespian, can stage. But why the number?  I suppose it is because some people collect stamps; others, like Michael, collect Tudor caps.

My mausmeister has fond but distant memories of him and that other colourful figure of Sydney University politics, the late Vincent John Flynn. He remembers the things which were said about him by those two worthies during those halcyon days of student politics, not to his face, but after he had left a meeting early.

You see Flynn had inter alia currency issues; and so does Michael. Different form of currency; different definition. Both defined by spotlight, one avoidance of it, the other always searching for it.

Modest Expectations – Totally White

The ship is sinking. Most of us are begging the passengers to get into the lifeboats. Others are telling them to ignore us, that they’re better off trying to swim. Or, worse, denying the plain fact that they’re in danger at all.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a practice run for the even bigger global catastrophe that is climate change.

And instead of doing everything we can to save as many people as possible, we’re trying to get past the morally bankrupt right-wingers who would sooner see our fellow passengers set adrift on the ocean than admit they’re wrong and lose sway.  Boston Globe 12 August 2021

When the Ruby Princess catastrophe occurred last year, it smacked of undue influence in high places. To clear the ships, various influential Liberal names bounced around – somebody had relatives on the ship, and so on, rolling around the rumour mill. However, the media bias tended to scrub the political decks clean before the miasma could take over. The problem with NSW is that the history of the colony and then the State has been laced with corruption, and it is no different under this Premier.

At the time of the Ruby Princess debacle and for weeks following when Dr Kerry Chant was reported as advocating an incomprehensible “zig-zag approach”, I was firmly of the opinion she should be sacked. That did not help my reputation among some of my public health colleagues. In this fiasco, there were others who were the fall guys and were sidelined, but as they had no public profile they could be sidelined without fuss, irrespective of the ultimate consequences upon their respective careers.

There is an old saw which says that the controversy generated is inversely proportional to autonomy of action. Even if you try to be professional, are basically honest and hardworking, in the end if you become of no use to government, you will endure the spin, labelled the scapegoat. That unfortunately is happening now, quite unfairly, to Dr Chant. This is especially so when the State has a Premier who is a genius in deflecting responsibility. As I have written before, Berejiklian shows all the Armenian traits for survival, regularly changing her political raiment to ensure survival at the expense of others.

Dr Chant has been pilloried in the conservative press. She has been humiliated by her Minister Hazzard in front of a Parliamentary Committee.  It was her fault that the lockdown did not occur earlier … that is the spin from the Premier’s office. In the guise of praise, Berejiklian has always heaped the consequences of any COVID-19 Government decisions on the shoulders of Dr Chant, presumably the Berejilkian office ensuring that an appropriate story is fed to the media. In line with abandoning Chant, she has now stopped talking about decisions being based on “medical advice”, it is now “a whole of Government approach”.

At the time I felt very sorry for Dr Chant being consigned to irrelevance as the Premier seemed to be doing, centimetre by centimetre. There is one impediment that the Premier has created for herself by installing Dr Chant as NSW Premier’s Woman of the year 2021 with accompanying effusive praise. Hence the methods being used to erode her standing by the corridors whisperers, who inhabit all political systems.  After all, that cynosure of NSW Government intelligence, Dominic Perrottet, is reported at one stage as saying Dr Chant should take a cut in salary, presumably as punishment for not quelling the pandemic. As one dark wit has said about Dr Chant, she has come from Punchbowl to Punching Ball.

One thing I found out when holding an influential advisory role – one minute there is lavish praise heaped on you, with the danger that you believe it; the next minute, not. Chant does not fit into that category of being sucked in by that spin. Rather she has had the naïve view that politics will yield to logic, but in the current Coalition culture that is the last thing that is valued.

At the time I thought that Chant was at the point of resignation, it would be interesting to see how the public health community reacts.

Despite the usual AFR prediction the day before, there was certainly a volte face by the NSW government on Saturday 14 August when the cases rose to 446, and spread had seemingly occurred in the Aboriginal population in Western NSW?

Dr Chant returned on the Sunday and gave a report of the public health situation without political spin, controlled emotionally, but intense in her message. The Premier in the same session admitted the Saturday was a wake up call and that “she went upstairs to Dr Chant with the Deputy Premier after the briefing”.  Hello, Dr Chant was not at the 11am briefing; she was “upstairs”. One can only speculate on what occurred after that briefing apart from the Premier’s crabbing mea culpa. Furthermore, Berejiklian has reversed her previous strategy of not discouraging the dark shadows denigrating Dr Chant.

I thought Dr Chant realised that public health is part of the mysteries of political science.  I hoped she had enough resin on her hands to contain the slippery Gladys, whose business mates face the task of whether they go to ground or continue to be a noisy claque.  Unfortunately, Dr Chant, you can only use that stratagem of threatening to resign once.

Hence, by Wednesday, Chant had all but capitulated. The SMH reported her performance at the media conference where she had the opportunity to maintain her grip on the proceedings but no! As reported in the SMH, “The Premier and I are very committed to achieving the same outcomes,” Dr Chant said. “We have a shared vision: a shared vision which is high vaccination coverage and very low levels of community transmission.”

Vision or hallucination? The circuit breaker that Dr Paul Kelly had yearned remained connected. The only glimmer was that the Premier had found out that a basic reproduction number exists.

Then Dr Chant was again absent from the Thursday briefing without any comment and the moveable feast of ostensible deputies commenced again with 681 cases today.

The Commonwealth Chief Health Officer, Dr Paul Kelly, has said there is a need for a circuit breaker. Dr Chant’s resignation, or threat thereof, could have done just that. However, I am getting around to the belief that the Kelly circuit breaker will be the resignation the NSW Premier. That is not liable to happen in the short term with the neutralisation of Dr Chant.

By the way, Oliver Cromwell lurks in the South. Not Premier Andrews but “the eliminationist”, Dr Brett Sutton, the Chief Health Officer of Victoria.

Soon the comparison may well be stark if Victoria succeeds. Then the heat will be on the soles of the Berejiklian footwear. 

The Level of Incompetence

Every person with COVID will have 10-20 contacts to trace, which means if you have 100 cases a day, you need to trace 1,000-2,000 contacts within 24-48 hours. If you don’t trace them rapidly, you will miss the window of opportunity to prevent them infecting others. If you don’t trace them all, you will face a growing backlog and lose control of the epidemic.

This comment was made last year to the National Cabinet by the then Chief Scientist, when he also said that for every outbreak, the government reaction should be to go early and go hard. It seems that the NSW Premier was not listening at the time.

No matter how good the contact tracing system is, in the end it will be overwhelmed if the case load gets out of control. It is no good boasting about the number being tested if there is not the infrastructure to process the tests and report quickly; and then having identified those who are positive, they need to be isolated and their contacts traced.

There are those who believe that you can turn contact tracing into a digital exercise.  All the attempts at using computer codes or computerisation in relation to health status has been dotted with unmitigated disasters, but while the governments are under the pernicious sway of the big consultancy firms then like the poor, they will be with us always. A prime example was the COVID-19 app, which was flogged mercilessly by the government at the onset of the pandemic. This app has been an unmitigated failure.

The introduction of QR codes has improved the situation of identifying people who had been to exposure sites, but the success of any system, as with face-to-face contact tracing depends on honesty and compliance, and here, as some American source said, Australians are compliant whereas in America it would be impossible to initiate the lockdown Australians have endured without there being open opposition, in all probability, violent. Just how compliant and honest the population is in relation to the use of QR codes in the long term remains to be seen, but the maskless opponents have crawled out of the long grass and are barking at shop assistants about their “rights” to be non-QR and maskless.

After all, the Government has the tools to punish lack of compliance, by increasing penalties, both monetary and incarceration; it should use these tools.

Nevertheless, in relation to honesty, I have always wondered whether some of the cases of breaking lockdown rules hide criminal activity; presumably drugs and other illicit stuff does not move magically and lockdowns make the transport of drugs somewhat inconvenient. I wonder whether this question has been investigated, or even asked, because if a person has something to hide, he or she is not liable to confess to a contact tracer unless the contact tracer is a priest, and even then, if you are COVID-19 positive, are you going to tell them about the contraband in your possession and your contacts aka clients?

A Family Tragedy

All families need at least one mystery. On the night of 13 December 1929, a tragedy occurred in our family. Rupert Clarke was my Aunt Grace’s husband. He was also Ararat’s Shire Secretary. Ararat has always been a government town, since being a railway hub there were many workers located there.  On the hill surrounded by high bluestone walls was the prison, which held the most dangerous criminals – the mad and the bad – men who had killed and having escaped hanging were there at the Governor’s pleasure because they had been adjudged insane.

My aunt had gone to her sister who lived in the nearby town of Stawell for Christmas. Rupert was to follow, but he had work to do before he could go up to Stawell. Since he had been left to his own devices and presumably wanting to avoid the domestic chores, he decided to move into the Turf Hotel.

Turf Hotel, Ararat

The Turf Hotel no longer exists but it was then a three-storied hotel. Whereas the second floor had direct access to the balcony with its cast iron lacework, the next floor was aligned to the roof of the balcony, and the windows opened onto this roof; it was a somewhat curious construction.

As described in the local newspaper, Rupert had spent the evening yarning with the Assistant Shire Secretary and was said to have retired at midnight, stating that he wanted to study the municipal books. Did he find something puzzling – a little untoward? Who would know, because next morning he was found on the street below, in his pyjamas, in a pool of blood. It was speculated that he had sleepwalked – climbed out of bed and through the open window, wandered across to the edge of the balcony roof, and then plunged onto the street 50 feet (15.2metres) below. Apparently it was known that he walked in his sleep.

He was still alive, although he had compound fractures of both arms and one leg. He was unconscious and was described with “serious injuries to the head”. He was seen by the local doctors, obviously there was nothing much they could do, and he died at 11.00 am without regaining consciousness. He was 30 years old.

It was one of those things I heard about, but nobody ever talked about it. My aunt, with whom I had a good relationship, never talked about it. She died in 1975, and I found the newspaper cutting relating to her husband’s death sometime after.

Sleepwalking is often linked with stories of horror and there is no more famous scene than that where a highly agitated Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking and trying to wash her hands of the bloodbath in which she has been a willing participant, while her doctor stands on the side making commentary without interfering.

I have been reassured without delving back 90 years that Rupert’s death was an accident. No defenestration here. But did he find anything untoward in the municipal books? Maybe his yarning with his assistant involved consumption of a drink or two. I do not know and nobody has volunteered whether there were underlying genetic factors. Sleepwalking runs in families, and children are more likely to sleepwalk, and then grow out of it.

So, there it is.  Death by misadventure, but for those with a suspicious mind, the basis of a good story.

As for Aunt Grace. She never enjoyed Christmas after that. She never remarried.

The Meeting at Telgte

Many years ago, I read the famous history of the Thirty Years’ War by Cicely Wedgewood which was published in 1938, the work of a young historian. Cicely Wedgewood, always known as C.V., was a member of the family which has so much penetrated our lives with their china, apart from anything else. It was a long time ago when I read it and I marvelled at this most significant piece of European history happening at the same time as the rise and fall of the Stuart kings and the accession of Oliver Cromwell. We were taught about this period in England but nothing about this immensely destructive conflict in Europe happening at the same time.  Moreover, there was this magnificent historical source written by a very young Wedgewood.

There was a link with the English Monarchy as James I’s daughter, Elisabeth, was the wife of Frederick V, ruler of the Palatinate and briefly the King of Bohemia, after the defenestration of two of the ruling Roman Catholic aristocrat Regents from the windows of Prague Castle by Protestant allies of Frederick, who then ascended the throne – for a year (a cardinal rule in Prague is – don’t go near a window – it has happened before and since).

The Roman Catholic aristocrats, although falling 70 feet, survived because they all fell into a dung heap. Nevertheless, they disturbed the heap enough for some of it to hit the fan, in a manner of speaking, to fuel the beginning of the destructive sectarian Thirty Years’ War.

Günter Grass wrote his historical allegorical novella concerning a meeting of poets in Telgte, a city near the Dutch border, at the Bridge Inn there. A group from across the German states had been called together to exchange their poetic gems and provide, by the force of their deliberation, significant moral persuasion to end the War.

This gathering, although convened by a major historical figure in the Prussian poet and hymn writer Simon Dach, was mythical; even though it did not happen as written it still bore a certain sense of authenticity.  The attendees were real persons, but unless versed in the German language writers of the 16-17th century, the names just become a brain-numbing cascade, and thus for the inexperienced reader as myself, I need to read the novella again. I say German language, because the disparity within the German nation indicates the various linguistic preferences of the participants in the convocation.

This convocation, in a world where it was perilous to move about, was held under the protection of a Hessian soldier poet, Christoffel Gelnhausen and his band of Swedish musketeers and cavalry.

The innkeeper, Libuschka, had participated in a number of military incursions herself. She had been on “harum-scarum” campaigns, participated as a soldier in the distribution of loot.  She captivated her literary audience by detailing her exploits when she had been in her twenties, “in breeches and on horseback” she had served in the Battle of Lutter and taken a Danish captain prisoner. This Battle 20 years before had been a spectacular defeat of the Protestants under Christian IV, the Danish king. She is the only woman whose personality is drawn out in the novella. There is the normal background of young women who could have walked out of Moll Flanders, free love being the escape amid the squalor of war.

The book weaves a background of violence, ever-present fear of atrocity, and yet central Europe had been at war for nearly 30 years, the countryside had been laid waste, food was in short supply. The description of the feast in the book where, at a time of famine, the assembled company rationalised their gourmandising by not asking too deeply how the soldiers had obtained the ingredients.

The key historical association was that Telgte was close to Münster, where ultimately the Treaty of Westphalia, which meant the end of the War, was concluded. The literary figures had no effect on the Treaty deliberations, as they were brutally informed.

In the end, protection of the soldiers was removed and the inn burnt down, but those participants, although vulnerable, all returned to their disparate homes safely.  I suppose that was the closest one could get to a happy ending.

The Treaty of Westphalia

The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 gave the Swiss independence from Austria and the Netherlands independence from Spain. The German principalities secured their autonomy. Sweden gained territory and cash, Brandenburg and Bavaria made gains; France acquired most of Alsace-Lorraine. The prospect of a Roman Catholic reconquest of Europe vanished forever. Protestantism was in the world to stay.

The above is a concise summary. Grass wrote this novella post-WW2. Germany had suffered a cataclysmic defeat and been divided into four zones by the foreign victors. This was not a Treaty, but an unconditional surrender. Central Europe, as it was three centuries before, had been laid waste in the prosecution of territorial aims and ideological pursuits.

How ironic to read such a book at the time when the President of the United States  has called a halt on a pointless war, recognising there is no gain in prosecuting it further. Yet the political braying within his country for what he has done – for what?  Only to save military face and spend billions more in dollars?  The guilt-ridden neocon shadows who have led us into this War of the Willing are now very much more the older but, as is in evidence, not wiser men unfortunately – or dead themselves.

Just a Normal day with the Lobbyists

Limitations of Authorized Use 

Sotrovimab is not authorized for use in patients: 

  • who are hospitalized due to COVID-19, OR 
  • who require oxygen therapy due to COVID-19, OR
  • who require an increase in baseline oxygen flow rate due to COVID-19 (in those on chronic oxygen therapy due to underlying non-COVID-19 related comorbidity). 

Benefit of treatment with sotrovimab has not been observed in patients hospitalized due to COVID‑19. SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibodies may be associated with worse clinical outcomes when administered to hospitalized patients with COVID‑19 requiring high flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation – GSK/Vir Technology release for media and investors 26 May 2021

With all the concentration on vaccination to counter COVID-19, the purchase of 7,700 doses of sotrovimab, described as a “novel monoclonal antibody treatment”, occurred in early August. The drug’s efficacy has yet to be peer reviewed. The Government was coy about the cost. However, from information available it costs about USD2,200 a dose and is given intravenously as an 8ml bolus. This drug was purchased while it still had only an Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) from the FDA in America.

Much of the drug company information is parroted back by one “Greg Hunt, Liberal Party of Australia Somerville Australia”. This authorisation is jammed in the middle of a Ministerial media release by this resident of Somerville in Victoria. There is reference to the support it is receiving from one of the  expert committees.

The day after the Hunt release, nevertheless, Australia’s top COVID-19 clinical advisory group was reported  (sic):

“There is not yet enough high-quality evidence to support use of a new monoclonal antibody treatment, of which the federal government recently bought more than 7700 doses.Based on the fact it was an interim analysis of a single study, with relatively low numbers, the panel decided to give an only-in-research recommendation, pending the availability of more data,” he said. “We don’t base our recommendations on press releases. Other countries have also purchased Sotrovimab. The government is trying to get ahead of the curve and purchasing a drug, pending review by the TGA, is reasonable.”

This is a two-bob-each-way answer, especially given the “killer” information in last line of the pharmaceutical company’s release is “between 30 June and 13 July, the drug was administered to 6,175 patients with mild and moderate disease, and within 14 days 92% of recipients had fully recovered with a 99% ICU prevention rate”.

With a Government grasping at straws, why have we not heard  much about this wonder drug, especially given the haste in purchase?  Given the Government propensity to magnify every minute scrap of positive information, here the Federal Government has been strangely muted.

Far be it from me to suggest that a well-placed lobbyist got in the ear of the Boy from Somerville and cleaned up – not the huge bucks of some of the expenditure – on the Treasury line item labelled “Rorts”.

Where now are the vials of Sotrovimab? Into which veins has this drug gone? If any? More information please, before it is an invitation for an avalanche of unproven drugs with unpronounceable names dumped on our “fatal” shores, courtesy of a very persuasive lobbyist.

Or emerging into a more positive light, just how is the administration of this life-saving drug progressing?

The cost of this exercise – about $20m?  Just petty cash, so inured Australia has become that it has not been questioned.

Mouse Whisper

I am only a mouse but I can’t keep out these whispering echoes.  The sounds are persistent. Perhaps a bent banana may help – certainly the glint of gold does not.

 Japanese government auditors have estimated the true costs are likely at least to be $25 billion, which includes projects related to the Games.

You actually have very limited possibilities of stripping down cost because the majority of the business decisions are made by the IOC and international athletics organizations.

Even under the best circumstances, putting on the Olympics is quite a burden financially … covid-19 definitely hasn’t made it easier for Tokyo.”

You have been warned, my fellow mice gnawing on the sugar cane ambrosia, oblivious of the world tomorrow.

These recent Games are sure to put an unprecedented burden on the host city of Tokyo and the Japanese government, which is facing a ballooning national debt that is worsening because of the pandemic.

Remember all that is yellow is not gold. Bananas eventually lose their yellow glow, blacken, then rot.

Modest Expectations – Clive Lloyd

In this lockdown, gazing up through the grate of our oubliette at the caerulean blue sky above, I thought about the place in Australia where I’d rather be more than anywhere else. After all, we love the West Coast of Tasmania and I love driving out from Broken Hill at sunset and seeing the Mundi Mundi Plains spread out below me; the small dust speck of a car streaking across the plain lives in my memory.

I could ramble on and on – Jacob’s ladder in the Indian Ocean at Broome; the total eclipse of the sun at Ceduna and even my first adventure in the bush when I, still in kindergarten, climbed up Little Joe – and so on – wallowing in the reminiscences of being privileged, able to travel around Australia.

No, the place that I would rather be is sitting at the edge of the river where the Darling River empties into the Murray River, near Wentworth. It is the epitome of serenity, where all you have to do is just watch as these two major arteries which maintain life in the Southern Part of the Continent sustain life, come together.

It is not as though being there you are far from civilisation. If you you’re your gaze away from the rivers you can see through the river red gum foliage a collection of nondescript houses, a recreation reserve and even paved streets. The hospital at Wentworth, essentially a nursing home of 22 beds when I was last there, lies on a spit of land near the junction of the rivers – unfortunately the rooms at the hospital do not have a river view. There is also the disfigurement of a viewing tower.  Fortunately, that and the buildings do not contaminate my view of the river.

What is beautiful is being able to shut all that out at the water’s edge. Just watching the rivers move; one having flowed from the Snowy Mountains, the other from Queensland, picking up many a tributary along the way – as a giant imperial force, until it finds that the real emperor with its own of tributaries from NSW and Victoria justly receives its homage as the Darling salutes her, not as a rushing torrent but as a genial meeting of the waters. Yet there is always the vulnerability of the Darling river being bled until in parts it is reduced to pools of water.

I have seen where other giant rivers come together, such as the Missouri and the Mississippi at St Louis and the Rio Negro entering the Amazon at Manaus. The first conjunction is not spectacular – just one meandering around low marsh land as though accidently meeting. The other is more spectacular, bringing its distinctive colour, seemingly black at a distance but in reality umber, to be dissipated by its mighty tawny relative. “Mighty” is the word attached to big rivers. I had a colleague who always prefaced Murray with “mighty”.

River red gum

Shaded by the river red gums that provide the arcade through which one moves towards the other there is a certain tranquillity, which even the sulphur crested and the black cockatoos screeching above, cannot disturb. Their noise enables me to block out the sounds of the dusty dirty city to coin a phase. Their racket is counterpointed by the black swans noiselessly passing by and the wild ducks which move with the merest splash.

Near the open space there is patch of long reed and sedge, which has to be negotiated if you want to wander down the river to get a better vantage point. I have always watched for snakes because water and tiger snakes go together in Australia. Fortunately, there is a narrow path cut through the reeds, but unfortunately I cannot pivot this story. I have never seen a tiger snake there.

I found a relevant scrap of paper to complement the above reminiscence. In the past, I would jot things down, but did not have the time to do anything more with them then. However, I tend to find them tucked away. This is the story of my life. I once wrote a series of short stories, which I labelled Outlines in numerical order. I remember giving them to the late Brian Johns and he gave them to someone to assess. The reviewer came back and said they sure were outlines – implying how little content there was. I thought that somewhat cruel, but I shrugged; I had other outlines that needed attention – and these short stories ended up in my chaotic filing system.

I have been thinking about that criticism as I‘ve being doing an archaeological dig through my existence. Maybe that has been the description of who I am – an outline that has drifted along through a series of those undulating hills – perhaps towards that “green hill far away”. Anyway, enough of that!

This scrap of paper which was obviously written for some long-forgotten speech as it floridly commenced: “I was festooned with gown and caduceus” as the rather awkward opening gambit.

When I worked onwards through my notes, it described a route I travelled very rarely, between Broken Hill and Mildura. Mostly I drove the Silver City Highway, which was a sealed road. That was never a guarantee against the odd kangaroo, so I tried to avoid driving at dusk.  But the early morning was also a dangerous time. I was somewhat shocked to see this grey furry blur disappearing under the left headlight and how I missed it, God only knows – as well does the kangaroo.

The other route from Broken Hill to Mildura is partially sealed. Driving to Menindee, the road is paved. Menindee is a strongly aboriginal township, but without the notoriety of Wilcannia.

When I would reach Menindee, I usually sat down for a beer in the internal courtyard of the hotel. Here was where Burke and Wills stayed, but since that time the pub has burnt down, losing that authenticity, and that single hibiscus which grew in the courtyard.

Burke and Wills campsite

When I was there then, there was water in the Menindee Lakes because rainfall had been moderate in the early 1990s. I since have seen the lakes waterless. I found it distressing because dry Menindee Lakes signal a distressed river. Near the four Menindee Lakes, there is a sign that says Burke and Wills camped there; well, they had taken 18 men with them, and those that had not resigned stayed by the Lakes.  Burke and Wills were ensconced in the inn. The journey from Melbourne had taken two months to arrive there with their wagons, horses and 22 camels. As I sat in the courtyard drinking a beer and looking abstractedly at the walls, I wrote down “…we all have magnificent obsessions, for in the end we are a long time dead”.

In the annals of Australian exploration the Burke and Wills expedition was a gigantic “cock-up”, but as with the Gallipoli disaster, it is a part of the national psyche to not only remember but also venerate these occasions.

From Menindee to travel south, I drove on to Pooncarie, also on the Darling River. The road between the two townships was just bulldust then. Not only does an oncoming vehicle create a sandstorm, but what may appear to be a smooth sandy roadway can be a cover for large craters. A nice little trap for those who want to “fang” along. If you want to deviate away from the delights of Pooncarie, population 48, you can drive towards Mungo National Park, named after Mungo MacCallum whose forefathers inhabited the region before they anglicised their name to Wentworth, that nearby town standing on traditional land.

Va bene, I have been known to pull the end of a leg. But MacCallum inherited certain of the Wentworth traits.

Anyway, apart from being back on the Darling River, Pooncarie has a pub, a community health centre and an airstrip – but not much more. The fact that the Pooncarie Cup in October is the highlight says a great deal about these tiny settlements. This is not a value judgement, just an observation. If it is not an annual race meeting, it is a rodeo. The next step up are the annual shows or field days – I don’t quite know where to rank the B&S Balls.

Wentworth and Mildura are not that distant from one another – the orange groves surrounded by arid land soon appear. After a drive through the waterless land, citrus groves are civilisation. They have proliferated all along the road. This is the Sunraysia District.

The road is sealed and it has been the work of the then local member of Parliament who, as he always did when he was determined, had the road made some years before, after a time when the township was cut off by floods and a pregnant woman died because she could not be evacuated in time.

The medical service at Wentworth was appalling at the time I was there, but that was the problem with rural medicine. Out there were a number of weird doctors, who survived because they were often in single person practices and nobody was watching them.  Wentworth was one of these captured townships. As I found out, it was almost impossible to get dysfunctional doctors deregistered then.  Wentworth residents had some solace of knowing that Mildura was only 30 minutes away. However, as was demonstrated, Pooncarie was a township too far. Needless to say, its population did not justify a doctor.

Confluence of Darling and Murray Rivers

Then again, I am sitting here in my favourite place where the rivers run together and as I watch silently, I recall what Yeats once wrote:

“…Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.”

Snakes alive

I have always been wary of snakes. As I wrote above, I always look where I am putting my feet. The reason is that when I was about 14 years old, I went to retrieve a football which I had kicked over the fence into the long grass. I was wearing thick socks and football boots. I forget why I was kitted up – but fortunately I was, as it turned out.

Eastern brown

It all happened in such a flash. I was about to pick up my football when I felt as though I stood on a pipe, there was this sting in my leg and a saw a greenish brown body of what I presumed to be a snake slithering away.

When I went back over the fence to home, I pulled my sock off revealing two distinct puncture marks in my calf. The ambulance was called; I don’t remember much after that – until the ambulance arrived. I know my father, who was a doctor was not there. Somebody in the house may have tried to tourniquet my leg. There was nobody there to try do anything much with the puncture marks apart from washing it.

As I remember it, nothing much happened. The ambulance drivers arrived with polyvalent antivenene. First, they had to give me a small amount to test my reaction. I had a major local reaction. They did not give me the full dose.  While this was going on, minutes were ticking over and I remained symptomless.

I had been bitten, that was clear. Why had nothing occurred? The snake was later to be identified when a few weeks later, workers clearing the site for the construction of a telephone exchange killed an eastern brown snake.  That would fit the fleeting picture I had.

Ever since I have speculated while I had no systemic signs. Perhaps the football sock absorbed the venom; or as does happen, the first strike often does not contain any venom. The eastern brown snake is very venomous, and even though its fangs are short, they were still able to imprint my leg with the tell-tale puncture marks.

Anyway, that is my snake story. Anticlimactic but true. Come on, do you know anybody who was bitten by a snake?

Not a household name

Allyson Felix won her 11th career Olympic medal Saturday, combining with her American teammates to finish the 4×400-meter relay in 3 minutes, 16.85 seconds for a runaway victory.

The team of Felix, Sydney McLaughlin, Dalilah Muhammad and Athing Mu was never in jeopardy in this one. Poland finished second, 3.68 seconds behind, and Jamaica finished third.

Felix, who became the most-decorated woman in Olympic track history when she won bronze in the 400 the night before, now passes Carl Lewis with the most track medals of any US athlete. Of the 11 medals, seven are gold.

No doubt an amazing feat, but she is hardly a household name in Australia. Similarly in USA, who had heard of Emma McKeon, certainly not the NYT.

The Olympic Games has been used by the venal to justify their existence by these fleeting illusions. Unfortunately, it is a drug for politicians to cloak their venality in collaboration with the dark forces of the IOC.

Norman, Smith, Carlos

Yet the Olympic Games has spawned for each nation a pantheon. Even re-telling the story behind the famous photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their arms in the Black Panther salute in the 200 metres victory ceremony, Americans fail to recognise the role of the whitefella on the podium with the human rights badge. He was Peter Norman, and his intrinsic solidarity with the two others was victimised by a spiteful hierarchy which foreshortened his career. When Norman died in 2006, both Smith and Carlos were pallbearers at his funeral. Needless to say, these three men have been belatedly recognised for what they did. However, the essential humanity of this trio have been brushed away by the Olympic seigneurs with their “joy-boy” vassals that still roam the upper feudal reaches of the “sporting family”.

Perhaps the man most associated with the Olympic ideals was Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. The story is well known of his friendship with the German athlete Luz Long, who assisted Owens in his long jump style. Long’s name dissolved into time as he had been killed in World War 11 in Italy. His legacy, a letter to Owens re-affirming his friendship, was written just before his death on the battlefield.

However, there is a lesser-known story about Owens in Berlin where he was befriended by one of the Finnish sprinters, Toivo Sariola. When Owens said he felt unsafe in the streets, Toivo said Owens should join his group and thus the Finns would protect him in the city. Owens greatly appreciated Toivo’s gesture. After the USA’s victory in the Men’s 4x100m relay final, Jesse donated the USA team’s baton to Toivo and wrote on it “With friendship to Toivo Sariola”.

Paavo Nurmi

From 1912 to 1928, Finland was never lower than fourth in the medal count and, in 1924, finished second with 14 gold medals. This was the time of the distance runner Paavo Nurmi, who was always mentioned in the same tone of reverence as Owen. At the 1924 Paris Games, Nurmi made history by becoming the first athlete ever to win five gold medals at a single Olympic Games. Over four days, Nurmi won the 1,500 metres, the 5,000 metres, the 3,000 metres team event and the two cross-country events. He was prevented from competing in the 10,000 metres because officials thought it would be too much. Nurmi broke the record for the 10,000 metres very soon after, a record which stood for 13 years.

But how times change. In 1924, Australia sent 37 athletes; the Finns 121. In Tokyo 2020, Australia sent 472 and the Fins 45.

At the 2020 Olympic games Finland won two bronze medals. Since 2000, Finland has only won one gold medal – in shooting.

Helsinki was due to hold the Olympic Games in 1940 and, although the Finns had built some of the venues, it was a difficult proposition to hold the Games and at the same time battle what we would term today as “the Russian variant”, while the whole of Europe was succumbing to a much more virulent “Hitler variant”. Compare that with Tokyo today, and if the world had been able to visually enhance the virus particles so it could be visible, I doubt if Tokyo would have gone ahead. After all, Spanish flu did not disrupt the Olympic Games cycle in the 1920s for perhaps the same reason. It was unseen.

One the major scandals to have coloured the modern Finn’s view of sporting success has been in 2001 the Finn Nordic skiing team being caught systematically doping. Six top Finnish skiers were caught and disqualified.  They were using a plasma expander to mask erythropoietin usage, for which there was no reliable test at the time. The scandal was covered in the national press as a matter of public shame, and there was a sense of collective embarrassment in the country.

As one commentator said: “For the Finns, the worst thing about the doping scandal was not, however, the scandal itself. The worst thing was that, along with the facade of honesty in sports in general, the myth of the honest, hardworking Finn came crashing down.”

Yet before there had been the Finnish runner, Lasse Viren, who dominated distance running in the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games. He claimed reindeer milk and running long distances in the snow and at altitude was his secret. He never admitted to blood doping, which was then not illegal (until 1986). One reflection:

Scandinavia had helped pioneer the practice for winter sports, particularly cross-country skiing. It was very much in vogue in Finland at the time of Viren’s arrival on the world stage, and that he only seemed to peak at the major competitions added fuel to the speculation that blood doping had to be part of his preparation.

Even though it was legal at the time, to some people it offered a clear and unfair advantage, while others reckoned it was merely a more scientific form of say altitude training, and simply used the body’s own resources in a more productive manner.

Salla, Finland

The Finns are intense people with a dry sense of humour. One of the bids for the 2032 Summer Games was from Salla in the very north of Finland, one of the coldest places there.  The bid for 2032, was based on  the climate with global warming being just right for Salla  holding the Summer Games. One Finnish word for this parodic exercise is ironinen.

Helsinki did eventually hold the Olympics Games in 1952, using those facilities which had been built pre-war. Even now they are impressive. One source has stated there is no way of telling even the approximate cost of these ventures.   One figure was an “on books” cost of 1,580 million finnmarks and the Committee reported a 49 million mark loss.

It is significant that for Tokyo, the Finns sent their Minister for Science and Culture, Antti Kurvinen, who was there to discuss the themes of education and competence, especially from the perspective of the digital transformation, research and innovation.  Not sport. He is a significant figure in the Finland Government, being also head of the Liberal Party Parliamentary Group. The Finnish words for “political junket” are “poliittista roskaa” (literally political rubbish). One would be forgiven for thinking that is the overall Finn view of the Olympic Games.

Over Coates

There is one fact that has got lost in the ebullience of Brisbane overcoming the sturdy opposition of Salla, that Finnish megapolis within the Arctic circle of 50 people.  There has been no announcement for the 2030 Winter Olympics. Yet.  The Washington Post has wryly commented that: “you’ll notice an unprecedented hole, the 2030 Winter Games, still looking for a home. There’s a reason for that. The world has caught onto the ruse and the Olympics need to respond by acknowledging their process is outdated and unnecessary.” To use that new collective noun, it may well be that there is an inadequacy of bidders, or perhaps serious bidders.

Curling, 2030

But wait! What about Canberra? What a great idea!  Could use that Parliament House foyer for curling. Come on, Scotty what about it? Worth a few media releases. Send the hares running up the ski runs at Perisher. But be prepared for those “over coates” to guard against that pending reign.

Mouse Whisper

For Finns, silence is golden; talking is silver.

This was demonstrated to me when I met my cousin Hiiri dragging a large vial of vodka across the sauna floor.

He motioned to me to open the vial, and I poured each of us a thimble. Before each thimble in honour of his presence, I would cry “Skål”.  Hiiri remained mute again. I raised the thimble and again cried out “Skål”. Hiiri said nothing.  Again… and again. Skål. Skål.

Even though he said nothing, I could see Hiiri was getting irritable.

Then suddenly Hiiri burst out: “The trouble with you Australian mice, you talk too much.”

That was ten words.

Modest Expectations – Geometric Progression

“I rarely post on Facebook, but I feel compelled to comment on the large number of unvaccinated people there are. Many think that is awful. But the more I have thought about it, the more I conclude it may be the best thing that has happened to the human race in several centuries.

Those who choose not to vaccinate are, and will continue to be, the vast majority of those who contract COVID-19, as well as the majority of those who die. While I feel sorry for the friends and families of those people, in the long term that may be the best thing that has happened to the human race in a long time.

By weeding out the dumbest of our people, the average intelligence of our race will clearly improve!! So look on the bright side—the human race will be better off in the long term with the dumbest of our people being the largest bloc of deaths!!!“

So wrote my American mate.

It demonstrates that the ferocity, which is consuming American society, being played out between those in favour of vaccination and the antivaxxers. Thinking about this invective I am reminded that my forebears survived the Black Death. But so did those of everyone who is living at present, even the progenitors of the anti-vaxxers. On this basis, some of these survivors proliferated, so stupidity is never totally extinguished.

Do I disapprove of anything sent above? Well, I do think the multiple exclamation marks are a bit over the top.

Seriously, despite the robustness of the comments, I genuinely worry about any suggestion of eugenics, for whatever reason, even in the case of America given the action of the disgusting Trump in dumbing down the community over the past four years and dismissing the seriousness of this pandemic.

Tales from the South Seas

South Sea Islanders have always seemed to me to get the rough end of the pineapple, as it were.  This mob is largely confined to the sugar growing areas of Queensland. Mostly, they have been ignored, despite the appalling way their ancestors were treated. Their forefathers were the victims of blackbirding, the trade in men mostly, from modern day Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, who were kidnapped, transported to Queensland and northern NSW, where they cut sugar cane.

South Sea Islander flag

Most were repatriated in the early years of our Federation, but a number remained – the actual figure being a subject of conjecture. From a peak of 60,000, the estimate now is about 5,000 although how rubbery that figure is, who knows.

When South Sea Islander leaders, Faith Bandler and Dr Evelyn Scott, died, politicians, the media and the wider community labelled both as Indigenous activists and gave no recognition to their South Sea Islander heritage.

Later, on other hand, when Dr Bonita Mabo died, she was widely recognised as a leading Australian South Sea Islander activist, also involved in Indigenous activism.

Therefore, the recent very public apology by the Mayor of Bundaberg, Jack Dempsey, to the South Sea Islanders reinforced the success of the Islanders over the last generation or two in educating their fellow Australians about their existence.

Australia flies both the Aboriginal and Torres Islander flags widely, but who recognises the South Sea islander flag? The argument may be that they are an insignificant number, but then if you apply that rule, the Aboriginal population and even more so the Torres Strait Islanders would be similarly considered given their respectively small percentages of the whole population.

The root problem goes back to the 1975 report of Australian Law Reform Commission where South Sea Islanders’ claims for recognition were dismissed contemptuously.

I am sure that Rugby League fans would dispute this, given that one of the greatest Rugby League players ever was Mal Meninga, himself of South Sea Islander heritage. He is not the only one.

In my 2017 book I wrote about the experiences of a young Philip Morey, when he had worked on the then New Hebrides island of Erromanga between 1932 and 1934. Here he had encountered a man who had been taken to Queensland as a youth who, after 40 years, returned to his village on Erromanga. The exchange between the young Australian and the old native needs no further commentary. It is nevertheless instructive. The extract starts with Morey asking a question while the old man was harvesting his plot of sweet potato.

The Sheep of Erromanga – Messages from the Martyrs Isle, Jack Best

“What was life here like when you were a small boy?” 

The dreaminess reappeared in the old man’s cadence. “Son, that was a long, long time ago.” The dreaminess vanished as quickly as it had come and edginess came into his voice. “I was less than twenty years old when the boat took me to Queensland. It was not even Australia then — just a group of colonies where you white men wanted me to make you some money. And I did. You know, I cut cedar and kauri for a shilling a hundred foot. I even worked on cattle stations.”

The old man drew a circle in the dirt.

“The pay wasn’t much, but I made enough money to rent fifteen acres and a farm in Northern New South Wales — on the Clarence. Married a white woman.” He stopped.

Philip thought he expected a question about mixed marriage, but miscegenation did not trouble Philip. He had read too much French literature to share the English fear of mixing skin colours. The French were very much more tolerant. He wondered whether there was a Creole culture in this strangely governed group of islands. 

Philip was quiet as he pondered this old fellow who had lived forty years among white people and who, after twenty years back on the island of his birth, could still speak fluent English. He had lived and worked under white men’s rule in a white man’s house with a white woman as his wife. He had seen and enjoyed the comforts and pains of civilization. Now he was living in a dirty and dilapidated old native hut wearing a dented old hat and a dirty threadbare loincloth.

He thought, so much for forty years in Australia!

The old man turned as if he felt Philip’s final thought as a laceration. 

“Son, civilization is not only in the eye of the white man.” His clouded eyes belied the directness, the clarity of the comment.

“You know what made me come home?” The old man continued without waiting for any acknowledgement. “I had learned enough about the way you white men handle your riches — you are always selling that lie to others to make even more for yourselves. I found out what civilization was all about. I lived as a white man — I saved and then I gambled money that I had earned on making money that would come without me earning it. What do you call it? Dividends? Interest? It has taken a long time for me to forget the words of deceit.” 

Philip thought that the way he said “deceit”, with his teeth clenched, was an expression of repugnance at a life he had once tried to embrace. 

“I lost my money,” the old man continued. “Any money I had got over that first twenty years went in the 1891 bank crash. Lost my farm, lost my living — lost my wife. Went back to the cane fields. But that life is for a young man, and my back started to give out. In the end, in my last ten years in your newly created country, I made enough to live on, but when I came home I left every penny in there — in your Australia.

What this man did not say, because there is no record of him having any children, was when the descendent of the first wave of South Sea islanders was repatriated, many of them were the product of mixed marriages, particularly with Aboriginal women. They suffered discrimination from the locals, who were of Melanesian stock. Strange world. Nevertheless, when I visited the Torres Strait, the comment was made that Torres Strait Islanders discriminated against those who lived on Horn Island, who were predominantly Aboriginal.

During World War 11 for instance, as an example of interracial discrimination, it was reported that while only earning one-third pay compared to whites, Torres Strait Islanders were compensated at a higher rate than Aboriginal soldiers. The Australian army viewed Torres Strait soldiers equal in combat with white soldiers, while they considered Aboriginal soldiers to be liabilities.

The experience the Erromanga man had in Australia from his first-hand account does not mention any discrimination – only that he lost all his money and his wife, and yet had returned home, content with obvious wisdom gained.

Captain Robert Towns

Nevertheless, even today, one matter rankles with me. At a time when the world is dishonouring slave traders, there is no move to change the name of Townsville away from one of the most notorious slave traders of the South Pacific, Robert Towns. He was British born and now is buried on Castle Hill. There has been some protest, but that has been ignored. Just imagine if Towns had been associated with an Aboriginal massacre.

I suppose it is a part of the Australian diaspora that we have a large regional city named for a mass murderer.

On what was the Vanuatu National Day, the last word should go Waskam Davis, whose forebears came from Tanna, one of the southern islands of Vanuatu. In response to the apology from the Bundaberg Mayor, she said: “We’ve grown up watching this struggle for recognition, and also working alongside our Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander families for greater recognition, greater inclusion, better outcomes for our collective communities”. 

Well, they could start by renaming Townsville. After all, we were once New Holland.

God, I am sick of these people

One source has suggested that vaccine supply logistics has been a form of a Ponzi scheme, although in this case there was a lot of smoke and mirrors about non-existent stores of vaccines or those sitting, waiting to be validated, coupled with much encouragement to “book a vaccination”. 

Such a comment displays a dangerous lack of confidence in Government.

Soldiers are joining police on the streets to ensure compliance, which has been sadly lacking in those suburbs where there has been a high immigrant population.  Those who have used their migrant groups to establish their petty satraps in local government, these so-called community leaders, have failed to accept the responsibility of both reassuring the population and reinforcing the compliance message. These community leaders should be accompanying the police and the soldiers in walking the streets, instead of braying from the sidelines.  Instead of explaining that Australia is at war with a Virus, which has killed or maimed millions of people across the World, and that this involves everyone making hard decisions about their lives in the short term, these so-called community leaders are selling this confected tripe that these people have fled from war torn countries and these immigrants will be totally blown out of their minds if they see soldiers on their streets.

Why are they doing this? Why are they sabotaging the State Government?

There are a number of reasons. I would hate to say that it is easy to whinge and in effect do bugger all. After all, do people go into local government primarily to help others?

There is a lack of leadership. The face of a Prime Minister who acts like a Cheshire cat with that very distinctive smirk, but whose default button is the media release and blame shifting.

Then there is the Premier, who is completely hapless, talks too much, has had a pet albatross called Darryl still bobbing around in this ocean of discontent, and an expertise in document shredding to list some of her achievements.  Perhaps I have missed something but there is nothing Churchillian in her desperation.  Her default button is “on the best medical advice”.

Therefore, the blame is shifted onto Kerry Chant who has shown, as I have said previously, remarkable resilience. However, everybody has his or her breaking point, especially if the contact tracing system, however well organised, is being overwhelmed.

It should be recognised that one positive outcome in NSW has been the QR code, originally devised in Japan in 1994, which was introduced after a month-long trial in Dubbo last year.

All Ministers of Health should be ensuring that the rest of the health system is working, and there are worrying signs. The problem is that all health bureaucracies are steeped in people who may know the regulations, but as I have written before, “health” is a separate language. In time, bureaucrats learn to speak “pidgin” health. While the NSW Health Minister is suitably authoritarian, he gives the impression he is not across his portfolio despite being the Minister for four years.

The key quality of a strong health minister is being able to speak fluent Health, as this is the major defence against the central agencies always wanting to trim the health budget. The problem for health ministers is that on most occasions the central agencies “plant” their own bureaucrat in the health portfolio to do their bidding. As an example, you don’t have to look past Jane Halton when she was Secretary of the Commonwealth Health Department.

As for the current Federal Minister of Health, he has presided over a failed app, a failed social marketing advertising strategy and a collection of mates getting jobs in relation to the failed logistics of distribution of the vaccine. The result is that there has been a series of poor decisions in choosing vaccines, a disjointed rollout of vaccines and, in regard the aged care portfolio, just a schemozzle when, with little additional effort, the workforce could have been vaccinated at the time of the vaccination of the residents. It does not help when the general in charge of the vaccine distribution looks as if he is about to cry at any moment.

There are so many opinions flying about that it is time to call a halt. Instead of this so-called national cabinet as seeming to be an exercise in shoring up fiefdoms and ensuring every political leader has their own pet scapegoat, it is time for political games to stop for the good of Australia.

As an example of this is the numbers flying about from the modellers about the percentage of those vaccinated which will enable Australia to move through the putative phases. The Doherty mob were asked by Government to provide an indicative figure to minimise lockdown. Fair enough – clear direction. But it seemed to let loose a storm of academic babble.  It is time for the academics to stop thinking this pandemic is a research conference.  The problem in a world of imperfect information is to know what to believe, leaving a confused community which eventually stops listening.

The country needs now:

  • A national contact tracing system. Here I agree with Stephen Duckett’s opinion piece in the SMH. Those of both NSW and Victoria have been tested. The initially woeful Victorian system was rectified; the NSW system has been resilient. If we had a national system, then it would signal that the Federation lives. Those who are starting to question the NSW system must recognise that if enough stress is put on a system, it will break. It needs continual engineering not scapegoating.
  • Custom made quarantine facilities, along the lines of Howard Springs, where there have been no recorded breaches, are essential. Its success was evident from the very start with the repatriation from Wuhan. Of course, whenever the profit motives intrude, as they did with the hotel quarantine, disaster follows, and thus the decision to look after one sector may end with the whole business sector compromised. The absurdity of continuing to talk about building them while doing virtually nothing is breathtaking. Endless useless contracts have been given to consultants over the past year; if the private sector as epitomised by the Wagner Brothers had been contracted to construct quarantine facilities they would have been in operation months ago.
  • The logistics of timely supply of testing materials and vaccines needs to be properly organised so it isn’t used as a conduit to just give taxpayers’ money to mates. Maybe somebody should take a lesson from Essington Lewis’ playbook from World War 11. If we had these turkeys in charge then, each State would have raised its own militia and Tasmanians would be making sake instead of gin.
  • The evidence of the best venue/s in which to distribute the vaccine and the need to have a national disaster plan using the evidence gained from this pandemic, particularly in the use of masks and hand sanitiser.
  • The QR code system, which has been an example of success, should be made uniform and compulsory across Australia. The communication strategy, the failure to acknowledge the app dud, and instead of subjecting the whole community communication strategy to public scrutiny, it will be buried from scrutiny to the overall national detriment. There have been some spectacular successes in social marketing campaigns in the past. Remember the success of the NSW anti-drink driving campaign orchestrated by the incomparable John Bevins.
  • Recognition of the danger of the lockdown and border closures where there is no uniform national control by the Federal Government. Say NSW decides to loosen all restrictions a lá Boris, in conflict with the other States with harsher restrictions, then there is the potential for community chaos and a fractured Federation presided over by an impotent Federal government. The actions of the West Australian Premier in particular fill me with a sense of foreboding; Australia does not need a re-enactment of the 1890s.

One of the great successes Wooldridge had when he was Commonwealth Minister of Health was improving the vaccine rate across Australia. I recognise he has had a chequered history since he left that job, but it has not stopped him from advising Hunt, particularly in the way the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme can be nuanced.

I wonder whether he would agree with “jab” as part of the politician’s lexicon, and if there is hesitancy, the best place to test this in schools is to make it compulsory for all children, say at 12, to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Once you introduce a program into schools, then it is a perfect road to eradication – rubella and polio are prime examples, or have the current policymakers forgotten about those scourges? Such a decision would reinforce some of the calls to redirect inoculation to the young.

In the interim, give the residue of children aged between 12 and 18 the vaccine. It is only a matter of organisation to get them all vaccinated – and incidentally a good way to identify those among the parents who are avowed anti-vaxxers and those who are just hesitant.

While it has been admirable that the Government has concentrated on the elderly, the assumption being we are the most vulnerable, and therefore vaccination is a community anodyne for not clogging the acute hospitals with the most unproductive sector of the community, particularly applying to the intensive care units. Any COVID-19 patient admitted to hospital can spread the nightmare.

Another matter is the long-term morbidity, which will contribute to the cost on the system. The post-viral syndrome is protean in its manifestations and it seems that COVID-19 can be particularly severe. Then there is the murky world of the auto-immune disease, and having a chronic auto-immune disease myself, I would not flirt with the disease, with preferably having a choice of vaccine. My second injection is due tomorrow.

The overarching concern, despite much work being done in relation to SARs vaccine development in the past 15 years, none of them have had the usual level of testing that most vaccines undergo before being approved for usage. This is the baggage which Australia has, given investment in the Queensland dud and the almost exclusive Governmental preference for the AstraZeneca vaccine.  That is the risk one takes when there is urgency, and where hindsight is a wonderful attribute.

Hence, with long-term morbidity, there will always be the search for a cure. Given the nonsense in relation to bleach, zinc, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and whatever, it is still important that all treatments are not dismissed.  The example of the nucleotide, remdesivir with the associated use of cortisone has received attention and seems to have some role in the most serious cases, but there needs to be more convincing data.

Finally, one area which has remained relatively untouched in the mountain of commentary is the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). It should not be forgotten in any national review. Here Australia is in a pandemic and there is the spectacle of national chemist chains peddling the usual remedies for the common cold and other respiratory complaints on national television every night. Most remedies have been shown not to work, and normally can be tolerated, but this is a pandemic, and mixed messaging needs to be eliminated – not gaily spouted on national television. The medical advice is to be COVID-19 tested if you have “the most minimal of symptoms”. Yet the advertisements are full of contradictory advice encouraging use of ineffective patent medicines that are likely to delay being tested for COVID-19.

The problem is that the Commonwealth Department of Health’s Health Products Regulation Group needs a large shakeup. The current deputy secretary in charge, John Skerrett, is in a long line of bureaucrats who, in the words of the Health Department, contribute to the stewardship of Australia’s health system. Exactly! It was one area which, in hindsight, I should have weighed in when I had some influence in the area.

In all, public health specialists sit uneasily with business community. There are few bridges. An American view was that the public health specialists are Democrats and Business Republicans. It has been shown in the unfortunate politicisation of this pandemic, particularly in the United States.

There’s business, and then there’s seriously good business.

Victoria, with its vocal proponent Peter Doherty, is pushing ahead with plans for an mRNA research and production capacity in Australia. Of course, the race is on internationally.  After the spectacular success of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Sanofi announced on June 29th that it will invest more than USD475 million a year to develop mRNA vaccines against other diseases, and much of the work will be done in Cambridge, a suburb of Boston in Massachusetts

Sanofi is creating a vaccines mRNA Centre of Excellence that will employ 400 people both there and in Lyon, France. The French pharmaceutical firm has about 4,200 employees in Massachusetts. Sanofi hopes to have at least six potential vaccines to test in clinical trials by 2025 against a range of diseases.

While Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca both vowed to sell their vaccines on a non-profit basis during the pandemic, Moderna, which has never made a profit and has no other products on the market, decided to sell its vaccine at a profit, as did Pfizer, notwithstanding that it didn’t need the profits because of its already healthy bottom line. Last year Pfizer showed USD9.6bn in profits, before the COVID-19 vaccine. In the first three months of this year the COVID-19 vaccine delivered USD3.5bn of revenue.

And that is just the start. Like the eponymous Magic Pudding, the vaccine is expected to keep generating significant revenue, especially because of the likely need for regular booster shots, already before the FDA. Pfizer has said it expects its vaccine to generate USD26bn in revenue this year and the company has been signing supply deals with governments as far out as 2024. Nice work if you can get it.

Just an addendum

I could not agree more with Gideon Haigh’s comment made last Sunday about the nature and future of the Olympic Games, much in the same vein as I wrote about last week. The euphoria generated by the number of Australian gold medals in the first week made those who reckon that the Olympic Games is now in need of a thorough overhaul seem like the Grinch. The Games have provided a degree of fairy tale theatre for those of us caught in the lockdown.

The problem is that life has many airheads, often former Olympians who “are on the tit” directly or living a life that they once had in amongst the gaiety of the Games, not to mention the close contacts that some have made and persisted.  What do they call it?  Yes, the Olympic Family.

Apart from hubris, there is no reason for that appalling decision of the Queensland Premier to commit to the same contract which has left the IOC again wallowing in cash, when it was clearly on its knees. Here, the host city and, on this occasion because we have a drongo Federal Government prepared to cough up 50 per cent, every taxpayer in Australia will be saddled with debt. A form of neoliberal communism, you may ask. Don’t bother.

It was interesting to note that the residual Sydney Games debt is still bouncing around 20 years after the end of those Games.

The country, particularly Queensland, may come to curse Coates, who will be 82 when the Games come around – or dead.  Coates may think he has fenced his legacy, but as I said last week, in 2032 there will be a different World. Indeed, fire-fighting may have become an Olympic sport by then.

And by the way, that winner of the mens’ 100 metres the other day, from the vantage point of mia sedia in salotto, appeared to have the physiognomy of the Canadian Ben Johnson.  He certainly has made massive strides, as they say, over a short time, as distinct from the IOC. Could have been something in the tagliatelle.

Mouse Whisper

As my cousin Camundongo from Lisbon has warned me that before entering the swimming pool remember to circumflex since:

If in Maio

You want on whim

To decide to swim

Remember to wear your Maiô

Portuguese water dogs

Modest Expectations – Arithmetic Progression 

“The first most precious thing in life is food in your mouth.” Rowan Atkinson has visited the local food bank I volunteer at regularly over the entire period of the Covid-19 pandemic (where visits have increased tenfold in the last two years). He brings massive amounts of tinned fish which is exactly the luxury our customers ask for first, tuna runs out so quick I’ve seen people queue for hours in the mornings to get some. He never stays around to shake hands or give some self assured speech or anything despite how everyone comes out to see him – he just passes us a few big Sainsburys bags full of tuna and fresh vegetables then drives off. A real man is defined not by his words but by his deeds. – Joel Dixton

Time to Throw away the Old Coates?

“You have to understand how important these events are for small countries that are isolated. It was wonderful to have all those people and be the centre of the world. Events make them important and the focal point as they think they should be.” Quote from NYT.

As I schoolboy I went to the Olympic Games in 1956. I was sports mad and there I was, in the queue 18 months before, on the day ticket sales opened. I am there staring at the camera when I was snapped by the National Geographic magazine photographer just after I had purchased my tickets. The most expensive tickets for the opening ceremony cost six guineas, but none of these were on sale for the “unwashed” even on the opening day. After alI, I was not very far back in the queue which snaked up Lonsdale Street away from the retail store Myers.

I was able to buy tickets for the opening ceremony costing three guineas, and then there were tickets for one guinea. All very quaint, but I had the sum of 100 pounds which had come from cashing out an insurance policy my grandmother had taken out when I was born. I bought a variety of tickets, including the closing ceremony as well.

Sydney was somewhat different. Some time after Sydney was awarded the 2000 Games in 1993, my mate and I each bought two of initial ticket packages, which included the opening ceremony, for about $3,700 each. We could pay in instalments, and by far the most expensive component was the opening ceremony. That was $1,500 a ticket. The opening ceremony was a spectacle, and it is easy to dissect and criticise, but you remember some of the gloss and then the interminable parade of each country’s fashion sense as the nations marched by. The highlight for me was being included in the Torch relay, courtesy of Ansett Airlines. I had my gig in Nowra, kept the torch and, for eternity, stare out of the pages of the Illawarra Mercury.

On both occasions, I was very enthusiastic about the Games.  Here was a time to be recognised on the world stage. No matter that the 1956 Games were nearly victim to Australian mismanagement led by the fumbling fascist war hero, Wilfrid Kent Hughes, bumbling away with the irascible American IOC chairman, Avery Brundage, an admirer of Hitler, knowledge of which was airbrushed away by 1956.  Then, before the Games, inconveniently came the Suez crisis and the aborted Hungarian uprising, which resulted in a smaller Games than in Helsinki four years earlier. The Dutch inter alia did not come to Australia, and Australian quarantine regulations meant the equestrian events were held in Sweden. However, all this was lost on this 16 year old called me.

Those games were not then mired by the systemic cheating initiated by the Eastern bloc which, in 1976, led to Australia winning no gold medals, the first games at which this had occurred since Berlin in 1936. As the Australian finalist in the women’s 400 metres final commented, she was the only runner without a moustache.

There were the riots in Mexico City in 1968, the murder of the Israeli athlete hostages of Munich in 1972, the Moscow Games boycott because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. One could hear the death rattle, with the IOC under the Irish peer, Lord Killanin, only to be rescued by the American Peter Ueberroth, who made a profit on the Olympic Games in 1984. He injected an element of humanity, whether cynical on not, in encouraging the incorporation of the Paralympics into the main schedule, to ensure that from 1988 they were held in the same city as the main games. The Paralympics had arisen from the Stoke Mandeville project in England and the first was organised in Rome in 1960, but not under the Olympic movement banner.

Somehow, despite the stench of doping and of a privileged and corrupt IOC, the Games have survived, but the death rattle can be heard again in the Tokyo Games. The Games are no longer a diadem, and Brisbane has been bullied and cajoled by one man to take on the financial burden. Can the fact get into the heads of our politicians as they grasp at the straws of our disintegrating country that nobody is really interested in taking on a massive debt, except Queensland (with, of course, the Federal Government picking up 50 per cent of the cost on behalf of the Australian tax payer)?

Australia just does not need the IOC pied pipers to allure the children of now to the Bananabender Boondoggle called “Brissie”.

Yes, I was one who marvelled at the exploits of Ralph Doubell while the smell of tear gas drifted over the Mexico City stadium and when Shane Gould was our swimming heroine and angry when Raelene Boyle was cheated out of greatness by an East German doped so much it precipitated her early death; all the while terrorists were killing 11 athletes in the Munich athletes’ village.

Sure, the magnificent swims by Ariarne Titmus and efforts of Jess Fox provide a short term boost in national pride.  They are exceptional athletes. There is no doubt that the exploits of our current Olympians feed the traditional image of a sporting nation and temporary jubilation from a nation imprisoned by a Virus. But what of 2032?

Ueberroth provided a false dawn by providing a model of running the Games profitably. He stated a clear objective; he ruthlessly pared costs, re-used venues, and achieved a profit measurable in real money. Following that, the World has had a series of Games “striving to be declared the best ever”, increasing the number of sports, some of which border on theatre and judged by subjective opinion rather than the objectivity of being “first past the post”. Along the way there have been burgeoning TV rights – until somebody may stop the carousel to do the numbers. The IOC and the successful cities in his aftermath had forgotten Ueberroth.

The local press is celebrating Brisbane for being chosen in 2032 with Coates, as the driving force, being forgiven for his boorish behaviour. In the cold light of tomorrow, Australia may realise how it has been hoodwinked by Coates, there was no other city interested apart from his adopted hometown. Nobody else wants it. It is too expensive for dubious gains.

Coates  yet has rescued the IOC, saving them from going cap in hand to some other city to strike a deal. Instead Australia, which will be coping under the economic and social cost of the COVID-19 pandemic for decades to come, has been conned into more debt. Sure, the athletes will come, and the quote from the NYT at the head of this article will ring all so true as our Clutch of politicians will bask in the sunlight of praise until, after two weeks in 2032, the light is turned off leaving the Clutch in darkness, and in debt.

I suggest that failing the employment of a latter-day Ueberroth, Queensland do a poll to determine the level of sponsor interest. It is noteworthy that the AFR was gushing in its Editorial about Brisbane’s win. Are they the same writers who, just a couple of weeks ago, advocated that Sydney not go into lockdown to halt the spread of the Virus?

Enough said?

Well, not quite. Remember in 2003 when the NYT ran an article on the financial aftermath of the Sydney Olympic Games. This quote is salutary:

For a party that lasted only 16 days, the Games carried a big bill. In a 2002 report, the New South Wales auditor general put the Games’ cost at 6.484 billion Australian dollars, or about $4.77 billion, of which 2.037 billion Australian dollars came from the government. The report cautiously accepts estimates by the government of New South Wales that the Games generated 653 million Australian dollars in additional tax revenues from visitors, but even that figure leaves a loss of 1.326 billion Australian dollars.

All the extra costs of the Games were paid for from the budget, meaning they did not leave much of a fiscal hangover. (Unlike the Montreal Games where the 1976 Olympic Games billion dollar debt was not finally extinguished until 2006.)

“A lot of our planning was very extravagant,” Richard Cashman (then a UNSW academic) said. “There was a decline in the health and education budgets in the years before the Games.”

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

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

Remembering Cuba

Cuba was what we expected.

Now we went to Cuba as members of an American delegation. I suppose that was somewhat unusual, having been invited by the leader of the group of health care professionals, Dr Bill Jessee, to join the delegation. It was an easier time then when Obama had loosened the restrictions, and relatively easy to get to Havana. After all it is only  370 kms from Miami with a flight time of  one hour. The plane we flew in was not marked but on returning it was clearly a Delta flight. In the flight magazine Havana was not listed as a Delta destination but on questioning the flight attendant she was quite offhand in saying, “Oh, we fly every day to Cuba.”

We were booked into the Mela Cohiba, a so-called 5-star hotel close to the beach, but a half hour walk from the Old Havana centre. It was a somewhat strange experience when we arrived to be sitting around the pool drinking the first of countless mojitos – the signature white rum, sugar, lime and soda with mint garnish. A walk up the shaded street with the broken concrete footpath showed an interesting sight: the British Embassy was next to that of the Northern Korean.

Despite the protestations of Cuba being an egalitarian country, this Havana suburb could pass as any middle class suburb.

What was evident was that despite the general ramshackle nature of Havana, there was still an underlying enthusiasm for what Castro had done. For instance, there was the wiry little guy who was introduced with reverence. He was small, hard faced, leathery and harangued us in Spanish. He had been one of the 26th July crowd, they whispered, the original band of men who had followed Castro into the Sierra Maestra mountains – hence the reverence. When we were there, Castro, albeit ailing, was still nominally in charge. Castro’s brother, Raul, maintained the Castro power.

However, as you read the papers today, there is street rioting. Fidel is dead; Raul retired. The Castro legacy of the romantic saviour, in a population winnowed by the original opposition being crushed or fled to Florida, is now of decreasing relevance to this younger urbanised group. They have no memory of a rural revolution; the energy which drove the victory over the corrupt Batista regime ruling a Cuba that was the louche playground of American gangsters.

Once the largest World supplier of sugar, exploited by American and other foreign interests, and then after the Castro accession distortion in the market  by Russian subsidy, Cuba has had to restructure what was a sugar economy. Now Cuba is way down the list of sugar cane producers and therefore having to adjust its economy to sustain its socialist ideals has become increasingly difficult.

In 1959, Castro offered a different world, and whether you agree with his methods, he was able to establish, govern and improve the standards of living. Whatever you may think of the methods, Castro had a cleansing effect on Cuba as a haven for criminals and resisted over decades American interference, starting with the Bay of Pigs in 1960.  Notably when we were there, there were no beggars on the streets, no overt poverty. The unemployment level was said to be less than four per cent, but there is some controversy about what that figure means. The level of “hidden unemployment” may be a factor underlying the recent rioting.

The American automobiles around the streets were remnants of the fifties. They had become a tourist attraction. We were driven about in a sky blue Ford Mercury, but mostly we bussed around the various locations to see a variety of health facilities in what appeared to be a school bus.

The hospitals reminded me of the country hospitals that I had known in the early part of my medical career, just shorn of the technology which I had come to accept as de rigeur. Their pitch to us was laced with propaganda, matter-of-the-fact, no overt hostility to the Americans, mildly surprised to find a couple of Australians in their midst. This was the home of the the barefoot doctor!

One of the local leaders of our delegation told us how her parents had been part of the communist ethos whereby if you were a labourer on building a block of apartments you would be given one. The problem now, however, was that these small one or two bedroom apartments that housed a small family 40 years before, increasingly were housing two to three generations because housing development under the communist regime had not sustained the increasing need for new housing.

The visit had its ups and down. I was laid low for a couple of days with severe food poisoning, which I suspect came from a fish lunch. I was the only one to be poisoned, so I wondered whether I had been a mistaken target for some dastardly deed. Anyway, it reduced the amount of health facilities I had to visit, so there is always a silver lining. Nevertheless, I did avoid being a customer of the Cuban health system, whatever conclusion can be drawn from that.

Havana’s old city was just what you would expect – the picture postcard vista of the Old Spanish American town.  At the dinner when I was serenaded for my birthday, she could have been a sultry Lena Horne look-alike stepped out of a 40s movie, and I trying to be cool as she fixed me with her gaze as she sang. But I don’t do nonchalance well.

Wandering into the Nacional Hotel with all the memorabilia of its heyday strewn around, it was easy to be transported back to that era of Clark Gable and Ernest Hemingway. This was the place in Havana where the movie stars flocked because you could drink, you could gamble, you could frolic with money and in so doing could escape the Puritan eye of their American forefathers. Built on a hill overlooking the sea, with a large lawn, the hotel was not difficult to imagine being in one’s tux strolling out in the evening, cocktail in hand, and watching the lights of the hotel skip along the sea swell.

In 1959 this romance was transferred to revolution, but that has long gone and given way to an ageing, ideologically-driven nation increasingly having difficulty paying its way.

Yet in 2011 I suspect there was enough residual nostalgia and reverence, because of the Castros. They epitomised this romantic image of revolution, where the face of Che Guevara was still everywhere.

In a restaurant where we went for lunch I noted a stack of those T-shirts with Guevara printed on the front. Red starred berets were on sale. I went across to the stand where they had been stocked, a much better word than displayed because there was nobody trying to hawk them. I extracted a red and black one with the imprint of Che on the front – and a beret. Once the others in the party saw what I done, they flocked over, and then there were none.

Needless to say, this group of health professionals had a number, somewhat incongruously, who went off to buy that other commodity for which Cuba is famous – the cigar. Together with Cuban rum, cigars were still a prohibited import into the USA. There were constant warnings that the customs would be there, searching for any sign of Cuban tobacco leaf or the smell of rum. The funny thing was when we arrived back in Miami at the end of the week, there was not a customs officer in sight. Irony on a number of levels.

The footpath along the sea wall provided a wide vista of the foreshore, although you had to be wary of the rogue wave breaching the wall and giving one of good dousing. Here  was another reminder of the American presence. In Havana, walking along the seafront, there was this large  anonymous building surrounded by a formidable fence.   This building was the one which later achieved a degree of notoriety when the embassy staff were subject to microwave radiation during 2016-2017. They complained of symptoms ranging from dizziness, loss of balance, hearing loss, anxiety and something they described as “cognitive fog”. It became known as “Havana syndrome”. It coincided with the time of Trump, who predictably re-imposed  sanctions on Cuba.

The memories of Cuba seem a long time go. I suppose being on an American delegation we could watch the interactions. Apart from the irascible “hero of the revolution”, the reception for the Americans was warm; whether any thing long term developed from the trip I doubt it. The problem is that the Caribbean is a beautiful area contaminated by European adventurism. The Cubans had freed themselves from that, at a price, but still exhibited a warmth in welcoming these health professionals without any feeling that we were meeting a set of selected ideologues spouting inanities.

You get to know when you are on a mushroom tour. Cuba was not one of these . I like to believe in the musicians of the Buena Vista Social Club – the optimism and exuberance of these old guys, could not have come from a totally dark past.

As one writer put it recently: “The musicians you hear on the street corners of Old Havana aren’t playing current styles like reggaeton, or hip-hop, or even salsa. They’re playing music by the Buena Vista Social Club.” As it was when we visited. Thank God, Trump did not destroy that; I do hope that element does survive amid the rioting of a youth that has no memory of the 26th of July.

A Precautionary Tale yet One of Hope

Below is an edited article from The Washington Post this week. It is at a time when some Australian journalists seem to be advocating “eating our young”. In other words, singling out ATAGI is not particularly productive. It gave the typical conservative advice, narrowly based and what they did not say was based on the wrong assumption. There was insufficient Pfizer vaccine to allow for unfettered choice.

Australia is in a time of rationing, not seen since World War 11, and therefore if ATAGI gave advice related to a time of cornucopia rather than rationing, the decision should have been the role of government, rather deflect on the meaningless “we rely on medical advice”. In any event, the government has changed the chair of the ATAGI – just one way of defining scapegoat.

Meanwhile…

Kim Marin and her 12-year-old daughter, Kate, isolate at home Friday in Fairfax County. Both are fully vaccinated and recently tested positive for the coronavirus.  

Kim Marin planned to spend her 51st birthday on Friday eating a cherry pie made by her 80-year-old mother and 12-year-old daughter. But Marin and her daughter, Kate, began feeling ill earlier this week. On Wednesday the pair, who are fully vaccinated and live in Fairfax County, tested positive for the coronavirus.

At first, it seemed like they just had a bad cold: They were coughing, sneezing, and feeling achy. But their symptoms got progressively worse. Kate developed a bad sore throat and the two were outright exhausted. 

“Because my daughter and I were feeling so badly, I just thought, let’s go to urgent care and while we’re here, they should probably test us [for the coronavirus],” Marin said. “We both got tested and we were shocked. We both were first in line to get vaccinated when we were able to.” 

Breakthrough cases are rare. Just 0.031 percent of the 4.5 million fully vaccinated people in Virginia have developed covid-19, according to the state’s dashboard. Just 0.05 percent of the more than 375,000 fully vaccinated people in the District of Columbia have tested positive. And out of the 3.5 million people who have been fully vaccinated in Maryland, just 2,493 have tested positive, according to state officials. 

“I think the thing that’s so startling is that we have been really sick,” Marin said. “The messaging has been that cases like ours should be pretty mild. . . We’re not in the hospital, so we’re so grateful for that. But it still has not been an easy week.”

Marin has been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine since mid-April, and Kate, also with the Pfizer vaccine, since mid-June. Both Marin’s 48-year-old husband and 14-year-old son, who are both fully vaccinated, tested negative Friday. 

Marin said she isn’t quite sure how she and her daughter contracted the virus. Her family still frequently wears masks when going to the grocery store, only having walked into a store a few times without one. Health officials have yet to contact Marin and her daughter for contact tracing, she said. But Marin immediately notified her doctor and the family’s paediatrician about their results. Marin said her nurse told her she was getting more of these calls from vaccinated people, and told her to go back to wearing masks full time.

Officials in the Washington region haven’t moved to reinstate mask restrictions.

The delta variant has already become the dominant strain in Maryland and Virginia; it makes up 1 percent of cases, but officials are working to increase their sequencing of specimens. While the risk of contracting the virus for vaccinated people is still low, it has increased compared to earlier strains.

The delta variant is much more infectious than the alpha variant was, and than the wild type was before that, and so a better understanding really is — in the short term, in the past 30 days — what proportion of new cases were in individuals who are vaccinated, because that gives a better picture today of what the risk is today to any vaccinated person. 

Los Angeles County officials, for example, look at breakthrough cases in a time-bound way and are able to say, for instance, that 20 percent of the coronavirus cases in June in the county were among vaccinated people. While time-bound figures can help show how exactly the risk for vaccinated people is increasing, officials say it’s still important to note that the risk level for unvaccinated people is higher and increasing, too. 

For her part, Marin plans to go back to taking the precautions she followed in the spring. She has young nephews whom she doesn’t plan to be around without a mask anymore. And she no longer plans to go maskless in any public spaces. But she’s still grateful for the vaccines has made that possible.

“I’m struck by how much worse it could have been,” Marin said. “While it’s been very unpleasant, and scary, we have not felt like it was life-threatening.”

Mouse Whisper

This involves two doctors who were discussing the fact that one of them had been able to diagnose a middle-aged man, whose heart condition had baffled a variety of clinicians. The first doctor asked how the other had come to the diagnosis of cardiac amyloidosis.

The second replied by saying he used the Uncle Bert Sign. “If I described Uncle Bert to you and sent you out into a crowd to find him, you’d probably fail. But if you’d ever seen Uncle Bert” — he snapped his fingers — “no problem. You’d find him in a second. It’s all about recognition.”

Heard it before, Topo?

Modest Expectations – Hadrian’s Wall

We both have had an injection of the vaccine against the Virus this past week. My wife received the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine, having been slotted in because of a vaccination cancellation in the general practice, her earlier booking having been cancelled when vaccines were diverted to Melbourne during its last outbreak.

Because of my complicated medical history, I was placed in the bureaucratic imbroglio of being allowed by government to seek a recommendation from my doctor to receive the Pfizer vaccine. You know, the new definition of infinity.

The problem is there is not enough Pfizer vaccine in this country at present, but there is another problem in the supply chain. While in one area there is a clamour to have the vaccine where the freezing facility is bare; in others there is vaccine to spare; needing an arm in which to inject. So, it is a game of chance when distribution is a mess. Serendipity kicks in, and I was fortunate.

There is this disconnect between what the politicians announce what happens on the round.  RPAH for example, was swamped by people under 50 wanting  Pfizer vaccine. RPAH and ST V’s are just not mass centres. Their level of communication is minimal or non-existent, as they refine and then refine again the definition of infinity.  It is the place where two bureaucratic streams playing in parallel meet.

Yet the professionals on the ground are very good, given the tedium that any mass action, whether it is testing or treating, with long hours – their remuneration is not questioned, but the same task.

For those tossers in marketing, the injection is not a jab. They should know it’s a small prick in the arm without residual pain or tenderness. Morbidity after the first injection of AZ is reasonably common and anecdotally the severity varies from a day or two of “unwellness” to a need for hospitalisation. This is unrelated to the much-hyped problem with clotting. I suppose the reaction should take comfort in knowing that this shows the vaccine is working.

Still, I was lucky to be able to receive a Pfizer vaccination. Having unsuccessfully contacted multiple sites to try to get a vaccination, and having received no assistance from the Government sites, I managed to get a vaccination when there was one unused from a vial and because I could get to the location quickly.

I was told as I filled in the Pfizer form that the second dose, unlike the AZ vaccine, is more likely to provoke side effects. The paperwork is detailed, and one question I was asked would have most people scratching their heads. It enquired about mast cell disease. I would imagine most people do not have a clue about mast cells. They are important tissue cells involved in the first line defence against inflammation and infection. They contain both heparin and histamine and stain blue (basophilic), but mast cell diseases are rare, although often severe when it occurs. Maybe those with the disease know when they are asked the question.

But why ask it in this questionnaire? Apparently in people with mastocytosis, Pfizer vaccine can trigger an anaphylactic reaction. Somehow, unlike the AZ furore, it has escaped the eye of the experts or media. Nevertheless, on a slow news day…

There is one very deep problem in the messaging. To try and shift responsibility, the politicians and the bureaucrats say if you are troubled by the prospect of the vaccine side effects, talk to your doctor or pharmacist;  when English is not your first language, that message invariably will cause confusion. The confusion also arises because of the messages to stay home, isolate and get tested – conflicting instructions.

Some interpret the message as when they feel sick they should go to the doctor not to the testing centre. Hence, the infected have been turning up at doctors’ rooms or at pharmacies, and potentially compromising primary health care. Fortunately, it seems to be limited, but the more the message remains ambiguous, the more likely the infected will turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In relation to pharmacies giving the injection, the average pharmacy is constructed as a retail outlet not as a health centre. Many pharmacies are configured with narrow aisles crammed with all sort of goods. Is that the place for an injection of vaccine where there is a long form to be completed, concerns to be allayed and the need to wait 15 minutes after in case of a reaction? Even though pharmacists are used to managing cold chains, more so than most doctors, is the configuration appropriate? Yet I would ask the question of whether you would be injected in a shoe store? Well, very unfair, you say. But then I do remember when some pharmacies sold cigarettes.

Yes, an example of the relevant  pharmacy standard abridged shorn of some of the prolixity, indicates: “The vaccination service must (a)  have sufficient floor area to accommodate the person receiving the vaccination and an accompanying person, and the pharmacist adequate space (b) have sufficient a bench space  with an impervious surface, a chair and a first aid couch (or similar)(c) not permit the vaccination to be visible or audible to other persons in the pharmacy. …There must be at least 4 square metres to ensure that if required in an emergency, a patient could lie down on the ground (sic). Additionally, that there must be a dedicated area to enable the vaccination service to be provided.”

Who is to check compliance and can anybody show me where the model based on this standard is in operation?

As a footnote, I started writing this blog while Berejiklian was talking at one of her media conferences. Her first default position is to talk about herself, basically the why-are-you-so-unkind routine. “I have not seen my parent for a month.”

The second is to act as Pollyanna, which leads to mixed messages. For instance, when asked about whether people can go to the shop over the road when over the road is over the local government border, did our Gladys say “No”? Instead, she fluffed again, saying people should use their common sense and thus effectively countermanding the government order. She should understand by now that common sense is not necessarily a common commodity in the community.

Her indecision was shown so starkly in relief when the Victorian Premier and his officers fronted the media soon afterwards. There was information More concisely given; the messaging clearer, but she still talks too much – the sign of guilt of the child trying to talk her way out to avoid punishment.

She has found a new word “quash”! Ask 100 people in the street and see how many understand that word, particularly in the critical areas of SW Sydney. Each of these are trivial criticisms but there is a compounding effect.

Several days later, she did realise that fluff and Pollyanna did not work, as she seemed to try to change her persona to the Iron Woman from Willoughby. She still talks too much.

What will be her next role in front of the media while some of the community watch on? 

One for the Armenians

A crush of new cases fuelled by the fast-spreading delta variant has threatened to overwhelm Iranian hospitals with breathless patients too numerous to handle. But as deaths mount, and the sense swells that protection for most citizens remains far-off, thousands of desperate Iranians are taking matters into their own hands: They’re flocking to neighbouring Armenia.

Vaccines arrive

In the ex-Soviet Caucasus nation, where vaccine uptake has remained sluggish amid widespread vaccine hesitancy, authorities have been doling out free doses to foreign visitors — a boon for Iranians afraid for their lives and sick of waiting.

Gladys’ relatives are showing a humanitarian streak in Yerevan towards their neighbours. The Iranians have the highest COVID-19 infection rate in that area, yet only two per cent are vaccinated. The Armenians show their merchant finesse, having obtained Pfizer and AstraZeneca plus the Chinese and Russian versions, all for their 3 million population. 

Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus

When I studied Roman History, to me the best time to be around in Rome would have been in the second century A.D. (we did not use BCE). When I was a youngster, I always wondered why and how, despite all the debauchery and hedonism mixed with sadistic brutality, did Rome survive the first century after the death of Augustus.

However, from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, it seemed to be so that Rome entered a “moral period”, with these two emperors being bookends between Hadrian and Antoninus Pius. This was the Golden age.

Hadrian and Trajan were related, being distant cousins. Trajan is always viewed as the conquering hero, who extended the Roman empire to its widest limits. Only after I visited Romania did I comprehend the difficulty of subduing a countryside wedged between the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube. The Danube is two-edged by forming a barrier between Roman troops and the Germanic tribes. It kept the latter out. Once the Romans bridged the river they had lost a bulwark. Their time in Dacia as it was then called (now modern Romania and Moldova) lasted 150 years. Even though the Romans were there briefly, the Roman legacy is the Romanian language.

My youthful romantic notion then was of Trajan the conqueror, a man steeled in the playing fields of Rome. Hadrian was the studious builder who came along and built walls, preserved heritage. Given the way history was taught in deference to our British heritage of the time, Hadrian was primarily a wall in the North of England.

Hadrian’s Wall

Hadrian’s Wall stretched across the northern English countryside, south of the modern border between Scotland and Wales.  All walls which stretch across countryside attract visitors, especially if they last 2,000 years.

Eighty Roman miles long (117 kms), it crossed northern Britain from Wallsend on the River Tyne in the east to Bowness-on-Solway in the west.

Most of it has gone now, but as we found out, meandering along beside it (once you could walk on it), this remaining wall is impressive as it indents, curves and disappears over the distant hill. In parts the wall is quite low and you can peer over the top, looking down on the undulating greenery folding into the dales. It is unnervingly peaceful now, thinking of the Roman defenders in combat against blue painted warriors, their Pictish accents incomprehensible yowling, rushing up the slopes with spears and shields.

I still have a copy of the source material, Cary’s History of Rome. It is a very dry account, packed with facts, but steers well away from Hadrian, the person.

It is said that the Memoirs of Hadrian, a fictional epistle from Hadrian in old age to Marcus Aurelius as a youth is one of the “imperishable” biographies of the 20th century. Written by Marguerite Youcenar in 1951, it was translated from the French somewhat later, and of course was not in the curricular diet of an impressionable youth such as myself.

I was to find out later that Hadrian was homosexual, a word in my schooldays larded with a snigger of derogatory epithets. Certainly there is nothing about this in Cary nor about Hadrian’s young Greek lover Antinous, who died tragically on the Nile. He was the subject of many extravagant memento mori by the grieving Emperor.

As has been written, Roman emperors seem to be divided between monsters and mediocrities, with an occasional near-genius, like Hadrian, thrown in to break the monotony. Highly intelligent and cultivated, he was a Grecophile, always a good sign in the ancient world. As emperor, he attempted to pull back from the imperialist expansion of his predecessor Trajan and wanted, as the chronicler Aelius Spartianus put it, to “administer the republic [so that] it would know that the state belonged to the people and was not his property.”

There are many monuments scattered around the Roman lands. At the northern entrance to the ruins of the Roman city of Gerasa, on the outskirts of the modern Jordan city of Jerash, there is the huge Arch of Hadrian, an entrance through which only the privileged could walk into the city. Gerasa was destroyed in an earthquake in the eighth century and was buried under sand for a thousand years, which meant that when it was uncovered, the ancient city was in reasonable condition, including the Arch.

Arch of Hadrian

Walking around the ruins of the city, the Arch of Hadrian, built in 130 AD, stands out. It is as though it is a symbol of an emperor, who was not the conventional cardboard character of a Roman emperor but that very complex character, who knew he had to consolidate his cousin’s expansionary strategy. After all, Dacia was not just expansion for the sake of expansion. The mines there were the source of gold and silver. It was one of the tasks that Hadrian had to balance to maintain a profitable empire, rather than continuing conquest being an exercise in hubris.

Oh, and by the way, Hadrian’s wall was built starting in 122 AD, five years after he became Emperor at the age of 41.  I doubt if it was a modest expectation.

Americanus Imperator

On both 11 September 2001 and 7 December 1941, the most powerful country in the world was ambushed. There is a word which has crept into the language “proportionate”. In the case of the Pearl Harbour attack, it was clear that this was a pre-emptive strike by the Japanese Imperial forces, the responsibility for the attack extending to the Emperor. The American revenge took four years, but bloodied and scarred, with 405,399 deaths, (comparable with deaths from the American Civil War) America emerged victorious; and so the myth of American invincibility was born.

Grateful for survival, Australia since then has followed America into the Korean War, admittedly fought under the United Nations banner, then almost a decade in Vietnam, and then 20 years in Afghanistan after a gap of 26 years. The results:

  • Korea – a festering stalemate at a cost of 36,000 American lives;
  • Vietnam – now a united country on the cusp of prosperity – a defeat in 1975 for America at a cost of 58,220 American lives; more than three million mines remain as the American legacy, with 40,000 Vietnamese killed or maimed since;
  • Afghanistan, 20 years – Taliban about to resume transmission, a defeat for America at a cost about 2,400 American lives (about the same number as the War of 1812 when the Americans were battling the British).

The following recent American assessment is unsurprising:

After having invested so much for so long in Afghanistan, we cannot now escape responsibility for its fate. In 1975, a U.S. Army colonel famously told a North Vietnamese colonel, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.” His counterpart responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” 

Indeed, guerrillas prevail not by outfighting but by outlasting a more powerful foe. The Taliban has done just that. It has not yet defeated the government in Kabul, but it has already defeated the one in Washington. Let the recriminations and finger-pointing begin. If Vietnam is any indication, the Afghanistan “blame game” could roil U.S. politics for decades to come.

Ruins of Afghanistan

The revenge for 11 September had thus been blown up. Anyway, 15 0f 19 conspirators were Saudis, and the Saudi royal family were allowed out of the country with the blessing of the Americans at about the time of the attack. Revenge needs a target, and a target was confected and 20 years later the Americans are farewelling the battleground of the Hindu Kush, defeated.

I would not bet on when the next exercise will occur. After all, there is always a need to use all these bright and shiny new weapons. Interesting to see the latest war exercise in Australia (take note) concentrating on a sea-land attack. Reminiscent of a World War scenario, but how relevant to modern circumstances?  War games have a periodicity, and as long as advances in technology are subverted for such activities there will always be more wars, with the armed forces increasingly bearing less of the pain, it being transferred more and more to the civilian population caught up in each particular war game. I only hope that Australia does not get a home game.

Japan – In Search of a Hill

Alan Talbot is a remarkable fellow, remembered as a self-assured Pommy kid who descended on my school. I didn’t know him well at school, but I recently caught up with him. He had a life as an accountant; mine was in medicine. I found out that he and a school friend, just after the last term of school, went walkabout in northern Queensland, with little if any money, quickly aborted.

From a young age Alan was a venturer, on show when he was at school in England where he rambled across the Lake District, and scaled Scafell Pike, in a very busy and varied trip. He has written about this and Mt Fuji in a book published last year called In Search of the Hills.

It took many years before he struck out on his mountain adventures as an adult. One of these was taking a break from a conference in Japan when he decided to climb up Mount Fuji despite it being October. The mountain was closed to tourists, with ice and snow on the climb. Alan was warmly dressed but hardly in serious mountain gear.  When he reached the point about halfway up where the road ended, he noted the signs said “closed”. Nevertheless, he noticed a Japanese guy exercising beyond the border – running up and down. He, as Alan tells it, was only running up and down 50metres or so; but that was sufficient encouragement for Alan to follow him over the border.

Fortunately, he had started early, and the mountain just encouraged him upwards. Once started, the mountain beckoned him to the next outcrop; to the next patch of scree. On the way he found a discarded parka, which although too small, gave him some protection for the climb to the summit. Once, he reached the summit, he walked around the rim, which was about a kilometre, meeting a troop of mountain climbers, who had climbed up the tougher approach but with a permit. They were shocked to see this person in little more than warm clothes.

Even if they may have disapproved what could they do with somebody who was loping along with the exhilaration of being at 13,000 feet (3,620 metres). It took him six hours to go up the mountain, where he spent one hour and then three hours to go down the way he had come. He, blackened with scree, emerged into the carpark to the astonishment of tourists who had come to see the base of the mountain in the fading light which provided a perfect vista for him as he climbed down the mountain.

Alan just did it, without any fuss.

So different from our experience when we decided to follow the instructions in a Michelin guide to go to Mount Fuji and learnt that what appears as a few lines in a book is in fact not just a matter of changing trains seamlessly and ending up with a picture book view of Mount Fuji.

We had gone to Tokyo at Easter. It happened to be cherry blossom time, just over its peak, but still providing a delicate panorama of white and pink blossoms.

Cherry blossom at Chidorigafuchi Park, Tokyo

We stayed in the Imperial Hotel, but the reason for doing so is another story. We were lucky to have a room in this hotel because it is always full at cherry blossom time.

Japonisme had its genesis in this and other portrayal of Japanese flora. Cherry blossom in full bloom is a magnificent spectacle because there is something in the delicate colour and the nature of the blooms which exemplifies that beauty is so fragile. As the blossom is buffeted by nature, it quickly loses that bloom of youth – once robust in its white and pink announcement that a new life has arrived.  Then the petals fall and accumulate as white and pink detritus on the pavement. The blossom clings, a thin remnant, until eventually it is gone.

However, if cherry blossom defines Japan, then so does Mount Fuji. If you travel by bullet train to Kyoto and you are on the right side of the train you see it briefly arising amid a landscape of poles and wire, industrial drabness and clustered houses which were defined by Pete Seeger’s song, increasingly long ago.

We decided that we wanted to see Mount Fuji close up and we had this Michelin recommended route.  The hotel concierge was polite and suggested mildly that the recommended way was complicated. “Understatement” is a Japanese characteristic rather than saying why do it.

The result was a confusion of trains. We had Green Passes equivalent to first class (the very fast Nozomi bullet train was excluded). So the train out of Tokyo on the Kyoto line was comfortable enough, fast enough, excellent by Australian standards

Mt Fuji in the mist

We had to change at Kawaguchiko where we transferred to a private railway which zigzagged its way through the gorges, past picturesque Japanese villages to Gora, where the cherry blossoms were still a filigree. It was slow and rickety, and by the time we got to there we had yet to see Mount Fuji. Then we had to board a funicular and then cable car railways as we wended higher up the mountainside and then down to Lake Ashinoka. We strained to see Mount Fuji as we rose and fell on the mountains and then  on the colourful lake ferry. Surely we would see the mountain now, but no, it was blanketed in mist.

The problem was when we arrived at the other side of the lake, where normally a bus would take us back to the railway station to board the Tokyo train, there was a huge queue of people and no buses – well very few with an officious little man determining who was given a seat. This was the problem in Japan when matters go wrong, and there is nobody to speak English; with signs comprehensible only to the Japanese. There are no concession to the visitor.

Sunset had come and gone. Everybody was concentrated on getting out of the cold and into a bus. A sprinkling of taxis arrived and at last after two hours one was within reach.  We piled in unceremoniously, me waving my stick to indicate both determination and disability. Two young Guatemalans joined us, crammed into the back seat; and off we went into the night. At last we arrived at the railway station. Tokyo thankfully was now within reach. The station was surprisingly sparsely populated, considering the melee we had left. One Nozomi rushed past without stopping, but eventually a train did stop.

The concierge had been right.  The route we had taken had successfully blended “tortuous” and “tortured” into an unforgettable day. Symbolic of this had been that part of the journey above the Owaki-dani, the valley from hell, where the steam bubbled through the cracks in the volcanic landscape, the air was pungent with sulphurous gases, Lucifer not far away.

We had not seen Mount Fuji, but we knew more about the train lines of Japan. In fact we were to use the Green Pass only five time traversing Honshu. I wished we had had Alan Talbot with us; he would have destroyed any barriers.

Mouse Whisper

Queixo ou Queijo

Now make sure you don’t get your chin in your cheese

When you are dining with the Portuguese.

Portuguese Queijo

Modest Expectations – Eleven Squared

One of our most extraordinary journeys across the USA was our drive from Los Angeles to Denver. Our first stop was at Furnace Creek. Several years before we intended to drive there, but Los Angeles was cut off by an unseasonable storm which dumped a load of snow around Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Mountains, cutting off the route to Death Valley.

This time it was on the cusp of summer and it was about a five hour drive straight after clearing customs and picking up the hire car following the flight from Australia. The drive was a little arduous. It takes a seemingly endless time to leave LA behind. However, it was a necessity as it happened to be the last day that the resort at Furnace Creek remained open before it was due to close for summer.

Death Valley

Death Valley has always been one of the hottest places on Earth, and even then was not open over the summer months. We had time to look around and feel the dryness and the heat, but hardly the temperature being experienced at the present time. Furnace Creek, where its temperature is measured, sits at 58 metres below sea level in the Mojave Desert.

As The Washington Post noted this past week: the third massive heat wave in three weeks kicked off in the West on Friday, Death Valley, Calif., soared to a searing 130 degrees. If confirmed, it would match the highest known temperature on the planet since at least 1931, which occurred less than a year ago. Friday’s 130 degree (54.4c) reading comes after it hit 126 degrees (52.2c) on both Wednesday and Thursday. It’s predicted to reach as high as 132 (55.6c) degrees on Saturday and 130 (54.4c) on Sunday. Night time lows may stay above 100 (37.8c) until the middle of next week.

What with the Pacific Northwest temperatures last week, anybody for climate change denial? What was that about coal fired power stations now?  I’m beginning to believe that nobody who is due to shuffle off the mortal coil should be allowed to vote, so much have we stuffed up the World.

But wait, there is more; from The Boston Globe describing the wettest July on record:

Flash flood warnings, tornado alerts, heat advisories, and of course, rain, rain, and more rain. Hey, whoever’s in charge here, we’d like a refund, please. We were promised Hot Vax Summer, but instead, we’re getting a soggy slap in the face. Couples who postponed their weddings because of COVID find themselves dashing to the church amid downpours. Families gathered for overdue summer reunions are enjoying more together time than they bargained for. Restaurateurs eager to make an extra buck on outdoor dining are chasing runaway umbrellas.

I doubt if this will feature on the National Party dashboards.

Information in the Soot

Neanderthal Man

I am indebted for the inspiration for the following blog to a review in The New York Review by Tim Flannery of a book just published entitled: “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love Death and Art” by Rebecca Sykes. I have quoted from it.

Rebecca Sykes is a young Welsh palaeontologist who has spent a great amount of time in the south of France scouring the caves for signs of Neanderthal life. She is an inveterate writer and this book, which has attracted wide recognition, is her latest opus.

What I found especially interesting was the concept that soot on the cave walls can be used as a clue to age.

Fulginochronology was established three years ago as a scientific method. It is an advance in scrutinising our ancestral navel that has not been given much prominence. It involves the study of miniscule stratigraphic layers of soot on cave walls. The fossil soot build-up is a microscopic barcode printed on the walls of the cave. Each single bar line represents one specific moment of burning, around a hearth in a cave. These timelines can be read to create a chronology of events within the cave as different groups of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens came and went. The technique has been used in the Mandrin Cave in south-east France and in the El Salt caves in Eastern Spain.

Esoteric, yet important in defining the life and times of Neanderthal man and their interaction with Homo Sapiens, and the overarching question of hybridisation. It is fascinating to think that those people roaming Europe are increasingly thought to be a hybridisation of the two occurring about 40,000 years ago. The discovery of skeletons in Europe dating from that period shows all were hybrids. It is as if suddenly the hybrids took over Europe at that time.

The concept of fulginochronology intrigued. I look forward to reading the book, once our copy reaches Australia. The question I would like answered is how do these data fit into the assertion that the Aboriginal people have been here for 65,000 years, in effect predating any hybridisation event. Maybe we need a bit of fulginochronology, Tim, in places like the Jenolan Caves.

The Cave of Niaux

We had always wanted to see the caves at Lascaux with gallery after gallery of images of animals, all painted in the Paleolithic period by the Magdalénians about 15,000 years ago. Sealed at some stage during this prehistoric period, they lay unknown until accidently discovered by a group of boys in 1940. Opened in 1948 to the general public, it took only 15 years before the caves needed to be closed to the public because of the damage being done by the carbon dioxide in the expired air of the tourists. There were up to 1,200 tourists coming through each day, including Picasso who, on seeing the art, said that we had not learned anything new. Thousands of years later the skills of the artists were there for all of us to see.

It is suggested that, at that time 40,000 years ago with abundance of food and the benison of tranquil weather in that period, these people had time for developing artistic talent and then marry it with a spiritual philosophy – and the appropriate alignment of such thoughts within their environment, the equivalent of the feng-shui of today’s interior decorators.

Very few people are allowed in to see the paintings, but it is one of the only shows in the world that I would use “my ticket of influence” to see, if I had one. There are at least three Lascaux facsimiles, as there is another depicting the caves of Altamira near its site in Cantabria in Northern Spain. There problem with facsimiles is that, although the reproductions may be excellent, they are not in context. The paintings are of animals, in particular bison, auroch and horse seem to dominate. The colours resemble the ochre colours of our Indigenous people and largely they are drawn using iron and manganese-based pigments. Carbon is used, but apparently not in the Lascaux paintings.

The Altamira caves were discovered in the nineteenth century, and they are almost as well known as those at Lascaux. However again, these caves were closed to the public as of 2002 for much the same reasons as at Lascaux – damage from expired carbon dioxide and the fact that opening the caves up induces changes in the temperature and the humidity so that lichen and moss overgrowth is occurring on what once were plain stone walls.  All of these factors contribute to the deterioration of the paintings.

The entrance to Niaux Cave

This is where the Niaux Cave comes into the discussion. For some reason we were actually discussing cave paintings and the frustration of not being able to see any of them. We were travelling around the foothills of the French Pyrenees, which is a long way from Lascaux but over the range in Northern Spain were the Altamiras.  We had stopped at Foix, a hilltop town and over coffee, we found out we were close to the Niaux Cave. So we drove down and there it was, a majestic entrance which would not have been out of place on the front of a cathedral, a line of steel poles guiding us down the mountainside to the entrance. As we found out the number at any one time permitted in the cave is limited, but we scraped into the afternoon quota.

Descending into the cave with head lighting, walking along a board walk knowing that there were shadowy forms of stalagmites and stalactites strewn along the way, the sound of dripping water, squeezing through and crouching low at several points to progress, it could have been difficult, but mostly it was just a stroll.  On the walls the headlights showed a series of glyphs – what may have been signs – and some enigmatic lines of red and black dots along the opposite wall.

We came to an area where pathways crossed. Then we found we were climbing a steep rise into what we learnt later was the Salon Noir. It was about half a kilometre from the cave entrance into this pitch black area. Here we stopped and were instructed to turn out our lights. Even in the pitch black, you knew you were in a large space with a sense of high ceilings. It is strange that this feeling of space did not require vision. The group surprisingly was silent, just outlines alongside me.

Then the guide turned on the light and there were the images of a bison and ibex, lines of black on a rust tinted wall. Time was limited. Photography was prohibited. Once the light was turned out, that was that. Sure, they illuminated the salon to show how domed the chamber was – the acoustic quality of the chamber was tested.

Niaux cave painting

There was hardly time to absorb the images; if we had been in a facsimile of the chamber, we would have had more time to view the images; even be able to photograph; there would not have been the conservation restrictions. Stepping forward, we now have virtual reality technology, so in future we will probably not be restricted to one gallery, but be able to see the whole complex through the eyes of the palaeontologist, being able to stop, rewind, fast forward – see more than we did without the discomfort and cost of being on site. We could be force fed a commentary; and with such devices able to store the memory, not even have to remember. Just press a button, and there they are, remarkable images in a virtual cave

I have seen many Aboriginal rock paintings on site; they tend not to be in the depth of caves, but then again if the mining industry continues to blow them up with the connivance of government here in Australia, it just becomes an academic matter. I have been privileged to see some of these paintings, but I admit I have not trekked for days to see them if there’s been an opportunity to see them in a book, in a museum, or on film.

So why do we do it?   Why trek to some cave? For me, it is a sense of a different space, each of these spaces is unique, and the fact that where I was standing some artist a few millennia ago was viewing his or her masterpiece, but at least he or she had control of the flame to show what had been drawn for me to see. My time was limited to wonder at the genius of these drawings deep in a cave where sunlight could not reach.

Tartuffi not Tartuffe

Lockdown is tedious, but that is the strategy which has worked to curb the spread of the Virus if properly policed and where the community is compliant. It is essential, and there is no point looking for scapegoats. You can fine them; you can penalise them within the confines of society norms, which no longer believe that stocks and pillory are acceptable, but in the end lockdown is group punishment.

It was in this context and realising it was the season for them, we decided to purchase a truffle. Our prime epicurean son who unlike us lives in free range Australia agreed that the best truffles in Australia do come from Manjimup in Western Australia in a season which extends through winter to early spring.

Snuffling a truffle

So, we purchased a substantial fresh truffle which was delivered, vacuum packed, a few days after it was ordered. The package contained a note from the Truffle dog that snuffled it out of the round. As she said in her dog-eared note, Gaby warned us never to get in her way when she was hunting.

These truffles are related to those found in Périgord, and we noted that ours has fine white lines running through it, the sign of a good truffle. This morning it was time for scrambled eggs with visible slices of truffle, not the normal dark sprinkled confetti when you order any eggs allegedly with truffles in that local posh breakfast establishment.

Needless to say, the online shopping outlet had a truffle slicer for sale. Now how could one resist the temptation to buy this vital everyday requirement for the kitchen? It was a handsome, if somewhat terrifying serrated stainless steel implement. What was interesting to me was this affettatartufi in acciano inoz con manico in pallisandro (stainless steel truffle slicer with a wooden handle) was made not in China but in Italy.

Although France is associated with truffles, the most expensive ones are the white truffles found in Piedmont and Tuscany. Their prices can approach $10,000 a kilogram (whereas the Australian black Périgord truffles retail for $2,000 a kilogram). The white truffles are scarce, partially because nobody has ever been able to cultivate them. Needless to say, there is all this palaver about their smell and taste to justify the lengths to which people go to find these potato-shaped fungi.

The truffle slicer was what intrigued me to find out more, because it was made in Italy by a firm which has been in this sort of business for a long time – Sanoma Ambrogio. Perhaps I am just showing my ignorance, but then is that not the reason for pressing on – to show how much you don’t know?

Ambrogio Samona was the founder of the firm, which bears his name in reverse, which still manufactures its high quality product in Premona, a mountain municipality north of Milan. Here in the surrounding mountains iron ore has been mined for millennia, but Premona came into prominence in the Middle Ages because many of the iron workers were lured to Venice, and there was apparently an exchange between the two.

Originally settled by the Romans as a castra in the first century, but as is known the Romans were not great metallurgists and used brass in preference to iron. Steel-making was known for a very long time when the early metallurgy-minded noted that adding carbon to the smelted iron resulted in steel, albeit as a boutique process, used from the middle ages – mostly for armaments. There were Premonan artisans in the Venetian arsenal from that time onwards, making arms for battle, including sword blades. The best steel then came from southern India, and how they produced it has been lost; but in the Middle Ages there were also renowned steel makers in Damascus. The technology spread westwards.

Steel increasingly switched from being the accompaniment of war to that of the butcher and the kitchen. This firm, which provided our truffle slicer, was founded in 1863, and built up an international reputation so it has not only survived but also diversified.

Stainless steel came into use when it was found that the addition of chromium inhibited rust. Now the steel used by Sanelli has many additives, vanadium, molybdenum and others like spices in a kitchen so that the knives of Sanelli are just as much a symbol of Italian excellence as Bugatti or Versace, Gucci or Bulgari.

Amazing what you find when you read the outside of the truffle slicer box. And mark my words, this Tartuffo is not, dear Molière, a Tartuffe – it is the real thing.

The Stubbornness of Scott Morrison 

On 25 June, the AFR, the cheerleader for the Sydney business community, ran an Editorial entitled “Let’s hope NSW can hold out against lockdown”. Its opening lines were “Sydney remains on a knife edge”. Correct. Then it commends the Premier for keeping her nerve and not locking down the State, “leaving citizens to do the right thing themselves”. Then it goes on that line, “It is a proportional response, says the Editorial writer, whatever that means. This crap is in the same league as “We are taking the matter seriously.”

The Editorial accepts without much conviction that NSW has the best contact tracers on the planet, a claim made by Berejiklian to shore up her initial decision not to lock down Greater Sydney and the Illawarra. By saying that, she may not have recognised the potential damage she has done to the credibility of contact tracing as part of the armoury against the Virus.

This idea that lockdown infringes civil liberties and is Orwellian socialism as contended by the Liberal Party flakes in Victoria ignores the fact that the Virus does not read Hayek when that State was locked down. This neoliberal approach is the sort of dangerous twaddle that has accelerated the pandemic across the globe. Victoria had to deal with its outbreak before a vaccine was available. There’s no need to stir the embers of the disastrous decision making in relation to the choice and purchase of vaccine, which have resulted in the present level of vaccination in Australia. Australia just needs more, both in quantity and in diversity.

While accelerated vaccination provides a security blanket, there is no clear indication of long term efficacy of any of the vaccines. Vaccination provides a level of protection that is an important retardant in the spread of the Virus, even with its cleverness in its ability to change. The uncertainty is attested by the way the timing of the second AstraZeneca vaccine dose has been promoted; and there is no doubt that this vaccine has a noticeable level of morbidity as well as absolute contraindications.

Therefore, at this time and that needs to be stressed, the State Premiers have opted for suppression of the Virus, not the least because of the poor decisions made by the Federal Government and what some see as its indecision. However, it is more stubbornness in relinquishing positions that Prime Minister Morrison takes which probably owes itself somewhat to the rigidity of his upbringing. Maybe that is too sympathetic and just say Morrison has poor judgement.

Tracing the contacts

What worries me is that the contact tracing capacity becomes a casualty – a scapegoat for political indecision. I have been a severe critic of Kerry Chant as I thought the handling of the Ruby Princess was a disgrace and smacked of political interference. As Chief Health Officer, I assumed that she bore responsibility, but others closer to the action said it was not her fault, and she had minimal involvement.  If this was so, it was even more an indictment of  NSW Health.

A year on and implicated in a pandemic disaster, where politicians are essentially fearful of making difficult unpopular decisions, Dr Chant retains her job, with a tenacity and determination to pursue the Virus. I suspect that when her advice was for lockdown, it was ignored because of her reporting to a Premier whose neither makes  difficult decisions nor accepts responsibility when things go wrong. Worse, she had a Health Minister who, at one point, was advocating waving the white flag and saying we may have to live with the Virus, even though Australia has low levels of vaccination.

Hence the very visible presence of Kerry Chant, who could have resigned as I suggested and who would have to be blamed given the continuing scrutiny of NSW having to live with the tag of being the gold standard – a very two-edged foil when a catastrophe occurs.

Just ask Brendan Murphy, who at the beginning of the year was the hero of the pandemic, ACT Person of the Year and now the subject of rumours that the bus is being revved up for his demise. Certainly, his exposure has lessened as the Prime Minister seems to have taken over his role with a new military sidekick called Frewin and no sign of Dr Murphy. Fortunately, Paul Kelly still appears, but how much he is listened to is anybody’s guess.

Kerry Chant was given the title of NSW Woman of the Year in 2020, in effect binding her to the NSW Government and more particularly to the artful Premier. She therefore walks that narrow corridor where a person has to defend her scientific integrity while working for a Government at any moment liable to throw her whole strategy out the window.

It is the same dilemma that Fauci faced with Trump. Having to resist those who want to let the Virus coexist. “Let it rip”. Report of another minister in relation to the northern beaches lockdown that  she should take a cut in salary because the Virus had escaped is denied, but from my long experience, such reports are not magical – there is always a source. The dark art of undermining. Then there has been the unfair twittering about her wiping her eye with her mask – an instinctive reaction for which she apologised immediately – and then her crooked glasses (one arm of her spectacles inadvertently broken while she was being interrogated by the media). For God’s sake!

So here I am, championing Kerry Chant. What I fear is that everybody has limits, and I worry how close she is at that limit no matter how great her inner toughness. The contact tracing system is a vital defence mechanism, for the pursuit of the Terrorist Virus. Her devotion to the cause has revealed a steel I did not think she had.

One thing is certain is that singling NSW out as “gold standard” just because it has the same political complexion as the Federal Government, has to  stop.

All it does is invest Berejiklian with “teacher’s pet” status, so cessation hopefully will discourage the Prime Minister from continuing to plant wedges in the population. The disgraceful infantile behaviour of the Liberal Party opposition during the Victorian lockdown contrasts with the maturity of the NSW Labor Opposition response in supporting the government.

Perhaps the discussion may turn to ensuring that there is a uniform contact tracing system across the country, rightfully using NSW as a one of the models to be emulated. The problem with suggesting that quarantine and the processes surrounding it are a national responsibility comes against the stubbornness of the Prime Minister – or is it only stubbornness?

Mouse whisper

A sobering introduction from the May 25 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) editorial. 

When the IOC postponed the Tokyo Olympics in March 2020, Japan had 865 active cases of Covid-19 against a global backdrop of 385,000 active cases. It was assumed that the pandemic would be controlled in 2021 or that vaccination would be widespread by then. Fourteen months later, Japan is in a state of emergency, with 70,000 active cases. Globally, there are 19 million active cases. Variants of concern, which may be more transmissible and more virulent than the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, are circulating widely. Vaccines are available in some countries, but less than 5% of Japan’s population is vaccinated, the lowest rate among all Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development countries.

I’m probably glad that I was not selected for the Rat Run. Perhaps after this Games hopefully the motto will still be Citius – Altius – Fortius, without Aegrius being added.

Modest Expectations – My Brilliant Career

“There are known knowns — there are things we know we know,” (US Secretary of Defence) Rumsfeld said in February 2002, when asked for evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to supply weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. “We also know there are known unknowns — that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld

It was 120 years ago today that Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career was published. Let me say it was a brilliant title, but the brilliance of its content has always eluded me.

I have a very tenuous connection with Miles Franklin by staying over Easter one year at Brindabella Station, where Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin spent her early years. She was 16 when she wrote this melodramatic piece of Victorian passion, the choice between the bloke or the brilliance. Initially rejected, her book was taken up by Henry Lawson, who took it to England where it was published.

We were invited to the Brindabella station by the then owner Richard Carleton. The station lies to the south of Canberra amid the Brindabella range. The Goodradigbee River flows through the station. Carleton’s ashes were scattered on the river after his death in 2006.

Carleton was an avid fisherman but, knowing him, it was the prospect of owning a famous piece of Australiana that would have been high on his agenda in purchasing this property. Richard Carleton was a complex, highly intelligent, outwardly affable but emotionally taut person. That weekend at Brindabella I unfortunately upset what had been a relationship of mutual respect, and for a period in the mid-seventies, when I had fallen from grace as it were, he had been one of my Canberra associates, who proved not to be fair weather. So, the station was one of mixed memories.

However, that is a different tale from My Brilliant Career. Several years earlier, the film of the book of the same name had won international acclaim.  The tension between marriage and career was a relevant theme at the time in the seventies transitioning into the eighties.  The film’s director, Gillian Armstrong, had been a young Australian at the outset of a successful career as a film director; the film’s heroine was played by Judy Davis, who has played “mood indigo” so very well in her long career.  The hero was played by Sam Neill, who as usual played “Same Neill”, which he does, as always, so well. The success of the film gained the book and the author, who had died in 1954, belated recognition. Franklin is a minor author at best. Her link to feminism and her foresight in setting money aside for the annual eponymous award for “the novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases” – the award first presented in 1957 to Patrick White for Voss – has vaulted her into a position of literary eminence.

My Brilliant Career was the only novel written by her or under pseudonyms, which gained her the recognition during her lifetime that she craved.  Phyllis Rose, in an essay in The New Yorker written after the release of the film, was very critical of the novel, saying it was over-written and in fact what would have been expected in an immature person. Phyllis Rose reported that Franklin herself would later refer to it contemptuously as a girl’s book, tossed off in a matter of weeks (10), written out of ”inexperience and consuming longing”. It can be noted that Franklin prohibited its re-publication until at least 10 years after her death in 1954.

This was a somewhat different interpretation from that of Jennifer Byrne who wrote, in a foreword to a later reprint, that “the young author was stung and refused to allow My Brilliant Career to be reprinted for decades”. Allegedly this was due to controversy caused by its publication because of the aspersions cast upon certain characters in the novel, which was presumed autobiographical – presumably it was seen a betrayal of the bunyip squattocracy.

The book is very much “Come on, Goodchum, we must be going” – interspersed with the heroine’s interpretation of home teaching: “I calmly produced my switch and brought it smartly over the shoulders of my refractory pupil…but bringing the rod down on the table, I threatened to thrash every one of them if they so much as whimpered.” Nothing like a bit of domestic violence to remind the reader of its relevance to modern day.

Miles Franklin

The photo of Miles Franklin dressed in black with a matching bonnet is that of disdain and withdrawal. There is no charm in this woman. She is still young, but the image in the photograph is not that of a young woman with an umbrella tucked under her arm like a swagger stick. Judy Davis, in her portrayal, converted this cardboard woman to that of a recognisable feminist in period costume, full of smoulder and volcanic dormancy. Judy Davis was The Brilliant Career.

Why have I identified a link between the Rumsfeld Quote and Miles Franklin?

Rumsfield, in his response set down, established a quadrate for whatever reason, but presumably at least as a clever conceit. He mentioned “known knowns”, without an example, but for him presumably his date of birth would satisfy.

Then he mentions “known unknown” and gave as an example the weapons of mass destruction; but given what later transpired – the lack of these weapons which he knew about, but we mug punters did not – was an example of an “unknown known” (in this case deceit). He did not mention this option in his quoted response – the “unknown known” – and it seems nobody thought to ask him why he left it out.

Finally, for him as with us still alive, “the unknown unknown” at the time he made this statement was that he did not know the time of his death.  However, for us that survive Rumsfield, his death has become a “known known” (29 June 2021) – trivial though it may be.

I have never thought much about Miles Franklin, although her contemporary Australian female authors dominated my childhood – Mrs Aeneas Gunn of We of the Never Never and Mary Grant Bruce and Ethel Turner; their books were all in the cousins’ bookcase; I remember Katherine Prichard’s Coonardoo as a year 12 book, which I loved at the time, despite it being compulsory reading.

I started off from square one in this pursuit and took the text from Rumsfeld, which typified his “look-at-me” approach; “I’m smarter than anybody else, you stupid interviewers”, and yet he left out one of the squares of his quadrate. Why he did this? Who knows?

The more I have read about Miles Franklin, the more intriguing the person becomes. As with Phyllis Rose, I thought her writing in places unintentionally hilarious. Her writing may also be self-conscious and stilted, but that is not what makes her intriguing, especially when she was searching for that brilliant career which later, in 1946, when she wrote it, “went bung.” But did it?  Her working in the Balkans as a volunteer cook during the latter part of World War 1 was one instance, and her observations in the summaries I have read are brilliant.

The late Jill Roe spent most of her academic life at Macquarie University, concentrating on the life and times of Miles Franklin. Hers can thus be said to be the definitive biography of Franklin. Like Franklin, she grew up in the country, she at Tumby Bay, a fishing village on the Eyre Peninsula where the leafy sea dragons frolic in the nearby gulf. Unlike Miles Franklin, Professor Roe was able to resolve her sexuality and undoubtedly did have a brilliant career, judged by her baubles of success.

The more I have thought about that brilliant title, the more I see it portrays the essence of what Rumsfield was saying, even if he did not know what he was saying. As Jill Roe herself once said when accepting another piece of Tudor fancy dress from Macquarie University, “that is what I shall be arguing!” Brilliant title or brilliant insight?

What beats No Trumps

(Two Trump biographers) both said the indictment of the Trump Organization comes during what appears to be the company’s most difficult moment since Trump’s financial crash in the early 1990s.

During that period, Trump found himself hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and lost control of prized assets — including an airline, a yacht and New York’s Plaza Hotel. His business empire did not fully recover for a decade, until Trump gained television fame and made tens of millions as the star of NBC’s “The Apprentice”. 

The financial picture for Trump today, based on his government disclosures, is dramatically better than it was then. On his most recent financial disclosure form, Trump reported around $300 million in income for 2020. But experts and former employees say the reputation of his brand among consumers and potential business partners is arguably worse. 

Barbara Res, a top construction executive at the Trump Organization from 1980 to 1998, said Trump was already facing a problem caused by his political career: His company is still built around the old gold-plated luxury brand, aimed at wealthy urban dwellers and tourists. But his political career alienated most of that demographic. Now, Res said, “most of his [company’s] brand talks to people who are not his supporters.”

This is a somewhat different angle on Trump. The Brand Trump and the Political Trump are increasingly dissociated according to this former insider.

The Brand Trump will take a battering if the prediction is proved correct. When he was President, the Brand and the Political merged. Now that he is not President, his only political ploy is to keep saying the election was rigged. His mind is consumed with revenge and pillage. That is the basis of his residual power – he maintains his harness on the dark recesses of the American mind. He has turned illusion into hallucination. Yet negativity only has a limited life span, and therefore for Trump political success is vital.

Brand hedonism played out to gated communities does not respond well when his Political Brand is continually depicted as pitchforks and mob harangue. His Brand constituency should be looking around for somebody else; the Brand has been jolted by his electoral loss, and his refusal to go away. However, it is easier to believe midterm election success next year is the last shot in maintaining the sharpness of the pitchforks.

As I have said repeatedly, Trump is old and the decay is showing. His survival from COVID-19 was helped by an array of drugs, unavailable to his own constituency, and he showed resilience despite years of poor diet, obesity and pig-headedness. Nevertheless, that episode will have taken its toll, especially with a brain already fraying at its cognitive edges.

America is a violent society. That is a known, and Trump is known to fuel such violence. This community violence is mirrored by a propensity for political assassination. The unknown is whether his continual provocative antics will entice someone mad enough to emulate those who have gone before as political assassins:  Using the Rumsfield quadrate, “E Ea Ignota”.

Thus the “known” is, in the end, that Trump will fall from grace, whether by violent death, natural causes or just because to be demented and maintain authority he would need to be installed as Pope. The demise of the demagogues from that of the Gracchi brothers in Ancient Rome is a known fate. In the case of Trump, the unknown is to know how long it will take; and whether when the head is gone, the lumpenproletariat body will survive.

The Long House

From childhood I have always been fascinated by the wild men of Borneo, comic strip characters associated with jungle fantasy.  In my childhood, most of Borneo became independent from the Dutch in 1949 with the establishment of Indonesia, but there were enclaves along the coast, which remained part of the British Empire for about a decade longer.

One of these was Sarawak which, from 1841 to 1946, was the fiefdom of the Brooke family, the so-called White Rajahs, one of whom was the model for Josef Conrad’s “Lord Jim” – a book I have started so many times but never completed.

To me Sarawak was always distinctly exotic for three reasons – it is the home of the Orang-utan, shrunken heads and the long house. Inevitably when mention is made of these latter two, the talk is of Dayaks – the sea Dayaks to be more precise. These fierce Dayaks were the models for the wild men of Borneo.

We had made one of those on-the-spur decisions to spend time in Sarawak – it was around Easter time. We flew to Kuching, the capital.

I had been especially interested in the long house concept and have wondered whether it would be a useful model to be adapted by  Aboriginals. Having seen the living conditions of Aboriginal people in various parts of Northern Australia, where the community has close links with one another, it always seemed to be that the suburban house design with conventional rooms was never appropriate for Aboriginal living.

Therefore, when we were offered the opportunity to stay at a long house in the jungle up the Sarawak River from Kuching, we immediately accepted. The means of getting there was the distinctive Iban long boat without a paddle but with an outboard motor.

The long house was perched on stilts close to the river, access being by both a narrow concrete staircase on one side and a ramp on the side where the ablution block was placed. The slope of the river bank was steep, but we noticed there was abundant horticulture. Rubber trees were growing further up the slope, as were pepper vines (we soon learnt that the best pepper in the world came from Sarawak). There were even pineapples.

All around to show off the lush vegetation were red, yellow and variegated cordylines, slashes of colour in this tropical garden. No wonder Sarawak has been a botanist’s paradise.

Inside the long house

It was the inside of the long house which intrigued me. Down one side of the house was a stretch of poles, which defined the sleeping quarters, low platforms with a basic foam mattress and individual mosquito nets, hung away during the day. Outside access was provided via doorways with canvas flaps, a convenient way to go to the toilet at night, although the literally potential pitfalls of the broken concrete pathway posed their own challenge en route. As for other hazards, there were the roaming community dogs.

The long house owners were our host, sea Dayaks, small leathery friendly people, the men covered in tattoos.  We the guests were us two and a group of young Germans. The kitchen was located off the main area in the “apartments” of each family, and we were invited to participate in preparation of the meal, which was fish and pork, rice cooked in bamboo. Our job was to clean the bamboo leaves.

In the evening, there were demonstrations of Dayak culture – women and young boys dancing and then suddenly an older man with hornbill headdress stepped up. Our guide whispered to me that he was his uncle, the headman. He was recognising my presence by the hornbill dance.  Hornbills presage purity and strength and it is how the Dayaks communicate with their ancestors.He was according me a great honour.  Whether it was always regularly performed to recognise the oldest visitor in their midst, I was still “chuffed” by such a spontaneous gesture. The next morning, I did not justify such an honour by failing miserably in using the blowpipe.

Reflecting on this visit to the Dayaks’ long house and having stayed in Aboriginal settlements on several occasions, notable was the lack of organised horticulture in the latter. We whoever, whitefellas, have imposed our buildings on Aboriginal lands – the missions, a sign of permanency for whitefellas.  The difference is the Aboriginals foregather on their own land and move around within that space.

I remember driving into Beswick, a settlement in the Northern Territory, and seeing this lawn of green shimmering in the distance, it suggested horticulture. As we came closer it turned out not to be cultivation, but a layer of flattened VB cans covering the earth – just outside the boundary of this “dry” settlement.

Aboriginals know their flora, as shown by the myriad demonstrations of “bush tucker”. For example, I was shown  at one settlement where they knew the bush potatoes were growing, they had their digging sticks – but it was not a matter of deliberate cultivation. Why bother when there were no competitors and the potatoes came back in the same place every year.

In their kitchen, the Dayaks had large terracotta amphoras where they stocked their rice. There was minimal evidence of western tinned food; they lived off their produce and where they did not grow the commodity, they bought or bartered in bulk. The Dayaks had their own spices, in addition to pepper, which they used in every dish which was served.

There were no cans of beer.

We were very glad that we stayed in the long house, which we had always wanted to do –and it provided us an insight into successful communal living.

Confusion

Israel backed the Pfizer vaccine, and was prepared to pay the price; Australia, by not accepting the Pfizer price, is paying a different price. Moderna was never in the equation.

The great unknown is what are the deals, the kickbacks, the political and bureaucrat beneficiaries of the AstraZeneca (AZ) preference and purchase; and the various consultancies handed out to the Government mates for vaccinating the sector of the health care area they directly control – those who come under the aged care and defence portfolios. Not knowing what the conditions for the various deals were, yet knowing that there is effectively no scrutiny that will yield any immediate information, how can the community know what the hell the outcome will be?

The AZ vaccine, in a community which is unused to death by COVID-19, has received a far different response than that of its spiritual home – Great Britain, where there have been overall 125,000 deaths (the last figures available still showed 27 deaths in a single day).  Over 1,000 people have died there in a single day.

Whereas in Australia there have been 910 deaths overall, a large proportion of which were in Victoria in August/September last year, but not one since late October last year. It is thus unsurprising that in Australia every death from a reaction to AstraZeneca will be magnified; and there is rumbling in the community about how ill the AZ vaccine makes some of us feel.

Thoughts, drifting like soap bubbles …

Once the view that the government has something to hide, “gets traction” then the stigma sticks.  Here this adhesive is on the AZ vaccine. The Government seems to have little idea at times when the mRNA vaccines will become available, given the different dates being put out. Therefore, we have a range of fumblers, braided or in mufti, wheeled out to fill in the air space without saying much. Thoughts drift like soap bubbles, never reaching terra firma. The business community, medical students, paramedics are all to be enlisted into this gigantic national initiative of jabs and feints, and more jabs and more feints amid a cascades of thought bubbles – in a country with not enough vaccine.

The Prime Minister talks about phases to fill the black hole of failed policy. And thus it will go on – the strategy being to treat us as fungi – and stupid fungi at that.

The one thread which has showed as the ray of sunshine is the strength of the contact tracing system within Australia which, despite the Berejiklian wont for hyperbole, is probably among the best in the world, a fact acknowledged by Dr Chant to be due to the work of Sue Morey, who was her predecessor over 20 years ago. I wonder whether she will get as much acknowledgement that the Government has accorded other great humanitarians who have saved our country, even if it did take Victoria a considerable time to recognise the fact last year.

But even contact tracers get tired, especially if their political leaders act like buffoons and prematurely loosen restrictions or continue to leave the current bodgie hotel quarantine in place. Every potential outbreak is started by Mr or Ms 00.01% in the Prime Minister’s quarantine system.

As a postscript, it seems that the Treasurer is the last shot in the government locker, with his rallying call of the business community to marshal their workers. The strategy is anybody’s guess, but if the incentives for vaccination are free sausage sizzles and frequent flyer points, then these are in the league of offering axes, beads and mirrors.

The worry is that of filling in the policy void with public relation burble. as substitute for organised action. This is dangerous if there is no concomitant systematic collection of data when there are so many variables. Jane Halton bobbing around, with commentators on her report obviously having not read it, providing gratuitous advice does not help. “People coming home fully vaccinated need not quarantine” – given your Tampa experience, how do you police that thought bubble given this apparent Damascene conversion to open borders for Viral refugees?

Big English Guinea Pig

Uncertainty abounds; the long-term efficacy of the vaccines is anybody’s guess. There is already talk of the need for a booster; imminently Prime Minister Johnson’s initiative to sweep away all controls leaving vaccination as the only defence in the United Kingdom. Australia should watch England as the Big Guinea Pig, before doing anything precipitous.

Finally, the symbolism of the General and the Treasurer leaving the meeting of the business representatives two days ago should not be lost on the wider community. The General put on a mask immediately; the Treasurer did not.

Mouse Whisper

He was musing there, leaning on his cane, stuffing his face with cheese and wine, oblivious of my crouching beneath the table enjoying the messy Stilton droppings which were raining down around me. I always enjoyed such murine canapés.

“You know” he said to the Mop lounging in the corner of the room, as if that were his only audience, “I would not be standing here if my ancestors had not survived the Black Death.” I thought that was one way of defining survival but – looking up at him – hardly of the fittest.